The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: philosophy

  • Time to put away childish things

    Update (2013 Feb 4): Noah Smith has an awesome response to the attack on Prof. Krugman, too.

    Paul Krugman today discusses a post on “How to Debate Paul Krugman”, which by all appearances is a serious piece.  The answer can be boiled down to “Ask questions like a child”:

    This seems to me to be a basic divide between liberals and conservatives (or, at least, the conservatives who dominate the right at the moment).  Liberals see the world as data-rich, model-complex, and infinitely varied.  Conservatives want the world to be simple, precept-driven, and authority-based.  They want bumper-sticker policies.

    Each side accuses the other, with some justice, of hubris.  Conservatives say that liberals are so arrogant that they think they can change human nature and upturn thousands of years of received wisdom. But conservatives suffer from their own arrogance:  The delusion that the world is static and simple; that human nature can be comprehended in a not only finite but small set of precepts;  that you can reason from rules-of-thumb that work on small scales to vast interlocking systems; that what is true is always obvious — the delusion that no one, in fact, is smarter than a fifth grader.

    After all, that’s the origin of the wildly misleading “If a family has to balance its budget every month, why doesn’t the government?”  (We’ll leave aside the fact that families in fact do incur debt, and have good reasons to do so.)  The national economy is not a household budget, of course, and to argue that it should be run the same way is silly at best and perhaps insane.  Things that work at the household level are unlikely to extrapolate to an intertwined world economy.  Even if there are broad principles to be deduced, their application will necessarily be complex.

    To get back to my main point:  Although conservatism used to have intellectual giants who correctly confronted liberal theorists with hard questions, those days are apparently over.  (Witness the coup within the Cato Institute and the general decline of the Heritage Foundation; witness the concurrent meteoric ascent of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain…) Conservatives no longer want sound answers to important questions; they want comforting answers to simplistic questions.  They have abandoned the “reality-based community” and forsaken the “evidence-based world”.

    This is a slightly more genteel version of the virulent anti-intellectualism that defines the conservative movement of the day.  To the right, when you hear data that confounds your expectations or worse, your desires, the instinct is to reject not only the data but the idea of data.  That’s how you get climate deniers, birthers, poll “unskewers” —  a vast sweep of people whose commitment is to the idea that numbers are meaningless.  These are not isolated outbreaks of irrationality that mar the otherwise-pristine right.  They are surface symptoms of an interlinked pathology, and “ask a child’s questions” is just another expression of it.  You can’t spend forty years reflexively demonizing “intellectuals and elites” without driving them from your party, either literally or by self-selection.

    Why is the “right” way to debate Paul Krugman to repeatedly ask questions a child would ask? Because their philosophy isn’t fit for grown-ups.  It takes maturity to appreciate nuance, to rely on data (even when it says things you don’t like), to reason deeply.  Modern conservatism seems to be inherently infantilizing (which is actually funny, considering their knee-jerk abhorrence of the “nanny state”): Grab with both hands, define “fair” as “what benefits me”, put yourself at the center of the world; rely on totems; fear the monsters under the bed.

    The world is more complex than that.  The principles (and intellect) of a five-year-old are not equal to the challenge of understanding it.  There is a difference between being childlike and being childish — modern conservatism has dived deeply into the latter.

  • The Better Nation We’ve Become

    In his post today (“Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall“), Paul Krugman links to a graph showing growing acceptance, over time, of interracial marriage in the United States:

    Trendline of Approval of Black-White Marriages
    Gallup Poll on Black-White Marriages

    I like this for the chart that indicates that 86% of the country agrees that it was OK that I married my wife. That trendline — and all the histrionics that underlie it, which we hear echoed today — is why I find the issue of “gay” marriage a non-question: Of course the state should recognize the longterm commitment a pair of consenting adults make to each other, full stop. (I’m of the opinion that the state has no business being involved in marriage qua sacrament, but that’s a whole other semantic argument.)

