"When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too"

1. Sam Anderson (NYT sentence-of-the-day guy) does a year-in-marginalia -- a form that is distinctly more natural for me than a Year in Reading (or a Month in Swindon); I particularly liked this Bolano passage:

And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn't using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn't a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry. 

2. Stephen Haven (a.k.a. Heaven-Haven) describes a dinner in Beijing with the wonderfully named Chinese poet Duo Duo:

Duo Duo said, “No, that is not the difference. The difference is something else. British and American poets always have to ‘tell the story,’ and at the end of their poems they sum the story up. In France and Germany poets don’t do that.” Duo Duo said he admired Rilke, Paul Celan, Apollinaire, Rene Char, André Breton. [...]  Maybe that is why modern, Continental poetry comes through better, because it is more powerfully built on imagery, especially when the imagery is surreal. Maybe Frost’s long narratives are untranslatable, I said, because they are so subtle [...] We talked about American and British poets Duo Duo admires. He said he loved Roethke, Charles Wright, R.S. Thomas, Ashbery, Mark Strand, Whitman, James Tate, James Wright, Dickinson. When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too, and Hart Crane was also an important poet for him, many years ago.

3. Mark Lilla's review of The Reactionary Mind is awful in an exemplary way. (He thinks the book is awful in an exemplary way too, and perhaps it is; I haven't read it.) The book (by all accounts) argues that conservatives throughout history have really been driven by the desire to justify oppression and oppose equality. The review asserts that this is obviously incorrect because conservatives have disagreed with one another -- a non-sequitur if there ever was one; as if it weren't possible to disagree about the correct way to justify oppression -- and then goes on to restate a bunch of conventional tropes about conservatism and liberalism. (This story is evidently preempted by the argument of the book under review, which is that the metaphysics is a smokescreen for interest-group politics; but it is not clear if Lilla sees this. -- "Sees" is, incidentally, a palindrome like "eye" and its cognates.) However, I thought this antithesis of Lilla's was thought-provoking and not obviously wrong:

The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.

(I think the correct way to read "history" -- given the context of the rest of the article -- is as "large events"; i.e., you can unpack the claim as saying that reactionaries and revolutionaries are people whose views on politics hinge on the moral significance attached to specific historical events, rather than on a theory of human nature. It is not entirely implausible that some such distinction is behind some intra-left or intra-right squabbling. Lilla's attempts to apply this schema to contemporary politics are pretty weak, however.)

Less-than-sterling

Interesting Guardian article about CasaPound, an Italian fascist group named after the Pound:

[Pound's] daughter is now taking action to defend his reputation after an Italian fascist organisation named itself after the poet.
Mary de Rachewiltz, 86, has launched a lawsuit to force the far-right group CasaPound, which has about 5,000 members, to change its name.
"A politically compromised organisation like this has no business using the name Pound," said De Rachewiltz, who lives in a hilltop castle in northern Italy where she reads The Cantos to students.
[...]
Taking a lead from Pound's fascist ideals and denouncement of usury, CasaPound campaigns for cheap public housing but has been accused of attracting violent supporters. A Rome member was arrested last month on suspicion of assaulting leftwing activists.
[...]De Rachewiltz responded: "Pound was not leftwing or rightwing and you have to understand The Cantos to understand that. It is also a question of style. I have seen pictures of their shaven-headed leader and it does not impress me."

The poor, the sleepless, the wet, and the cramped

1. A Thomas Bernhard story, "Two Tutors" -- as good a place to start reading Bernhard as any, though of course there is no excuse for not reading Wittgenstein's Nephew, which is short -- with some instantly recognizable Bernhard touches:

“If you can imagine,” he said,  “that already as a child I had to lie in bed awake for ten, twelve nights in a row, dead tired, without being able to sleep. An adult,” he said,  “can, thanks to his intelligence, control his sleeplessness, make it ridiculous. Not a child. A child is at the mercy of sleeplessness.” Above the New Gate, without as usual looking down vertically on the town, we turned, as every day, to the right, not to the left: he wants to turn right, turns right, so I also turn right, because at this point above the New Gate he has always turned right, he now no longer dares turn left, I think . . . It is up to me, one day to turn left, then he too will turn left, follow me, because he is the weaker of the two of us. . . For the same reason I have now for weeks been following him to the right . . . Why? The next time I’ll simply turn left, then he too will turn left . . . The time when I can be useful to him when as usual I allow him to turn right, follow him to the right, is over, I think, now I only harm him, when I let him turn right and follow him . . . He no longer has the strength all at once to turn left . . . Shortly after the fork he said:  “What I said to you regarding my sleeplessness is related to my discharge from the Innsbruck establishment, in which, as you know, I was employed until the beginning of the holidays.” He said,  “All my life I have led only an awful life, and it is my right to lead an awful life, and this awful life is my sleeplessness . . . But now, the story which led to my discharge from the Innsbruck establishment. Like all my stories it begins with my inability to sleep. I was unable to fall asleep. I take many drugs, but no drug helps me any more. I had,” he said,  “walked for hours along the north bank with my students. We were all tired. My eyes open, incapable of distracting myself by reading, at the mercy of my lifelong sleeplessness, I was gripped by the most despicable thoughts and said to myself again and again: they sleep, I don’t sleep, they sleep, I don’t sleep, I don’t sleep, they sleep, I don’t sleep . . . This boarding school silence, this dreadful silence emanating from the dormitories . . .

