A Bucket List for America

Posted on May 22, 2014 by hessd

“America” is not an expression I use much.  It has “Fatherland” or “Mother Russia” connotations that make me uncomfortable.  When Republican presidents end their speeches, they say “God bless America;” when Democratic presidents end their speeches, they say, “God bless the United States of America.”  Ever notice that?[1]  When I say “America,” I mean the kind of thing Alexis de Tocqueville meant when he titled his reflections, Democracy in America.  He was interested in how the Americans were managing their lives here in the United States.

But today, I want to say “America,” not the USA.  I want to think of “America” as something that emanates from or that is contained in the United States.  It is an emergent property, not reducible to the pieces that make it up.  I want the word to include the promises we have attached ourselves to as well as the policies the United States has pursued and that we, the people, have embraced.  Not just the “idealized America,” but actual political entity which has served not only as the vehicle for those ideals but as one of the principal violators.  It is that complicated combination of realities that I want to refer to when I choose the word “America.”

bucket list 1Now to “bucket list.”  As everyone knows who has seen Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson do their magic in the movie of that name, a bucket list is a list of things you want to be sure to do before you “kick the bucket.”  This essay imagines that “America” is going to kick the bucket.  “Kick the bucket” is a way to say that a person—or, if you are so inclined, “a person’s body”—has died and begun to decay.  But nations are not persons.[2]  What would it mean to say that a nation had kicked the bucket?

The United States is declining as a world power.  I think that is beyond dispute.  We are still the predominant power in the world, all things considered, but we will not be “the leader of the free world” for much longer, even in our own image of ourselves, and we were never the “leader” of any other part of the world in the sense that the rest of the world looked to us for guidance.  That means that, properly speaking, it is the international dominance of the United States that will be kicking the bucket, not the United States itself (ourselves).  And if it is true, as I am arguing, that the United States cannot be simply reduced to “America,” it is also true that the United States is still the vehicle by which “America” has been delivered to the world.

bucket list 2I don’t want to say we’ve done a bad job.  I just want to say that looking ahead to the decline of our dominant position, we might want to put a few things on a bucket list—these would be things we would want to do before we kick the bucket; before we are no longer in a position to do those things.  It might be easier to imagine it as a cell phone that has enough battery left for just a few messages before it, the battery, kicks the bucket.  What would we want to say in those messages?

Frankly, I have just given you the idea I am confident about.  Our time is running out and there are a few things we should do before the buzzer.  But now the logic of the essay moves to the question of what those things ought to be.  What should be on the list?  And, to tell you the truth, I don’t know.  I can make up a list—I’m about to do that—but there is no reason to think it will be better than your list.  Let’s start with just a few samples.

1.         Maintain freedom of religion among a population that cares about religion.

We’ve done some good work on religion.  The old idea that the king’s religion IS the citizens’ religion never worked here.  Only a few states ever had state churches.  We have protected the right of many school children not to be subsumed in the religion of the district’s majority.  We have protected religious speech in many settings where what was being said was unpopular.  But most of the gains we have made in what we call “religious tolerance” have been made by not really caring all that much and I think we make a mistake when we call this apathy, “tolerance.”

To use an old maxim about ethnic diversity, America as a melting pot does not and was not intended to “tolerate” other cultures.  It was meant to tame them; to “socialize” them; to make them so much like the pre-existing culture that disputes lost their zest.  But a new phase of cultural identification has come about and we hear about “the rise of the unmeltable ethnics.”[3]  The picture I have is a rise of the unmeltably religious.  These are religions people care about intensely.  In the picture I am constructing, their willingness to grant the rights of citizenship to people in other religious groups would come not from their apathy about religious belief and practice, but from their passionate affirmation of the value of all this honest diversity.

When America “dies,” i.e., when our dominance has sunk to the level that deprives us of our access to the world podium, I would like to be able to point back to that achievement and say, “There.  I told you that could be done.”

2.         Find a way to distribute income that is not based solely on profit-making employment.

This is harder, I’m sure you will agree.  It is the same problem Karl Marx saw coming down the road.  It made him look away from what he already knew about how people are and to defer his hopes to how people might be willing to be.  I do sympathize.

Our current economic system and any imaginable future economic system will require thatbucket list 4 people spend money on the goods they want to buy.  There is a level of consumer demand, in other words, that is absolutely essential.  By tying income to employment, we have been kicking the can down the road and now the road is starting to peter out.  There is not enough employment to continue to distribute income that way and we are extremely wary of other ways.

There is, of course, some work that needs to be done.  Bridges need to be built and maintained, for instance, and hair needs to be cut, and gutters freed of the winter’s load of leaves and needles.  Our commitment has been to the idea that people will not do the work that needs to be done unless the consequences to them are predictable and dire.  But there is no longer enough work that requires human beings to do it, let alone human beings who live in the United States.  So that game is over and we need to find some way to replace it.