    But I really like this post because Paul Krugman puts his finger on what’s gone wrong on the far right, and why even we progressives mourn the passing of grown-up conservatism: “And I don’t think the right has a clue how to operate in the better nation we’ve become”.  For a host of reasons, most people in America seem to believe things have gotten much much worse than it was a few decades ago.  Some of this is legitimate (economic mobility has ground to a halt; job security is now mythical; our infrastructure is fraying), and some of it is rose-colored nostalgia (there was crime and violence in the 1950s, believe it or not; and we had nearly half the world armed and ready to physically eliminate us).  I think things are better than people believe, and better than they were.  (See: Me, my wife, marriage to).

    But let’s grant for the moment the thesis that things have gotten worse.  There are fundamentally two possible approaches to what comes next:  Things are going to get worse, or things are going to get better.  The difference I see between Ronald Reagan’s era of conservatism and Mitt Romney’s is:  The GOP doesn’t really believe things are going to get better.  Sure, they’re fight the good fight (as they see it; I disagree) and they’ll do what they can.  But the vibe coming out of Congress and Tea Party caucuses seems overwhelmingly defeatist, or at least resigned.  They might beat back a tax increase for now, but eventually those rascally takers are going to win.  They might hold to the guns for the moment, but the gov’mint’s coming for them someday.

    Overarchingly, they don’t seem to offer any way forward.  They’ve mistaken conservatism for stasis:  If only we could go back to the Golden Age (which is the 1950s, or the 1920s, or the 1850s, or for a small number, the 1350s), everything would be right with the world.  Sure, some people would have to go back to being uneducated, to serving quietly, to riding in the back of the bus, but wouldn’t it be worthwhile?  It’s that sort of thinking that leads to idiocy like arguing “Slavery was a blessing in disguise“.

    Now, this is a very broad brush.  There are some conservatives out there who genuinely are trying to carry forward the principles of the past to the world of the future — which is what I think legitimate conservatism is.  I know, because I’ve taught some of them.  Right now they don’t have much of a national voice. It’s possible that Marco Rubio is one of them, though I remain on the fence about that.

    But overall, I think a backward-looking despair is the hallmark of the modern conservative movement, and it is a distinct difference to modern progressivism.  Progressives believe in, well, progress:  Things are, overall, better today than they were fifty years ago.  Moreover, and more importantly, we believe things should get better with time:  That our system should be geared toward expanding the opportunity and security of all, toward improving the quality of life for the greatest number, toward eliminating the eternal vexations that have bedeviled civilized life for as long as there’s been civilization.  The loud voices of the conservative movement see a changing demography as a threat to America.  Progressives see it as America.

    It is a better nation, and we’re going to make it better still.  That is touchstone of liberalism, and why it’s not the curse word some on Fox News imagine it to be.

     

  • De-tuned

    I wrote this nearly five years ago.  I was mad then; now I’m more or less just resigned.  The intellectual commons is being fenced off, now more than ever.  I think we’re losing more than outlets for creativity or profit; we’re losing the shared language to remember who we were, who we are.

    ==============

    De-Tuned

    Recently I’ve come to feel under assault.  Not in my person but in my past.

    One of the guilty pleasures of my childhood was a TV show called The Greatest American Hero, which I adored when I was twelve.  For those not fully up on their Reagan-era television trivia, the show involved an ordinary guy — a school teacher, in fact — who was given a “supersuit” by friendly aliens in a Close Encounters-type flying saucer.  The suit, a ridiculous set of red long underwear, empowered Ralph the teacher with powers reminiscent of Superman: flying, strength, immunity to bullets.  But unlike cool and collected Clark Kent, Ralph Hinckley has all the usual foibles of humanity: he can be frightened, angered, made jealous.  Moreover, he loses the instruction book and has to figure out the suit on his own.

