Power and Limits

I recently encountered a good piece in the New York Review of Books about Ferguson and the political moment it has come to symbolize.

He [Reverend Osagyefo Sekou] rejected what he called the Beltway strategy of appeasing forces on the right of center in favor of what he sees as the political possibility that has come from the street. He, like the young he counsels, feels that the system hasn’t worked and now needs to be born again.

Herein lies the problem:  "the street" has limits.  The crucial question is twofold.  First, what are those limits?  Second, how tolerant will those outside "the street" be of the attempt to recast or re-form "the system"?  Given the fact that "the street" seems, by virtue of its minority and dispossessed status, rather limited in the power it possesses, the second question is likely the more critical one.  When will a substantial portion of those who wield the majority of the power feel shame or embarrassment or injustice to a sufficient degree that they will hear and give credence the complaints of "the street"?

The injustice and oppression that black persons face is unconscionable.  That much should be clear to any thinking person.  If it is not, then that person is willfully ignorant, figuratively blind, or overtly racist.  What matters is how any thinking person will react.  What is to be done about the obviously unconscionable?  Perhaps one may be sympathetic, though sympathy alone is ineffectual.  Perhaps one may be outraged, though outrage alone is ineffectual.  Perhaps one will be rueful, which, it seems to me, is the worst possible response.  The only thing that matters is doing something.  Action alone will help raise volume of the the complaints of "the street" and begin to give the complaints credence, to legitimize them in the eyes and ears and hearts of the dominant.

But what, exactly, is to be done?  Unfortunately, social justice and moral behavior are practical matters and hence have no clear path or prescribed course.  Instead, what should be done is something that is active and, to whatever extent humanly possible, not patronizing.  Perhaps marching meets this criteria.  Perhaps testifying at a police and fire commission meeting would fulfill the criteria.  I am inclined to think that smaller things matter too.  Simply not being afraid or acquiescing to play the typical role in the sociocultural drama of the races would meet the criteria.  Acts of decency, normalcy, and fellowship go a long way toward leveling the differences between persons.  It seems to me that there is no reason that such acts would not also go a long way toward leveling the differences between persons of different races.

America has always felt the necessity of keeping its black male population under control. Behind every failure to make the police accountable in such killings is an almost gloating confidence that the majority of white Americans support the idea that the police are the thin blue line between them and social chaos.

And this, I suppose is what it all comes down to:  how many "white Americans" or those who might be deemed white by proxy or aspiration will stop supporting the idea that blackness is dangerous, that blackness is chaos, that blackness needs to be controlled, policed, monitored...  I think this is the obligation of "white Americans," to demonstrate through concrete action that blackness is human in the same way that whiteness is human; that blackness is nothing but a fabricated and false idea, a dangerous and deadly idea, a wholly unnecessary idea.  And conversely that whiteness is a fabricated and false idea, a dangerous and deadly idea, a wholly unnecessary idea.

I [the author] had to ask myself, When did I become afraid of black youth? How had I, a black man, internalized white fear?

 The magnitude of this tragedy is astonishing.  The only way out is to externalize normalcy and fearlessness until internal fear dissolves and finally disappears.  The only way out is to act as if everyone and every circumstance is normal.  Send kids to integrated schools.  Talk to people at bus stops.  Ride the bus.  Engage in small talk.  Ask teenagers where they want to go to college, what they want to be when they are finished with school.  All of this matters.  It assumes that teenagers can and will go to college and that they have aspirations that matter and that interest you.  It assumes that you care about what others think, even about such trivial things as the weather.  If you speak, it assumes that you are not afraid.  It assumes that all children are valuable and capable.  It assumes that all children belong together.

Do something, even if it is small.  Doing something matters.

Acquainted with the Night

I cannot stop revisiting some pieces of writing over and over, as if the lines are semi-autonomous creatures finding their way into my consciousness often for reasons I do not understand. While Robert Frost does not rank among my favorites, these lines, which are of the sort just described, do:

...further still at an unearthly height/One luminary clock against the sky/Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 

Pain, Suffering, and Self-Reliance

The Atlantic has a good piece titled, "Who Has a Right to Pain Relief?" about the relationship between how we treat complaints of physical pain and politics, especially the politics of social welfare. As Rebecca Davis O'Brien writes,

Physical pain is not merely a private struggle.  Pain is also a problem of representation and trust, of rights and responsibilities, and a source of tension between individual and community. Perhaps not surprisingly, efforts to manage it give rise to a chronic American condition:  an intimate, unknowable experience co-opted by special interests.  Pain, in short, is political.

