The Dilettante's Dilemma

“I will never be able to forgive myself.”

Posted on April 18, 2014 by hessd

I don’t remember ever saying that myself, but I’ve heard actual people say it and I’ve seen it in a lot of movies. There are two reasons why a person might say this sentence. One is that he or she—I’ve heard it more from women than from men, so I am going to say “she”—will try to forgive herself and fail in the attempt. That is what the sentence actually says, that she will not be able. The other reason is that she is not willing to forgive herself and so, however she may phrase it, she never tries.

“Willing and able” is the common English phrase and those options cover most of the occasions we need to explain. I’d like to look at “self-forgiveness” a little today. That’s the point at which I want engage the argument. Now I’m going to pull back a little and prepare for that engagement. Let’s consider selves first.

Is it really plausible to divide myself into two pieces so that one can hold a grievance against the other? Sure. We do it all the time. I think that it represents a rough and ready theory of the self that serves us well and it is thoroughly embedded in the language for a reason. The reason is that when you get down to specifying just who is thinking and who is deciding whether it was a good thought, it gets complicated and rough and ready solutions look pretty attractive.

So there is a part of you that holds certain norms to be appropriate. You ought to do some things all the time, some most of the time, and there are some things you need to be careful not to do at all. And then there is the part of you that monitors behavior (both prospectively and retrospectively) to see how closely it conforms to the norms. Think of a motion-activated camera and then substitute ethical significance for “motion.” Any time you get close to doing something that might be a right/wrong thing, the camera comes on and you see your behavior from its viewpoint.[1] And finally, there is the part of you that rewards good performance (self-praise) and punishes bad performance (guilt/shame). All this is about a part of the self we are likely to call “the real me,” the self that is taking action in the real world and whose behavior is being judged, in the light of certain standards, and who receives the praise or the blame. Except for the language I have used, which is a little more formal than ordinary coffee shop language, this is the standard notion of how we regulate our behavior.

Now let’s imagine that there is court that does all this. In the instance that called all this to mind, it was a person in the role of parent whose behavior was inadequate. She looked away for just a moment, she says, and something really bad happened to one of her children. So this court I am imagining would have some standards that related to parental oversight of children. There are standards that cover gross neglect, of course, be we are looking at the other end of the scale. At the other end it should say, “Nothing bad will happen to your kids while you are with them” or “When you and your children are at the same place, your surveillance of them should be complete, i.e., none of their behaviors escape your supervision.

The court’s next job is to make sure it knows what you are actually doing. I don’t want to get unnecessarily entangled in technology here. How would they do that? Bracelets? Drones? Omnipresent recording devices? Whatever.

And finally, the court’s job is to respond to you with appropriate incentives or disincentives—or, “carrots and sticks,” as we sometimes say. You would be formally praised for achieving the court’s standards for parenting and formally condemned for failing to meet them. There might be periods of probation for failing to meet the standards or mandatory parent surveillance workshops or something. Let’s say six months of some kind of work to bring you up to the court’s standards.

Before I go on, I want to be sure you know that I think this is just as preposterous as you do. A public court that holds the standards by which my performance of my parental duties should be judged? Outrageous! Impossible! And not only that, it is, in the special word chosen by Frank Hearn, from whom we will hear shortly, “juridification;” it is turning over to the courts matters that the community should do for itself.

On the other hand, there are some nice things about it. The standards, because they are public, are “out there” instead of “in here.” It is an entirely different thing for the court to say, “We will never forgive you” or “The public, whose sense of order we guarantee, will never forgive you,” than it would be to say, “I will never be able to forgive myself.” Someone could say, and someone probably would say, that the standards used by the court are unreasonably strict or that the judge is being unreasonably strict. Either of those might do some good. Telling the mother that she is being unreasonably strict will certainly not do any good. She has reasons for doing what she is doing.

Besides that, the court actually could forgive the mother. They wouldn’t call it that. They’d have to call it something else, but the court sees a lot of “prudent person” cases, so they might be good at this. A person is held to be negligent if she fails to do something that any prudent person would have done. “Unceasing and completely effective vigilance for the first 11 years of the child’s life” does not meet the prudent person standard. It does meet the “overburdened parent seeking sainthood” standard, but the court is empowered to say that the state, and the values of the community which it expresses, hold that the “unceasing vigilance” standard is inhumane and should not be used against anyone.

All those things the court might say don’t amount to forgiveness and I am not going to pretend they do, but they do some really good things. It doesn’t do them as well as a supportive community would do them. The supportive community could do a lot of what my imaginary court does, including: a) identifying the standard as unreasonable, b) monitoring the behavior of the parent to call her attention to instances of actions based on this unreasonable standard, and c) forgiving her and helping her forgive herself for her failures. Here is Frank Hearn’s notion of what is available.

Family, marriage, and parenthood are institutions….In institutions people are able to step out of themselves and into a shared social life. Institutions offer guidelines and criteria of right and wrong that lie beyond the self-interested preferences of the individual as utility- maximizer/rights-holder…. Institutions are arrangements of mutual support centered on activities that are essential to human development and the satisfaction of important human needs. In part collective responses to human vulnerability, institutions regularize and justify by making moral those cooperative activities that help assure the orderly provision of the basic requirements of human existence and coexistence.[2]

I like that a lot. What I’d really like to do at this point is bring this essay to a close and show a closing shot of the sun going down peacefully behind the hills. Unfortunately, there are two problems to deal with yet and neither of them is a small problem.

First, you don’t bumble into communities that could serve you this way. At the very best, you find communities that could do this for you and join them. More likely, you help build them to the point where they could serve you and other members like this. You don’t start looking for them when you need them; that’s way too late.

Second, you have to grant the community—this is Hearn’s “institution,” the authority to tell you something you don’t want to hear. Take this “unceasing vigilance” standard, for instance. Why does the mother hold that? Her mother held the same standard? She read it in a book? All her colleagues at school believe the same thing and require her to believe it as well? It’s her way of feeling “in charge of” the lives of the children? It’s her way of fending off criticism, showing that she has worked so hard that it is unreasonable to ask her to work harder?[3]

Whatever it is, there is a reason (or two or three) why she holds that standard and why she whips herself with it. It is, in this narrow sense, her own choice. Granting to the community the right to say that it is not a good choice—that it is, for instance, not good for the child; not good for the child’s father; not good for her—is a breathtaking loss of personal control. It could save her life, but letting a collection of informed, caring, others insist on the “not blaming” option, will be a hard thing to do.

If the community she belongs to believes in a God who is just and gracious, eager to forgive, the community could point out that it is a tough thing to insist on higher standards than God uses. It might even be a heresy—a real one with a special name and everything. Demanding the right to continue to hold herself guilty when God is straining every fiber to declare her to be innocent, could be seen as daring. It could be seen as foolhardy. Depending on who else is being damaged—I suggested the child and the father, but presumably this woman has parents as well, and possibly grandparents and the father also has parents and grandparents—it could be seen as cruel.

But, you know, when God’s standards aren’t high enough, what’s a mother to do?

[1] And some people have to watch re-runs for years and years after the event.
[2] Pretty wonderful, isn’t it? That’s from the first chapter of Frank Hearn’s Moral Order and Social Disorder.
[3] And I haven’t even touched the distortion that makes “how good a job the parent is doing” rather than “how good an experience the child is having” the central matter. How did that come to be the important question? For the child to have a successful childhood, a childhood where autonomy and resilience are learned and where guilt-mongering is condemned, he is going to have to have room to make mistakes and only gaps in the eternal vigilance standard will grant that.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, sociability | Tagged community, forgiveness, God's grace, helicopter mother, perfectionism, self-punishment | Leave a comment

A school stabbing. Everyone lived.

Posted on April 13, 2014 by hessd

A student goes wild in a crowded school and attempts to kill as many of his fellow students as he can. That’s not even an unusual story anymore. Here’s what’s unusual: nobody died. Not yet, at least.

