The Dilettante's Dilemma

The President as Cherrypicker in Chief

Posted on November 22, 2014 by hessd

The Constitution identifies the President as the Chief Executive. He is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Since the President is the principal source of major congressional considerations, he is often called the Chief Legislator. It was not until President Obama’s speech yesterday that I began to imagine a Cherrypicker in Chief role.

What is “cherrypicking?” Here’s a broadly representative description from Wikipedia.

Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position.

If you grew up, as I did, where there were a lot of arguments about just what the Bible taught about one thing or another, then “cherrypicking” will mean something more specific to you. In a debate where the underlying question is, “What does the Bible teach about this?” and where the proponents of one side cite these verses and the opponents cite those verses, each is likely to accuse the other of “cherrypicking.” You have chosen, each will say, the verses that confirm your position and you have ignored the verses that confirm mine. That’s “cherrypicking.”

That’s what President Obama did yesterday.

Lately, I’ve been teaching a Bible Study course called Disciple. So far, we have looked at most of the history of Israel as it is recorded in the Bible. Part of this curriculum involves taking the scriptures we are studying and asking questions about personal application of those events. So when we read about the time of the judges in Israel, our Disciple Manual identified this trait as a “mark of discipleship.”

Disciples provide a sense of direction and purpose through godly, obedient leadership.

If you were going to draw lessons from Israelite history, those would be good lessons to draw. Gideon, for instance, provided godly obedient leadership when he destroyed all the shrines to local gods at his father’s house. He might have come up a little short in “honoring his father” at that moment, but as long as we are cherrypicking, let’s go with the “God raised up Gideon” theme and not the “Honor your Father” theme.

With this conflict in mind, I sent out an email to the Disciple class, asking them to think about this dilemma and to think if they might want to discuss it at our next meeting. Everything that follows—the red letter text—is my note to them. Then there is a regular black print conclusion that belongs to this post.

We have been looking more carefully, recently, at the Marks of Discipleship. We talked about those entries that had to do particularly with “godly leaders.” With that in mind, let me pass along a passage from President Obama’s immigration speech yesterday. Here is the passage.

Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger –- we were strangers once, too.

I thought it might be worth our while to ask whether this might be what the Manual had in mind by “godly leaders,” the kind we are supposed to support. It’s plausible, at least.

Here’s one: Disciples maintain a perspective on leadership that supports and respects godly leaders but give true allegiance only to God. And here’s another: Disciples provide a sense of direction and purpose through godly, obedient leadership.

I’m arguing that the people who put our course together might very well have had proclamations like this in mind, but I would like to take a stance against it. I am troubled that President Obama made that claim. I don’t object as an American. I don’t object as a liberal. I don’t object as a student of politics. I object as a Christian.

Here is why. Look at the three uses of the word “we” in the cited passage. Who does that refer to? It isn’t us. I don’t want to stand up before a meeting of the Coos Bay council and say that we Coquille Indians want our land back. People who live in Coos Bay may have different attitudes toward the local Native Americans, but they will all have the same attitude toward a German from Ohio who addresses them as “We Coquilles…” YOU, they will say to me, are not part of that WE, and they would be right.

The “strangers” in that quotation are the Israelites, not the Americans. The “scripture” the President refers to is the scripture of the Israelites, not the Americans. I, for one, do not want the President saying that in his role as First Exegete, he has determined that this passage applies to us, but the one about keeping kosher does not. I would be more than happy to reduce my federal taxes to a tithe, but I would be very unhappy to learn that the Bible and not the Congress was the authority for my federal taxes.

The President as Chief Exegete is the President as Chief Cherrypicker. Let me say that in English. If the President’s job is to use his office to say what scripture means, then it will very soon be his job to say that these scriptures apply to us and those do not.

In the same speech, the President argues that immigration gives the U. S. an advantage over other nations and that the immigrants who are here, most of them, are good people who deserve to stay and be protected. I don’t object to either of those arguments. They may be true or not true, but they don’t scare me. The quote from Exodus 22 or Leviticus 19 or Deuteronomy 10—whichever of those relevant sources the President had in mind—really does scare me.

This particular class is not really a Democrats v. Republicans class or a liberals v. conservatives class. It is a class, however, that returns over and over to the “meaning” of a biblical text and to the associated question of what this text means for us, particularly. My position is always that the first meanings—the privileged meanings—are the ones that the writer intended for that particular collection of readers/hearers. When we get some clarity on that–as much as we can–we can began to ask how that meaning ought to apply to us.

If the meeting turns into an O.K. Corral sort of meeting and if I return from the corral, I’ll tell you about it.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Politics | Tagged America as a Christian Nation, cherrypicking, immigration initiative, Office of Exegete in Chief, President Obama | Leave a comment

The Gospel of Matthew in Pleasantville

Posted on November 20, 2014 by hessd

Halloween fell on November 1 this year. Costumes, candy, trick or treaters—the whole thing. On the morning of November 2, Starbucks started using their red “holiday” cups and offering the egg nog latté. Ho ho ho.

I’ve always been unhappy with the earlier and earlier introduction of Christmas. It used to be the day after Thanksgiving, you know. But now, rather than jumping the gun on Christmas, they have invented “the holiday season,” and it starts as soon as Halloween is safely out of the way.[1] This year, rather than being unhappy, I have decided to start writing about Advent themes whenever they start talking about “the holiday season.” I don’t know if it will actually work, but today’s essay is my first step in that direction.

As you see, I am going to be poking and prodding at Matthew’s use of scripture. For myself, I would say “Old Testament scripture,” but those were the only scriptures Matthew had and, not coincidentally, the only ones Jesus had. Matthew starts his account in Bethlehem. Luke starts his in Nazareth. I’m going to start mine in Pleasantville.

In the movie Pleasantville, a “modern” brother and sister (1998) are accidentally transported back to the world of a 1950s sitcom. The brother (Tobey Maguire) and sister (Reese Witherspoon) are called David and Jennifer in their own world, but when they appear in Pleasantville, they are the two children of the Parker family and their names are Bud and Mary Sue. In their own world, they are regular full-color people. In Pleasantville, they are, initially, black and white, as you see in the picture, but some of their friends have already become colored and they will too–eventually.

Here’s what makes it so interesting for me. David is a Pleasantville nerd. He has watched all the shows. He knows all the characters. He knows what happens in one episode so that something else can happen in the next one. When he arrives in Pleasantville, he goes to basketball practice because “Bud” is on the basketball team and in Pleasantville, he is Bud. Here’s what happens when Skip, a fellow team member, does what he needs to do to advance the plot.

Skip:   Could I ask you a question.”

Bud:    Sure

Skip:   Well…if I was to go up to your sister…What I mean is, if I was go up to Mary Sue…

Bud:    Oh my God. Are we in that episode?”

Skip:   What?

Bud:    Oh, I don’t believe this.

But he does believe it. He knows why Skip is going to go out with Mary Sue and he knows what he is going to do on the date and he knows how Mary Sue is going to react. He has seen that episode many times and nothing is going to surprise him.[2]

And how, exactly, is that like Matthew? Matthew is trying to tell the story of Jesus to people who know the story of Israel pretty well. They have heard the episodes many times. Matthew is going to catch the sense of “Oh, are we in that episode?” and use those elements in the story he is telling about Jesus. Here are two episodes Matthew uses.

Matthew is telling the story of Herod and the attempt to snuff out the baby who was born in Bethlehem to be the new king of Israel. Then something catches Matthew’s attention. He thinks of the Pharaoh’s attempt to control the Israelites in Egypt by killing all the male children and how Moses was saved through a combination of stealth, deceit, and simple chutzpah. Oh, Matthew says, are we in that episode?

