Bianca Steele

Don't Troll the Customer Service Rep!

In response to the story about Sen. Schumer’s apparently calling a flight attendant a “bitch,” Amanda Marcotte has some interesting thoughts (here) about how middle-class people treat service personnel.  This reminded me of the recent Crooked Timber post about trolls (here—it’s also worth following the link), because I think there is a kind of snide, impersonal style of interaction that people sometimes are tempted to adopt in public, and trollishness has more than a little in common with that.

I suspect this habit is a temptation to which academics, and also pedants in general (no shortage of those on the Internet!), occasionally succumb, when they are talking to a customer service person who seems less knowledgeable than maybe ought to be the case.  I have in mind primarily situations where you have asked someone for information, especially technical information, and you think you know more about the subject matter than they do.

It is not your job to take the service person to school over the issue you’re discussing with him or her.

What good could possibly result from doing so?

In the very best case, you might just possibly open up a dialogue between the service person and the more knowledgeable people in his or her organization.  The service person might become better educated, and the organization might become aware of the need for better training.  But this is very unlikely.

If you make the service person feel bad about not knowing enough, he or she may blame the knowledgeable people they interact with, for not teaching them enough, or for teaching them misleading things.  He or she may blame the people they work with for being, as you demonstrated to them, wrong.  He or she may totally misunderstand, and make up a narrative around the incomprehensible things you said to them, as best they can manage to interpret it.  (They may blame you for being a jerk, but only if they are so confident in themselves that it never occurs to them that they could be in the wrong, and it never occurs to them that their information was lacking, in any way, in the first place.)

Canine Linguistics

At Language Log, commenter “anon” (who I'd guess is British) says:

Many years ago, some Army combat engineers tried to teach dogs to sniff out explosives. They taught the dogs to bark once for a land mine, twice for an unexploded bomb, and so forth. Unfortunately, when the dogs encountered explosives for which they had not been taught barking and growling patterns, the dogs ignored the explosives, and some of the dogs and their trainers were blown to bits.

The engineers concluded that the dogs' ability to detect explosives depended on the words for explosives in the dogs' language.

This is called the Sapper-Woof hypothesis.

(Explanation: here or here).

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.

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

Are Humans Creative?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman raises a question that’s of interest to all bloggers: can we have too many peeves? and can community peeving increase each person’s count of annoyances even an order of magnitude higher than it would have been normally?

She starts with the great problem of the word “create.”  Many of us, I suppose, have never heard anyone complain that the word “create” has a modern implication that is foreign to our traditional way of thinking.  I think I first ran into this purported “issue” when reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, or maybe in George Steiner.  At the time, most likely, I assumed the idea—that only since the modern era have artists been considered “creative” in a sense previously reserved to God’s creation of the universe in the Biblical book of Genesis—was a commonplace.  I can easily imagine Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps, arrogating the word “creative” to himself and his fellow poets.  Yet that is only speculation, especially if, as Freeman says, there’s no basis in historical fact for thinking that “creative” in this sense is a modern invention.

In Bloom’s case, it is easy for me to dismiss what he says in retrospect.  In the fifteen or twenty years since I read his book, I’ve learned a little about how political disputes can contaminate otherwise scholarly thought, and these days I wouldn’t believe anything Allan Bloom says about anything unless I could find corroboration, properly documented and argued.  The case of George Steiner is more difficult given his liberal politics, but the personality he conveys in his books (and the fact that he says much Bloom would also agree with), makes it increasingly less so.  Yet, if there isn’t a real issue there, why would Daniel Boorstin have begun his popular book The Creators, about the literary canon, with a survey of metaphysics or creation myths in various world civilizations?  Though, on the other hand, the absence of a real issue might be exactly what makes that book a little unconvincing.

Is there really anybody who believes it’s immoral or impious for individuals to “create”?  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a review of a book by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus that inspired me to coin the new logical fallacy, “dixit ergo creavit”: he said it, therefore he created it.  Neuhaus, in essence, blames philosopher of postmodern pragmatism Richard Rorty for certain ills of the modern world.  His evidence: Rorty’s vivid description of the effects of those ills.  That is unfair, surely.  Describing problems does not make them any worse or bring them more concrete being than they had before.  In fact, Neuhaus himself would have been unable to attack those putative developments without Rorty’s description.