So what’s going on? Is the kid a bad shot? Not really. He was armed with two kitchen knives and he was stabbing his fellow students, not shooting them.

This brings us to “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” That was always stupid when posed as a set of alternatives. It’s why “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are stupid when posed as alternatives.

Alex Hribal, the kid in Franklin High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who did all the damage with the knives, fits awkwardly into the NRA mantra about “people killing people.” It is awkward because this incident changes the obvious question, the one that lies on the very surface of the debate, to: do people with guns hit more targets than people with knives? The answer is: “Yes. They do.”

This episode began about 7:15 a.m. EDT and ended about 7:20. You can see a good account here. About five minutes. In that time, Hribal stabbed 20 students and a security guard, before he was tackled by an assistant principal. Imagine that he had had an AK 47. They shoot, according an answer I got from asking the question on Google, “An automatic one approx 600rpm. A semi-auto variant as fast as you can pull the trigger.”[1]

The debate about the regulation of firearms in the U. S. is as complicated as you would like to make it. The Supreme Court has debated for decades now about the relationship between the “well-regulated militia” clause and the “right to bear arms” clause. On the Court, no one has changed anyone’s mind for a long time.

You can argue about whether we would be better off if everyone had guns or if no one had guns. The position of the NRA is that we will never achieve a condition where no one has a gun and the next best position is for everyone to have one. We don’t need fewer guns, we need “more good people with guns.” This has the virtue, as the NRA sees it, of changing the discussion from a policy outcomes question–what effects will a society awash in weapons experience ?—to a moral question. The moral question is how we can be sure that more of the people who have guns are good guys. Apparently, the NRA feels that shots taken by good guys don’t hit bystanders by accident.

You can argue about what means the government can take to reduce the chance that a mentally ill person has ready access to automatic weapons. Are “background checks” really going to do much? Would proximity triggers help, a gun that would fire only when in the hands of the registered owner? Would control of bullets (the Constitution is silent about bullets) be a better strategy?

You can’t argue that if Alex Hribal had had two semiautomatic pistols instead of two kitchen knives, he would have done less damage. You can’t argue that. Many people in Murrysville are alive today because Hribal had knives instead of guns. Even the adaptation of the NRA slogans—“knives don’t kill people, people kill people” or “what we need is more good people with knives”—are patently nonsensical in the light of this event.

The “people kill people” dodge has always been offensive to me as someone who aspires to constructive public argument, but today, it just seems silly.

[1] This answer is two years old and came from a person whose on-screen name is “Fatefinger.” I’ll take it as close enough for my purposes and, so far as I know, it might be exactly correct. I saw a range of 400 rounds per minute to 600 rounds per minute (rpm).

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged Charlton Heston, gun control, guns, knives, murrysville, NRA | Leave a comment

How to be a Beta Person

Posted on April 11, 2014 by hessd

The previous post was my best shot at how to be an Alpha—a person who, in the seemingly random distribution of resources, gets a card marked A. Today, let’s consider how to be a Beta person—someone who got a card marked B. It’s harder

This is how far we have gotten. There is a distribution of conditions, A and B; the distribution is random.[1] The people who get the A cards and the people who get the B cards are not different from each other in any way prior to getting the cards. The people who get the A cards, and who come over time to think of themselves as “Alpha people,”—as good people, rather than as beneficiaries of a process that took no note at all of merit—are healthy, wealthy, and wise. The people who get the B cards and who—unless they get some help—will come to think of themselves as Beta people, are unhealthy, unwealthy, and unwise. (I hope you will forgive the inelegance of the terms; I am riding the stereotypes as hard as I can so no one will mistake them for descriptions.)

Since in the first essay, I called myself an Alpha, as carefully defined in the footnote, I can say quite easily “how Alphas should invest their resources.” There is no way I can say that about Betas. Trust me on that. I have tried for ten years or so and have failed.[2] From here on out, when I say “I” and “we,” I am referring to myself and to others like me as the people who were dealt B cards.

Our first and most important job as Betas is to believe in the context—some people got A cards and some people got B cards. The most demanding task for the people who got the A cards is to keep themselves from drifting into thinking of themselves as “Alpha people;” the most demanding task for us is to keep from thinking of ourselves as “Beta people.” The community that binds the two sets of people together is based on the recognition that there is no particular merit in having been handed an A card; nor is there any lack of merit in having been handed a B card. It is a community of people who entered the room as colleagues, and who, if they know what they are doing, can leave the room as colleages.

Everything about our lives since that (fictional) moment will tell us that we “are” Alphas and Betas. Why? Well, people who are healthy, wealthy, and wise don’t live where people live who are unhealthy, unwealthy, and unwise. You know that as well as I do; we may be “unwise,” but we aren’t stupid. That means that what the Alphas strain to concede and remember, the Betas strain to claim and remember. The best of the Alphas, the ones most likely to have their A cards reissued after the next shuffle, know that the reason they were blessed with resources is so they could share them with us. Our job is to be sure we don’t knock that commitment out of their heads to the detriment of both sets of people.

How could we do that? How could we screw up so badly that we persuade the Alphas to think of themselves as superior?

We could do that by paying with gratitude for the gifts they offer in friendship. Our job in accepting their help is to continue to accept the community that we once shared. That community results in two simple maxims: they need to offer their resources because that is their part of the job; we need to accept those resources because that is our part of the job.

Remember that the Alpha task is just a little complicated. As long as they remember that nothing separates us but the card they were handed and the card we were handed, they will support us out of their riches and be glad for the chance to do it. When they fail to remember that, they will have to confront the fact (this “fact,” as all the facts in this story, is fictional) that how well they do their job of bringing resources to us is going to be evaluated. They do not want their A card to go to someone who will share more generously than they have.[3]

It is so much better for them to share out of our common collegiality than to share as a strategy for keeping their A card status. It is also better for us, so we need to address seriously how we can achieve that goal. We will need to join them in appreciation for what their sharing has achieved. Using “healthy, wealthy, and wise” as our table of contents, we can help them understand fully how these people are healthier, those people are less impoverished, and those others less cognitively impaired than they would otherwise be. We can stand side by side with the Alphas and celebrate that achievement.

Our celebration as colleagues need not be impaired in the slightest by the fact that we ourselves are among those who have received this benefit. The collegiality implied by the original distribution of cards—they share only out of their surplus; we receive only out of our need—has been reaffirmed. Suffering of all sorts has been alleviated and we celebrate that with them.

All the alternatives to this way of giving and receiving resources are less good. If we Betas receive as if it were a compensation for our lack of merit, we teach them that they received an A card because of some merit. It is not good for us to teach them that and it is not good for them to learn it. They will come to see their own merit as the explanation for having received the A card and our lack of merit as the explanation for our receiving the resources that were given them to share.

Two effects will come from this: both bad.

The first is that they will come to see their sharing as an exercise in charity, as if it were particularly meritorious. They will see it as appropriate and sensible when things are going well in their lives and as inappropriate and onerous when things are not going well. Giving as “charity” will not spare them from the feeling that they really ought not be asked to do this. Immediately following that feeling will come the sense that we ought not to ask it.

The second is that they will come to see their sharing of resources—the resources that were given to them so that they could share them—as a way of safeguarding their own status when the cards are shuffled. The giving that was once necessary and fully implicit in the distribution of cards now becomes something they have to do to safeguard their own future. When they stop being “people who received the A card” and become “one of the Alpha people,” there is the danger that the sharing they do will become only a means to assure their own status. That way of grasping their lives will be both abrasive and toxic to them.

Both of these bad effects—seeing the sharing as “charity” and practicing it as a strategy for retaining their status—come from a common source: it is the failure of collegiality. When they see their giving and our receiving as the two stages of the one process, they are protected from both of these bad effects. They will try as best they can not to fall into “charity” and “status maintenance” as motives, but they will fail if we do not help them. They will continue to share as our colleagues if we continue to receive as their colleagues should. Nothing else will do that job.