It seems to Matthew that God is telling the Moses story again; Moses the leader God raised up to deliver his people. And now God is raising up his son, Jesus, to deliver his people. It is Matthew who has Joseph take Mary and Jesus into Egypt, hiding out from Herod’s wrath, and then crowning that episode with the prophetic citation, “From Egypt I have called my son.” (Hosea 11:1)

It is Matthew who salvages an episode from Israel’s past to illuminate the meaning of Jesus’s birth. Matthew tells about the magi from the east. They saw a star and headed for Jerusalem as quickly as they could. We don’t know how many of them there were, but there were three gifts, so we have hit on three as the number in the party. Herod asks them to help find the “new king of the Jews” so he can be killed. And the magi are OK with helping out with the finding, but after they have found the child, God has a serious talk with them and turns them into accomplices of the divine plan, rather than henchmen of Herod’s plan.

All that sounds familiar to Matthew. He has an “Oh, are we in that episode?” moment. What episode was Matthew trying to call to mind? How about the evil king Balak, who recruits a wise man from the East and asks that a curse be put on the nation of Israel, who appear to be set on entering Canaan? Balaam is a magus (the singular form of magi). But instead, Balaam sees “a star coming out of Jacob” and prophesies the victory of Israel. You can check Numbers 24 if the story is unfamiliar. It wasn’t unfamiliar to Matthew’s first hearers.[3]

Matthew doesn’t cite these stories of Israel as proof of anything. I think he is trying to increase the resonance of the story he is telling by packaging it in a way that will engage the memories of his hearers. Making the Moses story so broadly similar to the Jesus story may not round it out for us, but it would have made a lot of sense to First Century Jews. The Balaam story joins the magical (he is a seer) and the world of nature (there is a star) and brings them into the story of what God is doing. Those emphases don’t hurt the meaning of Jesus’ birth narrative either. They provide an infrastructure of community memory to support the new story about Jesus.

I think what tickles me most though is the social distance between the two stories I am telling. The greater the distance–so long as you can still see the similarity–the funnier it is. Seeing an outcast like David, living in a full color contemporary world, being jerked back into Pleasantville, where he is “Bud,” and where the world is black and white and fifty years older than David is—all that requires an adjustment from the viewer. But then when you see the magi jerked back a thousand years into a history where the tribes of Israel are just arriving at what they are calling “the Promised Land,” you see the same narrative displacement. I do, anyway. And you see that just as Pleasantville is the infrastructure of David’s life, so Balaam, the “magus from the east” is the infrastructure of Matthew’s account of the Wise Men. And you see the two displacements—Pleasantville’s and Matthew’s—as two instances of the same narrative treatment. I do, anyway.

And then when you pick up the New Testament to read Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, you say, “Oh, are we in that episode?”

[1] There are lots of other reasons for preferring “the holiday season,” of course. It doesn’t privilege a holiday with a Christian name over Winter Solstice holidays from other traditions. It just includes them all, provided they don’t come after Christmas. And then too, “the holiday season” provides for a lot more commercial enterprise than would have been accommodated under the old “not until after Thanksgiving” rationale.
[2] He will be surprised, nevertheless, because Jennifer is not Mary Sue—or is Mary Sue only against her will—and she doesn’t want to go out with Skip. And Pleasantville is never the same again.
[3] I’m trying to get away from saying “readers.” Nearly all the people who came into contact with Matthew’s story heard it. Literacy was not common and there were very few manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Movies | Tagged Balaam the Magus, Gospel of Matthew, narrative traditions, Pleasantville | Leave a comment

The Experience of Competence

Posted on November 14, 2014 by hessd

In a recent piece, I described myself as an AHOG—an amazing, high-performance old guy. At first glance, that looks like a substantial and probably incredible claim. It is not. I justified “amazing” on the grounds that I was, in fact, amazed. Surely, I reasoned, if it amazed me, then it was amazing. I justified “high-performance” by rigging the base line so low that the performance in question was “high” by comparison.

Now I’m back and I want to talk about the piece of being an AHOG that raises the question of attention.

When we talk about “the experience of competence,” as many writers do, we focus on the “competence” part. I want to focus on the “experience” part. There is no necessary relationship between the fact of competent performance and the experience I have of my own competent performance. They are related, of course, but they are different things. Mihaly Czikszentmihaly wrote in his book Flow, that when you are in a “flow state” you can do the best work of your life for hours at a time and have no awareness of it at all.

I’ve had that happen to me—I almost said I had “had that experience”—and I know how good I felt about it. But I didn’t experience it while it was happening. I looked back with gratitude and appreciation on what must have happened during that time. The work I held in my hand or saved in my document file was some of the best I have ever done and it must have taken quite a few hours because it’s now late afternoon and I am really hungry but of the time itself—nothing.

This chart is just for fun. I built literally hundreds of these in grad school while I was trying to find out what I was saying and what the alternatives were and then hundreds more while I was teaching and trying to help students find out what I was saying. A number of those students read this blog and they will remember that it is true and smile to themselves. A few of them may email me just to rag me about it. But this table is entirely unnecessary and I just put it in for fun. Cell A, or the relationship between Cell A and Cell B is the subject of today’s inquiry.

So the question is, “What calls my mind to an experience so that I become aware of it at all?” And the answer is: failure. Here are a few examples that should establish the relationship. If your ankle hurts most mornings when you swing your legs out of bed and put your feet on the floor, you will notice the mornings when it does not. “Wow!” you say, “I’m feeling really good today.” That means that the disability (the painful ankle) comes to your mind—that’s the experience part—and you notice that you are able to do whatever you want with that ankle that day. If you are usually very anxious about walking into a room of strangers, knowing that you will have to “make conversation,”[1] and today when you walk in, you feel confident and eager to engage, you experience your competence. Notice the role frequent failure plays. It calls your attention to the event; it asks you to experience whatever is about to happen—to place whatever is about to happen in one of the mental categories that falls in the “competence” folder.

Here’s a personal one. My left knee is…um…unpredictable. I call it crickey; it’s a technical term. By the time I am out of the shower, I have a good idea whether it will round into shape that day and whether I can go for a run on it—soft surfaces only. When the knee is “promising,” it raises my spirits and when I am able to run without being perpetually wary, it raises everything except my blood pressure. Woohoo! An experience of competence.

And, moving ahead to the conclusion of the case, I experience a life I know how to live. When I lecture, I blank on words—I wish I didn’t, but I do—and I engage the audience in helping me remember what the word is and then I go on. They like that. I don’t really mind it. I feel that overcoming that obstacle is something I know how to do and the practice of overcoming it gives me a sense of satisfaction. That sense of satisfaction is something I never had before I started to blank on words. The “experience” never registered. And I wouldn’t have that satisfaction, either, if I tried and failed to retrieve the word or if I couldn’t remember just why I needed it. Or why I am standing up in a room where people are writing things in notebooks.

There is a way of walking that seems to stress my left knee less when I remember to do it. So if I am walking along and get that crickey feeling and start to walk with my left foot toed in a little and the pressure on the inside of the ball of my left foot and the crickiness goes away, I say, “Woohoo!” An experience of competence. Needless to say, I never had that experience before I began having trouble with my knee.

My body is like an old car. There are so many things wrong with it that I am really the only one who knows how to drive it. “No, no—you bang on the door before you put on the turn signal. It doesn’t work otherwise. No, no—you have to start the car and then turn it off and then start it again. It works really fine if you remember to do that.” You get the idea.

So my experience of myself as an Amazing High-performance Old Guy is built on the foundation of successes that relate to conditions where I have experienced failures (like the ankle) or to obstacles that I have learned to overcome. No failure, no attention. No attention, no “experience” of success.

AHOGS unite, you have nothing to lose but…but…what is it we have nothing to lose but?