 2. A Christmas tree made of pencils; other things similarly constructed but merely rectangular:

3. Epic floods in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. (I'll put up a link to a relief/donations page when I can find one.)

4. Mike Konczal quotes T.M. Scanlon on the non-transferability of social obligations:

The strength of a stranger’s claim on us for aid in the fulfillment of some interest depends upon what that interest is and need not be proportional to the importance he attaches to it. The fact that someone would be willing to forgo a decent diet in order to build a monument to his god does not mean that his claim for aid in his project has the same strength as a claim for aid in obtaining enough to eat (even assuming that the sacrifices required on others would be the same). Perhaps a person does have some claim on others for assistance in a project to which he attaches such great importance. All I need maintain is that it does not have the weight of a claim to aid in the satisfaction of a truly urgent interest even if the person in question assigns these interests equal weight.

This makes sense at first glance but I am not sure I want to agree with it; as a descriptive statement it comes down to the observation that people are "paternalistic" towards other people (they're willing to "help" but only in matters in which they can imagine themselves wanting to be helped -- i.e., a typical limits-of-empathy problem). So the distinction most people would make between helping with the food and the monument is a moral failing in my book. Speaking of food, I recently came upon this Economist blog post:

as [Duflo and Banerjee] remark, “things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor”. They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player.” Why had he bought all this if he didn’t have enough money for food? “He laughed and said ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.’”

As Sarah Duff recently said, Orwell has been here:

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes – an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread…? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.  … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! ... Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium.

Scanlon would say, I suppose, that there's no obligation to let the poor buy the food they want. In a sense this is true: redistribution followed by frivolous use makes for bad politics; even non-fungible transfers to the poor are better than no transfers, and have the advantage of being politically (somewhat) safe. As a point of morality, however, I disagree, for reasons prev. discussed. (One could make a non-utilitarian argument for Scanlonian redistribution on the grounds that it reinforces civic participation or whatnot but I'm not interested in this line of thought.) The apparent broader lesson is that although redistribution and nannying are different issues in principle, they are largely the same issue in practice because people suck and are censorious/nosy. It is not clear what one can do about this: to the extent that morals are immutable, one either has to make pre-transfer outcomes much more equal (presumably by cleverly redefining the concept of transfers, or by intervening in economic activity) or give up on the issue.

(Perhaps because I have never attempted to run a business and have no interest in doing so, I'm not bothered by the idea of heavy economic regulations on corporations if the ultimate result is to give poor people more freedom to eat unhealthy food. I fear that this will always be a minority view.)

A gaggle of dissonances

These posts are all talking about the same thing:

1. Ian Leslie, today, on Obama's speech:

even though the policies he laid out are, on their own terms, popular, the signal they send about his position is that he's a traditional tax and spend Democrat. During the British 2005 general election the Tories took a hardline on immigration because polls told them it was a popular position. But the signal it sent was 'same old Tories'.

2. Erica Greider (at the Economist's American politics blog) on the popularity of "compromise":

What I find striking is the staggeringly high number of people who say they want politicians to compromise: fully 85% of respondents (even though the alternative to compromise, as the poll frames it, is "not getting as much done" rather than "falling into gridlock, dissolution, and despair"). [...] In practice, politicians do tend to defer to the voters on such questions [...] but you rarely hear them put it that way. Is that because they're worried that they'll look weak?

3. Yglesias on the weird behavior of German voters:

The mainstream center-left political parties in Germany, the Greens and the Social Democrats, are substantially more Europhilic than the governing Christian Democrat/Free Democrat coalition. [...] Given that these measure are deeply unpopular with the German electorate, you might expect the Greens and the SPD do be suffering at the polls. In fact, the reverse is happening [...] I was inclined to do an “everybody’s wrong and actually Germans love fiscal union” post based on these election results, but I looked up the poll data and it’s just not there. Germans prefer Merkel’s (wrong) view to the opposition’s (correct) one.

Her problem is roughly the problem President Obama is facing. The vast majority of people just vote for the same party every year. “The voters” don’t care about the economy, they’re mostly committed Republicans or committed Democrats. But elections are swung by the relatively small minority of people who don’t have firm partisan allegiances and they vote—whether in Germany or in the United States—largely on the basis of whether or not the incumbent is producing good results. 

4. John Holbo on Rick Perry (qua Republican) not meaning what he says:

The deeper question, I think, is why it appeals so much to so many Americans that conservatives constantly say things that they don’t really mean. Let’s go back to that oft-quoted line from Free and Cantril (The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion). Americans are “philosophical conservatives but operational liberals”. [...] what Free and Cantril found is that when Americans say Big Things about American politics, whose consequences they aren’t really prepared to affirm, in practice, they say conservative things. Whereas when you find out what they really want, in practice, they are liberals. [...]