There are two kinds of “work” I am imagining.  For the first, I would like to see people do the work that needs to be done because it needs to be done.  Somebody needs to clean the roofs and count the ballots and create the statues and parse the language and maintain a credible currency.  Those are essentially “maintenance jobs” and they are predictable.[4]  For the second, I would like people to imagine what could be done and try to do it.  The whole creative edge of the society doesn’t need to be paid to do things; they just need to be supported while they dream new dreams and try to write programs for them.

This brings us to the crux.  Will people really do things like that if they don’t have to?  Yes, they will, if they are properly socialized.  People will “give back” if there is a “back” to give to.  If the basis of self-respect includes carrying your share of the load, then most people will carry their share of the load.  I am willing to state that as an axiom.

That brings us to the question of how we get from where we are to that kind of society.  I have no idea.  Probably we won’t.  But a bucket list that didn’t include it would be an inadequate bucket list and I’m just not willing to leave it off.

You may have noticed that my “list” is only two items long.  I do have half a dozen more items (or so) but time—I have to go now—and space (there is a limit to what people are willing to read) have run out.

[1] Except for President Obama, who once said, in a State of the Union address, no less, “God bless these United States.”  I have not yet found another president who has used that expression in a State of the Union address, but I’m still looking.
[2] Corporations are, according to the current Supreme Court majority, but no one has maintained that nations are.
[3] See, for instance, Michael Novak’s book by that title.
[4] Hyper-state novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward have all that work done by young people.  Hypo-state novels like Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed have it done by everyone, using an “every ten day” rotation.

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“Flopping”

Posted on May 21, 2014 by hessd

John Dickerson asked on the Slate Political Gabfest recently what should be done about all the floppers.  I had never heard that expression applied to politics, but I understood what he meant right away.

He had a political application in mind, but the picture he wanted us to see was this one.  Inflops 3 basketball, the rules specify that when the ball handler is going for the basket, the defender cannot simply get in his road.[1]  You can “be” in the road, but you have to get there first.  If you are there first and the ball handler runs into you—it has to be a significant, not just an incidental contact—the dribbler has committed a charging foul.

“Flopping” is making incidental contact look as if it were significant contact.  As I go by you, my shoulder brushes yours, just barely, but you fall backward dramatically, waving your arms, trying to get the referee to call me for charging.  That’s “flopping.”

So in politics, my opponent brushes my shoulder in passing, and I begin to scream and shout.  The idea is to persuade the voters (that’s the referee in most political conflicts) that there was a “significant” contact.  Let’s take Mitt Romney’s famous line, “I don’t care about the poor.”  What he actually said was:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there,” he said. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

That wasn’t an insensitive thing to say, but it was a vulnerable statement.  Romney made what any ref would call “incidental contact” with the interviewer, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, and she went flailing backward as if he had hit her with a baseball bat.  She said:

“I think there are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.’”

Soledad O’Brien flopped.  And Mitt Romney was called for the foul.  Does it matter?

flops 4Well…yes, it does.  Let’s go back to basketball for a moment.  The game is supposed to be about one team trying to put the ball in the basket and the other team trying to prevent them.  If I am the offensive team and I dribble better and pass better and set picks better and cut for the basket better, eventually I am going to get a clear shot at the basket—with all that, probably an easy shot at the basket.  Your job as the defensive team is to impede my dribble, challenge my passes, get around my picks, and stay with the cutter, so that no matter what you do, you will not get a clear shot at the basket.  Seeing to good teams trying to do things like that is really exciting.  I call that basketball.  Here is Tim Duncan with the standard “Who me?” pose.

There is an alternative, however.  Rather than your trying to get to the basket, you can try to make the ref think the defensive player impeded you path to the basket.  This is all drama; it is all showmanship.  I play defense for the purpose of persuading the ref that you committed a charging foul.  You play offense for the purpose of persuading the ref I committed a blocking foul.  This is not basketball; it is theater.  The more the game is rigged for dramatic effect, the less it is like basketball and the more it is like a bad soap opera. [Note: not all flopping is bad.  Below is Dick Fosbury of Oregon State, who perfected flopping before it was even a bright idea in basketball.]

It works the same way in politics.  What Dickerson meant was that there is a way to play flops 2politics.  I try to show that my party is more reliable than yours; that my issue positions are more likely to work than yours; that I am a more appealing, more likeable person than you.  You say that my party is out of step with the American people, that my positions will lead to some dire outcome; that I, myself, have done or said things I should be ashamed of—Mitt Romney “not caring about the poor” is a good example of that last one.  And while you are trying to show that my issue positions are bad, I am trying to show that yours are worse.  We are playing offense and defense simultaneously.

But what Dickerson actual said is that there is a lot of flopping going on.  The whole game of politics is skewed as candidates try to pretend that something racist or sexist or ageist has been said and that the candidate who said it should a) apologize to anyone who might have been offended, b) withdraw from the race, and c) if necessary, sacrifice his or her firstborn child.  The more the political debate is rigged for dramatic effect, the less it is like civic discourse and the more it is like a bad soap opera.

President Obama wants the poor to get good medical care as they do in the social democracies of Europe.  President Obama is a socialist.  He is un-American.

