Ned Danison, unedited

Do you support war? Do you think the rich should pay their fair share of taxes? Should the poor receive government assistance? Do you think it’s important to preserve the natural environment?

There are people who can answer these and many other similar questions quickly and unequivocally. These people are more concerned with style than substance. These are the people for whom it is important to be on the “correct” side of an issue, even though the issues, in substance, do not have one single correct side. The honest response is, “That depends”.

There is always an easy answer to such questions which says “I’m intelligent”, “I’m hip”, and “I care”, or at least such an answer will put you in the crowd that advertises these qualities. It is the answer which does not lump you in with the ignorant (traditional, uneducated, narrow-minded), unpopular (backward, nowhere, uncool), and callous (bigoted, warmongering, haters).

A liberal lifestyle is one that above all puts on an enlightened face, often by espousing vague ideals in bumper sticker forms. Such forms are substitutes for substantive thinking on complex issues. So once the slogans are unpacked and put to the test of argument and evidence, there may be no enlightenment inside at all, but only a stylish facade.

It’s easy to adopt the liberal enlightened style. I grew up in it.

Probably as an outcome of our affluent age, our preferred course of action in dealing with a problem is to skip the subtleties and specifics and throw money at it. Everything comes down to money, we say, so we might as well just put a dollar amount on a problem and get it over with. That’s one side of it. The other side is, when there’s a lot of money being thrown around, it behooves those who want a cut of the action to conceal all specifics by promoting a big, global crisis that only lots of money can solve.

(Here’s, by way of Paul Jacob at Common Sense, a nice example of the point I am about to make.)

1. Social institutions set up as social safety nets (churches, charities of various kinds) have been eclipsed by behemoth government entitlement programs. Where there were once many small, dispersed local charity groups who could help people at their specific point of need (in many cases, one charitable individual dealing with one needy individual under the auspices of the organization), there is now Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security — programs whose chief concern is channeling money to meet those many and diverse needs. The money has become the focus: people who have money should give some of it to other people who don’t have money — whatever their need happens to be, if they even have a legitimate need!

It is now painfully obvious that these government entitlement programs are inefficient, corrupt, and deep in debt. There is bound to be some inefficiency and corruption in charitable enterprises, but when there are many dispersed, small-scale organizations, a cancer in one doesn’t affect all the others. The opportunities for corruption in small enterprises are proportionate to their size. When the charitable enterprise becomes a national, impersonal, faceless behemoth, the opportunities for corruption are also proportionate to its size.

People helping people at their point of need has been supplanted by a process of politicians securing votes for themselves from people who benefit from entitlement programs. The taxpayers who would have been voluntarily charitable now have their charitable impulses numbed by the fact that they’re “helping others” by paying taxes (which are involuntary contributions!).

So in the national discussion on “poverty”, the loudest, shrillest voices wrest the discussion away from local situations and specific needs and put the spotlight on money, or more specifically, the haves versus the have-nots. The very definition of poverty is not even clear in the discussion. We are not talking about “ill-clad, ill-housed, and ill-fed” anymore, since only the tiniest minority fit this description. The point seems to be that some people have money and they must give it to other people via government bureaucracies (or as President Obama put it, we should “spread the wealth around”).

The government will use its power of imprisonment — indeed, power over life and death — to make sure you “contribute”. And yet the goodhearted people of the United States are not completely numb to a sense of personal responsibility to the needs of others, as they continue to contribute to charity over and above what their government forces them to do through taxation.

2. It is also painfully obvious that American public education is an international embarrassment. The ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and waste — not to mention fraud and abuse — in the public school system is on display for all to see (I happen to see it up close and personal quite frequently because I am a teacher in the public school system and a PhD candidate in a university department of Educational Theory and Practice).

In the national discussion of what to do about all of this, the focus inevitably becomes money: How much money is spent per pupil? How much are teachers paid? How much equipment does a school have? How much should people be taxed? Discussions of “equity” are also, bottom line, discussions of money, i.e., do the have-nots get as good an education as the haves?

