Having Bill and Lou for Dinner

Posted on December 1, 2012 by hessd

For years, I have treasured the title of an article my brother John called to my attention.  I haven’t actually read the article; I just liked the title.  It is “Carrying Capacity is a Rural Truth; Bambi is an Urban Lie.”  In the process of tucking in the last few loose ends so I can write this post, I have run onto a difficulty or two.  John never heard of the article.  He agrees with me that it is a wonderful title.  I can’t find a record of such an article anywhere.  My memory of how I reacted to it the day I was told about it is extraordinarily vivid, but I am now considering the possibility that it never happened at all.

In any case, I will point out that when you put “Bambi” in a sentence that goes on to bambiconsider what happens to deer when their numbers outrun the resource base, you get a truly unsettling sentence.  Bambi is cute; hordes of starving deer are not cute.  What to do?

Here is an interesting story from Vermont.  It isn’t about deer, but I can see the “carrying capacity element” in this story and the “Bambi element” as well.  I’m betting you can see them too.

 

Here’s the New York Times account in full, and below, a small excerpt.

 Just past the village here is the farm at Green Mountain College, where chickens roam free and solar panels heat a greenhouse. The idea of sustainability runs so deep that instead of machines fueled by diesel, a pair of working oxen [Bill and Lou]  have tilled the fields for the better part of a decade, a rare evocation of a New England agricultural tradition.

Their names are Bill and Lou, and by the end of the month, they are to be slaughtered and turned into hamburger meat for the dining hall.

If you take seriously the idea that this is a “farm,” everything fits nicely.  Lou’s health is no longer good, so the farmers and deciding how best to use him next.  Pot roast, possibly.  “This is the logical time, said Baylee Drown, the assistant manager of the farm, “to use him for another purpose.”  The farm’s manager, Philip Ackerman-Leist agrees.  It is the farm’s purpose to produce food in a humane and sustainable way, not to shelter animals and concludes, “We have to think about the farm system as a whole.”

William Throop, the provost of Green Mountain College says, I’m imagining that I can hear the exasperation in his voice, “Bill and Lou are not pets.  They’re part of an intimate biotic community of the farm, in food webs and relationships of care and respect.”

You might expect to get a little pushback from the students.  Andrew Kohler, for example, took a course in how to drive a team of oxen and Bill and Lou were the team.  “They start listening to you and they become your friend,” says Kohler.  “I feel honored to eat them.”

Those are the “carrying capacity” voices, as I see it, but they are not at all the only voices.  Pattrice Jones, is one of several founders of an animal sanctuary in Springfield, Vermont.  He offered to take Bill and Lou into retirement and he might as well.  The name of the sanctuary is “Veganism Is the Next Evolution.”  Jones said the college’s idea of what is appropriate for the aging oxen “shocks the conscience of anybody who believes in kindness to animals.”

Animal rights groups have been incensed as well, and have amassed thousands of signatures of people opposed to this use of Bill and Lou and went on the college’s Facebook page to call for “a reprieve.”  As ideas go, it seems to me that “reprieve” is over on the far side of retirement and I would guess that the next step would be a “pardon.”

At this point, Throop’s “Bill and Lou are not pets” runs smack into Jones’s “kindness to animals.”  I suppose there is no way to say, in general, that one is better than another, but there is no question which better fits the college’s notion of what “sustainability” means on a small farm.

 

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Nonviolent Communication

Posted on November 22, 2012 by hessd

The cover story in a recent issue of The Christian Century is called “Beyond Anger and Blame.”  That sounds good to me.  The “beyond,” especially, sounds good to me.  I have no complaint at all about getting “beyond” anger and blame.

Here are the four steps that Allan Rohlfs, the author of the article, has in mind.

The four steps of NVC [Non-violent Communications] offer a way to change that physical reaction and the speech that flows from it. They offer a way to regard the other person as other than an enemy, and they give one the freedom to respond with care.

The four steps are: 1) naming the behavior that is a problem; 2) naming the emotion you feel when the behavior takes place; 3) naming the need you have that is not being met because of the other person’s behavior; 4) stating in very concrete terms what would you would like the other person to do.

I have nine responses to this approach.  Truthfully, I have limited myself to just nine observations.  Everything I say about this approach to conflict resolution from here on is going to be negative, so let me say at the beginning that I am sure there are people for whom it works very well and it is a great deal better than the approach Rohlfs presents as “the alternative.”  (But why would there be just one alternative?) The following collection of “what ifs” and “yes buts” is my response not so much to NVC as to every kind of communication that takes this approach.  There are many of them and they are very popular.

Nevertheless.

1.  I am troubled by a package of communications proposals that is named by what it is not.  It is good that it does not require violence, but what, exactly does it do?  Does it bring peace?  Does it bring justice?  Does it nourish the small society where it takes place?  Are other approaches notably more violent?

2.  “Naming the behavior” that is the problem is fairly straightforward unless it is your behavior.  My guess is that happens roughly 50% of the time.  One of the things you might consider in such a situation is to stop doing the things that cause the other person to behave that way.

3.  “Naming the emotion you feel” is a rat’s nest of difficulties.  First of all, it imagines that you feel only one emotion.  I have been in situations where I felt I was on two or three trampolines at once.  I feel a lot of emotions and then I feel emotions about why I feel so chaotically emotional.  Naming “the” emotion at such a time is just not going to happen.  And even if I could isolate just one, can I give it a name?  Is there a name that fits it pretty well?  Is there a name that fits the combination of the two principal emotions you are feeling pretty well?  Three?

4.  With the best will in the world, “naming the emotion” is difficult and I don’t always have the best will in the world and that is true, also, of a lot of people who are my very good friends.  And if you don’t have a relentlessly charitable and honest character, there are other things that could happen when you get to naming the emotion.  You might, for instance, be drawn to the name of an emotion that will do your antagonist the most damage.  “I feel really angry when you…” might just roll of his back, but there is always the choice of “I feel so hurt when you…” if that will hit him harder.  Choosing an emotion name for strategic reasons is not fair, of course, but naming an emotion is difficult and when you are irritated anyway, it will be hard to find the “correct” emotion name and to continue to walk past the name that will do the most good or the most harm.