This creates a problem for liberals: they get branded as utopian even when they are not utopian in the least. (Which they never are, in practice.) They can’t use any utopian rhetoric or systematically exaggerate what they intend to do or any of that stuff. If they do, they suffer for it. Intellectually, this is mostly a good thing. But it makes you think small, policy-wise. Because any bold thing you propose, even if it isn’t utopian, will be denounced as utopian. And electorally it’s a source of endless frustration. But the real source of this frustration is not conservative politicians but, per the title of Free and Cantril’s book: the political beliefs of Americans. Or rather, their political beliefs plus their political non-beliefs.

5. Grobstein, passing along an article about Michele Bachmann and vaccinations, remarks:

Perhaps this kind of epistemic warfare shows up on the right wing especially because it is a money-cheap response to areas where the left wing has a money-expensive strategy. It's a natural division of territory in the space of politics. Or do you think it's just an anti-sex signal?

As in any such discussion one should also link to Chris Hayes's old piece of reporting on swing voters, which suggests (consistently with other data, as far as I know) that true swing voters skew low-information and unreflective-about-politics, so have a somewhat exaggerated version of these common dissonances -- in what follows I shall use "people" to mean something like "swing voters." Perhaps what is interesting about all this, though, is the conundrum it poses for people who see democracy as a means for some sort of aggregative preference utilitarianism. (I'm unsympathetic to this view but I don't want to propagandize here.) The general problem is that people like politicians for appearing to be above [some subset of] common desires, but also happen to have these desires and to want them gratified. So clearly these sets of preferences have to be weighed against each other. I can think of two limiting readings:

1. People elect politicians who want what the people want to want, so we should let them have said politicians even if they don't want what the people want, for the same reasons as we are happy selling people salad greens. I.e., the system works, and representative democracy leads to better outcomes than direct democracy. (This is not far from Leslie's reading.)
2. Most political discourse consists of shibboleths in the Biblical sense; people do not want, or want to want, or want politicians to want, what politicians are universally expected to vaunt to want. Political discourse is a complicated charade (or perhaps a collection of shibboleths in the Biblical sense). People want what they want; they don't trust politicians to want what they vaunt; therefore they use shibboleths to confirm that the politicians aren't just pandering. The system is inefficient as drowns finer distinctions, erects artificial barriers to entry, and also provides cover to extremist politicians who hold the symbolic positions literally; one should cut the Gordian knot and restore power to the people (e.g., via ballot initiatives). 

The point is, you can resolve this contradiction either way -- aspiration + weakness is operationally similar to hypocrisy -- but they give you different prescriptions re what to fight for.

"Theories of politics"

Henry Farrell has two posts (here and here) attacking Matthew Yglesias and "neoliberals" for not appreciating

the need for a theory of politics – that is, a theory of how policy proposals can be guided through the political process, and implemented without being completely undermined. And this is all the more important, because (on most plausible theories of politics) there are interaction effects between policy choices at time a and politics at time a+1. The policy choices you make now may have broad political consequences in the future. 

The comments to both posts degenerated pretty rapidly into name-calling and anti-"neoliberal" sloganeering. (Crooked Timber is famed for good comments threads, but I have never seen any.) However, Farrell's original point has some force: e.g., when one is thinking about optimizing policy in the American system, the correct procedure is to optimize subject to the constraint that the policy be sustainable, i.e., tailored to benefit enough powerful interest groups that it won't promptly be repealed, and not harmful to interest groups whose ends are broadly aligned with one's own. (I wrote some posts on this in 2010: e.g., on poverty, good faith, and means-testing.) The constrained optimum is usually less efficient than more vulnerable alternatives (the classic example here is means-testing, which should always be resisted); a shortcoming of much "technocratic" thought is that it fails to appreciate that these "improvements" are in fact harmful mirages. There are some cases in which the dynamic is transparent to everyone involved: so e.g. when a right-wing economist opposes cap-and-trade on the grounds that a carbon tax is better, the "advocacy" is clearly dishonest. However, there are also cases of cluelessness rather than mendacity; see e.g. Mark Kleiman:

Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”

This example had a powerful impact on me when I read it. Going back, I see that Kleiman intended it as another case of conservatives moving goalposts; but it struck me at the time as something more interesting. One could honestly persuade oneself on technocratic grounds that education funded by means-tested vouchers would be superior to public education at equal levels of support; any liberal with a good theory of politics, however, would oppose the idea.

(An obvious problem is that a lot of people are dilettantish or incipient technocrats, and this fact should be part of one's theory of politics. In particular, it is difficult to bring up sustainability issues in a persuasive way in political debates without sounding patronizing. However, the questions of what positions one should hold and how one should advocate them are separate.)


Beyond the notion that one's advocacy should be informed by some notion of what policies are likely to stick, one might argue (as in CT comments) that neoliberal arguments are framed in the wrong "voice" -- i.e., they are policy advice in a disembodied sense, but not an agenda for anyone in particular. I think this is on the whole not very strong: people are interested in whatever they are interested in. MY has a blog that in principle gives him a platform for political advocacy, but presumably many of his readers -- e.g., ego -- read the blog for posts that are thinking-aloud rather than advocacy, and unless you think everyone ought to stop thinking aloud and start waving banners, it is stupid to object to this. Still, it is reasonable to complain that many technocratic left-wing policy debates are a purely academic game until one gets the political structure right.

