Super Vidoqo

The Problems of Equity Language

2023-03-18T12:26:00.001-07:00

As an old hand with social justice language use, I've always had an ambivalent relationship with the concept. I've recently come across the term "Equity Language", which describes the concept of changing language to ostensibly create more positive and affirming associations. Words clearly matter, but how much?

In the 1990's, the term Politically Correct went mainstream. Starting as an in-joke on the left to critique over-sensitivity and group-think, it was soon taken up on the right as a convenient cudgel not only for overly-sensitive progressives, but for the ideas and theories which they promoted. It was not only "PC" to say "People of Color", but also to bring attention to racial identity and the ways in which marginalization of those groups persisted. In a handy bit of jujitsu, an association was made between a cynical lack of good faith in both the morality and intelligence of others (you are guilty of not recognizing the suffering of others at best, or harboring prejudice at worst), and a dismissal of any concern that such suffering or prejudice exists. The term was also quite fungible - it could come to mean any manner of progressive social movements: race, feminism, environmental concerns, inequality, etc. So not only could you shift the discussion from a critique of serious ideas to a critique of personal social obnoxiousness. Further, when highlighting the "groupthink" component of political correctness, detractors could also undermine any serious discussion of underlying progressive critiques by attacking the epistemological foundations of their beliefs as motivated not by reason or social analysis but rather mere adherence to arbitrary protocols of group membership. PC language was less an attempt to instantiate progressive thought but a way to signal in vs. out groups and personal moral performance.

If I recall correctly, in the 2000's, PC, possibly having lost its cultural cache though overuse and abuse, it reappeared in newly-online discourse under the term "Social Justice Warrior", or SJW. This highlighted an online political correctness that not only sought to correct language, but to actively promote progressive thought with a similarly obnoxious, smug and arrogant demeanor.

In the 2010's, a transition again occurred, this time into the concept of "woke", reaching an explosion onto the cultural stage with the Black Lives Matter movement. The term itself wasn't new, tracing back to the civil rights era as a black vernacular description of "awaken consciousness" - in a decidedly positive and progressive direction. But now the term woke made a swift transition to a near identical stand-in for the previously used PC and SJW. "Woke politics" referred again less to actual ideas and theories, but rather to something rather recently coined as a "mind virus"- in which one's capacity for serious thought is hijacked by a rigid ideology that serves not legitimate discourse or social change but signaling and out-group slander.

Interestingly, there does not appear to be a similar critique in the other direction, from the left to the right, despite the fact that conservatives themselves are just as guilty of group-think, and personal obnoxiousness. However, the reason we don't notice it as much has to do with the basic differences between conservatism and progressivism.

Progressivism is defined by an ongoing deconstructing of social traditions, most notably the human tendency towards hierarchy and power relations of social control and how it functions to limit personal freedom and equity. Conservatism is defined by an ongoing defense of social tradition and hierarchy - or, more charitably, that hierarchies and power relations are much more equal than progressives make them out to be. Thus, the cultural momentum is always tilted in favor of the status quo, which already serves to define in and out groups, and is fed by a larger and more pervasive "group think". The progressive observes, defines, compares, analyzes, and then proposes new ideas and social forms. This starts at the micro level and expands outward to effect broader social changes to varying degrees. The conservative stands on tradition, which is partly defined by an explicit absence of observation, analysis and deconstruction. While the progressive often pushes a "radical" agenda that takes risk in new modes of cultural practice, the conservative stance is Buckley "standing athwart history yelling stop" and a cautious appeal to the wisdom of avoiding "unintended consequences". Both of these stances create their own identities, the progressive as always on the attack, with the conservative always on defense.

When everyone is wearing white at the party, and a small contingent shows up in red, it is the red group who seems suspiciously "out of place" and reasonably presumed to have conspired amongst themselves to take a bold action: the conditions ripe for something like group-think to take hold. So too does their provocative red attire seem to imply a critique of those in white. Why red? Is there something wrong with white? When one of them overzealously makes obnoxious assumptions during conversation with a guest wearing white - perhaps instead of emphasizing that wearing different colors is perfectly fine, they instead make accusations about the character of those in white, suggesting they are ignorant of color, or harbor secret ill-feelings towards the color red, you might be inclined to define this behavior as overly sensitive or antagonistic, or simply wearing red to "be cool". While we can imagine in this scenario such critiques to be accurate, we could as easily imagine some of those in white to be no less susceptible to obnoxious and acrimonious reaction.

In taking these dynamics into account, I'm always torn in sympathizing both with legitimate progressive social critique and its entailment of active social pressure towards change, but so too the understandable exhaustion by those on the receiving end of unreasonable, misguided, or downright anti-social progressive cultural discourse. From within the left, I have my own progressive social critiques of traditional social behavior, but so to have seen progressives resorting to dialogue in which bad-faith arguments, ad hominem attacks take the place of substantive engagement of what are almost by definition complex moral and political questions about power, equality and freedom. My most pointed observation may be that the historical schism between so-called "liberal" and "progressive" - the discrepancy in rate and magnitude of structural change being advocated - informs this subject such that in preferring a more mild and less radical approach, liberals might find an emphasis on language preferable to an emphasis on action. To hear many liberals, talk, it would seem that many social inequities have their root in language (and belief), rather than deeper structural forces that give rise to language and belief in the first place. Equity language requires one to merely learn new vocabulary, a process that can be accomplished without doing the laborious work of deep observation, analysis, and, harder still, advocacy and engagement in a larger social and political process.

To illustrate, in a town where segregation is widespread, and pay is unequal, much of the language used might reflect a demeaning association towards the poor and segregated. But what good will enforcing more equitable language do if the economic on political systems in the town serve to perpetuate disparity. As Equity Language guidelines appear to be flowering in prominent organizations across the country (e.g., the Sierra Club, American Medical Association, etc.) one has to wonder if - as good-faith as they may genuinely be - this project might not serve as a useful smokescreen for avoiding more radical restructuring of actual policies and practices that tangibly impact the subject of the terminology, they are advocating alteration of.

In linguistic terms, we see a futility in equity language in the absence of structural reform in the concept of the "euphemism treadmill", technically termed "pejoration". This describes the process by which terminology with negative associations are discarded in favor of fresh new words with no negative associations, and yet after a period of time the new terms simply take on all the old negative baggage. The term "imbecile" (from the Latin "weak-minded", used to refer to people with mental disabilities) at the beginning of last century was replaced with "retarded", which was then towards the end of the century replaced with intellectually disabled, and which now in the early 21st century is being re-evaluated for replacement yet again. Evidently, the negative associations arose when users of the new terms - their motivations and beliefs apparently unchanged - simply used the words in the old, unfortunate ways.