Courts embraced a liberal, subjective standard of "real" pain, rejecting the notion that discomfort was a fact of life; those who in earlier years might have been dismissed as malingerers were now guaranteed treatment and protection. Medicare and Medicaid were born, and a "bureaucracy of relief" grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

[Princeton historian of medicine and public policy Keith] Wailoo dates the modern era of pain politics to Reagan, whose acolytes saw in the welfare state "a failed and overliberalized society taken in by subjective complaints of pain." The time had come, they urged, for a "conservative restoration founded on objective criteria for measuring true need." ...The pain of the fetus and the pain of the taxpayer mattered most; the addict's pain was suspect, the housewife's pain imagined, the disabled worker's pain symptomatic of a weak society, Wailoo writes.

The great irony...is that deregulation and government retreat allowed the pharmaceutical industry to expand, virtually unchecked, to meet the demand for analgesia--in turn creating new clinical criteria for pain, new opportunities for treatment, and new markets for drugs. The pendulum swing was extreme, abetted by a growing sentiment in the medical community that...a crisis of undertreated chronic pain was at hand.

 This led me to consider how much of the idea of pain is a cultural trope that gets manipulated in various ways but ultimately functions as a complaint against the order of things.  Specifically, how much of what O'Brien writes about reflects a conscious or unconscious understanding by the guardians of the order of things that the cultural trope of pain imperils the overriding cultural trope of self-reliance?  Medicalizing pain segregates the idea of pain from the idea of the self-reliant individual so that pain cannot function as a complaint against the trope of self-reliance.  Once medicalized, pain can no longer reveal the trope of self-reliance to be false or problematic because it is located in the biological leaving any potential cultural failure or problem undiagnosed.

The dominant cultural myth of self-reliance and those interested in its perpetuation cannot countenance the possibility that visible evidence exists demonstrating that the myth is in fact just that, a myth, and that the myth causes much suffering.  Hence, suffering must be considered either a medical (and hence pathological) condition separate from the culture or as a failure of will and constitution.  This is true of both liberal ("rejecting the notion that discomfort is a fact of life") and conservative positions ("the disabled worker's pain symptomatic of a weak society").  In this way, pain as a complaint against society is dismissed.  To those suffering, the message is two-fold:  you are physically defective or you are psychologically defective.  Either way, the suffering is your fault, a failure of the individual and not of society.  The order of things cannot, after all, bear any blame or the order of things might actually change.  Heaven forbid.

 

 

"Many tweets were accompanied by the sort of pictures that could be used to tar even staid black professionals as intimidating. Brown was a large eighteen-year-old—six feet four inches, according to his mother—and, in the image that circulated in the media immediately following the shooting, his size is highlighted. He flashes a peace symbol that, in conjunction with his imposing stature, could predictably be assailed as a gang sign."

Jelani Cobb identifies something that perhaps could be ameliorated by one simple step:  conversation.  The interactions between white persons and young black males is the performance of a fear drama.  Fear suffuses every aspect of practically every encounter.  Whites fear young black males and act apprehensive, worried, and defensive.  Young black males, internalizing the exquisite humiliation of their role, inhabit the part in varying ways that usually suffice to convince white persons of the accuracy of their culturally ingrained intuition.  This doesn't mean a young black male in inhabiting the part is doing anything wrong, simply that young black males often react to white persons within the context of the fear drama, having a dearth of culturally transmitted roles available to them and choosing how to act from among them.

What can be done to change things?  Perhaps white people could talk to black teenagers and young men as if they were just teenagers and young men.  Sitting at the bus stop?  Ask a black kid what school he goes to, whether he plays sports, what television shows he likes to watch, what the music is that he is listening to, etc.  Yup, you're a goofy cracker, but so what.  The distance separating black and white is one that can be bridged by simply normalizing the human interaction and the expectations between black and white.  Someone has got to start somewhere to make things better.  Why not make it you.

"A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him.  He shall keep the blow.  No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition."  Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King.

The Douchebaggery of Grammar and Usage Zealots

We have norms of grammar and usage for one purpose:  to make language universally intelligible to speakers of the same language.  The norms are largely arbitrary as can be seen by comparing the propriety of expressions across different languages.  For example, many tonal languages do not have plurals.  How can this be?  Seems unthinkable for an English-speaker, right?  Well, the billion plus speakers of tonal languages in Asia seem to do just fine.  Why?  Because their grammar and usage does not require making words plural due to the heavy reliance on context in their speech.  The point being that a norm in English is not universal, but is something that developed as the language itself developed and is not, as some might have you believe, sacrosanct (like the use of the second person plural just now and this run-on parenthetical fragment).

