Bianca Steele

How do you feel about the word inspired?

My freshman year in college, my roommate and I both were prospective English majors and writers/journalists.  She had a lot more experience than me, however: more preparation for college-level study of literature, and a better idea about how to write.  One day she came back to the room and announced that, after having struggled to find a topic for an essay, she was inspired.  Sounded reasonable to me.  But, some time later, I tried the same thing on a guy who lived in the same dorm as us, down the hall.  It was the first snowfall of the year, my first snowfall in New York, and I had gone for a walk down Broadway to get a sandwich at Mama Joy’s, and was when I came back, I told him, “inspired.”  His reaction was scorn.  “Inspired?  What does that mean?”  I was tongue-tied; I didn’t know what inspired really meant, or why it was a good thing with reference to essay-writing.  Since then, I’ve been leery of the word.

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn’t afraid of it, though, apparently.  And he’s a philosophy professor, so he should know.  He’s also got a good post about why the conservative arguments against health care reform are silly.

I'm Okay, You're Dumb (The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein)

My local public library has purchased a copy of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.  I may be the first person in eleven months to have turned pages past the midpoint of the book, but they do have it on the shelf.  I picked it up several months ago, opened it randomly, and said, “this doesn’t make sense,” so I put it back.  Then I saw it again at Border’s, and this time I noticed that there was a chapter titled “The Betrayal of the Mentors” that appeared to talk about what has gone on in academic humanities departments over the last thirty or forty years.  I didn’t agree with it on a first glance, but on a second glance it seemed thoughtful and thought-provoking.  On a third and fourth glance I’m puzzled and, strangely, almost, insulted.

I figured the book would discuss why, in spite of increasing access to higher education, young people evidently score less well than their seniors on social scientists’ measures of knowledge and skill.  Since Bauerlein is an educator who has written as a conservative activist, he would presumably focus on what liberal college professors believe and on what education schools advise regarding lower-level schools (both topics conservatives consider important).  Instead, we find a complaint to the effect that reading, of the kind Bauerlein teaches and was himself taught, and the kind of reading all educated people (according to Bauerlein) have practiced for centuries, is dying out.

That is the argument of the first two chapters, especially:  The Internet has been around for between ten and twenty years, depending on how you count.  Therefore, American kids now finishing high school and beginning college have grown up with the Internet and we can expect them to display whatever advantages Internet is actually able to confer.  The Internet contains lots of information about topics of civic and academic interest, so kids who have grown up with it ought to know a lot.  They don’t, though.  The reason for this is that they don’t read; reading provides all kinds of benefits that help kids do better in school, and readers acquire all kinds of information as they engross themselves in books and reflect on what they say.  Kids don’t really acquire information in school, so it’s natural that their leisure-time activities are what determines how well they do on standardized tests and in college.  Bauerlein pulls the elements of this argument from a smorgasbord of sociological studies.

He appears to take the incredible yet still increasing popularity of the Internet as obviously the reason for the decline he feels exists.  The book is addressed both towards people who are interested in the rise of this new technology and also towards people who are interested in culture and reading.

As Bauerlein reads the studies, working with computers appears to improve a kind of putative intelligence which is actually bad. (He does not describe what it is, or at least not in any detail, but presumably he knows it when he sees it.)  Thus, the book will make those who work with computers consider whether they have been missing anything.  And, correspondingly, it will make those who are interested in culture and reading, and who suspect that those who work with computers are missing something, more sure that they are right.

I don’t personally find this argument convincing, but Bauerlein covers the bases very neatly.  The data for the arguments are not Bauerlein’s, so if they are questionable, he is not responsible.  And he emphasizes frequently that lots of people appear to be highly intelligent yet are (in his opinion) unable to read.  Those who disagree with him and cannot make sense of his argument may conclude they fall into this category.

Which raises the question who he thinks his audience is.  Because he has lost the people for whom critical thinking involves evaluation of evidence, as well as felicity in word choice.  He has lost the people who are turned off immediately by statements like the one I peeved about last week.  He has lost the people whose response, when faced with huge metaphysical arguments like the ones that English professors today are so fond of, on one of which I presume Bauerlein implicitly bases this book, is WTF?  And I’m not sure whom that leaves, other than college professors, the more credulous sort of journalist, and maybe the clergy.  Yet his book is published by a nonacademic press. 