5.  A related difficulty—logically, it comes earlier in the sequence, but I postponed it so I could make a little context for it—is how sharply or how vividly you feel something.  If “irked” doesn’t do the job, would “devastated” be better?  I think it must be better, at least in some ways, because there is a great deal of training going on—both by precept and by example—about how to be more “hurt” by insensitivities than you once were, or how to be hurt by “insensitivities” that you would previously have passed by without noticing. It is also true and perhaps not incidental that by being hurt by some particular behavior gives you an instant peer group: people who were also hurt by that behavior.  A magically appearing group of fellow sufferers feels really good.

6.  I notice that we began, immediately, to talk about emotions—right after the behavior that produced the emotions.  Why are we talking about emotions?  Could we talk about intentions?  “What was it you had in mind when you did that, Charlie?  I don’t think I really understand it.”  Could we talk about prior agreements?  “As I remember it, we agreed that we would stay away from that topic on Friday afternoons.  Remember what used to happen before that agreement?”

7.  Talking about emotions usually means talking about MY emotions.  Talking about my emotions is not always the best thing to do, but it is a reliable way to keep the conversation about ME  Not everyone likes talking about the emotions he or she is feeling, but some people like it a lot.  The danger in talking about ideas is that it may turn into a cooperative endeavor, with one perspective feeding another. The danger in talking about achievements or failures is that they cue up an assessment of doing something well or a critique of doing something poorly.  There are ways that conversations about ideas and achievements can turn toxic as well, of course.  It is not the unique property of emotional transactions that they alone can be highjacked by other people’s needs.  “We’re Only Human After All,” says my wife from time to time.[1]

8.  This article describes a system of communication that “works well for people.”  What kind of people, I wonder, does it work well for?  Are there people for whom it does not work very well, no matter how well it is done?  I suspect there are.  At a grieving time of my life, I ran across the work of Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka, who maintain that there are “instrumental” ways of dealing with grief and “intuitive” ways.  They are not at all alike, but they both work if they fit the style of the person using them.  What doesn’t work is for a person whose natural style is instrumental to be told that he or she really ought to be handling grief intuitively.  I think NVC runs precisely this risk.  It’s not a good style for everyone.

9.  Finally, there is the curiously isolated feeling of these conversations.  It is as if the behaviors in question and the emotions in question did not take a good deal of their meaning from what other people do and feel.  When you complain about a behavior that hurt your feelings, it would be good if it were not a behavior that is widely accepted in that social setting.  I know from my extensive reading of undistinguished books that there are gatherings where the men and women refer to each other as “bitch” and “bastard,” meaning nothing by it except a gratifying crudeness and camaraderie.  I would move off to a different group, myself, but another response a woman might take would be to approach the next man who referred to her as a bitch and say that when he did that, she felt sad and small.

The behavior you are referring to, when you say you felt some particular emotion, really ought to be extraordinary.  If it is “how we do things here,” the person whose feelings are hurt will have to find another way to proceed.[2]  And raising the question of “how we do things here” introduces social norms and social agreements.  One of the things that might be said about a behavior that has, as one effect, hurting someone’s feelings, is that it makes the workplace or the classroom or the living room a poorer or more unstable place.  It may well have, in other words, bad social effects and it might be opposed just because it has those effects.  If it does have those effects, you may not be the only person who sees them or the only person who wants them stopped.

I think I’ll stop here.  I’m a political psychologist by training, but before that—long before that—I was interested in the way people use power.  There has been, it seems to me, a breathtaking rise in the number of people whose feelings are hurt and who want to tell you what you can do differently so that they will not continue to be hurt.  This response is so popular that it is crowding out a lot of other responses to ill-advised behavior, some of which work better.

 

 

[1] We don’t even say that anymore.  We just say WOHAA.
[2] And that is, by the way, the process by which the manager of an office wound up with the responsibility to maintain a “climate” that was not notably racist or sexist or ageist.  The people who found the office climate offensive made it the job of someone in particular to have a plan to do something about it.  That change of strategies was not achieved by hurt feelings.
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“Next to our liberties, most dear”

Posted on November 11, 2012 by hessd

Here’s the way I picture it.  It is April 13, 1830.  President Andrew Jackson and his Vice President, John C. Calhoun were attending a Jefferson Day dinner.  Jackson was a proponent of national dominance; Calhoun of the states’ right to “nullify” offensive federal legislation.  It came time for the toasts and this exchange occurred.

Jackson:          Our Union.  It must be preserved.

Calhoun:         The Union.  Next to our liberties, most dear.[1]

All that is historically true.  In my own picture, I have them smiling at each other from opposite ends of a long dinner table and looking each other in the eye.  I love the adroit way that Calhoun completely cuts the legs out from his first words by adding some very gracious sounding additional words.  All while still smiling.  That’s what my own little mental movie looks like.

I got to thinking about this exchange when Speaker of the House John Boehner delivered the Weekly Republican Address.  I saw it on November 8.   President Obama responded.  I saw it live on November 9.  That’s when I thought of Jackson and Calhoun.

Here’s what Speaker Boehner said.  I don’t want to send our economy off the “so-called fiscal cliff.”  Some people say that the way to avoid that is to allow the top two [federal income] tax rates to rise.  That will, by one estimate destroy 700,000 American jobs because many of those hit by this tax increase are small business owners.

He also offered an alternative.  Rather than raising taxes on “the American people,” let’s close special interest loopholes and lower tax rates.  And while we’re at it, let’s “shore up” entitlement programs which are driving our country into massive debt.

Conclusion: “…if there was a mandate in this election, it was a mandate to work together to do what’s in the best interest of our country.”

Here’s President Obama’s response.  “At a time when our economy is still recovering from the Great Recession, our top priority has to be jobs and growth.”  That sound pretty good, doesn’t it? “That’s the focus of the plan I talked about during the campaign.  It’s a plan to reward businesses that create jobs here in America, and give people access to the education and training that those businesses are looking for.  It’s a plan to rebuild our infrastructure and keep us on the cutting edge of innovation and clean energy.  And it’s a plan to reduce our deficit in a balanced and responsible way.”