Senator McCain wants to send a message to Iran: “You know that old Beach Boys song,” he quipped, “Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”  Sen. McCain is a warmonger.  He would involve U. S. troops all over the globe at horrific personal and financial cost.

People who like their politics dirty ask, “What’s the harm in having a little fun?”  I say it depends on what you have to give up to have that fun.  When candidates are punished for every expression that could be misunderstood, they will resort of completely opaque “talking points.”  When candidates’ private lives are ransacked for unguarded comments to friends or neighbors, they will make sure no part of their private lives is accessible to anyone outside the clique.

Flopping is an increasingly common political strategy.  I say it’s ugly.  I don’t want to watch it. And it takes the place of issues oriented discussion without which we will continue to drift.

[1] The NBA says, “If a defensive player is not stationary, does not have both feet firmly planted on the floor, or does not have established position before the offensive player is by him, he will be charged with a blocking foul.”.

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College Recruiting and Sexual Abuse

Posted on May 17, 2014 by hessd

This is probably one of those essays I will eventually wish I had written and not posted.  I take a little courage from the experience of Hannah Arendt who wrote about the trial of Adolph Eichmann and called it “the banality of evil.”  The OED defines banality as “anything trite or trivial; a commonplace.”  Eichmann?  The guy who ran the Nazi death camps?  Trite?

That’s what Arendt was reviled for saying, but she had a point to make.  The point was the Eichmann himself was a nonentity.  He was a petty bureaucrat.  The death machine the Nazis created and put at his disposal was a horror beyond all previous imagining, but there was no way to put this horrific institution on trial; we had only Eichmann to try, and he was small fish.  Arendt’s critics were not satisfied.  They wanted Eichmann himself to be evil.  Arendt said that was missing the more important point; it was missing the point we really needed to understand, which is that evil can be routinized and turned over to “rule-followers.”  Killing all the rule-followers is not going to help us.

So…I’ve got a point to make, too.  It is that sex is a big time part of big time sports programs in the NCAA.  It is, to this point, to the advantage of the major athletic programs to arrange the sex, to deny how commonly it is used to buy athletes, or to look steadfastly in some other direction while it is occurring.

The article this post is based on appeared in the New York Times in 2002.  I am going to pick out of this article a series of events that suggest that sex is a normal part of the recruiting process.  It is a system.  Because of that, it does not exclusively represent the choices made by individual men and women, although that is also true; it represents a system that has enough goodies in it that it will continue despite periodic scandals on this campus or that.

By the way, I normally illustrate these posts with pictures that make the topic more visually compelling.  You will understand why I am not doing it for this post.

The article is based on the New York Times, but the fact is that I am a University of Oregon alum and the recent scandals about basketball players at the U of O provide an occasion.  Bear in mind my idea that these scandals are the by-products of a system and that the system benefits from continuing to have them.

Here’s what the University of Oregon believes happened.

Damyean Dotson, Dominic Artis and Brandon Austin were named in a police report alleging that they assaulted a woman at an off-campus home on March 8. None of the three players were charged with a crime.  The police couldn’t find anyone with a clear and verifiable memory of what happened.

Oregon President Michael Gottfredson said at a press conference, “that he has worked with several campus organizations to make sure that allegations of sexual assault in the campus community are dealt with swiftly and appropriately. It’s my great hope that we as a community can address the broader issue directly, openly and decisively,” he said. “We will do whatever it takes to foster a culture of respect and shared values on our campus.”  Very presidential.

Oregon Athletic Director Rob Mullens said that the alleged actions of the three players involved in the incident aren’t befitting of a University of Oregon student-athlete. “It was very clear to us that we didn’t want them representing our organization,” Mullens said.  It’s about the players, you see; not about the party.

Basketball coach Dana Altman said, “I’m very disappointed in these players.  When I read the report, I was disappointed.”  A somber, fatherly tone.

I don’t want to imply that any of these responses is insincere, but it is what the occupants of those statuses always say when another in the long series of sexual abuses becomes a news story.

Here, for instance, is James Duderstadt, who was president of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996.

“These parties are a major problem and I can’t say for certain, but I think they are a problem at a number of universities, mainly because these are high school kids away from home and there is a total lack of supervision and structure. I was shocked when I heard about how they were handled. They basically turn these kids loose and hope things work out.”

The parties are the problem.  The kids are not up to the challenge of behaving themselves.  “They”—that’s someone from the university—just turn these kids loose and hope things work out.

Mary Keenan, the district attorney from Boulder, Colorado, looked into recruitment parties and found them to be “an ugly football subculture.”  A 17-year old woman had told the Boulder police that she had been raped by a Colorado football recruit at a party in 1997.  “These recruiting parties are definitely concerning,” Jim Fadenrecht, director of public safety at the University of Colorado, said. “The bottom line is there are certain ingredients when you put them together that can be a problem. Those things are alcohol, young kids and a lack of supervision.”

Fadenrecht’s comment is the closest one so far to that way I am approaching things.  There are these “ingredients.”  You put them together and you are going to get trouble.  I like that because it begins to define a system that is a good deal larger and much more stable than the individual intentions of individual men and women.