[1] At my church, smalltalk after the morning service is called “fellowship.” I don’t know why.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged competence, experience, failure, overcoming obstacles, paying attention | Leave a comment

President Obama Doesn’t Get It

Posted on November 8, 2014 by hessd

This essay is going to wander into some disreputable places, so let me start with the easy stuff. First, I’ve been blogging for several years now and I have learned that “President Obama Doesn’t Get It” is a better headline than “The President and I see some important structural elements differently.”[1]

Second, these remarks which the President made on November 5 were a sort of pep talk. To reporters assigned to cover the White House? And who “score points” by asking the President, on TV, questions he can’t afford to answer? Why would you give people like that a pep talk? They are paid to be immune to pep talks.[2]

Third, the President has been saying these same things over and over since 2010. They are diverging farther and farther from a credible and useful account. I am not saying, of course, that the President is saying things that are factually untrue—and if he were, I wouldn’t care all that much. The media circus now in operation would pounce on those mistakes like so much red meat in the lion’s cage. But in these cases, it’s not really the facts that matter; it’s the premises.

I’m unhappy about the premises and they, unlike an errant fact now and then, really do matter. I was really struck by a remark Noah Chomsky made as the Vietnam war was winding down. “Now,” he said, “the real war starts.”

That’s the way I remember it. A more sober version is captured in Question 1 and Answer 1 in this transcript.

The war he was referring to was the war that would be waged to establish once and for all what “the meaning of the war” was. This is “the war” as it would go down in history books and as it would be learned by generations of schoolchildren and referred to casually, as something we all know, in speeches.

So let’s get to it. We’re looking at the premises that underlie President Obama’s remarks and to which I take such great exception that I am willing to say that, as he is portrayed in these remarks, “he just doesn’t get it.”

What stands out to me, though, is that the American people sent a message, one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours. They want us to get the job done.

The American people elect us to work hard. The premise there is that our elected politicians are not working hard enough. No one I know who has seen the schedules that drive our elected representatives thinks that. There are people, it is true, who seethe with a kind of populist anger and who think that “the politicians” have a sweet deal of some sort that that allows them to loaf around and collect inflated salaries. That sentiment is a class antagonism. It applies to everyone, public and private—except prominent entrepreneurs—who has a lot of money. It is “them.” That’s not what the President is talking about.

So if the premise is that people expect their elected leaders to “work hard” and that they are expressing their anger at the polls because those leaders are not working hard, I say that is wrong and I think the President knows it is wrong. It isn’t the amount of effort that is being judged negatively.

We’ll just skip over “as hard as they do.” This is a version of the casual and unthinking attribution of merit I first began to think about when an expensive hair product was advertised as worth paying for “because you’re worth it.” The first time I saw that one, I thought, “What would anyone actually do to be worth an expensive hair product?” And right after that, I thought, “I am so worth this that I get to pay for it? Wow!” But now everybody does it and I hardly notice.

Moving on. The next false premise is in the next sentence: “They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours.” There is a way that could be taken that would make it make sense, but that’s not what the President means. It could mean that people expect their leaders to play it straight, to refuse to line their pockets with what used to be called “the spoils of victory”[3] and wind up rich at the public’s expense. That’s not what it means here. Here, it means that they want political leaders to enact the policies “the people” favor.

This functions as a quick reference to the fact that most of the Obama initiatives are supported by public majorities and yet, somehow, Congress doesn’t move on them. How could that be?, President Obama pretends to wonder. He does know, of course, that these same policies are vociferously opposed in many places and that it is the votes of the representatives that matter, not the preferences of the much-polled populace, and that the role of large donors in re-election campaigns is very large. He does know all that. Yet somehow “their priorities” are supposed to be credited as if this were a democracy (let’s see a show of hands) rather than the republic the Framers gave us.

All those same difficulties affect “get the job done” in the next sentence. “Getting the job done” is the Holy Grail to the person who gets to set the agenda. Having the right to say “No” or “Not yet” or “Not unless there are offsetting reductions” is the Holy Grail to people who have to work on someone else’s agenda. President Obama knows that.

This country has made real progress since the crisis six years ago. The fact is more Americans are working; unemployment has come down. More Americans have health insurance. Manufacturing has grown. Our deficits have shrunk. Our dependence on foreign oil is down, as are gas prices. Our graduation rates are up. Our businesses aren’t just creating jobs at the fastest pace since the 1990s, our economy is outpacing most of the world. But we’ve just got to keep at it until every American feels the gains of a growing economy where it matters most, and that’s in their own lives.

That’s the way the President sees it. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sees it.

The median annual household income—the level at which half are above and half below—rose 0.3% in 2013, or a total of $180, to an inflation-adjusted $51,939, the Census Bureau’s latest snapshot of U.S. living standards showed Tuesday. The increase, which wasn’t statistically significant, leaves incomes around 8% below their level of 2007, when the recession officially started.

The government’s annual look at U.S. incomes helps explain why, despite a stock market that has returned to record highs, the economic recovery has been so unsatisfying for the broad swath of Americans who rely primarily on wages for income

President Obama knows all this and yet he says we need to “keep at it.” In that phrasing, “it” refers principally to the Democratic initiatives that he says will be helpful. “Keep at it” implies that persistence is going to help. But if it is true, as I have argued elsewhere, that wages are low because of the collection of business practices that keep them low, then “keeping at it” means one thing for businesses (lower labor costs and higher profits) and another things for governments.

People are frustrated because their economy—not the economy—is not improving and there is no indication it is going to improve for their children. According to a Rasmussen report, two thirds of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. If the direction is wrong, “keep on going” (the President’s proposal) is not going to be well received. And, of course, it was not well received. This shows the same thing in chart form. If it is not all clear, the right hand table, showing income quartiles, should illustrate this point.

And the speech goes on from there. Whatever the private Barack Obama knows, the President Obama who appears in public and talks to the press, clearly doesn’t get it. And now he gets a Republican Congress to work with. He’s going to invite them over to the White House and talk strategy with them. That ought to do it.

[1] I’m not even sure that that statement is true. It is entirely possible that, if I were to sit down with him to talk, just the two of us, and I pulled his November 5 remarks out of my pocket, that he would wave them away and say, “Oh…that. Let me tell you what I really think.” Maybe he would do that. But I am working with what he said and pretending for the purposes of this thought experiment that he really thinks all those things.
[2] It isn’t that I don’t know the talk is televised, so lots of Obama supporters are watching the press corps grill their president. I just don’t think it is good TV.
[3] That phrase is the origin of President Andrew Jackson’s “spoils system,” in which the party faithful were rewarded with jobs and contracts. It is also the origin of Gov. Rob Blagojevich’s idea that appointing an interim senator “belonged to him” and he would sell it to the highest bidder.

Posted in Paying Attention, Political Psychology, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged a new direction for America, President Obama, Republican sweep, What the President knows | Leave a comment

Today’s Modern World

Posted on November 1, 2014 by hessd

The course is called “Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive.” I saw it first, today, in the brand new “holiday wish book catalog offered by The Teaching Company.[1] I’m not going to order it.

I want to move, shortly, to the “headline” on the page that describes this course, but let’s pause a little at the “sub-headline,” which is: “Learn the scientifically proven techniques for raising healthy, happy, and smart children in this course, taught by a world-renowned child development expert and father. I stopped at the sentence that has “scientifically proven techniques” and “happy…children” together.[2]

It is the headline that got me, though. Here is is: “Gain a Research-Based Toolkit of Best-Practices for Raising Your Children in Today’s Modern World.” That’s TODAY’S modern world, you understand. Not yesterday’s modern world.

“But it’s just clunky,” you might say. “Why make a big deal out of it?” OK, it’s clunky. But is it “just” clunky? Is it worse than clunky? Here’s why it might be.

From a language standpoint, “today’s modern world” is redundant. But let’s say that this mistake was caught by the Department of Grammar and sent back for correction to the Department of Marketing. And let’s say that the Department of Marketing has in hand the results of focus group responses that shows people will be more likely to buy a course with the redundant phrasing than one with the correct phrasing. Anybody want to guess the outcome of that struggle?

