The Dilettante's Dilemma

Local Eats

Posted on March 29, 2013 by hessd

During the growing season, from early in the spring until late in the fall, Bette and I get a good deal of the food from Bette’s garden. Bette’s the principal grower and I am the principal “cook,” if you call cutting salad greens out of the garden and mixing them with vinegar and oil, “cooking.”

In Portland, you can find “local eats” at some restaurants, too. Not quite as local as Bette’s garden, just outside our office door, but pretty local. One of the reasons we keep going back to Meriwether’s Restaurant in Portland is the local veggies. It isn’t just that they serve them; it’s that they pitch them.

Here’s a section from the menu:

This spring has been a little dry for our taste, so the rain we got mid-week was mighty welcome! The plants we have planted out in the field are now chard, lettuce, kale, and cabbage. It is exciting to think that by May or June, the kale will be ready for harvest. Until then, we have overwintered kale to harvest..

This notice comes, it says at the bottom of the page, from Caitlin Blood, Farm Hand.

You could say that is just marketing, but I don’t think it is “just” marketing. Bette ordered pasta primavera, which means pasta with “first greens” and first greens is what came with the pasta—little leaves of kale and some raab.[1]

According to the menu, this week they are harvesting: collard greens, kale raab, thyme, leeks, fingerling potatoes, cabbage raab, salad greens, tatsoi raab, and chives. It’s enough to keep us going back at least until Bette’s garden starts to kick in.

[1] The menu says, “Raab looks like a small head of broccoli that brassicas grow toward the end of their life cycles. They are means to keep growing, flower, and put out seed but…we snatch those sweet and crunchy parts right off the stem.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged fresh veggies, local food | Leave a comment

Everyone Deserves to Live “Long Enough”

Posted on March 26, 2013 by hessd

Daniel Callahan is my kind of guy. I first ran across him 20 years ago in his book Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society. Everything I have read since then has been a refinement of or an extension of his argument in this book. The question at the heart of all his writings is this: “How much is enough?”

Here is what admiring fellow authors say about him on the jacket blurbs. Earl Shelp says that Callahan “poses hard questions and proposes provocative answers.” Marylee Wilson calls this book “a thought-provoking and heart-jarring assessment of medical goals…today.” Gilbert Gaul says Callahan’s book is “thoughtfully crafted and often troubling.”

Callahan is, apparently, the kind of person who will not be dissuaded from saying out loud in public truths that really can’t be avoided but that no one wants to talk about. What’s not to like? You know the person who does this is going to be misunderstood, sometimes deliberately. The arguments will be parodied and the findings contested. The proponent himself will be vilified. Callahan was 57 when he wrote the first edition of this book. He is in his mid-80s now, i.e., he is now the age of the people he characterized as “the elderly” when he wrote the book.

The problem Callahan is trying to deal with is talked about all the time as a negative proposition. People will say that we are going to have to deal with rising healthcare costs. They will say that a larger and larger percentage of those costs come from extending the lives of the elderly. Callahan wants to approach it as a positive proposition instead. He wants to see medical expenditures cut back for people who have lived long enough.

That sounds like a good approach to me although I am sure I would not want to pay the price that Callahan has paid for saying it out loud. I would not like to pay even the price Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer paid for his proposal that Medicare should pay for the conferences that elderly patients are supposed to have with their doctors about how they want their bodies treated when they can no longer say what their preferences are. Blumenauer’s opponents called those conferences “death panels.”

So talking about this issue in public is going to lead to stone throwing. Maybe some sticks, too.

The genius of Callahan’s proposal is that he proposes a way to curtail expenses for people who have lived “long enough” so that we will be able to offer crucial medical services to people who have not yet lived long enough—people who deserve, by our most commonly expressed values, our help in living longer. If that sounds scary, let me outline the edges by trying to express the alternatives. One is that crucial medical services to people in the midst of their lives ought to be cut back so that people who have already lived a long time can be supported even more. That doesn’t sound so good. Another is that everyone ought to have a valid claim on all the medical care they would like and that the total cost should be borne by the taxpayers. That doesn’t sound so good either. The last one is that everyone who can afford it should have all the medical care he wants and that people without resources should be denied all but the most basic medical care. I don’t like that one either.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us where Callahan begins. We need to get some kind of grip on what “enough” means, when we are talking about spending to prolong human life. Then we need to constrain expenditures for people who have reached that landmark status so we can provide more services to people who have not yet lived long enough.

See what I mean? When you say it positively rather than negatively, it just sounds like common sense. On the other hand, a lot of things sound like common sense when they are phrased in terms of public policy and then they stop sounding like common sense when they are applied to actual persons. So let’s think about these proposals in terms of an actual person. And how about letting me be the person?

Have I lived long enough? Have I already had, that is, a great deal of what people think life is about?

I think that second question is a better one. The first question sounds like it is about numbers. I’ve lived 70 years or 80 or 90 and that’s “enough.” Enough for what? But if you look at some widely used markers of a rich life, you are not just using numbers.

I have some markers in mind. Susan K. Gilmore, who is a counselor and a writer about counseling and who was, in the early 1970s, my counselor says it is often helpful to think about work, relationship and aloneness. I met Sue while I was working on a graduate degree in political science so I added “politics” to the list. I was influenced partly by the fact that adding politics gave me a set of values captured in the acronym WRAP, but I was also in mid-career as a professor of political science so I imagined that I was going to spend the rest of my career talking to undergraduates about the allocation of values in the polity.

And I have. I retired from that occupation today.

So Callahan’s question could be refined by asking, first, whether I have had as much work as anyone really ought to expect. I have, surely. I started teaching in 1960 and just now retired from it. That’s fifty-three years. And I had a brief fifteen year “sub-career” in politics in the middle of that. I’ve been hired and fired and overpaid and underpaid and overappreciated and underappreciated. I’ve had all the kinds of benefits I know about in my work life and some I just discovered when they happened to me. If that’s not “enough,” how could “enough” possibly be defined?

So I’ve had enough of the advantages people are looking for when they plan a career. How about relationship? Well, I haven’t been a hermit. I’ve been a son and a husband and a father (and a stepfather); I’ve been a lover; I have served others and have been served by others. I’ve chaired committees and written minutes and proposed agenda items. I’ve celebrated the lives of others and have been, in my turn, celebrated and treasured and—even more—been really understood. That last one has been a little unsettling sometimes, but it profoundly affirming.

So I’ve had most of the experiences people say they value when they talk about relationships. I’ve been rich in relationships. All my true relationship needs have been met, at one time or another. I have had, by even the most generous accounting, “enough.”

