Trigger Warnings on College Campuses

The Atlantic has published an article that correctly laments the rising use of "trigger warnings" by colleges, but which focuses on an unsupported thesis that there is something materially different about "kids these days" rather than examining why college administrators are sensitive to demands for those warnings. Don't get me wrong -- there are differences between generations, and in some ways today's college students are a lot more sensitive about wrongs than were past generations. For example, today's college students appear to be much more sensitive to and much less tolerant of racism, as compared to past generations.

A couple of decades ago, when I was in law school, my criminal law professor used sexual assault in order to illustrate some of the complexities of the law. A law professor can pose a hypothetical example of a sexual assault in which the victim sincerely believes that a sexual assault occurred, while the accused (reasonably or unreasonably) sincerely believes that everything that occurred was consensual. Such a hypothetical case allows you to examine questions of the degree to which intent should factor into criminal prosecutions, charging decisions and sentencing. Should two equivalent acts receive the same punishment, even though one offender was acting deliberately and the other was clueless? To what degree does deterring the future acts of others justify prosecuting an offender who may not have realized that he was committing a crime? Hypotheticals can also extend into cases in which consent is obtained through fraud or deception, or by a mistake of perception.

Some of the students in my section made strenuous objection to the use of sexual assault -- not to any specific example, but to its being mentioned at all -- within the classroom. The objections did not change the manner in which the class was taught, but did inspire school administrators to meet with the students who raised the objections to try to explain what the professor was hoping to accomplish and to resolve their concerns. At that time I was told by another professor that the atmosphere for discussing sexual assault cases had changed significantly, and that some professors had already stopped using sexual assault hypotheticals in the classroom despite the difficulty of formulating hypotheticals that would as clearly illustrate the legal principles they were trying to teach. The Atlantic article opens with the example of "law students asking... professors at Harvard not to teach rape law", as if it is a new development. It is not.

When I hear of demands for "trigger warnings", my response is not that students are somehow different from back when I was in college. It may be that there has been some shift in the number of students raising objections -- something that I have not seen documented -- but the primary difference appears to be that school administrators have changed how they respond to student objections. Forty years ago, the response probably would have amounted to, "It's college, and you're going to be uncomfortable at times. Get over it." When I was a student the response was more gentle, but with a similar outcome. Today, college administrators do seem much more likely to ask that a professor add "trigger warnings" or change something about a course in order to avoid making the objecting students uncomfortable.

Why would administrators change their approach?

I think the answer lies not with the modern generation of students, but with the modern approach to the funding of college education. When college education was more affordable, and colleges were less dependent upon squeezing every last tuition dollar out of a student, colleges could more easily treat their students as students. As states have chosen to reduce their support for public colleges, colleges have increasingly had to fight for every dollar. Part of that process has involved making life a lot easier, and a lot more comfortable, for students. Part of that process involves catering to a vocal minority that, if not appeased, is likely to create negative publicity for a college or take its tuition dollars elsewhere.

The authors write,

The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being.

I think, here, that the authors are looking at two different forms of response by college administrators. There was no ambiguity in the classroom instruction -- sexual assault was presented as a bad thing, empathy was extended to the victim even when the hypothetical posited an offender who did not realize that he had committed a crime, and nobody questioned why "'No' means 'no'" was sensible policy. The students who objected to any reference to sexual assault in our criminal law class were not interested in widening the discussion or including additional viewpoints. Had our professor been less sensitive, perhaps an administrator would have advised him as to how to introduce the subject in a more sensitive manner, but the key difference seems to be that the administrators were not receptive to demands that material be removed from classroom instruction on the basis that it created discomfort for some of the students.

While the authors of the article describe the efforts in our society to make life more safe for children, I think that they overstate their conclusions. They write, "children born after 1980 — the Millennials — got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well." I disagree that the underlying message is "Life is dangerous" but, more than that, it's difficult to see that as a distinction from prior generations. Doe the authors believe that in the past generations, parents were teaching kids that "life is safe", even when that was patently untrue? Did the generation that grew up a century ago, spending their early childhood in an age before polio vaccination and where infant mortality was common, who experienced the Great Depression, who were born around the time of World War I and saw the country go through World War II (perhaps fighting in that war) under the impression that life was safe? I somehow doubt it.

Perhaps the difference is that parents of past generations of kids told them, "Life is dangerous, but you're on your own, kid -- you can't count on me to keep you safe"? No, that doesn't seem plausible, either.

I think the authors stray off of the rails when they suggest that political partisanship may be a significant contributing factor, based on "survey data going back to the 1970s". The authors are certainly aware that past generations have also experienced times of fierce political partisanship. Our country even once had a civil war. I also have little sense that students arriving on campus are more politically aware than those of past generations. So when the authors suggest that "students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past", it seems fair to point out that they're engaged in conjecture, and that they haven't adequately supported a theory that even they phrase as conjecture. Similarly, when describing the advent of social media, the authors write,

These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts.

Or... they may not be any different.

The authors note that faculty members may be concerned about being attacked on social media, something that might explain why faculty members and administrators are perhaps hypersensitive to certain student complaints, but that's not an observation about the students.

The authors state,

We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real.

If they're not suggesting "simple causation", what form of causation do they in fact intend to imply? What changes in diagnosis rates has occurred, and for what mental illnesses? Which mental illnesses are now more frequently diagnosed, and what portion of the increase for any given mental illness do the authors believe might be associated with calls for "trigger warnings"? When they speak of "experts", what are the qualifications of the experts whose views they have examined and deemed relevant? What does it mean to "seem to agree", as opposed to expressing actual agreement? It's really easy to make a nebulous, speculative assertion in support of an argument, but if you want it to carry weight you have to provide some amount of substance.

The authors suggest that changes in the interpretation of federal civil rights law that occurred in 2013 might play a role in the changes, but that argument seems weak on a number of fronts. First, the trends they are describing started long before 2013. Second, the average student is completely unaware of those changes. Third, to the extent that administrators are responding by being hypersensitive not only to situations implicated by the actual changes, but to situations well beyond their scope, that suggests a problem with the administrators and not the students. To the extent that interpretations of the law by federal agencies are making it more difficult to teach effectively on campus, those organizations should reconsider or clarify their interpretations, but it's not the fault of either students or federal agencies if college administrators impose policies that extend far beyond what the law requires.

The article continues into what I see as some rather odd armchair psychology, such as the suggestion that triggering material could benefit sensitive students by desensitizing them to a trauma. Even if we assume that the people demanding trigger warnings are doing so because of their own sensitivities, as opposed to those of others, there is a difference between a sensitivity and a phobia -- and no psychologist in his right mind is going to conflate random encounters with material that triggers a phobic reaction or PTSD is a proper alternative for a professionally conducted process intended to desensitize and individual. In fact, you're apt to learn that such an approach could worsen the phobia.

They share a couple of example of "catastrophizing" that are about college administrators:

Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read I will take what is mine with fire & blood, a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word fire could refer to AK-47s.

Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The coll[e]ge described the proposed structure as a “memorial” parking garage—a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.

I don't think that the dean who complained about Francis Schmidt was identified, but I doubt that the dean was a 'Millennial'. The president of Valdosta State University appears to have been in his late sixties at the time of the incident, so it's safe to say that he's not a millennial. Those actions may not represent the best of what we hope to impart to college students, but they appear to support for the argument that the primary source of the problem lies with college administrators as opposed to students.

The article also references an incident in which an instructor's joke was misinterpreted by a student and reported as a threat, resulting in the instructor's suspension. It is no surprise that college administrators are sensitive to potential violence on campus, and does not appear to be in question that the response in that case was an overreaction. It's difficult to see how the incident has anything to do with students being too sensitive, as opposed to there being an understandable concern (even if magnified by the spotlight effect) about violence on campus.

My preferred approach would not be seen as very sensitive to those who are concerned about potential triggering, or who are inclined to reinvent innocuous statements as "microaggressions": I would like to see colleges instruct incoming freshmen that the can expect their ideas to be challenged as they come into contact with other students, professors, and materials that reflect opinions and perspectives different from their own, and that the risk of being at times upset or offended is inherent to the learning process. I would trust professors who were planning to use particularly disturbing or potentially offensive materials to warn their students; for the most part it's difficult to think of scenarios where the nature of the material that will be presented in a course is not foreshadowed by the subject matter. Students who are hypersensitive would be free to explore their options within that framework, or to consider other colleges. The small but influential population of students who want to protect not only themselves, but to protect others from any form of actual or or potential offense would be on notice that the administration will focus on incidents of actual bias and discrimination, but won't be tying itself in knots trying to ensure that nobody is ever offended.