Norms are useful to the extent that speakers and writers internalize them and generally abide by them when speaking and writing which makes expression more readily intelligible to listeners and readers (though it should be noted that even our notions of speech and understanding bear correcting as it has become well-known among interested neuroscience specialists that much speech and the understanding of speech actually involves anticipation and so the actual completed expression of a speaker is of less importance than would seem to be the case from a common sense perspective on how language works).  Likewise, expressions that deviate from the norm but cleave close enough to it to be readily intelligible to speaker and listener or writer and reader seem for all practical purposes to fulfill the function of linguistic expression regardless of existing norms.  "Ain't" would be such an expression.  Every competent American English speaker who hears it knows what the speaker means and it seems rather prudish and Victorian to publicly insist that one ought to instead say "isn't" when they are functional equivalents.  It doesn't matter what the history of the contraction is or frankly any other highbrow criticism of the contraction as lacking meaning because, by any reasonable definition of "meaning," "ain't" has it and it, the meaning that is, is clear.

Ludwig Wittgenstein summarized the problem with being priggish about grammar and usage succinctly:  “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Philosophical Investigations 43).  Language is practical and is driven by how it is used, not by rules that are appended to it (and which, it must be said, are always appended to it after the fact - the edifice of language by necessity preexists the rules that are applied to it).  The notion that language requires policing is narcissistic, to say the least.  In the spirit of openness and honesty, I must admit that I am predisposed to this narcissism and struggle mightily not to be a grammar and usage zealot.  In any case, the problem is that if the goal is intelligibility and an expression is understood, then it is narcissistic and patronizing to insist that the speaker conform his or her speech not to intelligibility but to the norm that the pedant, as unofficial arbiter of all things language, informs them is the only way to express themselves intelligibly.  

It must be said that norms serve a purpose and there are situations in which adhering to them is necessary.  However, adhering to the norms in special cases is usually not necessary for intelligibility but rather is an issue of culturally transmitted norms of credibility.  Hence, when a lawyer writes a brief to an appellate court, she will avoid writing "ain't" because the accepted norms of legal writing deem such an expression to be improper and, given the insistence by those in the legal profession that the norms be adhered to, using the expression will diminish her credibility in the eyes of the readers of the brief despite the fact that "ain't" may have been otherwise perfectly intelligible to those same readers.  I believe that ad hoc and arbitrary norms in any specialized field should be abandoned in favor of common usage, but I also recognize that until the norms are abandoned one must conform to them if one hopes to maintain his or her credibility.  The same would be true of speech among any specialized cohort such as teenagers, chemists, or detectives.

Language is perpetually in tension:  pulled between the particular and the general.  This reflects the fact that language develops in response to local conditions but is also common to diverse populations and so the influence of one pulls at the other and vice versa.  Hence, we have phenomena such as the northern cities vowel shift, which is a geographically particular change in the way many persons in cities from Buffalo to Minneapolis pronounce certain vowel sounds.  It would be patently ridiculous to say speakers from this region are somehow speaking improperly in the same way it would be ridiculous to admonish all speakers of English from the 15th century or so onward for speaking improperly because they adopted the pronunciation of vowel sounds common after the great vowel shift and in some ways were speaking a debased English, an improper dialect if you will.  

The same can be said of grammar and usage - the particular influences the general and vice versa not because of some failure to abide by fixed and inviolate rules but rather because any human language is (and should be) subject to the vicissitudes of the experiences of its speakers.  Thus "hopefully" as commonly used may appear to some as daft or moronic or unintelligible, but for the vast majority of English speakers and readers, the term is immediately understood and perfectly functional.  While the pedants descry or laugh at the "malaproprism," the rest of us just use it.  And this is how it should be.

So speak to be understood and when you understand don't pontificate or act pompous about how another said it.  You are not Moses and words are not written in stone.

The Free Market Sucks. No Really, It Does.

"For-profit home health agencies are far costlier for Medicare than nonprofit agencies, according to a nationwide study published in the journal Health Affairs. Overall cost per patient was $1,215 higher at for-profits, with operating costs accounting for $752 of the difference and excess profits for $463. Yet the quality of care was actually worse at for-profit agencies, and more of their patients required repeat hospitalizations."

The study makes it clear that the "market" is more inefficient than Medicare and is frankly dangerous to the recipients of home health care from private agencies.  Why this should surprise anyone is beyond me.  The needs of a patient and the motives of for-profit home health agencies are obviously divergent, despite the failed attempts of states to regulate the conflict of interest out of existence.

In the words of the studies authors, "Letting for-profit companies into Medicare was a huge mistake that Congress needs to correct...  Our findings show once again that the free-market, private-sector managed care model has failed."

Of course no one will fix this because we definitely want to keep the government out of our Medicare.  They just screw everything up, you know.

Be Nice, Be Human (According to Science)

"The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at the same time that we developed a more co-operative temperament. If prehistoric people began living closer together and passing down new technologies, they'd have to be tolerant of each other. The key to our success is the ability to co-operate and get along and learn from one another."