“Aloneness” isn’t the absence of other people; it is only the opportunity to come to grips with who I am, myself. I have had every opportunity to become comfortable with who I am, as well as with what I’ve done. I don’t know of any good metric to measure my own internal life; not even one good enough to use, myself. But I have had plenty of opportunity to learn that sweet spot between being comfortable with myself and challenging myself to do better. I have had a very rich array of models. I have had people who are willing to honor me with their affirmation and with their criticism. I’ve had the leisure to be thoughtful about myself and my life. I had, for example, a long commute to work for a number of years and it provided a good deal of leisure for this kind of speculation.

Separating achievement, which I admitted I didn’t know how to measure, from opportunity, I would say that I have had “enough” aloneness. At the very least, it makes no sense to me to claim that I have a right to more than I have already had.

Politics, my own addition to Sue Gilmore’s list, defies careful measurement as well. I have never aspired to public office, but I’ve been a policy analyst and a lobbyist. I’ve written and delivered testimony to legislative committees. I have ghost-written a lot of letters for a lot of governors. I have defined for many generations of undergraduates just what public values will have to be attended to and what they will have to know to act on their own values in the public arena. I was a teacher, after all. If those are all “politics,” and that is what I would call them, it cannot be said that I have not had abundant opportunities to hone and practice my craft.

Now comes the last little half-step. I have defined “enough life” as “enough of all the components of a life like mine.” I have touched on each of those components—work, relationship, aloneness, and politics—and have concluded that I have already had more than anyone could claim to have a right to. The last half-step is to conclude that I have had enough life.

And what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to keep living the life I am living. I like it very much and I want to keep doing all the things that I love and that I am still able to do. It doesn’t mean that I renounce the medical expenditures that would keep my life vivid and that would help me keep living this kind of life. It does mean that I have no claim to the simple extension of my life—just making it longer—rather than to the restoration to a health that is still possible for me. If I could live the kind of life I value if only my doctor would prescribe antidepressants for me, then I would claim the right to the antidepressants. If a feeding tube could successfully extend my dying for two months, I would say I do not have a right to that. The antidepressants would give me more “life;” the feeding tube would only postpone my death.

I want to say, on my own behalf and on behalf of all other old people who would like to associate themselves with this standard, that I affirm the first and reject the second.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged death panels, long enough, medical costs, old age | Leave a comment

Narrative Integrity, Jesus and Allison

Posted on March 17, 2013 by hessd

I want to write about the character of Jesus today. I admit I have a grievance and blogging about it seems to help. The pivot point, the point I will keep returning to until I start to feel better, can be called “narrative integrity.”

“Integrity” isn’t just a good word for me because I have gotten used to seeing “integer” in it. It is the wholeness of the integer, the fact that it has not been divided up into fractions, that makes it a good model for the notion of integrity. “How is the character of Jesus to be understood?” is the question for today.

Twenty years ago or so, I started pulling apart the birth narratives provided by Matthew and Luke. Raymond E. Brown, in The Birth of the Messiah, divides the book very sensibly into two parts: what Matthew tells us and what Luke tells us. My practice over the last couple of decades has been to read the Matthew part one year and the Luke part the next year. Slowly, my imagination began to be rescued from the Advent Goulash that we have invented by throwing the stories together.

That was when I started to understand what narrative integrity is. It turns out that the story Matthew tells is surefooted, effective, lucid, and even—leaving out the genealogy—rather spare. Luke isn’t spare at all, but all the embroidery has a purpose in Luke, and the characters, not too many of them, are richly drawn. It is things like that that you find out when you read the stories one at a time and it is things like that that I have in mind when I talk about narrative integrity.

Raymond Brown has also written a book called The Death of the Messiah. I have maybe six to eight years of work into it. The division of the gospel accounts can’t be handled simply, the way they can in the birth narratives, but if you begin with the instinct for narrative integrity—for what each account, taken on its own terms, has to offer—you can come to see how very different the accounts are. For most purposes, it is good enough to divide the accounts into three: Matthew/Mark is one narrative stream; Luke is another; John is yet another.

I have jokingly called the process of getting away from the Gospel Goulash and understanding the separate accounts as “getting clean and sober.” Like getting clean and sober, it takes a long time and it requires discipline and relapses retard whatever progress you were making. I was making a lot of progress in getting clean and sober about the stories about the arrest, trial, and crucifixion—called, as a group “the passion narratives”—when our church choir began rehearsing a goulash-style oratorio to sing at our church’s Lenten services. The music is really quite nice but the narrative is awful. Truly awful. And there is no recognizable Jesus in it at all. This is the problem of “the character of Jesus” to which I alluded at the beginning.

Now let me start at another place, just to try to illustrate for you how bad this is and why publishing companies don’t allow their authors to do things like this. In a good novel, there is a real array of characters. Well beyond the good guys and the bad guys, there are the comics and the pathetics and the schmucks and the recognizable bit parts, like the hero’s mother-in-law who makes wonderful yoghurt in her kitchen. You get the idea. But every one of those characters obeys the laws that govern narrative. If you want readers to care about your book, you want them to care about your characters. That means they have to find them credible. That means that if a character does this, she simply can’t also do that.

So here is Allison, the daughter of Steve and Martha, whom you might remember from some other stuff I have written. These are all completely fictional, by the way. Allison is in high school. She is a cheerleader. She belongs to the local Goth faction. She is a top notch student. She chews her fingernails down to the quick in her Goth life, but as a cheerleader, her nails are long and painted with the school colors, which, it seems, are green. She is in a state of perpetual conflict with her teachers, which is pretty much required as a Goth, but is in a very close relationship with them as a cheerleader and as a serious academic talent. She sits in a corner of each room, as she changes classes at the high school; sullen, aggressive, withdrawn. But during each class session, she participates actively in the discussions and very often asks permission at the end of class to give a little plug for the team in the upcoming game.

Got a good grip on what Allison is like? I hope you like her character because I am going to send it to a major publisher and I want to be able to forward to you all the rejections that tell me that nobody—nobody at all—is going to be able to attach to Allison. She is incredible, in the worst and most literal sense of the word. Making a narrative about her is simply a waste of time.

There is a way to save this book. It’s easy and it has often been tried before. You just have three narrators. Allison is described by the advisor of the Honor Society; by the member of the counseling staff who has seemed most effective against the Goth invasion; and by the sponsor of the rally squad. The Honor Society tells about the successes of Allison the Good Student; the counselor tells about the tribulations of Allison the Goth; the sponsor bubbles over about Allison’s athletic abilities and her perpetual good humor.

Now it is true that each narrative will leave out some material. The sponsor will tell you about the manicured green fingernails, a detail that fits beautifully into her narrative. The counselor will tell you about the brutally chewed nails, which advance the narrative he is telling. Each has a story in mind. In each story, there is an “Allison” who comes to life in that narrative and who is vivid enough to drive the plot forward. Readers can believe the cheerleader and the academic and disbelieve or pay no attention to the Goth.