That’s not always easy for us, but it is our piece of the work to be done. Our job is to receive the resources as colleagues, not as failures. When their intentions lapse and they drift into the “I am an Alpha person” mindset, they will offer their resources in the way a person who deserves to have resources (Alphas) offers them to a person who deserves to have too few resources (us). Even when the resources are offered in that way, we need to insist on receiving them as colleagues would. If we Betas agree to be distinguished as less deserving, we bind on the Alphas the burden of thinking of themselves as more deserving. The whole question of desert—of who deserves what and why—is the enemy of collegiality and collegiality is all that keeps us together in unity and mutual appreciation.

I know this has all been abstract and hypothetical. Perhaps a homely example will help.[4] You are having dinner at a good restaurant on the first week in April. The waiter does a really good job of serving you; he is knowledgeable, interesting, and efficient. You recognize the unusually good performance with a substantial tip. The same waiter serves you in the first week in May. What will you have taught him about you and what will you have taught him about himself?

Let’s try that scene again. You are having dinner at a good restaurant on the first week of April. You make it plain to the waiter that if he provides good service, and not otherwise, there will be a substantial tip in it for him. He does a really good job of serving you; he is knowledgeable, interesting, and efficient and you give him the tip you promised to give him if (and only if) the service was good. What will you have taught him about you and what will you have taught him about himself?

In the first instance, you will have reinforced the waiter’s view of himself as a competent server and he will regard the tip as a recognition by you of the quality of his work. You will have presented yourselves as diners who are capable of recognizing good service, who expect it, and who reward it. You are appreciative customers. In the second instance, you will have taught the server to think of himself as someone who would not offer good service if it were not for the promise of the tip. The tip is the goal; you, the diners, are only a means to reaching the goal. You will have presented yourselves as diners who expect that they would have been served poorly had they not dangled additional compensation in front of the waiter. You are manipulative customers.[5]

Those two dining experiences reflect, though in a glass, darkly, my argument about Alphas and Betas. The way my story plays out, it is the distribution of the cards that makes one a diner and the other a waiter. If we treat the A card holders as people who have to do what they are doing or risk losing the A card, we are teaching them to be coldly calculating—to treat us as a means to an end.. If, on the other hand, we servers treat the A card holders as colleagues—matching the high quality of our service with the high quality of their understanding and appreciation—then we teach them to think of themselves as colleagues, even when the conditions of their own lives make them vulnerable to erosive considerations of comparative merit.

It’s not easy to do our job well. We can learn to hunch our shoulders as if our need reflected any lack of merit. It’s not easy to do their job well either. They can learn to stoop down, if meritorious people were somehow being asked to share their resources with people who did not deserve them. But when we both do our jobs well, the context of our common life is affirmed. That means our essential collegiality is affirmed. And that means that the goal of supporting those who are not healthy, not wealthy, and not wise—which is the real goal of the people who are handing out the cards—is achieved.

[1] Last time, I passed over all of the buffering I ordinarily do, but considering holders of the B cards, the Beta people, is much more offensive so this might be the time to add it. Here are three things to consider. First, the notion of randomness doesn’t actually mean anything in a theological context. Randomness is a crucial statistical tool, but it doesn’t help us if Providence is one of the players. Second, privileged families have privileged children. It isn’t fair, but it is indisputable. Despite the commonsense presuppositions of the economists’ term, “distribution,” economists do not imagine that there is a Distributor. Finally, it is one thing to lecture the privileged on remembering to serve the less privileged; it is quite another thing to lecture the Betas on how to live their lives. I have eased that dilemma a little by positing that I am, myself, a Beta, and giving this lecture to myself in that capacity. I am, in fact, an Alpha: I am healthy, for an old man; I am wealthy, given my lethargic appetite for spending; and I am as wise as I am ever going to get.
[2] If you want to experience that yourself, there is an easy way to do it. Head a column “As an Alpha, I should…” and then another column as “As a Beta, you should…” In the second column, sentences will come to you that you will simply not be willing to write down.
[3] A cards never go to B people. The whole fantasy would collapse if I allowed that.What will you have taught him about you and what will you have taught him about himself?
[4] It’s commercial, I know, but it is homely.
[5] And, unless you really are knowledgeable diners, you will find yourselves paying only for a flamboyant servility and no professional service at all. Everyone can recognize servility; only a competent diner can recognize really good service. And—lest this example get out of hand—let me say that I am not, myself, a particularly competent diner, but servility really distresses me.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged acceptance, community, healthy, poor, rich, service, unhealthy, unwise, wise | Leave a comment

How to be an Alpha Person

Posted on April 8, 2014 by hessd

Some years ago, I wrote a short essay on the providence of God. Here is the scene with which that essay began.

Let’s imagine that each of us is on a team with a special skill and that the teams are distinguished by color. There is a red team and a blue team and so on. We’re all waiting, which is what we’re supposed to be doing. While we are waiting, we are living our lives, earning income, raising families, and so on. A messenger comes through the door and yells, “Green.” One eleventh of us, the green team, haul up to our feet and head out the door. We have a job, apparently. I’ve written a lot of essays about the guys on the green team, the guys who are “on.” This essay is about everyone else. What’s our job now? Nothing. Be ready. Be at peace. Repair yourself. Your time will come.

The idea I was trying to get at is that everyone is doing the job that needs to be done. The guys that get the current assignment are; the guys who wish them well and stay behind relaxing are. Everyone is. I’d like to use all those same guys again today and try something a little trickier with them. I want to turn them into an A Team and a B Team.

Let’s imagine that the A Team and the B Team were chosen at random. They were not like the Green team and the Red team in the example above, which, after all, have special skills that are going to be called upon. You get a card that says A or B and when you turn it over, you find it says that some of you, the B Team, are going to be emotionally unstable and physically disabled and socially isolated. That’s not your job; that’s your condition. The job comes later. You get the A card and turn it over and you find that you will be healthy, wealthy, and wise (your condition) and will have the resources to make the lives of the B Team members substantially better (your job) than they would be without your help.

What happens now? I mean right now. Do you look at what is says on the back of the A card and say, “Rats! Why didn’t I get to be the one with the emotional and physical and social disabilities and who gets all that attention from the A Team?” That’s it? That’s what you say?

Probably not. Probably you turn your A card over and say, “That’s it? I get to be healthy, wealthy, and wise and the only condition is that I have to invest myself in the lives of the people who got the B card? That’s terrific! I am so happy!”

Later, you learn that it isn’t exactly like that. Close, but not exactly. You got the A card because you were thought to be very likely to use those resources to help the B community. That’s a whole new notion of “gift card,” isn’t it? The people who dealt the cards are really serious about helping the people in the B community. If you turn out to be as good at it as they thought you would be—as compassionate, as patient, as resourceful—then they are going to re-up your A card after the next shuffle.[1] But that is only if you really turn out to be that goo Maybe you really don’t take advantage of your opportunities the way they thought you would and after the next shuffle, the A card goes to someone else.[2] In this way of looking at it, getting the resources where they are needed is the big thing; the people who get them there are not, themselves, what the project is about

So I’m the A card holder and I’m a good guy—most of the time. I was ecstatically happy when I got my A card and it made all the sense in the world to share my resources—my happiness, my wealth, and my wisdom—with the B card holders. And I spend a lot of time with the B community. Early in this process, when I said “we,” I meant all the people who were in the room when the cards were distributed. But the way things naturally fall out, I spend more time with the other A card holders and I find I really have more in common with them.[3] More and more, when I say “we,” I mean my fellow A card holders. I’m really more “an A card kind of person” myself and, of course, so are they.

I hope you will agree with me that this slow transition to “association with people like me” is the most natural thing in the world. I don’t even feel any blame for the people who, over time, begin to think of the A card, or “Alpha People,” as we come to say, as “we” and the B card, or “Beta People” as “they.” “Perfectly natural,” I say to myself.

Two things remain problematic. Here is the first. I need to change the people who share the B condition from a community defined by their condition to a community defined by their value—and by “value,” I want to be sure to mean, “value to me.” These people are really not very much like me (condition) and there is so little they can do (value). I am, after all, healthy, wealthy, and wise. They are, taken as a whole, unhealthy, poor, and…um…not very intellectually stimulating.

