Chik-fil-A

Posted on August 8, 2012 by hessd

So here’s an interesting question: “Do we really want our political lives and our commercial lives to be so wholly intermeshed?”  It turns out that some do and some don’t. 

Here’s an answer that is closer to what it looks like where the boots are on the ground: “I don’t want our civic lives to be in constant turmoil, but it is only right that I retaliate as best I can against a firm that opposes my interests.”  That’s an answer both ugly and common, so let’s think about it a little.

The question comes from Jonathan Merritt, son of the former Southern Baptist Convention president, James Merritt.  Here is a small collection of answers.  I will prefix the answer to the question before the quote.  Gov. Thomas Menino of Boston, “(Yes) I urge you [Chick-fil-A] to back out of your plans to locate in Boston.”  Mayor Edwin Lee of San Francisco, “(Yes) Closest Chick-fil-A to San Francisco is 40 miles away and I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”  The Reverend Billy Graham, “(Yes) As the son of a dairy farmer who milked many a cow, I plan to ‘Eat Mor Chikin’ and show my support by visiting Chick-fil-A on August 1.”[1]

Not much of a collection, is it?  Everyone seems to want to preserve the right to retaliate.  I’d like to put this non-debate in context.  The answer I provided above—it is only right that I retaliate as best I can—is a common answer, but I don’t think it is a good answer.  For one thing, no one thinks the level of public incivility we are experiencing is a good idea.  People do think, however, that the other side is doing it and so we have to do it too.  The effect on the present issue is what we focus on; the effect on the way we discuss politics in this country (the growing incivility) is in the background.  It is always in the background.  That is why we do what we do with our eyes on the present issue only.[2]

So my first point is that we are choosing “constant turmoil,” as I said above, without even noticing that it is not what we want.  Second, I would like to point out, as a liberal, that conservatives are always going to win an argument about morals.  There are more conservatives and moral issues are more highly salient, and they define morality as the good, itself, rather than as “freedom to choose,” which is the liberals’ notion of “morals.”

Dan Cathy, whose family owns Chick-fil-A, says he endorses “the biblical definition of the family unit.”  We could quibble, of course, about whether there is a biblical definition of the family unit and in what part of the Bible it might be found, but that’s not where I want to go.  I want to ask what the liberal definition of the family unit is and why it is good.  The answer, I think, is that we don’t have one and we don’t argue that it is good.  What we want to protect is freedom of choice—especially, in the present context, for gays and lesbians—and we think the question of whether it is “good” is beside the point once the “right to choose” has been granted.[3]  So my point, again, is that if the argument is about morals, the conservatives will win it.  For liberals to win it, it has to be about freedom of choice.

Third, this is not a freedom of speech case. It is not about Chik-fil-A’s notoriously bad spelling, as in the famous ad.  Chik-fil-A is not preaching about conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage; they are actively funding events and organizations that have the twin goals of making abortion unavailable and gay marriage illegal.  I think it would be a lot more direct to oppose each and every use of Chik-fil-A’s money for those purposes than to retaliate against the company.  Donating money to make abortions unavailable to women who want them, or whose doctors advise them, can reasonably be characterized as a restriction of freedom of choice.  Liberals are going to win a freedom of choice argument, provided it is about morals, say, rather than pollution.  When liberals go after the conservative companies like Chik-fil-A, they are shifting the argument back to morals, where we will lose.

Finally, there is the slippery slope argument.  I want to boycott Chik-fil-A because I don’t like what they do with their profits.  Fine.  Do you know what your life insurance company does with its profits?  Your dry cleaners?  Your running shoe manufacturer.  Do any of those guys pollute?  Pay their workers too little?  Maintain bank accounts in the Caymans?

That’s the slippery slope.  It is one thing to oppose a prominently political company like Chik-fil-A, but how do you draw the line so you don’t have to know just what the carbon footprint is, for instance, of anything your buy or the political investments of any firm you patronize.  I don’t know those things myself and I don’t want to have to learn them.  If Chik-fil-A makes a really good chicken sandwich and if I really like chicken sandwiches, then I have no problem at all about going there to get one.  If you have a problem with it, there are some questions about the products you buy and the firms you patronize that we are going to have to get into.

I know you don’t want that.

[1] The Reverend Doctor Graham has allowed his publicity machine to use an ambiguous pronoun.  That happens sometimes.  Did his father, the dairy farmer, milk a lot of cows?  Did he, the son of the dairy farmer, milk a lot of cows?  Both, probably, but you can’t tell from the statement.

[2] It is impossible in politics, as much as in ecology, to swoop in and change one thing, leaving everything else the same.  You kill a noxious pest—this is not a partisan reference—and you kill whatever ordinarily eats that noxious pest.

[3] Following the same logic, gun enthusiasts think gun-related homicides are beside the point once the right to own, carry, and use guns has been established.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Guns and Politics

Posted on July 25, 2012 by hessd

A gunman stood up at a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado and killed 12 people and injured 58 others–as many people as he could with the time he had and the arsenal he brought into the theater with him.  David Brooks’s response (here) comes down to this: “The crucial point is that the dynamics [of mass killings like this one and the others he cites] are internal, not external.”

Puh-leese!

Is there something we can do to better protect our citizens from the rapidly increasing chance that they will be slaughtered by someone with guns and grievances?  Brooks’s answer is yes: there are two things we can do.  First, we can have closer relationships with each other.

It’s probably a mistake to think that we can ever know what “caused” these rampages. But when you read through the assessments that have been done by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists, you see certain common motifs.  Many of the killers had an exaggerated sense of their own significance, which, they felt, was not properly recognized by the rest of the world. Many suffered a grievous blow to their self-esteem — a lost job, a divorce or a school failure — and decided to strike back in some showy way.  Many had suffered from severe depression or had attempted suicide. Many lived solitary lives, but most shared their violent fantasies with at least one person before they committed their crimes.