That could work. The Goulash Allison will not work. No one will be able to make any sense of her—not enough to empathize with her situation or to deplore her friends or even to criticize her persistently bad choices. If this bad book receives any awards, it will become the kind of book that people know they need to refer to, but no one will really read it and no one should.

Now let’s come back briefly to the Passion Narratives. You will not be surprised, at this point, to learn that different writers have seen Jesus in different ways and have written compelling narratives about his arrest, trial, and death. You might have seen Matthew/Mark, Luke, and John in my Honor Society, Goth Enclave, and Cheerleader. You were supposed to, so I hope you did.

Beginning with the Gospel Goulash, I have been working at getting clean and sober. I have been having some success. I understand that the Jesus we see in Matthew/Mark is really a truly different from the Jesus of Luke. The Jesus of Matthew/Mark is a recognizable character. When you see that A happens to him, you are ready to expect that B will happen soon. In Luke, when you see that C happens to him, you are ready to expect that D will happen soon.

In Mark, the relationship between A and B—between the agony of Jesus as he prays in Gethsemane and the abandonment he feels as he dies alone on the cross—makes sense. You can feel the loneliness; you can see Jesus looking hopelessly down the barrel of the gun the Romans have pointed at him. In Luke, the relationship between C and D—between the appearance of an angel to strengthen Jesus for the ordeal and the connectedness with the Father he feels, even as he dies that awful suffocating death—makes sense. It isn’t pretty, of course. It’s a ritual execution by torture. But it does make sense. It is a real narrative with a real character. This Jesus—either the one Matthew/Mark tell us about or the one Luke tells us about—is someone you can care about; someone you can invest your emotions in, as you can in any well-drawn character.

This Jesus does not shed understanding and empathy the way Allison does. If he did, there would not be a church. You will not be surprised, by now, to see what effect it had on me to sing a chorus about Jesus dying on the cross alone, abandoned even by God. And then, immediately after, sing a chorus in which Jesus confidently commends his soul to his beloved Father, knowing that even in this awful moment, the Father’s purposes will be achieved and that God suffers with Jesus through all the pain and mockery. Jesus turns, in the midst of all this, to pardon a thief who is being crucified along with him. This Jesus is full of compassion, not despair.

So we sing about the despairing, abandoned Jesus; then about the confident, caring Jesus. The one right after the other.

If we were trying to get the general readership to care as little about Jesus as they have learned to do about Allison, I can hardly think of a better way to proceed.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Paying Attention | Tagged crucifixion, Gospel Goulash, jesus, narrative integrity | Leave a comment

There’s Always a Chance for Redemption

Posted on March 10, 2013 by hessd

“There’s always a chance for redemption when it comes to the NFL.”

So says Steven Gerwell in The Bleacher Report. That’s his opening line in a piece that names Peyton Manning the Comeback Player of the Year in the NFL for 2012.

Redemption: now there’s an interesting idea.

I’ve been thinking, during Lent this year, about Peter the Apostle. If there is to be a comeback player of the year for the year Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified—apart from Jesus, of course—I’d pick Peter.[1]

People who want to build up Peter’s resume go to, “I say that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” See Matthew 16 for the context. That text never meant much to me for some reason. Recently, however, I found one that means a lot to me. I’ll tell you what it is, but first I want to tell you why I missed it all my life.[2]

Luke gives us a scene (Chapter 22) in which Jesus says to Peter, “And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, [a translator’s addition] strengthen your brethren” That’s the King James Version, which was simply “the Bible” when I was young.[3]

But the “you” it turns out, is a plural. The devil has not desired Peter particularly; he has desired to brutalize all the disciples of Jesus. “Brutalize” might seem a little over the top as a verb to substitute for “sift,” particularly if you bake pastries from time to time and know not to measure the flour until you have sifted it several times. That’s not the kind of sifting we are talking about. If you want to remove the part of the wheat you want to eat from everything else, you begin by using a flail and you beat the living crap out of it. Like these guys are doing. If you were doing it to a person, you would call it “scourging.” Then you take it outside on a windy day and throw it into the air repeatedly until the wind has blown the chaff away.

Those experiences are what the devil has in mind for Jesus’s disciples, but it is not going to happen. Why? Because Jesus has prayed for Peter. The shift from the plural to the singular accomplishes all this and because they are the same in English, I never noticed. The devil has horrible plans for the disciples, but these plans are going to be defeated because Jesus has prayed for Peter. For some reason—possibly because it is about people and not about buildings—this way of putting the preeminence of Peter has a lot of resonance for me.

This is not all good news for Peter, however. Peter’s job is to “strengthen your brothers” but that is not his first job; it is his second job. His first job is to return. You get your choice of phrasings here; I think I would choose “turn back.” The New Jerusalem Bible has “recover.” Jesus is saying, without saying it in so many words, that Peter is going to be led astray. I like to use the verb seduce to picture this kind of dilemma, built as it is from the Latin verb ducere, “to lead,” and the prefix se-, “aside, away.” Sometimes we say “astray.” The great advantage of “away” is that it requires that we understand that there is a way to go; a way you should go. Being led “astray” means that you did not go the way you should have gone.

The devil will seduce Peter. Peter will be seduced. On the same night Jesus tells him this, Peter will deny three times that he knows Jesus or has ever had anything to do with him. Peter’s first job is to recover from that in whatever way he can. I have been raised, as you have, in an era where the psychological explanations are the “real” explanations. We are inclined to imagine Peter “owning” the awful betrayal or embracing his dark side or getting trauma therapy. Making a mistake of this order, denying the Lord, to whom he pledged unwavering loyalty, is a truly horrible act. He needs to admit it and move on.[4]

He needs to move on because Job 2 is staring him in the face. He is called upon to “strengthen his brothers,” who were sifted, just as Peter was—were flailed and tossed just as Peter was—and who would be crushed if they were not strengthened.

The prayer of Jesus for Peter has certain poignancy. He does not pray that Peter will not deny him. He knows Peter is going to deny him. He prays that Peter will not be crushed by his guilt and remorse and that he will be strong enough to move on to the task for which he was spared; to strengthen his brothers.

Amazing. And as we consider who is to become the next bishop of Rome, we might wish for him that he understand how important it will be for him to leave behind those times when he has denied his Lord and turn to the crucial task of strengthening his brothers and sisters.

[1] I got to poking around in the field of papal candidates a few days ago and discovered a Ghanaian cardinal whose nickname is Peter the Roman. That led me to his predecessor, Peter the Galilean and, in time, to a reflection about Peter’s amazing comeback.

[2] I wasn’t the last one to realize this, I see. Here’s an internet commentary: “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat”(Luke 22:31) “Only occasionally do we have glimpses into the interaction between God and the devil. Though certainly much has gone on behind the scenes it the struggle between right and wrong, God has seen fit to reveal only a small portion to us. Yet what we do know leaves us interested and often confused. Here Jesus tells Peter that the devil has requested him specifically, with an undoubtedly evil purpose at heart. While much remains hidden, what can we learn from these verses? Why did Satan ask for Peter?”