Not everyone agrees with the “mix of ingredients” approach.  Tyrone Willingham, who was the football coach at Notre Dame at the time, said “Most players and recruits behave like gentlemen at these parties…I think there are [sic] only a handful of troublemakers.  Barry Switzer, former coach at Oklahoma doesn’t see it that way: “There are groupies everywhere and sex is going to happen when kids are involved.”  That’s not much of a mix of ingredients and by “groupies,” I think he means women who go to the parties to score with athletes.

Mike Freeman, who wrote the New York Times piece I am relying on for information, thinks it may be more a misunderstanding.

“Some of the accusations connected to recruiting parties seem to have their origins in confusion over their purpose. Some participants have acknowledged after an incident that they knew the women were expected to have sexual relations with visiting high school players. While the relations generally appear to have been consensual, occasionally women who attended a party said afterward that they had no idea what was expected of them.”

I find that same passive construction in a protest by several women’s groups:

“Some women understand they are expected to have sexual relations with the recruits and do so willingly, but others do not have a clue about what is expected and become unwilling participants.”

I’m looking at the passive verbs here: “were expected to have sexual relations” and “no idea what was expected of them.”  I put the emphasis on other people’s expectations of the women in Freeman’s account and the emphasis on “groupies” in Switzer’s account.

Inevitably, we get down to the question of whether the women consented to sex.  We want to talk about that because we want very much to distinguish between between “kids having fun” and “sexual abuse.”  Everyone who wants that distinction to be very clear will be unhappy about the amount of alcohol consumed at these parties.  Freeman tells of a woman who volunteered to have her apartment used for such a party.  She drank eight beers and two shots of run and went to lie down.  She woke up with people on top of her.  Did she consent?  Is that a question that means anything?

These parties are going to happen.  The universities’ athletic departments like it, the boosters like it, the recruits and players like it, the women who go to these parties for thrills like it.  The NCAA says it is up to the universities to police these matters.  The universities say they do police the official ones but there are a lot of unofficial ones.  These parties are going to happen.  “Recruiting parties can be harmless fun,” observes Mike Freeman, “but they can also cross the line.”

I have argued that there is an organized system of beneficiaries and that the sexual abuse that sometimes happens is a by-product.  One of the ways of making sure that these parties don’t “cross the line” so frequently is not to run the whole recruitment enterprise so close to the line.  That means that university officials must make it their business to know what is happening and to actively prevent it or lose their jobs.  If “I didn’t know about it” is not acceptable as an excuse and “they are boys away from home for the first time” is not an acceptable excuse, and if “you failed in your responsibility as president/athletic director/coach and so you are fired” is the consequence, then these parties will stop.

Let me return to the system emphasis.  My point here is that there is a confluence of interest so great that this kind of recruiting WILL continue, and people will continue to be victimized by it.  But these “victims” are also free agents.  The recruits and the veteran players who decide how to “show them a good time” are agents.  They can decide what to do and what not to do.  They are accountable for their choices.[1]  The women who go to these parties for the thrill of it and who drink themselves into irresponsibility are still accountable for their choices.[2]  The boosters who arrange the parties and, in some widely noted occasions, arrange the strippers, are accountable in the same way the players are.[3]  The NCAA, the university president, the Director of Athletics, and whichever relevant coach or assistant coach it is, are still accountable for their actions and should be condemned if they fail.  When they fail twice, i.e., both by ignoring the behavior and then by denying that they knew anything about it, they actually are condemned.  Many formed presidents can testify to that.

There is a lot of fun to be had, as I see it, in condemning any or all of these people; their choices, their distorted priorities, and their self-centeredness.  But now, I get to cash in the business end of the Eichmann analogy.  Hannah Arendt never denied that Eichmann was culpable for what he did.  Her point is that if we allow ourselves to be distracted by this person—his choices, his distorted priorities, his self-centeredness—we will not attend as we should to the much greater evil.  That greater evil is that a system was built that was so large and so powerful that “holding people accountable” doesn’t even slow it down.

And that is my point about sex and recruitment in big time athletic programs.  The sexual abuse that occurs is a predictable by-product of what is done all the time and that most of the time, produces no complaints.  For instance, the woman who drank eight beers and then two shots of rum and then woke up with a very large athlete on top of her—remember her?—was one of four women at that party and the other three said they got exactly what they came to the party to get.

That means that we need to shut down the machine because the low percent of regrettable by-products is too high or we need to say that keeping the machine going is so important that we can afford that percent of regrettable by-products.

I think those are our real options.  What some people think of as “a better option” does not seem like an option at all to me.  That would involve a new recruit, brought to a room of strippers in the presence of people he looks up to and whom he hopes to join as a teammate, saying, “No thanks.  This isn’t something I want to do.”  It would involve women refusing to go to “parties like that” as her friends do or going to the parties in non-seductive clothes and staying resolutely sober the whole evening, making herself conspicuous in the process.  It would involve coaches, ADs, and boosters choosing “good character” and lower athletic skills and watching their program decline relative to their traditional opponents and, of course, losing their jobs in the process.