To a large extent, he is criticizing educators like himself, yet his book is addressed to a general readership.  I get the sense he is trying to rally nonacademics to join in his critique of a subgroup among his fellow academics, something that conservative college professors have been doing for two decades, at least.  Because the book reads, essentially, like an (ever so mildly worded) jeremiad.  Yet it seems ungracious to harangue his lessers for not correcting his own colleagues and even himself.  Why would he do that?

Perhaps to make readers feel guilty or indignant enough that they would urge their legislators and other elected officials to support the educational policies Bauerlein promotes (vaguely described as these are).

Perhaps to intrigue future teenagers who feel they are smarter and more moral than their peers, who after reading this book may feel inspired to major in English and put into practice the high-flown sentiments they’ve learned from reading it.

Perhaps to console middle-aged and retired autodidacts and former English majors, who know they know how to read and are frustrated by the fact that they can’t express their own opinions without being challenged.  Perhaps to give them talking points for responding to such (explicit or implicit) challenges. 

Perhaps to encourage what general readers may actually remain (and have time for books like his) to discuss the ideas it contains with their friends and colleagues after work or during their lunch hours.

Of course, it’s more than probable that Bauerlein had no such rhetorical intention.  Perhaps he is simply articulating the beliefs of those he considers the entire educated class.  In fact, I have little real doubt that he sees himself as doing something quite different from what I describe above.

As a conservative and an English professor, naturally, I think, he writes a kind of book that is really rather traditional.  He assumes no subject matter expertise and, indeed, prefers no such expertise.  Though he seems to have no problem turning reading itself into an expert skill.  He assumes a unitary culture and even proceeds as if one existed.  Though, at the same time, he is continually discovering individuals and groups that don’t properly belong to it.  Though he dehumanizes those he disagrees with by referring to them as a faceless horde with an ugly name like “technophiles” or “technovangelists”: almost a metaphysical cause in itself—like Tony Kushner’s imagination of what an angel is—here, though, a fallen, Satanic angel.  It’s the continual casting out of the other that really grates, but maybe I ought to ignore that.  After all, none of us are without sin.

He is writing for a general audience: not political, not professional or technical.  He is writing an old-fashioned kind of book, the kind of book that can be read by all educated men and women.  His book is not at all of a type that can be read and be of use only to wonks, to bureaucrats and technocrats and low-level government clerks.  His book is, precisely, a book that informs educated men and women of what’s going on behind the scenes in the social and governmental institutions that determine what their lives will be like (on those infrequent occasions when they interact with such institutions).  His readers do not themselves work within those institutions, and they don’t have any influence on the controlling beliefs within those institutions either (except the small incremental influence any one of us has, and uses when we talk among ourselves or raise concerns with authority figures).  His readers are educated and at least vaguely conservative and much like himself.

This interpretation, however, while generous to Mark Bauerlein, leaves this particular reader out in the cold. 

You Have to Read This

You have to read this article (“Why I Fired My Broker”) in the May Atlantic.  If I were still a subscriber, I would feel worse about it than I do.

In fact, he didn’t fire his broker; he fired his financial adviser.  He didn’t want to do business directly with a broker, because brokers get commissions and are in it for their own self-interest.  He didn’t want to buy into a mutual fund, because he didn’t know anything about the people who ran them.  He felt he needed—and deserved—personal attention, from a highly-qualified person who talked directly to him and had time to devote to his account and his account alone.  He didn’t want an adviser who made all his decisions based on a computer program.  He wanted a good adviser, one who could get the best returns possible, who could explain to him, briefly and in language he understood, exactly how.

The article is about how selfish and self-protective financial advisers have become, in the form of a complaint that the writer’s own broker no longer returns his calls.  The reader follows him as he visits big-name finance thinker after child of international financial guru and philanthropist, trying to get them to acknowledge the point of view of an investor who, because he only has $200,000 to invest, is forced into the financial equivalent of taking the crosstown bus instead of a cab.  (Remember Roger and Me?)

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to take seriously a journalist who begins by saying he thinks the stock market should have only an insignificant risk of loss within only a one-year time window.

Frames Versus the Invisible Hand

Via Will Wilkinson, Matt Yglesias says of financial firm CEOs: “surely we could agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people.”  He goes on to elaborate, explaining that they are “greedy.”  This isn’t his main point, and he goes on to invoke Adam Smith and to “recognize that none of us are without sin,” but he says it more than once, and I think Wilkinson is right to point out that it’s not consistent with what Yglesias has represented his argument to be.