Will that happen? Perhaps at a college that is not dependent upon accepting most or all of the students who apply. But as long as colleges are in the position of having to treat students like customers, I don't expect that this sort of trend will reverse itself -- and I find myself in full agreement with the authors' underlying position that this trend isn't good for anybody

The Other Side of the So-Called Trophy Culture

A recent Real Sports broadcast, summarized here, declared that our nation has a problem with a "trophy culture" that coddles kids by handing out trophies for merely showing up for games, or perhaps even simply for signing up for a team whether or not they even come to a practice. At the conclusion, Bryant Gumbel expressed that he didn't see it as a big deal, and was told by the correspondent that it was somehow emblematic of a larger social problem. I find myself far more sympathetic to Gumbel's position.

If you've ever seen very young children play a team sport, like Soccer, you might be reminded of kittens chasing a string. No matter how many times you tell them to hold to their positions, most and sometimes all of the kids will simply chase the ball no matter where it is on the field. At that age you will find some kids who are skilled beyond their years, but for the most part I don't see much benefit in treating a game as if it's a meaningful contest. Let the kids have fun, don't worry about the score, and focus on building their interest and skills for future years.

As kids get a bit older, and they divide into groups of better-skilled and lesser-skilled players, a new question arises: Are you going to give every child some time on the field, or are you going to instead focus on getting the win? When the focus is on the win, stories of bad conduct by adults -- don't take it from me: Here's Real Sports on the issue:

Real Sports found a person by the name of Ashley Merryman to play the part of the scold against tropies. My first reaction to her statements was, "Kids aren't that stupid," or, to put it another way, kids know the difference between getting a trophy for participation, as compared to getting a trophy for their performance. I thought that perhaps somebody had researched the issue and discovered that somebody had -- as explained by none other than Ashley Merryman herself:

By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.

So the issue really isn't that kids are fooled into thinking that their performance exceeds their actual skill set by getting participation trophies -- they know the difference. Having undermined her own argument, Merryman tries to turn it around by arguing that top performers might "give up" if they see other kids get meaningless trophies -- to which I respond, "That's nonsense". When I look at youth sports these days, I see kids performing at the highest levels that I've ever seen, far beyond the performance of the same age cohort when I was a kid. What evidence does Merryman offer to convince me not to believe my lying eyes? That would be... nothing.

At this point the case against participation trophies would seem to be that, past the age of five or six, the kids see them for what they are, and it costs a lot of money to hand out hundreds or thousands of meaningless trophies. Merryman can see that, but just can't stop herself from catastrophizing: "We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives." That would be an argument that's supported by the facts, while extrapolating that participation trophies are emblematic of the ruination of our society, the decline and fall of our civilization... not so much.

By The Time You're Talking About Prison-Like Schools, Love Isn't Enough

Michael Gerson dips his toes into what he deems the "prison schools" of the inner cities, and their efforts to build character. Apparently one doesn't need educational credentials to run a good school for inner city kids. One simply needs a prison-like environment and a whole lotta love:

Students are urged to be “Ginn men.” It is an ideal with the strong imprint of a particular man, Ted Ginn, the high school football coach who was seized with the initial vision for the academy. While possessing few academic qualifications, Coach Ginn has a credential often lacking in prison-like, urban public schools: a passionate belief in the potential of at-risk children. “You can’t have people around young people who don’t love kids,” he says. “If you don’t have love, you don’t have nothing.” Love creates a child’s internal desire to meet external expectations.

Even as he recognizes that the theory of inculcating "character" into inner city schools is predicated upon jargon-laden language, Gerson laps it up:

But the basic idea is sound and should be familiar to anyone who has read cultural anthropology or changed diapers. From the very earliest age, children need one adult — preferably more — who believes in them utterly. And that belief is expressed in a series of social and moral expectations. (At Ginn, for example, the boys must learn to iron a dress shirt, a ritual reinforcement of the fact that there are rules for everyone.) The early connection between love and rules creates behaviors — sitting still, keeping your hands to yourself, focusing, respecting others, deferring gratification — that make the educational task possible.

The problem with Gerson's notion, in practice, is that even the most loving of school principals (wardens?) cannot give enough love to every student, and perhaps not even enough love to any student, to make them believe that somebody "believes in them utterly". Frankly, the very creation of the prison-like environment Gerson notes, then blissfully ignores, is a hallmark of the very deep mistrust these schools have for their students. In fairness to Gerson, the school he visits does offer "life coaches":

The most innovative part of the Ginn approach is the use of “life coaches” — one for every 25 boys — who are mentors from the community, embedded in classrooms and available 24 hours a day. “You learn everything you can about the child,” one life coach said, “if they have a single parent, if they need extra cereal in the morning, who is having a bad day. If you catch it early, you’ve changed the course of his day — and maybe not just his day. Who knows what might be his choice on that day?”

It's difficult for me to see, however, how a "life coach" of unknown qualification can effectively track and mentor twenty-five children around the clock, no matter how much love he has to share. Life coaches cannot make up for struggling homes, poor parental guidance, food uncertainty and dangerous neighborhoods.

Here's the biggest problem, as reported on a right-wing education blog: No matter how much these schools hope to teach character, there's no evidence that it works. Quoting a report analyzing KIPP schools, a highly structured network of inner city charter schools with strict, often extreme and even bizarre, behavior codes and rules:

[T]he KIPP children showed no advantage on any of the measures of character strengths. They weren’t more effortful or persistent. They didn’t have more favorable academic self-conceptions or stronger school engagement. They didn’t score higher than the comparison group in self-control. In fact, they were more likely to engage in “undesirable behavior,” including losing their temper, lying to and arguing with their parents, and giving teachers a hard time. They were more likely to get into trouble at school. Despite the program’s emphasis on character development, the KIPP students were no less likely to smoke, drink, get high, or break the law. Nor were their hopes for their educational futures any higher or their plans any more ambitious.

What KIPP offers is consistent with what other studies have found -- better academic performance due to the fact that its students spend more time in the classroom. The rest is window-dressing, even if well-intentioned, that creates the prison-like environment that would keep somebody like Gerson from ever dreaming of sending his own kids to one of their schools.

Gerson, stepping into the role of "the blind leading the blind", complains that the political parties don't understand the issues facing these kids.

Republicans tend to ignore the urgency of this cultural challenge. It is not enough to blame parents (who are often deeply disadvantaged) or to call on charities to fill the mentoring gap (since the scale of the need is too large for volunteerism).

Democrats tend to underestimate the complexity of the cultural challenge. This gap of adult commitment and involvement will not be filled simply by extending schooling downward by a year to cover 4-year-olds. Even the best early-childhood education programs seem to have fleeting or marginal effects unless they are followed (and preceded) by complementary efforts. Programs such as the Nurse-Family Partnership — in which nurses visit first-time, low-income mothers to provide information on nutrition and parenting — may be a more focused (and cost-effective) way to increase the school readiness of at-risk kids.

I was not aware that Democrats opposed educational programs for new mothers, or that they opposed nutrition education and programs for new mothers. I was not aware that Democrats thought that quality child care should not be offered, or even subsidized by the state, before the age of four.

At the end of the day, Gerson falls into standard tropes about inner city youth -- they just need to be taught discipline, even if in the form of meaningless symbol:

Education is the cumulative result of such choices. And Ginn provides a vivid expression of the educational task: Iron your shirt and get “right for a miracle.”

Do you think Gerson irons his own shirts, or do you think he uses a service -- and no matter what the answer, do you think it would tell you anything about his character? I'm quite certain that Gerson has worked with a large number of privileged men who have lived their entire life blissfully unaware of how the clothes they strew across the floor get picked up, laundered, and placed back into their drawers and closets... mom, spouse, maid, maybe elves or pixies....

One of the favorite studies of the people behind this form of character education is the marshmallow study -- a study that revealed a strong correlation between whether a child can resist the immediate reward of a single marshmallow in exchange for the promise that if they resist they will receive two, and future success. I've read that at some KIPP schools they even use "Resist the marshmallow" as a slogan. But I have read about a follow-up study by a graduate student, working at a homeless shelter, who found that the biggest predictor of a child's ability to resist the marshmallow was whether the person promising the greater reward was reliable. If that person broke an earlier promise to the child, children were far less likely to delay gratification. My formulation connects reasonably well with Gerson's notion that every child needs somebody "who believes in them utterly" -- in essence a trustworthy caregiver. The reason that character education fails in KIPP schools is that it comes too late, and in the wrong form.