I think it is a wonderful idea to be more social and inclusive, but here is what is not going to happen: we are not going to “recognize” the significance of these people in the way they think is deserved; we are not going to prevent grievous blows to their self-esteem; we are not going to prevent them from living “solitary lives;” we are not going to have everyone who hears a friend vent a violent fantasy contact the police.

We are, in short, not going to prevent people from having grievances.  But does that mean that we can do nothing to prevent these grievances from becoming the occasions for mass slaughter?  I don’t think it does mean that.  Brooks tries to show that there is nothing we can do by citing a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the effect that gun control laws are not effective.  I don’t think that works.  I haven’t seen the study he cites, but I’m pretty sure it compares states with stricter gun control laws to states with more lenient gun control laws.  I can see why no effect is shown in that comparison; indeed, it would be remarkable if any effect at all could be discovered.

Here’s another look.

The United States has by far the highest rate of gun deaths — murders, suicides and accidents — among the world’s 36 richest nations, a government study found.  The U.S. rate for gun deaths in 1994 was 14.24 per 100,000 people. Japan had the lowest rate, at .05 per 100,000. The study, done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the first comprehensive international look at gun-related deaths. It was published Thursday in the International Journal of Epidemiology. 

This quotation and the next one can be seen here.

Maybe comparing economically developed nations with a lot of gun violence to similar countries with only a little would be a help.  Brooks tries to head that off by mentioning mass killers from elsewhere: Ernst Wagner in Germany (1913), Robert Steinäuser (Germany), and Anders Breivik (Norway).  These have nothing to do with aggregate statistics, as Brooks knows.  The figures for gun deaths per 100,000 of population are Norway 2.22, Germany 1.16, and the U. S. 9.46.  Does Brooks really think that the gun laws of these countries are unrelated to the rate of gun deaths?  I don’t think he does think that.

He might be thinking that it is the gun culture—not the laws—that account for such high homicide rates here in the United States.

The CDC would not speculate why the death rates varied, but other researchers said easy access to guns and society’s acceptance of violence are part of the problem in the United States. “If you have a country saturated with guns — available to people when they are intoxicated, angry or depressed — it’s not unusual guns will be used more often,” said Rebecca Peters, a Johns Hopkins University fellow specializing in gun violence. “This has to be treated as a public health emergency.”

Brooks and I know that you can’t change a cultural feature by making laws about it.  On the other hand, the laws are not irrelevant to the direction the culture takes.  Our “acceptance of violence” is part of the culture, as Rebecca Peters says, but the availability of guns is part of the politics.

Brooks’s second solution is to be more aggressive in our provision of “treatment options,” especially for young men.  I think that would help, but what is he thinking people are going to be “treated” for?  Massacring without a license?  Oh…wait.  You don’t have to have a license for that.  “Treated” doesn’t sound like prevention to me.

As long as we have angry loners with guns, we will have attention-seeking killings.  Nothing the government can do will directly affect how many people are angry.  Nothing the government can do will directly affect how many people are loners.  No one is going to murder a dozen people in a theater with a switchblade.

Any ideas, David?

 

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Public Porn

Posted on July 23, 2012 by hessd

The two most common responses I have heard to protests against pornography are these: a) it doesn’t hurt anybody and b) what they (the consumers of pornography) do in the privacy of their homes is nobody’s business. The New York Times this morning ran a story called, “He’s Watching That, In Public?”  You can see the whole article here.  There aren’t any pictures in the article, but I have added a few that I liked, as you see.

The best place to begin is the experience of Dawn Hawkins, executive director of a group called Morality in Media.  She was on a plane several months ago and noticed that the man in the row in front of her was engrossed in the images on his iPad.  These were images of naked women whipping each other.

He was consuming pornography “in public.”  What is public?  Let’s imagine that he was looking at these pictures on cards the size of playing cards and holding them discretely in his lap so that only he could see them.  That’s “public” in the sense that he is doing his viewing in a public place, but it is not “public” in the sense that it couldn’t be dealt with simply by not paying attention to it.  It is not different in kind, it seems to me, that his reading a pornographic novel.  On the other hand, let’s imagine that he was viewing these erotic flagellants on a 15 inch computer screen.  It’s going to take some effort “not to notice” for people in the periphery of the viewing area.  For the person in the next seat or in the several seats behind him, no effort is going to be enough.  I think that is “public” in another sense.

There are people who are going to want to treat this story as if pornography were wrong and should be prevented or punished.  I don’t know quite how I feel about pornography as a moral matter because I don’t really know (see option a, above) how directly people are affected by it.  I am going to treat it as an offense against one’s “fellows.”

One’s fellow what?  Well, in the San Francisco library people have been using the library computers to access pornography.  If this is a violation, it is a violation of their “fellow patrons.”  The library responded by putting plastic hoods over the monitors so only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen.

On the road in New Jersey, we are talking about one’s fellow travelers.[1]  State Senator Anthony Bucco has introduced a bill that would ban porno on seat-back DVD players.  These players are oriented so that other drivers could plausibly be distracted by them.  The people in what I called “the viewing area” on the plane are fellow travelers as well.

At the Café Ponte in San Francisco, where customers come to surf the web, they would be fellow diners (companion is the Latin version of that) and compotadors if they drank anything.[2]  Bruce Ponte, the owner, says “This is an internet café.  People come here to surf.  Am I supposed to do something about that?”

Let’s imagine that I have established that the public viewing of pornography—I have defined “public” as a viewing that can be avoided by one’s fellows only by heroic effort—as a bad thing.  What to do?  Dawn Hawkins complained about the fan of erotic flagellation on her place and was told by the flight attendant that he was powerless to force the man to stop.  That might be literally true—“forcing him”—but it seems reasonable that he was not powerless to ask him to stop.  The Association of Flight Attendants says that its members want to avoid offending passengers or playing the role of censors.  I’ll bet they do.  But if one of the people on the plane is doing something offensive, then people are being offended and the flight attendants are going to have to choose a course of action.