This is problematic because I was there when the cards were handed out. I saw other people turn over the A cards and try immediately to mask their elation lest they offend the others. I saw other people turn over the B cards and try to mask their disappointment lest they offend the others. I did that myself with my A card. I wasn’t proud of getting an A card. What’s to be proud of? I wasn’t deserving. I didn’t deserve an A card any more than my buddy Tom deserved a B card.

So this is the first problem: I come to think of myself as “an Alpha person,” but I still remember when the cards were handed out. There are solutions to this problem, of course. Here is the first. I can begin to think of what it was about those people that resulted in their getting B cards. Surely there was something. I’ll bet I could come up with something if I really put my mind to it. And here is the second. Getting the B card was entirely random at the beginning and being a Beta Person is a tough gig, but Tom isn’t handling it very well. It’s one thing for Tom not to be healthy, wealthy, and wise the way we are (Alpha People), but does he need to be so focused on being sick and poor and uninteresting? He could do better than that, I’m pretty sure. The condition isn’t his fault, sure, but aren’t we all responsible for handling our conditions as well as we can? Is that really the best he can?

You can see my struggling to get out from under the essential randomness of the A and B conditions. I twist one way, then another. Not very attractive, is it? But that’s only the first problem. The second problem is that I have known from the beginning that the principal purpose of my health, wealth, and wisdom—the reason I have those resources— is sharing it with my B colleagues. There are things I can help them do because I am healthy and they are not; there are things I can help them afford because I am wealthy and they are not; there are things I can help them think through because I am wise and they are not.[4] And at the beginning, when I got my A card, I was keenly aware that that was what these resources were for.

Now I struggle to remember that. It is so pleasant to be healthy, wealthy, and wise—to have those traits—that I don’t always remember how pleasant it is to share them. In the sharing, I remember that they are resources, not traits. I remember that I have them for the purpose of sharing them, not for the purpose of “being them.”

The solution to this problem—not the problem I imagine I have, like the problem I “solved” in the prior case, but the problem I really have—is to take pleasure in the use of these resources. If I take pleasure in sharing these resources, I will continue to do it and to enjoy it. If I do not take pleasure in sharing them, but continue to share them only because “it is the right thing to do,” I will probably not continue to share them and I will certainly not continue to share them well.

Casting the alternatives as baldly as this is a little like stirring up a hornets nest just to see the action. It’s not something I do as a rule; I have been stung too often to enjoy “the action.” And I am quite aware that I could use the rest of the essay to buffer the conclusions and to make exceptions to the categories. There would be nothing wrong with doing that. Tomorrow, I may wish that I had done it. I do have to get on with the Beta people, however.

Instead, I want to call up the prospect of what I called a “reshuffle.” What does it do for me to know that there is going to be an accounting and right after that, a reshuffle? First, it helps me remember that these traits are not “me,” nor are they, except in the loosest sense of the word, “mine.” At the most, they are “me at this moment.” They are not “me” after my heart attack or my stroke or my catastrophic accident. The first great gift of the shuffle is to help me remember that.

The second is that I have a feeling that I got all these resources because I was a good bet to share them widely and deeply. If Outcome 1—the thing that really needs to happen—is the amelioration of the conditions suffered by the B Community and my getting the A card is only a means to that end and if I really like having the A card, then I have every incentive to put my shoulder to the wheel and make sure that I do my part in achieving Outcome 1. Let me say it more crudely: Outcome 1 is my meal ticket. It is why I got the A card and why I will continue to have it in any proposed reshuffle. If there is a back room anywhere where they take the A cards away from low performers and reassign them to potentially high performers—I’m not saying there is—then I want my performance to be really good. I know that is not a good reason for wanting my performance to be good, but let’s deal with the performance first and worry about the motive later.

Understanding what my resources are for and using them well is “how to be an Alpha person.” Being a Beta person is a little more complicated, but it is next.
[1] I’m not really going to deal with the notion of “reshuffling” in this post. It would be a long and winding road. All I really have in mind is something like the story Jesus tells in Matthew 25 about the master who dealt out a lot of money to his servants along with instructions to use it well. One of the servants did not use it well, so it was taken away from him and given to investors who were more healthy, wealthy, and wise. The amount of money he chose not to invest, by the way, was not pocket change. It was 67 pounds of silver. If you want a modern approximation, multiply that 67 by 16 and then by the value in dollars of an ounce of silver today.
[2] Don’t push me on what happens to the former A-Card holder. I haven’t thought it out that far and really don’t want to.
[3] That is undoubtedly true. The question is whether “traits in common” is the best way to sort the relationships.
[4] If these persistent references to being “wise” are starting to grate on you, you may begin to substitute demented where the ment- part derives from the Latin mentis, “mind” and the de- prefix indicates “away from.” “Out of your mind” is a common approximation.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged deserving, giving, healthy, receiving, talents of silver, wealthy, wise | Leave a comment

Is the free speech of rich people guaranteed?

Posted on April 5, 2014 by hessd

Yes. It is. And it will continue to be guaranteed until one of the five justices who gave that answer drops dead or retires and is replaced by a liberal. That would be the first and last in the top row and the first three in the second row.

In political science classes—and probably not anywhere else—students ask what kind of sense it makes for modern 21st Century America to be governed by a constitution that took an 18th Century society for granted. We are going to be dealing with the unhappy part of that answer today, so let’s start with the happy part. The happy part of the answer is that our Constitution is flexible. It can be adapted to changing circumstances by being amended by the people or by decisions of the Supreme Court.

At that point, a student who knows more than the rest and is not happy with recent rulings says, but what if the justices of the Supreme Court get it wrong? What if they say that the Constitution says something it really doesn’t say? That answer to that question, a good enough answer in an introductory political science class, is: That is impossible. The Constitution actually says whatever the Supreme Court says it says.”

And, of course, that’s the bad part. Now let’s take a detour. I think this will help us put matters in perspective. Here is “the question” as posed in the justly famous Griswold v. Connecticut. These are all cut and pasted from www.oyez.org, the easiest of the court sites to use.

Does the Constitution protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on a couple’s ability to be counseled in the use of contraceptives?

And here is “the answer,” just an inch or so down the page. “Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, create a new constitutional right, the right to privacy in marital relations.” Or, more briefly, “Yes. The Constitution does protect that right.”

We didn’t have the hyperpartisan sources in 1965 that we have now, but it is not hard to imagine conservatives screaming about the misuse of any very general “right to privacy.” Does the Constitution protect privacy for bad uses as well as for good uses,” they would ask? Yes. It does.

It didn’t take us very long after that to get to Roe v. Wade. Here is the question: “Does the Constitution embrace a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?” And here is the answer: “The Court held that a woman’s right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy (recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut) protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.” Or, more briefly, Yes the Constitution does do that.

Conservatives argued against both Griswold and Roe on the grounds that the decision the court made would have bad effects. The court majority responded, in effect: “Our job is to say what the Constitution requires. After that, whatever happens, happens.”

What this means is that you will have two perspectives on any seriously contested Supreme Court case. One will have to do with the logic of the decision or, in some cases, the effects of the decision for the Court.[1] The other will have to do with the effects on society of one decision or another.

That brings us to McCutcheon v. FCC, which is making headlines these days. Here is the question: “Is the two-year aggregate campaign contribution limit constitutional under the First Amendment?” The answer is, No, it is not.

This is an answer that makes conservatives very happy, at least in the short run. It means that the attempt of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which tried to find a way to limit the amount of money being spent on politics, was a failure. Liberals, of course, are unhappy and four of the unhappiest liberals are the four losing justices on the Court’s 5-4 decision. Justice Breyer was so unhappy he read his entire dissent from the bench and made everyone listen to it.