Yglesias’ post invokes a frame that it’s unusual to see in sophisticated economic reasoning: every problem can be blamed on a particular person, who both benefited directly from the problem in the most natural way, and committed a particular sin that necessarily would have caused that particular problem.  In this case, as the frame, and as Yglesias, would have it, the problem was not only caused by financial firms, but by the individual executives of these firms.  And it’s not just that their actions caused the problem because they made some mistake, because they were lazy, because they were incompetent, because they were out to get somebody else and lost track of what they were really supposed to be doing—they caused financial problems for other people because they were out to benefit themselves financially.  And it’s not just that their desire to get big bonuses or to drive up the price of their employers’ stock—or even their self-identification with the firm and its products, so that the firm’s gains felt like their own—led them to act in acquisitive ways, it’s that they were acting to benefit themselves instead of with the public good in mind.

There really is no other way to explain the stupidity of this kind of argument (at least I can’t think of one), than to see it as basically automatic, nearly unconscious.  It’s something you expect to hear from a guy who’s just finished yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!”

And what it misses is something important.  If we really think Adam Smith was right, it is important to have people around who will act with self-interest (their own and others’) in mind.  If we want to live in a modern society with complex institutions, it is important to have people around who are aware of the impact their actions have on the well-being of others without imagining that impact is direct.  And if we want to get anything done at all, it is also important to have people around who do not become paralyzed with fear every time it occurs to them that “none of us are without sin.”

Don't Think of an Elephant: Progressives and Foreign Policy

George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant has been on my radar since it was published in 2004, and I’d of course heard of Lakoff’s seminal theoretical work, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, but until recently I hadn’t read anything of his.  I had heard interviews with Lakoff on NPR and he sounded like someone I didn’t agree with.  The review in the Atlantic that appeared just after the election didn’t make the book sound especially appealing either.  It was reviewed with Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, which I ended up tackling first, and which I ended up liking quite a bit.  Possibly the media overexposure itself left a bad taste behind, because I’ve just begun Don’t Think of an Elephant and I’m finding it entirely worthwhile: I don’t agree with everything Lakoff says, but his analysis is compelling, and the results of that analysis are persuasive.

 

Last night, however, I ran across a statement I disagreed with to the point of being unable to find anything of value in it.  Most of the first part of Lakoff’s book (I’ll be referring only to Don’t Think of an Elephant in the rest of this blog post) consists of pieces that appeared on the web site AlterNet in 2003 and 2004.  The second chapter, dated October 13, 2003, is about the 2003 recall of California’s Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to take his place.  In the course of explaining why the “poor communicator” frame fails to explain those events, first because other, more important things were taking place that the frame elides, and second because Democrats generally are poor communicators when it comes to the greater majority of voters, Lakoff introduces his “family” metaphor for politics.  As I think is well-known, Lakoff says the way we think of politics reflects the way we think families ought to be run: when conservatives think of families, they think of a “strict father” model, while liberals use what Lakoff calls a “nurturant parent” model.

 

Lakoff goes on to enumerate the implications each model has for thinking about various topics in current affairs.  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the strict father model: “In foreign affairs the government should maintain its sovereignty and impose its moral authority everywhere it can, while seeking its self-interest (the self-interest of corporations and military strength).”  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the nurturant parent model: “In foreign policy the role of the nation should be to promote cooperation and extend these values to the world.”

 

If Lakoff is typical, no wonder Barack Obama’s support among progressives is so tenuous.

 

It explains why the left’s objection to the war was that it was “fought under false pretences”: a slogan you hear much more than that the war was “fought for nonexistent WMD,” yet which is consistently explained as meaning simply the latter.  This would seem to assume that people who supported the war did so because they believed it was a just war, just the way the Bosnia war was just: fought for humanitarian ends, in order to effect a discrete moral purpose.  It might also begin to explain why Democratic insiders who at first had been hawkish on Iraq switched sides exactly when they did: at a time when, to the average person reading the news, nothing obvious had changed.

 

This is essentially a neoconservative argument.  Obviously Lakoff is not a neoconservative.  If I did not know he considered himself to be a progressive, I might conclude that he is a neoliberal.  The argument is strange to hear in a book about how progressives think differently from conservatives, in a talk about how Democrats don’t know how to communicate with the electorate and need to become less like stereotypical liberals.