Starbucks, which always seems to find a way to manage these things, says it does not censor the use of its Wi-Fi, but it does reserve the right to ask someone not to view material that might offend patrons or employees.  That seems like a good approach to me, but let’s looks at one that is a lot better.

Lewis Goldberg, 42, a partner in an investor relations firm in New York, occasionally watches shows like “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones” on his iPad when he works out at the gym. But he fast-forwards through sexual or particularly violent scenes.  “There’s a woman jogging behind me on the treadmill and I don’t want her to fall off,” he said. “I’m bringing my media into a public space, and it’s part of my responsibility in a civil society.”

That’s the approach the most sense to me.  It doesn’t ask why Goldberg is watching shows in public that have sexual or particularly violent scenes.[3]  It focuses on his sense that he has a responsibility to others and it gives as an instance one way he enact that responsibility.   And this is what conservatives always say.  If we have people of sensitivity and social responsibility, “fixers” will not have to be called in: not the library or the airlines and certainly not the legislator.  I’d have to say that in this case, it is the conservative stand on managing what “public” means that makes most sense to me.

 

[1] This is perhaps the most nearly innocuous use of “fellow traveler” I have ever seen.  When I was growing up, it was a very substantial political charge.

[2] I made than one up, but you have to admit it is plausible since potare = to drink and com- means “together.”  Companion uses the same prefix and substitutes panis = bread for the focus of the action.

[3] It is worth our while to pause to note which of those terms was thought to require the emphasis on an adverb.  Some societies, it seems likely, would have said violent or particularly sexual” instead.

Posted in Politics, sociability | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dangerous Architectural Innovations

Posted on July 12, 2012 by hessd

Here’s what I learned today: “In architecture, the apse (Greek αψις (apsis), then Latin absis: “arch, vault”; sometimes written apsis; plural apses) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome.”  That’s from Wikipedia.  Here’s what one of them looks like.

I looked this up because it occurred to me that from an engineering standpoint, building a dome like that our of large hard pieces of material–stone, probably– could be quite dangerous.  Very much of that stone falls on people, some of them are going to die.

So then I got to wondering if the expression “killer apse” (often misspelled) comes from these early architectural innovations.  Not very likely, I suppose.

Posted in Words | Leave a comment

Boy-friendly Schools?

Posted on July 11, 2012 by hessd

So let’s talk about accountability and cooperativeness.  They’re good, right?  So if you built a set of institutions to teach little boys and little girls to be accountable and cooperative, that would be a step in the right direction.

This is a hard question; I am not going to pretend it is easy.  But consider: “independence” is good, too, and there is no way to reconcile independence with accountability.  Whoever you are accountable to is who you are not independent from.

That may seem obvious when put in that light, but it wasn’t obvious to any of the players in the story I am about to tell.  My first non-seasonal employment by the State of Oregon was by an agency called, at that time, the Oregon Educational Coordinating Commission (OECC).  We were created to serve the state by proposing statewide educational plans and to serve the legislature by advising them and, to a certain extent, doing studies that showed that what they wanted to do was a good idea.  We were, so the stories say, the legislators’ fair-haired boy.

By the time I arrived on the scene, we had lost a good deal of our popularity with the legislators and were very vulnerable to attack by agencies who would do better on their own programs if we were not there.  I didn’t see that we really had any weaknesses.  We were created to be an independent agency and were to be protected in that status by a legislature whose interests we served.

These hostile agencies, however, noticed something I had not.  They noticed that the newer legislators had not been party to the old understanding and were not eager to offer the OECC their protection.  This opened the door for an attack that led with this question, “Who are they (the OECC) accountable to?”  We didn’t catch the changed climate as fast as our opponents had, so we countered, “We are not supposed to be accountable; we are independent.”  It didn’t work and that’s how I learned that “accountable” and “independent” are mutually exclusive.

In the same way, cooperativeness is a good idea.  It is a good character trait, as anyone knows who has had to deal with uncooperative elementary and secondary students, and it is necessary if we are all going to get along with each other.  The Farmers and the Cowboys should be friends, after all.  Territory folks should stick together.  Territory folks should all be pals.

But, cooperativeness isn’t always a good idea and it is a better idea for some kinds of people that for others.  It is better for some kinds of tasks than for others.  Cooperativeness is “nicer,” of course, but “nice” doesn’t always get the job done and sometimes the job really needs to get done.  There are times, in summary, when you really need to stand with your own judgment rather than be accountable to others and there are times when you need to win, even though that requires that someone else lose.

David Brooks wrote about this dilemma in the New York Times on July 5. Here is the full column.  I think he and I might have some differences about definitions, but I am quite sure that he is right about the effect of the current school practices on boys.  From the torrent of lament about the declining ability of male students, this one was particularly startling: 11th-grade boys are now writing at the same level as 8th-grade girls.  Here is the challenge Brooks lays down.

Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

It’s hard to be against “diversity,” isn’t it?  On the other hand, look at the sets of opposed values.  There’s cooperation v. competition.  That’s just a matter of definition if we are talking about persons, rather than groups.  Then there’s environmental virtues v. military virtues.  Who in the world thinks those are alternatives?  Then sharing v. winning and losing.  And finally, friendship circles v. boot camp.

Let’s divide those sets of terms so that we have “first term” values and “second term” values.  The first term values are cooperation, environmental virtues, sharing, and friendship circles. The second term values are competitiveness, military virtues, winning/losing, and boot camp. When I was in school, I was a boy (still am) and was much more comfortable with the first term in those sets than with the second term (still am).  So Brooks isn’t talking about all boys, but let’s give him a pass on the generality that “most boys” would benefit from the second term virtues

I taught in public schools for six years and I know a good deal more about faculty relations than Brooks does and I want to know how the first term teachers—cooperative, environmental, sharing, friendship circles—are going to relate to the second term teachers.  Abrupt and devastating moral condemnation, I would guess.  And you know how the second term teachers—the competitive, military, winning and losing, boot camp teachers—are going to respond.  Utter disdain would be my guess.