Frankly, the best way to lift a population out of poverty is to make work available at a decent rate of pay. But barring that possibility, if you want to create the type of personality that is primed for success, you have to intervene at the family level long before a child reaches school, and when you identify a vulnerable child you need to do a lot more than have a nurse visit and provide nutritional education or parenting advice. By the time you get around to telling a vulnerable child, pushed into a "prison-like" school, that somebody utterly loves him (and, simultaneously, 24 of his classmates), you're too late.

The Charismatic Sociopath

Watching Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, depicting the scheming Frank Underwood, I can't help but wonder... how is it that the lead character of a show, a man who will literally lie, cheat and steal his way into the White House, maintains popularity with the show's fans? Spacey's character is unquestionably a sociopath or, if you prefer, afflicted with antisocial personality disorder. At times he strategically all-but-admits his sociopathy to other characters as a tool to win back their trust.

I've seen studies that indicate that people are quite good at spotting sociopaths, but if the sociopath is sufficiently charming will nonetheless allow themselves to succumb to his charms and confidence. Plenty of people saw through Bernie Madoff, but plenty more chose not to. I guess if you're smooth enough, charming enough, we can find a way to turn off our better judgment.

Healthcare.gov and Human Nature

It's an unfair generalization, but when I look at the traffic that took down a defective healthcare.gov website on its first day, and the traffic that came close to doing the same on the last day of open enrollment, I can't help but wonder if there's a component of human nature that silently instructs us, "If you can't do something at the very first opportunity, you might as well put it off until the very last minute."

Hating the Haters is... So Cool!

Was somebody on the Internet mean to Stephen Marche?

The Internet has reached peak hate. It had to. At every other moment in history when there has been an explosion of text — whether through social change, like the birth of a religious movement, or technological change, like the advent of print — a period of nasty struggle ensued before the forces of civility reined it in. In the past few months alone, we've seen the catfishing of Manti Te'o, a professional tennis player quit because of trolling, and a rash of teenage suicides from cyberbullying alongside the by-now-standard Twitter hatestorms of various strengths and durations. The sheer bulk of the rage at the moment can seem overwhelming. But the fact that we recognize it and have acknowledged its unacceptability is a sign of the ancient process reasserting itself yet again. The Internet is in the process of being civilized.

Peak hate? Is that like "peak oil" - you think you've reached it, and then somebody finds a new source or finds a way to dig a deeper well?

Hate is a source of acknowledged pleasure. Hate-watching. Hate-listening. Hate-reading. These are all things that you, your friends, and your neighbors, not monsters, likely do. We deliberately expose ourselves to objects of contempt to stoke inner outrage in order to enjoy the release of fury. It's not just online, though the Internet is the most obvious theater of cruelty.

The Internet is "the most obvious theater of cruelty"? Seriously? I guess, perhaps, if the most dangerous thing you do is interview models and send tweets from your home office. But... seriously?

Marche then proceeds to imply that every mean thing said on the Internet is a form of cyberbullying, admits that he takes personal thrill in it, and suggests that we're headed down a road toward having anonymity legislated out of the Internet. He's a reporter, but I think he missed some foundational lessons on the First Amendment. Also, I don't think it's helpful to define bullying so broadly to encompass every mean thing posted on the Internet. Marche should take personal note here, given that when he argues that "Twitter and Web comments are really just new expressions of that oldest of monsters: the crowd", that "these hatestorms" against individuals on the Internet are a form of bullying, and "bullies and their victims both have a higher rate of mental illness for decades afterward", it's difficult to avoid the fact that he's describing his own conduct. I'll grant, he uses the term "we" a lot, but that seems largely to be a matter of projection.

Wildness is always followed by civilization, the root of civilization is civility, and the rules of civility have not meaningfully changed in two thousand years. Cicero outlined them in "On Duties": Speak clearly. Don't speak too much. Make sure everybody has a chance. Don't interrupt. Alternate topics so that everybody can talk about something of interest to them. Don't criticize people behind their backs. Don't be angry or lazy. These are the rules. You already know them. They've always been the rules. People are just going to start following them again.

Except the thing is, it's not as if human nature has changed over the past 2,000 years, and Marche himself admits that what he's describing is simply a manifestation of human nature, at times magnified by technology. Were Marche to look at the past 2,000 years of human history, he would quickly find that Cicero's rules are most often honored in the breach. That's not going to change, and the Internet is not going to be tamed by (imagined) legislation that requires you sign your real name to everything you post. If Marche wants to transform himself into a champion of online civility, a role model for us all, that would be great. If he thinks he can change others, or transform human nature through legislation, though, he has quite a bit to learn about the limits of his capacity.

If You Want to Reduce Suicide, Focus on the Economy

Ross Douthat is concerned that "loneliness" may be behind an increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men... a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. You would think this part would clue Douthat in:

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

But you can see he's already on the wrong track by the end of the paragraph. That is, the problem is not about a retreat from family, community and work. It's about the carpet being pulled out from under you.

You would think it was a state secret that the group at highest risk of suicide was middle class men (particularly white men), and that risk of suicide is strongly associated with three stressors: job loss, loss of family and poor health. Contrary to Douthat's assumption, there's not a higher suicide risk if you're single versus married - but divorce is a risk factor.

In our culture, our identity is wrapped up in the work we do. One of the first questions you're likely to be asked when you meet somebody is "Where do you work" or "What kind of work do you do". The factors also tend to go hand-in-hand. Poor health can lead to the loss of employment, financial stress resulting from loss of employment (or from poor health) can lead to divorce. When somebody's self image is built around job and family and he feels that he's irretrievably lost his economic future and his family, that's a huge psychological blow.

Douthat builds his argument in part on a fiction, that we're dealing with "structural unemployment". I've taken some issue with those who argue that there's nothing structural about our unemployment situation, but the type of thing they're talking about (the ability to return to full employment) and the type of thing I'm talking about (the ability of somebody who has lost employment to get back onto a similar income and career path) are two different things. If Douthat believes that there's something new about the problems men have if they're displaced from the workplace during or after their late forties, he hasn't been paying attention. Not even to the content of the newspaper for which he writes:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

More academically,

Suicide rates among both men and women aged 35–64 years increased substantially from 1999 and 2010. This finding is consistent with a previous study that showed a notable increase in the overall suicide rate among middle-aged adults relative to a small increase in suicide rates among younger persons and a small decline in older persons during a similar period. The increases were geographically widespread and occurred in states with high, as well as average and low suicide rates. By race/ethnicity, the increases were highest and statistically significant only among whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives, widening the racial/ethnic gap in suicide rates....

Possible contributing factors for the rise in suicide rates among middle-aged adults include the recent economic downturn (historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship); a cohort effect, based on evidence that the "baby boomer" generation had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years; and a rise in intentional overdoses associated with the increase in availability of prescription opioids.

In a loosey-goosey sort of sense, one court argue that Douthat has a point. That if people who were suicidal could break out of their mindset, reconnect with their communities, and find peace and joy in their lives, they would no longer be suicidal. But that would be to assume that depression and suicide are the results of a rational thought process rather than cognitive distortion, and that somebody who is suicidally depressed is well-positioned to make significant life changes. Sometimes in response to a suicide you hear, "I don't understand, he seemed so happy that day" - the result of a confusion of the immense relief that can come from the decision to commit suicide with an emergence from depression. When severely depressed individuals receive treatment, you have to be very careful during their early recovery because in some cases the only thing holding them back from suicide is lacking the cognitive energy to carry out their plan. This cartoon series, I think, does a pretty good job of illustrating depression - but that freedom depicted at the end can be (and in the author's case, was) dangerous.

Douthat shares a non-suicidal author's account of how he reconnected with his small hometown due to his sister's terminal illness, and extrapolates,

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

It seems that Douthat is looking for a simple solution to the issue of suicide that ties into his conceit that a simple, small town lifestyle is somehow superior to... the way he lives his own life. As if anybody can find peace, contentment and community simply by moving to small town, rural America. As if small town, rural America would be unchanged if we all moved there. As if that's even possible. As if you can't find community in a city. As if suicide rates weren't higher in the less urbanized parts of the nation.

If you care about reducing suicide, you should be calling for government policies to help restore full employment. You should be advocating programs to help people deal with job loss and regain decent employment. You should be concerned about the quality and availability of mental health care. Pretending that all will be well if people return to the type of community seen in states with above-average suicide rates? Probably not helpful.

