Today is May 30, 2016. It is the sixth anniversary of my birth as a blogger. Or six years after
I gave birth to the blog. It’s a question of perspective, I guess. And after six years of this, I’d have to say that I am surprised at how much it has changed me. As is often the case, I have three things in mind.
The first is how hard it is to do what set out to do. I had in mind a record of those things that delighted me. I knew when I chose it, of course, that dilettante was mostly a negatively connoted word. Certainly, it does not suggest that the person is actually good at anything. Quite the contrary. A dilettante “dabbles;” he jumps from one idea or project to another without seeing anything through.
I chose it for a different reason. I knew that it was based on the Latin delectare, “to delight in.” And I wanted to write about the things that delighted me. What could go wrong?
Quite a bit, it turns out. To know what is tickling my fancy, I have to be paying attention to my fancy. There is a certain amount of quiet attending involved. And if I am going to hear what is quiet, I am going to have to unhook myself, at least a little, from what is loud and boisterous.
In a loud and contentious political time, people want me to write about politics. I can do that. I have paid attention to politics, in one form or another, for most of my adult life. But if I write about what is going on out there, I run the risk of missing what is going on in here. I miss the early signs of a new idea—a heightened wariness, an unexplained recurrence of a particular image, the filing of one event after another into the same mental file, when that file had scarcely been used before. Those are very quiet things and if I am not quiet, I will miss them.
I chose dilettante as a way to remind myself not to miss those things.
The second thing that surprised me—I see now that it should not have—is that when I pay attention to things because I think I might write about them, I attend to them differently than I would have otherwise. I noticed it because of all my years in the classroom. When I learn something only because it is of interest to me, I learn it one way. When I learn something because I am going to use it for something—I am going to integrate it, for instance, into some larger structure—I learn it differently. It feels different. I have that feeling about the blog and it is a very familiar feeling.
In writing a blog, I find that many of the ideas I run across in the course of a day’s conversations are neurologically linked, like a microphone planted somewhere in my mental landscape. They catch and transmit the remarks of passersby; they remind me of stories I haven’t thought of for fifty years; they make connections between phenomena I have never seen as related before. Briefly, it changes how my mind works.
Third, trying to write out ideas as I am thinking them through makes me much more “vulnerable” [1] to the process of writing. Like every other writer I have ever heard of, I have little connections I don’t know anything about. I use a figure of speech and it sends my narrative off in a direction I had not imagined. I use a metaphor that I have always associated with offense to describe a situation I have always associated with defense. It is like coming around a familiar corner and seeing a completely unfamiliar landscape.
I had thought of developing the essay like a ski jump. There are lots of elements to a successful jump and I know they include speed and balance and wind resistance. But sometimes it is more like being the ball in a pinball machine. All you want to do is go safely down the hole, but everything you touch whacks you or bumps you or flips you in an unanticipated direction. And when they are done with you—THEN you get to go down the hole and rest.
So very often, I start off in one direction, looking for the word that will complete the thought, and I choose, instead, one that subverts it. Or, sometimes a word that amplifies it so that it no longer fits in the neighborhood where I was when I started looking. Mostly, I just go with those things. I don’t experience them as “things I am doing.” I experience them as “things that are happening to me” and sometimes I am just charmed by how fresh they are. [2]
My first blog was called “Blog 1” and it was 257 words long. Then I sat down and wrote 502 more essays. This one is #503. That works out to somewhere in the mid-70s per year. [3]
In that first essay, I worked out what “log” meant as a nautical device and how the b- of web got assimilated to it to make the word blog. It was heady stuff, for sure. If I had known that six years later, I would think it was a good use of anyone’s time to remember that, I would have been truly amazed.
[1] I am very cautious about using a word like vulnerable. I know that the Latin vulna means “wound,” and know that by using that word, I am setting up a picture of my writing as something that can be “wounded” by new thoughts or images. I don’t want to say that, but I want to almost say that.
[2] By “fresh,” of course, I mean that they seem fresh to me. I will never forget the criticism a teacher wrote on a school essay. I had included a figure of speech I had never heard before and that I really liked. She said it was “trite.” Later, I learned that if I mean “often used to convey that idea, tired from overuse, threadbare,” it was indeed trite. But I had never heard it before, and I was still being charmed by its novelty. Trite! Humph!
[3] Although “year” has been defined in several ways during this time. I counted May—December 2010 as a “year,” because I started in May. Then in 2013, I began a “blogging year,” which begins December 1 and lasts until November 30. So all the yearly collections since 2012 have been named BY (Blogging Year) + the year in which that series ends. So I am working in BY 2016 at the moment.
the ingroup bias, “sticking with your friends.” I would call the ethnocentrism, “American exceptionalism.” I would call the emphasis on social norms “being a team player.” I would call a reliance on friendly sources of information, trusting people “whose hearts are in the right place.” And of course, I would provide pejorative names that they could use to describe the nonauthoritarians. Traitor and coward come readily to mind.
I presented these contradictory responses as a “policy conflict,” but actually only the second response engages policy at all. The students who wanted to get the best of what there was to get did not have a policy orientation in mind at all. They took the system for granted and wanted to know how to work it. “What if we came to class an hour early?” they wondered. “Or maybe if we were among the first 27 students to register for the class. Or maybe we could get the professor to give upperclassmen first shot at those seats and seat underclassmen only if there were still room. Or maybe we could send one of “us” early and have him reserve the 27 seats for the rest of us.”
At this point, I would like to introduce Marc Heatherington and Jonathan Weiler as they are represented in their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (2009). I’m going to be relying on their recent work for most of the rest of this essay. They use several tests which look very good to academics. The tests are “valid,” i.e., they test what they are supposed to test and they are “reliable,” i.e. they come up with the same findings when a population is retested. So, in general terms, these are really good measures.