[3] As is often the case, I like the New Jerusalem Bible a good deal better. Here it is: “Simon, Simon. Look, Satan has got his wish to sift you all like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail, and once you have recovered, you, in your turn, must strengthen your brothers.”

[4] I learned a few weeks ago that the liberal political group “MoveOn.org,” is named that because of their first political stand. They were unhappy that the news was saturated day after day with stories about President Clinton’s private infidelities—he was “seduced,” as I say. Their proposal was that the House of Representatives should “censor and move on.”

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged guilt, Peter the Apostle, redemption | 2 Comments

American Catholics and African Catholics

Posted on March 8, 2013 by hessd

Yesterday, the New York Times released a poll they conducted with CBS. The goal was to ascertain the views of Roman Catholics in the United States. I want to go further in this post, but here are some results that might interest you.

Who is in touch with “the needs of Catholics today?” Considered as a general matter, 53% are out of touch. Bishops, 49% are out of touch. Parish priests—this is where the break occurs—63% are in touch. And for your priest in particular, 72% are in touch. Nuns are 51% in touch.

I’m familiar with this phenomenon in the well-known finding that Congress is bad, but my congressman is good. The schools are bad, but my child’s school is good.

What would U. S. Catholics like to see in the new pope? He should be younger (66%) and more liberal (54%). He should favor letting priests marry (69%) and letting women become priests (69%) and for “artificial methods of birth control.” (71%). On the other hand, he should not favor legalized abortion (56% opposed) or the death penalty (56%).

Finally, we come to three questions that bring us a little closer to my own interest. The question is, “Do you believe the pope is infallible when he teaches on matters of morality and faith or not?” The highest number say he is not (46%), but the number who say he is infallible is not far behind at 40%.

“On difficult moral questions, which are you more likely to follow—the teachings of the Pope, or your conscience?” Not, “the teachings of the church,” I notice. Conscience wins in a landslide, 78% to 13%. Another 7% say they don’t know, but I’d guess those are “conscience people” whose consciences tell them it is not wise to speak their opinion candidly to a pollster.

“Do you think it is possible to disagree with the pope on issues like birth control, abortion, or divorce and still be a good Catholic?” Yes, it is possible, 83%. No, it is not, 13%.

This brings us to Geri Toni, a 57 year-old woman who was one of the respondents to the poll. “I can understand how the Catholic Church stands against it (abortion). We are not supposed to kill. That is one of our Ten Commandments. But as a woman, I have to make sense of it, and I believe choice comes down to the individual.”

That seems to me a striking statement for an American Catholic to make. I am readier to hear that sentiment from a Baptist, for whom the congregational tradition is so strong and the hierarchical obligation so weak. “I know what my church says,” says Ms. Toni, “but I’m a woman and I don’t believe it if I don’t understand it and I think that whatever my church says, it is my own sense of right and wrong that matters most.”

Did I miss anything there? Is that what she said?

		Position on Catholic Doctrines
		Liberal	Conservative
Norms Governing Social Organization	Individualism	Winner in the U. S.	Loser in the U. S.
Norms Governing Social Organization	Corporatism	Loser everywhere else	Winner everywhere else

Let’s take another step. One of the men who is being considered as a possibility for the papacy is Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana.[1] I know almost nothing about him, but let’s consider him as a strong contender on the grounds that as the Roman Catholic church is shrinking in the northern hemisphere, it is growing rapidly in the southern hemisphere. As the majority of Catholics shifts to the south, it would make sense to choose a pope from the south and Ghana fits that directional shift.

But that points to some difficulties. As the American Catholics are shifting to the left socially and theologically and as they are claiming unheard of freedom from the dogmatic guidance of their church, the Catholic church of the south is a good deal more conservative. If they are more loyal to the institution—for lack of anything else to call that loyalty, I called it “corporatism” in the table—as well as more conservative, I think they will take over the governance of the church fairly quickly. Organizations made up of individualists are going to lose out, more often than not, to organizations made up of corporatists, or, if you will, “team players.”

So now what? American Catholics split off and become Episcopalians? A distinct, non-papal American Catholic Church is devised? Catholicism splits into a church of the Catholics of the North and the Catholics of the South?

I have no idea. The thing I am pretty sure of is that the Catholics can’t become markedly more liberal, so as to keep the American allegiance, and markedly more conservative, so as to accommodate the South, at the same time.

[1] I’m just meeting Cardinal Turkson today. I know his nickname is Peter the Roman. I know his full name is Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, and I know that his father was a carpenter.

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged American Catholics, Cardinal Turkson, individualism, New pope | Leave a comment

It’s So Hard to Get Good Help These Days

Posted on March 3, 2013 by hessd

It is a truism among environmentalists that it is not possible to do just one thing. I think it is true everywhere, but environmentalists have demonstrated it so clearly and so many times that I think they deserve to be recognized for it.

Public policy, on the other hand, very often tries to do one thing. Only. Scarcely a bill or a regulation exists that does not have a single or a very small number of “goals,” and we are left to wonder what other effects these measures will cause and when the effects will be visited on us.

We will be working today with a notion that the authors of a recent article call “AE.” Academic Entitlement. Who would have thought it?

Imagine for instance, that a university wanted to become aware whenever a professor’s conduct of a course fell so far below the university’s standards that even the students noticed it. If, for instance, the professor frequently failed to come to class or if he graded examinations unfairly or if he fell asleep during his own lectures. I have seen that done and I am not entirely certain I have not done it myself. The solution to this difficulty is easy to discover. Require the professors to distribute and ask the students to complete a Course Evaluation Form. When a number of such forms indicated that the professor missed classes and misgraded exams and snoozed during the lectures, the department or the college would have some occasion to deal with the difficulty.

What could be simpler?

Except, of course, that it is not possible to do just one thing. When one remedy is enacted, others are enabled. If, for instance, you begin by asking whether the lecturer dozes as he lectures, will the next level of question to be enabled be whether he is “interesting?” Next, whether he is “knowledgeable?”

Both of those questions are troubling to me as a political psychologist because the power in the question is in the status it grants to the one who is asked to give the answer. Both are troubling to me as a professor as well. Let me mention a few things about “interesting” that you and I both know. Some lecturers are more interesting than others. Students who have invested themselves in the material before class are much more likely to be interested than students who have not. So, as we all know, “interesting” is a word that attaches to the lecturer, but it is, in fact, a transaction between the lecturer and the student.

The second question (the professor is knowledgeable) is even more vexing. It requires both that the student know how much the professor knows and also how much he should know. Is that a good question to ask the people who are supposed to learning a discipline? Would they know enough to answer such a question?