Anyway, I considered whether “creavit” or “invenit” (discovered) was the better word.  “Discovered” certainly describes better what I think Rorty, a scholar, not a belle-lettriste, was trying to do in his book.  But the fallacy is not only the unsurprising fact that the first person who says a thing may not have been the first person to think it.  Without the idea that Rorty had introduced something new into the world, Neuhaus’s accusation doesn’t have a lot of force.  Evidently he felt Rorty had created the turn of thought he wrote about: taught his students to believe this, whether or not that was an actual fact.  Evidently he felt human beings would be better off if nobody at all had even suggested its possibility.

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.”

Frames in the Business Section

A couple of posts ago, I commented slightly negatively on George Lakoff’s frame theory, but I actually think it is very valuable, so here is an example of how one might make use of the theory.

In today’s New York Times business section, Robert J. Shiller has a column addressing the idea that the experts could have or should have known the current crisis could or would happen.  Shiller’s column illustrates a particular set of frames that are sometimes found in business writing.

In 1989, Shiller heard an expert (Lawrence Summers) muse on his speculations that although nobody thinks it could occur, “a severe contraction, even a depression, could indeed come again.”  This is the people think a certain huge problem can never occur again, but in fact there is no reason to think the world has changed frame.  The state of affairs it describes may well be true, for any given situation, at any given time—but often it sounds alarmist, and one is tempted to think it has some of the attributes of a stopped clock.

The fictional scenario began with “lawyers and dentists explain[ing] to one another that investing without margin was a mistake.”  This is the problems are caused by certain kinds of licensed professionals who think they know something about a different field but really are ignorant frame.

The fictional crisis was then triggered when “a major Wall Street firm was forced to merge with another after a poorly supervised trader lost $500 million by failing to properly hedge a complex position.”  This is the problems are caused by subordinates’ failures to follow instructions frame.  There was no real problem, either with the regulations governing Wall Street firms, nor with the way executives were running the company, but only because a small number of employees were insufficiently disciplined.

All of these frames have one thing in common.  They all exonerate the people on top before the fact.  They all find problems only at the very bottom of the hierarchy.  They might permit a problem to be found just one level up from the very bottom—in the supervision or hiring of the lowest rank—but never explicitly put the blame on first-line managers.

None of the frames states ideas that are 100% inaccurate.  Sometimes people don’t follow the instructions given them by their managers.  Sometimes dentists and medical doctors misunderstand the ideas they hear coming out of other disciplines.  However, these frames do make it nearly impossible for any systemic issues to be identified publicly, not only by anyone who feels constrained to stay within the lines they indicate, but also by anyone who is dependent on information provided by those who feel so constrained.  Merely reversing the frame doesn’t work either, in part because the only information that can be provided is what fits into the frame.  It is not an unfair criticism of the New York Times to say that it reuses a limited set of frames over and over again, and that these frames very often indicate a neoliberal point of view.

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.

The Definition of "Neoliberalism"

At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal is discussing Walter Benn Michaels’ essay “The Neoliberal Imagination,” which appeared in n+1, and he says:

Michaels accuses liberals of stooping to a politics of respect or recognition where we should be practicing a politics of redistribution. "[T]he politics of the neoliberal imagination involve respecting the poor, not getting rid of poverty—eliminating inequality without redistributing wealth." Liberals, he argues, like to treat classism as homologous to racism or sexism—as being primarily about the destructive force of prejudice, rather than the destructive force of not having enough money to pay for basic needs. "So, just as being opposed to racism is by no means to be opposed to racial difference… to be opposed to classism is by no means to oppose class difference."

But to my ear, “neoliberal” is not interchangeable with “liberal.” “Neoliberal,” as originally used in the US in the 1990s, refers to the second generation of people who were previously liberals but were moving in the direction of conservatism. The first generation said they were “liberals who had been mugged by reality,” whatever that means, and called themselves “neoconservatives.” The next clump were politicians like Joseph Lieberman, people who wanted to consider themselves liberals, still didn’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, etc., but who read Sullivan’s The New Republic and increasingly saw merit in conservative arguments.  These Democrats, the DLC and so on, are the ones who were in power since the early 1990s, so I think I'm using the word in pretty much the same sense Michaels is, at least in this Bookforum essay.

“Neoliberal” is a word I didn’t hear much for a while, until around the time the n+1 guys came around. I assumed they had heard it from their professors at Harvard. No idea what those guys thought it meant.

I later learned that “neoliberal” was used in Europe to refer to what’s called a “classical liberal”: someone who believes in the free market, disestablishment of religion, in other words, someone who a European reactionary would call a liberal. My understanding is that the Liberal Party in England is “liberal” in this sense. In the United States, it describes Jonah Goldberg: conservatism without the bigots.

But, as I said, I have no idea what those krazy n+1 kids mean by it.