God Loves the U. S. Senate

Posted on October 8, 2013 by hessd

What if the way out of the political crisis turns out to have nothing at all to do with character?  Would that be embarrassing?  Would God be surprised?

Dr. Barry C. Black is the Chaplain of the U. S. Senate and he has gotten a lot of attention recently chaplainby giving the assembled senators a tongue-lashing during the morning prayer.  Here is an account from the New York Times, but everyone covered it.  We could ask why the Senate should have a morning prayer, I suppose, but that’s not the line of thought I have in mind here.

Here are five things that could conceivably happen.

1.         The government fails completely to meet its obligations and through that event, people learn that they don’t need the federal government nearly as much as they had been told they did.  A wholesale swing to government by the states and by local communities follows.

2.         The integrity of the caucuses is shown to be faulty and new tough measures of party discipline are initiated.[1]    The change I am pointing to here would have Reid, McConnell, Boehner, and Pelosi exercise substantially more power over the votes of their members.

3.         The possibility of a grand bargain exists, but it is compromised away by small adjustments made every month or so by cautious and uncertain politicians.

4.         The Senators and Representatives take very seriously and very literally their promised to the voters and big contributors in their districts, and refuse to compromise or be guided by their party leaders in Washington.

5.         Many members of the Senate are cut to the heart by the Chaplain’s words and decide they want to be saved from the madness and to acknowledge their transgressions and give up trying to sound reasonable, knowing that that will save them from the charges of “hypocrisy” and “smugness,” which Chaplain Black has leveled at them.  But now that they have done those things—they have acknowledged their transgressions, they have been saved from the madness, they have given up the appearance of reasoned discourse—they discover that they have no idea what to do next.

Choosing Among the Five

If you take seriously the lectures Chaplain Black has administered in the guise of prayers, you will conclude that #5 is the best that can happen.  And maybe it is, but I have two concerns about settling on that too early.  The first is that I think there are better solutions, so I’m not all that happy about the Chaplain focusing on what seem inferior solutions.  The second is that as God’s judgment is brought into the political mix on Capitol Hill, it is almost certainly going to focus on the character of individual members.  I think that in this regard, God is not showing much political sense.

1.         Are there better solutions?

Yes.  But before we get there, let’s look at the kinds of solutions.  Number one is a radical restructuring of the federal system of the sort that would make Rand Paul dance in the shower.  It substitutes local (states, communities) action for national action.  Nearly all the constituency groups supporting the Democratic Party lose big time in such a “solution.”  Number three involves a very dangerous brinkmanship, but many believe that the desperation necessary for a grand bargain will not happen in small adjustments and will, in all likelihood, be prevented by small adjustments.  Desperation is a plausible alternative.

Numbers two and four are alternative distributions of power.  In number two, the voters in the states and districts lose power over their Senators and Representatives.  They may be much better served by them, but if the caucuses work like teams, the plays aren’t going to be called by the spectators any more.  The caucus leadership loses power over their members in number four and each legislator puts “the views of the home folks” first.  That means that both “the needs of the country” and “the cooperation necessary to make Congress actually function” both get moved down and both of those seem important to me.

But God really likes number five best.  I’m trying hard not to sound snide, but the fact is that I am not really comfortable that God likes the kind of solution pitched in number five.  God likes good personal character and good personal behavior.  I like a reconsideration of what the federal system requires and new ways of balancing the power of the caucuses with the authority of the constituents.  I value a grand bargain very highly and I am quite sure that business as usual is not going to get us there.  Good character doesn’t get us to any of those.

2.         Is a focus on inner sins and outward attitudes going to help us move forward?

I really don’t think so.  As favorable as I am toward the recognition of our sins and the value of attitude adjustment, I really think we need structural and political change very urgently and this brings us to my second concern.  Any institutional chaplain—Dr. Black is not unusual in this respect—is going to ask people to focus on inner, spiritual flaws and on outer, interpersonal flaws.  It might be that God wants structural change, but if so, that point is not going to be made from the podium by a religious professional.  It will not.

Here’s one of Dr. Black’s prayers.

“Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable. Remove the burdens of those who are the collateral damage of this government shutdown, transforming negatives into positives as you work for the good of those who love you.” 

I see that God opposed hypocrisy and removes the burdens of those who are inadvertently affected by the huffing and puffing of national politics.  But surely you see that Dr. Black’s prayer that the Lord deliver us from governing by crisis is a blow to my hopes for the grand bargain.  His prayer that all Senators become “responsible stewards of God’s bounty” does not recognize just what “responsible stewardship” implies is one of the major differences between the two parties.  Ask the Environmental Defense Council and the American Coal Council if you don’t agree automatically.  Does God favor one of those groups and hate the other?  Does the Chaplain accept “stewardship” equally from those two groups?

I’m honestly not sure that Dr. Black has a clearer view than Dr. Hess does (that’s me) of what political outcomes God wants in this situation.  I’m not entirely sure God has a favorite outcome that requires action by the U. S. Congress.  I guess we should just all be grateful that I am not the Senate Chaplain.  But for shine the light of God’s judgment on policy questions, do we really need a Senate Chaplain?

 

[1] Each party has a gathering of its members in each house of Congress, although the Republicans call their caucus a “conference” for some reason.  That means that there is a Senate Democratic caucus, presided over by Majority Leader Harry Reid; a Senate Republican caucus, presided over by Mitch McConnell; a House Republican caucus, leadership of which alternates between Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Canton, depending on what the issue is; and a House Democratic caucus, presided over by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

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Still a Family

Posted on October 7, 2013 by hessd

The men in this picture are the family among whom I grew up.  Our parents died nearly thirty years ago, and we have related to each other differently since then.  We have been much closer since then.  I think there was a fairly general “it’s up to us now” sort of feeling. Bro Mo 2013

This collection of people makes up a huge chunk of my best friends in the world.  Only my children, including some of my stepchildren, belong in this group of intimate friends and colleagues.  It is a truism—trite, of course, but valuable—that you can’t make new old friends.  That means you will have to make do with the old friends you have now.  The same is true for family.  These guys, in whose company I spilled milk and Cheerios on the tablecloth, are the family with which I must now “make do.”  I am extraordinarily fortunate.

I didn’t grow up with these wonderful women, of course, at least not in the same sense I grew up with my brothers.  On the other hand, I was still in my teens when Karl (just to my left in the picture) brought Betty home to meet our folks.[1]  I was in my twenties when Mark (immediately to my right in the picture) brought Carol home.  I was in my forties when John (to Mark’s right) introduced us to Gina.[2]  Anyone who knows who I am now, in my 70s, would have to admit that I have grown up quite a bit in the last thirty years.  It’s never too late, I guess.