 

There is more to politics than the family.  There is more to politics than personal morality.  War is not justified by our desire to do good.  Lakoff makes me realize why I am a liberal who sees good things in progressivism, and not a progressive full stop.

Statistics and Homicide Rates

UPDATE: I thought I had saved my changes and posted this on Thursday, but apparently not.  I posted it Friday before noticing the errors, then took it down so I could make the corrections offline.

Boston homicide detectives’ record is below par. Only 44 percent of 2009 homicides were solved, compared to a national average of 55 percent. (Stranger killings, including gang-related homicides, have been particularly difficult to solve.) A Globe editorial Thursday suggests ways the department might be improved in order to fix the problems.

Another possibility, of course, is that Boston homicide detectives are more scrupulous than detectives elsewhere, less inclined to plant evidence and do all the other nasty things “necessary to get the job done” that we’re familiar with from TV crime dramas. It would take more data, and some kind of in-depth study, to find out for sure. But I’m sure that if the detectives in the Boston PD feel they’re being criticized unfairly, they will let their supervisors know, and loudly.

An anecdote near the beginning of The Tipping Point raises a similar question. The frequency with which homicides occurred in New York City declined dramatically between the early 1980s and mid-1990s. Malcolm Gladwell attributes the decline to gradual, global changes that for some reason that nobody has ever been able to explain, in New York City alone resulted in a sudden drastic drop in crime rates. Gladwell describes the case in such detail that he raises questions about what he is arguing. Is what he describes really plausible? Does it square with our preexisting knowledge about how human beings behave? Could the decline have been due to people giving up and failing to report crimes?

Reviewers have been extremely harsh on Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, while his earlier books were met with apparently unnuanced enthusiasm. One might assume that Gladwell, Tom Clancy-style, has been getting sloppy and that his editors are permitting him to get away with a lot more than they did when he was just starting out. At the same time, the flaws in Outliers were already apparent several years ago when The Tipping Point appeared. Why have they been noticed only now?

Rhetoric, Poetry, and American Politics

President Obama has great rhetorical skills. His speeches and his books are a promise that if we work for it, the world can become what we hope it will be, that we are not fated to end up in the world we fear in our darkest moments we are moving toward.

You will hear it said that rhetoric -- verbally convincing people to do something they would not have done otherwise, especially by appealing to their emotions, using fancy words that add little to the rational basis of what you’re saying -- is dangerous. The speeches of Adolf Hitler were said to be so powerful that listeners who understood not a single word of German came away from his rallies convinced that he was a great man and would lead his people to do great things.

Every evidence is that Obama’s speeches do not fall victim to the rhetoric he makes use of, but overcome the history to which that rhetoric has been put to use.

President Obama decided to have a poem read at his inauguration, something that may be becoming, but is not yet, traditional. Poetry, though not a form of rhetoric exactly, like rhetoric relies on the emotional response of listeners and readers. Like rhetoric, poetry can lie, and still be good at being what it is. Keats may have written, “Beauty is truth, Truth beauty,” but Keats may have been wrong.

A world in which only firmly, commonly accepted truths could be spoken would be a world without poetry. We expect our everyday, pragmatic, practical world to be a world in which what happens is by and large predictable. We do not expect our workplaces, our hospitals, our social service agencies to be places where people go around speaking poetry in place of clear, rational prose. It is difficult to imagine a society in which poetry and art had no place at all even in people’s off-hours, but it is not impossible. There are those who believe the Communist sphere was such a place. There are those who believe the neoliberal West, including the contemporary United States, is. There is no reason that must be the case.

A world in which there was no poetry would not necessarily be a world in which there was no rhetoric. It is possible to imagine a world in which speeches issued by powerful leaders were the closest thing to poetry anybody ever heard. I don’t think such a world is one we should be trying to bring about.

Some American conservatives and many neoliberals seem to believe we ought to want a world in which Keats and Dickens are revered but Elizabeth Alexander is ridiculed, in which Shakespeare is our secular equivalent to Scripture but people who make good speeches are accused of megalomania. They are, I think, afraid that the rise of fascism was due to some quality inherent in the ability to write and deliver a speech that will move enormous numbers of people -- essentially inherent. I think they are wrong.

Gitlin on the New President

The Atlantic has finally made it easy to find its "Dispatches," and published one of Todd Gitlin's post-election essays there.  If they published things like this on a regular basis, I might not have let my subscription lapse last month.