    In my memory there has always stuck out one particular episode, called “Operation: Spoilsport“.  (I have since learned the title; at the time, I was not the type who appreciated the importance of titles to works.)  It marks the return of the “little green guys“, who warn Ralph and his FBI partner Bill about the impending destruction of the Earth.  Probably to make the aliens seem mysterious and transcendent, the writers decided that they could speak to Ralph only by adjusting the car radio so as to catch little snippets of regular broadcasts that, put together, made up the message.  Even at the time this struck me as a clever trick to make the aliens sound, well, alien.

    Here’s where the assault comes in.  To bring home their point — to underscore the stakes — the aliens keep sending Ralph the same song over and over.  From 1982 until recently, I had thought that the song was “Eve of Destruction“, a song by P.F. Sloan that Barry McGuire took to a place on the Billboard charts in 1965.  I was 12.  I hadn’t ever paid attention to 1960s music.  The Viet Nam War was, at best, the source for action movies like First Blood.  I knew about Red China but I almost certainly didn’t know why Sloan would compare it to Selma, Alabama.  In short, the song should have been, to me, a jumble of confused rage directed at outdated cultural references that had no meaning for me.

    I was only 12.  But it was 1982, two years into the Reagan presidency.  Six months earlier the President had nakedly called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and made undiluted opposition the cornerstone of his foreign policy.  The New York Daily News had published its periodic map of the city, showing the hypothetical effect of the latest Soviet warhead if it were to be detonated above the Empire State Building — cryptic squiggles and broadly-drawn circles whose radii indicated just how far away you had to be to escape each of the various killing zones: the immediate blast region and the flash-immolation zone and the merely concussive damage area.  Everyone simply knew that World War III was on its way, that it would start with a Soviet invasion of West Germany, and that it would end with, well, The End, capital “T”, capital “E”.

    Small wonder, then, that I found myself morbidly drawn to this song with its rough-hewn, unworkable, unrelenting refrain: “Tell me, over and over and over again, my friend, how you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction”.  Small wonder, perhaps, that I found comfort in the thought that maybe, out there somewhere, was an ordinary high school teacher in a ridiculous suit of red long underwear who could step in and save the world.

    Time passed.  The Soviets never came over the North Pole, or from Cuba, or even from East Germany.  Reagan went to Reykjavik and then to Berlin (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!“).  I went to high school and then to college and then to grad school.  The Greatest American Hero went to reruns and then to syndication hell and then to oblivion.  Everybody forgot that at one time everybody had known that World War III was imminent.  There was peace, for a time, and there was prosperity, for a time, and there was security … for a time.

    Then they were gone, and everyone — whether they knew it or not — was humming the refrain from Barry McGuire.  I found myself doing it consciously from time to time.  I took some obscure hope in remembering how eerily prophetic it had seemed in 1982 and in how its prophecy had utterly failed to come to pass.  From my more nuanced vantage I knew now that McGuire was singing more of the raging undercurrents of hate and mistrust that spawned the violence of the Sixties, and I even recognized that that river still ran strong and deep in human affairs.  But it was a piece of my youth, one of those signposts along the way toward maturity.  “Eve of Destruction” had been, through the medium of The Greatest American Hero, part of the soundtrack of my growth from the simplicity of childhood toward the complexity and shades of adulthood.

    Or so I had thought, for two decades and more.

     

    Eventually, Anchor Bay Entertainment released, after many delays, the DVD set of the second season of The Greatest American Hero.  Episode #2 was “Operation: Spoilsport”.  I opened the box and jumped to that episode immediately.  I reveled in the guilty pleasure of being a twelve-year-old proto-geek again.  It was everything I remembered — until the end of the second act.  The little green guys returned, they futzed with Ralph’s radio, and out came… some random manufactured pop hit.  Where was Barry McGuire’s gravelly rage?  I rationalized that I had misremembered.  After all, there were several instances in this episode when they sent Ralph a song.  Probably the writers had built up to “Eve of Destruction” and then I, struck by its power, had expanded it to fill the episode in retrospect.