Brother has a strict genealogical meaning, of course, but it has a lot of extended meanings as well, as “fraternity brother” attests.  As a rule, relationship names don’t change all that much over time.  The Indo-European root bhrātar produces both the Gothic brother—and the German bruder, which is the linguistic background of our family—and the Greek phratēr.  So “brotherhood” and “fraternity” are just forms of the word from the two prominent language traditions underlying English.  Of the four of us, all of whom enjoy words, I am the one most attracted by what words used to mean and what they mean now.

Since the “blood brother” meaning of the word is so powerful, you would expect people to develop related expressions that extend it and indeed, the seventh meaning given by the dictionary I am using gives the meanings as “a male fellow member of the same race, church, profession, organization, and so on (including both fraternity brother and soul brother).” We are of the same race, of course, but we are of different “churches,” different professions, different organizations.  We are of different temperaments, different ways of seeing the world, different priorities among values that we “share” when they are defined very generally.  Our unique histories have given us odd quirks, foibles, hot buttons, tolerances, and strengths.  You never know what is going to set one or the other of us off.

But in all that diversity, the tie of being a part of the triumphs and tragedies of each other’s lives for so long has made us family in a very strong way.  It is rich, but as you could guess from the reference to tragedies, it is expensive.  We have held each other, both metaphorically and physically, as marriages have come unstuck, as children have received frightening diagnoses, as parents have died, as wives have died, and as we have all begun to be just a little less sharp than our memories tell us we were when we were younger. 

Being a part of all that hurts.  There is no honest way to say that it doesn’t.  On the other hand, it is the basis for intimacy and trust.  That’s what you buy when you pay those costs generously and with an open heart.

We are all academics and all healers.  The brothers on either side of me are medical doctors.[3]  They are academics because you have to be academically accomplished if anyone is going to let you practice medicine.  They are also academics because they know they need to teach their patients if any long term good is to come out of their practice of medicine.  I know stories from the examination rooms of both of my doctor brothers and I know both are teachers as well as doctors.

The other two of us spent the better part of our lives in colleges and universities teaching students about the several kinds of politics (my field) and of biology (John’s field).[4]  You can teach in any of several styles, just as you can practice medicine in any of several styles, but I think it is fair to say that John and I practiced as healers.  We taught about the healing of natural and social systems and we practiced our craft by working toward the healing of those of our students who came to us to ask for it.

The four of us and the women who continue to share their lives with us will continue to meet as long as there are eight of us to do it.  Then, when there are seven.  Then six.  The last two of us will embrace at our last meeting and if we can still speak, we will say, “Brother.”

[1] All the wives are standing in from of their husbands.  The ages of the husbands are in serial order, of course, but the ages of the wives are not.

[2] I was in my sixties when I met Bette, the redhead who is standing in front of me, and I’m not entirely sure I have grown up any at all since meeting her.  Things might have started going the other direction, in fact.  You’d have to ask her.

[3] Both have retired, but that has not stopped them from being doctors.

[4] That means both of us have spent a good deal of time studying what snakes do, so if there are behavioral herpetologists, two of them are us.

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Why We Shut the Government Down

Posted on October 3, 2013 by hessd

Today is the third day of the shutdown of the federal government.  This would be the result of a tantrum on the order of “I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue” if there were only one government body involved.  Alas, there are more.

I count five active participants.  The “Tea Party caucus” of the House Republican caucus is one.[1]  The moderate (non-Tea Party) Republicans in the House comprise the second.  Speaker John Boehner is the third.  Republican Senators are the fourth.  The fifth is President Obama.

The classic tantrum situation is this: “If you don’t [something—I’ll say, “give me Sugar Pops for shutdown 3lunch, just to have an example], I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue.”  Today, I want to think about this shutdown using the tantrum model.  Then, I’d like to pivot, at the end, to a very telling and well-known story by H. G. Wells in which Speaker Boehner plays the part of Wells.

Since I am a liberal Democrat, I see the Tea Party caucus as the tantrum-throwers.  In the late 60s and early 70s, we saw a lot of left wing radicals whose avowed goal was to “bring the Mother down.”[2]  Yale political scientist Robert Dahl wrote a book called After the Revolution? in which he laid down this challenge.  “OK,” he said, “the revolution has been successful and you are now in control of the government.  Now what?”  The point he wanted to make, and for which he was widely reviled on the left, was that the revolutionary left had no political program.  They just wanted the nasty national government to go away.  Presumably, everything would be OK after that happened, as if a cancer had been removed.

The history of the postwar (Vietnam) period and the takeover of the National Democratic Party by centrist Bill Clinton dealt with the power of the hard left over the Democratic Party.  Now it’s the Republican Party’s turn.  Maybe there’s a rule of some kind that there must always be a certain number of apocalyptic revolutionaries in the country and they are allocated first to one party and then to the other.  For whatever reason, the revolutionary right is now the active faction and Robert Dahl’s question comes back to me from time to time.  OK, you win.  Now what?

shutdown 1It is worth noting that this struggle is not “partisan” in the classic sense.  It does not pit the Democratic Party against the Republican Party.  The Tea Party activists were fundamentally dissatisfied with the presidency of George W. Bush and they would have been dissatisfied with John McCain and Mitt Romney.  They are probably even more dissatisfied with Barack Obama, but at their level of outrage, it is hard to tell a few extra decibels more or less.

The sugar freak toddler in my initial example is actually in a much better place than the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives.  The harried parent can always say, “OK, I give up.  Here are your damn Sugar Pops.”  But imagine now that this is not a toddler, but a former toddler.  This guy is now thirty years old and his implacable wrath against his parents is based on their often withholding Sugar Pops from him when he was a child.  What, exactly, do the parents do about a not-so-young man who is angry about how little sugar was available to him when he was a child?

I think the dilemma of the Tea Party caucus is more like that.  They are angry about the Affordable Care Act.[3]  They are angry that majorities in both houses of Congress passed it.  They are angry that the President proposed it and that when it was passed, that he signed it.  They are angry that the Supreme Court declared it to be (mostly) constitutional although Chief Justice John Roberts did wiggle a little about what was a “fee” and what was a “tax.”[4]  They are angry that the state exchanges necessary to provide the promised benefits are being set up by the states nearly everywhere and that the federal government is setting them up in states that won’t.