Those don’t look like “options” to me.  I think the real options are the two I offered earlier.

 

 

[1] Of course, they are accountable for the failure of their alternative (“not showing them a good time”) strategies, too.  These recruits are going to play somewhere.
[2] Of course, the one woman in clothes unlike the other women and drinking club soda, unlike the other women, will have to find a way to answer the question, “So…why are you here?”
[3] They must explain, in other words, why they seduced the recruits (not just with the strippers) or why they allowed the program to decline or, in a more just world, both.

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Simple-minded

Posted on May 14, 2014 by hessd

The topic on my mind today is dementia.  That is not what the adjective “simple-minded” has ordinarily referred to, but I have a plan for today.

I have kids (and step kids) who are going to read this, so I want to say at the outset that this is not a hand-wringing piece.[1]  I don’t see myself as any more demented than is normal for my age.  I have friends who might read this if they are assured that there are no dementia jokes in it.  Relax, guys: there aren’t any.  And Bette, my wife, will surely read it and no matter what I say here; she will roll her eyes and wonder why she married a man who over-processes things so often.

I do have a metaphor in mind, however, and it has helped me think about dementia dementia 1differently.  The metaphor uses the musical form, “theme and variations.”  Let’s start with my favorite.  In 1733, George Frederic Handel wrote the Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-flat major.  I haven’t ever heard it, myself, but I do know what the theme sounds like because in 1861 Johannes Brahms used it in his magnificent Variations and a Fugue on a Theme by Handel.  We can leave the fugue aside for our purposes.  What I know about the theme of Handel I learned in the opening bars of Brahms’ piece.  Brahms gives us Handel’s theme, then he gives us 24 variations on that theme.  That’s a lot of variations.  Brahms was 28 at the time and 24 variations might not have seemed to be too many for a young man in his prime.

What do we lose as we are “un-minded?”[2]  There are all kinds, of course.  To borrow a thought from Tolstoy, every sound mind is alike; every demented mind is demented in its own way.[3]  Some minds, as they lose their grip lose the ability to recognize faces.  Others can’t remember how the rest of that song goes.  Others just can’t recall the name of President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior…you know, the one that said…what was it he said?  One of the favorite pastimes of social groups made up of people my age is trying, collectively, to remember something that any one of us could have remembered without effort a few decades ago.

In this reflection on “un-mindedness,” I don’t want to think about forgetting things.  I want to think about losing variations.  Brahms died in his 60s, but imagine that he had lived longer and had gone through this de-menting process.  He might have shrunk to 15 variations by the time he was in his 70s.  Maybe he eliminated all the variations in a minor key.  And then to only 5 variations when he was in his 80s.  All the ones he has left have three beats to a measure and he can’t remember the ones with four.

In this highly fanciful narrative, Brahms has not really “lost” anything. If you play for him a variation that has four beats to the measure and is in a minor key, he will still recognize it.  He hasn’t lost his hearing; he has lost his taste for some kinds of variations.  Does that sound at all familiar?

old people 6I might lose my taste for narratives that don’t have a clearly identifiable bad guy, for instance.  And by “narratives,” I mean books, movies, plays, conversations, lectures, and stories.  And, following Tolstoy again, I might “lose my taste” in any number of ways.  I could deny that there are stories like that.  I could avoid them, knowing full well that they are out there.  I could attack them by calling them bad names like, perhaps, “amoral” or “relativistic.”  Or I could take up all the available narrative space telling, eliciting, and supporting stories of “the right kind,” i.e., those stories that really do have identifiable bad guys.  This essentially pre-empts the space where that other narrative might have been unfolded.

Those are all indications that I have “lost my taste for” such stories.  They indicate the variety of behaviors that really mean the same thing, but that show up differently in different people.  And another way to say that same thing is that I am strongly attracted to these kinds of stories (not emphasizing the stories that no longer appeal to me) and I will name these stories by some good name.  I will say they are stories of “moral clarity” or that they are “uplifting” or even that they are the stories that “made America great.”

If you are listening to me go on about stories of moral clarity, in the specific sense of dementia 2confronting the bad guys, it might take you a little while to notice that there are no stories of good people doing good things and being praised for it.  It would come to seem odd after a while.  Consider the case of the nurturing grandmother who steers her talented grandson into the arts, when all his friends went first into drugs, then into the penal system.  She doesn’t show up because that story does not represent any of the five remaining variations.  If she went to the local drug lord and screamed at him that he was a bad influence in the neighborhood and he should leave her grandson alone, she would be accepted into the canon.  Why?  Because what I call “moral clarity” is really only about stomping on bad guys.  It’s the stomping that I can still hear and still enjoy; it’s not the good and bad.  And I might not know that about myself.