Immediately following are other issues that are opened up. If we imagine that a student knows whether a lecturer is “interesting” (apart, of course, from his own preparation for class) and whether the lecturer is “knowledgeable,” there is the question of whether students by and large will answer these questions based on their own sober judgment, or whether they will use them to unfairly reward some professors and unfairly punish others. If a student asks for additional time, for instance, to complete an assignment for which the deadline was last month and is denied that request and is angry about being denied and then is given a Course Evaluation form, will he offer his own sober judgment about the professor’s work or vent his anger about the favor denied?

Any questions you might have about where this leads may be addressed at www.ratemyprofessors.com. Professors are rated there as to whether they are “good” and whether they are “hot.” Here are two pictures I found pursuing the question of what “hot” might mean. No one I have ever had as a colleague in my sixty years of teaching looks like either of these spectacular specimens.[1]

It does get worse, though, and I come now to the deeper meaning of the axiom about “doing one thing.” When you ask a student to complete an anonymous evaluation, you have in mind collecting information about the professor and you do. You also bestow the status of “consumer” on the student. No one seemed to notice at the time. but treating them as customers has had, eventually, the effect of students coming to think of themselves as customers as of courses as “products” which they are competent to judge. They come to feel “academically entitled.” I didn’t like her class in medieval philosophy becomes a statement like I don’t like the new flavor of yoghurt. “It,” says the student of both the course and the yoghurt, “failed to please me.”

I got to thinking about this when I ran across an article, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors.”[2] Their concern is with “academically entitled” (AE) students.

The authors have devised a scale to help them quantify “academic entitlement.”[3] They gave to a sample of students statements that seemed to capture the notion of entitlement. The percent agreement you see is the combined numbers for the three favorable columns—“strongly agree, agree, slightly agree.” I found it interesting just to see the concept specified. I’ll put an asterisk on the ones I have faced myself. The percent agreeing (all three levels of agreement combined) is in parentheses at the end.

1. If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade.* (66.2%)

2. I feel I have been poorly treated if a professor cancels an appointment with me on the same day as we were supposed to meet. (41.1%)

3. If I have completed most of the reading for a class, I deserve at least a grade of B.* (40.7%)

4. Teachers often give me lower grades than I deserve on paper assignments.* (31.5%)

5. Professors who won’t let me take an exam at a different time because of my personal plans (e.g. a vacation or other trip that is important to me) are too strict.* (29.9%)

6. Teachers often give me lower grades than I deserve on my exams.* ((25.4%)

7. A professor should be willing to lend me his/her course notes if I ask for them. ((24.8%)

8. I would think poorly of a professor who didn’t respond the same day to an email I sent.* (23.5%)

9. If I am not happy with my grade from last quarter, the professor should allow me to do an additional assignment.* (17.7%)

Finally, this one got only 11.2% agreement, but I think it captures AE so very well; “ professor should be willing to meet with me at a time that works best for me, even if inconvenient for the professor.”***

Before I close this reflection—and well before it becomes a diatribe—let me point out that nearly all the students in whom I have encountered these attitudes are students with good manners and normal temperaments. Reading the items above, it is easy to picture mincing vixens and snarling brutes. That hasn’t been my experience. They are learning what the implications of the status “student” are, and the status, “professor.” They are trying out new roles, very often coached by upperclassmen who have found that one technique or another has “worked.” They come to me as they would come to a sales clerk who had just charged them $39.99 for a bracelet marked $19.99. “You’ll make this right, won’t you? It’s only fair.” they ask.

I don’t have a solution for AE. I think it is part of the presumed self-worth of our times. Grade inflation—at all kinds and styles of institutions have experienced this, by the way—seems to have made students feel that they are really smart. Email has put professors in a position that only butlers were once in, receiving negative evaluations for responding too slowly to employers’ demands. Anonymous evaluations of professors—do you think your professor is really up on the latest literature?—have caused prudent professors to court the favor of their students.[4]

It is also true that at my university, Portland State, many students are driven to requests like this who would not otherwise make them. I teach single moms who have three kids, take a full academic load and work 40 hours a week. One of the students in my 8:00 a.m. American government class came to class on his way home from work. We worked together to deal with his tendency to go to sleep in class and sometimes we were successful. It teaches students who are paying their own way through the university with the tips they get as barmaids and the night before the exam was very often a late night.

I have both respect and compassion for these students, but they are not in my class to get what I am there to give them and among them, the snarky ones feel that in the universities, it is so hard to get good servants these days.

[1] Although Daniel Hamermesch in his book Beauty Pays says that “hot” professors make about 6% more than “not” professors.

[2] Nearly any online library collection will get you to the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. This article, by Ellen Greenberger, Jared Lessard, Chuansheng Chen, and Susan P. Farrugia, is in Volume 37, no. 10 (2008) pp. 1193—1204.

[3] The thought being, “if you quantify it now, you won’t have to qualify it later.” I just invented that one and I am still enjoying it.

[4] Tabachnick et. al. report that 22% of academic psychologists states that they sometimes give “easy courses or tests to ensure popularity with students.” The work is cited in Greenberger et. al. if this catches your interest.

Posted in Education, Getting Old, Political Psychology | Tagged entitlement, grade inflation, narcissism, universities | Leave a comment

Smart and Poor

Posted on February 25, 2013 by hessd

This post is going to be about the working poor. I say that first because it is going to take me a little bit to get there.

In my line of work, which is political psychology, we make a good bit of use of a category called salience. “My line of work,” will not change, by the way, when I retire for Portland State University. I’ve been mulling over political psychology ever since there was a subdiscipline called that and I’m going to continue being a political psychologist long after they have stopped paying me for it.

Salience is one of those words, like data, that seem to be “out there,” but which are, in fact, “in here.” They are something we do, not something “it” does. Data is a word that comes to us from the empiricist tradition. It comes to English from the Latin and I am going to give all four principal parts because it is a funny-looking verb for English speakers. The parts are do, dare, dedi, datus. You can see the beginnings of data in datus. It means “to give” and data are “given to us” by the environment. We now know that nothing is “given to us.” Conception shapes perception. It if comes into our minds, it comes in tainted. That is why rats in mazes observed by English scientists behave differently that rats in mazes observed by German scientists.

Salience comes, Latin again, from salire, which means “to jump.” We say something is salient if it “jumps out;” it “calls itself to our attention,” we sometimes say. A fact “jumps out at us” in the same sense that the sun “rises” in the morning.[1] It is a perfectly natural way to describe the feeling of the occasion, but when you start paying serious attention to it the earth and the sun, you need to understand the process differently.

I am going to show you two tables and give you a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. It isn’t anything in the tables that I want to talk about. The tables present data that are salient. In each, there are comparisons that lead our minds along one path or another. What I want to talk about is the choice of paths.

Here’s the first table. It shows who was making how much money in wages in Oregon in 2010.