With the country thrashing around and an incoming president as yet largely untested, hopes hearken backwards, converging on memories—and fantasies—of a time in the previous century when, in the wake of a catastrophic and self-destroying presidency, history met legend under the sign of a vague but promising phrase (what exactly was a “New Deal” anyway?), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt rushed to pull rabbits out of a hat, and the spirit of confidence—the refusal of fear—was part of the rebuttal to fear.  No sooner was Obama elected than Time magazine’s cover offered a Photoshopped Barack Obama in fedora and rimless glasses, grinning big, cigarette holder in place, hand on convertible steering wheel, with the tag-line:  “The New New Deal.” No surprise, Obama’s run-up to “Change” sends many a political analyst to accounts of  FDR’S first Hundred Days in office, when Americans first clamped capital letters onto the phrase. Obama himself sounded more than a little like FDR when he told Steve Croft on “60 Minutes”:  “My interest is in finding something that works.”

On the surface, at least, the resemblance is plain in both temperament and style.  Heaps of histories and biographies make clear that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an improvisation artist, and the conventionality of the observation does not erase its accuracy. 

You can read more here.

Drug companies paid doctors to sign articles they did not write

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has a post up about the Wyeth ghostwriting miniscandal as it relates to academic ethical standards.  It brings up an interesting question about different requirements made by different professional groups, not only about authorship and credit, but about consequences and liability.

Spokesperson for the pharmaceutical manufacturer:

The authors of the articles in question, none of whom were paid, exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content.

Senator Charles E. Grassley:

Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling.

Professor Quiggin:

In reality, having someone write articles for you amounts to not doing the job for which, as an academic, you are paid and, if the articles are sufficiently numerous and well-placed, promoted.

The Association of Medical Editors:

The integrity of the published record of scientific research depends not only on the validity of the science but also on honesty in authorship. Editors and readers need to be confident that authors have undertaken the work described and have ensured that the manuscript accurately reflects their work, irrespective of whether they took the lead in writing or sought assistance from a medical writer. The scientific record is distorted if the primary purpose of an article is to persuade readers in favor of a special interest, rather than to inform and educate, and this purpose is concealed.

A professor whom I won’t name, in order to protect her reputation and that of the institution with which she is associated:

It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break.

Detroit Bailout vs. Globalization

At TPMCafe, Steve Clemons of the American Policy Institute raises some interesting questions about the Detroit bailout w/r/t globalization.

GM said that it was taking all of the technology it could get its hands on -- whether from the labs or elsewhere -- and fully deploying it in China.

GM felt that this was a way to embed itself deeply in the Chinese economy over the next three decades and would keep the car manufacturer ahead of the more technologically-stingy Japanese firms as well as Daimler and Chrysler which had already had hiccups at that time in their China activities.

In a different realm, Citibank has been a leader in off-shoring, pushing more and more of its financial services support base overseas.

I'm not an expert on globalization, or for that matter, free-market theories generally, and I don't know how to balance America's role as a leader that can help developing economies grow, with the need to support American society as a whole -- including all of its members.  But I think his points need to be addressed.  Because the concerns Clemons raises are going to be shared by a lot of people.

The other day, I was talking to a handyman working in my house, and after asking me what I thought about the automakers' bailout, he suggested it wouldn't be necessary if people bought American.  His truck, of course, was parked right next to my reliable, fuel-efficient, short person friendly Japanese car.

I babbled for a little while about Japanese auto plants here in the US and how the Big Three are outsourcing to China anyway, how the American companies I and my husband work for have huge chunks of their workforce in other coutries already.  Then I whined a little about how tough it is when your position requires you to work with people in other timezones and you end up being on the telephone at 11:00 or 12:00 at night, sometimes on a regular basis.  But I felt like part of the problem: after all, we are management, practically -- or at least professional staff, which is close to the same thing.  I don't think what I said to him was helpful.

There's not much doubt of the fact that any bailout will require the Detroit automakers to become more efficient.  And there's not much doubt of the fact that becoming more efficient -- in the way the government's bailout will require -- is going to involve reduced costs and improved efficiencies.  And there's no doubt that means eliminating positions in the US and moving operations overseas.  And for those who remain -- one way or another -- getting rid of the old way of doing things and replacing that with something new and more rational.  How can this be made to look like a rescue to the people who are being asked to give up what they know?