This seems an empirical question, albeit a difficult one: what impact does changing language really have? The last century has seen a great change in social perception of mental disabilities, owing to a wide array of movements. Most notably, a long series of legal cases have changed our laws surrounding how society treats the disabled, from access to services such as IEPs in school, to physical alterations to the infrastructure of sidewalks, busses, and places of business, to laws banning discrimination in employment and housing. How much of this was due to not to changing the associations of the words we use to describe disabilities, but rather how much individuals and groups have mobilized to argue for better treatment?

It may be helpful for us to begin by assessing how the language itself is used.

An inequitable word or phrase is commonly referred to as a slur, in that it implies a derogatory claim or implication, or otherwise disrespect for its subject. ("Slur" is generally evocative of the harshest terms, but for our purposes the degree of derogation in any particular term is in question, so I'll use it to refer both in its strong sense as well its weaker, more contested senses.)

A slur can be used in different ways, and with subtle difference of meaning. In its most explicit form, it is used to express strong derogation of its subject. The N-word is the clearest example. But a similarly strong sentiment - of dehumanization or devaluation - can be expressed in similar service as a humorous punchline (this provides the speaker a benefit of possibly avoiding accusations of personal moral failure if he simply argues he was "only joking", and misdirects the listener to examine his own, different moral rectitude with the admonition to "lighten up."

However, more commonly slurs are uttered without derogative intent, but without the speaker's knowledge of a particular historical context of the subject's position or that the subject might take offense at the term. A recent example of this is the public apology by Whoopie Goldberg, who on her "The View" television program used the term "gypped" to describe being taken advantage of monetarily. In her apology, she admitted to having not been aware of the historical origins of the term as a derogatory slur against the Romani people, previously referred to as "Gypsies", with a bigoted insinuation of dishonesty and thievery. A stronger example of this - and a term of which it is much harder to claim ignorance of, might be the antisemitic "Jewed", with (historically notable) similar connotations of dishonest financial exchange.

However, another category of slur usage might be more relatable to conservative speakers. This would be examples of usage in which the speaker actually disagrees with the connotation and would argue the basis upon which the claim that the term is in fact a slur is contested. An example here might be the recent appeal to change "homeless" to "unhoused". The claim that the former is a slur while the latter is not rests on the larger claim that the position of people living "on the street" have a legitimate claim not to be viewed as being either morally culpable for their failure to find housing, or that society has a particular moral culpability in their predicament. One might disagree with one or both claims. Furthermore, these speakers might feel that even if the subject (or a plurality of which) takes offense at the term, their ire is misplaced as it doesn't accurately reflect any derogatory sentiment on the part of the speaker. "Don't be so sensitive" is a refrain here that echoes the "can't you take a joke" line previously mentioned.

Proponents of Equity Language usually make an additional claim about the social implications of slurs. Apart from the degree to which a slur expresses the speaker's own internal motivations, it is also claimed that a slur serves to normalize and reinforce both attitudes towards its subject as well as modes of thought and assumptions that give rise to inequitable treatment of the subject. This is a harder case to make from an epistemological standpoint, as isolating the independent variable in a slur's effects on society at large, or even across a small community, is nearly impossible to measure. It stands to reason however, at least with stronger forms of slur (e.g., the N-Word) not only does the term cause offense and harm in black listeners, but so too does it normalize dehumanizing and negative associations with black people by members of other racial categories. However, with weaker forms (e.g., homeless versus unhoused) this proposition seems to rest on much flimsier ground. While certainly plausible, it is harder to imagine.

It may be helpful now to turn from use of the slur to use of the euphemism, for it too can have different uses by different speakers.

Primarily, the motivations of the speaker of the euphemism can be categorized in 4 uses. First, by a desire not to offend the terms subject. Secondarily, by a desire not to misidentify the historical context, position or status of the subject. Third, the speaker may want to actively make an association that actively highlights a particular nature of the subject, its historical context, or a specific political relationship. A good example of this might be the preference of "person-centered language", in which the subject is teased out to illustrate a particular social dynamic. An instance of this can be seen in "Autistic person" versus "Person with Autism. The former centers the diagnosis as a prominent, defining feature of the individual, while the latter seeks to illustrate autism as only one among many possible features that define the individual. The stress here arises from a historical context in which an autism diagnosis has served to marginalize, limit and dehumanize the individual, overshadowing all of the other more salient and positive aspects of their personhood.

A fourth motivation of the euphemism's speaker is less flattering (and ironic), if true. As previously mentioned, a common critique of equity language use (political correctness, SJW, Woke, etc.) is that it can function as a "performance", motivated by a desire to signal one's moral rectitude. In this way, the concern is less about the subject, but rather the elevation of speaker himself - either in his own imagination, or to others. The signal can highlight different forms of speakers desire. It can serve to validate one as a card-carrying member when speaking to the in-group, or as possessing a powerful, morally superior knowledge when speaking to the out-group. (This former usage brings to mind the curious role embrace of conspiracy seems to have in individuals who find in it a sense of empowerment that comes from possessing a secret knowledge that mere "normals" have yet to discover).

A final motivation of the speaker is also less flattering, in that it arises from a desire to avoid either the actions involved in political mobilization, or the difficult internal thought processes involved in more clearly understanding deeper mechanisms at work in social structures that perpetuate the inequities the euphemism seeks to overcome. In this sense, the critique would be that the speaker is "taking the easy way out" by over-emphasizing the role language plays in social change. This critique depends on the degree of change euphemism use has on social relations, which as noted previously appears an unsettled question.

I'm not a linguist, but it seems fair to say that a salient feature of language is that change is constant. As society changes through history, our behaviors and relationships with one another change. The systems within we organize ourselves change. Equity Language is an attempt to intervene and put some degree of pressure on that change, such that it conforms to our ever-evolving world views. In the case of a handful of words, their harm appears obvious, but for many more the case for harm is difficult to assess. As humans, our motivations for use of particular terms can be complex, as are the interpretative frameworks listeners bring with them when they hear us.

In the social media age, it is easier than ever to rapidly send out unfinished, malformed or otherwise "throw away" language. This makes discourse even more slippery. Frequently, miscommunication arises over differing interpretations of both speaker intent as well as listener interpretation, and the actual meaning of the subject under discussion takes a backseat to superfluous debates over meaning in which lengthy dialogues pass likes ships in the night and no one is the wiser. Rigidity with language can have its place, such as when evidence of intent and meaning is clear, and both parties can debate with equal understanding at least of term usage and can move on to discussions of deeper assumptions about social preferences. I'm still less convinced about the extent to which most terminology actually affects broader culture; however, I am open to cases being made.

Deconstructing Deconstruction

2022-09-10T19:36:00.005-07:00

What follows is a paragraph-by-paragraph response to a piece on Deconstruction I came across on the Coffee Thoughts web blog, by Collin Brendemuehl.

Deconstructing Deconstruction

Collin Brendemuehl answers what deconstruction is and why it should matter to Christians.