But the liberals are unhappy because of the effects they see. It would be a very rare liberal—I have not yet heard anyone take this view—that the Court got the First Amendment wrong. If money is speech (Buckley v. Valeo), then the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act infringes on Shaun McCutcheon’s right to speak freely. What is it about the guarantees of the First Amendment, much beloved by liberals everywhere, that makes they want to think that in this case, it doesn’t mean what it says. It says, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.”[2]

Liberals wail, “How could you do that?” The court majority responded, in effect: “Our job is to say what the Constitution requires. After that, whatever happens, happens.” I hope that looks familiar. It is just cut and paste from the Griswold decision.

This is what I thought was going to happen. Here’s what I wrote last October 10 about this case.

Being a liberal, I am bothered by how much influence wealthy people have in our elections. I don’t like the way they dominate the lobbying of Congress either, but that isn’t today’s topic. The Supreme Court’s standard—one man, one vote—in Reynolds v. Simms (1964) seems like a good one to me. “One dollar, one vote,” which is what happens to the political system when unlimited amounts of money may be dumped into it and candidacies bought and sold in front of God and everyone, seems like a bad standard.

And I still feel that way, but you will notice that my objection to it last October had to do with the effects it would have and why I, as a liberal, would deplore those effects. I think the effects of money are so pernicious that I would be happy to see Buckley v. Valeo overturned so that the court said, “Look. There is speech. That’s protected by the Constitution. Then there’s money, which is legitimately regulated by the Congress.”

I’m pretty sure the Hobby Lobby case will be coming up next. Conservatives will say it is about freedom of religion. Can the government really force individuals to take actions they believe to be wrong? What does that do the conscientious objection to active service in the armed forces? I don’t know how the Court will decide that one, but I know this. Some will argue that the decision ought to take into account the effects the decision will have and the others will argue that only the questions that bear strictly on the logic of the Constitution should be allowed.

And if I’m wrong, you can use my blog to say, “I told you so.”

[1] The Court has argued against reversing the conviction and subsequent sentence of death for a man conclusively proved to be innocent. The argument is that if the Court started taking cases like that, they would be inundated by this one kind of case and would not be able to do their real work. This is an “effect argument,” but it is only the effect on the Court’s docket that is being considered.
[2] It has, of course, made a lot of laws restricting speech which the courts have found fully constitutional, but the language is there to be confronted. You do have to find a reason and the Roberts Court did not find one.

Posted in Politics | Tagged conservative objections, freedom of speech, liberal objections, McCutcheon, privacy, Roe v. Wade | Leave a comment

What to wear to the commons

Posted on April 2, 2014 by hessd

“Nobody washes a rental car,” runs an oft-repeated conservative lament.

“Farmers don’t prevent their cattle from overgrazing and killing the commons” runs an oft-repeated liberal lament.

You can’t exactly say either of these is false, but I think we can say that neither is true all the time. The rental car companies do, in fact, wash rental cars and they do that so they can rent them out again. Farmers do, in fact, prevent their cattle from overgrazing if they will be caught and punished for not doing it. We might wish for loftier motives, but most of us say “good enough” and let it go.

I am going to wind up talking about public school dress codes, but I want to go back and lay in a little background on the commons first. Garret Hardin proposed the dilemma by picturing a common grazing area and a bunch of dairy farmers. The commons will support only so much grazing, but each farmer thinks it might support just a little more—just enough for him to add a few of his own cows, provided that no one else follows the same logic. The others do follow the same logic—how could they not?—and the commons is overgrazed and crashes and all the farmers go through a very hard time until it recovers.

The “commons” I want to think about today is common value commitments. There are some outcomes that everyone wants in the same way that every farmer wants to graze his herd on the common pasture land. Even the students in the schools we are going to look at want to “decrease violence and theft” (E, below) and to “aid in the recognition of [potentially lethal] intruders (J, below). Many of these students also want to “enhance the schools’ ability to achieve their basic academic purposes” (A, below) and even to “diminish differences among socioeconomic levels” (B, below).

But even if they wanted all those values to be achieved, they would desire them impersonally and abstractly. They would desire those goods the way the farmers desire “sustainable use of the common grazing lands.” But, it turns out, there are things that each member wants in a more immediate and more individual way. For the farmers, it’s “extra grazing land for my (not your) cattle. For the students, it is “pushing the uniform code just enough to call attention to myself (not you).

So lets think about public school dress codes. Nearly half the states explicitly allow schools to formulate and enforce dress codes and in all the other states, except Massachusetts, where it is forbidden, it is presumed that schools have good reasons for having them. Here is more information about states and dress codes than you ever wanted, courtesy of the Education Commission of the States. There are lots of good reasons why schools might want a uniform style of dress. Here, for instance, is a collection

While no long-term empirical studies have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of school uniforms or dress codes in improving student or school performance, proponents argue that the use of such policies (A)can enhance schools’ ability to achieve their basic academic purposes. Uniforms, they say: (B)diminish differences among socioeconomic levels, (C) promote school spirit and (D) improve student self-confidence and behavior. Similar positive effects from implementing a school uniform policy were cited in the U.S. Department of Education Manual of School Uniforms, disseminated in 1996 to all of the nation’s 16,000 school districts. Among the potential benefits cited were: (1) (E) decreasing violence and theft, (2) (F) preventing students from wearing gang-related colors to school, (3) (G) instilling student discipline, (4) (H) helping to resist peer pressure, (5) (I) helping students to concentrate on academics, and (6) (J) aiding in the recognition of intruders.

My lettering goes, as you see, from A to J, so there are 10 good reasons, allowing for a little overlap here and there, for making and enforcing dress codes in public schools.[1] These public goals and rationales are “the commons” to which I referred in the title. How could anyone be against such things? Is there a pro-gang clothing faction among educators? Does anyone want to sponsor a form of dress that has the goal of diminishing the self-esteem of some students? Doesn’t everyone understand that some kinds of clothing are going to make the effective conduct of class very difficult?

The answers are all obvious. It is hardly worth the trouble to formulate the answers. Schools have great difficulty with their dress codes, however, so something is going on. Here are some possibilities and here is the full New York Times article.

Let’s consider Andie Alexander, pictured below.

Lincoln Middle School in Indianapolis has started to allow leggings beneath skirts— and Andie Alexander, in eighth grade, has already gotten into trouble over it. “When I realized we were going to be able to wear leggings, I went and bought a bunch in wild colors — neon purple, violet, bright green, turquoise, red and yellow,” said Andie, 13.

Let’s pause for one moment and consider Common Values A—J. Now take another moment and try to think which of these Andie was trying to overthrow. If nothing comes to mind, you might take one additional moment…or you might just say that there is no relationship between Andie’s choices and the school’s goals. None at all.

These kids don’t oppose the Common Values. They don’t connect with them at all. The school administration is trying to explain why they are important and—with one exception, which we will get to in a moment—the kids don’t care. The students aren’t connected to the values; they are connected to the enforcers of the values. They want to wear clothes that distinguish them; clothes that are maybe a little daring; clothes that push the edge just a little. They said leggings—it does get cold in northern cities in the winter—and Andie said, “Woohoo! Neon purple! Violet! Mrs. Thompson will hate these!”

There is a little bit of the jailhouse lawyer in 13-year-old kids.[2] And then there are the peer subversion networks. And then there is the heroic status achieved by finding something “they” are going to hate, but that they didn’t clearly forbid.

None of those very common traits considers the commons at all. The substantial educational and social values that are supposed to be attained by this program are just ignored.

And where do the kids get these just-barely-permitted clothes? Oddly enough, they are manufactured precisely for this market.

Retailers have been happily catering to the changes. For the first time this year, the Lands’ End uniform catalog is offering girls’ khakis in pencil and boot-cut silhouettes. There are also shawl-collar cardigans, fleece peacoats, leggings and yoga pants. French Toast, another large uniform company, has made its girls’ polos and blouses tighter-fitting, and has added items like a boyfriend cardigan.