Of course if we do not want to be successful, we can be selfish, violent, and antagonistic.  In other words, we could be Tea Partiers!  Further proof of the diminution in quality of life when we decide not to be tolerant and cooperative:  Wisconsin has a widening gap of life expectancy between whites and blacks in the U.S. while the gap in New York is shrinking substantially.  Also, "states in the northeast made considerably more progress than states in the west."  Isn't conservatism grand!

The Disruption Gospel: A Bill of Goods

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history...Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.

Jill Lepore has a good piece in the New Yorker on the problematic assumption that innovation or ‘disruption’ is necessary and virtuous.  Her point that the evidence on which the problematic assumption lies is flimsy should confirm any thinking person’s suspicions that the intellectual drivel coming out of Silicon Valley is self-interested, demonstrably wrong, and socially dangerous.  In this regard, Lepore’s observation that the innovation ‘gospel’ is in a fact a secularized (or material) faith is apt.  Disruption for disruption’s sake makes no more rational sense than conservatism for conservatism’s sake.  The ideas of disruption or conservatism only make sense or are supportable when they are instrumentalities that increase or safeguard human flourishing.

Our experience in the world is just that:  experience.  Hence, any school of thought, ideology, philosophy, etc. that purports to have answers to the human condition must be judged pragmatically:  does the proposed action or rule increase or protect human flourishing?  If it does, then the action or rule should be adopted, regardless of whether the action or rule is intellectually consistent with an overarching school of thought, ideology, or philosophy, etc.  Belief is not betterment no matter how strong the belief.  Lepore succinctly and delightfully points out what the innovation gospel conflates, “[T]he world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.”  Just because someone in Silicon Valley says newer is better, does not make it so.

Lepore most discerning argument against disruption is the most damning:  disruption is a self-fulfilling and inherently circular prophecy.

When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis.  Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didn’t dim the fervor for disruption; instead, it fueled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption lies...

It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Why would we accept a school of thought or an ideology that led to a crippling recession and continues to produce billionaires who claim to know the solutions to all of our problems so long as the solutions involve less regulation, less worker protection, less corporate taxation, less income redistribution, and more privatization of public goods?  For example, Facebook is entertaining, but hardly necessary.  If that is the case, why would anyone think the code writer behind the company would have anything particularly useful to say about public education?  Mark Zuckerberg has no education bona fides.  He is just a citizen and his voice should only count as much as any non-expert citizen.  And yet, his voice counts much more than the average citizen and his gospel is clear:  disrupt everything so long as the disruption is consistent with my vision of how the world works which is based the serendipitous conditions that led to me founding a successful multibillion dollar diversion.

This isn’t to say Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to improve public education is disingenuous, simply that it is dangerous, based as it is on the gospel of disruption, to which he subscribes.

Once more Lepore:

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business.  People aren’t disk drives.  Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subject to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or trucks or drygoods are industries.

The disruption gospel celebrates failure, but is this appropriate for public education?  Do we continue to disrupt the education of our students in the hopes of finding a silver bullet that doesn’t exist?  And what do we do with the fodder of disruption, with the millions of students subject to the whims of billionaires and their policy-making lackeys?  What do we do with the students who fail?  How shall they wear this badge of honor  (“When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation”)?  

Read Lepore and don’t drink the self-interested, disruption-flavored Kool Aid coming from Silicon Valley.  It is bad for jobs, schools, and the economy.

A Constant, Blinding Rage

I spend a fair amount of time on longform.org because it is a great resource for finding high quality, long form journalism.  One of the things that has been particularly rewarding lately has been reading the James Baldwin essays that the site has posted which have been thought-provoking and have led me to contemplate a number of things.  First, I consider myself a literate individual with a decent grasp of American history and literature.  However, reading James Baldwin has demonstrated that I am both less literate than I thought and have a more incomplete grasp of American history and literature than I previously supposed.  Second, reading Baldwin has demonstrated that despite having made some progress toward becoming a more egalitarian and less oppressive society, that progress has been depressingly small.  Third, reading James Baldwin often puts me in the mode of a spectator, simply observing the deftness and power of his language.  The man wrote with remarkable power, poignancy, and perception.   

The most recent essay I read is “From the American Scene: The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948.”  In it, Baldwin tackles a number of issues involving the experience of being a “Negro” in America.  Toward the end he makes a couple of observations that are worth repeating because they are accurate and powerful.  He writes that “oppression – the social and political optimists to the contrary – does not imbue a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity:  it breeds in them instead a constant, blinding rage.”  He is, of course, speaking of the African American experience.   As noted above, it is peculiar that I considered myself literate when I was exposed to no such perspective.  I carried an enormous amount of passion when I was young for justice and equality and would rage against the excesses and inequities of the farce known as Reagonomics; nevertheless, the experience that stirred my passion was not “oppression” of the sort Baldwin describes in the essay.  While Reagonomics undoubtedly sanctioned inequity and excess, my complaint in truth was one of quantitative degree.  I looked like the very opponents with whom I argued.  I debated Paul Ryan (yes, that Paul Ryan) in AP History class and realistically the only difference between myself and Paul was and is familial wealth.  Redistribute a bit here and there, luck out a bit here and there, and our positions could be flip-flopped.  My arguments were of a vertical sort, addressing the unfair quantitative differences separating people.  There was in me no “constant, blinding rage.”  I could not conceive of such a thing.  Despite my youthful radicalism, I was at base optimistic.  Things would be better if only we just shared the wealth more equitably.  Unfortunately, redistribution is not the answer to oppression (witness the blinding rage stirred by the image of the “black welfare queen”). 