For the past several years the popularity of Critical Race Theory and some of its companion ideas have become popular topics of discussion. They are also, at times, popular whipping boys for conservatives. It’s not that conservative criticism of these things is wrong. I think their conclusions are, in general, right and important. But what is missing is a substantive discussion of the idea itself. The term “deconstruction” gets bandies around as though everyone knows what it means and some of the best teachers on the subject never get around to defining it. (Some may have, in books or pieces that I’ve not yet read.)

Deconstruction: What is it and why is it important?

At the core of deconstruction is something quite simple:

“a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.” (Oxford Languages)

This is pretty simple. First pick a subject. Then break it down into its components. Then find what drives it, what are its motivations. That will tell you its meaning.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem. In fact that sounds like a useful tool. And it is. It is, after all, used in every field as a diagnostic method for approaching problems and finding solutions.

This it begs the question: Why all the fuss?

The reason is this: The term should always be prefaced. There are types of deconstruction. Using the term without stating what type it is can leave the educated person wondering what is being talk about and the average person confused was to why such a useful tool might prove problematic. In other words, by being too general in our language we’re creating two problems. We’re telling both groups that we don’t really understand the issue. It can, and does, sound like we don’t know what we’re talking about.

If deconstruction is a useful tool, then has it been used in theology? Yes, it has. And its results are known to every evangelical. Back about 500 years ago, right after the Reformation, there was another movement called the Radical Reformation. In this movement was one very critical component. It was to move back to “what the Bible says” as a more primitive, a more Biblical theology. From this assumption we moved away from the liturgy of the Reformers and to the basics of (Ana)Baptist thinking: Call the individual to faith and baptize the adult on confession of faith. The teachings of the Bible were broken down to basic elements. Developed theology was, at least in part, rejected.

This was indeed deconstruction, in the sense that it was questioning the authority of the churches, and seeing them as a product of particular social, political and economic relations. What is left out here though, is that evangelicals were also a particular product of time and social circumstances. The story they tell themselves, (and us - as they'll proudly admit in "sharing their gospel"), as Brendemuehl points to here, is that their interpretation is simply based on a literal reading of the bible. This is the antithesis of deconstruction, as instead of turning to the larger context around a text or belief, it goes directly into the text to find ultimate truth. As a faith, this might be fine, however an initial move must be made to establish that text as authoritative. Faith has a sort of epistemological "get out of jail free card" in this respect as no other idea in the human project is allowed to be its own authority, without relationship to history or the natural world around it. As a supernatural system, one might grant this. However, not all faith traditions make this move, or at least to this extent. The one's that do we tend to refer to as fundamentalist. A non-fundamentalist (liberal, reformed, etc.) point of view, while allowing the text to indeed express supernatural religious truths, does so with a bit more epistemic complexity and nuance. It takes the text as divine, however also the product of human creators who were unable to escape their own social environments. They will point to certain parts of the text as flawed and even sometimes outright wrong or even immoral. Fundamentalists term this a "cafeteria style" activity, in which the word of God is being supplanted by humans merely picking and choosing what they "want to believe".

However, the liberal will counter this by pointing to the fact that this is an inescapable reality of human limitations. None of us can escape our social environments. Further, this is easily demonstrated by fundamentalists' own obvious shaping by a social and political culture they both are created by and in turn attempt to create. In this way, one might say that just as the liberal might be "playing God" by their own textual interpretation, so to the fundamentalist is playing God by insisting their interpretation is the only real word of God, after they have inserted themselves into their interpretation. Yet, they will argue, they are merely reading the literal text. But this isn't actually the case. For instance, Evangelicals routinely highlight certain areas of the bible. They often do so with general lines of scripture that could objectively be read in a significantly large number of ways - very specific political or moral claims. e.g., "love your neighbor", or "thou shall not kill", are fine phrases, but what is "love" or is it ever OK to kill? Inevitably, additional verses are required to compare and derive deeper meaning, and yet in the very act of choosing which verses to compare one has begun interpreting. This becomes even more challenging when some verses appear to outright conflict. One can either choose to deconstruct (interpret), but one cannot choose to be unconstructed.

Later on, when the revivalists started, men like Wesley not only called individuals to salvation but left the church with this: Get people saved. That’s all there is to salvation. Salvation was reduced to the individual’s salvation. The covenant demands of the liturgical churches were rejected. What mattered was the individual. This way of thinking continues today where the theme is merely to “get them saved” and then deal with the rest later as time allows.

This is still with us. Many para-church organizations have their student participants go do beach evangelism, lead someone to Christ, and then leave the flounder. Tract-based ministries lead people to decisions without commitments. The ticket is punched and that’s what matters most.

In all of these situations the doctrine of salvation was deconstructed to its most basic, core components. The rest that surrounds it is generally ignored. The Christian faith has been deconstructed and not always for the better.

Here, Brendemuehl points to an example of this process of selective interpretation, by adding his own interpretation - that core components of the bible's truth have not been given enough attention. What those components are and how true they are reflect his own consideration based on his own values.

The Origin Story

But … what’s going on today that’s so important?

The current movement has been around since the 1930s. There was a group in Frankfurt, Germany. These were philosophical Marxists. They differed from Marx in a number of ways. Their goal was to take Marxism as a philosophy and affect social structures.

Or, more precisely, they found Marxist critique of epistemological value - as a tool to get at deeper truths - and generalized it to further analyze not just economic but social and cultural systems.

To do so they introduced a variation on deconstruction that views the components through the lens of Marxism. They reformulated “truth” and “reason” to become “authenticity” and “imagination” so that the new ideals could easily alter perceptions of reality.

Granting this incredible simplification, what they started with was epistemic skepticism, that is they recognized that we are all social products, and that truth requires bringing to light the cultural, etc. assumptions underlying truth claims. And that as culture is such a vast web of entangled social relationships, getting at truth requires seeing the myriad connections behind all claims. Some went so far as to claim that truth itself was non-existent, however the greater majority of deconstructionists have always emphasized that whether or not this is true, what matters is the social analysis if we are to even hope of seeing even a piece of truth. In the scientific arena, this is easier because we are usually able to take measurements and thus have a way of separating the dependent from independent variables, replicating results, having other experts do peer review, and often to put technologies into practice that demonstrate effects. In the social arena, this is far more difficult. As a behaviorist, my claim on the measurability and "functional analysis" of human behaviors (including thought) is likely higher than most, but I readily acknowledge that beyond simple behaviors, the environmental relations quickly become too complex to properly measure. In large social relationships, our empiricism is diminished, and we must rely on many more subjective measures, and a such the opportunity to insert our own biases, etc. increases.

Ok, that sounds strange. You heard an example of this during the 2020 campaign when then-candidate Biden said, “we choose truth over facts.” By “truth” he didn’t mean accurate information (because if he did then he would have no reason to make such a statement). What he meant was that truth is the lens through which facts are assessed. This is how reimagines facts in the light of the truth.