Now let’s look at it from the standpoint of the principal.  Every change-oriented principal I have ever known or heard of begins by telling the faculty what his or her vision is for “the new culture of the school” and for the “student outcomes” that are to be expected if everyone signs on.  Not everyone signs on.  The principal then sits down with the ones who won’t go along and tells them to start looking for a more compatible school, generally promising a very favorable recommendation if the search starts soon enough.

This new school culture will not be a mixture of the virtues Brooks has described.  The culture will choose what norms are good, what deviations from those norms are understandable in the short term, and which ones need to be condemned at every appearance.  That tells the teachers not only what to ask from the students, but how to respond to teachers who are emphasizing incompatible virtues.  It tells the cooperative teachers, in other words, how to nullify the major values of the teachers who emphasize military virtues.

Of course, everyone is in favor of “diversity,” but to a cooperative teacher, a boot camp cut throat, “winning is the only thing” teacher is a travesty and a disgrace.  Such a teacher is “too much diversity” or “the wrong kind of diversity” or something.  If school culture is set at the top, and it is, then “one culture schools” are what we will get.

Brooks doesn’t argue that we should have programs that are good for boys but not for girls.  He sees that the programs we have are better for girls and thinks there should be little enclaves of “boy friendly” teachers and curriculum.  I regret to say that the schools we now have are not “enclave friendly” and back when they were, it was because no one exercised any significant oversight of the faculty

Brooks’s one chance, and he doesn’t take it in this column, is to argue that the current arrangements are not good for girls either.  He needs to say that both boys and girls will be benefited by moving the school culture back in the direction a little more toughness.[1]  I would love to see the research on schools that have tried that.  I have never seen any and I don’t expect to.

 

[1] More like the way “school” is during recess.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Building Abscission Layers

Posted on July 6, 2012 by hessd

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve been thinking about abscission layers.  I have read meticulous accounts of those layers and the processes that reliably produce them in biology texts where, after several readings, I thought I got the general idea.  I read those texts because it occurred to me that the “career” of a leaf and the career of a person like me had some similarities that might be clarified by a thoughtful analogy.  If you are going to work it out analogically, you need to get at least the rudiments of the science right.  That’s what the biology texts were for.

I’m picturing the red oak tree outside the bedroom window.  It’s a deciduous tree, so all the leaves fall off every winter.  Deciduous simply means “falls off.”  Every leaf that oak produces during the productive seasons needs to be connected to the tree so it can send back to tree system the energy it has produced and so it can be part of the complex internal communications system of the tree.  When it is done with all those things, it needs to fall off of the twig it was attached to and it needs to do so in a way that doesn’t leave a wound behind.  To get an idea of the difference, think of allowing the leaves to fall off naturally—just what “naturally” means is going to be explored in a moment—as opposed to just ripping the leaves off before they are “ready.”

Leaves fall off effortlessly and naturally.  They do that by developing abscission layers that look like this.  The action I am thinking about happens where the leaf stalk comes out of the stem.  It is the abscission layer that allows the leaf to fall off when it is time and the protective layer (cork) that allows the tree to be unharmed by the departure of the leaf.

That’s how the leaves do it; people, very often, do it differently.  Being attached to the stem is all we’ve ever known.  Through that stem we send the complete product of our working lives.  Through that stem we receive the nutrients we need and all the messages that the hormonal messengers bring us.  Then, one day, a message comes that we have never had before.  “Thanks for all the good work.  We couldn’t have survived without you and your colleagues.  But we are entering a period of rest and recovery and won’t need you any longer.”

At that point, the abscission layer begins to develop.  The leaf, which has worn the characteristic green (chlorophyll) coveralls since it was brand new on the job, takes the work clothes off and reveals the marvelous yellows and oranges and reds—carotenoids and anthocyanins– that go with its retirement.  Eventually the leaf drops off and leaves the tree safe from the water loss and the danger of infection that the tree would have experienced had the abscission layer not been formed—and leaves a space where a new working leaf can appear when business picks up again next spring.

My idea is that the way a leaf does it is a really good description of how we would do it ourselves if we were smart enough and good-hearted enough and brave enough.  But what the leaves do naturally, we must do intentionally.  We must be willing to receive the message that the tree is shutting down for a while.  Some people refuse to receive the message.  Some manage to suppress its plain meaning and many spend a good deal of money in the process.  We must deliberately set the appropriate processes going.  Abscission layers aren’t going to build themselves the way they do in leaves.  The protective layer that will protect the tree from the bad things that would otherwise happen in our absence will not build itself as it does in leaves.  Leaves know that there is a time to grow, a time to work, and a time to shut down and fall off.  People don’t always know that.

I’ve been looking at this process from the standpoint of the leaf, but now I want to switch to the standpoint of the tree.  Like most people in their seventies, I have had some experiences of loss and I have learned two things:  a) an attachment like an important relationship doesn’t just end at one time and b) there are better ways to manage the experience and worse ways.

My mother died 24 years ago, give or take a week.  In some ways, I knew right away what that would mean.  I knew, for instance, that I wouldn’t be talking to her on the phone any more, but I didn’t know that each of the ways we had known each other during my whole life would die a separate little death.  The joke we shared about the tag in my shirt is now a joke with no one to share it.  That leaf has fallen.  The form letters that served as “family letters” and which were redeemed by the personal notes she wrote on the bottom of the last page will not come any more.  That leaf has fallen, too.  The thousand childhood tricks by which I tried to avoid doing something I should have done are now gone, because only Mother appreciated them—an appreciation dimmed only slightly by her trying, and failing, to put on a stern face to lecture me about it.  All those leaves have fallen as well.