Here is a little razzmatazz that I put together for a course on public policy. It doesn’t say anything important. It simply says what is in the table

1.         One of the ways of calculating a “family wage job” is called the “average covered wage.” That is the sum of payroll from establishments covered by unemployment insurance law divided by the total number employed at those establishments. In 2010, the average covered wage was $41,700. By an eyeball calculation, that fits at about the center of the $35,000–$49,999 bar, the fifth from the left. If that bar is read at 15%, we can borrow half of it (7.5%) and add it to all the bars to the right and come up with a percent of “family wage jobs.” It is 54.5%.

2.         That means that 45.5% have “less than family wage jobs.” You can calculate it, or add up the value of all the remaining bars.

3.         The poverty level for a family of three in 2010 was $17,400. It would take more bar-splicing to get that exactly, but the total of the two left hand bars is just over 13% and that is close enough for this exercise. The number is $11,000 for a single individual, so only about 7% of the “households” are poor if they are one person households.

4.        If the botton 13% of the nonfamily wage earners are below the poverty line (for a family of three), then 32.5% are left in that fuzzy category that is better than poor, but not as good as family wage. “Family wage” is defined as covering the “basic expenses,” like food, housing, and utilities for the earner, a spouse, and/or two children.

We learn from this chart that in Oregon in 2010, somewhere around 13% of the workforce are going to be living in poverty. We don’t know who that will be, but if I had money to put on it, I would put the money on children who had been reared in poverty and, as adults, are still poor.

We learn that 32.5% are going to be “better than poor” but not as comfortable as “meeting the basic expenses like food, housing, and utilities for a family of three. Again, we don’t know who they will be, but we know how many of them there will be.

Here is the second table. It doesn’t anything much either. It shows how much schooling was received by the categories “low-wage workers” and “high-wage workers.”[2] A glance at the table tells you everything you want to know.

Educational Attainment	Low – wage workers	Higher-wage workers[3]
Less than high school	23.8	6.1
High School/GED	36.3	29.3
Some college	30.0	32.1
College or more	9.9	32.5

Now we get to my part. What is the presupposition of the first table so far as jobs and poverty is concerned? It is that there are only so many jobs that are “family wage jobs.” When those are filled, we are done. Everyone else who is in the workforce will have a “less than family wage” job. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? If there are 100 students in a classroom with 20 seats, we know that 80 students will be standing or making some other arrangement. We don’t know which 20 will be seated, but we know how many. If you want to know how many students will be standing, you look at the first chart. If you want to know how to get one of the seats for yourself, you look at the second chart.

What is the presupposition of the second table so far as jobs and poverty are concerned? It is that the more education you have, the more likely you are to have a “higher-wage” job. If nearly a third of those good jobs are held by people who have college degrees “or more,” and if I want one of those jobs, I had better get me some college “or more.” [4]

And that is true, of course, up to the point where we run out of higher wage jobs. When we have more “college or more” workers than we have “higher wage jobs,” then we will start gathering a crowd of people who have college or more and putting them into “less than family wage jobs” because those are the only jobs left.

And this returns us to salience. By this reading, the most important aspect of the table on the distribution of wages is the presupposition that there are so many higher wage jobs and not more. A table could be constructed that dealt with the processes by which a larger number of jobs is produced, but it would not be an “educated workforce” table. The whole presupposition of this table is systemic—there are so many such jobs and no more, exactly as in the classroom, there are 20 chairs and no more.

Conversely, the presupposition of the table on education and wages is that the more education you have, the higher your wages will be. It is individualistic rather than systemic. It tells me what I must do to improve the likelihood that I will get one the jobs in those top few bars the the distribution. It has nothing at all to do with how many such jobs there are, only what I must do to get one.

So the most important aspect of these two tables, by this reading, is not what they say but on what they presuppose. The salience, what jumps out at me, is that you can look at either the individual goals table or the systemic capacity table—provided that you know that there are two and what the limitations of each one are.

Otherwise not. And that’s why it is sometimes handy to have a political psychologist around.

[1] Incidentally, my grammar checker harrumphed at me for that sentence. It said it was a fragment. What do you think? Does that look like a fragment to you?

[2] Notice that we are permitted to know that something is low—absolutely low—but we are not permitted to know that anything is high, except in relation to other members of the category. It’s just a euphemism used by economists.

[3] Just a language note. Look how statisticians wiggle to avoid saying “high wage.” The pattern here should be either high wage and low wage OR higher wage and lower wage. Neither of those sets is chosen, so although we have “low-wage workers,” we do not have “high wage workers.” Does that strike you as odd?

[4] I’m going to make this pitch on February 26 to a bunch of senior political science majors, most of whom will not blink at the idea that their education will put them in line for a job that pays “higher” wages.

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged educational attainment, family wage jobs | 2 Comments

Property and Privacy

Posted on February 18, 2013 by hessd

I’ve been thinking about civil liberties. Civil liberties are the things the government(s) aren’t allowed to do to us. Being Americans, our minds go right away to freedom of speech and assembly; of guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment and retroactive definitions of crimes.

Then I listened to the opening lectures of John E. Finn of Wesleyan University. He has recorded a course called “Civil Liberties and the Bill of Rights” for The Teaching Company. In Lecture 2, he popped an idea that so stimulated me that I want to write about it even before I hear how he wants to develop it. I already know how I want to develop it.

John Adams	“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God … anarchy and tyranny commence. PROPERTY MUST BE SECURED OR LIBERTY CANNOT EXIST”
James Madison	“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort …. This being the end of government, that is NOT a just government,… nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has … is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”

Here’s Finn’s idea. The Framers looked to private property as a “hedge against tyranny,” as illustrated by the two quotations. I had never thought of the right to property as a civil liberty, but I get the idea. It’s a place the government cannot come and your property has features the government cannot appropriate. Then, says Finn, he is going to move directly to the right to privacy. The logic of that transition is that privacy is important to us now for the same reasons that property was important to the Framers. Privacy, to say it another way, is “the new Property.”

Here’s what that might mean. It seems to me that Adams and Madison had a notion of property based on Europe’s reaction to the end of the feudal era. Feudalism was about protection. The lord with his castle walls and moat could protect the serfs from invasion. In between, he could use the serfs pretty much any way he chose. The serf’s didn’t have property, so they didn’t have property rights. The existence of a putative legal right—the famous droit du seigneur— allowing the lord of a medieval estate to take the virginity of his serfs’ maiden daughters indicates that they didn’t have privacy rights either, but that’s another matter.

A merchant class developed, which had money and eventually property. It was their control of their property that distinguished this era from the previous one. My argument is that it was this notion of property as something the lord—or the king—cannot do that Adams and Madison had in mind.