Notice how the alternatives the two speakers offer differ from each other.  For Boehner, closing special interest loopholes (unspecified), lowering tax rates, and reducing entitlement spending are the alternative to the fiscal cliff.  Obama goes with him as far as “jobs and growth,” but no further.  Everything else is recycled from his stump speech—incentives for domestic job creation, education and training, clean energy, and all that.  Then comes his “next to our liberties, most dear” touch: reducing the deficit in a balanced and responsible way.

“Balanced” means both raising revenues and cutting costs.  Just cutting costs won’t do it.  Nonspecific “loophole closures” won’t do it.  And when Obama talks about “raising revenue,” he means “allowing the top two rates to rise.”  That’s a quote from Boehner.  It’s what Boehner says will cause the loss of more than half a million jobs.  Obama calls it “balanced and responsible.”

He is more specific later.  “I refuse to accept any approach that isn’t balanced.  I will not ask students or seniors or middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people making over $250,000 aren’t asked to pay a dime more in taxes.”  Without question, it is the “allowing the top two rates to rise” that makes all this fair.  The alternative is taking it out of students, seniors, and middle-class families.”

We know how to do this.  “We did it when Bill Clinton was president.  And that’s the only way we can afford to invest in…the ingredients of a strong middle class and a strong economy.”  And—watch this—we should do that piece first because it is a piece we all agree on.  “Making sure that taxes don’t go up on the 98% of Americans making under $250,000” is the first thing Congress should do—because, you know, we all agree on it.  And that leaves only the part Boehner is concerned about still on the table.

Conclusion: “On Tuesday, we found out that a majority of Americans agree with my approach—and that includes Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.”  That sounds pretty good, you have to admit.  But Boehner pointed out the day before that the American people returned Republicans to their majority in the House because the Republicans could be trusted not to raise taxes.  So it looks like a majority in the presidential race said one thing and just a few inches further down the ballot, those same Americans said a different thing.  And the House is, Boehner remarked in the earlier speech, “the people’s house,” after all.

There is such apparent gentility in all this.  With the single exception of Obama’s line—“I refuse to accept any approach that isn’t balanced”—everything is sweetly collegial.  The people have asked us to work together and prevent this awful fiscal cliff and I think that’s what we ought to do, don’t you, Mr. President?  Absolutely, Mr. Speaker, “next to our deficits, most dear.”

 

 

 

[1] There was more, actually.  Calhoun said, ““The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union”

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What Was It All About?

Posted on November 8, 2012 by hessd

The recently concluded—mostly concluded—election of 2012 is over.  What was it about?  As I look at the results and the arguments that led to them, it seems to me there are really only two questions involved.  The first is a classic version of the reformer v. the radical.

Reformers and Radicals

It’s a frame of reference question.  Since this is football season as well as presidential politics season, perhaps I can offer this illustration.  The owner of a losing team needs to look at just how far the team can go with what it has.  At that point a “start over” decision is made or a “continual improvement” decision.  It casts no aspersions on the owners to say that those who want to start over can fairly be called radicals.  This very useful word comes to us from the Latin radix = root and, in the NFL context, it gives us the picture of the team being torn out by the roots so that something else can be planted in its place.

What the moderates, the “continual improvement” owners are called depends entirely on who is doing the calling.  Moderates are sometimes said, by radicals, to be “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Sometimes they are said to be “putting bandages on a cancer.”  In a darker mood, they accuse the moderates of being merely tinkerers and hold that they are only obscuring the choice that will eventually need to be made.

It is true, of course, that among the costs of a commitment to gradual improvement is an obscuring of the need for fundamental (at the roots) change.  Conversely, among the costs of a commitment to radical change is passing up the chance to improve an essentially sound structure.  Here’s an easy example.  The conservatives in this election proposed to save on our entitlement costs by reducing medical care for poor people.[1]  The liberals want to stop wasting money on medical treatments that turn out not to do anyone any good.

The liberals say the system can be improved and that radical surgery will only make everything worse.  The conservatives say that the system is fundamentally flawed and all these attempts at “improvement” simply put off the inevitable day of reckoning.

Liberals and Conservatives

The second question offers competing notions of what a really good society looks like.  The radical surgery v. incremental improvement dilemma described above looks like an irreconcilable conflict, but it is irreconcilable only if the liberals and the conservatives are using the same measure of what it would look like when we get it right—and, of course, they are not. 

Let’s imagine that conservatives would really genuinely prefer a United States where only legal immigration was tolerated; where federal regulation was substantially scaled back; where abortions were illegal; where only heterosexual marriages were tolerated;  where saving for old age and for health care were decisions private persons made; where state-sponsored religion (Christian, Protestant, conservative) was allowed, and where labor unions were forbidden?  Yes.  They would.  For a while, at least. 

Let’s imagine that liberals would genuinely prefer a United States where immigration was considered a human right, where federal regulations were not only extended but the agencies doing the regulating were adequately funded as well; where abortions were entirely a matter for the woman and her doctor to decide upon; where gay and lesbian marriages were equal in every way to heterosexual marriages; where social security and medical care were available to everyone; and where people were protected from state-sponsored religious observances.  Yes.  They would.  For a while, at least.

So both sides are right in the very limited sense that they would initially prefer the policy effects they are championing.  This gives us two kinds of difference.  The first (liberal version) presupposes the society first put in place by the New Deal and wants to make the kinds of changes that will make those provisions effective and affordable.  Or (conservative version) rejects that kind of society in favor of decisions made by private persons and families, and economy dominated by giant corporations, and a small government for those few policies the states can’t handle.[2]  That sets radical change against incremental change.

The kind of society that would be produced, if each side could put its pipe dream into place, would have the list of outcomes described above.  According to the framework I proposed, the first set would be satisfactory to conservatives; the second satisfactory to liberals.

Where does that leave us?  As I see it, it leaves us with the liberal agenda largely intact.  We as a nation are not willing—possibly not even able—to choose the pre-New Deal society the conservatives think they would prefer.  You simply cannot allow people access to the ballot box and then treat them as if they had no recourse.  They do have recourse.  They can place measures on the ballot and then pass them into law.  They can mount immobilizing demonstrations the likes of which we have not seen since we drafted middle class boys to fight in Vietnam.  They can vote for your competition, assuring themselves first that “the competition” has the right goals and the will to pursue them.