That particular example might not catch you and I don’t want to make myself the personal bearer of all the narrative distortions, so let’s talk about you.  What if your thing is sex?  You may know people who can read a beautifully written and creatively developed novel and remember only the two sex scenes.  If you hang around this person—and if she were family, you might have to—you would get to hear this marvelous piece of literature attacked as “degraded.”  For this person, sex is the filter; it is the spice.  It is what enables her to taste, to take notice of, the book at all and noticing is only the necessary precondition for condemning it.  The subtle colors of the grasses, below, would be “no real color.”

dementia 4And this is just the attacking part.  In the series I ran above, denying them, avoiding them, and pre-empting them were three other strategies.  In the novel, the person who is losing her taste for variations, might deny that the sexual activity is really there (or that it is “just” about sex); she might avoid the novel herself and avoid anyone who might talk about the novel in a way that values its strengths; she might fill the conversational space with good stories, so that people who want to talk about their own notions of this story will have to shut her up or find another place to talk.  This brings us back to Tolstoy and the notion that every demented person is demented in his or her own way.

Obviously, variations on today’s topic far exceed Brahms’s 24.  There are people, for instance, who are fine with sex, but abhor violence.  There are people who love religion unless it demands something of them.  There are people who love the “affirming parts” of the world’s religious traditions and hate the “condemning parts.”  There are people who like stories about anything, but become very wary when an actual topic begins to appear.  There are people who are attracted only to positive things and people who don’t care that much about positive things, but who are actively repelled by negative things.  Variations on this theme exceed, as I said, the 24 used by Brahms.

So where does that leave us?  The idea that pushed me in the direction of this essay was that we easily recognize dementia when people forget names or the locations of the car keys or who Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior was.[4]  When the number of recognizable themes they are able to respond to declines from 24 (the magic Brahms number) to three or four, we don’t often call it dementia.  When an argument or even a description painted in subtle colors is seen as bland and arguments constructed out of black blacks and white whites are demanded, we don’t often call it dementia, but I think it would make sense.

It is, certainly, simple-mindedness.

 

[1] I am actually working on one of those.  I’m calling it “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
[2] Literally “out of one’s mind.”  Still, as one of Stan Freberg’s Indians says, “Is all how you look at it.”  Our much nicer word ecstasy means “standing outside” one’s mind and it is thought of very kindly in some circles.
[3] Probably the most famous line from Anna Karenina is “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  I think I would have said that there is a greater variation in kinds of unhappy families than there is in the kinds of happy families.  That helps to explain why Tolstoy is quoted more than I am.
[4] It was James Watt.  One of the famous quotes is: “My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”

 

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Honoring the Elderly

Posted on May 8, 2014 by hessd

Respect for the elderly.  That was always a hard sell for me when I was young.  I think I was a more achievement-oriented than a traditional-values little kid.[1]  Now I’m old and it still seems mostly like a scam to me.

But now that I’m old, it seems more complicated.  Here are some examples.  I still think the elderly should be respected for their achievements (rather than just for being old), but I now see that there are many more kinds of achievements than I could have imagined when I first wrestled with this issue.  There are old people, for instance, who experience pain every day and who, nevertheless, refuse to make that the text or the subtext of their social relationships.  I respect that achievement a great deal.  There are old people with firmly analog minds who continue to wrestle, in good humor, with the endless digital upgrades that interpose themselves between the old person and the simplest action.  My own patience is so very thin and if makes me respect their perseverance all the more.

So my notion of what the elderly ought to be respected for has become a good deal broader, but the essential difficulty of “respecting” an old person just because so many years have elapsed between the day of his birth and today, still seems like a great difficulty.

This brings me to Chapter 6 of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?  Chapter 6 is called “The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill.”  It is titles like this one that move me in the direction of reconsidering whether old people should be respected—look at the alternatives!

Respect for the elderly has been a central part of many traditional societies.  Diamond makes an exception in the case of nomads, who simply cannot carry extra people from place to place, but for many societies, respectful treatment of the elderly is fundamental to how the group lives.  Diamond discusses two kinds of reasons for this treatment.  The first is the utility of the elderly for the tribe; the second is the values maintained by that society.

I’m going to use two images that help me think of what is happening.  The posts and the lintel image suggests that if either of the posts is taken away, the whole structure collapses.  The rope image suggests that we cannot continue to use the rope as we have, now that one after another of the strands has broken apart.

old people 1

Imagine a lintel being held in place by these two posts: the utility of the elderly to the society and the value put upon the elderly by the society itself.  Now take away one of the posts.  See what I mean?

Diamond got me thinking that ideas like “respect the elderly” were once not just moral exhortations.  They were extremely practical.  Think of a formula like this one: We do and should respect the elderly because, after all, they are the only ones who can ___________.  It is what goes in the blank that I am thinking of when I use the word practical.

Here are four examples.  We respect the elderly because we live in their house.  We respect the elderly because they teach us how to kill prey or to plant crops or to gather nuts.  We respect the elderly because they have virtually all the power in the village.  We respect the elderly because we will be elderly some day and will want to be respected.

I want to look at each one of these, but the thing I notice first is that they are all practical.  If “showing respect” is expressed as behavior and demeanor, it is nevertheless based on the contributions of the elderly to our survival—all, that is, except the last one.  A clearer way to phrase the first three is: bad things will happen to us if we do not show respect.  The point this argument is getting to, on the other hand, is:  how does the moral exhortation hold up once the practical supports for it are removed?