There are many good schools, good teachers, good facilities, and good students with good test scores out there in public education. I happen to live in a school district where this seems to be the case. I also work in school districts where this is definitely not the case. Some other time, I’ll go into the many and subtle factors that result in a good education, but for now I will assert that it is not primarily a question of money. There are worse educational outcomes in places where the money spent per pupil is higher than in places with better educational outcomes. The story of KIPP schools and successful teachers like Rafe Esquith are examples of better teaching approaches — not more more money per pupil — that produce vastly better educational outcomes than the public schools that spend tons more money for dismal outcomes.

But the winning voices always come back to demands for more money or less money — throw more money at it, or throw less money at it. There is little subtlety in the discussion beyond whether teachers should have tenure or whether they should be paid on some kind of merit basis, say, according to student test scores. Somehow, the line goes, making the money situation more equal will make things better.

As in the case of the social safety net, the discussion of education of individual children at their specific point of need has been hijacked by big, top-down concerns: federal incentive programs, labyrinthine one-size-fits-all safety and equality legislation, and teacher’s unions, to name a few. The massive public school machine becomes more and more like a faceless, nationalized entitlement program and less a matter of individual children being met at their point of need by individual teachers.

3. I am close to someone who works on the front lines of the charity business at a small town church. This church, together with other churches in town, collects money from congregants to help the local needy people. This would seem an example of what I advocate in place of big government taking over the charity business — sort of a holdover from my imagined Golden Age of charity and personal responsibility. Well, yes, in a way. But here is what I see: People throwing money at a problem by way of putting a few bucks in the collection plate and believing it will find its way to the Needy’s point of need. Real needs are met occasionally, but only those needs that can be met with money.

The poor souls who come looking for assistance fill out a form and receive help in the form of a paid rent or electric bill, and that’s a good thing. But the habits of these people — their addictions, their incontinence, their laziness, their ignorance — go on unchanged. To truly meet such people at their point of need would be to spend actual face-to-face time with them persuading them to change their habits and their attitudes.

continued

It just occurred to me that life in the Middle Ages with its many burdensome proscriptions (especially on sex) is a lot like the late United States with its burdensome pronouncements on safety, environmental regulations, and playing-field-leveling affirmative action-style laws.

Science has replaced religion. The state of the art in the Middle Ages was lords and serfs looking to the authority of the Church to know how to live to get to heaven in the afterlife. Now the state of the art is democratic governments looking to scientific research for answers to how we should all live here and now. In either case, we have establishments we consider authoritative.

It seems obvious, but it is crucial to keep in mind that the understanding modern science has of the complexity of nature and human economies (just to name two general areas) is incomplete, even as the understanding of medieval thinkers was incomplete. Sure, we know a lot more now, but we still cover vast areas of ignorance with assumptions and guesses. In place of knowledge, we rely on authorities — people who claim to know how things work. And when these authorities don’t really know how it works, then we put faith in them that at least they are smarter than the masses, and thus make their policies and proscriptions for the masses’ own good.

Here is what was wrong in the Middle Ages and what is still wrong now: when the vast, distributed knowledge of the masses is trumped by the concentrated knowledge of the (elite) authorities, power is given to those whose knowledge is most limited. Science and religion are wonderfully complex things, and they offer a depth of knowledge that no individual can possess. Everyone should pursue this knowledge. But when it comes to the way people live their lives and do their business, the ones best equipped to make a decision in any individual case are the ones with the most local knowledge. And these decision makers would do even better if they had a broader education. To presume that some authority far away is better equipped to permit and proscribe what can be done in whole categories of daily life is just foolish. Authorities like this presumption, though, because it makes people dependent on them and gives them more power and more opportunities to exploit the masses with that power.