I retain a sort of optimism, though one measured and realistic, tempered as it has been by time and experience.  One such experience adding nuance to my perspective has been greater exposure persons of African American descent, among others.  Coupled with reading Baldwin (and other African American writers), this exposure has opened a window on a part of the American experience to which I had previously been blind.  I was always against and horrified by racism.  Nevertheless, I could only grasp racism as an intellectual concept, as a category that was like class, which could be ameliorated through quantitative means. 

My son is completing second grade and many of his classmates and friends are African American.  They are, like all of his classmates, funny, delightful, mischievous, ornery, regular, goofy, serious, brilliant, difficult, easy, etc.  In short, they are regular kids.  However, I fear that my son’s classmates and friends will be, if they have not already been, subject to the oppression about which Baldwin writes.  Perhaps it will not come in the form of abject poverty and overt discrimination.  It will however, come in some form, be it traffic stops that happen simply because they are black and driving or the palpable discomfort many white people will express simply because they are young and black or the condescension of those who will assume that their achievements were not wholly “earned” because they are black and must have gotten some affirmative action or something or the razor’s edge they stand on as adolescents between freedom and incarceration for doing things that would just be stupid things if they were melanin-challenged and living in a suburb.  Oppression, I fear, will come.  In this respect, I wonder how far we have come, if at all from Baldwin who, in 1948 wrote,

I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.  All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand, and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

I look at the boys and girls with whom my son goes to school and I am furious that any single one of them has been or will be irreparably scarred by the conditions of his or her life.  I am furious that I went 40 years before I began to understand in a visceral way that being “black” is not a class category or even a race (as the term is ordinarily understood) but instead is a category of power(lessness).  I am grateful to have encountered James Baldwin on longform.org, but I am furious that I did not encounter him sooner as a mandatory part of my education.  I think every person would do well to read Baldwin and allow his words to percolate and sink in, to consider whether the world about which Baldwin wrote is so different from our own, to consider whether she has been complicit in perpetuating the power differential that causes oppression, to consider whether there is something he can do to change the power differential, to consider whether we want to live in a country where persons deemed “black” are irreparably scarred by the conditions of their lives, to consider how she can fight oppression so that hope and possibility and ordinary striving can “replace constant, blinding rage.”  I leave you with these words from Ta-Nehesi Coates and Lyndon Johnson:

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.

Whitnall Park, Late Spring

It is hard not to be moved by lovely weather in the late spring.  I went for a jog in Whitnall Park and encountered no others on the entire 3+ mile loop.  The temperature was comfortable, but the air was humid in the denser parts of this small forest.  Fresh green leaves covered the ground and exploded from the tree branches around me.  And the humid air seemed a catalyst to appreciate this sense of growth.  In such moments, one can understand the ancients and why they celebrated the return of spring.  Even my creaky knees seemed fraught with impossible possibility, that they were infected with youth, that they were capable of speed again.  

In the first part of the loop, the trail winds across the side of a long slope or ridge.  For a tenth of a mile or so, a short distance, the forest thins out, devoid of the scrub and bushes that otherwise crowd the space between tree trunks.  In this short distance, in this small space, the ground cover is thick and perhaps 3-4 inches high and it is everywhere, blanketing the ground so the trees look magical, as if they are sprouting from a carpet.  Had they fuzzy tops and unusual colors, the scene would be Seussian.  I sense the ethereal and unreal.

Although I do not hear Horton, I find this particular spot entrancing.  It takes much effort to maintain my pace, to keep going, to avoid the temptation to wander off the path and find a spot where rays of sun break through the canopy to the ground, to find the spot and bask in it, in the sunlight, in the verdure, in the impossible possibility, in the sense that I belong here now.  I force myself to consider poison ivy.  This reduces the temptation, but only a little.  I continue on.

I cannot put my finger on what it is about this particular spot that seems so lovely to me.  Nearly the entire loop is picturesque.  I suspect it is the sense of openness and height that has something to do with it.  A cathedral with green leaves through which the light of heaven streams.  But this is not all that is entrancing.  The ground cover growing over downed branches and trees creates the sense of incessant vitality:  even in death the forest brims, life explodes from the mortal wounds of time and weather.  Even the smell is different in this spot.  How so, I cannot say for sure.  The vegetal odor of the forest is present, but less strong than in other places.  I think that I can smell the trees and breathe in their monumental time and strength.  I think of Fangorn Forest and Treebeard when I pass through this space and this flight into Tolkien has something to do with it, I am sure.  