I'm honestly not sure what is going on here. Is he saying Biden is a relativist in the derogatory sense that no truth exists, and he wants to create his own? This is a classic slur on the project of deconstruction itself, owning to a more specific argument about "cultural relativism", in which one is purported to believe that truth and more specifically morality - doesn't exist - and therefore "anything goes". Like stated previously, morality may not actually exist, but rather social relations do, and you can measure things like pain, depression, etc. If one is to claim that a moral truth exists, they must then demonstrate a framework showing from where, if not why. Is it from a textual authority? Then we arrive at the beginning in having to examine the authority of the text. If it comes from man, or reason, then we must examine the social relations therein. It is no accident that immorality of the past - say, slavery (which plenty of fundamentalist evangelicals actively supported) was at the time justified religious textual grounds, as well as by others on appeals to reason and social relations. In the end, one will argue a moral point by appealing to the best analysis one can muster. There were abolitionists who did so hundreds of years ago, and current debates about racism, bigotry, etc. will continue.

What’s Happenin’!

Part of the work of these men in Frankfurt was to break down power structures. While Marx was about economic power and conflict, the Frankfurt Group went about tearing down more than just economic classes. They went after all forms of dominion. So just as Marx made some general comments about the family and how it should serve the state and the collective, these men took another tack, another direction to the same ends. A man named Foucault applied deconstruction to power structures.

Family is a power structure. The family has been deconstructed to power-submission structures that are to be eliminated. What are these structures? Patriarchy is about power. Motherhood is about power. Fathers should have little or no say over wife and children. Mothers have been reduced to birthers. Parents would have no say in the public education of the children.

One cannot deny the role of power in a family, if one is to define power as the ability to influence the actions of another. The degree to which power is distributed is the question here. Underneath this small description of the deconstruction of atomic family dynamics, there exists a vast body of thought. I'm not even sure where to begin, however I'll start with the critique that Brendemuehl is offering up a very unfair depiction of what a deconstructed view of the family actually looks like. Most who disagree with patriarchal dominion of the family (as in, the believe women have just as much a right to autonomy as men) themselves tend to live in atomic units (even LGBTQ families). They do believe power is important window into analyzing social relations as we continue toward a (hopefully shared goal) of human flourishing. For instance, if both parents work 40 hours a week, maybe the father should also help out with the cleaning and child-rearing, right? Or at least talk to their partner about equitable power sharing. Is this something anyone would disagree with?

Regarding public education, this is a lot more complicated. Sets of assumptions about the role of government and religion in society, are extensive. The basic premise of public education is the right of a child to an education. However, it becomes murky when we disagree about what gets taught, especially as the classroom is a microcosm of the very topic of deconstruction itself. Teachers, curriculum committees, Textbook publishers, professors, parents, and children themselves are all stakeholders and must come to some consensus in heterogenous communities in thousands of schools in as many cities across the countries. All of them have their own ideas about what should be taught. C'est la vie democracy.

This is the popular language of today. You can read it almost daily. These statements follow the theme.

Race relations and historic social structures are power structures. Economic class is a power structure. You’ve heard of that notorious “1%” gang. To be white is to inherit the guilt of abusive white people even if they’re not your ancestors. Just because you’re white. To be a person of color is to be a permanent victim, not a person with free will and unity.

This is a lot, but just going to jump in here as a behaviorist and say that free will is something we actually can measure and have never found it. We've found instead huge amounts of data and a theoretical framework built upon it that demonstrates empirically that we are all products of our genes and our learning history. The environment forms a 4-term contingency in temporal space: the motivating operation (MO) > the environmental discriminative stimulus > behavior > the environmental consequent. We are at all times subject to countless schedules of reinforcement and punishment which drive us in a deterministic manner through time and space. There is no alternative explanation as demonstrable, replicable, and empirical.

Darkly, the notion of free will has been used throughout history not just to justify oppressive social conditions, but as well vast power imbalances. If one has a magical ability to simply "rise above" social conditions, the social conditions no longer possess as much valence. Oppressive conditions, unless one is physically trapped in bondage, can be risen above in this view. To the financially powerful - say a millionaire business owner with influence in government, the groups he supports, and large numbers of employees, etc. - this view would support more self-serving actions, instead of those that might otherwise focus more on his own moral requirement to distribute his power more equally if he also believes in equality of opportunity. The behaviorist view states that equality of opportunity is not enough to the extent that we are all products of social circumstance and genes. (I will leave it to others to elaborate on the ugly history of racist justifications for lack of opportunity based on genes).

(Critical Race Theory, aka CRT, is merely the application of this method of criticism to questions of race and it’s the only one where the purveyors of the movement were honest enough to use the term “Critical Theory” and thus reveal its origins.) To operate a store is to be exploitive and greedy, so that theft must be encouraged by the state. These things, too, are happening daily and you can hear about them like clockwork.

This is absolutely not a thing beyond the most radical or radical communists and anarchists. However, there is a logic rooted in Marx's critique of capital, just as there is in the capitalist notion of private property. Again though, nut-picking unrepresentative examples of people who adopt view X is not a substantive critique of view

These critical theorists did not ignore religious power structures. When a pastor speaks of “white guilt” or uses language that is consistent with it, he is compromising. When a church says women may be pastors, elders, or deacons, they’ve broken down the power structure to something small-d democratic and would allow anyone in based on skill set, not according to the typology of Ephesians 5 or the instruction of I Timothy 3. These are compromises of truth in light of today’s movements. It’s not just an alternative interpretation.[italics mine]

I refer to my argument above re: religious interpretation. Brendemuehl is making a claim about social behavior based on the authority of a scriptural text, which is his own interpretation involving many assumptions about politics, economics, etc. Does he claim we must follow it precisely? For instance, it says to not drink wine for it leads to debauchery. OK, but what if I just like a glass of beer with dinner? Anyway, if he wants to take a fundamentalist reading, that's his choice, however as I argue above, even in so doing he is applying his own socialization to his decision to take the text literally.

All of these things share the same theme. In technical terms it’s “neo-Marxist deconstruction” (also known as “Critical Theory”) from the Frankfurt school. But unfortunately, most people will get lost when you make such a precise statement. But at least you’ve got one here.

This is a thought patters which is inconsistent with Christian theology. The mission of the church is not to be a change agent intended on diminishing power structures. The Kingdom of God is a power structure built on His character and person. There is nothing higher or better. There is no other justice.

This just makes zero theological or historical sense. I mean did Jesus not say plenty about overturning power structures? Was he not crucified by actual Roman power structures? Brendemuehl seems to be arguing that we, or the church, should not question power structures because it is part of God's power structure. So secret North Korean Christian churches shouldn't oppose the North Korean government? Should we not oppose our own government? Earlier, he says parents should have say in their child's education (which I agree with!), but this is a power structure! In grappling with this issue, he seems to have tied himself in knots and I personally can't disentangle them. But I do appreciate the opportunity to do so. I'm glad he's doing his best as well.