Here’s the truth. There is a right number of words to convey an idea to a particular audience. That means that “too many” is a meaningful concept, as is “too few.”

Let’s say that another way. Redundancy is a tax everyone pays. It’s a small tax. You hardly notice it. And the people who benefit from a use like “today’s modern world” receive their benefit immediately and it is a sizeable benefit. They win. Let’s say there are 430 million people who speak English as their first language. They pay; they lose.

Are redundancy and other misuses really like taxes? Sure, if you think of time unnecessarily spent as a tax. I do. Steven Pinker says that we read efficiently because we project meanings. We read the first part of a sentence, hypothesize a meaning, and “scan” the rest of the sentence quickly to confirm that it says what we thought it said. That’s not some new model of efficiency. That’s how we read. But some sentences mislead us. Pinker calls them “garden path” sentences because their first words lead the reader “up the garden path” to an incorrect analysis.[3] The reader starts the sentence, projects a meaningful continuation; hits an impenetrable barrier; and “frantically look back” to the first words to see what went wrong.

Everything that does not guide you along from your first guess to a correct final conclusion is a tax you must pay. Indefinite pronoun references cost you. So is the “he” you referred to, the President, his father, or the Secretary of Agriculture? Novel meanings cost you. Does the political ad “It’s too extreme” mean that there is a kind of extreme-ness that would be just right?

Here’s where we are. “Today’s modern world” is wrong. It would fall in the category of “garden path” sentences if it were a sentence. It would be like one of Pinker’s examples: “Flip said that Squeaky will do the work yesterday.” It isn’t that you can’t figure out what it means. It’s just that it takes you a little while to do it and there are several more thousands of sentences where that one came from. You can see these taxes being paid. The EEGs show these taxes being paid. They are not imaginary.

People will argue that I am an old fogey, which is certainly true. It is also true that they pay these garden path taxes whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not.[4] The extra effort it causes their brains to run back, over and over, to the starting point of the sentence is visible and measureable on the EEG. They are paying the tax.

You don’t have to be a fogey to pay the tax. It helps to be a fogey if you want to complain about it, of course.

[1] Question: What is a holiday? Answer: Whatever designation will make people think of buying sets of lectures. The first one I noticed (page 31) was Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. You get your choice, really, of what god to celebrate, but the Persian sun god Mithras was celebrated on December 25 and I have that day virtually free.
[2] Had I not stopped there, I could have gone on to celebrate the marvelous cloudiness of English, which takes phrases like “world-renowned child development expert and father” and gives us no clue at all how anyone can become a world-renowned father. God the Father Almighty is not a world-renowned father. If it had been up to me, I would have put “father” first and “world-renowned child development expert” second.
[3] This is an amazing analysis. See Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, pp. 212—214. I have had a warm spot in my heart for Pinker since he produced this sentence in the New York Times on February 2, 1999: After the various associates of a word light up in the mental dictionary, the rest of the brain can squelch the unintended ones, thanks to the activity that psycholinguists call “post-lexical-access processing” and that other people call “common sense.”
[4] This is, please recall, a tax you pay for the poor workmanship of the person who built the sentence. And in most cases—probably not the one I am using as an example where the company benefits from additional sales—no one actually receives the tax. So you lose and, in most cases, no one wins. Hell of a way to run a railroad.

Posted in Paying Attention, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged good sentences, the tax of syntax, who loses?, who wins?, words | Leave a comment

Not a Democrat any more. Maybe.

Posted on October 31, 2014 by hessd

On November 4, the state of Oregon will start counting votes.[1] Measure 90 will either win or lose. If it loses, Oregon will continue to have closed primaries in May, in which Democrats cast their ballots for the candidates they think best represent their party (and/or have a chance to win) and Republicans—and all the other parties—do the same. Then, in the general election in November, the primary winners face off and someone has to actually take office. If Measure 90 wins, everyone votes for the nominees and the top two (few?) nominees face off in November. And if Measure 90 wins, there really isn’t any practical point to my being a Democrat.

I may continue to vote for Democratic candidates for office, of course, but “being” a Democrat has meant being part of the process by which “our” nominee is chosen. In the Yes on Measure 90 world, there will be no Democratic candidate—although, of course, there might be a candidate who is a Democrat—so I will not be a part of choosing him or her to run.

There are lots of other parties in Oregon. The environmental side of me likes the Pacific Green Party. Here’s what they say about themselves: “We are governed by principles and values. Unlike Democrats and Republicans, we do not accept corporate cash. Our platform is based on our values of peace, sustainability, grassroots democracy and justice for all.”

Is a party like that going to win anything? Of course not. And a scouting party never defeats the opposing army. That’s not what they are for. Besides, I could join the Pacific Green Party and give them money and still vote for the furthest left electable candidate—which, in Oregon in most instances, will be a Democrat.

The Pacific Green Party also says this about Ballot Measure 90: “BM 90 would create a “Top Two” election system. Top Two has been a complete failure in California where it has been used for two elections. Voter turnout in California hit an all-time low using Top Two. Californians from across the political spectrum are calling for its repeal.”

And if I am freed from the connection between voting and membership, I might also consider the Progressive Party. Here’s their first “plank.”[2]

1. We work for real campaign finance reform. Oregon Democrats and Republicans have enacted limits on political campaign contributions but have repealed voter-enacted limits 3 times. Campaign spending for Oregon state offices has skyrocketed from $4 million in 1996 to $57 million in 2010. Spending by candidates for Oregon Legislature increased another 13% in 2012. Winning a contested race for the Legislature now typically costs over $600,000, sometimes over $1 million.

I love the idea of “getting money out of politics.” No party that relies on major donations can afford to say what the Progressive Party is saying. But remember, I can always vote for Democrats in November if I want to. Take a look at the difference between Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Oregon’s current one. What does that tell us?

Finally, there is the Working Families Party. They come at it a little differently. They have goals as does every other party. Here’s a statement: “We’re about improving the economy for working people. We fight for new jobs, living wages, workers’ rights, better education, affordable health care for everyone, and a government that listens to working families, not huge corporations or other high-powered special interests.” Notice the assonance and the nifty rhyme.

But then they do something else. They endorse “good candidates,” whatever party label those candidates happen to have. “Good,” of course, is defined by the core values of the party, as it should be. Here’s what they say about how they work: How do we make sure that politicians listen to us? We research the records of all candidates running for office in Oregon –— Democrats, Republicans or independents. Then we support the ones with a record of standing up for the bread and butter economic issues that really matter to working- and middle-class families.

What does it mean when you see “Working Families” next to a candidate’s name? It means you know that they have our seal of approval — and you can vote for them with the confidence that they will do the best job of fighting for working people.

Now the Working Families Party has, as I recall, endorsed Democrat Jeff Merkley for U. S. Senate and if they haven’t, they should. An endorsement by the Working Families Party says that Merkley lines up with the values of the party better than any other candidate. He is also almost certain to win, so he is a good choice for idealists and pragmatists both—provided that they are left wing idealists and pragmatists.

On the other hand, leaving the Democratic Party might be more than I really want to do, emotionally. I have been a Democrat and proud to be a Democrat through the Vietnam war protests and the Civil Rights movement and Medicare and Medicaid and Title IX the protection of First Amendment rights and all that. Am I really willing to look back and say that “they” supported all those efforts or am I going to want to continue to say that “we” supported them?

Honestly, I’m not sure. That’s why the last line in the title is “Maybe.” Or maybe Measure 90 will just be defeated and I can just stay a Democrat. Fox News, Rachel Maddow, Al Jazeera America and the BBC will all tell you the same thing about the outcome on November 5.

[1] In most states, they say Oregonians will “go to the polls,” but we don’t have any polling places in Oregon. We have drop boxes for people who didn’t mail their ballots in in time.
[2] “Plank” is a joke within a joke within a joke. You call the principles that you “take your stand on” a “platform” because everyone knows what it means to stand on a platform. And you call the individual elements that make up the platform, “planks” because if the platform were wooden, it would be composed of separate pieces of wood. If you said that the planks “constitute” the platform—which is true—you would be doubling back to the first joke because the –stit part of “constitute” comes from the Latin verb meaning “to stand.”