Interestingly, however, the CT posts and esp. the comments are not really interested in fleshing out this critique (even to the extent that I have tried to), but are obsessed with one specific instance of neoliberal betrayal, viz. trade unions. And so it swiftly becomes clear that trade unions are by and large a proxy for communitarianism, and that (surprisingly enough) socialists dislike neoliberalism because it is a kind of liberalism. And while I can only speak for myself, I think it is wildly beside the point to accuse modern left-wing liberalism of "lacking a theory of politics" on the grounds that it is hostile to communitarian thought or "good" populism, of the George Scialabba variety. I oppose communitarian ends: a close-knit society, even if it were more egalitarian than an open one, would almost certainly be a more effective force for exclusion; it would be more racist and insular, more hidebound and suffocating and judgmental, than an open one. To the extent that one is a liberal, and values openness and freedom for their own sakes, one is unlikely to endorse (e.g.) Scialabba's shockingly cavalier view of the Jim Crow south.

If I were called in to construct a theory of liberal politics, I should treat it as the following task: beginning with the marginal figures of society, the extremely poor and those outside the cultural mainstream, to put together a functioning coalition that (a) had nontrivial political clout, (b) was bound together by mutual interest to some appreciable degree. (I don't have an answer but e.g. something that is obvious re: (a) is that an alliance of the poor and the lower-middle class generally won't work.) I would also ask what kind of institutional "division of labor" between the state and other institutions might be least bad for marginal populations. If one's answers to these questions are less emphatic than those of the Thomas-Frank-ish populist wing -- just get everybody really really angry and we'll burn teh corporationz!!! -- this is perhaps because it is harder to create institutional structures that safeguard the interests of minority groups than it is to do so for the cultural and economic mainstream, especially in a discourse that so insistently valorizes the "middle class."

Some thoughts re voting systems

I'd been meaning to write a post on this during the AV referendum debate, but never got around to it; the proximate impetus was a New Republic article by Jonathan Bernstein on letting parents vote on behalf of their kids. Too lazy to connect my thoughts, hence a bulleted list.

• There are two kinds of pro-democracy view: (1) that majority rule is morally right, (2) that democracy is the worst system except for all the otters. 
• On view (1) a system ought to be as democratic as possible, i.e., do as good a job as possible of representing views. On view (2) nothing of the sort follows. Thus most arguments for better voting systems are irrelevant if one holds view (2).
• My own views are much closer to (2) than to (1). To the (very large) extent that laws are coercive it is of no intrinsic significance whether the minority or the majority gets to do the coercing.
• Why is democracy superior to dictatorship? A negative argument: it is bad for any large ideological or interest group to be persistently in power (power corrupts) or persistently out of power (with no hope of enacting one's agenda peacefully one would be tempted to do so by force, or to secede or sabotage the system). The case for democracy is weak in cases where one expects the vote to split along persistent tribal lines, e.g., in some southern states and much of the third world; however, shifting coalitions of interests/tribes/ideologies are good.
• A different, "positive" argument: assuming there are some undecided voters in the middle who are uninformed and vote for/against the incumbent based on their sense of "well-being," democracy encourages governments to act in ways that maximize "well-being."
• The positive argument strongly favors a two-party unicameral system in which it is entirely clear who the incumbents are. The negative argument prima facie supports a proportional representation system in which as many interest groups as possible are represented. However, it is harmless -- in the sense of being socially stable -- to marginalize small enough groups; in fact it might be worse to give (e.g.) skinheads a legislative voice than to write them out of the political process. (Conversely: a political system in which skinheads felt they had a good chance of getting their agenda passed would probably be a bad one in consequentialist terms.)
• Unpopular/fringe views are often valuable to have expressed. It doesn't follow that fringe parties should get to be kingmakers as they are in Hungary etc.
• From my perspective, it is hard to come up with a general position on where this leaves us: the answer depends on the expected effects of moving to a more democratic system in any given country. It is not obvious to me that the British Lib Dems have any particular business existing as a separate party rather than as part of the more upscale faction of Labour: one possible argument is that because most votes in the Commons are strongly whipped, each faction really needs to be a separate party, but this is a very roundabout way of weakening party discipline.

This brings us to Bernstein's arguments re "interests" -- a pet theme of his is this notion that people both do and ought to vote their interests (which would justify unapologetic people-like-me votes); he wants to argue that, because we treat parents as representing their kids' interests in general, we ought to consider letting them be electoral representatives as well. One reason this seems absurd is that people care about social issues, and the youngest actual voters as a bloc disagree thoroughly with their parents as a bloc, so the extrapolation to kids defies common sense. However I'd tend to respond to it in terms of the framework outlined above: there is no imminent threat of a kids' uprising, so whether we should give them proxy votes depends on the probable consequences -- i.e., increased representation rel. to present of views that are associated with parents -- and should be judged based on those consequences. Which, as I've remarked in the past, I think are bad.