We don’t have the families we used to have and never will again.  We don’t have the jobs that sustained those families.  We have more expansive appetites for consumer goods.  We don’t have the clear judgments of right and wrong that sustained small monolithic societies.  We are past that and we aren’t going back.

What does that mean for the conservative vision of society?  It means that they will continue to say no to these changes as long as they can.  Then they will lose and move on to saying no to the next round of changes.  There is really nothing left for them to say yes to.

They used to say that the majority party was like the sun and the minority party like the moon.  The moon shines with reflected light, but it doesn’t produce any light itself.  The minority party thus has the choice of proposing an agenda of its own which will be rejected or saying that they can accomplish the majority party’s agenda better than the majority party can.  Ordinarily, that doesn’t work.

I’m not sure we have sun and moon parties anymore.  I’m not even sure how important the parties are anymore given that a candidate’s program and funding can both be outsourced.  But it does seem to me that we have sun positions on society—not the liberal pipe dream, but incremental steps in that direction—and moon positions.  The position of reflected light will enable the conservatives to identify this or that feature of the post-New Deal society and say no to it.  But its light is reflected light and they will not be able to produce a coherent agenda of their own.

I like President Obama.  Like a lot of liberals, I think he earned some good marks and some bad marks during his first term.  But I think the best part of the Obama campaign was his claim that the election was really about two visions of society and the opportunity of the voters to choose between them.  He himself is a very small part of that movement but the direction he has chosen to move is the direction we will be going in any case.

I was raised in a very small town in a rural part of southern Ohio.  I know the social parts of the conservative pipe dream.  I grew up there.  We are past that, for good or ill, and we will need to find another way. I would really welcome a competing vision of “yes.”  That would help us all.  Even “yes but” would help us.  I didn’t see either of those in 2012.

 

[1] Nearly everyone is “poor” who needs $50,000 worth of drugs to live to the end of the month—every month. 

 

[2] And a very aggressive and military-oriented foreign policy, but that need not concern us today. 

 

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Church and State

Posted on October 29, 2012 by hessd

Bette and I sat down recently with a couple we had not yet met, but with whom we would be spending the next two weeks on a bike and barge trip.  The conversation turned political fairly quickly—no surprise in an election year[1]–and then almost as quickly, began to move down that path that leads to hard and nasty.  In an attempt to keep us from going down that path, I proposed that we give sex and religion their fair share of the time.

It struck me as odd that religion would be a safer topic than politics and since then, I have been noticing those odd church and state frictions.[2] To me, it seems to highlight the difference between someone acting officially, on behalf of an organization, or unofficially, as the person he or she is.  In this piece, we will see that both the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Constitution are much more interested in agents than in persons.

Let’s start with the IRS and tax-exempt churches. There is a movement, I hear, called “Pulpit Freedom Sunday.”  Pastors are urged to back political candidates from the pulpit “in a direct challenge to tax laws that prohibit churches from engaging in electoral politics.”  The quote is from the October 31, 2012 Christian Century article called “Stump Sermons.”  But, of course, the tax laws do not prohibit churches from engaging in electoral politics.  They prohibit them from electoral politics AND their treasured 501(c) (3) exemption.  The IRS says you can’t be taxed like a charitable organization and act like a lobbying organization.  The state does not want, that is to say, to fund private lobbying with public dollars.

That seems sensible to me.  The question for a church is to decide whether it wants to be content with saying that some public policies are “good” or “godly” and that others are “evil” or “demonic.”  Policies.  Not candidates.  You can thunder all you want from any pulpit in the land that God will not abide homosexual marriages or torture as national policy against our enemies and the IRS watches contentedly.  Instructing your parishioners to vote for Obama or for Romney is another matter entirely, as the IRS sees it.

Does this “muzzle” the pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams?  Yes.  Does it muzzle the persons who hold those offices and play those roles?  No.  In a distinction long familiar to sociologists, I need to act as myself or in the character my role requires.  The IRS doesn’t care all that much about hallway conversations, winks, nudges, and implications.  They care about homilies—or, in a case I encountered recently, congregational prayers of confession.[3]

The same question is being faced by the cheerleaders of the Kountze Independent School District.  In a story the New York Times has been all over, the cheerleaders have been reproved for painting Bible verses on the paper barrier the team breaks through as they run onto the field.  The Freedom From Religion Foundation called the banners unconstitutional. They are a  Wisconsin-based group, which is made up of atheists and agnostics and have been active in East Texas, which is chock-full of Southern Baptists.  The District’s superintendent, Kevin Weldon, claims that prohibiting the students from writing Christian banner messages violated their religious liberties and free-speech rights.  Does that sound familiar?  The role that was played by the IRS in the question of Pulpit Freedom Sunday is played in this story by the Constitution.

Are these young women themselves and nothing more when they put on the cheerleaders’ uniforms and make signs for the school’s football team?  Kieara Moffett, an 11th grade cheerleader said about their banner—I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me (Phil 4:13)—“I feel like it’s getting God’s word out to those that need it.”  That it is “God’s word” and that “getting it out” is a good idea and that there are “those who need it” are the views of teenage Kieara Moffett.  That these personal beliefs of Kieara’s ought to be painted on a sign for the official school team to run through as they are cheered by the official school cheerleaders are, ultimately, the views of the school.

So far as the school is concerned, those views would belong to Kevin Weldon, the district’s superintendent.  Weldon decided to prohibit the cheerleaders from putting Bible verses on the signs.  He said that in prohibiting them, he was violating the school’s policies protecting students in expressing their religious viewpoints and school’s discriminating against the cheerleaders.

That puts Mr. Weldon on one side of the issue and the policies on the other.  He prohibited the signs based on legal advice.  He and the attorneys had their eyes on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, which established that prayers led by students at high school football games were unconstitutional and had the improper effect of coercing those in the audience to take part in an act of religious worship.   So it looks to me as if the consensus is that “protecting the students in expressing their religious viewpoints”—when these students are acting as official agents of the school—is unconstitutional.