The tool they have for expressing all this anger is passing the U. S. Budget (or not) and raising theshutdown 2 debt ceiling (or not).  And since this is the tool they have, they are using it.  The people who are in the way of their using it are in the path of an angry elephant and that is not a good place to be. 

The Republicans in the House who are not part of the tantrum are natural Tea Party opponents.  I’m not really sure how they are being kept quiet, but the possible reasons include opposition in their next party primary by a well-funded and angry Tea Party candidate.  These Republicans are watching their party being destroyed, but to do anything about it, they would have to step out in front of the elephant and mostly, they have chosen not to do that.

It is worse, in a way, for the Republicans in the Senate, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and recent Republican nominee for President John McCain.  You would think they would be listened to because they are Republicans, but they aren’t Tea Party Republicans, so they are part of Them and not part of Us.

It is probably worst for House Speaker John Boehner who must not only endure the tantrum being pitched by these forty or so members of his conference, but who must also, on occasion, make their pitch for them.  This is a script that does nothing for him at all.  It doesn’t get the party out of the corner into which they have painted themselves.  It doesn’t empower him to sit at the grownup’s table and help craft a larger longer term budget strategy in which some very important Republican goals could be met.  Nope.  He, too, is one of those who denied the toddler his Sugar Pops when that toddler was small.

President Obama is certainly the most reviled by the Tea Party Caucus, but he might actually benefit from the Republican divisions.  If business leaders in red states conclude that they have to choose between Democrats and a stable predictable business environment and Republicans who are still throwing a tantrum, large numbers of them are going to become Democrats until the Republican Party restores a little discipline.  That would be a HUGE change in American politics, although it would probably be a short term change.  When the party restores order to its ranks, the business leaders will revert to their natural alliance with low tax free market Republicans.

Why is John Boehner doing this?  As I thought about it, I remembered a memoir called “Shooting an Elephant,” by George Orwell.  The story begins with this line: “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

An elephant has killed one of the villagers and they call for Wells.  Orwell sends an assistant to get him an elephant rifle, but when he approached the elephant, he saw that nothing would be gained by killing him.  Then he turned around and realized that the whole village had come out to witness the spectacle of the white man with the gun killing the elephant.  Here is the way Orwell describes his dilemma.

 And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle.

Orwell shot and killed the elephant.  If you just substitute “Speaker” for Sahib and “Tea Party Caucus” for “natives,” I think you will see why John Boehner can’t find a way to respond.  If you are wondering what I think about it, I will give you the last sentence of Orwell’s memoir as my answer.

“I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

 

 

[1] The Republicans call their organizations “conferences,” I know, but no one seems to be talking about a Tea Party Conference, and you can see why.

[2] “Mother…” was widely understood to be an aphetic form of a longer and much more vulgar word.

[3] You don’t have to call it the Affordable Care Act if you don’t want to.  I call it P-Pac, myself, because I want to emphasize the “patient protection” part of the act’s name.  Or you could introduce a bill to deal with this Act, as Republicans did in the 112th Congress, when they put up HR 2, Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.  That’s true.  Really.  You can look it up at www.thomas.gov if you like.

[4] He also wiggled on the question of whether commercial activity can be required, or whether it can only be regulated when it occurs.

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I’m Either Sleepy or Angry

Posted on September 22, 2013 by hessd

This is an honest dilemma.  We’ll talk about what a lemma is in just a moment.  It may not be a dilemma for this particular child, whom Bette says is about 8 months old.  And even if it were a dilemma for this child, I have no intention to attribute this particular phrasing of the dilemma to this particular child.  The phrasing is clearly inappropriate to this child, which is why someone thought it was funny and put it on the web.  I thought it was hilarious, which is why I downloaded it.

Nap 1

A lemma is a proposition.  The fact that is comes from the Greek lambanein, “to take,” will help us phrase “proposition” as “taken for granted.”  But having two lemmas doesn’t really bring us to di-lemma.  To be a di-lemma both of the courses of action must be unsatisfactory and/or uncertain.  If you have to go one way or the other and can’t tell which way you should go, you have a dilemma.  Door #1 or Door #2 is not a dilemma.  “The Lady and the Tiger” is a dilemma.

Now, is the situation this child faces, a dilemma?  There is absolutely no way to tell whether a child that age could construe alternatives of this kind.  I, however, face that choice very nearly every day and I don’t always resolve it in the same way.  And neither do you.

Yesterday, I watched the Seattle Seahawks manhandle the San Francisco 49ers.  Looking back on the game, one of the commentators lined up a series of plays in which a very good Seahawk cornerback completely covered a 49er wide receiver.  Lots of physical play, all legal, but intensely frustrating.  Toward the end of the series, there were several plays when the wide receiver didn’t even run his route.  He just ran up the the cornerback and started pushing him.  He had decided to cry about being tired.  He had lost all interest in his nap.

Here’s a clip from a piece I wrote in anticipation of giving up university teaching.

Now let’s consider the player whose job it is to make the free throws.  This is the character in the drama with whom Clarence Thomas identifies.  This player’s  job, as Thomas sees it, is to focus on the rim and ignore the distractions.  But now imagine that he begins to think that the behavior of this unruly mob behind the backboard is intolerable. He, the player who is trying to make the shot, is doing what must and should be done.  They, who come to the game with entirely malevolent intentions, are doing what should not be done.  Justice Thomas has just been changed from a player—focus on the rim, make the shot, win the game—to a critic.  As a critic, he will not be as good a player.

I think that is where I am as an educator; I am becoming a critic.  I am having more and more trouble remembering how much more important it is to make the shot than it is to disapprove of the mob behind the basket.

I found myself right on the edge of crying about being tired—right on the edge of passing up a really restorative nap.  So I decided to give it up the crying and take a nap instead.  That is what I am doing now.

This child feels bad.  Look at his face.  He doesn’t know why he feels bad, but even he has the choice of calling the kind of bad he is feeling “sleepy,” and falling asleep or calling it “uncomfortable” and being angry about it.  And so do we all.

The choice to “cry about being tired”—and all of the analogs that make up adult life– is a moral choice; it is a protest.  It expresses our unhappiness.  It holds someone “accountable”—although it might just be the person who is nearest.  At that point, we don’t really care.

The choice to “take a nap”—and all the adult analogs– is not a moral choice.  It is an instrumental choice.  We feel uncomfortable and we are not sure the means of dealing with that discomfort are available to us, but Dilemma 2some means are available, and we incline toward those.  If “taking a nap” doesn’t work, there will always be time later to “cry about being tired.”