Honestly though, I do not worry about what makes the spot lovely because it is lovely and that is enough.  And it is a lovely late spring day and I had a chance to get outside and run through the lovely spot.  It is hard not to be moved and for that I am grateful.

Privilege, Responsibility, and Freedom (A Work in Progress)

This is a bit loose and unformed; nevertheless, I wanted to publish it because I thing it is an important topic that is frequently misunderstood.  The genesis for the post was thinking about the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Responsible.  For what are we responsible?  Are we, for example, responsible for the totality of the effects of privilege?  Common notions of responsibility (and decency) suggest that we are or at least should be.  If one is born into a particular station or class, one enjoys the benefits or privileges of the class and so should be obliged to accept responsibility for the effects the class has on others.  If the class into which one is born exists because it marginalizes, oppresses, or exploits other classes then one cannot ethically accept the benefits of class membership without also accepting responsibility for the marginalization, oppression, or exploitation.  In this sense, though it may seem counter-intuitive and unfair, children are responsible for the sins of their parents despite the inheriting responsibility solely through the accident of birth.  Just as it is inherently unfair to ask the disadvantage to bear their disadvantage solely because of the accident of birth, so too is it unfair to allow the privileged to enjoy the advantages of privilege that have been bestowed solely through the accident of birth without also requiring them to bear responsibility for the deleterious effects of their privilege.  Every member of society is responsible to her fellow members of society and this is a duty that cannot be compromised or abdicated without also compromising or abdicating one's moral duty.

The responsibility we have to our fellows never ceases, though its force becomes more imperative when social classes become more stratified and fixed because in stratification privilege and disadvantage are distributed in gross and uneven ways that tend to externalize the effects of privilege for those possessing it and to force the disadvantaged to internalize the costs or negative effects of privilege.  When social classes are flatter and more fluid advantage and disadvantage are distributed more fairly among members of society, in effect ensuring that everyone bears both the costs and enjoys the privileges of one's class without externalizing costs and forcing another group to bear them.  The flattening and fluidity of classes also prevents the ad hoc and irrational distribution of privilege and disadvantage through the accident of birth and the nonsensical mechanism of inheritance.  If we do not accept responsibility for disadvantage when society becomes more stratified and fixed, we abandon not only the moral imperative of social responsibility but we also debase and make a mockery of any cogent understanding of "freedom."

How so?  Quite simply, the idea of freedom requires a foundation of radical equality in order for the idea to be legitimate.  Otherwise, freedom is a purely a function of privilege:  the more privilege you have, the freer you are.  The inverse means that those born without privilege are also born without (or at least with severely diminished) freedom.  In this sense a stratified society is not a free society because "freedom" is in all practical senses coterminous with privilege.  Freedom as a distributed social value only has meaning for individuals and groups to the extent that they can exercise it.  Otherwise freedom is nothing more than an empty platitude or an incoherent abstraction.

[More to come]

The Cost of Entry and Diversity of Experience

I recently took a family trip to St. Louis.  While in St. Louis, we went to the zoo.  Aside from the ethical questions that all zoos raise, the St. Louis zoo was impressive in design, appearance, and scope.  Most noteworthy, though, was the fact that the zoo charges no entry fee.  As such, the patrons seemed considerably more diverse than what I experience when I attend the Milwaukee County zoo.  I cannot say for certain whether cost is the sole factor (and am not assuming that diversity is coterminous with poverty), but the city's promotion of the zoo and other cultural experiences as benefits of residency seems to make the experiences more communal.

In many ways, the St. Louis zoo reminded me of the Milwaukee lakefront during summer.  It is at the lakefront that the barriers of segregation are at their weakest because the public resource is limited in size, open to all, highly desirable, and accessible in cost.  I should add that there is no equivalent alternative available that could lead to populations self-sorting.  The St. Louis zoo or the Milwaukee lakefront are unique public resources and so have a truly public character.  The experience suggests to me that if we value diversity and prefer integrated social experiences to segregation or self-sorting, then we must place unique and desirable spaces and institutions wholly in the public domain.  By this I mean that the cost of entry and maintenance of the spaces and institutions must be spread progressively and fairly across the public through taxation rather than through usage fees, which are by nature regressive, even when partially subsidized.