The school’s policies are on one side and the U. S. Constitution on the other.  On the other hand, Mr. Weldon said that he supported the cheerleaders and that, as a Christian, he agreed with their religious viewpoints.   It is that sentence that brings the tightest focus, as I see it.  Weldon supports the cheerleaders and he supports the school policies that protect the students in the expression of their religious views.  Further, as a Christian himself, he thinks that they are right.  On the other hand, the Constitution makes the distinction between persons as selves and persons as agents.  Mr. Weldon doesn’t, but his attorneys do and so do his opponent’s attorneys.

Does that strike you as a bad place to be?

 

 

[1] They were having an election in The Netherlands, too, while we were there.  Their equivalents of our Democratic party and our Republican party were the two highest vote getters and were asked by the Queen if they would please form a government.  Dutch courage? 

 

[2] In Salem, the capitol of Oregon, there is actually an intersection of State Street and Church Street.  I went to see it to make sure there was no wall of separation, such as the one Jefferson prescribed.  No wall.  There is a traffic light, though. 

 

[3] An associate pastor worked in a plea for God’s forgiveness for declaring war on Iraq into the prayer of confession.  A substantial portion of the congregation ambushed him during the coffee hour afterwards and told him to knock it off. 

 

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The Gospel According to Gupta

Posted on October 23, 2012 by hessd

The question that has been on my mind for the last several weeks is this: “What do we mean when we say that a story is true?”  Is it just an old-fashioned way of saying that it is accurate?  I don’t think so.

I have two accounts of an event to offer.  Both are from Steven Spielberg’s movie The Terminal, which is about a man who is stuck for a long time in JFK airport in New York.  This man is Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) who, for reasons that need not detain us here, is not allowed either to return to his native Krakosia or to go out the front doors to New York.  The man keeping him in the airport is Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci); first on a technicality, then out of pure spite.

One day, Dixon comes to get Navorski out of his cell because Milodragovich, a Russian man, has been detained.  The man speaks no English and when they tried to confiscate the medicine he was carrying, he threw a fit.  He held a knife to his throat and would not let anyone near him.  Navorski intercedes with Milodragovich on Dixon’s behalf.  Then, with a sudden inspiration, he intervenes with Dixon, on Milodragovich’s behalf.

The picture here shows Novorski with Gupta, an Indian who was initially suspicious of Navorski but was eventually won over entirely.  Gupta is the one who tells the story.  He didn’t see it himself, but he knows it is true.

There was a 20 man.

Immigration’s gun was drawn.

The Dixon was ready to fire, to kill the little man with the pills.

But then someone walks into the room and stand in front of this little man.

“Put the gun away,” the man said.  “Nobody will die today.”

The crowd, jammed into a janitor’s closet,  responds to this account with a hubbub of questions. “Who?  Who was it that saved him? Yeah, tell us.  Who was it?  Who was this man?”

Gupta goes to a table in the back and hold up two piles of papers.  They are the copier prints of Viktor Navorski’s hand.  They were produced accidentally when Dixon slammed Navorski up against a copier as Milodragovich escaped.

Navorski.  Viktor.  “The Goat.” Navorski.

That is Gupta’s version of what happened and I say it is true.

It is not, however, accurate and very often, today, we call an account  “true” meaning mostly that it is accurate.  It is that distinction I am trying to make clearer in this post.  Here are a few things that are wrong with Gupta’s account.

1.  There weren’t 20 men.  Maybe a dozen.  Some men; some women.

2.  No guns were drawn.  Therefore “the Dixon” was not “ready to fire.”  He never threatened Milodragovich’s life.  There was never the slightest danger that Dixon would “kill the little man with the pills.”

3. Navorski did not stand in front of Milodragovich.  Ever.

4. He did not say “Put the guns away.  Nobody will die today.”

Virtually everything Gupta says, in other words, is inaccurate.  But that isn’t the feeling you get when you see the event yourself  (thank you, Steven Spielberg) and then hear Gupta describe it.  You feel more that the scene as it happens is cluttered with inessentials and that they obscure the meaning of what is going on.  You feel that Gupta clears the inessentials away and tells, simply and without the clutter, what really happened.

Looking at it through Gupta’s account, we might raise different questions.  Maybe better questions.

1.  Were there enough of Dixon’s people to physically control Milodragovich?  Yes.  And they had weapons, had they been needed.  Twenty, schmenty.

2.  In practical terms, “the little man with the pills” was not Milodragovich, but his father.  Very likely, the father would die without the pills, so the meaning of “to kill the little man with the pills” is pretty good and Gupta’s account is the only one that raises that line of effect.  Alternatively, “kill the little man” can be understood as “killing” the mission, which was obviously quite important to Milodragovich.  “Kill” would mean “cause him to fail in his efforts to save his father.”

3.  All you have to do to save “stand in front of the little man” is to change it into Latin.  That gives us interpose.  There is no disagreement that Navorski interposed himself between Dixon’s choice and effect of that choice on Milodragovich.  Navorski “placed himself between” (inter + ponere, “to place”) in every way except physically and interposing himself physically would have been useless and inflammatory.

4.  The best we can do here is to say that Navorski made irrelevant the physical force Dixon had available.  He may very well have saved Milodragovich’s life and his father’s life as well.  So nobody did die today.  It isn’t something Navorski said; it is something he did.

The Gospel according to Gupta?

I think the realities Gupta’s account pointed us to are fundamental to what actually happened.  It is an account that rings true, certainly, to the people in the janitor’s closet who heard him tell it—“little men” all.  The inaccuracies I have named seem to me inconsequential, which is why I allowed myself “twenty, schmenty.”

Having heard “the gospel according to Gupta” several dozen times now, I have also had the experience of going back to the scene at watching it in detail.  The feeling I have is like clearing cobwebs out of my way so I can see clearly.  Was anyone trying to shoot Milodragovich?  On what grounds did Dixon deny Milodragovich the safe passage of the medicines?  Did they use any unnecessary violence in hauling Milodragovich away?  Cobwebs.  Gupta doesn’t deal with them at all and his account is clearer because of it.