The Top Three Reasons Why Lists Are.... Oh, Forget It

Paul Waldman asks an interesting question - a lot of online content comes in the form of lists as a form of link baiting, but lists are also prominently featured in traditional magazines, especially the type that want to inspire an impulse sale at the newsstand or checkout lane. The length of the list seems to be relatively unimportant - people respond to lists, and tend to click links or buy magazines that promise lists:

So what's the lesson here? Lists are magic. Buzzfeed has built its spectacular success on that principle (just look), there are other web sites who have similar success, (see, for example, Cracked, which on the web is something very different and more successful than its print roots as a Mad magazine rip-off), and it's something every magazine and website editor knows. The next time you're at a newsstand, look at the magazine covers, and see how many are using lists to grab your attention. "9 Moves That'll Drive Him Wild." "8 Exercises to Burn Fat And Rip Those Abs." "12 Strategies For Achieving Financial Security." "14 Celebrity Bikini Nightmares." But the question is, why?

Waldman offers a couple of theories:

1. "Maybe it has to do with the promise of something both finite and complete, distilling the world down to something you can manage and then be done with."

2. "It could also be the attraction of something easy to read—because it's broken into small pieces, you know it won't require too much work to read, you'll be able to skim it easily, and if you want to read part of it and then stop, you'll be able to."

Waldman questions his theories as being too rational, as he sees the attraction of lists as being more visceral, "making us click on things whose topics we don't even otherwise care about". And Waldman's onto something with the argument that our clicking isn't purely rational. For actual informational content, I can't recall the last link I found that promised a list that lived up to its promise.

But here's the thing: Even when we click on a list out of idle curiosity, something we might not click but for the promise of it's offering the "top three reasons," or "four most important factors", on one thing or another, the clicking is fundamentally rational. We have questions or we have curiosity, and the list promises that somebody else has engaged in curation, separated the wheat from the chaff, and will give us the answers in a quick, easily digested form. You don't click on what might be a long form article or even a short essay about something of marginal interest to you, but if you can get that information by glancing at a list the cost-benefit analysis (time vs. interest) shifts. And if the topic interests you or is important to you, the implied promises of curation and relevance have appeal.

Supermarket magazine stands have been filled with lists for as long as I can remember, and they've presumably failed to live up to that promise for at least as long, given that the same essential lists are offered month after month, year after year. The top three ways to lose weight, the top five ways to find your soul mate, the top three tricks to drive your significant other wild in the sack... The goal is to get you to click or buy without thinking, or if you must think, "It's only $1.99," or "If the article at the other end of the link is junk I've only lost a few seconds of time."

Will it continue to work? The evidence at the newsstand says "yes", and so far the evidence from the content mills suggests that the technique isn't losing its effectiveness online. Alas, the actual cost is that the most meaningful, relevant information is likely to be headlined with a misleading title in order to draw more "eyeballs", and may fail to be noticed in favor of lists that, unfortunately, are often junk.

Isn't There a Word For....

A smart, superficially charismatic guy who will lie without conscience about even the most trivial issue if he perceives advantage, no hint of conscience or remorse, and act like you're wronging him when you call him out... I swear there's a psychological term....

Tolerance, Intolerance and Politics

In response to David Hoffman's argument, "a national conversation about guns and violence, facilitated and sped up by the internet, reduces our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminishes our capacity live together in peace", Jonathan Adler states:

I think he has a point. I also suspect this problem is magnified due to a decline in the understanding and appreciation of tolerance as a virtue. Not tolerance as acceptance or approval, but true tolerance. Tolerance as in there is something unpleasant, objectionable, or distasteful that one nonetheless tolerates. And this is brings us back to the problem of cocooning. If we have little interaction with those of truly different viewpoints — those whose entire worldview and starting premises are different than ours — we have a harder time recognizing the goodwill and fundamental humanity of those with whom we disagree. And that means we have a more difficult time discussing divisive political issues and trying to find common ground. So instead we demonize and attempt to marginalize our opponents — undertakings that may make us feel good, but do nothing to improve the situation.

I am reminded of the various "remember the good old days" essays, speaking of the 1950's and early 1960's as an idyll. Never mind the tensions, the racial discrimination and segregation, behind the scenes. Never mind the mentally handicapped child who is never allowed outside of the house or is institutionalized, lest his parents be embarrassed by the neighbors finding out about him. Never mind the ostracism of homosexuals and the criminalization of homosexuality. "We were all so much more tolerant when we were all the same. Why can't we get back to that sort of embrace of tolerance as a virtue?"

I don't want to be unfair to Adler. I'm just having a difficult time thinking of a period of human history in which the "true tolerance" he describes was lived as a virtue. Not discussed or advocated, but an actual part of the culture. I see instead a history in which differences in politics, religion and lifestyle have frequently been magnified, often with horrendous consequences for a targeted population.

Thanks to the Internet it's actually easier than ever to find and interact "with those of truly different viewpoints" - if you choose to do so. It's also very easy to cocoon. But to the extent that this represents a change, it's that people have a greater opportunity to seek out alternative viewpoints, not so much that people are largely staying within the confines of a like-minded community.

Adler argues that "It seems increasingly rare in political discourse for either side to consider that the other may be arguing in good faith", something he attributes in part to cocooning. I think a big part of the problem, though, is that many people who are leading the political discourse are not arguing in good faith. I've heard many politicians argue that they and their peers often take different positions behind closed doors than the ones that they take in public for their constituents. I've never heard a politician deny doing so. Behind the scenes we have a massive apparatus attempting to influence, manipulate and corrupt the debate.

If we're talking about people in general, it's reasonable to say that they're likely taking their positions in good faith, even if you're certain they're wrong. But when you look to the institutions that are advancing a particular narrative, those involved in the debate who are profiting from the stance they take, and those engaged in demagoguery, it's fair to both question their motives and to suggest that they're part of the problem Adler describes. When John Boehner distributed checks from tobacco lobbyists to his Repubican peers on the floor of the House, he branded himself as somebody whose motives are always in question. Does he believe the positions he takes? It's like the old joke, "Now we're just haggling over the price" - once you establish that you're for sale, your actual beliefs no longer matter.

At another level, if somebody is sincere in his support for a political position, but cannot explain why, cannot support or defend the position with facts, and cannot support or defend his position with logic, he makes himself irrelevant to the debate. We can engage in the type of tolerance encapsulated by the notion of agreeing to disagree, but you're not going to have a productive discussion if "tolerance" requires continuing to include that person in the debate or is contingent upon changing his mind.

It's not merely cocooning that leads academics to at times express puzzlement about how "someone of reasonable intelligence, good will, and good faith could reach diametrically opposing conclusions" - sometimes it's a product of the academic's having thought about the issue, while the person on the other side of the debate has given the issue little to no thought, or lacks sufficient information to properly analyze the issue. If you're actually interested in having a discussion, it doesn't take long to figure out if you're talking to somebody who is locked into a position, never to be moved, or if you can have a genuine discussion. I am approaching this from Adler's perspective of "an academic vs. everybody else", but if you want a meaningful discussion it's best to approach good faith debate without presupposing that you have an intellectual or informational advantage. You don't need to assume that the other person's position is informed, well-considered or offered in good faith, but you can attempt to provide an honest audience. If you're lucky, you might even learn something.

It would be interesting if Adler gave a position of an example of issue for which an identifiable population held an "entire worldview and starting premises [that] are different than" his own. My own international travels suggest that people around the world have a lot more in common than Adler's comment suggests. I suspect that he's speaking less about an individual or culture that disagrees on pretty much everything, across the board, and more about disagreement on some number of core or fundamental issues. Religion provides a context for how two people or cultures can be locked into a set of beliefs that exclude the possibility of the other's being correct. Religion provides an excellent context for the position that we would benefit from "true tolerance". Yet, alas, it also provides a context in which we have seen an exceptional level of intolerance over the whole of human history. (Even when one or both of the religions teaches "true tolerance" as a virtue.)

So, sure, let's aspire for "true tolerance" - but even if the tolerance we generally experience in the 21st century western world is a pale imitation of the ideal, it nonetheless stands as a remarkable achievement.

Kill Him With Kindness?

David Brooks lectures,

It’s foolhardy to try to persuade people to see the profound errors of their ways in the hope that mental change will lead to behavioral change. Instead, try to change superficial behavior first and hope that, if they act differently, they’ll eventually think differently. Lure people toward success with the promise of admiration instead of trying to punish failure with criticism. Positive rewards are more powerful.