Even small entry fees will have, like all regressive taxes, a discriminatory effect, favoring both those best placed economically and those whose sociocultural experience values the space or cultural institution.  In short, if institutions like zoos and museums charge entry fees, they largely become the domain of the middle and upper middle classes (and especially what might be called the traditional or 'white' middle and upper middle classes) because these groups, through received experience, place a sufficiently high value on cultural institutions like zoos and museums so that they will not only be able to pay entry fees but are also willing to do so.  There is nothing wrong with being middle or upper middle class; however, our communities are richer when valuable institutions that help us create shared histories and experiences are actually shared with all people. Progressively spreading the costs of cultural institutions is a sensible way to do this.

Another Take on Race

Jamelle Bouie has a response to the Chait piece at Slate.  It is worth reading because it offers an important corrective to Chait:  there is an actual lived experience of racism that Chait does not address.  The most poignant example is the feeling a 20-year-old black woman has when her younger brother rides his bike to the corner store and is tailed by a squad car.  Regardless of the rhetorical foibles to which our conflation of race and political persuasion have committed us, race still matters at a visceral, experiential, and real level because it in fact still exists.

Bouie effectively reminds us that while it makes sense to remember that racism and conservatism are not coterminous, we must also remember that many conservative policies (such as voter ID laws), whether overtly racist or not, have a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities, especially African Americans.  In instances when a policy, conservative or otherwise, has a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, we should still get rid of the policy, whether it's origin was intentionally racist or not, and we should not be afraid to discuss the policy's racial impact, regardless of how the policy's supporters react.  And this requires us to engage with, talk about, and act on the lived experience of black Americans.

Jonathan Chait Talks About Race without Hyperbole

Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece in the online edition of New York Magazine regarding the significance of race at this moment in U.S. politics, specifically as it relates to Barack Obama's presidency.  I found it to be one of the more thoughtful treatments of the question.  Chait's thesis is essentially that liberals are guilty of painting everything politically conservative as racist without examining whether the policy or the politician is in fact racist while conservatives are guilty of ignoring the white resentment that stokes conservatism generally and some particular conservative policies.

Chait summarizes his position in a brilliant extended statement:

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life.  On another level, it is a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense.  The spread of racial resentment in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality.  It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives.

While the article spends more time addressing the conservative side, Chait does a fair job of pointing out that liberals are perfectly comfortable in taking advantage of the association between conservatism and racism, justified or not, to their benefit.  A telling point is the surprise liberals often express when they make critical statements about Israel and are immediately portrayed as anti-Semites by conservatives.  The bottom line is that our political discourse is skewed because conservatives consider any mention of racism to be a smear against conservatism generally and liberals are willing to use specific instances of racism to smear all conservatives.  While racism is still troubling and alive in America, it would be nice if conservatives would stop assuming every mention of racism is a metonym for conservatism and if liberals would stop using it as one.

Lunch Walk

I like walkable cities and walkable neighborhoods.  I prefer walking or biking to getting into my car and driving.  I’ll be honest, part of me feels a bit smug about this and all the good I am doing the planet/city/neighborhood by leaving the car at home.  Still, aside from any moral or environmental benefits, walking is just nice for no other reason than it feels good to be outside doing what our bodies are engineered to do.  

I currently work near a mall in the suburbs and have lately taken to going for walks during my lunch hour despite the nightmarish traffic and frequently puzzling and seemingly arbitrary decision on which blocks get sidewalks and which blocks do not.  The other day I headed toward an open air “shopping center” across the street from where I work to start the walk.  Although the temperature was cold, the wind was not blowing and the sun was out.  I decided to take the sidewalk next to the businesses while I was out to see what was in the shopping center.  Needless to say, not many persons were walking about.  With the exception of one person, everyone I saw was either making the trip from car to store or vice-versa.  The thing is, though, this is kind of an interesting place if you go slow and pay attention.

I walked past a dance studio that caused me to smile, thinking of the gentle scam that convinces some lonely folks to come back again and again because of their undiscovered talent or the couples dutifully struggling through a foxtrot so they can learn to dance for their wedding (which will be deejayed by someone playing cheesy pop hits from the last three or four decades, few or none of which will be conducive to foxtrotting, waltzing, or cha-cha-ing).  

When I was in law school we studied a case involving a dance studio in which the plaintiff claimed to have been fraudulently induced to spend money based on the studio’s representation that she was talented.  The judge used the phrase, “Terpsechorean arts” at one point in the opinion and made a few of us laugh.  I still smile thinking of it.  

I admit to being slightly disappointed that no tall, slender, bleach blonde-haired woman with a slightly husky voice and an unidentifiable Slavic accent did not bump into me as I walked by to try and seduce me into believing I was, despite appearances to the contrary, the next Fred Astaire (or whomever the equivalent contemporary figure is, if indeed there is one, which I am inclined to doubt).  Of course this would presume a coeval cultural currency between us that would be as weird as this wistful vision of mine is.