Hiding in Plain Sight

2018-06-25T13:16:00.001-07:00

One of the oldest misunderstandings about racism (and bigotry in general) is that it must be explicit to exist. If you are not walking around in a clan robe or posting swastikas on your facebook profile, you must not be racist. If you are not explicitly stating that black or brown people are less intelligent, or aggressive, or lazy, etc. by nature, you are not a racist.

The problem with this is that it ignores 99% of actual racism. If you look at the things that explicit racists say and do, most of it will not be explicitly racist. However, one can infer the attitudes behind the thinking. For instance, take a look at this random twitter feed from an explicit racist:

They go by "White Rights Activist":

They routinely retweet posts from non-explicit racists. But their interest in the dehumanization of minorities is clear. They seek portrayals of them as unhinged:

Sexually dangerous and/or diseased.

They glorify cruelty.

But it's easy to write them off as "one of the baddies" because they are honest and explicit about their racism.

But what if they didn't? What if they said the same things, posted the same pictures, and advocated for the same policies?

The modern Republican party is filled with people who do just this. None of them admit to explicit racism, yet say, post and advocate for policies that are identical.

In the past couple of days, Trump calls Rep. Waters "low-IQ". Huckabee tweets scary picture of MS-13. Rep. King tweets picture of immigrant kids and brings up MS-13. Andrew Sullivan decries the demographic change that (brown) immigrants will bring.

All the while actual policies are being enacted that are extreme violations of human rights.

I could go on, and on, and on. But there's really no need. The point is that racism does not need to be explicit to exist. It can smolder slowly, softly in the background, a quiet voice that whispers the same old song: fear them, distrust them, they are less important than you. It can always be plausibly denied. Each instance merely a hint.

But when you take a step back, line up the comments, line up the images, perspectives and emphasis, a pattern emerges that cannot be denied. It is a cacophonous beast that is well alive and snorting within the hearts of our fellow Americans.

Rehearsal

2018-05-28T10:02:00.003-07:00

There is a comic version of your life,
the way you fumbled through Aisle 2.
There is tragic version,
those things he did to you.

It is glorious and gilded,
would say the Apostles,
each breath a cosmic thread.
It is mundane and pointless,
as written by Camus.

In a scene today,
you reflect upon a line,
By tomorrow,
you'll have forgotten to take the time.

Famous and gifted players,
as if doing favors,
drift in and out of view.
Strangers fill in here and there to make things rhyme.

"Life", you type furiously,
But then you realize you had been daydreaming,
through two whole paragraphs.

"I don't read the reviews", someone once said to you.
"Thanks, I'll take that under advisement",
you say as you watch the falling rain make the ink run.

There is aversion of your life that no one will read,
written in an alien tongue by a castaway on a desert planet,
orbiting a star of one,
a star not unlike the sun.

Mapping Race

2018-02-01T21:04:00.001-08:00

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to observe the correlation between voting patterns and ethnic geographic integration. The results are not going to be completely in-obvious. As we all know, there is a deep partisan divide between rural and urban regions. Given that urban areas are more diverse than rural areas, one might expect to see a similar partisan pattern.

What if there existed a number that identified one's level of proximity to diversity, a diversity number if you will. You might have various breakdowns:

- proximity to non-whites in a 10 mile radius
- proximity to non-whites in a 50 mile radius

But you might also add some weights, such that:

- depth of diversity (types of non-whites)

Or you might take class into consideration as well:

- proximity to annual income < $30k per family
- proximity to those with college degree

I browsed google for a bit but didn't come up with anything quickly.

However, I did come across this from 2015 in the NY Times. A project called "Mapping Segregation", it is a tool that allows you to view geographic maps of the US by ethnic concentration.

Ethnic Groups in Coachella Valley, CA, 2015

It's quite fascinating. Noting one of the sources, "socialexplorer.com", I'm off to gather more data in hopes of creating some of my intended weights. Wish me luck.

Talking About Ideas

2018-01-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

On the podcast To the Point today, Warren Olney interviewed Ibram Kendi, who had an op-ed in the New York Times recently titled The Heartbeat of Racism is Denial.

I took issue with very little of what he said. But near the end of the conversation, he made a statement reflective of a common view among my fellow leftists.

“Evidence of racial inequities (whites have more wealth, are incarcerated) are explained by: Either those disparities that are all around us are the result of black inferiorities or they’re they are the result of racist policies.... the only other explanation for all these inequalities is that our country is racist.”

This is the false dichotomy I've been decrying on this blog for years, and unfortunately informs a view shared by both the right and the left when discussing racism. Minority disparities are either genetic or caused by racist policy.

The right-wing response is to argue that because very few people are explicitly racist, and no explicitly racist laws are on the books, that the cause must be be black people themselves. However, they don't want to admit to any genetic inferiority, so instead say it is "cultural".

The left wing response is to agree that no genetic inferiority exists, but that no "cultural" problem exists either. Instead, the answer must be racism.

Now, there are at least three words that need unpacking here: racism, culture, and policies. Because each could be interpreted different ways.

Racism could mean explicit, active racism (not hiring a black sounding name, not moving to a black neighborhood, etc.). But it could also be passive (not supporting policies with disparate impacts, not feeling as "generous" towards minorities, developing prejudices, etc.). But it could also be historical racism, which is not currently active, yet has previously occurred and left a mark (discriminatory hiring, policing, red-lining, etc. could have happened a generation ago yet still be impacting family members today). Or it could be all of the above.

Culture could mean the customs and traditions of an ethnic group (music, dance, conversation, style, etc.). But it could also mean micro-level or family or neighborhood level norms (not cleaning up trash, engaging in risky behaviors, not doing schoolwork, etc.). The latter type of culture is trans-ethnic, meaning it is less reflective of any particular ethnic group than a segment within that group, usually relating to class or privilege.

Policies could mean explicit laws pertaining directly to skin color, enacted for racist reasons, which actively target certain ethnicities for persecution (colored bathrooms, schools, profiling, etc.). But they could also mean policies that create implicit effects through inaction, which cause disparate impacts. For example, if majority minority neighborhoods are located next to polluting factories, and you pass laws eliminating regulations, the law is not explicitly discriminating, but the impact will be.

Now, to use the terms racism, policy and culture loosely is to cut conversation off at the kneecap. And yet this is exactly what we tend to do. I would argue that most conversations on race, policy and economics involve incredibly loose use of these terms. Even when the subject is broken down, as Kendi did in the interview, his use of the term racism and policy were too loose as to be meaningful in any deeper, more functional way.

Because if we are ever going to get anywhere in understanding the divide between right and left on racism and poverty - two fundamental problems of history itself, and to come together in our understanding of truth, we are going to need to dig into the weeds of what these ideas mean. As readers of this blog will note, the question of why we behave the way we do is incredibly complex from an epistemological standpoint. And how are we ever going to get to that if we can't agree on common language? Furthermore, how are we going to take steps to solve the problem if we don't know how to properly discuss it in an objective, orderly fashion?