So it doesn’t happen all at once.  If you are going to manage all the abscission layers of all the leaves—not likely, really—you are going to have to prepare thoughtfully for the safe departure of each leaf.  And they don’t all happen at once.  We don’t leave our productive lives all at once; we don’t leave our social settings all at once; we don’t leave our various friendships, central and peripheral, all at once.  And each one of them needs to have a careful sealing off on the stem side and an effective breaking off (“deciduous,” remember) on the leaf side.  Bad things happen when those are not properly done.

So attachments don’t end all at once and if you are a person, rather than a leaf, the ending will require careful thought and consistent practice.  This brings us to the second point, which is that there are better ways and worse ways to do that.  We can take the end of our productive careers not as an appropriate and satisfying end—that is what the yellow, the orange, and the red mean to me—but as a renunciation of the value our work.  “After all I’ve done for you,” we say, “…now this!”    And we say, “No one really understood how important my work really was.  If the tree really understood how important my livelihood as a leaf is, it would postpone the slowdown until I was ready.”[1]  And, of course, “It isn’t fair!”

Other lives end the way a long-running Broadway play ends.  There is celebration and satisfaction.  It had a great run!  Everyone who has been part of that particular play is given a brief vision of the way their work has connected with the work of others they didn’t even know.  There are nostalgic retrospectives.  And then the scenery is put away for the last time and the actors and directors and producers and stagehands move on to the next project.

I know it is beyond me to accomplish this, but in my status as a tree, I do understand that my life has been made possible by the thousands upon thousands of contributions from the leaves that have provided the energy I needed to do what I have done.  I want to prepare for each of those separations with the appreciation they deserve and I want to protect my own life for the next round of productive work.  I don’t want ragged or thoughtless separations.  They hurt; and they run the risk of diseases I can’t afford.  And they aren’t necessary.

In my status as a leaf, I have only one abscission layer to manage.  I want to do it right because otherwise the tree to which[2] I have given the results of my whole working life will experience losses and risks I don’t want.  I want to get the news of the impending slowdown at the right time.  I want to know immediately what it means.  I want to start right away building the layers that will allow me to fall away without damage to the tree.  I want to display the beautiful colors of my life that were always there, beneath the green work coveralls.  I want the people who see those colors to enjoy them fully, even if they don’t know what they mean.  And then I want to fall off.  I know business is going to pick up again in a little bit and I want there to be room for the new guy to get to work when the time comes.

After Dad died, I sent Mother a picture of a leaf from the red oak in my lawn.  The colors were as rich as any the oak produced that year.  The abscission layer had been built.  The tree had been protected.  I knew that’s the way Mother understood that part of her life, so on the picture, I had a really good calligrapher write, “The leaf that wholly loves its Tree[3]/Will never know despair.” I knew she would know what that meant.

 

 

 

[1] Of course, a leaf that would say that would never be “ready.”

[2] From a theological standpoint, I get to say, “to Whom.”

[3] The capital T- in Tree makes the same point I made above in changing “to which” to “to Whom.”

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Supreme Court Agrees that Congress Has the Power to Tax

Posted on June 28, 2012 by hessd

All of the opinions, concurring and dissenting, run to 193 pages.  That’s a lot of pages.  But you have to read only as far as page 20 to get this from Chief Justice Roberts: “Every day individuals do not do an infinite number of things.”

I know the ultimate disposition of the Patient’s Protection and Affordable Care Act (I call it Pea-pack, possibly because of my time working pea-pack for the Del Monte Canning Company) is an important public matter and I want to think seriously about it eventually, but right now, I am thinking seriously about introducing my Fall term Political Psychology class with this quote from Chief Justice Roberts.[1]

That is the question Chief Justice Roberts invites us to consider.  The actual heart of his opinion is that Congress does have the authority to punish people who do not purchase health insurance because this punishment—“a fine” in some readings—is actually “a tax” and everyone agrees that Congress has the right to tax.

That wasn’t the reasoning the Obama administration really wanted.  The administration “played” the authority to tax argument the way a good coach plays a deep bench.  The “authority to tax” argument was a substitute who just happened to be on the floor when somebody has to take the last shot. The starting players for Coach Obama were: a) health insurance affects interstate commerce and Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce and b) even if it didn’t have that direct right, there is the justly famous “elastic clause,” which says that Congress has the right to take actions that are only instrumentally authorized, i.e., you have to be able to do these things (not mentioned in the Constitution) so you can accomplish those things (directly authorized by the Constitution).  Those two—the interstate commerce clause and the elastic clause—were the starting players.  One of them was supposed to have the ball.

But with the clock winding down, the ball was in the hands of the sub—the power to tax—and he is the player who took the shot that won the game.  On the other hand, David, the shepherd boy who killed Goliath, was a sub as well and he too was saved, as one wag put it, by his outside shooting.

The Obama administration’s real case—not the one they made to the court—is that you cannot have an insurance system that covers (nearly) everyone and that is (mostly) affordable without having everyone in the insurance pool.  That’s what the individual mandate is for.  But Chief Justice Roberts, who, in an alternative metaphor, runs a swimming pool, ruled that the lifeguard has the authority to get everyone out of the pool, but not the authority to get everyone into the pool.

When he said, “Every day individuals do not do an infinite number of things,” the thing he had in mind was buying healthcare insurance.  Congress has a lot of authority over the things people do, he argued, but no authority over what people don’t do.  So the interstate commerce clause gives the Congress the right to “regulate” commerce, but not to “require” commerce.  Roberts ruled that “not buying healthcare insurance” was not an activity; it was an inactivity.  Therefore regulating it was not regulating commerce, but demanding commerce.