In the Middle Ages an exploitation of the masses was (to give only one example) the sale of indulgences — authorities extracting money from the masses in exchange for remission of punishment for sins. In our day, an exploitation of the masses comes in the form of reports of research that lead people to choose one course of action over another because, since it has been “researched”, it must be the better, more scientific course of action. Grant money is behind flawed (tendentious, dishonest) research on “climate change” and banking practices, to name only two areas. These studies are funded by people with a political interest in the outcomes. The masses step to their tune with votes, donations, and lifestyle changes.

A question I used to ponder a lot when I lived in Taiwan in the 1990′s resurfaced the other day. That is, why do the Chinese appear to be less creative than other civilizations? After all, the ancient Chinese gave the world the compass, gunpowder, paper, and other great inventions. But now they don’t produce anything really world-famous except Chinese food and maybe kung fu. Their neighbors the Japanese have been busy producing tiny electronics, anime, Miyazaki, and stuff seldom seen here in the West that is popular throughout Asia.

Why did the Chinese creativity dry up? There are several theories. I can point you in the direction of books on the subject if you’re interested. Mostly they point to the creativity-stifling nature of authoritarianism which is at the heart of Chinese social order. This pretty well sums it up, but more nuance is needed. My point here is one I don’t think I’ve read in any of those writings. I will get to it: in order to create new, world-changing things that people want (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook), you need 1) an economic level that allows leisure time, 2) a stable society with sediment layers of prior knowledge and invention, and 3) a social environment that tolerates cultural variety. What I think is a new addition to the going theories is the point that a standard of living has to be high enough and stable enough over time to allow lots of smaller innovations to develop while allowing more and more people the time and opportunity to have access to them.

If the social environment is stable and comfortable such that a critical mass of people can recognize that the new and different may well be better than the old and familiar, individuals will not be discouraged by social pressures to conform. Those pressures may always be there, but having leisure and freedom will cause others to lighten up and not feel so threatened by alternative ways of doing things.

The social environment aspect is especially relevant to Chinese culture because, having such a rich and ancient legacy, and having this as a point of pride and distinction in the world, letting all that go would be a kind of admission that some other way of life is superior. That would be a big loss of face. But of course, they don’t have to let all that go. They just need to build up new layers of Chinese achievements — or at least peculiarly Chinese trends that are consonant with current world fashions, such as communications devices, software, cartoons, movies. Once there is a new “tradition” of Chinese-style things (as there is a Japanese-style of cartoon), there can be more & more variations on them which generate even newer and more interesting things.

To be continued.

I just wrote a response on Amazon to a negative review of a book I like. Since I haven’t posted anything on my blog in a while, I thought I’d put that response here. Here’s the guy’s review. Here is my response:

Dear Salty,

Your comments are well-stated, and your point is clear: political philosophy cannot be boiled down to a polarized one-dimensional spectrum. The moment we attempt to describe or represent something, we reduce, we use metaphor. This is the limitation of thought and the poverty of language.

Your line of attack is a type of what I call the “philosophy stopper”. That is, since everything is so complex that it can only be smashed and hammered into some simpler form (no matter how sophisticated a shape it may take), any attempt to represent reality in some digestible form is just an exercise in perspectivism. This is a line often taken in graduate seminars in humanities when academics either 1) want to avoid criticizing someone by side-stepping the specifics of their argument or 2) want to dismiss someone’s argument without ever getting into the details.

Theorists and thinkers reduce, or, as Sowell says on page 5 of the book in question, “The ever-changing kaleidoscope of raw reality would defeat the human mind by its complexity, except for the mind’s ability to abstract, to pick out parts and think of them as the whole.” That’s why Confucius analogized all social life to family life. It’s what Karl Marx was doing when he said “The history of all … society is the history of class struggles” (Communist Manifesto). Freud constantly reduced human behavior to unconscious drives. Hayek had his economy-as-biology metaphor. Just pick your thinker.