The rhetoric of happiness

Photo src.

Evan Osnos has a good post on the new happiness drive in China, which is naturally faintly ludicrous:

Beijing Trade Union has arranged for forty thousand screens on buses and subway trains, as well as jumbotrons in city train stations and shopping malls, to play “happy testimonials” from workers, farmers, and teachers. A crew called the “Happy Blossom” is also making short films about the happy lives led by factory workers, to be shown on Beijing television. (Global Times includes a qualifying paragraph: “However, not every laborer appears to lead a happy life. ‘I am not happy at all to be a teacher. I majored in bel canto and I have to teach pupils because I don’t have better job opportunities,’ a 25-year old music teacher” told the paper.) 

Silliness aside, the Chinese govt. is playing a rhetorical game with happiness -- using it as a catch-all justification for policies that don't have easily measurable implications, or as a synonym for "intangibles" -- that has lately become ubiquitous. I find the "happiness" idea quite unambiguously worthwhile in its purely destructive uses: consider, e.g., the old Krugman point about French GDP per head being lower than American GDP per head because the French take more time off. It is intuitively clear that this weakens arguments of the form, "the French are poorer than the Americans, therefore they should adopt policies that make them more like the Americans" -- there clearly is a trade-off, and (at least at the intuitive level) a trade-off corresponds to a set of points that are not "well-ordered" in terms of utility.

With the constructive agenda based on happiness, however, I am almost entirely out of sympathy. No doubt this is partly stylistic -- like Ian Leslie, I dislike the "Trendy Vicar tone" of the happiness movement, all the "stop to think about it" / "hectic pace of life" crap -- and partly based on skepticism about self-reported happiness (largely dispositional, heavily socially influenced, inflected by signaling: I approve of people who respond to "how are you" with a grunt). But it also seems trivial to come up with situations that are the exact inverse of that Krugman argument: cases in which it is intuitively sensible to trade happiness for other things, like knowledge or responsibilities. For instance most works of art, and perhaps the large majority of scientific inventions -- e.g., the spinning jenny -- probably can't be justified through their impact on gross human happiness, but are worthwhile in some fairly obvious sense. (One can wriggle out of this through redefining "happiness" to include every possibly valuable thing, have higher/lower forms, etc. but this is a stupid semantic game.)

Anyway, the point about "happiness" is that it is the latest buzzword for scientism in the humanities; it is what "progress" was in the era after Herbert Spencer, and (perhaps) what growth was for a while in the mid-20th. (Perhaps the era of Lagrange and Gauss, ca. 1800, was obsessed with voting systems for a similar reason.) There is an enduring tendency for the latest scientific fad -- preferably something that is a little amorphous, though this seems not to be essential -- to be applied to human affairs by implicitly adopting a self-serving value system according to which the one thing the new science is about is precisely the thing that's to be maximized. Thus with psychology -- evolutionary and otherwise -- and happiness.

Of course, these scientistic fads have their political implications (Evolutionary Progress, of course, goes with racism; happiness, with a sort of goofy Chestertonian conservatism). There is a chicken-and-egg puzzle here that I'd like to understand better: to what extent are these political tendencies autonomous attributes of the sciences, and to what extent are they derivatives of the "class interests" of scientists? For instance, it seems clear to me that the discovery of large innate racial differences would delight Steven Pinker, although I doubt that he's a racist; it would just be a dramatic vindication of the kind of biological determinism his research is based on. At the other extreme, a lot of people, like Richard Posner, seem to have pre-existing views that they garnish with faddish scientific examples. On the third hand, one becomes an evolutionary psychologist or neurobiologist by choice, and chooses, again, to work on topics that impinge on human affairs -- typically not the most intellectually interesting part of a discipline. To what extent is ideological self-selection important here?

Happiness is different from Progress because its intrinsic political tendency seems to me traditionalist and conservative, i.e., quite different from the pre-existing tendencies and the "class interests" of scientists, much closer to those of David Brooks and Ross Douthat. This makes the politics of happiness an interesting test case for one's meta-theories about the social sciences...

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Unrelated but too short for a separate post: because Elisa Gabbert is Boston's best poet, you can now buy her book The French Exit for $6. Do yourself a favor and buy it even if you "don't like poetry": it's one of the more entertaining books I've read this year. (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of its merits; the reviews focus on "cleverness" which is misleading; more accurate, I think, to see the wit as (a) part of the definition of a well-defined and appealing voice, (b) a way of crystallizing the mostly everyday subject matter.) Here is one of my favorite poems in the book, conveniently online.

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PPS In the interests of full disclosure I should confess that I've been meaning to write a post on happiness ever since I saw the picture that heads this post.

Labor and the duvet

Some time ago I quoted Chesterton on lying in bed (via Calista):

Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite. Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. 

Apparently this is now a major political theme in the rest of the Anglophone world:

In her first media conference as Prime Minister last June, [Julia Gillard] first spoke of Australians who “set their alarm clocks early”. The line has recurred several times since, and featured prominently in her election campaign launch speech, when she spoke of how “it can be tough getting up every morning and going to work, setting the alarm clock early, getting the kids out to school”. Virtually the same sentence cropped up last week.