One of the commentators pointed out that with this judicial confirmation, the U. S. joined every other rich country in the world in requiring healthcare coverage.  Everybody says that a health insurance “pool” is not going to work unless everyone—those who currently need care and those who currently do not—is in it.  That’s really the whole case as a policy matter.

The Supreme Court’s job is to say whether this job can get done with the tools (constitutionally) available.  It’s one thing to say you really have to have a house and another to say that the materials and the equipment to build the house are on site and ready for use.  The Obama administration said we have to have the house.  The majority of the court said that the tools needed to build it are available.  The minority of the court said that the tools were not available and we would have to find a way to do without the house.

Next they’ll be saying we will have to do without the Senate.

 

[1] I encountered this logic late in the 1970s when I began wearing orthotics in my running shoes and therefore had to begin wearing socks—something I had refused to do up to that point.  And since I was wearing only one orthotic, I wore only one sock and people would say, “Look. You have one sock on and one sock off.”  On my best days, I would stop and invite this particular observer to tell me just how he knows how many socks I am not wearing.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Groundhog Day

Posted on June 25, 2012 by hessd

Phil Connors has this problem.  Every year, as Groundhog Day draws near, he feels the bile piling up in his stomach.  Every year, it is the same. You go to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and watch a bunch of bozos haul an over-fed rodent out of a box and act out a charade about how much more winter there is.  And the worst of it is, he knows that next year, he is going to have to do it all again—the whole meaningless round.

Except that this year, 1993, it didn’t happen that way.  It was much much worse.   Or so it seemed to weatherman Phil Conners.  The argument of this post is that his nightmare was just a little riff on his life—the life he was already choosing.

I’m going to skip the plot except for the barest essentials because only people who know the story will have read this far.  The movie is based—so it says on the imdb.com website—on a book by Frederick Nietsche called The Gay Science.  In it, as in Groundhog Day, a person is trapped in a noticeably small period of time and is doomed to live it over and over.  Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a meteorologist in nearby Pittsburgh.  He and his sweet little producer, Rita, (Andie McDowell) and inept cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) go off to “cover” the emerging groundhog.  The next morning, when Phil gets up, he discovers that it is the same day as yesterday—the same weather, the same banter on the radio, the same people walking down the street.

He is horrorstruck.  He panics. Then he sees some possibilities, all of them bad.  His intimate knowledge of the day, based on endless repetitions of it, enable him to indulge himself in every vice he desires.  Sex first; then wealth; then a straightforward seduction of Rita.  Everything works except getting Rita into bed. Then he gets sick of it and kills himself several times.  Nothing works: the next morning, he wakes up with the same bad jokes being told by the same people on the radio.

There is a flaw in Phil’s system somewhere and it needs to be overcome before he can get on to the next day.  There are a lot of candidates for “crucial flaw remedied.”  Phil turns, for example, from doing bad deeds to doing good deeds.  Maybe that’s it.  He finally gets Rita into bed.  Maybe that’s it.  He learns to play the piano.  I think that would be my mother’s favorite.   He achieves a much sharper notion of who he has been, finally admitting to Rita that he has been—IS, he says—a jerk.

I’d hate to have to argue against those, especially the piano, but here’s my favorite.  In his best moment with Rita, he says, ”Whatever happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now… because I love you.”  You have to know the movie to know what a step that is.  “Whatever happens tomorrow…” is pretty powerful from a man who has been denied and has finally renounced all  “tomorrows.”  Ditto for “for the rest of my life.”  And “because I love you” does not include her loving him.  It is not her love for him that has fulfilled him, but his love for her.  It is quixotic in the full Don Quixote sense of the word.  Phil Connors has accepted living the rest of his life doing the same good deeds for the same people over and over again and loving a woman to whom he has been a jerk as recently as yesterday.  Nice work, Phil.

There’s another reason this movie has been on my mind, though.  It is that being trapped in that day—forever Groundhog Day—isn’t all that different from the rest of Phil Connors’ life.  In the first phase of his enchantment, he is a nasty person using (abusing) today because tomorrow is all he values.  But before he was enchanted, he was a nasty person abusing every one of his todays and all the people those todays contained on behalf of an amorphous “tomorrow” whose principal virtue was that it was not “today.”

Phil thought that, as a rising young TV meteorologist, he was going to go to a bigger and better station and have colleagues who were not as mean-spirited as his current ones.  As viewers, we know that Phil is going to take his problems with him and that every new station will become a place he wants to leave and every set of colleagues will be inadequate in the one virtue that matters most to Phil—how much they admire him.  So Phil isn’t really any more “on an endless treadmill” when he gets trapped in Groundhog Day than he was before.  It’s just that the size of the trap is so small—24 hours—that he can see that he is trapped.

And whatever the magic ingredient is—see the list above or compile your own—that enables him to escape from the Groundhog Day trap, it enables him also to escape from the trap he has built for himself in his own life.  You could say that the Groundhog Day event was just a vivid illustration of the kind of trap he had built and in escaping from Groundhog Day, he escaped, also, from being the Phil Connors he had been.

It’s a pretty good day’s work.

 

 

 

Posted in Movies, Paying Attention | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Robots are better than anything

Posted on June 22, 2012 by hessd

Not, as in the earlier post, “better than nothing.”  Let me say up front that this whole “social robot” thing scares me.  It’s creepy, but the path to there from here is lit up like a strip with landing lights.

These are some further reflections from my reading of Sherry Turkle’s truly wonderful book, Alone Together.  Turkle doesn’t seem to me to be alarmist.  She is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.  I like that.  She is also a clinical psychologist.  I like that too.  And as an experimenter, she has a touch with the children she studies that I find reassuring; she has empathy, but she persists in getting the data she needs.

In her own uneasiness, she begins with what authenticity means:  “Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.”

Let’s start now with Anne. She confided that she would trade in her boyfriend “for a sophisticated Japanese robot” if the robot would produce what she called “caring behavior.”  And:  “She was looking for a ‘no-risk relationship’ that would stave off loneliness. A responsive robot, even one just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than a demanding boyfriend.