The question is not whether simplifying the landscape of human thought and history is remarkably appealing — it’s not only appealing, but it is necessary. The questions to ask of a work like Sowell’s are: How interesting is his focus? How good is his metaphor? What evidence does he have to back up his arguments?

Sowell’s favorite metaphor, it seems, as he has expounded on in several books, is the Vision, which is “what we sense or feel *before* we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory… A vision is our sense of how the world works” (p. 4). Social visions, he posits, are rooted in basic conceptions of the nature of man” (p. 9).

So far I’d say Sowell’s metaphor has “heuristic value” — it is a good starting point — because, for one thing, conceptions of human nature have been taken quite seriously by anthropologists as keys to cross-cultural differences (notably Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck). And so within Western thought and culture, different ways of conceiving human nature will likely lead to different political values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Then we should ask whether or not Sowell ultimately delivers on this good start. I think he does. But we’ll have to get into the details of the book to make that judgement in a meaningful way.

Sincerely,
Ned Danison

My wife and I went into town to watch the Memorial day parade. We set our lawn chairs up on main street alongside the crowds of townsfolk. We waited a long time for the parade to come by. My wife stepped out into the street to take a picture of the crowds, and as I watched her there, out in the empty road with all the crowds lining the street, I was conscious for a moment that she looks different from most of the other folks around us. She is a transplant from another country, another ethnicity, another race. I guess I saw her this way because I was aware other people were looking at her, and I wondered what they were thinking, if they noticed she is “different”.

Immediately, it struck me: This woman is an exceptionally productive citizen, and we’re all better off because of her contribution. Compared to many of these other folks — especially those who might think she’s somehow less of a citizen because she’s an immigrant — this woman is a pillar in this town. This woman has a work ethic that puts most Americans to shame. She also raises her children with discipline, respect for learning, an appreciation of beauty, and a sense of honor and decorum. This is probably the single most productive thing a mother can do: the quality of this town, i.e., the ethics and mannerliness of succeeding generations, depends on parents who instill their children with the prerequisites of civilization.

In addition to working at two part-time jobs, my wife creates works of artistic beauty and sells them in several local venues. Because of her, this town is more beautiful and has a higher value because of the time and labor she puts in to her craft. The things she creates become the treasured possessions of others. She does this because she enjoys working hard at what she loves, and even though the rewards she gets for her work are far less than what they could be (and should be), she nonetheless works hard at it because she believes being productive is a reward in itself. This attitude is also a thing of beauty, and this town is better off because of it.

I looked at all the various people and thought about what we each contribute to society. Each one, no doubt, has a contribution, greater or lesser. But I know so many people who do not uphold our culture by exercising simple politeness and decorum, who do not instill decency in their children, who never produce a single work of beauty, and who expect rewards for producing nothing. These people most likely don’t even realize that the sum of these things is civilization. The extent to which there are more people like my wife and fewer people like them is the extent to which societies are pleasant and enjoyable, the extent to which economies thrive and civilizations flower.

Here is a politician saying something of substance, something verifiably true. What do the media think is most remarkable about what she has to say? She doesn’t look at the camera.

There I was, idly reading a New York Times article about how American college freshmen are more stressed out than ever before (which is a laugh, really, when you know something about the life of college students in China or India). One thing led to another, and I thought: Hmm, what is the percentage of college educated people in the United States? That led me to Wikipedia (Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree, about 39%), and to this: “Educational attainment in social theory”. I have opinions. You can refer to the text I am responding to by clicking here.

The background is that over the past three or four years I have read a lot of education theory. I’ve read, among other things, the theories mentioned in the Wikipedia article: Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods” and Pierre Bourdieu’s “Outline of a Theory of Practice” — well, as best as I could read Bourdieu. So I read “Culture and Power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu” by David Swartz. No doubt Bourdieu is a genius, and I don’t pretend to have any more than a basic grasp of what he’s talking about, but I get the feeling, as with all postmodern writers, that he could just cut the crap and make his point somewhat simpler.