Since Gillard first used it, the phrase has been appropriated by British deputy PM Nick Clegg, who must get up very early indeed such is the vigour with which he is destroying the Liberal Democrat Party. Clegg pitched the coalition government and its budget cuts to “alarm clock Britain” in January, accused Labour leader Ed Milliband of “hiding under his duvet”, and even strayed into Python territory by elaborating on a sort of hierarchy of early risers, lauding those who had to “set the alarm incredibly early”, doing jobs “long before it’s even light”.

As politics, this is of course very similar in spirit to Hillary Clinton's "hardworking Americans, white Americans" moment, a nod in the general direction of conservative populism. (Perhaps the welfare reform we really need is having the relevant office close at 9am?) The rest of the article flitters around a point that has become oddly salient in recent years, viz. that the labor union movement and its sympathizers have essentially entirely different politics from the "greens"/urban liberals, and for any given purpose either contingent can be peeled off by a reasonably competent conservative movement.

Two barroom speculations and a rant

To be taken at the appropriate level of seriousness... (this was the drift of my side of a conversation w/ Matt P. and CWA last night) NB I expect blogging to be near nil next week, though I might post dispatches from Dallas. 

BS1. All professions will eventually become professions for women, just as all names will eventually become names for girls. (Of course there are more possible names than professions...) The argument is of the "Griffiths" variety and runs as follows. Once any profession becomes over, say, 60% female, it stays that way; men are far less likely to enter it. This effect is much stronger than the reverse one. (Aptitude etc. are largely irrelevant for most professions; social pressures are much more important in determining what people decide to pursue.) Over time any profession becomes more than 60% female because of random fluctuations. QED. (An implication is that this should happen sooner in smaller professions, subfields, etc. There is some evidence for this in, e.g., vet-med.)

BS2. Why are one's past struggles and sufferings such an important part of self-definition? In particular, why are all the best barroom stories tales of mishap? A standard answer, re struggles, is that one is reluctant to admit that effort was ever wasted, but this doesn't extend to suffering. An alternative resolution: one gives meaning to one's life by making a narrative out of it; it is naturally desired that one's narrative will appeal to others, and the easiest way to appeal to others is to appeal to their Schadenfreude, which is the most enduring of human emotions.

R. The invasion of Libya worries me because it suggests that people have either forgotten the lessons of Iraq or learned the wrong ones. This is especially true of the British and the French, who I suppose were especially liable to suspect that Iraq was a failed war because unilateralism or the fake WMD excuse. Yes, it was bad to start a war unilaterally and worse to start it on false pretenses, but neither of these has much to do with why Iraq ended up so badly: that failure was due to the lack of any clear positive goals, the fact that "regime change" is a misnomer for "regime removal," or the thoughtless replacement of tyranny by anarchy. (No one's admitting to the term "regime change" but David Cameron clearly has it on his mind.)

What is school history for?

Richard J. Evans writes in the LRB about the Tories' attempt to make school history less critical, more "narrative"-based, and generally more old-fashioned:

The demand, really, is for a celebratory history: how otherwise could it serve as the cement of national identity? Sample exam questions proposed by the Better History group for the new curriculum have included: ‘Why did Nelson and Wellington become national heroes?’; ‘What liberties did English people enjoy by the end of the 17th century that they hadn’t had at the start?’; and ‘How dangerous was the Spanish Armada?’ – the examinee, it’s presumed, isn’t going to answer from the point of view of the Spanish. 

There are two lines of objection to this, both with considerable force, one minor and one less so. The minor  one is that it'd all be white-people-centric and thus wrong for a diverse society. The proposed alternatives could be either (a) teach people of different ethnic groups different celebratory histories, (b) teach everyone a fairly diverse history. (a) is, I think, rightly horrifying to many people, and anyway defeats the purpose of creating a "cement"; (b) is a sensible (within-these-parameters) but not radical fix, which would have the incidental advantage of distinguishing Cameron from the more off-putting Little England types.

The major objection is that celebratory history is intrinsically a bad, stultifying, sort of thing that leaves people incompetent to analyze texts later in life:

Even more calamitous is the prospect of history teaching in the schools confining itself to the transmission and regurgitation of ‘facts’. [...] When I started teaching history at university in the 1970s, many first-year students were incapable of critical reading of this kind. (I ran into trouble with one class when I began to point out the problems in the arguments put forward by one of the books I had set them to read. ‘Why did you make us read it,’ one of them complained, ‘if you don’t agree with it?’) Better history teaching in schools changed all that, but now Gove wants to abandon these skills all over again. Better History declares that ‘it is by the acquisition and use of historical knowledge that historians are primarily judged’ – but in reality that only makes a Mastermind contestant.

It is possible to teach actual skills only if history is taught in depth, and that means a focus on a limited number of specialised topics. 