This might seem like a lot of time to spend on one chapter (Chapter 18, “The Inspection,” if you have the DVD) of a movie, but it meant a little extra to me because I have been thinking about the process by which the stories about Jesus’ life come to us.  Some of the stories about Jesus (like his walking on the water) and stories Jesus told, like “the good Samaritan” sound a lot like Gupta to me.  You don’t see the cobwebs in the New Testament accounts.  You get, instead, an interpretation of what is really important in the form of a story.  I can’t tell the story the way Gupta told it, but standing in that janitor’s closet, facing that audience of “little men,” I know I would wish I could tell it that way.

Some people say the gospel accounts we have are literally true.  I say the accounts we have are more like Gupta’s story than they are like the scholarly recreations that have been attempted.  The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” is more than one hundred years old by now and it has engaged some very powerful intellects.  Their work offers benefits to everyone who reads them, but they are not a better story than Gupta gives us and they are not a truer story.

Some people say that these stories are not the reports of actual events but, relying on Gupta again, I think it might be better to say that they are interpretations of actual events.[1]  In The Terminal, there is never any question that there was an OK Corral style confrontation between Navorski and Dixon.  The question is what actually transpired in this Corral.  Having seen both versions, I prefer Gupta’s.[2]

I think what I’m going to do is to try to hear Gupta’s voice in my head as I listen to the gospel accounts.  I have spent all the time I want to spend in validating and categorizing the cobwebs.  I want to see the glint in Jesus’ eye when, pressed on the question of Roman taxes by his opponents, he said, “So…anybody got a coin on him?”  I think in Gupta’s account, I just might be able to see that gleam and I’d like that.

 

 

[1] There are many myths that “symbolize” events, rather than describing them.  The goddess Persephone’s annual return to the earth in spring can be celebrated in the flowering of the meadows and  her return to the underworld in winter, mourned in the dying down of plants and the halting of growth. It’s a lovely symbol, but no one is arguing that it is a historical event.  

 

[2] Of course, I wouldn’t know that I preferred Gupta’s had I not seen them both.  That’s the great thing about movies. 

 

Posted in Biblical Studies, Movies, ways of knowing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Cheating at Harvard

Posted on October 18, 2012 by hessd

I wasn’t surprised to learn that they cheat at Harvard.  I actually was surprised that some of the cheating students are suing the university, claiming that their future job prospects would be jeopardized.  Here’s the account from The Harvard Crimson.

The line that caught my eye was this one: “Harvard has created this war between the students and the fricking school, and this is a war that I am willing and very eager to fight.”  Very bracing prose, I’m sure you’ll agree.  It must have been a very satisfying thing to say to reporter, particularly after you have been granted anonymity.

But a few things tugged at the side of my mind as I read.  One was that students who cheat are parasites and prominent among their several hosts is the students who don’t cheat.  If there should be a war, it seems to me it ought to between the students who are having the value of their work diminished and the students who are diminishing it to benefit themselves.  I think the advocates of “just war” theory could make a home in their hearts for that kind of war.

A second thing that tugged at my mind was that Harvard has “created this war.”  They have done this, presumably, by prohibiting cheating and then by enforcing the prohibition.  This seems unduly broad to me.  Presumably there are, at Harvard, prohibitions against violent behavior toward others, against theft of university property, against other kinds of fraud including, I imagine, not paying your tuition.  So let’s just test this statement by substitution one of those.  “Harvard has created this war between the students and the fricking school by demanding that we pay for the courses we take here.”  It’s the same position, but somehow it doesn’t have the same pop.

The third has to do with the damage done to the job prospects.  It is true that many employers hire the “degree from Harvard,” rather than any particular skills a student might have, but that will last only as long as: a) most Harvard students actually have the skills they are supposed to have and b) there are no other schools whose graduates will reliably outperform Harvard students.  In the first of those considerations, the student damages not only his own job prospects, but those of all graduates of Harvard.

Beyond that, though, it strikes me as bizarre that the student hold against Harvard the fact that future employers are likely to think this student is not such a good bet as an employee because he cheats.[1]  Employers will make their own judgments about the promise of potential employees.  Students who have made themselves less desirable by cheating are in a very weak position, it seems to me, when they hold the university responsible for prohibiting cheating in the first place.

It makes you wonder if honest scholarship might not be better.

[1]He “has cheated,” one of the lawyers said.  These may be really solid students who have had one lapse in an academic career.  But, of course, “one lapse” is enough to produce an unwanted pregnancy in other circumstances and that has been enough to made a product called Plan B popular.  These students have not thought as far as Plan B.

Posted in Education | Tagged , | 3 Comments

No Tickee, No Shirtee

Posted on October 7, 2012 by hessd

This title represents a respected—I am fighting the urge to say “hallowed”—maxim in American life.  The phrasing is taken from the stereotypical “Chinaman” who did the laundry and gave you a ticket that would allow you to identify the laundry as yours when you returned to pick it up and it is given in pidgin English so that the point can be made that however limited the laundryman’s English, he has a valid right to demand identification.  You can have the laundry you claim as yours when you present the ticket that identifies it as yours.  Otherwise, “no tickee, no shirtee.”

The New York Times this morning (see article) wrote about the indignation with which the Catholic Bishops protested the ruling of one of Germany’s highest courts that a German citizen was free to leave the church but that the church could not preventing him from attending the church services.  Here’s the description they gave.

Last week one of Germany’s highest courts rankled Catholic bishops by ruling that the state recognized the right of Catholics to leave the church — and therefore avoid paying a tax that is used to support religious institutions. The court ruled it was a matter of religious freedom, while religious leaders saw the decision as yet another threat to their influence on modern German society.

With its ruling the court also dodged the thorny issue of what happens when a parishioner formally quits the church, stops paying taxes, but then wants to attend services anyway. The court said that, too, was a matter of religious freedom, a decision that so rankled religious leaders fearful of losing a lucrative revenue stream that they made clear, right away, that taxes are the price for participation in the church’s most sacred rituals: no payments, no sacraments.

Obviously, it is that last line that tickled my Protestant funny bone.  It makes participation in the sacrament of the Eucharist something the church member purchases by his financial donation.  It commodifies the practice about which Jesus taught his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” It’s disgusting.