“Schools really do adjust to fashion,” said Matt Buesing, school marketing coordinator at French Toast. If a girl wears a polo that’s a little form-fitting, for instance, “it may not fit their code exactly, but the administrators in the school say, ‘That’s an acceptable shirt — we should allow it.’ ”

Part of the natural resistance kids have to school uniforms is that the uniforms are forced on them by adults. The easy way to solve that particular dilemma is to give the students a role in deciding what is to be permitted.

At Martin Luther King Jr. middle school in Charlotte, N.C., administrators asked students to help create the uniforms when they were first introduced in 2006 to minimize resistance. “If the people who are going to have to follow the rules are involved in establishing the rules, you have a lot more buy-in and a lot more cooperation than if it’s forced upon them,” said Janet Moss, an assistant principal at the school. “Of course, it was a much more popular thing for the students who created it than it was for the students who are there now.”

And that’s the problem Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said there should be a revolution every twenty years. A revolution is a democratic achievement for the generation that pulls it off successfully. But keeping the regime the revolution devised is just more rules passed down for the next generation. It’s fine to say the “the students” should participate, but then you have to say that the next generation of students is free to throw out a dress code that is working very well, thank you very much. We just solved the “cargo shorts” definitions and the “winter leggings” definitions, and now you guys want to change the rules again!

There is a formal solution. Don’t get your hopes up. There are two, actually. The first is that the students trust the adults to have instituted the dress code for good reasons and their compliance with it displays that trust. In this solution, the students don’t have to understand the relationship between how they dress and social values A—J. I’m not putting a lot of faith in that one.

The second one if for the students to be instructed in how their behavior relates to the values. This will require that the students be willing to sacrifice a little fashion one-up-manship so that other values, like banning gang colors, can be achieved. I’m not putting a lot of faith in that one either.

I think that means that the dress code public schools “movement” will always be small and we are going to have to figure out another approach to protecting the commons.

[1] In private schools, of course, it is even easier because you can just throw students out if they don’t conform.

[2] Jailhouse lawyer is a colloquial term in North American English to refer to an inmate in a jail or other prison who, though usually never having practiced law nor having any formal legal training, informally assists other inmates in legal matters relating to their sentence (e.g. appeal of their sentence, pardons, stays of execution, etc.) or to their conditions in prison. Sometimes, he or she also assists other inmates in civil matters of a legal nature.

Posted in Education, Political Psychology, sociability, Sustainability | Tagged common values, dress codes, pushing the limits, tragedy of the commons | Leave a comment

Racism and Sin

Posted on March 28, 2014 by hessd

Am I a racist? No. I’m not.

There. That takes care of the substance of the matter. I have blasphemed in public and I will be chastened by a lot of people whose social and political views are very like mine. We part company on some other issues. It might be the question of what language is for. It might be the question of what sin is like and what to do about it. I’m really not sure, but in the process of writing this post, I am hoping that I will find out.

Let’s take the language question first. What should a word like “racist” mean? It certainly ought to mean that race is a highly salient category. So a racist would look at a woman who is a Democrat, an entrepreneur, a Baptist, a mother, a Ph. D, a gifted poet and the product of Yoruba parents and say that she is “black.”[1] That category is more important, more immediate, than all the others. That doesn’t make this person a racist.

The second would be that it is race itself, rather than attributes that might be associated with race, that is the focus. Someone is going to point out that nothing I have said so far screens out black nationalists and that is true, but the next one will. If a population is black and poor and malnourished and used to living on a very short timeline of rewards and punishments, a racist would want to talk about inheritable traits rather than cultural ones. He would begin with a logic like “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” and make race, itself, the sow’s ear. That means that the population in question could become orderly, middle class, well-fed, and characterized by long-term incentives, and the racist would still predict disaster because the population is still black. You do inherit the Negritude after all.[2] The new successful orderly middle class black population would be very confusing to the racist.

Race, already salient and genetic, must also be negative. It must be bad for people to be black. That screens out the black nationalists who work to form positive and effective “black identities” and to read and write histories centered on the achievements of black people.

Finally, a “racist” must hold these views much more than his or her contemporaries. “Racism” is the name of the left end of the scale of racial views, as below. It is not the name of the whole scale, as above. Whatever social value you might hope for by labeling everyone a racist, it has no linguistic value at all. I don’t think it has much social value either, but that is a matter for another time.

So there is the language question. Now let’s take “sin.” Am I sinful? Sure. Of course. People are sinful, according to the theology I hold, so I am sinful. Not much of a linguist triumph is it? But if you are going to posit two entities—as Christian theology routinely does—God, on the one hand, and humankind, on the other, then there is still a language value in saying that God is not sinful but we humans, are. And God, who is sinless and omniscient as well, knows that I am sinful, and, where necessary, just how sinful. It goes with being God, I guess.

You, on the other hand, know that I am sinful only by the linguistic and logical route and you don’t know just how sinful I am at all. But what would you do if you really needed to know? If I were in your place, I would look for acts of impiety. Failing that, I would look for words of impiety. Failing that, I would look for acts or deeds that I thought might betray an inner attitude of impiety. Failing that, I would look for any associates you might have who are impious. Failing that, I would look at statuses you occupy—lord, serf, capitalist, rabble-rouser—to see if any impiety might be transferred from the category to you personally. And if even that failed, I might go so far as to say that you have not protested the impiety of others with the vigor you should have shown. I’d get you, one way or the other, I am pretty sure.

Seems like a lot of effort to expend, doesn’t it? But I think it is exactly what you would have to do to find me to be a racist. No effort is necessary, of course, to find me to be a racist on the scale labelled “racism.” For all the positions on that scale, there are only matters of degree. Just how racist I am, is the language game that can be played in that arena. But if you use the other scale, the one where “racist” applies only to the pejorative end of the scale, you will have to exercise due diligence to see whether my deeds and words and attitudes, etc. merit your placing me that far down.

Not that it can’t be done. You could look for acts or racism, then words of racism, then attitudes of racism, then racism by social category, then “tolerance of racism” on the part of others. Since I have reproduced the impiety series exactly, I am hoping that will sound familiar. It is, as I said, a lot of work to have to go to.

And who benefits so much from that finding that I am “racist” in the meaningful, not in the presupposed, sense? The immediate maleficiaries[3] of racism, certainly. People who, because of the racism of others, are denied graduate assistantships or promotions or lodging or dining[4] to which they would otherwise be entitled. It doesn’t help them very much, though. If I am the person who has refused to serve them in the way I would serve any other customers and they have established that I am a racist, they have made a significant causal attribution. It is my racism, according to this attribution, that is the reason for what I have done. But then, if I am chastened for my racism and move over to refusing to serve them because they are poor, they are only marginally better off.

There is no reason to deny that Asians are the victims of racial attitudes held by black people. The videos of Korean-owned convenience stores in Los Angeles that were a good deal too convenient to crowds of black people bent on revenge, make that point clear. There is a demonstrable prejudice in New York City against black people who were raised here and in favor of black people who were born in Africa. Continental prejudice? And the competition that Hispanics and blacks are forced into for some kinds of work has produced a lot of anti-black rhetoric by the Hispanics and a lot of anti-Hispanic rhetoric by the blacks.

These are serious issues. I would like to see progress made on solving them. Controlling the official attributions, so that the people who are doing things I don’t like are “racists” does not seem like much progress to me.

So I admit to being a sinner, as I define the term. Just how bad my sin is, God knows—and that’s good because He really needs to know. I don’t admit to being a racist as I define the term, although I admit that anyone who wanted to go through the steps I outlined above would find reason to call me that.

And that would be worth doing because…?