At some level I'm very sympathetic to all of this, but it is both muddled and blinkered to think of school history as being about the training of future academic historians. Evans distinguishes, near the end of his article, between history and "memory," but it is not obvious to me that history-the-academic-discipline is what should be taught at the high-school level. After all, what does society lose if people like Evans have to teach kids how to question sources -- yes, it's a waste of their time, but in this case they'd probably be better at it than the average schoolteacher. Is it that one should train kids to be anti-authoritarian because "this makes them better citizens" etc.? If so, then the Tories should, almost by definition, object to the idea; besides, it would surely be easier to teach "critical thinking" in a class about contemporary issues...

I am beset here by a basic ambivalence about what school should be for, beyond literacy, numeracy, and related survival skills. It takes people much longer to grow up than it does to become literate; what -- other than socializing -- is one to do with the rest of the time? One line of thought is to focus on what kids are good at, maybe beef up the math curriculum ("teh Chinese are invading!"), teach more foreign languages, etc. but there is only so much that one is ever going to use and it seems hard (though possible with some backing from neuroscience) to justify teaching explicitly useless skills. Another line of thought is to have everybody acquire an agreed-upon set of references and symbols, preferably reasonably rich and ambiguous, that can then be used in various kinds of civic and artistic discourse. This is perhaps roughly what's implied by teaching history as memory -- it's like doing the Greek myths, but with that frisson of fact... and, of course, with the right place names.

Evans's article strongly reminded me of Gordon Wood's criticism of Jill Lepore's book about the Tea Party, which is that she was unreasonably dismissive of memory as opposed to history. (I'll note in passing that I enjoyed Wood's book The Purpose of the Past on the whole.) Here is Bernard Bailyn, quoted by Wood on the slave trade:

the memory of the slave trade is not distant; it cannot be reduced to an alien context; and it is not a critical, rational reconstruction. It is for us, in this society, a living and immediate, if vicarious, experience. It is buried in our consciousness and shapes our view of the world. Its sites, its symbols, its clues lie all about us.

This is particularly relevant, and dangerous, in America, where the past's shadows are large and proximate. Memory is a political project, which is why it appeals to Gove and Cameron; but these partial, allegorical readings of the past are the only reason we care about what happened. To the extent that this is true, I wonder if it wouldn't be worthwhile to try and move the emblems as far away from the present as possible, to lower the temperature and have the myths be more mythical, and their literal truth less important for practical purposes. If liberalism and conservatism centered around alternative readings of the Metamorphoses rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, perhaps we'd have a saner public discourse?

Addendum Wood's article "Conspiracy and the paranoid style: Causality and deceit in the eighteenth century" has one of the best subtitles ever.

Brits, beards, bubbles

1. Simon Kuper (FT) has a mildly amusing go at the usual transatlantic-cultural-misunderstandings genre:

Americans won’t touch strangers, the French won’t talk to them, but Brits will neither touch nor talk to them. Passport to the Pub, a semi-official guide for foreign tourists to the UK, warns: “Don’t ever introduce yourself. The ‘Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama’ approach does not go down well in British pubs.”

Nor are Britons permitted to make eye contact: the former French prime minister Edith Cresson, disconcerted that British men didn’t look at her, estimated that one in four was homosexual. No wonder Britons drink ever-increasing amounts of alcohol. Alcohol was first distilled so that British people could reproduce.

Re his observations about American friend-hugging and the gingerness thereof, I seem to remember there being a facebook group, back in the early days, that stood against "ass-out hugging."

2. I was briefly obsessed last year with this trustworthiness-of-beards infographic, and the obvious resulting question of how much of the sequence one could go through starting with an enormous beard and progressively excising various bits of it until one ended up with, say, a Hitler mustache or a "pencil-thin chinstrap." Related to this is an old Vanity Fair article I came upon yesterday, in which Rich Cohen -- ostensibly writing about his experiment with the Hitler mustache -- talks about its history:

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe—pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man.^[1] Before that, the most popular mustache in Germany and Austria had been the sort worn by the royals. It was called the Kaiser, and it was elaborate. It was perfumed, styled, teased and trained. It turned up at the ends. It was the old, monarchical world that was about to be crushed by the rising tide of assembly-line America. In other words, in the case of Hitler and his 'stache, America faced an extreme case of blowback.
By the beginning of the century, it had been taken up by enough Germans to draw notice in the foreign press. In 1907, The New York Times chronicled a growing distaste for the import under the headline "toothbrush" mustache: german women resent its usurpation of the "kaiserbart."

Cohen also attributes the decline of the mustache after WW2 to a sense that one had to navigate between the Scylla of Hitlerian brevity and the Charybdis of Stalinesque luxuriance, and it was therefore simpler to drop the thing altogether.

3. Mark Doty writes about the bubbles in his eyes:

Bubble number two has been with me since early January. At first I couldn't see anything, and then when I could make out light again I seemed to be looking a viscous gray field, translucent and rippling. If I moved much it made me feel disoriented and a little sick. This bubble was of a sturdier stuff than the first, so it took until early February for it to become a circle that almost filled my field of vision, and now in early March it's become surprisingly pleasing: it's the size of a perfectly round pea, near the bottom of the right-hand side of the world. It is dark at the rim, a Rothko-ish black-purple, and and then it pales to a light sky color and then in the center is a blotch of a darker gray roughly the shape of Australia. Somehow this conspires to make it look three dimensional, as if beautiful and oddly colored pearl is floating near the base of everything. It has, today, a tiny satellite. Yesterday there were three.