Finn wants to argue, he says, that privacy is like that to us. We are a deeply interconnected society. We treasure our right to be private the way the Athenians treasured their right to be public. As the government of the 18^th Century was denied access to our property, so modern governments must be denied access to our identity and that is what “privacy” is all about. It is about who I am allowed to be.

And who I am allowed to be brings us to the question of “private behavior.” Am I private when I am parking my car in a shopping mall parking lot? Possibly. There may well be surveillance cameras around. If there are, you are private unless you do something against the law. If the people watching the surveillance tapes see you breaking the law—you may have been spanking a child, for instance—they may be required to report what they saw. It could very well be a crime for them not to report what they saw.

Are there private conversations anymore? Not on Portland’s highly regarded MAX light rail system. The new cars for the rail line come equipped with audio and video monitors. “These are standard,” says Tri-Met, the parent agency. That means that Tri-Met has no particular interest in seeing what you do and in hearing what you say, but they are going to anyway because the cars they bought come with those capacities. The case will be made that they are for protection, as the feudal system was, but I say they are about privacy.

And your private conversations probably shouldn’t be conducted by email or any of the social online media either. There’s a record of every email stroke you make and these records can, under certain circumstances, be subpoenaed. The courts are now deciding whether employees have the right to “personal” social media, like Facebook or whether part of the job is turning your passwords over to the employer. If this right exists—we’re still working on it—it would mean that the employer cannot come into your “cyberspace home” and see what you’ve been doing there.

Your “private” online searches aren’t private either if Google can be forced to hand their records—that’s their records of what you do—over to the government and they aren’t private if Google or Bing are free to sell them to a third party either. And this doesn’t ever raise the question of the warrantless wiretapping that has come to us courtesy of the PATRIOT Act and that the Obama administration has so far shown no interest in disconnecting.

Will the defense of civil liberties provide a hedge against government intrusions on privacy? Probably not. But I don’t think we’ve hit the worst of it yet. What if we could be enticed into giving up our privacy freely for some commercial consideration or another? That would be worse, wouldn’t it? Worse to give it away than to have it taken away?

I’ve been thinking about Disneyland in a new way since Bertram Gross wrote, in his book Friendly Fascism, that when—my recollection is that he said “when,” not “if”—fascism comes to the U. S., it isn’t going to be jackbooted thugs. It’s going to look like Disneyland. It struck me that our current vigilance in protecting our property would be like our vigilance against jackbooted thugs and our failure to be vigilant about our privacy would be like our failure to be vigilant and selling our personal information to Disneyland. Here’s what that would look like.

The Disneyland model seems to me to cross a new and very American line. The Disney plan is called MyMagic+. It eliminates waiting in line if you are wearing the bracelet (and if you have paid for it, of course). It means your kids can be greeted by name by the Disney characters in the park. So Cinderella comes up to your daughter and says, “Oh, Caitlin, it’s so good to meet you. And on your birthday, too. Happy birthday, Caitlin.”

How does that sound? I’ll bet it sounds pretty good to Caitlin. To me, it sounds like the old TV ads for sugared cereals, where the kids were instructed to tell their parents that the kids wanted Sugarpuffies and nothing else. Kids deserve Sugarpuffies. And only parents who didn’t know the worth of their children would deny them such a treat for breakfast every morning. This approach led to awful rows in the cereal isles of supermarkets and most of the ones I heard ended with the parent agreeing to buy the Sugarpuffies, although not on the first—and sometimes not on the third—pass.

So Disney now markets to Caitlin. If it isn’t this year, it will be next year. They portray the scene. How wonderful that Cinderella knows who you are! Who would deny a daughter an experience like that? And all you need to do is buy a bracelet, give a lot of personal information, including your credit card number, to the folks who run the park and wear a GPS chip everywhere in the park you go.

I don’t expect Professor Finn to follow this line as far as the Disneyland example. I think he will want to talk about phone and video and possibly cybersurveillance. Things the government might want to do. He might even get into the government commandeering emails and records of searches. But if we can be nagged into selling our privacy, cybersuveillance will be the least of our worries.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It’s Providential. And That’s the Bad News.

Posted on February 17, 2013 by hessd

“What luck!” says the woman with the secular vocabulary. “No,” says the man whose mouth is full of theology, “It’s providential.” Does that exchange make any sense at all?

Yes and No, I would say, if asked. (On a blog, you don’t have to wait to be asked; it’s one of the best things about blogs.) It is true that “lucky” and “providential” are alternative explanations of an event, along with “fate” and “karma.” The bulk of my academic work has been spent dealing with what we call “causal attributions.” We “explain things” to ourselves by attributing causes. This happened because I was too dull. That happened because his explanation was obscure. Two causal attributions and, as it happens, one internal (I was too dull) and one external (he was too obscure). That pattern of internal and external is pretty common and if you pay attention, you will discover that your friends tend to specialize in one or the other. If you pay even more attention, you will discover that you, too, specialize in one or the other.

Both of these attributions, it turns out, are external, but it is the positive flavor of both explanations that caught my eye this time around. We say, sometimes, that people have “good luck” or “bad luck,” but when we just say “luck,”—as in “he was lucky”—it is always good luck we are referring to. Similarly, when those who use the word “providential” say that some event was “providential,” they mean that it was a good thing. No one says, “Oh well. It is sad, but it was providential.”

Why don’t we say that? This argument is going to turn theological in just a little bit and when it does, I will use “Providential” with the characteristic capital P to refer to the Providence of God. The word used this way refers to the intentional ordering of things by God. I say the quip once that “Providence” is the word Christians use instead of “history.” That isn’t precisely true, of course, but it does give you a sense of the scale of the word. Does this picture illustrate Providence?

We get the word from provide. If you pronounced it “pro-VIDE-ence,” you would see that right away. So Providence is what God provides. But God, the argument goes, “provides” based on what He foresees. That’s how the etymology works, anyway. The root is the familiar videre, “to see.” God sees pro- (a version of pre-) ahead of time, so He knows what to make available to us. You could argue, as some do, that what is—what we see around us—is what God has “provided.” Or you could argue, as others do, that what we see around us is the result of what we have done with the opportunities and resources with which God has provided us. The theologies are different, of course, but the word works the same way.[1]

From the standpoint of faith in God’s work, we can say that Providence is good. We can say that about events we believe to be entailed in God’s management of things whether we like the particular things or not. Contrary to the way we use the word, Providential means only that it is a part of God’s plan; it is something He has provided. So the magical availability of a parking place could be said to be “Providential,” as could the maddening hour-long search for a parking place. The fact that we appreciate the parking place and deplore the hour-long search says nothing at all about whether both or neither are entailed in God’s management of things. God’s Providence is, in other words, an inference, not an observation. And it isn’t a very useful inference either, from a cognitive standpoint, because you can’t say by looking that some things are Providential and some are not. Some things actually are Providence, however. Here is a picture.