Posted in Politics | Tagged Democratic Party, open choices v clear choices, Pacific Green Party, popularity v responsibility, Progressive Party, responsible parties, Working Families Party | 2 Comments

The Courtship Marriage

Posted on October 26, 2014 by hessd

This starts with a really simple premise. I begin by rejecting “forever answers.”[1] He says, “Will you marry me?” meaning, “Will you love me forever?” She says “Yes.” Meaning “Yes, I will love you forever.” (I know that’s the truth of it; I’ve seen the movies thousands of times.) I reject that meaning because I know that this is not the first relationship he and she have experienced—they had parents, for instance— and they both know relationships don’t work that way.

She says yes because she has been courted. She has no idea how she is going to react to “not being courted.” We do, of course, but she doesn’t. If we assess this situation as one where he will get the responses he wants because he has been “testing the waters” as the relationship developed and has been “making progress” toward that “Yes,” then we are dumbfounded when he stops using the strategy that has been so successful up to now. Apart from the fact that it requires attention and effort, why would he stop checking on how they are doing and stop planning for the progress they can make together?

The premise, apparently, is that “reality” is fixed at the time he asks the question and she answers affirmatively. There is a much more realistic premise, of course: she will continue to say yes if she continues to feel that she is being courted. This isn’t really the kind of question the courts will ever decide.

The danger to the courtship marriage[2] is not that she will start saying No. It is not even that he will stop asking—although that is an important mechanism. It is that the question will recede into the fog of living a complicated life, so that it no longer seems an urgent question and if he asks it anyway, she will not say yes or no. She will say, “What?”[3]

In the kind of marriage I am calling a “courtship marriage,” it is understood that that initial Yes isn’t going to last forever. It needs to be asked over and over and for it to be a meaningful question, i.e., the context within which it can be meaningfully asked needs to be sustained. Most often, it is not necessary to use words to ask the question. The question is implicit in all the work that goes on to make sure that the marriage has all the room it needs to grow and all the focus it needs to be seen clearly.

Let’s look at the “room to grow” argument. And it does happen sometimes that providing the room the marriage needs in order to keep growing means cutting back on the room other interests would otherwise take. If you do it right, your marriage is going to grow. No matter whether you do it right or not, you are not going to get more than 24 hours in a day. That means that if some things become more prominent, other things will need to become less prominent. That’s not “advanced marriage;” that’s arithmetic.

And now the focus argument. I was thinking of photography when I included the provision about focus. There is a focal plane—long or short. That means you can give a marriage a kind of attention that is “too close” and one that is “too distant.” For me, that metaphor translates into “too detailed” and “too general.” You need to put the marriage, in the picture you are taking, where you can see all the things you need to see to help to shape it. You don’t need to see everything and I think, based on some years of experience, that trying to see too much detail is a bad idea.

All that to say that the context in which the “will you love me” question can be meaningfully asked, needs to be maintained. That has implications for giving the marriage room to grow and it has implications for how to focus on it. So, given these considerations, the question will not become irrelevant. And if it continues to be a relevant question, then it needs to keep being asked.

Why?

First, because you and your wife are not the people you were the last time she said Yes. Thomas Jefferson thought “every twenty years” would be good timing for a political revolution because it was wrong for one generation to have to live with the political decisions of an earlier generation. I’d have to say that I don’t have Jefferson’s appetite for political revolution, but I do agree that “the consent of the person”[4] cannot be reliably passed from one time to another. You are not married to the person who said Yes the last time you asked, and if you want a courtship-style marriage, you need to secure the enthusiastic consent of the person you are married to today.

Second, because asking the question and getting a thoughtful answer is the best way I know to keep the marriage strong. As I said earlier, the great danger is not that she is going to say, “Actually…no.” The great danger is that she is going to say, “Oh yeah…that again.” If the context of the question is not urgent, than the question itself is going to head over to autopilot, the graveyard of marriages that were once good.

Finally, I confess that I have written this from the standpoint of the husband because that is who I am. It isn’t that I don’t know that the wife’s part is as important as the husband’s. What I know for sure is that the question cannot be held in place unless both partners hold it. I know a woman who responds with pleasure to being courted by her husband is very likely going to continue to be courted. I know that if she will continue to teach him what kinds of courtship work best, he will continue to get better at it.[5] Husbands are insensitive sometimes, but we aren’t stupid. And I know that the wife can elicit the question from her husband even when he wasn’t thinking of asking it.

I know those things. I just know them the way a spectator knows them; not the way a player knows them.

Marriages also fail because bad things happen. I know that’s true. I just don’t know how to keep bad things from happening. This piece is about what I do know, which is how important it is to keep paying attention so the most important relationship of my life doesn’t just drift away because I stopped paying attention to it.

[1] I’m working with “Leave it to Beaver” era presuppositions: heterosexual marriage, marriage as a distinct and honored institution, and long-term romantic interaction as a distinct possibility. Romance is possible in an ongoing way if you keep putting resources into the emotional account that sustains the marriage in the same way that ongoing solvency is possible if you keep putting money into your bank account.
[2] It might be worth pausing to say that the kind of relationship I am calling “the courtship marriage” is not the only kind of good marriage. I know there are other kinds of good marriages that don’t look like this at all. But this is the kind I like best.
[3] The classic all-time what was given by Tevye’s wife Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, whose first answer is “What?,” followed by “You’re a fool.”, and eventually by “I suppose I do.”
[4] The marital equivalent of the “consent of the people.”
[5] Otherwise, he will “court” her in the style he understands best, whether she actually likes it or not.

Posted in Love and Marriage | Tagged autopilot relationships, clear focus, courtship, room to grow, staying current | Leave a comment

Is Forgiveness a Good Idea?

Posted on October 21, 2014 by hessd

I want to begin with as simple a phrasing as I can. Things are going to get so messy that I want to have something to look back at, as I would look back at my own innocent youth if I had had one like that. The simple phrasing is: Is forgiveness a good idea?”

There are some old notions of forgiveness that refer to social processes. These were not that complicated because they meant one thing rather than many things simultaneously and because they were transacted in public. When a debt was “forgiven,” you were no longer expected to pay it and you also did not go to debtor’s prison or into slavery. All of those are really clear. No one asked whether you were “really forgiven” of the debt. (Notice that “of;” we will need it again and I want you to know where I parked it.)

But no one was expected to loan money to that person either. He was not declared to be a good risk on the grounds that he no longer owed money. Giving money to people who don’t have any and need some might be a really good idea, but good or not, it would be called charity. Loaning money to people who are not at all likely to have the resources to repay you is just stupid. We are talking about loans here, not gifts.

All these transactions are, in principle, public transactions. The rich person—we are not considering branch managers here—who makes the loan and the poor person who gets the loan are characters in a public drama. Let me illustrate by citing the word “bankrupt.” Its literal meaning is “broken bench.” You were lending money in the marketplace. You had a bench that served as your place of business. When you were no longer had the resources to be a moneylender, they came and broke your bench. You were “bench-broken;” bankrupt.

Mostly, though, when we talk about “forgiveness,” we are talking about being released from an offense and the altered relationships the offense has caused. This is not a public process. It is not publically understood and supported by social sanctions. It is private—although often it is not as private as we think it is—and personal. And that is why we need that “of,” which I parked back at the end of the second paragraph.