The Language of Poverty

2017-12-22T12:36:00.001-08:00

Coates is again in the news as Cornel West takes him to task for his neoliberalism. A portion of West's thesis deals with Coates' embrace of Obama, including the imperialism he finds distasteful. While germane to a definition of neoliberalism, I'm personally more interested in how the two deal with minority poverty. As a white man, I recognize the privileged view from which I sit. However, with decades of work among poor and minority communities, and a life-long grappling both (literally and figuratively) with how to help understand and solve the wealth gap, I feel my critical engagement with these issues comes from a place of deep respect. Further, I continue to feel that true anti-racism requires humanization, not objectification of minority thought. That said, I welcome critique of my ideas should they veer towards offensive caricature, or any other reflection of my whiteness. But onwards.

Critiques of West have been that he is too ad hominem - arguing Coates' hasn't "earned" the right to his pessimism. That can be read as such - shouldn't Coates' arguments be taken on their merit, as opposed to the body that voices them? But one could read West not as impugning Coates' personally, but rather - again in line with West's thesis - his lack of a developed theory of oppression. West is a Marxist, and places oppression in the context of an accumulation of wealth and power that is explicitly capitalist. Coates spends very little time with this. Coates' paints vivid and beautiful portraits of what oppression feels like. And this is to be admired greatly. And his effect has been great. But much of this effect, arguably, can be attributable to his resonance with Whites' deep ambivalence between their neoliberal assumptions and their discomfort with their obvious privilege. Coates paints a vivid portrait for them to hang on their wall, to give passing penance. But nothing else about the room is required to change. The walls of the building remain.

My problem with Coates’ neo-liberalism is that it rests snugly in the neo-liberal Whites’ allergy top real economic reform. If it is all about racist white behavior, then you don’t have to deal with the deeper economic assumptions that literally perpetuate minority poverty. Whites are, have been, and likely be racist in all kinds of ways. But imagine if you got them all to stop tomorrow: what would that really change about minority poverty? We have an economic system which requires low-skill labor be paid low wages. This means historically marginalized groups will inevitably be the ones doing that work.

Neo-liberals assume that if you simply make the playing field equal, that society with be equal. But capitalism simply doesn’t work that way: it REQUIRES an underclass. Take Coates’ reparations - I’m all for them, but they don’t demand better pay for low-skill work. In fact, the neo-liberal assumption of a meritocracy in which everyone gets a good education and goes to college, ACTIVELY undervalues and views moral failing in the poor. Yet when the poor make bad choices, don’t raise their kids right, misbehave, etc. - neoliberals have no answer other than to pretend it doesn’t exist and that the problem is not the system but rather white racism. What they cannot or will not grasp is that capitalism depends on a caste system of societal capital, in which financial, emotional, cognitive, neighborhood, property, etc. resources are leveraged by market values. These market values don’t care a whit about the immorality of privilege and historical advantage. It depends upon the individual acting according to self-interest, which will always be stronger than group interest unless larger contingencies are in place. The strongest contingency of all is a system of laws that grant privilege status to property above morality. Thus, high-SES and low-SES is allowed to exist.

Of course race will be a factor in this, but it is only the language that the system uses to describe the violence that the economic system perpetrates. West’s critique of Coates is that he is “all talk” in this sense - that he revels in the language of racism without looking deeper, into its economic grammar, if you will.

In my intellectual evolution over the years (documented for better or worse on this blog!), I've come to develop the notion of something I call Societal Capital. Its an extension of the Marxist notion of the leveraging of capital in a capitalist society, but reaching more broadly to include not only financial but other forms of material wealth that can also be seen as commodities. Essentially, anything that can be leveraged to help one develop for themselves more freedom is Societal Capital. Likewise, the lack thereof of this development act to deleverage one's freedom. For example, when a parent reads to her child and engages her in stimulating conversation, she improves the child's cognitive capacity, which the child will be able to leverage for increased access to freedom in school and peer relationships. Similarly, the way a parent smiles at her child, hugs her and comforts her builds up a child's emotional strength, which then she will be able to leverage outside the home.

The notion of Societal Capital is Marxist in that it eschews the static notion of libertarian free will that is presumed by classical liberalism. Supporters of a "free market" imagine in individuals as free actors; if people are free to make decisions, all things being equal they will thrive according to their merit. An inherent morality is thus derived in which personal circumstance is largely the product of one's "personal freedoms", without regard to past or future learning histories. The ultimate product of this view is that people who don't do well in school, seek to better themselves, stay in low-wage jobs, or generally make choices that are less productive, have no one to blame but themselves.

This presents a problem for neo-liberalism, which fundamentally accepts the notion of merit and personal responsibility. But hold on a second, you might say - I'm a Democrat and I don't blame the poor!

Enter Coates and West. I first began reading Coates many years ago, when he used to blog for the Atlantic. I was interested in his take on education, especially how it intertwined with race. But I grew frustrated with his embrace of ed-reform (a movement rooted in neoliberalism's assumptions), and the picture he painted of "poor" schools did not reflect what I knew to be the case - both from research as well as first hand experience in the classroom. More so, I was annoyed with the what White readers - most of whom likely never spent much time in a ghetto in their lives - seemed to conveniently elevate him. Sure, there were racist teachers - I'll never forget one in PA who whispered a complaint to me about the "black ones". But sadly, the racism in her words was not in the facts of the case, but rather her interpretation of them. In Reading, PA, schools were filled with poor, misbehaved children. And there, as is the case everywhere in America, a higher proportion of misbehaved kids were indeed minority, especially black. But the racism dripping from her white lips was that she put the blame squarely ON THEM. She did not understand the context of what she was seeing. She did not see the historical marginalization, the wealth gap, and ultimately that poverty, not race was the determining factor in the behavior that she loathed. And as a teacher, you can only imagine how infuriating poorly behaved, disrespectful, sassy, unmotivated children can be. But poor white kids were hardly better (owing to their small privilege of being white and the modicum of Societal Capital that had allowed their family to maintain). When I finally left the profession, it was because I simply could no longer take the daily confrontation of poor kids with no support in the rest of their lives. I would end the day with a stack of notes to call home. When I phoned, their parents had long given up on them, and had no advice for me. These parents did not have enough support themselves. And in Yucca Valley, CA, they were primarily white.

For decades now, since explicit racism has been written out of the lawbooks (segregation, miscegenation), and society has generally embraced the notion that all races should be in theory treated fairly, the persistence of the minority poverty gap has presented a problem for mainstream political thought. The conservative Republican party views the problem as classical liberals might: free will in minority communities necessitates that the problem is individual. Far right racists say this is biological, less far-right race "realists" say it is cultural. The problem is not, that is, due to racism or economic structure.

