Bianca Steele

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  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.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. 

"Let Them Work in Marketing!"

Via the Boston Globe’s Monday business blog round-up, Elizabeth Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard’s Business School says, during a recession, everyone in a company should think of themselves as working in the marketing department.  She means that with revenues dropping and the bottom line dwindling, in order to keep the concern going, everybody has to drum up business, and in everything they do to think in terms of getting new customers and keeping them happy.  But the Globe’s very brief summary suggests that Kanter could be read as suggesting something more literal.

It’s not a stupid idea.  It ensures that everyone in the organization is on the same page.  It gets everyone in the organization speaking the same language—which helps everyone avoid misunderstandings and makes any mistakes that do occur easy to correct.  In effect, it makes the customer the CEO, so everybody knows who’s the boss and what that boss wants.

Moreover, it orients the organization in the direction that’s supposed to be best for the modern economy.  A business textbook will tell you that the correct vision of the firm is the “marketing model.”  A firm exists to facilitate a relationship between people with goods or services and people who need goods and services, and Marketing is the department (or profession) that most concerns itself with establishing and maintaining that relationship.  In accordance with this model, employees who have the interests of the firm in mind will think, not in terms of shareholder value and stock price, but in terms of the multifarious needs of customers.

In practice, though, I think it would be a distraction.  People are already pressed for time.  Most employees are not trained to think like marketers.  They would have to take time away from other tasks to learn how to think of their jobs in terms more appropriate to somebody else’s job.  They would have to take time away from thinking about their jobs in the terms they were actually trained in.  The topics of discussion that are “traditional” in their professions or trades could easily be edged out in favor of something they don’t fully understand.

I think the problem is ultimately a kind of discomfort with Adam Smith’s idea of the division of labor.  (Karl Marx did not envision the division of labor coming to an end, only a shorter working day and a more flexible approach to both avocation and vocation.)  So it seems unfair to people and almost immoral to ask them to work towards a goal that’s subordinate to “the main goal” of the organization.  There’s an understandable wish that everybody might understand the big picture all the time.

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.

Breaking and Entering

The other day I watched Breaking and Entering, one of the last films that Anthony Minghella directed.  It got pretty bad reviews among Netflix viewers but it sounded interesting, and I guess it was, but I’m not really sure whether I liked it or not.

It is fairly easy to see why movies that seem “interesting” while you’re watching them can trigger negative reactions with some viewers.  I don’t think it’s only that such viewers dislike these kinds of films, and that they’re translating the thought “I don’t like this kind of movie” into the language “Nobody will like this kind of movie: it’s a bad movie.”  Interesting means something most filmmakers don’t automatically do, and movies that try very hard to be interesting often fail.  These readers are probably accurately picking up on things that promised something interesting and ultimately fell short, elements in the film that weren’t persuasive about the new information they tried to communicate.

Usually the main problem seems to be the dialogue.  It’s stilted, or else it’s overly metaphorical.  It has nothing to do with the plot.  It may not make sense as normal, conversational human verbal behavior, or even as any recognizable form of in-group banter.  At times the actors are very evidently uncomfortable with it.  Occasionally you suspect that what you’re seeing is the least interesting parts of the script, and that what otherwise would have been significant scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor.  Which does no good to a plot that may be teetering on the edge of coherence anyway.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect movie.  It’s still not obvious why this problem generates more hostility than others might. I don’t know the answer.

Anyway, the plot is still there, but what is the story about, really?  The main character is an English architect, played by Jude Law, still young but getting close to middle age, often enough tempted to stray from his beautiful wife but never yet having done so.  He is very nearly the only thoroughly English character in the film.  His wife is Swedish though her father was American and she attended college here.  His partner (Jim from the English version of The Office) is apparently Jewish.  Their subordinates are Asian (and only one, that I recall, is male).  The criminal gang with which his apparently perfect life becomes tangled up is composed of refugees from Bosnia.  The only other English character is the gruff but not uncompassionate police detective.

The Dickensian situation Law finds himself him in uncovers the reality of how the other half live.  Or maybe opens a somewhat cold (typically English?) professional to the possibility of compassion.  Or something.