I really don’t approve much of people who think that “crying about being tired” is “the wrong approach” and consequently don’t do it.  They are stoic.  I think that’s too much.  The people I like are the people who try the solutions that are within their power (“napping”) first but who are willing to express their displeasure (“crying”) effectively should the occasion call for it.

All this to say that this kid’s face illustrates a dilemma that seems very familiar to me.  I wonder if it seems familiar to you as well.

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Why I Became a Political Psychologist

Posted on September 21, 2013 by hessd

I didn’t know it at the time, but I became a political psychologist so I could study stories like this from all different angles.  The top of this story is how the City of Portland (Oregon) is handling the question of parked cars with blue “Handicapped” tags hanging from the rearview mirrors.  That’s the story as it appeared in the Oregonian, which you can see here.

It’s a perfectly legitimate story, but it can be approached from so many other ways.  When I was it grad school at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!), I began to say that I was interested in the commitment of psychosociopolitical resources.  Even in grad school, that sounded pretentious so I gave it up.  Not right away, of course.  It does suggest, however, that I was looking for a way to look simultaneously at the way individuals formulate problems, the several ways societies try to respond to (or preempt) those problems and the way governments use the scarce resource of authority to define the issues and the outcomes.  That’s still what I am interested in.

Let’s start this story at the political level.  The government does, after all, set the conditions for Novick 2parking and has an interest in how this scarce resource is offered.  Here is Steve Novick, one of the five commissioners who run the city of Portland, Oregon.

“The idea that more than half of the people with business in the core area of downtown Portland have disabilities that preclude them from using parking meters or other forms of transportation frankly strains credulity.”

Novick has never been known for his subtlety of expression.  Then again, Lynne, in the next scene, isn’t all that subtle either.

On Tuesday, an IRS employee named Lynne smoked a cigarette next to her Volvo parked outside the downtown Portland federal building. It was one of five parked cars displaying disabled placards on the street. “I have multiple issues,” she said, without going into details. “But honestly, I just couldn’t afford the $150 a month for parking. I’m not the only one doing it.”

A conversation between Novick and Lynne would go like this.

Novick:           So…you don’t actually have a disability.  You’re just ripping off the system.

Lynne:             I have no intention of ripping off the system.  I just can’t afford to pay the going rate for parking and a lot of us feel that way.

We could start thinking about personal values like integrity.  Lynne needs to lie to her doctor about her condition, then accept a parking pass she doesn’t deserve, and then deprive the city of the income the parking meters should generate and deprive honestly disabled people the parking spaces they need.

It is a commonplace of political theory that a society of law-abiding citizens can get by with a remarkably modest government.  This government does not intrude unduly on the lives of its citizens and, partly for that reason, it is a very inexpensive government.  This small decorous government requires people not to act the way Lynne did.  But if you look at the reasons Lynne gave, you see right away that her behavior is not the only problem she is carrying around.  In my line of work, we call these reasons “causal attributions.”  Here are two.

Novick 1The first is that she would not otherwise be able to afford this particular amenity.  Here is a block of cars enjoying this particular privilege.  The list of things Lynne could steal using that reason is staggering.  These clothes.  This BMW.  The restaurants from which I steal meals by using bogus credit cards.  The fact is that all these are covered quite nicely by the excuse that she could not, otherwise, have afforded them.  It is a very broad rationale and why should she limit it to disabled parking tags?

The second is that she is not the only one doing this.  The idea that it needs to be unique to be illegal is staggering.  Every drug lord can point legitimately to the existence of other drug lords; every embezzler to the actions of other embezzlers, and so on.  “What I am doing is not wrong because it is not unique” is the standard she is using.

Still, you don’t buy these parking tags from a vending machine.  They are like prescriptions from your doctor.  Your condition is assessed and a pill or a rehabilitative program or a special permit are issued.  It is your doctor’s status as a trusted professional that assures us that he or she will not simply sell these parking tags.[1]  And what if there is a Portland Association of Physicians?  Would they guarantee that their members would simply not sell these parking tags and would they use fines, censures, and loss of license as tools?  They might.  But they will certainly not discipline a physician who is simply worn down by the persistence of a patient who wants cheap parking and who knows that wearing down her physician is the only way to get it.

Novick 4You might want to rely on the community of professionals to prevent abuses of this kind, but I don’t think that is going to be effective.  Or, to start from the other side, you might want to rely on the community where Lynne lives.  Let’s imagine that Lynne lives in an old, stable, neighborhood which has norms of conduct that are so well agreed upon that they are never discussed among the adults.  They are much discussed with the children, however, because that is one of the ways social norms are clarified and enforced and “Don’t do what our neighbor Lynne did” would certainly be one of the cautionary tales.

There could be, in other words, a community of professionals that prevents its members from abusing their control of parking tags and/or a community of neighbors capable of saying to one of their own who has offended the neighborhood’s character by using a pass everyone knows she is not entitled to, “We wish you would stop using that pass.  It’s embarrassing.”

A society of solid, morally engaged communities—both professional and neighborhood, in this instance—will prevent the problem we have been looking at.  And they are very inexpensive, compared with the legal solutions which government will apply if necessary.  And in Portland, one of the Commissioners is concluding that something has got to be done.  He is a city commissioner.  He will not propose that we develop more moral citizens or more controlling communities.  He will propose stricter enforcement and punitive fines.  Maybe he has already.

 We come, finally, to the politics part of my psychosociopolitical schema.  There are lots of places the government can step in.  Doctors, for instance, are regulated very lightly by governments because they have professional associations and they can “police themselves,” as the saying goes.  If they don’t police themselves, there is no reason government cannot step in and charge the offending physicians.  It’s a terrible solution in nearly every way, but if the choice is between this solution and just holding your nose at this persistent parking fraud, it might seem like the lesser evil to a majority of commissioners.

On-the-street surveillance is not only possible, but, as costs go today, it is relatively cheap.  With very little tweaking, we can appropriate the threat made by gangsters in gangster movies, “We know who you are and we know where you park.”  We did all that with surveillance cameras.  And the fraud division found out that the doctor you got this pass from gave passes easily to three undercover cops posing as new patients, so he’s got some legal problems as well.  Oh, and did we mention that the fine for the kind of parking you’ve been doing has just tripled?  And that the next time, your driver’s license goes away, too?