To be forgiven “of” an offense means something different that “being forgiven.” (I’m going to introduce “forgiven for” in a little while to make that clear.) What does it mean to forgive “a person” as opposed to forgiving a person of an offense? It doesn’t mean anything at all to me. I think it is just an unfortunate contraction of the words we use. I think it would be clumsy always to say, “I forgive him his offense (having an offense in particular in mind)” and it is much easier to say, “I forgive him.” But now we have committed ourselves to a phrasing that is hard to understand. It is personal and private; it is no longer specific; it is emotionally volatile. And we have given up a phrasing that is interpersonal and public; it is more specific; and it is not quite so emotionally volatile because it has to do more with doing and not just with feeling. Maybe that’s why I like it so much better.

In this setting, as in so many others, we have individualized and interiorized a meaning that was once social and public. There is value, I think, in keeping the old meanings in mind. I don’t think we are able to mean them anymore, but knowing what they once meant might help us. It’s a little like Ariadne’s thread, which helps us find our way back out of the mazes we have built for ourselves and in which we often get lost.

Please allow me a brief detour. I have a lot of theologically astute friends who might just put this down in disgust if I do not make it plain from the outset that this piece is not theological. At all. Maybe I should have written about God’s forgiveness of us and our consequent obligation to forgive each other. And maybe I will. But not today. This is mostly a psychological and linguistic consideration, leaning heavily on the social processes that underlie the psychology and the language we use.

So, what do we mean by “forgiveness?” I don’t think we mean that “it” is forgotten. I put “it” in quotes because there is no abstract way to say just what is to be forgotten. In my classes, I have often made use of a series that goes like this: a) an action, b) a trait, c) a person’s character, and d) human nature.[1] I don’t know all that much about human nature and I look with wariness on anyone who says he does. I put “human nature” there to mark the end of the series. The rest of the series is pretty unremarkable. There’s a) an act, like forgetting an appointment; then there’s b) a trait (a series of acts) like “forgetfulness.” I would probably call it “irresponsibility” because it would irk me so. A cluster of traits could be assembled. He is genuine or simpleminded or single-minded or cruel or pathetically eager to please; I would call that c) “character.” Does it make any sense to think of “forgiving” a character? I don’t think so.

I think it is foolishness to go to naively a meeting with a guy who misses half his appointments and not to make other plans. Take your computer with you; you can blog while you are waiting. You may have forgiven him—in a sense I am getting to in just a moment—but you have not forgotten that he is not good about appointments. The fact that you remember is a good thing. It means you might leave an email reminding him of the appointment or call an hour before or keep a side line of communication with his wife. You could do any of those things with a good spirit, even if you wished you didn’t have to do them.[2]

It is when you go to meet your friend carrying your resentment with you, that you know you have not forgiven him. When you tell the story to others, making light of his difficulties, you have not forgiven him. It’s fine to remember “what he is like.” How, otherwise, could you mitigate the effects. But when you remember for the purpose of keeping the grievance fresh and “sharing it” with others, you are refusing to forgive.

Let’s come back now to that “of.” We started by looking at a usage like “forgiven OF a debt.” The way I am looking at this, you can always forgive a friend (or an enemy) OF an act. You might forgive him OF a trait: something he often does and therefore is likely to do again. When we get to the next larger collection, character, it gets harder to keep the phrasing “forgive OF.” When you get to what a person’s character is like, we might begin the think of forgiving FOR. “He’s a heartless bastard and he made my adolescent years a living hell, but I forgive him FOR that.”[3] Note 1: I’m not saying that’s a good idea. I’m just distinguishing between “forgiving of” and “forgiving for.” Note 2: I’m not saying it’s a bad idea either.

Here’s an episode I thought was surprisingly apt. This is from the first two pages of Robert Parker’s Stranger in Paradise. Jesse Stone is chief of police; Molly Crane is the office dispatcher; Wilson Cromartie is a professional criminal.

Molly Crane stuck her head in the doorway to Jesse’s office.

“Man here to see you,” she said. “Says his name’s Wilson Cromartie.”

Jesse looked up. His eyes met Molly’s. Neither of them said anything. Then Jesse stood. His gun was in its holster on the file cabinet behind him. He took the gun from the holster and sat back down and put the gun in the top right-hand drawer of his desk and left the drawer open.

“Show him in,” Jesse said.

Molly went and in a moment returned with the man.

Jesse nodded his head.

“Crow,” he said. “Jesse Stone,” Crow said.

Jesse pointed at a chair. Crow sat. He looked at the file cabinet.

“Empty holster,” he said. “Gun’s in my desk drawer,” Jesse said. “And the drawer’s open,” Crow said. “Uh-huh.”

“No need,” Crow said.

“Good to know,” Jesse said.

“But you’re not shutting the drawer,” Crow said.

“No,” Jesse said.

“Nothing wrong with cautious,” Crow said.

The two lines I like best are Crow’s “No need” [You don’t need to be that careful about me] and Jesse Stone’s “Good to know” [Nice of you to say that. I’m leaving the gun right where it is.]

Jesse has not been nursing his resentment of the havoc Crow caused the last time he was in town. On the other hand, he is not discounting the possibility that he is in town to cause a little more havoc. Jesse is ready, but he is not resentful. In the way I’m using the words, I would say Jesse has forgiven Crow of his actions; he has forgiven Crow for being an exceptionally competent killer. On his own behalf, he is going to keep his gun handy. On the town’s behalf, he is going to do everything he can to find a way to charge him with the crimes he committed the last time he was in town.

My idea is that you can tell whether you have forgiven someone by watching what you do. If you feed the smoldering fire of resentment—if you don’t feed it, it goes out eventually—you have not forgiven. If you tell jokes or recall stories or distort other relationships as a way to freshen up your hostility, you have not forgiven.

We talk about “carrying” a grudge. I think that’s a very evocative metaphor. I’ve heard it likened to carrying rocks in your backpack. Every time the guy you are resenting does something else, you put another rock in your pack. That’ll show him you’re nobody to mess with! And if he does it again, you’ll put ANOTHER rock in the pack. You can get really tired “carrying” grudges.

One final tricky turn yet and I’ll wrap this up. All the ways I have illustrated the lack of forgiveness are active. They are things you do. You actively feed resentment and you actively tell stories and so on. But there are passive ways, too, of reminding yourself not to forgive and of displaying your lack of forgiveness to your friend (or your enemy). Choosing active punishment or passive punishment is just a matter of what tools are at hand or of your own preference for active or passive means. One isn’t any better than another. They are both bad.

On the other hand, you might choose not to meet with a guy who blows the meeting off half the time. You might just keep a prudent distance from someone who delights in tormenting you. You might just stop denying what his arrogance costs you—everyone else knows it anyway—and admit that it hurts every time he does it and cut down, as you are able, on his opportunities to keep doing it.

Every one of those, as I see it, is compatible with “having forgiven him OF” the actions of the past and with “having forgiven him FOR” who he is. You aren’t carrying the weight. You aren’t feeding the fires. You are at peace with how you have responded and with how you are responding. And you’ve made the decision not to be stupid.

[1] My academic study has been a study of the reasons people give for why something happens. “Reason giving” is changed significantly by referring to the action of a person, for instance, or the character of a person.
[2] I had an episode of depression in 2006—still unexplained—during which I was a bad appointment risk. I went so far as to tell a friend that I had every intention of meeting him, but I would ask him to call an hour before just to get a current assessment of whether I could manage it. It was an extraordinary act of kindness for a friend to do that, but I never had the sense that it was begrudged. And I have had friends since then who have found themselves in that kind of bind and I am the one who calls an hour ahead to be sure. I have never had the least sense that I am doing something I “shouldn’t have to do” or that I begrudged. Possibly…probably…because it was done for me.
[3] The best movie depiction of this process I know is in Pay it Forward, where Arlene McKinney meets here mother, Grace, in the railroad yard where Grace lives for the purpose of forgiving her for the abusive and neglectful childhood the mother had laid on her. The dialogue just stops and we see the face of a woman who is being deeply forgiven for many awful things she has done. It helps that she is, at the same time, invited to her grandson’s birthday party—but only if she can manage to be sober for it.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, Uncategorized, ways of knowing | Tagged feeding grudges, forgiveness, not feeding grudges, prudence, resentment | 2 Comments

What I’m Good At

Posted on October 14, 2014 by hessd

“There are two things I know to be true. There’s no difference between good flan and bad flan, and there is no war,” says CIA agent Charles Young (William H. Macy), in Barry Levinson’s mercilessly funny movie, Wag the Dog. Two seems like a good number. I’m going to try to say two true things today.