The two bubbles have given me a cataract (unavoidable side effect) so that may be contributing to the pearly aspect of the little sphere. Two oddities: at night, light bounces off the bubble into the upper reaches of my eye, so that I can see up high the double of a candle flame, a dashboard, a computer screen. And, if I tilt my head down and look at the floor, the bubble turns a magenta red, as if I'm looking at it through the screen of my own blood.

4. I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Friedman's essay on the trouble with libertarianism, viz. that it didn't stay true to its elitist, anti-democratic roots (!) -- and I agree locally with a considerable part of it, although in my view it is misguided to think of libertarianism as a philosophy at all.

5. It has occurred to me that, in these "closing-tabs" posts, I often misattribute or neglect to mention the sources of links. I'm sorry about this but it's inevitable as the tabs have usually been open for a while.

Dogs, not quacking

It seems that polls are only talked about to the extent that they agree with the prejudices or agendas of some large group of people. (This is also true of popular psychology.) While it is inevitable and perhaps healthy that most people interested in politics in one sense should also be interested in the other, and that most "analysts" should be propagandists, one sometimes finds that genuine puzzles are widely ignored. For instance, Nate Silver has two state-by-state maps of Obama's approval rating now vs. his vote share in 2008. Here is the absolute change:

And here is the swing-relative-to-national-average:

Blue is better for Obama, red is worse. The zero has no obvious significance: approval ratings track votes but there might well be an overall offset of a couple of points. (For instance, one knows people in New England who disapprove of Obama but would be unlikely to vote for a Republican.) To the extent that this offset is different for every state one should be skeptical of treating this as an apples-to-apples comparison; but some of the effects are large and presumably real.

I find this data puzzling.

1. Re the south, one's default hypothesis is that support for Obama is inelastic -- being determined almost exclusively by demographics -- so the first graph is the relevant picture. Most states where Obama hasn't lost ground are states where he didn't have ground to lose.

1'. Silver suggests that Obama might be gaining ground among racists as they become used to having a black president. (The diminishing-salience-of-race theory.) I don't buy this theory as the pattern is evidently about deeply Republican states (NE/AK/UT), rather than southern ones in particular.

2. I don't know what's going on in upper New England. At all. Nor does anyone else seem to, at least that I've read... is there a story here that I missed? "Libertarianism" does NOT work as the Dakotas, Montana etc. do not look like NH/VT/ME.

3. Silver suggests a "swing state effect" -- states where Obama campaigned heavily in 2008 were artificially pro-Obama because he outspent McCain. I don't see it; NH looks more like VT than like Ohio or Florida.

4. If there is a pattern here -- and I'm not sure there is -- it raises exactly the opposite worry from the usual one about "working-class whites" (see Galston for another formulaic implementation of this meme, and Clive Crook for a robotic blurb). Obama has lost more ground in Colorado than in Ohio. If I had to draw a general inference from the second map it would be that (barring W. Va.) the states in red have disproportionately many cultural progressives, many of them well-off. Three obvious narratives come to mind. The first is that these people were unusually starry-eyed and are now unreasonably disillusioned. (But what about New York and Massachusetts?) The second is that, having had more to begin with, they lost more in the crisis, and are therefore unusually sour. (But Vermont and New Hampshire have low unemployment.) The third is that, having more leisure, they have been paying more attention -- this is the notion of the "high-information" voter -- and that when others really begin to tune in they will come to similar conclusions.

Though who knows what things will look like on the other side of the government shutdown.

"Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity"

The TLS's slang dictionary review sent me back to an old essay in Thumbscrew by Craig Raine, on swearing and translation, which doesn't live up at all to my memory of it. However this bit has always stuck with me:

I recall Thom Gunn asking me in San Francisco if I had really published a poem entitled ‘Arsehole’. I had. […] Gunn’s comment was a poet’s comment on two languages. “Gee, ‘arsehole’ is so much dirtier than ‘asshole’.” […] “Asshole” is a possible translation of “arsehole” but it isn’t the right translation - not only for the reason given by Thom Gunn. To call someone an “arsehole” is quite different from saying someone is an “asshole”. The former is malignant where the latter is harmless. To be on a desert island with an asshole would be irritating perhaps. To be on the same desert island with an arsehole might even be dangerous.

And, as if on cue, here's Daniel Davies on Egypt:

Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren't interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising - there are fucking millions of them.

(Via Yglesias, who has the linguistic tact not to translate the word.) One is inevitably reminded of the "I'm surrounded by assholes" set-piece in Spaceballs, a precisely converse situation where "arsehole" would be a mistranslation.

I wonder if anyone's bothered to study the difference between "arsehole" usage in rhotic and non-rhotic dialects -- Green's dictionary, maybe? -- there must be something, I feel, but it's hard to isolate immediately from all the other differences between Scottish and southern English speech.

Any time Thom Gunn comes up is a good time to reread "The Gas-poker."