After all of that — and now that I’m not in any graduate seminars where we act like this stuff is very relevant and important — I look at the Wikipedia gloss on these theories and they strike me as complete nonsense. Well, almost complete. At least, they seem to make huge assumptions with no acknowledgment of what most people can see is common knowledge.

That common knowledge is, in short, that there are good habits and bad habits, and, luck notwithstanding, the consequences of each will follow.

On Bourdieu, Wikipedia says: (1) “Students who possess the valued cultural capital… are rewarded with high academic achievement.” The idea here is that social classes reproduce themselves by “rewarding” their particular ways with achievement. Well, how about this: if you study hard, like Jewish immigrants of the early 20th century or Chinese immigrants of the later part, for example, you will will reap academic rewards. Sure, you have to learn the language and the customs associated with higher learning, and you still may not enter the cocktail circuit of the so-called white elite classes, but your education is worth something, and you will become lawyers and doctors and engineers. And you will, on average have a higher income than the other ethnic groups (Asian-Americans have the highest average income). “Cultural capital” is simply good habits — parents who make their children study, strong work ethic, perseverance, thrift, etc.

Furthermore on Bourdieu: (2) “Members of the working class, on the other hand, are not rewarded for their cultural capital in schools, and are instead socialized for working class jobs.” If the immigrants who came from abjectly poor backgrounds can achieve higher education by applying good habits, why can’t the so-called working class? To say they are “not rewarded for their cultural capital” sounds like they should be rewarded for their habits, whatever they may happen to be. What is cultural capital anyway? “Capital” that does not carry its own reward isn’t capital in the first place! You can’t start a business with beads as your start-up capital. Beads aren’t capital. Bad habits are not capital.

On Lareau: “[M]iddle class parents engage in concerted cultivation to teach their children, while lower and working class parents do not… The child-rearing practices of lower and working class families thus do not comply with the standards of educational institutions” and schools do a disservice to working class children because they encourage and expect everyone to follow the middle class model. Setting aside the class labels, let’s put it this way: Some parents hold their kids to higher standards and help them study and some parents don’t. Since public schools have to teach everyone (except those lucky enough to be able to afford the schools of their choice), what should they assume? Should they assume that none of the kids have parents at home who value education, who do what is necessary to give their kids the attitudes and aptitudes necessary to grasp the abstract and seemingly irrelevant stuff that schools have to teach? Or should they be able to assume that the necessary priming has been done, and that everyone can get on with it? Again, as with Bourdieu, it’s not a matter of educational institutions failing classes of people; it’s a matter of numbers of people failing to breed good habits into their children.

In the spirit of compromise, let’s try teaching kids with the “working class” educational model for a while. Let’s respect their cultural “capital” and design curricula accordingly. I’m still waiting to see what that model might look like. The minimum requirement for education (in math, science, language arts, etc.), it seems to me, is a willingness to engage the mind in the acquisition of abstract knowledge and to expand one’s mental connections — the key word being willingness. Students have to bring this attitude to school with them, and they have to bring it from home.

(continued, maybe.)

I posted a comment on Language Log a few days ago, and it appears it’s been removed. That’s okay, I’ll just make the point here. One way or the other, it amounts to less than a germ on a flea on a dead cat in the middle of nowhere.

I have said this several times already, quoting Will Rogers: Everyone’s ignorant, only about different things.

Lately I’ve been getting fed up with academics such as linguists, using their expertise in a narrow, esoteric field (linguistics, as interesting as it is to me, seems more and more useless the more I study it) as a credential to intone on politics, as if their knowledge of phonetics makes their political views more enlightened than others who know nothing about phonetics.