Let’s take the first one: living in their house.  Traditional societies are either patrilocal or matrilocal.  We live, in other words, in the father’s house or the mother’s house.[2]  In traditional societies, that is where we live and where we ought to live.  Modern societies, by contrast, are neolocal—we live in “some new place.”  In our new place, we don’t live “with” or “under the supervision of” the parents.

What does that mean?  Well, if you take them one at a time, they don’t mean very much.  We would not say that we do not owe honor and respect to our elders because, after all, we do live in a separate house or a separate village.  My argument, rather, is that “respect” is the effect of many such obligations.  Snapping one of the strands still leaves a pretty robust rope.

old people 4The second is that we owe respect and deference to the elderly because they show us how to make a living.  If you think of killing prey or planting crops as things a man would do, being a really good hunter or a prosperous farmer are very good things for a man.  For a hunter, the alternative is sometimes being the prey rather than the predator.  If an elderly and experienced hunter can show you how to survive an encounter with a lion, showing respect for him and for people like him makes a lot of sense.  Or, to think of access to desirable mates, being a prosperous farmer gives you a lot more choices than being an unsuccessful farmer.

If you think about gathering nuts and berries, the traditional supplements to the family diet, as women’s work, elderly and experienced women can show you how to do that job well.  That’s good for being a desirable mate on the one hand and for helping to feed the family on the other.  Respecting the older women who are really good at knowing what “food” is and where it might be found is a practical as well as a moral matter.

In modern societies, our elders don’t do that very much anymore.  Education for “economic activities” takes place outside the home and is conducted by professionals.  Imagine shop teachers and home economics teachers if you want examples that match the traditional society, but it takes an effort of will just to remember shop and home ec teachers.  And if we go to high tech examples, we know that elders are much more likely to learn from youngsters than the other way around.  Going back to the rope made up strands, we see that we have just snapped another one.

The third example is the easiest; the fourth, the hardest.   For the third example, it is important only to note that in traditional societies, it is often the elderly, usually the old men, who hold power.  Prudence requires that they be respected.  The fourth example is entirely reasonable, but it is a very long term project and although it looks like a prudent tradeoff in the long run (I respect the elderly now and when I am elderly, I will be respected), it requires moral sensibilities to make it work in the short run.

Above, I pictured the usefulness of the elderly as one pillar of respect and the values of society as the other.  The idea is that we could all imagine what would happen if you pulled out one of the pillars.  The rope metaphor has the same idea imbedded in it, but it is a little more subtle.  Imagine that the rope is woven of five strands, four of which I have named as examples.  The rope is sound and useful because there are so many strands and because, being woven together, they support each other.

old people 5

The first strand is the kind of personal familiarity and personal obligation that come from living in the elders’ house, presumably under the elders’ rules.  The second strand is the crucial know-how that the elders are likely to have and the youngers not so much.  The third is the monopoly of political power that elders, usually men, have in traditional societies.  The fourth is the long term trade-off by which I respect my elders now so I will be respected by young people when I, in my turn, am old.  The fifth is the moral tenet that old people should be respected.

In my understanding, our “rope” is now missing four of the five strands.  I don’t think that fifth strand is going to hold.  In fact, I think it has already snapped in many parts of our culture and is badly frayed in others.  A good way of thinking about cultural continuity and change is to imagine instructing the new generation.

Traditional Parent:  You should always respect your elders.

Child:  Why?

Traditional Parent:  How can you even ask?  Look at the good things we would lose without them and the bad things that would happen to if we did not respect them.  Besides, it’s the right thing to do.

Or, as a way of looking at it from our own time.

Modern Parent: You should always respect your elders.

Child: Why?

Modern Parent: Um…because it’s the right thing to do.

Those two exchanges capture my notion of how the five-strand rope has become a one-strand rope and is not really up to the job.  It may be time to give the “honor the elderly” pitch a rest or maybe retire it entirely.  There are, after all, other values than respect.  I have seen a lot of grandparents and grandchildren who genuinely enjoy each other’s company.  I have seen grandparents who save their children a great deal of money that would otherwise go for childcare.  There are a lot of good ideas that are worth keeping and that go by other names.

But I think “respect” as an attitude that is “due” the elderly has passed its “best used by” date.

[1] I don’t mean to imply that I achieved a lot; only that I thought that achievement was the proper foundation for respect.
[2] Those are references to the father’s or mother’s “line,” by the way, so it includes grandfathers and grandmothers.

 

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Speak softly and carry on with your shtick

Posted on April 20, 2014 by hessd

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) lectured Secretary of State John Kerry recently on the Obama administration’s conduct of foreign policy.  One of McCain’s heroes, he said, is President Theodore Roosevelt, who is identified with the maxim, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”[1]  McCain thought that was a good practice for U. S. foreign policy in the Obama era and chastised Kerry for speaking loudly and carrying no stick at all.[2]  Secretary Kerry didn’t take it very well.  He responded with a metaphor from an actual Roosevelt speech (1910) the pertinent part of which goes like this.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Needless to say, Kerry had McCain in mind as “the critic, who does not count,” and himself as “the man who is actually in the arena.”