The liberal Democratic party is too politically "liberal" (i.e. moderately progressive), to directly challenge the classical liberal assumptions of capitalism such free markets, property rights and individual freedom of action (free will). Instead, (especially after the horrific example of communism's form of dismantling these assumptions) it has chosen to delicately tip-toe around these notions, avoiding direct confrontation. Government is sold as a salve in the rougher edges of capitalism. Supports such as public education and health care subsidies are promoted as morally necessary when individuals are unable to obtain services such as education and health care on the free market. But when faced with the persistence of minority poverty, they are ill-equipped to confront the problem directly. To challenge racism is old-hat. This requires no actual challenge to any real norms. Be nice to everyone and treat them with respect. OK, fine. We've all agreed that this is what you are supposed to do. Of course, people are going to be racist in all manner of micro-aggressive, ignorant and mildly ugly ways. But undoing any of this, no matter how hard we try, is... well, lip-service.

Generational poverty is a product of capitalism. If we take race out of the equation altogether, you still get economic segregation and broken communities, for the simple fact that low-wages inflict a violence upon families that is beyond compare. It creates stresses, hardships, and instabilities that devastate Societal Capital. It creates ghettos bereft of public capital such as parks, clean streets, role-models, nice stores, good transportation and basic safety. It saps family capital as marriages are strained and children grow up unsupported. Emotional and cognitive capital is deserted in early childhood, leading to schools filled with children far behind their higher-wage family peers. Educational capital is thus hamstrung as the school-to-poverty pipe-line is reinforced. Hope is depleted, short-term is prioritized, which reinforces behaviors that don't build long-term capital.

But all of this is to become skeptical of capitalism, of merit itself. It is to become skeptical of economic and social structures that are foundational to our country. The moral portrait it begins to paint is one of inequity, specifically that the privileged no more earn their place than do those without privilege. Inequity is not something you can simply "educate away". All the schools in the world and lack of racism is not going to fill the vacancies of landscapers, dishwashers, maids, cashiers, line-cooks, waiters and the rest.

This is what I took West to be saying. Coates was his target not because he was black, but because he wasn't white. In the neo-liberal mainstream media world, critiques of capitalism are verboten, but lip service to racism is always fair game. And better yet, when a black writer like Coates, who so eloquently, poetically describes in rich detail the indignity of White Supremacy - yet without the deeper, revolutionary critique of capitalism, he is lauded. Much like the erasing of Dr. Martin Luther King's pivot to poverty allows modern Whites a sort of moral cleansing, Coates' wallowing in the pessimism of a neo-liberal framework unsatisfied with its own inability to come to terms with its perpetuating forces too abets a process of toothless political meandering.

And while "woke" twitter throws shade over lattes and worn copies of bell hooks, people are still waking up at the crack of dawn to do dirty work for little pay.

The Neo-Liberal Paradox

2017-12-08T11:13:00.001-08:00

Race Counts is a great project. Its goal is to bring awareness of racial disparities across the state of California.

"Through cutting-edge, rigorous research and analysis, RACE COUNTS will rank all 58 counties by these issue areas and provide a roadmap of how we can unwind generations of racial oppression.My package was marked delivered today, however I was at home all day. It was marked left beside door, however I have an enclosed courtyard, and there are no packages there."

It was established by The Advancement Project, which calls itself

"a next generation, multiracial civil rights organization working on systems change. The staff in the California offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento work to expand opportunities in our educational systems, create healthy built environments and communities, develop the connective tissue of an inclusive democracy, and shift public investments towards equity."

The website is smartly laid out, and provides handy tools to examine data on economic opportunity,
health care access, education, housing, democracy, crime and justice and healthy built environments. Information is broken down by ethnic group, population and county.

For instance, a chart filtered by poverty shows Fresno as having the highest levels of income disparity and lowest performance (overall prosperity, including income, graduation rates, etc.). In a population of around 100k, nearly 30% of people live in poverty. Clicking on the Fresno link takes you to a county overview. Some key facts:

It is 50% hispanic and 30% white.
Highest employment levels are among Latinos.
Highest graduation rate is Pacific Islander at 97%, lowest is black, at 72%.
Whites on average had $30k income left over after housing costs, Latinos had only $23k
Other figures broken down by race included included: truancy arrests, curfew arrests, incarceration, food access, proximity to hazard

So, most of it is what you'd expect, with Black and HIspanic minorities generally bringing up the bottom of the disparity gap. Some surprises, however. White kids are actually arrested for truancy at rate more than doubling Black and Hispanic kids. However, while curfew arrest rates are roughly equal for Blacks and Hispanics, rates for Hispanic kids are more than two thirds lower.

All well and good, but two things stood out to me. First, the rates across ethnicities aren't broken down by SES. For instance, how would high-SES blacks compare with high-SES whites? My guess is we'd still see disparities, but they would be vastly smaller. When you have a good paying job, a stable family, an education, and live in a nice neighborhood, things are kind of going well by definition.

So this presents a problem. Emphasizing disparity by race is important in understanding historical context of racism, legacy of Jim Crow, immigration, redlining, etc. It makes a profound case for the present disparities being unfair and immoral. It thus demands action as a moral imperative.

However, the danger in racial analysis is that, by emphasizing racial disparity, an easy narrative can form that racism is the problem. That is, if we simply ended racism, things would all get better and we would have equality. If teachers treated kids fairly, if employers looked past race, if lenders gave out loans without regard to skin color, these disparities would somehow end.

But this misses a crucial element of how we have chosen to structure our society: the setting of wages in free market capitalism. You can treat people as fair as you want, but we will still have millions of low-skill occupations that need to be filled. In a free-market system, these jobs will pay poverty wages. If you look at pay scales historically for jobs in which repetitive, relatively simple and manually intensive labor is required - picking, scrubbing, folding, stacking, carrying, checking - you will find wages at the very bottom of the pay scale. The people who will take these jobs will be the most desperate, those with the least available options - the least education, the most difficult childhoods, the most mental and physical health issues, the most unfortunate family crises, etc. And when you require someone like this to spend 40 hours a week performing difficult, exhausting and depressing labor, and then only pay them a poverty wage, you create a perfect recipe for intergenerational poverty.

To make matters worse, in a system of free-market housing, they can only afford to live in the cheapest homes. Voila! Ghettos are born. Apartment complexes, trailer parks, housing developments filled to capacity with poverty and struggle.

But why stop there? Tie basic government services to a neighborhood income tax base, and things like roads, postal offices and libraries are barely funded.

What about the children? Public schools in these neighborhoods will be filled with children who come from homes with vastly fewer resources. Lower education, higher stress, more dysfunction, and likely generations of disadvantage. Even the best teacher will struggle to make up for the cognitive, and emotional needs of their pupils. Federal programs like Title I try to make up for these disadvantages in small ways, like providing free and reduced lunches, counseling or maybe social workers to try and support the families. But they are for the most part band-aids that, while crucial and greatly needed, only serve to stem some of the bleeding.

Schools try to innovate, but results are messy, and what appear to be effective interventions are often fleeting as success often requires a lot of luck and everything to be just right (above average leadership and staff, above average culture, above average... something). But by definition, above average is not scaleable.