    Three more acts came and went.  Three more quasi-pop songs too upbeat for their faux angst.  No Barry McGuire.  No “Eve of Destruction”.  It was the final act and there was only one more opportunity for the green guys, and now it wouldn’t even make sense — the crisis was past.  Suddenly, the end credits rolled.  I wondered if I was crazy.  Before playing the disc, I would have sworn in a court of law on a stack of Bibles that the key song from “Operation: Spoilsport” was “Eve of Destruction”.  Had I gotten my wires crossed?  Perhaps somewhere in the past twenty years I had come across “Eve of Destruction” and subconsciously recognized its appropriateness, then pasted it retroactively into my memory of “Operation: Spoilsport”.  If the human mind was so malleable, if I could unknowingly alter my memories so thoroughly — well, the world was suddenly a much scarier place, and not just because of Soviet nukes.

    Before checking myself into a mental hospital, I did a little bit of research.  Only a few minutes online brought me some confirmation of my sanity.  If I had invented the insertion of “Eve of Destruction”, at least I was not alone in my delusion, because several different message boards were aflame with people indignant over its removal.  The true story was simple and, a propos for the times, more base:  money.

    The Greatest American Hero, it turns out, was ahead of its time a little in that it incorporated “regular” music deeply into the storylines — a tactic used to more lasting impact on Miami Vice a few years later.  Because it was a pioneer, the show’s creators never thought to secure reproduction rights for home collections.  In 1982, nobody could buy an entire season of a TV show and certainly nobody thought anybody would if offered the chance.  Everybody “knew” that when a series ended, its appeal vanished and its money-making chances went as well.  Just like everybody “knew” that World War III was just around the corner.  Today of course the home market represents the lion’s share of revenue for a project and no one would forget to purchase those rights.

    Anchor Bay faced two options:  Pay for all the songs again and raise the price (and cut their profit margin).  Or splice in generic songs to which they had the rights, and hope nobody would notice.  Judging from the vitriol flowing online, they made the wrong call.  And I have to admit, I share the anger.  Quite some time has past since I discovered the substitution, and it still rankles me.  I’ve been trying to figure out why.  After all, it’s just a TV show and — I have to admit — not really the best one, either.  It’s campy and goofy; the situations ludicrous and the characters cardboard.  While I’ve always had a soft spot for The Greatest American Hero, I’ve never considered it my favorite show nor even among the best.  Why would it inspire a slow-burning anger at its modification?

    But of course it’s not the modification of the show that inspires the anger.  It’s the mutilation of my memory.  Precisely because the writers had woven the music into their story, it couldn’t be simply spliced out.  A purpose of art is to evoke change and response, and clearly, that episode had attained that purpose, at least for me.  “Eve of Destruction”, learned by me in that particular context, had played a part in the formation of the adult me, of who I became, of who I am.  Now it had been callously and carelessly removed, edited out in a creepily Soviet fashion.  My memories, my past, were not out of bounds, it would seem.

    The whole affair has given me a better insight into a different work of literature.  Without any intention by Anchor Bay, they gave me just a taste of Winston’s life in 1984.  Big Brother wasn’t out to rule the world, here, but Big Brother Incorporated didn’t mind trashing the past to make a quick buck.  What’s more, there seems to be a growing use of and a growing acceptance of this sort of media revisionism.  We are losing any idea of a shared cultural base.  The cultural commons are being carved up and fenced in.  But a person’s identity is myriad and shared, and cutting up the commons means carving up ourselves.  Soon we could just be atomistic stubs bouncing off the walls we erect between us.

    Think on that and then tell me again, my friend, if you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

  • My philosophy of education

    Edited to correct some grammatical mistakes.

    The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize.  But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in.  Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep.  Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”.  I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.

    I didn’t win the prize 🙁 but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing.  That’s worthwhile.  And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here.  Enjoy.

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  • Can seeing a US flag turn you Republican?

    And if so, what can be done about it?

    A study referenced in Discover has the provocative conclusion that seeing a small American flag while completing a political questionnaire can induce the respondents into being more Republican, even up to 8 months later. Is our society doomed by our optic nerves to surrender to the rabid right?