[1] One of the many useful things I learned in the course of completing an undistinguished history major at Wheaton College is that PERSIA—the political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic elements of society—is an amazingly useful acronym. I used it in the example of “the black woman” as you can now see.
[2] The word is such an oddity. You have to keep the capital N- because Negro is capitalized (as is Caucasian), while black is not (nor is white). Negritude refers to the physical racial inheritance, whereas black is much more often a word that takes in cultural phenomena as well.
[3] I invented that for a public policy class. I got tired of talking about the beneficiaries of a given policy and the…people who were disadvantaged by it. It’s not an acceptable word, so far as I know, but it does feel good.
[4] Unless, of course, it offends the religious scruples of the corporation who has hired the manager who refused to serve you.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, Politics, Theology, Uncategorized, Words | Tagged causal attribution, original sin, racial guilt, racism, sin | 4 Comments

Mother Nature holds all the cards

Posted on March 25, 2014 by hessd

I want to think out loud for a little while today about the Oso landslide in Washington. When I heard the news on Monday morning, my first thought was that they are now naming the landslides the way they name tropical storms. The second thought was, “Wow! They have gotten as far as the O- in Oso!” Not so. The call it the Oso landslide because it occurred in Oso, Washington, in Snohomish County.

The TV account I saw, on my way to find out what happened in the NCAA games the night before, was all about two things: the rainfall and the survivors. The news anchors handled the survivor questions by going to field reporters who were interviewing people. The rainfall news came from the meteorologist. There had already been a lot of rain, he said, and the soil can only hold so much before gravity starts to push the tops of the hills toward the bottom.

Well, I thought to myself, we need to find a way to get it to rain less or to find a way to help the soil absorb more. Either one would work.

That reflection put me in mind of the class’s reaction to a word game I used to use in my political psychology classes. I would show them a picture of a bridge under water and ask if the difficulties the motorists were experiencing came from the bridge being too low or from the water being too high. It didn’t take very long in most classes for everyone to agree that it was not a good question. It was bad because it is the relationship of the bridge to the water that is the difficulty. It is not one or the other.

On the other hand, when you take the next step and turn it into a problem[1] it matters a great deal whether you say the bridge is too low or the water is too high. It matters because as soon as you call it one problem or the other, a set of things you should do about it comes into view and, it turns out, some things are harder to do than others. That always divided the class again. It was one thing to agree that it was the ratio of the bridge to the water that made it impassible. It was quite another to say that the best solution was to lower the water level or to raise the bridge level. The class divided into “bridge people” and “water people” and in some years, they stayed divided throughout the term.

This came to my mind as I was watching the meteorologist talk about how much rain there had been and how the soil could hold only so much water. I noticed that the TV station didn’t have an environmentalist to say how even steep hills ordinarily hold their shape because they are held in place by the roots of the trees and bushes growing on it. Having someone to say that there was too much rain and no one to say that clear-cutting the forest is going to make the soil unstable didn’t sound sensible to me.

Everyone knows that if you raise the bridge, you can allow the water to get higher without submerging the bridge. I you had a TV station with a bridge person, who would explain that the bridge was too low, you might almost expect the station to have a water person to explain why the water is so much higher than it used to be. If the TV station had someone on staff to give one perspective and no one on staff to give the other perspective, it would feel almost like an editorial endorsement for raising the bridge.

Or, if it was a station with a reputation for responsibility, it might have a panel of experts available. One would talk learnedly about the bridge; the other learnedly about the water. Viewers would be left with the impression that even the experts didn’t agree and so with no clear sense of what might be done about it.

I did wonder about the Oso landslide. Here is one of the things I found with a few minutes of poking around.

One factor that is linked to landslide occurrences is areas that have been cleared of vegetation – more specifically areas that have been stripped of trees by clear-cut logging practices. Trees and their root structures strengthen slopes and help keep soil in place. After an area that has been clear cut of trees, roots deteriorate and lose the ability to hold soil in place on mountain or hilly slopes. The trigger for landslides is typically from rainfall that saturates the deforested slope or in some circumstances earthquakes can bring down masses of earth.

Jonathan H. Friend posted that on May 2, 2011. You can see the whole page here. I am quite sure that is what he would have said about the Oso landslide had he been in the studio, as the meteorologist was, and had been asked why this terrible tragedy had occurred. He would have said that “trees and their root structures strengthen the slopes” and that hills with that kind of protection could withstand a great deal more precipitation than could hills from which the “trees and their root structures” had been removed.

You have to admit that sounds sensible.

But the TV reporters faced the same problem my students faced. Once you say that “too much rain” causes landslides, you have said all you have to say. You aren’t going to make it rain less. The other thing that might be said is that leaving adequate protection on the steep banks by cutting trees selectively, rather than by clear-cutting, is something we actually could do. It could be a “best practice.” It could be state policy. It could be the law. It could be the kind of thing you could get sued for neglecting to do.

Not to sound all conspiratorial or anything, but it seems likely to me that the TV station does not regularly receive money from people who want to protect the steep forested slopes, even in rainy weather. I think it is more likely that they receive money from people who want to talk about “balanced use of forest products” and it is these people who order their lands to be clear-cut.

The logic is clear-cut as well.

I don’t have a criticism to place at the door of Governor Jay Inslee—I just don’t know enough—but I was caught by the logic of what he said about the tragedy. “Mother Nature holds the cards,” he said at a briefing on Sunday in the Osa area. I think he meant by that that “Mother Nature” is going to make it rain as much as she wants and that no one can talk her out of it. I don’t think he meant that the systematic denuding of steep slopes was one of the nasty tricks nature plays on us.

[1] I used “problem” as a technical term in that class. This kind of problem began with a statement that had a normative standard in it, e.g. the bridge is “too low,” and that followed this standard with the implied resolution, i.e., the bridge should be higher.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged clear cutting, landslide, TV news, Washington State | Leave a comment

Giving up haggis for Lent

Posted on March 21, 2014 by hessd

I’d like to think about “giving up X for Lent” today. I am honestly respectful of the notion that additional resources ought to be devoted to experiencing Lent—the dark season of the church—fully. I am pretty open-minded about just how to go about that. When it comes to “giving up”—one strategy among several—things “for Lent,” I am more inclined toward public skepticism and private amusement.[1]

“Giving up something for Lent” is a tool looking for a project. Ordinarily, that’s not a good way to go about it. If you start at the other end—beginning not with the more fundamental question of why you should have anything to do with Lent at all, but the more challenging question of how to observe it more fully—you get a question like, “How can I receive all that Lent has to give me?”

So, what is Lent and what is it for? For many churches, Lent is the period from Ash Wednesday, which was March 5 this year, to Easter Sunday, which will be on April 20 this year. That’s 40 days exactly if you don’t count Sundays. Why 40? Forty is a “set aside” sort of number. Forty years in the wilderness; forty days of testing in the desert; forty days in the preparation of the church.[2] So if 40 is a “specially set aside” sort of number, what are the forty days of Lent set aside for?

There are two ways to go at that question: institutional and personal. I like them both. Churches celebrate Lent in ways that make sense for “the church” as a body and for the members of that church collectively. It would make sense for a member of such a congregation to say “We are commemorating Lent this year in a series of evening vigils.”

I’ve always been more interested in the individual observation of Lent and it is in that sense that the question of “what is Lent for?” can be posed. Lent is ordinarily observed as a time of dark and quiet so the way I ask questions would have to lead me to ask what is so good about dark and quiet? In the context of Lent, if Lent is a preparation for Easter, the answer is that it gives Easter a much more powerful effect than it would have had if you had not prepared yourself for it. If you are looking for a celebration of Easter than will shake you right down to your shoes, a dark and quiet Lenten season would be the way to do it.

There is nothing puzzling about the effect. It is the difference between being in a dark room for a long time and then coming into a bright room. It’s a trumpet fanfare after a long silence. The relation of Lent to Easter is just like that, so it leads to the question of whether you want to experience Easter in a way that has a powerful effect on you.

But Lent isn’t just a dark and quiet room and Easter isn’t just the full light of day. There is more to it in each case—at least there can be. In the dark room, your pupils contract so as to make the best use of whatever light there is. Our selves don’t react to the dark season the way our pupils react to the dark room. If you are going to use your time in the dark, you are going to have to know what you are doing and some discipline might be required.

That brings some unusual Lenten questions, for instance: a) what does Easter mean to the church and b) what does it mean to me particularly?