The older I get, the more I am attracted to spending my time doing things I am good at.[1] It’s not that I don’t need to get better at a few things I’m not all that good at now. That would be really nice and I plan to do some of them. But what gives me enduring satisfaction and enduring pleasure—two very different things—is helping people have conversations they would not be able to have if I were not there.

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it just might be really important. Here’s a paragraph’s worth of theology on why it might be important and why no one really knows. I believe in the Providence of God.[2] That doesn’t mean I know what it is. The most practical thing I get from believing in Providence is that I am no longer certain how small a small kindness is or how catastrophically bad a “harmless prank” can be.[3] So I am not (any longer) daunted by how small and insignificant my gift seems because I no longer believe that how small it seems matters very much in the Grand Scheme of Things.[4] End of theological excursus.

There are two elements that make up this talent. The first in hearing hidden premises. The second is a sense for the integrity of the argument itself. Everything else I want to say today will be about what those words mean.

Hidden Premises. It is an odd thing to put an intention into the form of speech. I’m going to list a series of booby traps that very often blows the transmission of intention right off the road. Most of them, I don’t care about. First, there is the question of just who is speaking. “Who I really am” is strongly situational. Who I am when I am with these people is not at all like who I am when I am with those people. Who I am under stress is not like who I am relaxed and focused. And so on. One of the most common hidden premises of ads for shaving products, for instance, is the beautiful women that come with them.

Second, there is the question of intention. I have a credit card that renders the name Dale E. Hess as Dalee and that is the way the company addresses me. I don’t really care. On the other hand, one of the guys used to have coffee with in the morning—at a Starbucks in a galaxy far away—thinks I’m a pansy and if he persisted in calling me Dalee, I’d come right up out of my chair.[5] The computer at the credit card company is dumb; the guy at Starbucks is malicious. I can tell that because I can hear the emotional premise of what he says. That’s a really useful thing to be able to do, particularly if you are always right (which, alas, I am not), but that’s not what I’m talking about.

The premise I am talking about is the intellectual premise. In the midst of a discussion, you hear someone make a proposal. He means it; at least he means the surface of it. But he doesn’t know why he chose that particular thing to say or what the necessary presuppositions are that underlie the charge. Very often, I hear all three of those at the same time. Sometimes they sound like three voices to me. I hear what is said and what is presupposed and what, from among the plethora of possible emphases, was chosen for particular emphasis.

I’ve been part of a lot of conversations about public policy. I know you can feature how bad the problem is that the policy is supposed to address. You can talk about how this policy will save money in the long run if it is invested now. You can talk about the sincerity of the proponents or the insidious schemes of the opponents. You can argue that no one will be worse off and some will be better off. You can argue that this is just the right thing to do, but not by government; or not by the courts particularly; or not by the appellate courts; or not by that particular appellate court. You get the idea.

Most often, I can “hear” what grounds for action are not being chosen. If there are five common reasons for making this proposal, I hear the silent ones as well as the verbalized one. I see the speaker passing by this one and this one and this one and this one and choosing that one. I can clearly see the unchosen premises and sometimes I can guess why they were not chosen.

How best to use this kind of sight is a problem I face. Let’s say the question is about child abuse and what can be done to make it less frequent. The speaker proposes that every instance of child abuse be considered a felony and that the testimony of the other parent—presuming that there are two parents in the setting—will be sufficient for conviction. I can see all the concerns he has not brought forward. I see that he has chosen a particular bad behavior, that he wants it criminalized, that he wants serious punitive consequences, and that he wants conviction to be simple and straightforward. He might have no sense of having made all those choices and in a sense, if he was unaware of them, he didn’t “make them” in the same sense. But they are there.

The Integrity of the Argument: My gift is seeing what has been chosen and what has not. Now I need to decide what to do. That moves me on to the next focus. The second part of this gift is an appreciation for the integrity of the argument. I am often the only guy at the table who is friends with the structure of the argument; who does not want to see it abused.

That’s not always the case, of course. When a debate is going on and I am one of the parties, I try to rig the structure of the argument so that it “comes out right.” I am perfectly capable of arguing that this is essentially an individual question (if it might otherwise be decided by the group) or that it is an ethical question (if it might otherwise be decided by statute) or that the market will take care of that by itself (if state regulation is in the offing). I know how to do things like, just as everyone else does, and for quite a few years, I was paid to drive down to Salem, Oregon’s capital, and do it for a living.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I would choose—and very often I am now free to choose—not to be one of the parties to the discussion. I am an amicus tractiae.[6] I am a “friend of the argument.” I want it to succeed. I want it to be healthy and robust. I come right up to the edge of saying that I want it to be happy, but then I shy away.

And what is the enemy of a happy argumentative structure? Is it partiality? I want the argument rigged so that I will prevail! No, I want the argument rigged so that I shall prevail? Nope. That’s not it. When everyone is arguing his own argument within a common and robust structure, all is well. It is when they are making incompatible arguments and no one has noticed that everything gets screwy. There is a wonderful scene in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance in which the Major General and the Pirate King are on the verge of conflict when someone realizes that the Pirate King is saying “often” and the Major General is hearing “orphan.” When each realizes what the other is saying, the brewing conflict simply evaporates.

When you are making an argument that starts from a different premise than mine or that proceeds by a different logic than mine or that features a different emotional color than mine—and I don’t that—you look like a knave or a fool to me. Your argument is wrong, it is shabbily put together, and emotionally perverse. When I understand that you are making a different argument, it looks to me and feels to me like…just a different argument.

John Gray dramatizes this so well in his well-known Mars/Venus books. This is how they argue on Mars (how men argue), Gray says, and that is how they argue on Venus (how women argue).[7] If a man doesn’t know that, he thinks the woman is trying to argue the way he does and is making a fearful hash of it. When he learns that she is not trying to argue that way, that she is arguing in an entirely different but equally valid mode, then he can set about taking her argument on its merits. Not on his merits. Not on her merits. On IT’s merits.

It is misaligned arguments like that that can benefit from an amicus tractiae and that would be me. At my best, I can recognize that different kinds arguments are being made and are not being recognized. I can build and hold in place a conceptual structure that has a place for both arguments to appear and within which they can be seen to be different from each other and potentially, deserving of respect.[8] I get hammered on from both sides sometimes. If you want to tilt the argument this way because it shows how unrepentantly silly the other person’s argument is, you will not want a structure to be built that shows that your argument, too, is “a kind of argument.” My holding the structure in place is keeping you from tilting it. I get hit from the other side for the same reason. But being a friend of the argument itself, wishing it integrity and robustness, is going to mean that the parties might not like what I am doing.

I’m OK with that. There are times when everybody hates the umpire. [9] Even worse is a person who is actually one of the parties and who is trying to pretend to be “not one of the pair,” to be “above it all.” Nobody’s OK with that, including me. When I find I slipped into it and failed to notice it at the time, I am embarrassed and I have to fight down the feeling that I ought to apologize.

So…I have a gift. Or a curse. I guess it depends on how you look at it. I really do, often, hear hidden premises. I really do, often, exercise my role as amicus tractiae. It brings value, sometimes, to discussions that would suffer if someone didn’t do those things and I like at least to try.