Where to start.... Perhaps, "David, I promise to admire your restraining yourself from feigning objectivity when stumping for the Republican Party"?

Mitt Romney's Empathy Deficit

When I saw a recent blog post by Charles Pierce, "The Problem with Romney Is the Problem with Empathy", my first thought was "he noticed that too?" Then, upon reading Pierce's analysis I saw that I misinterpreted the headline. Pierce believes that Romney has too much empathy, as compared to his party:

It turns out the problem Republicans have with the program is not the ideological big-government aspect of it. The problem they have with it is the good it turned out to do for people. The problem with it is that it made people's lives a little easier. The problem is that cruelty has become an ideology in itself, and it is an implacable one....

The problem with the Romney campaign is not the alleged ideological incoherence of his political resume. The problem is that he's trying to appeal to a party full of moral monsters.

Elided from the middle of that quote from Pierce is his own quote of a Tea Party activist, and I have to say that it does support Pierce's thesis that a powerful faction of the Republican Party not only lacks empathy, it eschews the concept:

"The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments," said Ryan Rhodes, a tea party activist from Iowa. "The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created."

Let's be blunt: the Southern strategy, and the subsequent evolution of the Southern strategy (welfare queens, "young bucks" buying "T-bone steaks" with "food stamps", John McCain's "black" daughter, the "food stamp President (who hates capitalism, wants to undermine capitalism and implement socialism, and is a secret Muslim who won't show us his birth certificate)", "voter fraud", "I don't want to help 'bleah' people"....) relies upon an us vs. them philosophy, with "them" being greedy and undeserving poor people - or perhaps greedy and undeserving people that have more than you - with the subtext that they probably also have dark skin and vote for Democrats.

That Tea Party activist's comments also highlight the cognitive dissonance you see among a lot of the Republican "base" - the "Keep your government hands of my Medicare" philosophy. One of the ways in which the Republicans ginned up opposition to the ACA was to tell seniors, "Obama's cutting your Medicare to help [undeserving poor people] get health insurance." It was inconsistent with the Romney team's then-stated economic plans (now they're promising only to slash and burn Medicare for future seniors - again relying upon a lack of empathy among their supporters - "As long as it doesn't affect me..."), but a great number of the beneficiaries of the ACA do have jobs but are nonetheless uninsured or underinsured. If you talk to enough Republicans at the low end of the wage pool, you'll find people who receive or have received housing subsidies, food assistance, unemployment insurance, the earned income tax credit, WIC, Medicaid, Medicare... but they'll insist that their receipt of public assistance is somehow different from the "takers", or that "I paid for it through my taxes" (never mind the actual math).

I'm also reminded of a Ted Nugent quote shared at Beat the Press,

As I’ve written before, for at least the past 50 years the Democratic Party has intentionally engineered a class of political “victims” who have been bamboozled into being dependent on the federal government for their subsistence, including food, housing and now health care. They get this without paying any federal income taxes, and that’s wrong.

I've mentioned many times the fact that it used to be Republican policy to get people off of the federal tax rolls - and by that I mean average, working people, not only the wealthiest among us - but now something Ronald Reagan used as a bragging point is used by people like The Nuge to bash almost half of all Americans. But... does Nugent actually know what the word "subsistence" means?

By now you're probably thinking, "I thought you disagreed with Pierce." I'm getting to that. First, let me say, a lack of empathy is not something that is unique to the Republican Party. It may be more manifest in Republican politics, and may be more likely to be vocalized by supporters of that party, but our society as a whole is not very empathetic. About the best way to get our society, at large, to turn on a group is to paint it as a greedy, undeserving, exploitative "other" that is getting rich off of our dime. As others have pointed out, that's why the Republican distortion of "You didn't build this" resonated with some businesspersons, even those who had built their businesses based upon SBA loans, government contracts and the like - they were uncomfortable with seeing themselves as takers, even if they could respond that on the balance they have given back far more than they received.

But the fact is, Mitt Romney does have an empathy problem. I found it grating when I heard George W. Bush speak of "compassionate conservatism" and "a hand up, not a handout", because I didn't believe he meant what he was saying. Like Romney he comes across as the proverbial guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. But he made the effort. His public persona was carefully constructed around trying to make people see him as "one of them". And for all of his bashing of welfare recipients, Ronald Reagan projected empathy. George H.W. Bush, who in retrospect may have had more actual empathy than his predecessor and his son put together, came across as more distant, more patrician. That didn't help him in either the election he won or the one that he lost.

In the current election cycle, one of the themes the Republicans are pushing about President Obama is that he's cold and prickly, doesn't like to glad hand, eats dinner with his family on most nights instead of going to parties, doesn't have close friends among other world leaders and the like. Nobody is going to mistake Obama for Clinton, but here's the thing: pointy headed, introverted family man or no, most people like Obama. In contrast, Romney comes across as a phony, and when you hear the "behind the scenes" stuff about Romney, which of course you have to take with a grain of salt, it's not a case of "to know him is to love him". Clearly the Republican operatives pushing that line about Obama are hoping that people don't do a "compare and contrast" with their own candidate.

If you look at Romney's personal history, it's difficult to find examples of empathy. He'll point to acts of charity, but an act of charity through financial contributions to your church, providing assistance to members of your church and the like does not prove empathy. When you see Romney actually try to connect on a one-to-one (or one-to-many) level with members of the public you see a consistent pattern, from this:

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To this:

From "who let the dogs out", to a bucket full of "hardware stuff", to oversized bets with Rick Perry, Romney's pro forma efforts at humanization and humor tend not to resonate with voters - instead they reinforce the perspective that he's not just out-of-touch, but not even interested in them (save for wanting their vote). If you want to succeed in politics, you don't necessarily need to be sincere but at some level there will be times when you have to at least be able to fake sincerity. Romney's lack of connection with those outside of his stratospheric wealth and social class seems to be a product of an empathy vacuum.

Romney is capable of feeling and reacting to the crowd's energy directed at him, but he does not appear capable of giving anything back. He does not strike me as a narcissist, except at the level that anybody who gets to this point in a presidential campaign is apt to think very highly of himself, but he does strike me as somebody who, unless you can do something for him, simply doesn't care about anybody who is neither part of his inner circle. He can go from being a huge proponent of providing health insurance to the uninsured to sneering at them as takers because the former position was fakery. The 47% comment resonates because for once Romney seemed sincere.

The Early 1960's as a Victorian Era

David Brooks offers a mostly interesting book review on habits and being a "good person", but I question the manner in which he romanticizes 19th Century values. I've touched on this before in relation to his praise of the early 1960's as a pinnacle of American values, somehow divorced both from what came before and what came after.

In the 19th century, there was a hydraulic model of how to be a good person. There are all these torrents of passion flowing through you. Your job, as captain of your soul, is to erect dams to keep these passions in check. Your job is to just say no to sloth, lust, greed, drug use and the other sins.

Sermons could really help. They could help you identify sin. Preachers could exhort you to exercise the willpower you need to ward off temptation.

These days that model is out of fashion.

Having spent much of my childhood in a town that was once a temperance community, I heard jokes that dated back to that era:

The temperance minister, preaching to his flock, thundered, "There are more than a hundred taverns and bars in this community and I haven't been to one of them!"

A voice from the back of the crowd asked, "Which one is that?"

The notion that the Victorian era was one of great manners and controlled behavior is nice, but if Brooks remains concerned that the wealthy and the working masses don't share the same values and interests, let's just say that modern society has nothing on the Victorians. Brooks also confuses a strong sense of public appearance among the wealthier Victorians with some of the behavior that went on behind closed doors. Brooks is simply correct when he suggests that Victorians had more willpower, although he would be correct to say instead that the boundaries of propriety have shifted such that behaviors that the Victorians kept secret are part of our open culture. It's also fair to say that certain behaviors that were tolerated or accepted in the Victorian era would not be acceptable today, particularly in relation to domestic violence and sexual impropriety, and that those changes have benefited our society and most notably the women in our society. As they say, the good old days weren't always good.

As the Victorians understood (and the folks at Alcoholics Anonymous understand), if you want to change your life, don’t just look for a clever trigger. Commit to some larger global belief.

I think Brooks also misunderstands 12-step programs. While those programs are about changing habits over the long-term, they provide a very important structure over the short-term. And in that regard, they are more like the mundane examples of habit-changing that Brooks previously mentioned,

You can change your own personal habits. If you leave running shorts on the floor at night, that’ll be a cue to go run in the morning. Don’t try to ignore your afternoon snack craving. Every time you feel the cue for a snack, insert another routine. Take a walk.