Every organization I know of has a problem called the “freeloader” problem.  Freeloaders are people who receive the benefits of an organization without being a part of and without supporting an organization.  Labor unions are the classic case.  By demanding higher wages for their members, they raise wages for people who are not their members.  I can listen to Oregon Public Broadcasting whether I give money to the station or not.  If I listen but do not support, I am a freeloader.  Organizations do everything they can to reduce the number of freeloaders and why shouldn’t they?

But the Catholic Church of Germany does not own the sacrament of the Eucharist—not even for German Catholics.  They can’t sell it because it is not theirs.  Pretending that it is theirs, and they can price it as they please, is theologically repugnant.  Very likely, it will be impracticable as well and we may all give thanks for that.  And while we are in the thanksgiving mood, let us thank James Madison for his Memorial and Remonstrance on the subject (see document).

As is often the case, a glance at the origin of a word helps to establish a context for it.  The (barely) English Eucharist comes from the Greek eu- meaning “good,” and the verb charizesthai, “to show favor.”  The related noun charis, the source of the English charisma, means “grace, beauty, kindness.”  In all these cases, the theological setting imagines that the showing of favor is something God does.  The Eucharist is made available to us by God’s grace.  It is “grace” because it is given without reference to merit.  It is, therefore, also given without reference to means—no one is too poor to receive an undeserved favor.

The “shirtee” which the religious freeloader will have to do without includes not only receiving communion, but also making confession, serving as a godparent, holding any office in the church, and receiving Christian burial. 

Actually, I’m OK with the prohibition on office holding.  The holders of the offices of any church are the leaders and will be called on to be the exemplars of that church.  Freeloading, i.e., refusing monetary support to the congregation you are supposed to be leading, is something that ought to be prevented whenever possible, but not on theological grounds.  I think of this kind of prohibition as akin to the requirement that a candidate for office must actually live in the district he or she is supposed to represent or that citizens of a state ought to be the ones allowed to vote for their leaders.

But Christian communion?  I don’t think so.

 

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Cheating

Posted on September 30, 2012 by hessd

I am a teacher, so “cheating” seems like a bad idea to me, however it is justified.  On the other hand, I am a teacher of political psychology, so the way a cheater explains why he is cheating is of interest to me as well.

I don’t think I want to say that cheating is always wrong.  Here’s the way I look at it.  Cheating is a violation of trust and very often a predatory act against one’s fellow students, so I think it’s almost always wrong.  Imagine “Thou shalt not cheat” as a hurdle.  It is possible to jump over that hurdle and to justify jumping over it under some circumstances.  Not many.

We’re about to look at an entire flea market of rationalizations for cheating, thanks to Vivian Yee’s piece in the New York Times.  See the whole article here.  About each of these rationalizations, we might ask, “Is this reason so powerful that it clears the hurdle?”  If the reason is that good, we might say, we ought to allow an exception to the rule.  We keep the rule.  The hurdle is still there.  But sometimes, as this metaphor puts it, it is better to violate the norm than not to.

On the other hand, the norms aren’t random formulations.  Cheating on a test affects the cheater.  It affects those who are cheated.  It affects the school where the cheating takes place.  It affects the businesses that hire the students who have learned to cheat.  The costs of abandoning the norm, “Thou shalt not cheat,” are large beyond exact calculation, but they do not make the final decision for us.

Let’s start just by considering some of the reasons given.  These were offered by alums and current students of Peter Stuyvesant High School, “new York’s flagship public school,” according to the article.

First, let’s look at an approach that might be called “better things to do.”

A senior at Stuyvesant High School said he copied a table of chemical reactions onto a scrap of paper he would peek at in his chemistry exam. He had decided that memorizing the table was a waste of time — time he could spend completing other assignments or catching up on sleep.

Of course, assassinating the three students ahead of him for the prized scholarship might be thought of as an efficiency, too.  If there are no normative considerations to take into account, the student simply lays out his options as “things that take time” and makes his choices.  In my judgment, that one doesn’t have any promise of clearing the hurdle at all.

Here’s a second kind of exculpation.

“You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.”

This notion of “taking a risk” overshadows every other notion.  “The risk” is more important than learning the material, than being fair to your fellow students, than forfeiting the self-respect that sober second thought might put in jeopardy.  Risking, apparently, is good.  Al Capone would be proud of that one.

Here’s a third kind—one that I think we need to take more seriously.

A recent alumnus said that by the time he took his French final exam one year, he, along with his classmates, had lost all respect for the teacher. He framed the decision to cheat as a choice between pursuing the computer science and politics projects he loved or studying for a class he believed was a joke.

The teacher—to combine to two grievances this rationale contains—is a joke.  “Not cheating” would appear to be a form of respect for the teacher in this way of looking at it.  You wouldn’t cheat on a good teacher because he didn’t deserve it, but a bad teacher doesn’t merit honesty from the students.  The students, of course, will be making the judgments about which courses are worth “not cheating” for.

I hear another overtone here, though.  I hear in this student a wish not to be complicit.  If good teachers are treated with respect (the students don’t cheat) and bad teachers are not (the students do cheat), then is the student making things worse by treating the bad teachers as well as the good ones?  If the students are attentive and engaged when the lecture is good and inattentive and disengaged when the lecture is bad, won’t that help the teachers to give good lectures and not bad ones?  Is pretending to be interested in a bad lecture, being complicit?

As someone who makes his living by lecturing to students, I will say that I no longer believe students can tell the difference between a good lecture and a poor one.  Without question, they can tell the difference between one that is entertaining and one that is not.  The use of the complicity standard might put more of a burden of judgment on the students than they can reliably carry.

In a fourth kind of exculpation, several framed the collaboration as banding together against a system designed to grind them down.

This is a serious charge against the system.  Stuyvesant is a very competitive school.  The students knew that when they applied.  That means that a few will achieve the top honors and the rest will not.  Failing to achieve top honors may be stressful; it may be embarrassing; it may compromise the future you had planned.  None of those are “designed to grind them down.”

“Grind them down” doesn’t have to do with merit; only with the ability to endure punishment.  When the system has no reason for its demands—and “grind us down” refers only to the experience of the system, not to the rationale for it—then subverting it is appropriate in the way that cheating on the bad teacher is appropriate.