As I approached the all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, a car pulled up. An old couple tottered out of the restaurant leaning on their respective canes and made their way to the car.  Another older couple walked slowly ahead of me for a moment or two before turning into the parking lot to get to their car.  The scene was melancholy.  Perhaps it is the fact that this restaurant has reduced food growth, preparation, and consumption to a mechanized event devoid of the unique, the real, and the spontaneous that did it for me.  A caloric Eden amid a nutritional desert sold at prices that cannot honestly reflect the actual costs involved, which must be borne on the backs of impoverished farmers and migrant workers and other cheap labor, that is borne on the backs of us all in the farm bills that subsidize the growers and processors and agri-chem companies and shippers and truckers and who knows who else.  While a part of me feels the guilt of snobbishness, I am still overwhelmingly convinced that the buffet restaurant is symptomatic of the depressed state in which the American middle class finds itself, part of the downward spiral of Wal-Martification, union busting, and wage suppression that has been going on for two decades or more.

For further proof I didn't have to walk far.  There is it was, that box of societal sorrow, defeat, and despair - a dollar store.  Advertising frozen chicken nuggets for a dollar.  A woman carrying three full plastic bags out of the automatic door.  Difficult.  Dolorous.  Determined.  As if she is not trying hard enough.  Obviously we should further erode her pride and force her to urinate into a cup to keep receiving the meager support the government gives her so she will not have to go hungry.  It only makes sense, right?  It isn't wrong to assume that if she's poor and needs some help that she's probably a drug user, right?

Next door is the high-end tea shop with clever lights and displays selling organic and specialty and fair trade teas that make you feel like a hero for purchasing them.  With appropriate implements necessary for the experience to be authentic and rare.  And commodified.  Like everyone else.  Aristocratic dreams.

The fabric store.  God-awful memories of my youth.  There can be few worse places in which to be a boy while accompanying one’s mother shopping than a fabric store.  Even the imagination has its limits and the fabric store tests them.  The rolls of fabric may entertain for a few minutes:  feeling the faux fir, checking out the sports themed racks.  But then what?  The soul-sucking begins.  The barely audible fluorescent light hum would be hypnotic if it weren't enervating.  The vinyl tile floor lacks the comfort of the carpeted department stores in the mall so you have to stand.  And that is basically all there is to do.  Stand and watch your mother look at fabric and patterns and thread while the light fixture hum bores a hole through your spirit.  Emptiness without nirvana. Boredom that lacks the panache of ennui.  Time slows unbearably.

Then there is the record store that miraculously survives without being a head shop, selling new vinyl and old vinyl and rare vinyl.  The record store beckons me.  Contrary to the horrors of the fabric store, the record store conjures up fond memories of my teenage years and my many sojourns to the record store in my home town where I would pore over Clash and Cure and REM albums amid the always changing but ever-present incense aroma.  Sometimes I would talk to the owner when he was working.  He was a scrawny dude with heavy metal hair and innumerable concert tees.  Once when I was fifteen he sold some weed to a friend and me, though it wasn't at the store.  We burned a bowl and went to the county fair glassy-eyed and ridiculous.  

The hearing aid store makes me think of my father who died nearly eight years ago.  He wore hearing aids, though he spent years denying that he needed them while we shouted our objections.  I miss him often and am grateful for things that bring him back to me if only for a short while.

Eventually I make my way past the last store and return to my usual route through the neighborhoods in the area, alone in the midday winter sun and happy I didn’t drive a block-and-a-half for a burger and fries.  

Failure Is an Option, at Least When Learning Something New

This is a post I published on the blog I write for Medical Systems, Inc.:

Medical News Today reports on an article in Pscyhological Science (subscription required) that found how we practice new tasks is more important than the frequency with which we practice new tasks to master them. Specifically, researchers found that persons who took risks or took more time between practices mastered a new video game faster than their peers who were more conservative and frequent in their approach to practice. The researchers concluded that, "individuals who were able to learn faster had spaced out their practices or registered fluctuating results during early game performances, indicating that these participants were analyzing how the game works, leading them to perform better." Tom Stafford, one of the authors, stated "inconsistency doesn't necessarily reflect flakiness, it reflects a willingness to explore the parameters of the game… [B]eing unafraid to fail early on, you gain the knowledge needed to support superior performance later on."

The findings may prove important in developing training and education strategies in multiple settings, including the workplace. According to Stafford:

If we can work out how to learn more efficiently we can learn more things, or the same things in less time. In an economy where we're all working for longer and longer, the ability to learn across the lifespan is increasingly important… This kind of data affords us to look in an unprecedented way at the shape of the learning curve, allowing us to explore how the way we practice helps or hinders learning.

This should give anyone who is an educator, whether in a school, the office, on the athletic field, etc., pause to consider how to foster creative risk-taking. Novel approaches to problems should be embraced rather than criticized when the approach is creative and well-thought out as it appears that the seeds of mastery are sown in the fields of creative failure.