If you crave your substance of choice, call your sponsor. If you crave your substance of choice, find a meeting. If you crave your substance of choice, reach out to other members of the program.... Unless by "larger global belief" Brooks means "sobriety", I don't see that AA is (or that the Victorians are) as special and unique as Brooks implies. (Yes, a certain percentage of 12-step members become the de facto leaders of the group or the larger 12-step community, but most 12-step members do not demonstrate that type of commitment. The third step belief in a higher power, "God as you understand him," is quite a departure from the religiosity Brooks associations with the eras he is most inclined to romanticize.)

Why Aren't "They" Grateful?

What is new about the following: A powerful nation invades and occupies a weaker nation, imposes some form of western-style law and order, western-style governance, all at the point of a gun. Then when the occupied people act in a manner that suggests that they are not grateful for "everything we are doing for them", the people of the occupying nation respond with surprise. How can they not appreciate our lifting them out of their ignorance, constructing roads, giving them the opportunity to live lives more like ours?

But the fact is, even if this is correct, people don't like to be subject to foreign military occupation. The fact is that living under military occupation does not feel like living under enlightened governance - it feels like, you know, foreign military occupation. It may seem obvious to us that our intentions are good, that capitulation is the best option for the occupied people and their fastest path out of occupation, and that we are making an enormous sacrifice for the good of the occupied nation, but that's not how occupied people view occupation. Nor is it how our nation would view an occupation even if the occupying power credibly promised to end poverty, balance the budget, fix the roads, and put every American into a productive, well-paying job while cutting taxes for the rich. Because, you know, foreign, military, occupation. And if they said, "Trust us - as soon as we're done which, if you capitulate, shouldn't be more than a few years, we'll leave you with an indigenous, democratic government under a new and improved Constitution," what are the odds we would believe it?

Without arguing that the comparison is entirely fair, this essay reminded me of this poem.

The United States and its allies have given the Afghan people every chance they could possibly have wished for to step up and be part of the modern world. If [internecine] tribal warfare is more important to them than forming a nation, who are we to tell them it isn’t? If they prefer feudalism and local warlords to democratically elected leaders and the rule of law, who are we to tell them they have to act like us? If they would rather have their hoary superstitions and magic books instead of running water and [penicillin], who are we to force them to enter the modern world, kicking and screaming?

vs.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Certainly it's not fair to suggest that the essay shares the same colonial mindset in which Kipling was immersed, or Kipling's projection of race onto a clash of cultures. But it's a similar reaction - why aren't they grateful? Why can't they see and appreciate everything we're trying to do for them? Why don't they realize that the violence of occupation is their collective doing, not ours, and that they will benefit from capitulation? But truly, would we act differently? One of those wacky aspects of human nature is that we seem to prefer, collectively, to suffer under domestic repression than to be "liberated" by a foreign occupying power. Once liberated, people want the liberator to leave. Although an occupation may be necessary to effect the liberator's goals, and may in some cases be objectively better than what came before or is likely to come after, occupation breeds bitter enemies.

When Israeli troops first invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 to drive out the PLO and create a "buffer zone" to prevent attacks on northern Israel, Shiites welcomed Israeli soldiers with rice and flowers. But that honeymoon did not last long, and Shiites were soon fighting the Israeli occupation. The Shiites turned out to be more formidable enemies of Israel than the PLO.

When we criticize or find incomprehensible the mores of an occupied nation, how far removed are we from similar conduct? How much different were the men of fifty years ago who saw it as a social good to lynch civil rights leaders, or boys who didn't show proper respect for white women? How much different are we from the German people, before or after the Nazi era, even if we fervently believe that something akin to happened in that dark period could never happen here? How long did it take us in the "global war on terror" to turn our collective backs on the concept that we are an enlightened society that adheres to the rule of law, that we treat our prisoners with respect, that we offer Due Process, that we disdain torture.... Why is it easy to believe that riots in response to the accidental burning of a holy book is evidence of depravity of an occupied nation, but so difficult to accept the possibility that the collective impact of occupation and the imposition of a corrupt, incompetent government, no matter how well-intentioned, have created a simmering resentment in which the burning of the holy book is more accurately seen as a proverbial "last straw"? Why is it that when occupation forces commit atrocities we can easily dismiss them as aberrational, while the actions of individuals within the occupied nation are often perceived as evidence of their collective depravity?

The idea of transforming Afghanistan - a tribal culture, proud of its long history of repelling and defeating invaders, with a population that is largely impoverished and poorly educated, with ethnic divisions that would make it difficult to form a universally accepted government in the best of times - should never have been perceived as something that would be either easy. As much as we might try local outreach, to try to explain our beneficence and good motives,

We came to install a democratic government and present the Afghan people with an opportunity to reconstruct civilization and re-enter the community of nations after decades of brutal internal conflict, Soviet invasion, and xenophobic theocracy.

To the Afghan man on the street, how different does the U.S. occupation look as compared to the Soviet occupation? How different does the Karzai government look as compared to the Najibullah government? To us the differences may be vast and obvious. To them? I'm thinking, not so much.

When we get into the realm of the transformation of culture - education that includes girls, allowing women to work, allowing women the choice of having their faces, even their hair, uncovered, hospitals that treat women alongside men, perhaps even allowing women to treat male patients.... It's easy for us to say that resistance to such progress is parochial and backward, but such clashes of culture can be the most obvious signs of foreign occupation and can overshadow less obvious signs, let alone the stuff that's simply not visible to the man on the street or simply not comprehensible to a village elder with a third grade education and strong religious beliefs that he feels are under active attack. Many of the things we have attempted in Afghanistan in the name of enlightened, progressive western thought are the same things that the Soviets attempted in the name of "godless communism".

Nation-building, to the extent that it has been tried, is largely oversold. If the occupied nation had the fundamental building blocks of a modern society prior to the occupation, some form of parliament, courts and a professional judiciary, a professional civil service, it stands a chance of emerging from occupation as a modern society. But the west's track record of transforming a society without that foundation into a functioning capitalist democracy through military occupation is abysmal. When you want to implement changes that require a generational shift in thinking, you should expect that your occupation will last for at least a couple of generations.

The World's Simply Not That Just (Sorry, Ross)

Something that appears with some regularity in Ross Douthat's column is his notion that we live in a meritocracy, in which "the best and the brightest" rise to positions of power and fortune, and all the undeserving folks who don't manage to achieve that type of wealth or position should simply accept their lot - and certainly not suggest that the elite contribute even slightly more of their presumptively hard-earned wealth to the commonweal. Thus when Douthat makes statements like this,

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

At least if my current interpretation is correct, I was a bit unfair in accusing him of engaging in a form of class warfare, as he appears to sees accumulated wealth as something that is deserved - the war is thus not between classes, as such, but between the deserving and the undeserving. If you deserved more money you would have more money, and wouldn't need to join a union or suggest that rich people should pay more taxes. Undeserving seniors get Social Security and Medicare benefits that, in Douthat's eyes, they haven't earned. Rich people aren't selfish, even if they advocate a world in which they pay no taxes, because they don't have anything that they don't deserve. One might mistake him for a Calvanist.

It seems odd that would in all sincerity refer to the people who drove our economy into the ground or who have ruined companies and bankrupted investors as "the best and the brightest", given that the phrase was popularized by David Halberstam as an ironic reference to the well-educated members of the Kennedy Administration who pursued disastrous policies. After overt reference to "Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science", Douthat proclaims,

...for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

Only ten years? It's been known for quite some time that giants often have feet of clay.

While Douthat reminds us that "pride goeth before a fall", it seems to me that Douthat confuses hubris with intelligence. That is, some people who profess to be intelligent, appear to be intelligent (often through the advantage of intensive coaching and tutoring, the use of professional speech writers, having questions submitted to them in advance, and the like), and even take great pride in their intelligence, turn out to possess less than impressive intellects. Douthat's example of "The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history" seems, to me, to be an example of exactly that phenomenon - bursting with pride, perhaps, but few of them appear to have been particularly bright.

Douthat urges that we, or perhaps I should say the Republican Party, seek

...intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.

Perhaps, though, we don't need "the best and the brightest," assuming we could measure it, let alone whatever subset of that class of people we could deem to have progressed sufficiently down the path toward becoming philosopher kings that we could trust in their humility. Perhaps what we need are people who are genuinely interested in the welfare of our nation and it's people, who have a clear sense of right and wrong, and who will attempt to bring the best solutions to the nation's problems without resorting to prevarication and hyperpartisanship. Above average intelligence would be a plus, but you can do a lot better than most of the present lot without being a genius.