That’s what I like. “Authoritarian” is a description; it is not a condemnation. On the other hand, there are times when the policies that authoritarians disproportionately support cost all of us dearly. I can be against those policies without raising—without even considering—the question of just why they chose those policies. And that is what the authoritarianism scholarship, beginning with Theodor Adorno, has mostly done up to now. It is not what Heatherington and Weiler do, which is why I am passing their work along to you.
seriously challenge social norms; nonauthoritarians are more likely to think that it is a good thing even when it does. Nonauthoritarians, to say it another way, are willing to put up with a good deal of disorder to protect the autonomy of persons. They don’t feel the same consideration for the “autonomy” of powerful social systems.
My own personal views really don’t fall at either extreme. Like most people I have some of these traits and some of those. Or I honor these values in one situation and those values in another. In other words, I do not fit the “ideal type” that the tests identify. I fit somewhere further toward the middle of the scale.
As you can almost tell, even with the way I cropped the picture, this is a front yard display. It is in my neighborhood in the sense that I drive by it on 35th Avenue every morning on my way to Starbucks. And one morning at Starbucks, my friend Paul McKay said, “Hey, you know that house on 35th that has that pig in the front yard? You know what that is? It’s ‘pearls before swine,’ like in Matthew.”
nomination—there has been a lot of talk about “authoritarianism.” On behalf of the political scientists of the world, let me invite you to the discussion. We talk about authoritarianism pretty much all the time. It’s just that this year, some of our stuff is landing on editorial pages and is being read by a broader audience.
In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [1], Hannah Arendt raises the question of whether Adolf Eichmann was, himself, anti-Semitic. As I read her, the answer is either “No, he was not,” or “He might have been but it didn’t matter to his work.” [2] Arendt came very close to saying that Eichmann really wasn’t bright enough to be a thoroughgoing anti-Semite. She does say, clearly and repeatedly, that Eichmann’s operation of the Nazi death camps would not have been altered by so much as a single Jew if he actually had been an anti-Semite.
history in which a bold “take no prisoners” kind of leader is required. Imagine for a moment that you are the superintendent of a school district and that one of your school is a chaotic mess filled with incorrigible students. You may have the most fanciful liberal arts dreams in mind for this school, but first you are going to have to establish law and order. So you choose a law and order principal. He is flamboyant. He drives a fire engine red sports car which has a driver’s side door fitted with a scabbard for his Winchester. He encourages his teachers to carry guns in class. The parents who are desperate for order are enthusiastic and reduce his offenses to mere peccadilloes. The others are horrified that some blowhard clown is in charge of their kids’ high school.
Wendy Lustbader has written more sensibly about aging than anyone I have read for a long time and in a recent issue of Generations (2014) she wrote a piece called “It All Depends on What You Mean by Home.” Isn’t it the truth!
But among people who have known you for a long time, there is a broader kind of acceptance and it is based on a broader kind of knowledge. People who have known you for a long time know “who you really are,” not just how you seem in the afternoon after your nap. “How he is after his nap” is part of what friends know about you. “He’ll be fine,” they will say, “Just give him a little time.”
There are two things worth noting here. The first is the way Johnson sets the hook in the reader. “Did you ever have an experience like this?” he says. Nearly every Christian I know has had experiences like that. If you mix with the general public, it is pretty likely that you are going to be in a conversation where the idiocy, the arrogance, and the utter hypocrisy of religious belief are going to be taken for granted. Your own consequent idiocy, arrogance and hypocrisy are obvious applications of this view. That isn’t fun at all.
has nothing to do with religion and b) I am part of the group of friends.
So the lesson embedded in this setting of the story is: Let it pass and see what happens.
group. But a person who feels unable to do either of those might still feel that something should be done and that person might think of saying, “Remember when you were talking and laughing about how stupid religious people are? That really hurt my feelings and I wish you would be more careful and not do that any more.”
on that is going to choose Donald Trump as the nominee of “the Republican party.” Notice the quotation marks. Ryan is the highest ranking Republican. He is behind only Joe Biden as “our next President.” [1] He is as close to Mr. Republican as anyone can be. He looks pensive, don’t you think?
I think of “agenda” and “Trump” in the way I think of the agenda of the Earp brothers at the OK Corral. If there is an agenda there, it is “get them before they have a chance to get you.” Grand Old Party? Really?
[1] And if you can’t imagine what it would be like for a conservative Republican Speaker of the House to move seamlessly into the Oval Office and start “presidenting,” then you owe it to yourself to see John Goodman do it as Glen Alan Walken in Season 4 of The West Wing. I found it disconcerting.
In this picture, we see the result of Haber’s suggestion that the world not be divided into warring groups by the color of their skin. George dreamed that everyone was gray and when he woke up, they all were—including Dr. Haber. I’m sure that seemed a good solution to a dreaming mind, however far from Haber’s mind it was. When George was instructed to bring “peace on earth,” he invented aliens and had them invade Earth. Problem solved.
You don’t have to walk very far to see these two signs. There is going to be a vote, apparently, on whether to “put” (Boo!) or to “restore” (Yea!) fluoride in the water. “Put” emphasizes the novelty. This is new. It could be dangerous. “Restore” emphasizes the familiarity. We used to have this. Remember how nice it was? We could have it again if we wanted.
Here’s the other sign. It just comes from the other side of the conflict, but it might almost have come from another planet. Notice first how the policy process flows. Back in the good old days, we had “healthy water.” [2] Presumably, we made the water “healthful” by adding fluoride to it. And the fluoride produced healthy water and the healthy water produced healthy teeth. They don’t say that, but you can see the healthy teeth.