Programs like these are all possible and they are all legal.   They are cures that are worse than the disease, as political solutions often are.  They burn up the presumptive good will of citizens as if it were an easily renewable resource.  It is not.  It extends surveillance from national security warrants to parking abuses and we are watched, in my judgment, way too much already.  And these programs are expensive.  The cameras aren’t, because of the plummeting costs of all kinds of technological solutions, but everything after the camera is much more expensive and the enhanced budget requests of all the winning departments will make sure it stays more expensive.

I called these “levels” of activity and analysis.  It isn’t that an issue like this is “psychological” and therefore not “political” or “social.”  The problem itself can be looked at profitably from all three—and there are more than three—perspectives.  Each of these perspectives gives a different understanding of the issue and new ways to address it.  And that’s what I’ve been doing since 1974, when I stopped talking about “psychosociopolitical resources.”

 

 

[1] As Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, said about his control of a U. S. Senate seat, “This is a fucking valuable thing, I’m not just going to give it away for fuckin’ nothin’.”  I apologize for the language in my consistently vanilla blog, but I think it helps convey Blagojevich’s disdain for the law a little more clearly.

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The Putin Critique

Posted on September 16, 2013 by hessd

Every time I taught P.S. 102 at Portland State University, we studied the effect of the electronic media on American politics.  And every time we studied that, we discovered that “bias” was everywhere.  Everyone who cared enough about an issue to write about it or lobby for it or to fund campaigns favorable to it turned out to be “biased.”

Very shortly after we reached that point, someone would ask me where to go to get unbiased news.  I always said there wasn’t any such thing, and proposed my own solution to the dilemma.  Round up a substantial array of biased sources, read them all, take them all seriously, and draw a conclusion rooted in your own values.

It’s a pretty expensive solution to the problem and I suspect very few students actually followed it, Putinbut if they had, and if they had run across President Putin’s op ed piece in the New York Times, (which you can see here) and had brought it to me to see, I would have said, “See.  It works.”  This is a really marvelous speech.  Having written my share of speeches, I can tell you I would have been proud to have written this one.  It does exactly what Putin wanted to do and it paints his opponents into a corner.

Just look at these few elements.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

The U. S. is invited to bring significant international conflicts to the Security Council of the United Nations, where they can be vetoed.  The alternative—THE alternative—is unilateral action, which will ruin the U. N.

Or how about this one?

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.

The most powerful part of President Obama’s speech was that we need to do whatever is necessary to prevent the death of so many children.  President Putin points out that dead is dead.  The children who die of poison gas and those who die as collateral damage to drone strikes are laid out on the ground side by side.

Or this one?

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.

Here Putin’s argument is more subtle.  There is the factual question: who actually used the Sarin gas?  Then there is the danger to Israel—that is not a name plucked out of the hat—which we exacerbate by falling for the ploy the rebels used to get us to intervene.

But, to my mind, the most interesting by far, was his final point.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

He is saying that the nations of the world differ in many ways—size, wealth, form of government, policy commitments—but all are morally equal.[1]  Let’s imagine a caricature political universe where there is a “free world,” a Communist world, and an unaffiliated and mostly poor, “third world.”  In Putin’s proposal, all the nations that make up these three worlds are equal.  We are all equal because God created us all equal.  The United States as a leader of “the free world” is precisely like the Soviet Union, which dominates the police states that make up their empire.  Don’t let the starkness of this cartoon view distract you.  If there were such a world, the U. S. and the Soviet Union would be morally equivalent.  Furthermore, the Soviet Union and Latvia, which was not even allowed to speak its own language under Soviet occupation, would be moral equals as well.

There is, in short, no moral basis for distinguishing one nation from another.  I think that is preposterous.

Here is what Obama actually said.

America is not the world’s policeman.  Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong.  But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.  That’s what makes America different.  That’s what makes us exceptional.  With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth. 

So “doing the right thing” is what makes America different; it is why we are not just any old nation.[2]  We are willing to do these things—with modest effort and risk—and we are able to do these things, so we should.  “We” in all these instances is the U. S.  In other world, unilateral action or a coalition cobbled together by the U. S. are “we.”  The United Nations is not “we” and nations that are committed to intervening through the agency of the U. N. are simply not extraordinary.

I think that is preposterous as well.

As is often the case, I hesitate between two courses of action.  Very often, even the short-term effects of these actions cannot be foreseen and the long-term effects cannot even be guessed at.  On the other hand, it is also important that we pay attention to how we justify our proposed actions and inactions and I think that the accounts offered by Presidents Putin and Obama are not adequate.

 

[1] Putin’s phrasing is religious, rather than merely moral, but he just wanted to throw Thomas Jefferson back at us.  It is interesting that he interpreted “equality” as Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, and not as Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address.

[2] I know that phrasing is offensive, but ask yourself if it is different from “exceptional.”  I don’t think so.  I think the view of the Americans Obama is pandering to in this reference is precisely that the world is full of ordinary nations and then there is us.  I don’t think Obama actually believes that himself, but he is not acting as a self while he is in office.

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With Your Eyes So Blue (not Green, but Blue)

Posted on September 13, 2013 by hessd

Today, I want to think a little about one of the densest and most debated texts I know.  It is the Prologue to the Gospel of John, found in Chapter 1, verses 1—18.  These verses have made and ruined academic reputations, split churches, and very likely have made or ended pastoral careers.  I should say before I begin that this post is going to have to be longer than usual.  I’m sorry.  The next one is going to be about Vladimir Putin’s New York Times editorial and if you want to wait for that one, I understand.  This one will require a little huffing and puffing.

I’m not going to do anything that belongs in that league, but I’ve been thinking about some comments made by Raymond E. Brown in his lectures on the gospel of John and in his commentary on John as well.  As I read the Prologue, the question of “rather than what” keeps coming to my mind.  From a rhetorical perspective, it is obvious that when you say that an object is something, you are saying that it is not something else.  A hand, as St. Paul says, is not a foot. 

Very often, however, either “what it is not” is not explicit or “why the distinction is important” is not clear.  So in addition to my “rather than what” question, I must as “why does it matter?”

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it.

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and[b] is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

I have read that straight through, all my life, without asking the two questions with which I began this post.  There are two reasons for reading it the way I always did and the way everyone I knew always did.  The first is that reading it with the alternatives in mind is a lot of work.  The second is that it isn’t always work that leaves you feeling clear and committed.  Sometimes it makes you feel unclear and hesitant.