I’m not going to try to answer either question, except to suggest what Lent might be used for, but Lent is the time to prepare yourself for fully experiencing what Easter means. It might mean “victory over death.” Certainly, there are some scriptural supports for that notion. It refer to the disciples’ realization that the life of Jesus, which appeared to end in defeat, was all it ever appeared to be and more. Easter is the time when we realize that, again, ourselves. It might mean that God actually did pay the ultimate price—the price He spared Abraham—to redeem humanity and there is no denying the depth of His care for us.

All those ideas are completely orthodox ideas about what Easter has meant to the church, but if I want to experience Easter myself and experience it as victory over death, then I should use the time of preparation Lent offers me to be ready to have that experience. What I would do to live fully into the meaning of “victory over death” (Meaning 1) would be entirely different from what I would do to live fully into Easter as the demonstration that God will stoop to whatever depth is necessary to offer His love to us (Meaning 3). If you and I knew each other as fellow Christians, we might look at each other’s use of Lent with utter incomprehension. “You’re doing what!?”

But really, this is not different from my advising you to take a #33 bus because it will take you where you are trying to go, although I myself take a #22 bus because I need to go somewhere else. It is not different from that in the slightest degree—except, of course, by being trivial.

If we could do that—with and for each other—you can see how far we have come from “giving up marshmallows for Lent. There is a lot of popular ridicule associated with “giving up X for Lent.” I didn’t know that before I reviewed the images associated with. I have put some of them here, but if you’d like the full experience, google “giving it up for Lent” and hit “images.” You will be amazed.

So I would like to advocate a thoughtful alignment of what we do in Lent with how we want to celebrate Easter. I think if we do that, we won’t be quite so easy to parody.

[1] Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep’s pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally encased in the animal’s stomach and simmered for approximately three hours—or so says Wikipedia.

[2] Raymond Brown says that our Bibles tell three stories; The Old Testament tells about the law and the prophets. The New Testament tells about the ministry of Jesus and the foundation of the church. That’s too simple, as Brown admits, but it is interesting that there is a 40 at the front end of each of them. It is not an accidental sort of number.

Posted in Living My Life, Paying Attention, Theology | Tagged display, Easter, experience, giving up something, Lent, liturgy | Leave a comment

Being nice to Siri

Posted on March 18, 2014 by hessd

Siri, would you set an alarm for 3:30 please?

Siri, set an alarm for 3:30.

Damn it, Siri, I told you to set an alarm for 3:30

As you know, “Siri” is a “personal voice search assistant.” She (Siri has a female voice) is a feature of the iPhones and she doesn’t care how you address her. She has no preference among the three “requests” above. Unfortunately, I do. Let’s look at that. I believe this is the woman who voices Siri. She looks like a pleasant person.

One of the hundreds of gender-related experiments cited in Nancy Etcoff’s, The Survival of the Prettiest is one where the men who are the subject of this experiment are given a picture of the woman they are talking to on the phone. It’s the same woman in every case, reading the same script in every case, in the same manner in every case. The difference—the “variable” we social scientists like to say, hoping that someone will mistake us for physicists—is the picture of the woman. A picture of a very attractive woman is given to some of the men; a picture of a very plain woman to the others. You can tell by listening to a recording of the men which woman they think they are talking to.

Why? Well, like everyone else, these men have learned to tailor their manner to the audience. If you do that long enough with enough audiences, you learn quite a few styles of presenting yourself. And if you accept the notion of “authentic character,” (rather than situational role playing) you come to an expectation of what “the real you” sounds like. And also, what you ought to sound like.

This is all pretty complicated for human-to-human interactions, but today, we are considering human-to-operating system “interactions.”[1] Since Siri doesn’t actually care how I address her, I need only care about how I feel, talking to her one way or the other. I can treat her like an invaluable personal assistant. I can treat her like a colleague. I can treat her as the drone at the office that I have to work with no matter how much I wish she would call in sick more. None of those affect her. All of them affect me. This, by the way, is a picture of Siri Hustvedt, author of “The Blazing World.” She comes up when you Google “Siri,” and I had no idea why.

So far, I have chosen collegiality. I’ve tried being more polite, hoping that I would feel better about myself that way. It doesn’t work. I feel stupid. I imagine that someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “She’s not really in there.” So I compromise: I say, “Set an alarm for 3:30.”

I’m one of these guys who speaks differently to women than I do to men. It was the height of the “women’s lib” season when I was in grad school in the early 1970s and I got a lot of grief for doing that. The “liberation norm” of that season was that treating males differently from females in any form of social interaction was a form of social control. I didn’t like the idea of treating men and women alike, and I had been practicing the two styles for several decades before I ran into this reaction and I didn’t like getting scolded. So, all in all, I didn’t change then and I haven’t changed in that way since.

This brings me to an issue with Siri, who sends all the “woman” signals I learned to respond to in a gendered way. There is no reason, of course, that I couldn’t have a male voice on my phone. Here’s a little fantasy I found somewhere this morning.

I like Mark. He wakes me up at six on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, knows not to disturb me on Thursdays. Often, he is the reason I remember birthdays, anniversaries and appointments with doctors. He even calls people for me when I’m ill or just plain lazy. So, a few months after getting to know him, I asked, “Mark do you like me?” “I would not wish any companion in the world but you,” he said.[2]

Mark is the “interactive personal search assistant”—the Siri—on her phone. It seems to me that she isn’t having the kinds of difficulties I am having. So one of the options is to embrace the possibilities that the interaction opens up. Men and women could have “significant other” voices put on their phones. We may not be far away from having the actual voice of the actual “significant other” recorded, “Sirified,” and used on our phones. “Bette,” I would say to my iPhone, “would you wake me up at 3:30?” My actual Bette could be in Heidelberg but she’s still kind of here “in the person of” my operating system.

Or you could go the other way. You could have the voice of Rajib, the house boy. You could have the voice of Rastus, the house…um…person, from a pre-Civil War movie epic. Then you could order these people to do whatever today’s Siri does and do it in the “I am your colonial master” voice or in your “I am your owner and don’t you forget it” voice. Picture that interaction on a crowded public transit system.

The point here is that the operating system doesn’t care and you are going to have to consult “who you are willing to seem to be” in order to choose a style. Sherry Turkle’s research with human/robot interactions shows that mostly, we want them to like us.[3] We want them to succeed. We wish them well. He hope they feel as positively toward us as we do toward them.

And that’s just the beginning. It is, technologically, a piece of cake to set the desired “style” of interaction of the operating system. Who “desires” this style? Not an easy question to answer. It is easy to say that the programmers “desire” the style of whatever they devise and put in the operating system and that is true in a very limited sense. They did write the code. But they did not choose the style. The marketing department—someone with an advanced degree in cognitive neuroscience—chose the style.

Having “a preferred style” means that if you speak more brusquely to the operating system than she is set for—imagine a thermostat-like “setting”—she takes offense. Or she wonders if you are having a bad day. She introduces a trace of reluctance or of hurt feelings into her statement that the task you ordered is done. She says, “I have set an alarm for 3:30” in a way that suggest she would rather not have done it.

I don’t suppose I will have to solve this problem myself and I am sure that my grandchildren will find a way. Probably, I should just leave them to it. I would like to come up with a solution in principle, though.

“Siri, is there any good way to handle this dilemma?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand the question.”

“Never mind. Probably I don’t either.”

[1] As you see, you want to start dropping quotation marks everywhere so you don’t fall into an anthromorphic maze with no hope of escape. We are already in the maze. There IS no hope of escape. I’m going to stop with the quotation marks, right after this. Siri is a “she,” who “lives” in my phone and who “interacts” with me.

[2] To be fair, this little scenario is presented as “what the future of interaction with operating systems is going.” There actually is, however, a male voice called Mark and he is now available.

[3] Alone Together. The best book about human/robot interactions I have read.

Posted in Getting Old, Sustainability, ways of knowing | Tagged character, gender, interactive technology, Mark, personal search assistants, Siri, status | Leave a comment