Can we really outsource our intimacy needs?  What is a “no-risk relationship?”  I understand the tradeoff that couples sometimes make.  They want a high-intimacy relationship and are willing to take all the heartbreak that comes as part of the package.  I understand the tradeoff other couples make to have a more formal, more predictable relationship in which each partner agrees to ride herd on the tendency to emotional extravagance.  Neither of those is exactly my own choice, but I don’t find either one morally offensive.  Anne is choosing a “performance of behaviors we associate with feelings of intimacy,” knowing that they are inauthentic and, using Turkle’s definition, that they don’t elicit anything authentic in her either.  That’s not “better than anything” is it?

Let’s take a look at ordinary conversation.  Try this one: A thirty-year-old man remarks, “I’d rather talk to a robot. Friends can be exhausting. The robot will always be there for me. And whenever I’m done, I can walk away.  I know friends can be exhausting.  I don’t always choose to be with friends because sometimes they can be exhausting.  But what does “the robot will always be there for me” mean?  “There” is a little bit troublesome because it doesn’t mean “in the room,” but “for me” is much worse.  The robot is not there, in the emotional sense of “there,” and it is not “for you”—or against you.  You don’t matter to it at all.

Bette says that when you prepare a plot of ground for seeds and then don’t plant and nourish them, you are just laying down a welcome mat for weeds.  I know that’s right about weeds and I suspect it is right about robots.  What kind of lives are we living that offer such welcome mats for weeds.  Here’s a “back of the envelope” list from Turkle.  She calls this invitation to weeds, “the robotic moment.”

As I listen for what stands behind this moment, I hear a certain fatigue with the difficulties of life with people. We insert robots into every narrative of human frailty. People make too many demands; robot demands would be of a more manageable sort. People disappoint; robots will not. When people talk about relationships with robots, they talk about cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, and children who take drugs. They talk about how hard it is to understand family and friends.

I hear such resignation in those settings.  People make too many demands—and there is nothing we can do about it.  People disappoint us—and we can find no way to manage or to redeem the situation. Why is the husband cheating?  Why is the wife faking orgasms?  Why are the children taking drugs?  Does it matter? Is there really nothing we can do?  The “robotic moment” seems to be made up of people who have judged their own ability to understand and deal with these situations or, at worst, to endure them with grace, as entirely inadequate.  Reducing the need for action by outsourcing our emotional “relationships” to social robots seems, somehow, “better.”

One of the defenses of this tradeoff that Turkle introduces, then discards, is that these “relationships” might not be the very best thing, but there is no harm in using them. 

Dependence on a robot presents itself as risk free. But when one becomes accustomed to “companionship” without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky—it makes us subject to rejection—but it also opens us to deeply knowing another. Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal, but it consigns us to a closed world—the loveable as safe and made to measure.

This seems right to me.  If we learn “companionship” with demands, how will we accustom ourselves to humans?  Can there be a love relationship that is “safe and made to measure?”  Is there any way to open yourself to intimacy without risking rejection?  I don’t think so.  One of my several brothers uses the metaphor of “hostages” to describe how intimacy is built.  When I tell you something true about me, something that would hurt me if it were not received and honored, I give you a hostage.  Then you give me a hostage and each of us keeps an eye on how the hostages are faring.  Eventually we come to know and trust each other.  That doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen to the hostages.  It means that when something bad does happen, you and I will have the resources to sustain the relationship.

How would I accept a hostage offered to me by a robot?  Could I offer a hostage to a robot?

And there is one more thing that is bothering me.  It is the way we redefine ourselves to make us fit the world of robots.  There don’t need to actually be robots for us to begin to do this.  All we really need is to identify and accept “the performance of intimacy” as good enough.  When we do that, we redefine what “intimacy” means for us and for any human friends we might have.  And it isn’t just intimacy.

The meaning of intelligence changed when the field of artificial intelligence declared it was something computers could have. The meaning of memory changed when it was something computers used. Here the word “trust” is under siege, now that it is something of which robots are worthy.

Turkle’s point here, as I understand it, is that we have changed what “intelligence” means so that it can be a term that is commensurable—robotic and human “intelligence” can be judged, that is to say, by the same standard.  And the meaning of memory changes—what it means to remember something—when we adopt a common standard.  And not, Turkle says, “trust.”  There won’t be two kinds of trust; one for humans and one for robots.  The meaning of the word for us will change to accommodate the two kinds of users on a level playing field.

 

Posted in Living My Life, Love and Marriage, Paying Attention, ways of knowing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

My Father’s Magic and How He Worked It

Posted on June 17, 2012 by hessd

When I was in my 20’s, I had the rare privilege of watching my father teach an adult Sunday School class, using abysmally bad materials.  The classes were a lot better than the materials.  That puzzled me.

I got the materials myself and began to work with them during the week leading up to the Sunday class.  I didn’t find anything there.  It was as nearly without ideas as a desert is without waterfalls.  The writing was thoughtlessly bad.  It was trite.  When I forced myself to get past my assessment of the materials and to ask a much better question (“What would I do if I had to teach this lesson?), I found that I had no clue.  And even as I was coming to that conclusion, I knew that the next Sunday, Dad would find a way to create a good warming fire of discussion out of these dead embers of written lessons.  And he did.  And I would try to see what he knew that I didn’t.

Even while it was going on, I knew it pleased him.[1]  How would it not please him?  Your son comes up to you and says, “Will you teach me how to do this?  My efforts are failures and yours are successes. I know that you have skills I don’t have.”

It turned out that he didn’t know how to say “what he did.” He told me that “experience helped him.”  I was in my mid-20s and I didn’t have any experience and too little patience to like the answer.  Now I am in my mid-70s and I know exactly what he meant.  But where Dad’s gift was to do, and not so much to say, my gift is to say.  That is what I am going to do here.