Let’s postpone the Prologue for just another moment to consider the “what is not there” question.  For that purpose, I propose, “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” the beginning of it anyway.John 2

Down by the old mill stream

Where I first met you

With your eyes so blue

Dressed in gingham, too

Sometime in my unremarkable past, I learned another version.  This is the version that pretends to care a good deal about our first question, which, you will recall, is “Rather than what?”

Down by the old (not the new but the old) Mill stream (not the river but the stream), Where I first (not the last but the first) Met you. (Not me but you.) With your eyes (not your ears, but your eyes) Of blue (not green, but blue). Dressed in ging- (not silk but ging-) -ham too. (Not one but two.)

I say it “pretends to care” because some of the appositions are nonsensical and the ones that aren’t are trivial.  Is there really a new mill stream?  Are streams different from rivers in any important way?  Would anyone celebrating the beginning of a romance distinguish when I last met you from when I first met you?  Does “when I first met me” make any sense at all?

John 4However, when we get down to eye color, we begin to have something.  Let’s make it brown instead of green.  I remember a song that has the line, “Beautiful beautiful brown eyes; I’ll never love blue eyes again.”  Not blue but brown.  If there were rival clans, one of which had blue eyes and the other brown eyes, what would a romance between a brown-eyed boy and a blue-eyed girl mean?  It would mean what Capulet and Montague mean; what Hatfield and McCoy mean.  It would mean war.

So of all the nonsense accompanying that old mill stream, we come up with one distinction that points us in the right direction.  When I say “blue eyes,” is there an alternative that matters?

So—finally—let’s look at the Prologue and start with the last verse.  For working purposes, I am going to use my New Jerusalem Bible, which reads, “No one has seen God; it is the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”  We know now that someone has seen God and has made Him[1] known.  Who is it?  Jesus Christ.  Who is it not?  Moses.

“The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend,” says Exodus 33:11.  Prologue 1Here we have a tradition saying that Moses has seen God and a tradition saying that he has not.  These two communities are the leaders of the synagogues around 100 A.D. and the believers in Jesus who were being thrown out of the synagogues around 100 A.D.  In the bluntest and least conciliatory phrasing, we have the author of the Prologue saying “You say your guy saw God face to face, but you are lying because no one has ever seen God.  Except, of course, for our guy who is close to the Father’s heart (v. 18) and who was “with God in the beginning” (v. 2)”

Honestly, I don’t want to enter into this dispute.  My contribution to it is a) to note that there is a dispute and b) to show that only one side—the side making the claim in this text—is represented.  This text says “blue eyes,” but it does not say “not green eyes.”  It takes some study to come up with the green eyes.

Let’s try another.  Take a look at verses 12 and 13.  Here it is in the New Jerusalem Bible.

But to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God, to those who believed in his name—who were born not from human stock or human desire or human will, but from God Himself.”[2]

In all honesty, I will have to say that in verse 11, just before this passage, it says that the Word came to his own people—Israel—and his own people did not accept him.  That’s why I underlined did accept him.  Some did (Jews who believed in the claims Jesus was making) and some didn’t (Jews who found those claims the rankest blasphemy).  The people who accepted Jesus were begotten of God and Jesus gave these people the power to become the children of God.

There’s the positive reading.  Who can possibly object to God choosing some to be his children?  Well, remembering that the Prologue is a monument in the ongoing altercation between two parties, you become a Jew by having a Jewish mother.  The priests are descended from the tribe of Levi.  We are ourselves descended from Abraham (Chapter 8, verse 33) and we are disciples of Moses [because] we know God spoke to Moses (Chapter 9, verse 29).  Those are substantial claims and they had allowed Israel to hang together for centuries.

Here is the negative—that is, the version where the pejorative comparison is featured—version.  All those are wadded together into “human will” and contrasted to the creative gift of God.  What your guy (Moses, Abraham) has and so what you as their followers have, is “merely human.”  What our guy (Jesus) has and the gift of God which he has given us is divine and not human at all.

Let’s do one more.  This is harder because you have to stretch a little to see what is not there.  It is the Torah that is missing.  Here is the positive reading.  God created the world good.  He sent life and light into the world, but mankind chose the darkness.  That’s the story of Adam and Eve and their descendants who must live in the darkness their ancestors chose.  Then God send light into the world again (the Word) and even now, those who accept him may choose the light of God’s presence.  God is trying really hard here.  He offered light and life once and got His hand slapped.  So he offered them again.  You want positive?  That’s positive.  But as you now know, I am seeing every positive as paired to the exclusion of a (lesser) alternative.

No Jew—ever—would skip from the creation of the world to the incarnation of the Word as Jesus John 5of Nazareth.[3]  You start with creation, then move to the call of Abraham and the Exodus and the incomparable divine gift of the Torah.  This is where God says, “You will be my people and I will be your God” (Exodus 6:7 and many other places).  Why on earth would anyone go from creation to incarnation without citing the fundamental agreement God made with His people?

Why?  Well, remember that we have dipped into the middle of a ferocious conflict between those who believed in Jesus and those who did not.  The Torah is what they had shared.  No one is in a sharing mood anymore.  Why should we emphasize the Old Covenant when God is in the process of offering a New Covenant?

For the people who were engaged in this conflict, careful judgment and peaceful fellowship were not options.[4]  Those aren’t the options facing Christians today—at least they aren’t the options this post is about.  Our options are to read these texts naively—noting only the positive case and ignoring what is excluded—or with a sensitive awareness of how the argument is actually built.  As I Christian, I don’t pretend to be a neutral observer, but for most of my life, I have not been an observer at all.  I have read about the wonderful gift of God without ever seeing the “Our guy is better than your guy” connotations.

Now that I see them, I can’t not see them anymore.  For me, “blue eyes” are always going to mean “not brown eyes.”

 

 

[1] I still capitalize the word when I am not quoting someone else.  I’m a monotheist and it just makes sense to me.

[2] I put the dash after name, and capitalized the personal pronoun.  The rest is just what you would find in any New Jerusalem Bible.

[3] And if he did and if he was an Israeli citizen, his passport would get massively more complicated.

[4] Brown says there are some characters in John’s gospel who wanted to stay in both worlds and for whom John has nothing but contempt.

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The President Should Be Free to Choose a Response to the Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria

Posted on September 6, 2013 by hessd

That title is my thesis.  I’m going to make the best case for it I can, then I’m going to read that case several times and see if I am still willing to go along with it.  I will say, up front, that I am trying as hard as I can to make a positive case—this is what we ought to do.  Most of the emotion I have is anger against several negative cases—things we have done already and done in the wrong way—and I know that rejecting the bad actions is no way to choose a good action.  This is a “better angels of our nature” sort of problem.