The question Sen. McCain was getting at is interesting.  It is not really whether we are shtickcarrying a big stick.  He presumes that we are not.  It is the effects of our neglecting to carry a big stick.  The United States does not have the automatic compliance of its allies or the automatic prudence of its enemies as it once did.  Of course, “once” we had the only nuclear weapons in the world.  And after that, the world was divided into “ours” and “theirs” and “the third world,” purportedly trying not to get sucked into the Cold War or hesitating between potential allies.

 

That’s not where we are anymore.  China is making a claim to the status in the world that its population, industrial base, and military strength entitle it.  Russia is headed back toward Stalinism.  There is a robust international middle class whose needs must be taken into account if we are going to sell American goods there.  The European Union is friendly—they are our allies, after all—but they know that if Russia cuts off the flow of natural gas during the winter, we will not replace it.  Our “Berlin Airlift” days are well behind us.  There are new non-state actors who have terrorism in mind and are heedless of the cost in human terms.

shtick 4

You can see the colors clearly, but the nations are a little blurry.  They are, in order, USA. Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Canada.  The place the U. S. occupies in the world in now smaller by comparison with other actors.  I think that’s a good thing, all in all, and it has nothing to do with President Obama’s clear preference for diplomatic solutions rather than military ones.  If John McCain has won the presidency in 2012, we would continue to see America’s relative power decline and no “stick” President McCain had would affect that. He would continue to bluster because it is, after all, his shtick.  In all likelihood, it would involve us in several foreign wars.  And as we know, when a foreign war is not going well, it because we have not put the resources of blood and treasure into it (so we should send more troops and spend more money)  than we should have, or because we have not unleashed the military commanders to do whatever they think best (without adequate regard to other considerations, international treaties, etc.)  That is where we would be under President McCain.

The perspective I have just introduced is a little bit on the long and argumentative side.  It would make a really bad bumper sticker.  McCain’s preference for “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick” is much better as a bumper sticker and it is superb as a tool in domestic political conflicts.

This is, as are most of the things that catch my attention, a causal attribution problem.

Anyone who reads the foreign news knows that American power is declining relative to other powers.  Why?  My reading is that the whole structure of global power is shifting.  Other nations, other armies, and other consumers are gaining power, therefore, we are losing power by comparison with them.  That’s a causal attribution; it is my saying why this is happening.

Sen. McCain looks at the same news I am looking at and explains it differently.  He says it is caused by our failure to threaten military retaliation on those who defy us.  That’s what “the big stick” comes to.  He says the frequency with which nations violate our wishes and flaunt their ability to get away with it is a result of our failure to punish them for it.  That is his causal attribution; it is his saying why this is happening.

Jonathan Haidt, in his marvelous book, The Righteous Mind, argues that American politics runs on six “moral foundations.”  He uses the analogy of “taste buds.”  The more taste buds you reach in making your argument, the more richly it will be received.  Here’s a summary by William Saletan.

You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.

Here you see why Sen. McCain’s argument is going to be so much more successful than shtick 6mine.  My argument that the U. S. is losing influence because of a rebalancing of world powers is a very unsatisfying argument.  McCain’s argument that people are taking advantage of us—how about “spitting on Old Glory?”—because we don’t “carry a big stick” anymore is a much more satisfying argument.  It touches on: a) faith, b) patriotism, c) valor, and d) law and order.  That’s four of the six “taste buds.”  The fact that Sen. McCain is personally offended by the conduct of U. S. foreign policy helps sell his point.  He does not “regret” our weakness; he “despises” it.

shtick 5So, as I have indicated, I think he is wrong and I am right.  But I want no part of duking it out in public with him or anyone else who represents his views.  Their arguments are emotionally resonant and powerful.  They seem to give us some action to take; some way to fight back.  And, in the absence of a Democratically declared war that is successfully prosecuted in the very short term—is it too soon to invade Grenada again?—the Republican argument will be successful.  And then we will start going to wars in places where our honor is challenged and our supply lines are impossibly long.

[1] Roosevelt said it was a West African proverb but Gary Martin, of The Phrase Finder, can find no record of its use anywhere, including in West Africa, before Roosevelt used it.  Martin suspects that Roosevelt made it up himself and “ethnicized it” by attributing it to Africans.
[2] This criticism is, in fact, McCain’s shtick.  You can count on him for it no matter what office he is running for.

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“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 theForgive 1 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.

forgive 3Now 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 areforgive 4 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 forgive 2whips 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.

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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 kitchennra 1 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.

nra 3You 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).

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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.)

Alpha 5Since 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 better betaand 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.

better beta 4Remember 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 Beta 2retaining 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 Beta 9April.  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.

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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 Alpha 3the 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!”

Alpha 4Later, 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.

Alpha 7I 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?

Alpha 5You 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.

Alpha 8The 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.

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