As I previously indicated, Douthat's thesis extends into the world of business and finance, and he attempts to breathe new life into the Horatio Alger myth:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

Reading that you would hardly know that upward mobility is in decline and has been for many years.

When Douthat observes that the "for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good", it's as if he cannot even conceive an alternate theory. Such as, some of the elites weren't as bright as he thinks. Such as, some of the brilliant people brought into the financial industry (e.g., physicists hired to create derivatives) were charged with to creating financial instruments that could not be understood by investors or regulators, not because they wanted to improve the economy but because it's easier to sell somebody a sow's ear if you first disguise it as a purse. That some of the people who were publicly denying a housing bubble were playing the same role as the tobacco industry executives who used to deny any connection between smoking and cancer - lying to make more money, and comfortable that even if others were harmed they, themselves, would continue to become richer. If Douthat paid more attention to the mindset of many wealthy people, and what a driving force money is in their lives, perhaps he would be less apt to confuse wealth with virtue.

I'm not sure what to make of the time frame Douthat proposes - while it is true that the dot com bubble and the housing bubble both burst during the past ten years I somehow doubt that Douthat, a self-described Republican, would argue that the Clinton Administration represented "the best and the brightest" doing things right - bright people making good decisions as a result of having "somehow learned humility along the way" - that he sees as absent from that same class of leaders starting pretty much when G.W. Bush took office.

Writing a defense of Joe Paterno, and of Catholic priests who covered up the sex abuse scandal in the church, Douthat takes a position that doesn't seem to square with his Catholicism, but does square with his idealization of the wealthy and powerful:

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate. Having already cut so many corners, the thinking goes, what’s one more here or there? Why even aspire to virtues that you probably won’t achieve, when it’s easier to remain the sinner that you already know yourself to be?

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.

It's not a matter of original sin, or that we're all sinners subject to temptation. People are either good and heroic, or are mediocre to bad. Deserving or undeserving. It's only after you decide that a person is "good" or "bad" that you can determine whether his sin reflects the cutting of corners and disinterest in aspiring to virtues, or if the sin reflects the person being so blinded by his own goodness that he simply cannot see that what he is doing is wrong.

Apparently it's easier for Douthat to perceive this "too good to do anything about horrific sin" phenomenon when he's looking at those who turn a blind eye to the horrific acts of others, as opposed to those who commit the acts. So he excuses a cardinal who helped cover up child sex abuse, who "praised a French bishop for refusing to denounce an abusive priest to the civil authorities, because that cardinal had previously done good things for the poor of Colombia. He similarly excuses Joe Paterno, who, according to a biographer, "'lived a profoundly decent life' and 'improved the lives of countless people' with his efforts and example", and can therefore be presumed to be "a good man", despite allegedly covering up the abuse of children by Jerry Sandusky.¹

Wait a minute, you might interject, there are lots of very bad people who live lives that outwardly appear to be "profoundly decent", who devote time, energy and money to the aid of others, earning praise and adoration, who are ultimately revealed as frauds. A biographer might have described Jerry Sandusky as having "'lived a profoundly decent life' and 'improved the lives of countless people' with his efforts and example", but for the fact that this scandal broke. The same goes for Bernard Madoff. Even when someone repeatedly covers up misconduct, including the sexual abuse of women and children, that person cannot be presumed to be a human, and thus (as Douthat's church teaches us) a sinner. Douthat would instead project an odd version of the Madonna-whore complex onto the world at large, with some of us so pure that any sin could only be the "their very goodness", and the rest of us "bad or mediocre" whose objectively identical acts reflect our moral weakness.

Douthat asks in relation to the church cover-up, "How did the man who displayed so much moral courage in Colombia become the cardinal who was so morally culpable in Rome?", but he doesn't back away from his notion that the cardinal was a good man simply trying to do right by his church:

It was precisely because Castrillón had served his church heroically, I suspect, that he was so easily blinded to the reality of priestly sex abuse. It was precisely because Joe Paterno had done so much good for so long that he could do the unthinkable, and let an alleged child rapist continue to walk free in Penn State’s Happy Valley.

There appears to be a tribalistic element to Douthat's perceptions. That is, I don't believe he would look at the wealthy and powerful of nations like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Hussein's Iraq or Gadhafi's Libya and believe that the leadership represented a meritocracy who should not be asked to make a greater contribution to the less fortunate people of their nations, or whose bad acts can be excused out of a recognition of their saintly goodness. I doubt that he would extend that charity to the leaders of Greece and Italy. But when it comes to the financial industry, the Republican Party and the wealthy interests it serves, or popular football coaches, the blinders go on.

Douthat does not argue that sins committed "in the name of a higher good" are not sins. He instead argues that "No higher cause can trump" the obligation to serve natural Justice, "'what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt'" and that "not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark". That conclusion seems irreconcilable with Douthat's assertion that some people are so good and godly that they can be excused from moral judgment for doing exactly that, on a colossal scale, engaging in cover-ups that they had to have known would cause many additional children to suffer. While Douthat sees this as the result of a cognitive distortion ("they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution's various good works mattered more than justice"; they are "led into temptation... by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind" and "in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away"), for those who fall within his preferred tribes he cannot perceive the possibility that their motivations could be impure. He does not recognize that the patterns he describes - earlier lies or thefts or adulteries [that] make the next one that much easier to contemplate - are exactly those he claims would identify his idols as "bad or mediocre people".

Something Douthat does not appear to consider, at least with the context of his preferred tribes, is that some very bad people (and some who have no moral compass) work very hard to create a facade of being good and charitable, as the facade facilitates their gaining wealth, power and authority. There is no shortage of narcissists and psychopaths in our nation's board rooms, and some of them are extremely charming people. Douthat implicitly recognizes that the guy who creates a charity to help children in order to gain access to them for sexual purposes is a bad person. But what about the guy who creates a charity, not because he cares about its good works but because it will help his public image, because he knows he will be praised for his "good work", or because it will help him trick people into believing in his inherent goodness even as he schemes to deprive them of their money?

Douthat admits that among the good people of the Catholic Church there are "bishops in love with their own prerogatives, priests for whom the ministry was about self-aggrandizement rather than service", but how do you distinguish them from the others? Absent a scandal, from the outside it can be difficult to distinguish a charismatic psychopath, driven by lust for wealth, control of others, power and praise, from a true altruist who has risen to a position of authority, and scandals don't always come. But as scandals go, if covering up the sexual abuse of children isn't a sufficient test of who is good and who is mediocre, what is?

Douthat should consider that theodicy not only makes us ask why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to bad people. Particularly in terms of the distribution of wealth and power, the world is nowhere near as just as he assumes.
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1. To me, the cover-up of scandals by powerful institutions exemplifies how "earlier lies... make the next one that much easier to contemplate", and even make the next lie necessary. Once you choose the path of the cover-up, you not only have to continue to conceal the original scandal, you have to conceal the cover-up. Also, institutions that cover up one atrocity rarely have covered up only that one - often it's their success in covering up nine out of ten such scandals, or ninety-nine out of a hundred, that inspires them to believe that they again engineer a successful cover-up. A cover-up, revealed, can do great harm to an institution, usually greater than that which would have resulted from initial full disclosure, but that harm may be less than what would occur were all of the scandals revealed to the public as they occurred.

Sometimes There's No Excuse for Inaction

One of the interesting things about human nature is how we recycle ideas and, each time, seem to regard them as brilliant new insights. For example, every few years you will read an essay deploring "kids these days" and wondering how the world will survive being led by such debauched slackers. And you can keep going back, a few years a time, and find what amounts to the same essay, over and over again, back to antiquity. There seems to be a temptation to view human nature as malleable and subject to dramatic change within a generation, even though we have millennia of human history that hold to the contrary.

A couple of things you may note if you review human history: many instances of false bravado, and many instances of the judging of behavior and conduct of others with little regard to what the speaker might actually have done under similar circumstances. Within the latter context, sayings like "Judge not lest ye be judged," "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," and "Don't judge by appearance". Which is not to say that people should not be judged appropriately, just that you should not condemn others for sins equivalent to your own or without first having a sufficient appreciation of the facts, or judge others by the same standard you would have applied to yourself.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

To a degree, when David Brooks argues against feeling superior to others, his comment is fair. It's easy to feel smug and superior when you have no connection to the time and face no personal risk. But beyond that his thinking is exceptionally sloppy.

Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

Brooks spends some time discussing "motivated blindness", when people literally avoid seeing or processing information that makes them uncomfortable. There is a significant distinction between not fully understanding or appreciating a situation due to the foibles of the human mind, and fully appreciating the situation but choosing to do nothing, yet Brooks conflates the two.

One example of motivated blindness would be the victims of Bernie Madoff. If you read their statements, many of them explicitly state, "How could I not have seen what was happening? How could I have been so stupid?" Or even, "I knew it was too good to be true, but I still thought this was the real thing." We humans do have a remarkable ability to fool ourselves and there are few people who get through a lifetime without being scammed in a manner similar to Madoff's victims, albeit almost always with lesser stakes. It is fair to remind people who judge those victims of that reality.

But there are other atrocities, including the three described by Brooks, that don't fit well into the "people see but don't see" narrative. It's not that there aren't people who didn't see at all due to a lack of exposure, saw or perceived signs of trouble but for one reason or another dismissed them, or were willfully blind to the reality that should have been patent. But in all three examples there were people who saw horrors that they could not rationalize away and did nothing.

Even in that context, doing nothing may not be morally reprehensible. It is easy to point to a massacre and claim, "If I were there I would have done something," or "Shame on those people who stood by and did nothing." It's quite another when there are people with guns committing a massacre, your life is on the line and, objectively speaking, all your words or action will achieve is the addition of your body to the pile of corpses. Not every choice is that extreme but there are any number of situations in which the failure to speak or act is understandable, even if it would have been more honorable to do more.

Brooks wants to roll all of this into the bystander effect: "The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene." He complains that on YouTube there are videos of beatings, "with dozens of people watching blandly". Honestly I have not seen any of those videos and don't much care to go searching, but even accepting that dozens of such videos exist I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume that nothing was happening off-camera, or that you're getting the full picture from your impression of the "people watching blandly". It is fair to say that the bystander effect may be at play in some or all of the videos, with people assuming that somebody else will intervene, call the police or take other action. On one hand I wish Brooks had given an actual example, but on the other I appreciate that if he is able to link to a paradigmatic example I don't have to watch it.

Brooks attempts to provide splashy, non-YouTube examples, starting with the Kitty Genovese case that he tells us "is mostly apocryphal". It's unfortunate that the best examples of a phenomenon often turn out to be a bit "factually challenged". His next example is,

A woman was recently murdered at a yoga clothing store in Maryland while employees at the Apple Store next door heard the disturbing noises but did not investigate.

Brooks didn't provide a link, but it was not hard to find the story.

At one point on that night, he said, an employee at the Apple Store next-door to Lululemon Athletica heard a woman’s voice cry out: “Oh God, please help me.” A worker pounded on the wall but did not take further action, he said.

The fact that one person, applying 20/20 hindsight and no doubt to his regret, learned that pounding on the wall was not an adequate response to the cry from next door is duly noted, but does not suggest "motivated blindness" or make it a compelling illustration of the bystander effect.

Brooks' last example involves a disturbing case, that occurred five years ago in France.

Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was tortured for 24 days by 20 anti-Semitic kidnappers, with the full knowledge of neighbors.

An account in the New York Sun describes how Halimi was kidnapped by a gang known as "The Barbarians" and that "Halimi had been held in several different places in and around Bagneux, whose residents, most of them immigrants, did not appear to have noticed anything out of the ordinary." It's not clear how Brooks jumps from that to the idea that people outside of the gang were willfully blind to their actions, or knew and did nothing, and once again he doesn't offer the courtesy of a link to his source. It's possible that he was using this site, which claims without citation that "neighbors in the apartment block where his kidnappers had taken him (and where they lived) heard the commotion and came to watch", but we can only guess.

If we assume that occurred, the neighbors who came to watch weren't demonstrating the bystander effect - they were complicit. There is a huge difference between passively encountering a crime and intentionally going to watch the crime occur. Further, it seems self-evident that a violent gang of kidnappers would not let anybody watch their actions unless they were confident that the person would keep silent, and that those attending would understand as much. In terms of the possibility that some people in the gang's vicinity suspected that something was happening or chose to turn a blind eye, that seems more analogous to why people don't call police on gangs and drug dealers in dangerous neighborhoods around the world - it's typically not that they don't want the thugs prosecuted and jailed, but that they fear reprisal.

It is that last example that best illustrates the weakness of Brooks' thesis. Brooks argues that we should not judge bystanders. If that argument means, we should not judge the neighbors of a violent gang for not calling the police over noises they hear through the wall, it's fair. Neighbors of gang members often live in fear of the gang, or of the violence that can erupt around gang members and their households. If you don't have to worry that gang members will take revenge against you or your kids, or that you might catch a stray bullet from a rival gang by virtue of being too close to their intended target, you need to give the context more thought before you sound off about what you would do in that situation.

It is difficult to believe that this is lost on Brooks, but both the severity of an offense and the role of the "bystander" play a role in accountability. We're not talking about a dichotomy of offenders and bystanders. When you are talking about the collective action of a gang of self-described "Barbarians", even if some of the gang's members were away during this particular crime, it is fair and reasonable to judge them for their association with the gang. Even if some of the gang members did not directly participate in the crime, it is fair and reasonable to judge them. And there has never been a time in history when society at large would have adopted Brooks' supposedly superior approach, with the people quietly contemplating, "How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive", instead of judging.

People see other people litter, speed, and commit other trivial offenses all the time, and almost nobody calls the police. On the other hand, apocryphal accounts aside, when people see somebody being beaten or stabbed in a public street they typically do call the police.

Brooks tells us, of all things, that "we’re not Puritans anymore",

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Funny, I don't recall that the Puritans much hesitated to judge and condemn those who succumbed to "the evil within themselves". As ahistorical as Brooks' claim may be, I might have been more sympathetic to it had I not heard his prior version:

I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

You know, "Kids these days". (Doesn't it seem like Brooks is, oh, what's the word for it, judging people here?)

Brooks is back to confusing bystanders with insiders and participants. People are not angry at peripheral players who either had no direct involvement or could suffer serious consequence through their action. Brooks, sneering at those who would judge, states,

The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

First, there's a good chance that a lot of the people speaking would have taken action over what Brooks, himself, describes as an "atrocity". And it is fair for them to note that, however much sympathy you may have for Mike McQuery the graduate student, it's more difficult to turn a blind eye to his knowledge that nothing was done over the course of the next decade, during which he built a career at Penn State and had additional encounters with Jerry Sandusky, including times when Sandusky was in the company of children. Similarly, other than the potential for a comparatively modest furor over how it happened, there would have been little consequence to Joe Paterno had he followed up and insisted upon an adequate police investigation of McQuery's report, and he was in a better position than McQuery over subsequent years to see continuing disturbing behaviors that he, also, failed to stop. As Scott Lemieux puts it,

When it comes to people who are sure that they would have stood up to the Nazis or thugs with machetes or school shooters or whatever then I agree that they’re just blowhards. But Penn State was nothing like those cases. It wasn’t a question of standing up to power; Paterno, Spanier, and Curley were the power. They didn’t face physical retribution or even (if they had acted in a timely manner) substantial career retribution for doing the right thing. To compare this to people who didn’t join the French Resistance is absurd.

Contrary to Brooks' claim, the problem is not that we have muddier moral waters or have lost our sense of evil, unless perhaps he's using the "royal we". Forty or more years ago, crimes like those attributed to Sandusky were far less likely to be reported, and it would have been much easier for somebody in his position to prey on vulnerable children without fear of retribution. Over the past forty years, ages of consent have risen in most states. Penalties for all forms of child abuse have been increased. And to the extent that 67-year-old Sandusky or 84-year-old Paterno have a muddied sense of right and wrong it is fair to note that they came of age during Brooks' golden years of moral virtue, not the sixties and seventies.

Worse, if we do things Brooks' way, nothing changes. If you don't press those who are in a position to right a wrong, to stop an "atrocity", or take Brooks' position that anybody who attempts to hold them to account is deserving of scorn, you all but guarantee that history will repeat itself. Contrary to Brooks' position, this counter to his position is anything but new. To quote John Stuart Mill, from his 1867 work "On Education", "Bad men need nothing more to compress their ends than that the good men should look on and do nothing." (A variant, "All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing" has been in popular use, in various forms, for many decades.) It is better that humans follow their nature and judge, sometimes inappropriately, than that we instead take the milquetoast, amoral approach endorsed by David Brooks and engage in navel-gazing rather than holding to account those who could stop evil.