I’d like to take the time to clarify a few things before I begin.  You noticed that the title of this post Syria 1is ridiculously long.  That is because it contains all the references I now have to clarify.[1]  Note that I specify that it is “the use of chemical weapons in Syria” that requires a choice.  It is not “civil war in Syria” or “Syria’s dictator, Bashir al Assad, is a bad man.” [2]  The “red line” the President drew had to do with chemical weapons, not with who is going to govern Syria.

Second, note that I am trying to preserve for the President the freedom to choose “a response.”  I did not say “our response.”  I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that the President should be free not to respond at all.  The President might choose diplomatic or military responses or, as is commonly the case, both in varying proportions.  The President might choose a direct military action, like bombing something, or an indirect military action, like arming whichever side has not yet used chemical weapons.  The President might choose a coordinated action by all the major powers—including, as George H. W. Bush did, the Arab League—or he might choose a unilateral U. S. action.  I am not choosing any of those.  I am saying that I want him to be free to choose the one he thinks is best.

Syria 3Finally, by “free to choose” I mean free from congressional acceptance or rejection.  By “Congress,” I do not mean the chairs of the armed services committees and the foreign intelligence committees of the House and the Senate.  They will have to be consulted.  I mean Congress as a whole.

Here is my case.  If the goal is to stop each and every instance of the use of chemical weapons, then the U. S. cannot, alone, be the guarantor of that ban.[3]  That means that a substantial array of nations and international bodies will have to agree to the ban and agreeing to the ban means agreeing to prompt and adequate punishment of whoever violates it.[4]  If President Obama is going to coordinate that scale of agreement, he is going to be collecting, “yes,” “yes, but,” and “yes, if” commitments from an extraordinary array of leaders.  The work he will need to do cannot be done in public.  That’s not how deals like that are made, particularly if our side of the deal requires extensive payments of one kind or another.

Syria 2If there is to be anything like George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order,” the unprecedentedly large collection of nations and organizations that allied to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, it is going to be assembled in private.  That’s the way Bush did it and that’s the only way it can be done.  An international response, in other words, requires that the President be free to cut the best deals he can and not all of them are going to pass the sniff test.

If the President is going to treat the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons as a U. S. problem—something that will require a U. S. (not an international) response—then he is going to have to deal with the Congress.  I’m talking about House and Senate hearings, not just quiet conversations with the Gang of Eight.[5]  It will be treated to the full partisan attention of Democratic and Republican Senators and Representatives who are thinking about being reelected.  It will be thought about carefully by anyone who wants to be elected President in 2016 and who does not want what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2008 to happen to him or to her.[6]

If the question of whether the use of chemical weapons is going to become a serious international norm, defined and enforced by all the relevant nations and organizations, then it needs to be negotiated and acted on at that level.  Leaving the President free to pursue that goal requires that he be freed from the Congressional Carnival Tent so he can do the job that only he can do.

He doesn’t have to be reelected.  He cannot be reelected.  But he could actually earn the Nobel Prize he got for free just be being elected.  And he should.

 

[1] It is still better than “bomb, bomb, bomb/ bomb bomb Iran.”

[2] It is also not that the world would be a better place if we turned Syria into a regional model for democracy by invading them and installing a pro-Western puppet government.

[3] I would, by the way, include Agent Orange as a chemical weapon, not because it is an antipersonnel weapon by design, but because it is an antipersonnel weapon in effect.

[4] I am not opposed to involving the International Criminal Court, but they fail on the “prompt” criterion.

[5] “Specifically, the Gang of Eight includes the leaders of each of the two parties from both the Senate and House of Representatives, and the chairs and ranking minority members of both the Senate Committee and House Committee for intelligence as set forth by 50 U.S.C. § 413(c).”  That’s from Wikipedia: I got it by googling “Congress Gang of Eight.”

[6] The early Obama v. Clinton contest was very tight and one of Obama’s very large early advantages over Clinton was that George W. Bush had forced her to vote for the war in Iraq, while State Senator Barack Obama was out giving speeches against it.

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Vengeance is His

Posted on September 3, 2013 by hessd

Lincoln 1I have long thought that Lincoln’s second inaugural address was one of the most powerful pieces of English prose ever written.  I still think that.  But I am beginning to wonder whether I have misunderstood his message.  Here is the passage I want to think about today.  I would be happy to have whatever help you can give me.

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

It is always wise, when considering a passage beginning with the word “yet,” to look at what came before it.  Here it is: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”  We want this war to end quickly, says Lincoln.

But “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” so even if it costs the Confederacy unmeasureable blood and unmeasureable treasure, that would be only fair.  That is what it looks like to me.  Here is my argument, such as it is.  Two very nearly rhetorical questions.

Who received the wealth piled up by the slave’s labor over the 250 years of servitude?  As a factualLincoln 2 matter, it wasn’t the slaves.  As a matter of political sensitivity, it also wasn’t those Northerners who made a lot of money on the slave trade.  Lincoln doesn’t mean either of those two groups.  He means Southern slave holders.  If the war continues, says Lincoln according to this interpretation, until the Southern slave owners have lost as much money as their slaves made for them in two and a half centuries, we see God’s justice in that outcome.

Whose blood is going to be spilled if this war continues?  The correct answer is that all the soldiers are going to have to pay.  At this very late state of the war, the Union was losing three men for every two the Confederacy lost.  That was a winning margin for the Union.  But the question of God’s justice calls into question only the blood of Southerners, as I see it.  Who drew blood with the lash?  Owners of slaves.  Whose blood will be spilled, if God’s true and just judgments are to prevail?  Owners of slaves and those armies that defend the practice.

So Lincoln is saying, as I read it, “No matter how much it costs you, God says you deserve it.”

The passage I quoted isn’t the most familiar part of the Second Inaugural and it has never been my favorite part.  Here is my favorite part.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

I don’t see “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in the passage we considered first.  What I see in that passage is, “You are getting what God says you deserve.”  That’s why I titled this post “Vengeance is His.”  So what does this second paragraph mean?

Looking at it in the light of my (brand new) understanding of the first paragraph, I’d say that this is Lincoln’s Union paragraph.  “Let us strive on to finish the work we are in” would be directed at General Grant.  “Malice toward none” and “…bind up the nation’s wounds” are directed at the Radical Republicans, who weren’t sure that the Lord’s vengeance would really be enough.  Similarly, “all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves” is Lincoln’s program for the post-war years.