In the dénouement, he saves a Bosnian teenager—who has twice burglarized his office—from the prison sentence that ought to be his fate.  Instead, the boy gets to return to Sarajevo with his Muslim mother, and escapes the bad influence imposed by his father’s Serbian relatives.  (Though his uncle runs a crime ring, his father had been a doctor and died because he stayed behind to care for victims of the war.  His mother, now a very busy seamstress for rich people, used to play Bach on the piano before the smallness of her apartment required her to give it up.  These are utterly gorgeous housing projects by American standards, incidentally.)  To do this, he bravely announces, publicly, that he has had “an inappropriate relationship” with the boy’s mother.  That part is true.  He goes on, though, to fabricate an intimate and long-lived relationship with the pair of them, in which he had employed the mother for years, and (together with his partner, who’s inclined to be a bit more vindictive) had offered extensive career counseling to the son.  Thus, he knows the boy ought not to get caught up in “the system,” that he ought to be let go, and given a second chance.

So this pure person saves two lives by telling a lie.  But it’s strange how their lives are saved.  The good Bosnians go back to Bosnia and get away from the privileged Brits who exploit them at low pay; the Muslims get away from the Serbs who tempt them into a life of crime.  How is this so different from the ethnic cleansing that had them fleeing to London in the first place?  (The violence is missing, of course, and that’s not nothing.)

And there is a shadow tale that’s the more traditional ending for an English story like this one.  London, that most urban of cities, corrupts outsiders who aren’t prepared to deal with it safely.  It seems Law is permitting a young man to live a more normal life—which he may be—and to finish school, and also rescuing a sensitive middle-class woman from life in a tiny mews apartment strewn with the suit jackets and party dresses of strangers. But distant as the Dalmatian coast of Bosnia may seem, it is not the bucolic English countryside, much less Eden.  And the architect who plans to beautify dismal Kings Cross with greenery is a very good liar.

Is this coherent?  I don’t know, but I felt I was missing something important by not being English.  All of this occurred to me days after I’d watched the thing.  Emotionally, at the end of the film, I felt the story was about this Englishman and his discovery that there is an other half out there at all.  But, if so, so what?  It’s a typical story of discovery, a typical plot for this quiet little kind of film.  If that’s not enough, I do think it’s a failure of execution on the director’s part.

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.”

No Payoff

I think this is a good definition, from John Emerson's Trollblog:

[T]heories take ten years to learn and a lifetime to unlearn, and all they do is make it possible for you to make counterintuitive mistakes instead of traditionalist, common-sensical mistakes. No payoff.

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.

Marjorie Grene (1910-2009), and the Mirror of Nature

The philosopher Marjorie Grene died earlier this month, at age 98.  She may have been best known for her work on Aristotle, but her primary field of interest was in fact the philosophy of biology, challenging Cartesian ideas of consciousness.  Before getting her Ph.D. she studied with Heidegger and Jaspers in Germany.

She was also married to the classicist David Grene until 1961.  David Grene was one of the translators of the often-assigned University of Chicago Greek tragedies series.  As an amusing and interesting side note, Mr. Grene decided, apparently, in the 1940s, to become a gentleman farmer, a pursuit at which Mrs. Grene lasted not quite twenty years.

I’ve never read any of Marjorie Grene’s work, but here is where Richard Rorty cites her in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Kuhnians should, I conclude, resist the temptation to dish the Whigs by talking of “different worlds.”  By giving up such phrases, they would not be conceding anything to the epistemological tradition.  To say that the study of the history of science, like the study of the rest of history, must be hermeneutical, and to deny (as I, but not Kuhn, would) that there is something extra called “rational reconstruction” which can legitimize current scientific practice, is still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered by the physical scientists are creations of the human spirit.  To buy in on the normal science of one’s day in constructing the largest possible story to tell about the history of the race is not, unless one also buys the various Platonic dogmas mentioned in the previous section, to say that physics is “objective” in some way in which politics or poetry may not be.  For the line between making and finding has nothing to do with the line between incommensurability and commensurability.  Or, to put it another way, the sense in which man is a spiritual and not merely a natural being—the sense to which antireductionists like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Marjorie Grene have devoted attention—is not a sense in which he is a being who makes worlds.  To say, with Sartre, that man makes himself, and that he differs thereby from atoms and inkwells, is quite compatible with repudiating any suggestion that part of his self-creation consists in “constituting” atoms and inkwells.  But the confusions among the romantic notion of man as self-creative, the Kantian notion of man as constituting a phenomenal world, and the Cartesian notion of man as containing a special immaterial ingredient need to be examined in some detail.  This set of confusions is embodied in much discussion concerning the “nature of spirit,” “the irreducibility of the person,” the distinction between action and motion, and the distinction between the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften.  Since the last distinction is supposedly coextensive with the distinction between hermeneutical and other methods, it is especially important to take it up in order to clarify the notion of hermeneutics which I am offering.

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.