Here’s a line from Dorothy Sayers’s book, Busman’s Honeymoon.  It isn’t much of a line, but it is as good as the much more extensive materials Dad had to work with.  Lord Peter Wimsey has just taken his wife, Harriet, his mother, and his cousin to the local church on Sunday morning.  Peter has been asked to read the morning scripture.

“The congregation sat down with a creak and a shuffle, and disposed itself to listen with approval to his lordship’s rendering of Jewish prophecy.”

Having lived as long as I have and read as much as I have and, recently, having written as much as I have, I discover that most statements of this sort attract my attention.  Words like “disposed itself to listen” and “listen with approval” take on some significance to me because of the categories they fit into.[2] 

Let’s start with what it means to “dispose oneself” to listen.  This is a little bit of a sore point with me because I teach undergraduates who seldom “dispose themselves to listen” and who, if this were to be pointed out, would argue that such a “disposition” is not their job.  There are a lot of alternatives to “disposing oneself to listen.”  One can avoid the setting.  “Never go to church (class).”  Boring old sermons (lectures).”  One can “enact listening”[3] while actually attending to other things or to nothing at all.  And without even the pretense of listening, one can hop onto Facebook on one’s laptop or text friends on one’s phone.  You really don’t have to “dispose yourself to listen.”

And not everyone knows how.  As the obligation to listen has decayed and the occasions where one must listen have melted away, the skills necessary have atrophied as well.  Note the relationship of those three.  If you have the obligation to listen and not the skills, you are in for a long period of boredom.  If you are often in settings where you must listen, you are quite likely to develop, on the one hand, the sense of obligation, and on the other hand, the necessary skills.  I don’t mean to imply that those happen in the same order all the time nor that one is logically prior to another.  I think you will agree with me, however, that the three positive dispositions reinforce each other (obligation, settings, skills) and that the three negative dispositions also reinforce each other (no obligation, few settings, and low levels of skill).

The fact is that even when you know how to do it, it isn’t always the first tool to come out of the shed.  I often find myself listening to a performance of some kind and finding that it is too fast or too slow for me.  Sometimes I really want to invest myself in the listening, but when I begin, I find this discrepancy.  Generally, I am fast and it, whatever it is, is slow.  When I remember that this is something I have chosen to invest myself in, I know how to “dispose myself to listen.”  I slow myself down to the speed of the presentation.  I listen to it as it ought to be listened to.

As a rule, two things happen.  The first is that I really enjoy it.  It might have been a slow-developing movie or a very long adagio in a symphony or a conversation that is properly preceded by exchanges of pleasantries and which will, if I continue to attend to it, become significant and enjoyable.  So I get all the enjoyment that comes naturally from those good things.  The second is that I get a break.  It is not necessary for me to have been functioning in the high gear I was in and slowing down—disposing myself to listen—provides a reminder that I ought to slow down and a very restful demonstration of the benefits. 

The second phrase that caught my attention is “listen with approval.”  This is a part, remember, of the longer phrase, “and disposed itself to listen with approval to his lordship’s rendering…”  One cannot, of course, approve of a rendering he has not yet heard.  He can, anyone can who knows how, prepare to listen with approval.  Some would say that “listening with approval” improves the quality of what you are listening to.  That is a point with some merit, I think, but it might take quite a while to work.

It is the mechanism I am interested in.  One of the scholars I studied in grad school called it “membershipping.”  I’ll grant you it is an ugly term.  He meant, by inventing it, to say that we do not ordinarily test what people say to see if it deserves “membership” in our conversation.  Rather, we “membership” it; we ask how it belongs, rather than whether it belongs.  We set our minds, in other words, to explain WHY it was a brilliant remark, rather than the task of determining whether it was or not.  This is not always a good thing to do, for obvious reasons, but I will guarantee you that the members of the congregation listening to Lord Peter’s rendering of the prophecy of Jeremiah enjoyed every part of it more than they would have had they “disposed themselves to listen critically” to the reading.

Listening critically gives your mind the task of deciding how good it is.  Listening approvingly gives your mind the task of enjoying how good it is.  The first task is harder.  Not everyone can do it well although nearly everyone can pretend he is doing it well.  It is not hard, using Sherry Turkle’s words, to “perform criticism.”  The second task is easier.  Nearly anyone who is willing can do it.  The product of the first task is an evaluation of the performance.  The product of the second task is an enjoyment of the performance.  Each has its place.[4]

To return now, to how my father did what he did.  He took each of the elements available in the insipid materials and allowed it to ruffle his mind a little.  He found contexts of thought where they could be profitably be put.  He could teach the specific item, if that were needed.  He could teach the general category, if that were needed.  He could teach the relationship between the specific and the general and, to those who were paying attention, he taught just how to do what he was doing.

We’re close enough now to Fathers’ Day that I have been thinking with a more vivid enjoyment about what he taught me.  He would not tell me what he was doing, but he did it with such regularity that I figured it out.  And now that I am old, I have a batch of categories myself.  They aren’t the same categories Dad had, but they work the same way.

[1] I also know because I have sons of my own who, at one time or another, have asked me the question I asked my dad.  It felt really good.

[2] I will pass over the way “his lordship’s rendering” requires an understanding of the role of the nobility in Edwardian England and over what “render” might mean in “rendering Jewish prophecy.”

[3] Sherry Turkle’s phrase in Alone Together.  Robots cannot give you their attention—they are robots, after all—but they can “enact attention” and that is enough to satisfy many users of social robots.

[4] This would be the time, in another sort of post, to point out that oneself is at the center of criticism; the performer is at the center of “approval.”  In our era, being a keen-eyed judge of quality is a very desirable status.  Being able to give oneself to the experience of approval and enjoyment is not so highly thought of.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, ways of knowing | Tagged | 2 Comments