What’s worse is when these posers call people whose business IS political opinion ignorant. Ignorant? Ignorant of what? The devil is always in the details, and academics rarely trouble themselves with details beyond their areas of expertise. Who can blame them? Phoneticians are busy with phonetics, and there is a vast universe of details beyond phonetics of which they are ignorant.

On any given issue, there are arguments to be made and evidence to be presented. The fact that Rush Limbaugh, for example, has a particular stance or belief doesn’t make him wrong or right; the argument and evidence he can provide to back up his position either has merit or doesn’t. To dismiss him as ignorant and bigoted has nothing to do with politics, and nothing to do with the merit of his opinions.

But so many academics talk as if anything coming from Rush Limbaugh must be wrong because he is “conservative” (which implies ignorance and bigotry). That is to say, the details, the political science, the reason that Limbaugh regularly employs (if these so-called intellectuals were honest enough to actually listen to Limbaugh for more than just a few soundbites) don’t matter at all. What matters is the camp he’s in, and the camp they are in. One would like to expect more from “educated” people.

The academics I often rail about seem to be motivated by a desire to feel smarter than everyone else, and to set themselves above the masses by virtue of their education. In simple terms, I would put it this way: When it comes to government, it is necessary to have a certain amount of control over the affairs of people. There are those who think the smart people should be in charge because they are qualified to make better decisions than ordinary people; thus there should be greater government control, and the educated elite should be in charge. Then there are those who believe that knowledge is distributed among all people and not concentrated among the so-called educated elite. People should be free enough to make their own decisions in most cases because they are uniquely placed to have the specific knowledge necessary to make those decisions. Thus there should be less government control.

The biggest problem with government, as I see it, is that it is prone to chronic mismanagement. The bigger it is, the more it tries to manage, the more mismanagement there will be. And the cost of this mismanagement is passed on to the citizenry. That is, in short, why I advocate smaller government, and why I am irritated by linguists who snark at political opinions as if their expertise in linguistics has anything at all to do with it.

(this is the continuation from here)

I promised at the beginning I was going to say something about Chinese culture, but so far I have rambled on about the Americanness of the interaction between the guy and me in the restroom. Well, now for the anticlimax: in general I’d have to say that what transpired in the restroom incident would probably happen just about anywhere in the world. I mean: One guy at a urinal, another guy walks in, they’re familiar with each other, one guy greets the other, certain embarrassed or ambivalent feelings arise, etc., etc. — this probably happens in most cultures in the modern world where there are restrooms and urinals.

I say probably because I really don’t know for sure. Who can say anything scientific about this without systematically observing a large number of actual occurrences? I’ve asked people from Chinese and American cultures whether it is within the range of expectations for men who are acquainted to greet one another while one is at the urinal. No one is sure whether there is protocol for this situation, but everyone seems to think greeting is optional and not unusual.

As for my own experience, I married into a Chinese family about 18 years ago. Then I lived in Taiwan for eight years, all the while working in colleges. The first five years, I was a teacher in a sort of junior college that is equivalent to three years of high school and two years of college in the US. I’ve also visited homes and colleges in China on a few occasions, so I have a sense of the Chinese (Taiwanese) version of the situation I’m discussing here. But in all those years and occasions, I wasn’t really thinking about it. That is, nothing struck me as very different in the situation.

I can use my conceptual tools to describe the Chinese cultural template as it constrains the range of expectations in an equivalent situation (i.e., a couple of male colleagues at a school having this kind of encounter in a rest room). To repeat, those concepts are:
- sensory awareness
- communication channel
- communicative goal constrained by setting, social differences, and prior/shared context.

The first thing I should note is that my experiences among Chinese people are always as a foreigner. That means I have to factor in that Chinese may regard me as an alien, and I can’t say from personal experience that the way I’ve been treated and the way people interact with me is the way natives treat each other. Yet we’re all human, and, as necessary as it is to mention the alien factor, it might have only a small effect on the interaction. How small or large? That’s another question for empirical study.

(continued)