So this last paragraph of the speech sets out Lincoln’s standards for the post war years.  The earlier paragraph sets out God’s standards of justice as it applies to the South.  It is of such havoc as General Sherman wreaked on the south that Lincoln says, “…still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Now…I confess that I have never heard anyone say this and I haven’t done a lick of research to see if any of the avalanche of Lincoln books touches this question. I don’t know if it is a startling new insight or something every Lincoln scholar has known for years.

And I don’t care.  I’m a dilettante.

Posted in Living My Life, Politics | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

What Steven Pinker Should Have Said

Posted on August 24, 2013 by hessd

On August 6, The New Republic published “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” an essay by Steven Pinker.  It was an attempt to claim the word “scientism” for scientists and by claiming it, take it away from science’s enemies. This is a much-used strategy.  It’s what gays and lesbians did with “queer” and what the Society of Friends did with “Quaker.”

I thought Pinker’s article was pretty aggressive.  It was a name-calling, finger-pointing article. Pinker 5 Note that calling it that doesn’t establish anything at all about whether his accusations were true.  The finger-pointing did produce a lot of responses, though, and the New York Times printed seven of them on August 15. (You can see Pinker pointing one of the fingers here.)

From the seven, I’ve picked these four as the most fun.  None of them responds to what Pinker actually said.  Some talk about a topic they wish Pinker had written on rather than the one he did write on.  Some issue massive rebuttals of positions Pinker did not take.  Many of them have written books on “related topics” and the titles of the books go right below the name and the institutional affiliation.

Mine would look like this.  “Why is Steven Pinker So Scared of Steven Gould?”  Dale E. Hess is Adjunct Emeritus[1] at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.  He is the author of Steven Pinker and His Critics and a number of films, interviews, VHS tapes and filmstrips on the same subject.  These comments on Pinker, in other words, serve as blurbs for the book.

Pinker 1The first respondent was Karl W. Giberson, a physicist who teaches science and religion at Stonehill College, in Easton, Massachusetts.  Here is his resounding beginning.

We are hard-wired to want creationism to be true. A strong belief in a creation story like that told in the Bible validates the powerful human desire to believe that our lives have meaning and purpose, that what we do matters…

Notice “hard-wired.”  Very scientific.  “Hard-wired to want…”  Not quite as scientific.  “A strong belief (like that told in the Bible) validates our desire.”  Validates?  I could go as far as “illustrates,” but I don’t think our belief actually “validates” anything at all. 

Giberson’s next step is this: “The brouhaha about “biblical creation” is really a proxy war about the reality of meaning in the world.”  Pinker is the war-maker, I’m guessing.  He doesn’t want a war about the creation story (stories) in Genesis, so he is fighting a war, instead, to establish that life doesn’t actually mean anything!  Really?

Actually, Pinker does think that life means something.  He does not believe that its meaning is given to us from “beyond.”  And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Pinker would like more than a war about “biblical creationism.”

Nevertheless, the problem that shows up clearly in Pinker’s article, according to Giberson, is that he asks “either/or questions” and he should not.  One of the many reasons he should not is that Giberson has written a book.

I laid out just such a “bipartisan” story in my book “Seven Glorious Days,” but the warring camps are just too far apart in this conversation to appreciate any mediation..

Pinker 2My second choice is Kevin Wax, managing editor of The Gospel Project.  The Gospel Project thinks that Pinker went too far.  Of the respondents the Times chose, Wax comes closest to Pinker’s finger-pointing style and is furthest from Pinker’s actual views.  Wax wants to talk about whether people who accept that science is the only path to knowledge really live as if their lives had no meaning or purpose.  They should live that way, Wax thinks, once they have renounced “meaning” as the organizing principle of life, but they don’t.  They live as if their lives mean something.  Furthermore, “science,” is as impressive as religion is in handling data, because science is based on unprovable assumptions and is therefore “based on faith,” just as religion is.  So there.

Pinker didn’t actually raise the question of how scientists are to live, given that they “believe in” meaninglessness.  Wax thinks Pinker should have raised it.  Pinker also believes that scientific assumptions—which must, as Wax says, be taken on faith—are justified by their utility in accounting for data that cannot otherwise be accounted for.  Pinker’s standard is “Trust, but verify.”  Wax thinks that one or the other should be enough.

Wil Gafney is our next respondent.  She is an associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Pinker 3The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and she wants to talk about why the creation account(s) given in Genesis should not be taken literally.  Pinker doesn’t actually raise the question of literal readings of the Bible, but you can tell he knows about them and that he is not happy.

Gaffney spends her days teaching students not to fall for literalism.

Literal readings of nonliteral texts can also lead to fraudulent readings, dogmatic tenacity to ahistorical or unscientific claims, and the loss of credibility for those who insist on nonsensical interpretations.

The dangers of literalism is what Gaffney would rather talk about.  Pinker, we would hope, wishes her well, but I am sure he would wonder why her students are reading sacred texts at all.  Pinker’s view sounds more like this and it is a much broader charge than Gaffney is responding to.

Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Pinker 4Finally, my favorite respondent.  Salam Al-Marayati is executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.  He has no interest in Pinker at all.  He has a soft spot in his heart for the fundamentalist position on creationism, but he also thinks that the creationists are pansies.  “You think it’s bad when you want to talk about creationism at dinner parties,” he tells them.  “You should try talking about Shariah law.”

Americans should all be able to discuss topics like Shariah and creationism without intimidation and browbeating. Freedom of speech applies to those who want to follow religion as well as those who want to flee religion.

Al-Marayati has found that people don’t know much about Shariah, but they know they hate it.  He seems to believe that if creationists got treated better, there would be a chance that advocates of Shariah  would be treated better.  I’m sure he would appreciate that and I don’t blame him.  Besides, Shariah is what he wants to talk about and Pinker’s pitch on the virtues of “scientism” is of no more interest to him than Shariah is to Pinker.

I titled this post “Responding to Steven Pinker.”   You know now that I consider that a heavily ironic title.  No one did actually respond to Pinker.  Everyone responded to something that Pinker’s article made them think of.  In many cases, it made they think of the jobs they have or the books they have written.

Of course, I have not responded to Steven Pinker’s argument either.  But I might.

 

[1] That is my actual title since my retirement.  An adjunct professor is like a substitute teachers in an elementary school except that you get the phone call earlier.  “Adjunct Emeritus” means that I am a substitute teacher based on my merit, which you could take either way, really.

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