And, fifth, if “the system” is the enemy, why should you not help your friends instead.  Refusing to cheat is, in this picture, only a way of collaborating with the enemy.

“It’s seen as helping your friend out,” Daniel Kanovich, 17, a senior, said. “If you ask people, they’d say it’s not cheating. I have your back, you have mine.”

I have to admit that I like the sound of that language.  There is in it the kind of everyday heroism that soldiers in battle speak of.  The enemy is there, but we protect each other.  We are comrades.

Before we give up, let’s turn the corner and look at one more assessment.

 “We all want to prove that Stuy is one of the top schools in the city,” said Rachel Makombo, a freshman. “We don’t want to be looked at as a cheating school.”

Ms. Makombo starts from a different place.  Everyone benefits from Stuyvesant’s reputation.  It has always meant something to be a Stuyvesant grad.  If you got through the program at Stuyvesant, you are worth taking a risk on; you are worth hiring; you are worth admitting.  If, on the other hand, what you are getting from Stuyvesant is students who know how to cheat, but not how to work, everyone suffers.  All the graduates suffer; both those who cheated and those who refused to.

In this light, the cheaters are parasites.  Cheating is effective because only a few do it.  It is like standing on tiptoe in a crowd.  It works if you are the only one who is doing it.  The cheater gets a better relative placement in his class and still gets the benefit of the Stuyvesant reputation and he gets that courtesy of all the students who refused to cheat.

That seems powerful to me.  The guy who has his buddy’s back is a parasite as well as a friend.  The student who thinks only good teachers deserve honesty in their students is a parasite, though it may be a fear of complicity that has driven him to it.  The guy who thinks of cheating as a good way to get time for a nap is a jerk.

 

Posted in Education, Political Psychology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Battle of Favorite Aunts

Posted on August 26, 2012 by hessd

David Brooks and Paul Krugman are at it again.  I’m not as surprised as I was the first time I noticed it.

This is an odd kind of disagreement.  Imagine that you and your wife are visiting the home of two elderly aunts.  Your young daughter comes into the room with a ball of yarn.

“Isn’t this yarn a beautiful color?” says the child. 

“Oh, yes,” you say, “And mauve is one of Aunt Ella’s favorite colors.”

“No, no,” says your wife, “That’s forest green.  One of Aunt Margaret’s favorite colors.”

This is a disagreement.  It is packaged so as to appear to be a disagreement about what color the yarn is.  It is, in fact, a disagreement about which aunt’s sensibilities need more to be catered to at the moment.  You and your wife are not colorblind, as an uninformed observer might think, but you do have different judgments about the feelings of the relevant parties.  Let’s look at it this way.

“Isn’t this yarn a beautiful color?” says the child.

“Oh yes,” you say, “And remember how important it is to reassure Aunt Ella about how much we care for her.  She just got some very bad news from her doctor, remember.”

“Oh no,” says your wife.  “Aunt Ella doesn’t care a lick about little preferences like that and Aunt Margaret does.  Besides, you can see, just by looking, that Aunt Margaret is in a lot of pain right now and playing the “favorite color” card is the humane thing to do.”

If we were to extend this (I’m not going to) it is easy to image the beginning of the next round going like this.

“What is with you and Aunt Margaret?  You are always soooo sensitive to her every mood and you don’t care as much about Aunt Ella.”

“I do care as much about Aunt Ella, but you simply can’t load every situation in her favor without Aunt Margaret noticing.  She isn’t as dumb as you say she is.”

You see where that’s going.  Does it sound familiar?

My observation today is that the persistently discrepant observations of David Brooks and Paul Krugman are like the first round of the argument.  They are disagreeing, certainly, but they are not disagreeing about what they seem to be disagreeing about.  This is not a fight about the merit of the two approaches to Medicare and deficit reduction.  This fight is about whether David Brooks’ favorite aunt should be catered to (Republicans—moderates, where available, but Republicans for sure) or Paul Krugman’s favorite aunt, a Democrat.

There are other differences between them, of course.  Brooks writes about political culture when he can.  Krugman writes about economics all the time.  Brooks honors personal intention whenever possible; Krugman focuses on systemic effects whenever possible.

Judge for yourselves.  Here is Brooks’s column. Here is Krugman’s.  Krugman says Paul Ryan’s plan is an illusion.[1]

What Mr. Ryan actually offers, then, are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us, but which will turn his overall plan into deficit reduction.

If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is. Yet Mr. Ryan’s “plan” has been treated with great respect in Washington. He even received an award for fiscal responsibility from three of the leading deficit-scold pressure groups. What’s going on?

The answer, basically, is a triumph of style over substance.

OK.  I get that.  On the other hand, according to Brooks:

If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station.

And why is that?  The reason is that addressing really big problems requires passionate commitment.  Who has the passion for entitlement reform?  Not Obama:

He [Obama] had the courage to chop roughly $700 billion out of Medicare reimbursements. He had the courage to put some Medicare eligibility reforms on the table in his negotiations with Republicans. He created that (highly circumscribed) board of technocrats who might wring some efficiencies out of the system.

Still, you wouldn’t call Obama a passionate reformer. He’s trimmed on the edges of entitlements. He’s not done anything that might fundamentally alter their ruinous course.

Romney and Ryan, on the other hand.

When you look at Mitt Romney through this prism, you see surprising passion. By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate. Possibly for the first time, he has done something politically perilous. He has made it clear that restructuring Medicare will be a high priority.

This is impressive. If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station.

Here’s where we come out, imagining that Brooks and Krugman are talking about the same thing in the sense that the husband and wife are really talking about the color of the yarn.  Krugman says Ryan’s plan is an illusion and a con job.  Brooks says it is the only train leaving the station.

This isn’t about Medicare savings and entitlement momentum.  It isn’t, that is to say about the color of the yarn.  This is about whether Aunt Ella or Aunt Margaret is to be preferred, given that in this instance, you must prefer one of them.

If Brooks and Krugman ever lined up their argument so that it was about the same thing and measured by the same metric, then someone would be right and someone would be wrong.  They aren’t going to do that.  It’s going to be yarn color v. favorite aunt from here until November.

 

 

[1] Actually, it is a chimera but I don’t want to scare the children.

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