[1] “…if you will forgive the grammatical inadequacies of that sentence,” says Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
[2] Everyone exercises “providence” in the sense that we “provide” for what we “foresee” (pro + videre = to see). When God is the subject of the sentence, I use the capital P in Providence to keep my providingness separate from His.
[3] We seem to be doing movies today. For the former reference, see Pay It Forward; for the latter, Needful Things.
[4] A Grand Schemer is postulated, of course.
[5] After which I would ask him if he’s like to step outside and settle this. If he were dumb enough to fall for that one, I would lock the door behind him. If he found his way back in, I suppose I would have to be the one to go outside.
[6] That’s plausible. It is built on amicus curiae, of course: “friend of the court.” The Latin word for “discuss” is trahere, which means a lot of other things as well, but which has a past participle, tractus, which, as a noun, would mean “discussion.”
[7] He overdoes it, of course. The “men” and “women” in his illustrations are just genderized stick figures. That’s what makes his presentation so clear and its application so useful.
[8] Of course, in any mode of argument—Gray’s male style or his female style, for instance—there are good argument and poor ones. The standard I am talking about requires only that they be judged by the appropriate criteria.
[9] Etymologically, we get “an umpire” from a numpire. “Numpire” comes from the Middle English noumpere, meaning “not a pair.” The two people who are arguing are a pair and you—the umpire—are not one of them. You are “not a pair,” which is easy to resent when the pitcher and the batter both know you are wrong.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Paying Attention | Tagged arguments, faulty logic, good arguments and bad arguments, hidden premises, Mars and Venus, partiality | Leave a comment

“Commemorating” Vietnam, 50 years later

Posted on October 11, 2014 by hessd

How will we go about commemorating the 50th anniversary of a war from which we have not yet recovered. I was thinking about the Vietnam War, but it has been 150 years since the American Civil War and there is abundant evidence that we have not entirely recovered from that.

Does a nation ever recover from a war about which the citizens are deeply divided? Maybe not. Maybe a war is a self-inflicted wound. We can stop the bleeding, but we can’t recover the integrity we enjoyed before the wound. There will be scars. The scars will reduce our flexibility. We’re going to need that flexibility and it is gone, along with the trust Americans used to feel toward their national government.

On Memorial Day 2012,” says today’s New York Times in an article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “President Obama issued a proclamation establishing a 13-year program, lasting until 2025, “in recognition of a chapter in our nation’s history that must never be forgotten.” We really don’t need to spend $15 million for that—it will not be forgotten. On the contrary, it will be remembered. But it will be remembered differently by different people and that is our problem today.

It isn’t just the hatreds. Jane Fonda will be remembered forever by some part of our population as “Hanoi Jane.” Allowing pictures like to be taken was foolish and insensitive. She has apologized for her bad judgment many times. But she and Tom Hayden, whom she would marry the next year, had gone to North Vietnam to check on the truth of the Pentagon claim that they had not bombed civilians. They saw “destroyed villages” and said so by every available medium. What they wanted to say was that the American people were being lied to about the conduct of the war. Many Americans felt either that the war was, in fact, justified by the nature of the threat it posed, or that showing that your own country was lying was an unpatriotic thing to do.

And there it is. What is the patriotic thing to do? I can think of three approaches. I don’t want to go so far as to endorse any of them, but whatever we wind up doing ought to be seen against the background of what else we could have done. Nothing is going to be good. Is there a way to make it less bad?

Denial: The first option is to pretend it didn’t happen. We can’t deny it, of course; not with such a powerful Vietnam Memorial in Washington D. C; not with organizations of Vietnam Veterans still prominent? And what would it mean if we did? Would it mean that we really don’t know what happened to the 58,000 or the roughly triple that number wounded? There is no denying the battlefield heroism of many young Americans. Why would we want to deny it?

On the other hand, the war itself—apart from the experiences of the people who fought the war—was a dubious policy adventure so say the least. It looked like a disastrous mistake to me at the time and my sense of it has not improved in the last fifty years. So let’s say, for the purpose of this contrast, that the war was a disaster; an atrocity. How do we condemn the war as a whole, while recognizing the heroism of so many individual soldiers and while mourning the loss of so many young men? What’s the patriotic thing to do?

We could see condemning the war as patriotic. “Living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger. And that is why I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture,” Obama said.[1] He equated patriotism with “living our values” and just as he used that stance to condemn torture, we could use it to condemn our involvement in Vietnam.

We could see denying the war as patriotic. We did, of course, send American advisors to help the beleaguered South Vietnamese, who were being invaded by their neighbors to the north. After that we sent troops to support the fledgling democracy in South Vietnam. In the end, the South Vietnamese were not able to defend themselves, but we tried our best to help them. (The echoes of our exit from Iraq and Afghanistan are eerie.) I see that stance as “denying” that we really did what history shows we did in Vietnam and it also identifies “defending democracy” as what our participation was about. We could call that patriotic.

Justification: The war in Vietnam was just one more link in America’s successful “containment strategy.” The theory was that if communism could not expand, it would implode. We stopped communist expansion in Europe, across the Middle East, and (Korea and Vietnam) in Asia and today the major communist nations are trading partners and fellow members of the Security Council of the United Nations. There were domestic protests, of course, which evaluated the war in Vietnam as a conflict without context. They saw the costs of jungle warfare, but they did not understand the benefits of containment. Vietnam was not a success for the United States, but the strategy as a whole worked well and we are the beneficiaries of it today.

The Free Market of Ideas: As we come to the 50th anniversary of significant involvement in Vietnam, we find that there are still deeply held differences among us. We are a strong enough country to admit that it was a dark time. There were atrocities committed by U. S. troops; the bombing of the North was barbaric; our allies were venal and corrupt. At the same time, we protected the South for a long time from the bloodletting perpetrated by the Viet Cong; we fought bravely for years in a war that was not a war of national expansion; there were uncounted acts of bravery and heroic sacrifice by our armed services.

There are two views, we would say. Our democracy is robust enough to allow free play to both of them and to retain the love of our country that has sustained us so far. There is no need for us to fear the open debate of the meaning of our past. To allow such debate and to contain it within a free society is one of our highest achievements.

I have presented those three approaches as possible, warning that the best we can hope is to minimize the damage. Against that background, let’s briefly consider what the Pentagon is going to do. We have a website up already that signals the directions we might take. Major General Claude M. Kicklighter is overseeing the presentation. He says the mission is “to “help the nation take advantage of a rare opportunity to turn back to a page in history and to right a wrong, by expressing its honor and respect to Vietnam veterans and their families.”

You see where this is going, don’t you? We are going to “right a wrong.” We don’t know just what wrong that is, but in order to accomplish it, we are going to express honor and respect to Vietnam veterans. If we take that means as a guide, we conclude that the lies by the Johnson administration that led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution will not be among the wrongs to be righted. Nor will the My Lai massacre, which is being called “an incident.” Nor will the angry congressional testimony of a young Vietnam vet named John Kerrybe part of the display.

Tom Hayden’s view displays his skepticism. “All of us remember that the Pentagon got us into this war in Vietnam with its version of the truth. If you conduct a war, you shouldn’t be in charge of narrating it.” I share his skepticism. I remember vividly an article by Noam Chomsky. In 1975. The last chopper had just left the last rooftop in Saigon and he said the war to determine what this all meant was just beginning.

The US government was unable to subdue the forces of revolutionary nationalism in Indochina, but the American people are a less resilient enemy. If the apologists for state violence succeed in reversing their ideological defeats of the past years, the stage will be set for a renewal of armed intervention in the case of “local subversion or rebellion” that threatens to extricate some region from the US-dominated global system.[2]

I don’t remember ever hearing anyone call Noam Chomsky a patriot, but that assessment sounds pretty patriotic to me.

[1] His predecessor, George W. Bush, also said that America does not torture, but what he meant was that the practices, such as waterboarding, that everyone else called “torture,” really weren’t torture. While the President was maintaining this position, the Vice President, Dick Cheney, was trying to exempt the CIA from a ban on torture that was being considered by Congress.
[2] The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1975

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged domestic protest, heroic soldiers, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam | Leave a comment