Here’s how I came to this dilemma most recently. The last scene of Oh God, with John Denver as Jerry Landers and George Burns as God, illustrates the dilemma. Jerry has done all the things God asked him to do and his doing of them has had certain consequences. He has been fired from his job as the manager of a supermarket. He has become a public laughingstock. Probably, he as lost his wife and kids, too. The movie doesn’t say, but they are a big part of the plot and then they disappear. So, is this Providential? Yes. It is. I have George Burns’ word for it.

The scene goes like this. Jerry is driving out of town when a phone rings in a phone booth he has just passed. He back up, goes to the phone, and discovers God in the next booth, talking to him.

Jerry:   We failed, didn’t we?

God:    What are you talking? We did terrific. I gave you a message of encouragement. You     passed it along. Now we’ll see. You did good. We both did good. We’re covered.

Jerry:   Do you think anybody got the message?

God:    Do you think we have enough apples in the world?

Jerry:   Apples?

God:    We’ve got all the apples we need. You’re Johnny Appleseed. You drop a few seeds and      you move on. If the seeds are good, they’ll take root.[2] I gave you great seeds. The best.

Jerry:   I lost my job, you know.

God:    There are other cities. Other supermarkets.

Jerry:   Everybody things I’m a nut.

God:    Galileo, Pasteur. Einstein. Columbus. You’re in good company. Hold on.

So there you are. God cares a great deal about the seeds, about whether they will grow. It is God’s judgment that the cost to Jerry of this exercise is well worth while. The movie doesn’t show us just how Jerry takes that argument. I think I would find it hard, myself. Then I would remind myself of two things I know to be true.

The first is that you can’t tell by looking. I experience the costs, certainly, and in Jerry’s case, the satisfaction of doing the right thing, just as God told him to do it. In order to appreciate whether the benefits—the Providential ordering that could not have happened if I had not done what I was asked to do—match up with the costs, I would have to know what the benefits are. Not the benefits to me. That would be hard enough. THE benefits—the good that will come of a certain proportion of these seeds taking root and growing to full maturity.

So here I am, yearning for a nice clear cost/benefit justification and I find that I can’t measure the benefits. Only the costs.

The second is that you can do without the reassurance of cost/benefit analysis if you trust that things are Providential and that it is God who is asking you to do your part, however difficult that part might be. Paying the costs is hard for Jerry, but knowing what God wants him to do is not. God tells him exactly what he wants him to do and dazzles him with miracles. Jerry still remembers the miracles, I am sure, but now he is trying to live down the reputation he got from doing what God asked him to do and he is looking for a job and, as I see it, trying also to stay in touch with his estranged wife and his kids. He is remembering the miracles and he is living the life that his behavioral choices—God’s choices for Jerry’s behavior—brought him.

So what shall we say to Jerry? “Don’t worry. It’s Providential?” That would be hard. I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to say that. Of course, I have my own causal attributions to make and my own behavioral choices as well and I don’t have Jerry’s certainty. And I really don’t want to lose my job and my reputation and my marriage and my kids.

But if somebody has to, on what grounds, exactly, would I say that it shouldn’t be me?

[1] From here, some go off to theodicy, a “justifying” of God’s management of the world and His management of us part-timers who live here for a little while and who are supposed to keep the place in order. That’s not the direction I am going here.

[2] Jesus used the same metaphor to make a different point. Three different points, actually: one in Mark 4, another in Matthew 13, and yet another in Luke 8. All of them imagine that the seeds themselves are, as George Burns says, “the best.”

Posted in Theology, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged George Burns, John Denver, Oh God, Providence | Leave a comment

The Most Conservative Electable Candidate

Posted on February 12, 2013 by hessd

Has anyone noticed what Karl Rove is up to these days? He may not be able to call Ohio for Obama in a prompt and professional manner, but I think he has opened a whole new front in the partisan wars in Congress.

In my line of work, there are many opportunities to describe “the responsible party model” of politics and to lament our failure to approximate its severe logic. In fact, the U. S. has never had a responsible party system and cannot have one now without a lot of new legislation, but the model does serve a purpose now and then. This is one of those times.

In the Responsible Party Model (RPM) the party is dominant: it chooses the candidates, it gives them the complete list of talking points (which used to be called a party platform), and it funds the campaign. The candidates aren’t really “persons” as much as they are little atoms of party-ness.

Here’s the intriguing part. If all the candidates are hewing to the party line and if the party wins a majority, then there is a majority to actually enact these “talking points.” The Democratic party campaigns on ending torture. All Democrats are in favor, by definition. They win a majority and pass a law eliminating the use of torture. At the next election—here’s where the “responsible” part comes in—the party returns to the public with a record of accomplishment of the items on party platform and this question: “Do you want us to keep doing this?”

The theory is that “the people” aren’t all that good as evaluating theories and promises, but they are really good at evaluating policy effects. You campaign on redistributing income through taxation and at the next election, I watch to see whether it has happened and if it has, whether I like it the way I thought I would.

Now you might be wondering what brought that to mind. Here’s the article that started me thinking about it. If you look at the RPM, you can see that Karl Rove’s new push really doesn’t recruit Republican candidates. Rove wants to “vet them” and the criterion he admits to is “as conservative a candidate as can be elected.” Rove doesn’t want to establish uniform “talking points.” Rove doesn’t want to fund the candidates in the sense that Crossroads America is the only source of funds. In fact, you could argue that all he really has in mind is to neutralize the political contributions of people like the Koch brothers.[1]

Rove’s initiative is as close to the RPM plan as we have seen on the political right. It chooses the candidates (vets them) and it funds them (by counter-funding the primary election opponents). And really, you have to wonder what else he could do.

There has been a powerful and recent alliance between angry conservative voters (Tea Party) and strategic conservative donors. The combination has elected a “Tea Party Caucus” in the House of Representatives. Speaker of the House John Boehner doesn’t have a Republican majority without them. And, since they have resisted his calls for Republican unity, he doesn’t have a majority with them either. That means that the power of the Republican party in Congress has waned considerably. Further, the success of Tea Party Republicans in winning primary elections, then losing to Democrats in the general elections has led to the worst of all possible worlds—Democrats have been winning seats that should have been won by Republicans.

So Rove has swung into action. Maybe he remember the RPM lecture an otherwise undistinguished professor gave at the University of Utah. Maybe he would rather see moderate Republicans elected than conservative (Blue Dog) Democrats. Maybe he is sick and tired of seeing very wealthy conservative donors skewing the ideology of his party and screwing the Republican leaders in the Congress.

We really don’t know. What we know is that Rove has the RPM somewhere in his mind and he is doing what he can to keep the Republican party from committing suicide.

[1] Rove believes that things really don’t go better with Koch.

Posted in Politics | Tagged John Boehner, Karl Rove, Republican Party, Tea Party | Leave a comment