    First off, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If the description given is accurate, this study doesn’t meet the bar. The sample size is smallish (worse for the followup) and the controls seem ill-defined. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course. There is also a danger in defining some policies as solely Republican, or pretending that the conservative position is monolithic. Serious replication efforts are called for.

    But for the moment assume the causitive effect is real. Why would seeing a flag make one more identify more with Republican views? I would argue it’s because, since the 1960s, the Republicans have highjacked the symbols and language of patriotism. They have been aided in this by the tacit complicity of the media (which like simplistic us-v-them soundbites), the Democratic Party (which has been timid in defense of its country and of itself), and the American people (who have lazily accepted the sports-team approach to politics pioneered by Fox News and embraced by the rabid right).

    What path of action is there for progressives and liberals, who perhaps might be driven to despair over the apparent psychobiological advantage this gives the Republicans? The same one as always: Fight back by reclaiming those symbols. The advantage comes from two crossed circuits in people’s brains: “flags = patriotism = good” and “flags = Republican”. This leads them to erroneously conclude “Republican = good”. Progressives must break the chain at the second link. If we concede ownership of the trappings of patriotism to the rabid right, we will lose the public.

    Granted, this will be a challenge. Firstly, a lot of time has been wasted and a lot of ground lost. People would have to unlearn their unexamined habits of thought, and no one welcomes that. More importantly, patriotism is more complex for progressives. The message of the rabid right is starkly simplistic: My country, wrong or right. America – love it or leave it. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. The progressive position is more abstract, more nuanced: I love my country, but I don’t always love what it does. I recognize its greatness but I also recognize the uncomfortable ugly truths that are part of its history. America is not the pinnacle of history; it is a path to a better tomorrow. That’s harder to sell. It’s harder to enforce message discipline. It’s harder to tweet. 🙂

    But it is no less a stirring vision of America. Indeed, I believe it is more so. I think that the American people are sleeping, and in their slumber, the rabid right have been whispering illusions of a center-right nation. But at root, despite it all, the American people are a smart and a good people who will not dream forever. They believe not in an America that never was but in an America that should be. That is a message that finds far more resonance in the progressive ethos.

    Do people associate the flag with Republicanism? Has the rabid right seized the symbols of patriotism? Maybe. But that’s not reason to surrender them. It’s a call to take them back.

  • Published in the Hun Review

    This is just a list of things I’ve managed to get published in the Hun Review, my school’s literary annual:

  • National Constitution Center endorses torture

    Well, by extension.  They’ve invited John Yoo to participate in a forum on “A Conversation on Civility and Democracy in America” — apparently without a blink of irony, too.  Yoo, you might recall, is the author of the infamous Torture Memos, that said the United Stated could and would abandon its obligations under the Geneva Conventions because, well, President Bush wanted to.  He also said that the President could order warrantless surveillance on, well, anybody, ’cause you know, the terror and all.

    I knew that UC Berkeley had somehow decided to allow this lowlife to sit on its faculty, but somehow, the fact that the National Constitution Center is loaning him its gravitas really struck home for me.  And while I have no connection, even remote, to Berkeley, I do have one small lever with the NCC: I am a member.  Now, I have to decide if I’ll continue to be one.

    My note of outrage to the NCC is posted below the fold.

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  • Currently Reading: First Quater 2011

    • American Scripture by Pauline Maier
    • Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks
    • Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel

  • Information in Action: What is a parent?

    I was just watching a season 2 episode of Castle called “When the Bough Breaks” and it annoyed me, by going along with a societal convention that annoys me.  In it, a young Czech immigrant is murdered and, after a convoluted investigation, it’s revealed that a doctor had switched his baby for hers in the delivery room.  The doctor’s child had an untreatable always-fatal condition and he couldn’t face it, so he changed the babies.  Eventually, she figured it out, arranged to get access to his son (which was in reality the child she bore), swap the boy’s mouth for DNA, and get a lab to confirm the identity.  The doctor panicked and killed the woman before she could tell anyone.

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