Charter schools have proven to be a mixed bag - well intentioned, but more often than not merely representing a selection bias, attracting only the most motivated families: by definition the very families in these communities whose children are going to be the most prepared. One feels for their plight - who doesn't want the best for their child, and every family deserves a good school for their child. But if the reason your school is not "good" is that it is populated by poor kids, and you live in a poor neighborhood, requesting a selective school is helping certain families but not solving the larger issue.

Which, again, is poverty. Even in the best scenario - the one you hear again and again from those interested in "education reform", is that all these kids go to college. Great. But we still have millions of jobs that pay poverty wages. This is the great neo-liberal paradox: you spend/organize the perfect government intervention to get everyone an education and great jobs, yet millions of low-skill, low wage jobs remain.

And OK, education is hard, not everyone is cut out for college. Maybe the answer is trade school. A plumber, carpenter or electrician can make a solid middle class wage. But you still haven't dealt with the problem.

What if we really used our imaginations and somehow schools were able to get all kids graduated and into trade schools or college? So there then becomes this massive glut of highly educated/trained workers who can't find work. Yet there still exist millions of low-skill, low wage jobs. Are they going to all demand higher wages because of their fancy degrees and certifications? The maid, the fieldworker, the cashier is still going to be competing for a job, and will need to work... or starve. Degrees are poor leverage when everyone has one, jobs are scarce, and there's a line of willing workers lined up behind you.

The sad reality is that unless we find a way to raise pay for the massive numbers of low-skill jobs that our society demands, we are going to have massive numbers of people living in poverty, necessarily in poor neighborhoods, with their kids going to poor schools.

All you have to do is sprinkle a touch of historical racism and marginalization into the mix and racial disparity is guaranteed.

The Race Counts website has a list of current campaigns it is working on, including:

Incarceration and racial profiling
Investment in poor neighborhoods
Affordable housing
Better schools
Taxing corporations
Gentrification

These are all great ideas. But notice anything missing? How are any of them going to help raise wages for low-skill occupations?

Your guess is as good as mine.

We Must Go Deeper

2017-11-25T10:38:00.001-08:00

Writing in the Root, Michael Harriot discusses finding that minority and poor students received harsher discipline than whites and well-off students. Glossing over the very real issue that lower-SES students are indeed at higher risk for behavioral problems, he writes that “the problems of racial inequality in the criminal justice system begin in the educations [sic] system.”

I would say they continue, but do not begin there. They begin in our embracing an economic system in which low-skill work is paid a poverty wage. This creates ghettos, destroys families and depletes capital (financial, emotional, cognitive, safety, health, transportation, modeling, etc.). Historically marginalized, low-capital ethnic groups will get caught in the trap of being forced into working these jobs, and thus sucked into a generational system of oppression as an underclass, as geographic isolation concentrates the effects of poverty, nowhere more so than in neighborhood schools. Dominant ethnic groups will find racism a convenient rationalization for the structural economic system which requires the dehumanization of fellow citizens in order to excuse their continued exploitation. Politicians and pundits will find that demogoguery is an effective tool to gin up support for their personal or political ambition.

The way out is simple in theory, yet difficult in practice: raising wages for this type of work, thus detaching it from ethnic marginalization and geographic segregation. To truly dig out racism from society, we must go deeper, indeed to the root.

Thomas Kinkade, RIP

2017-11-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

News so fake it's true....

The Brain of Kool Keith

2017-11-05T09:57:00.001-08:00

In 1988, The Bronx-based rap group The Ultramagnetic MCs released "Critical Beatdown", a landmark in hip hop, setting a new bar both in production as well as lyrical complexity and imagination.

Its founder, Kool Keith, went on to create the album he is maybe best known for, as Dr. Octagon in Dr. Octagonecologyst, a concept album starring a "time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon from the planet jupiter". The wikipedia entry summarizing the epic space-narrative is quite brilliant:

"Octagon specifies a few of the services he offers, such as treatment of chimpanzee acne and moosebumps, and performs rectal rebuilding surgery and relocates saliva glands.[2] Octagon also performs medical experiments at night when the moon is out. Proclaiming that his hammer is dull and his drill is broken, Dr. Octagon tells patients that he doesn't have tools. Instead, he states that he'll rip out a stomach, dissect open rectums, put needles in kneecaps, apply Clorox to vocal boxes, and watch his patients vomit green. Dr. Octagon's office number is 1-800-pp51-doodoo, and his patients often wait in a waiting room for long periods of time before he dismisses the ones that have been waiting since morning. Octagon's hospital also houses mental patients that dance in the halls. Octagon has fed green fly soup to his patients on occasion, and has given patients a mixture of Pepsi cola, Pepto-Bismol, bugs, and pop rocks to watch them cough until they turn blue. One of Octagon's patients dies in room number 105 with cirrhosis of the eye while there is a horse loose in the hospital. Another patient is taken by Dr. Octagon out of the bathroom into water to touch the submerged electric wires. Octagon claims to hide the dead bodies of his patients in Beverly Hills, CA. Octagon's uncle, Mr. Gerbik, is described as being half shark, having the skin of an alligator, and is 208 years old."

Revisting Critical Beatdown this morning, I was struck by Keith's frequent reference to brains. So I made a wordcloud of his nearly 4000 word contribution to the lyrics of the album.

Indeed. Brain actually occurs 26 times throughout the album. As opposed to Spongee, which only occurs twice.

The Noble Savages Across the Tracks

2017-10-06T12:47:00.004-07:00

The Death of General Wolfe,
Benjamin West,1770

The iconoclastic Thomas Chatterton Williams goes after Ta-nehesi coates in today's NY Times. His main beef is the racial essentialism he feels Coates embraces, and which mirrors that of explicit racists.

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.

My beef with Coates has always been something else. He's a great writer. There is a lyricism in his words, and a brash, unapologetic embrace of colloquial manners, albeit never sacrificed for imprecision. But his passion and craft are hamstrung by a lack of nuance in the larger project of deconstructing the system he rails against.

Much of the heft of his words lazily harkens back to civil-rights era tropes that just don't fit the times. Racism is alive and well today, but it is of a much different sort. Whereas before, the question of racial equality was actually on the table, and people took explicit positions against it. This isn't true today. Right wing leaders publicly praise Martin Luther King. They talk about "not seeing color", and in a belief that everyone should live together as equals.

So what to make of the present, then, when inequality obviously persists, and white people behave in ways in which they seem to value minorities less?

For black liberals like Coates, the easy answer is racism. White people are discriminating against blacks in employment, in school, in policing. Sure, blacks may be misbehaving more often that whites - but this is because of how racist whites are.

The problem with this critique is that it is superficial and naive. It skips over the deeper questions about how our social and economic system is organized in ways that limit historically marginalized groups' access to and development of societal capital. Instead, it chooses to focus in on explicit acts of white racism, as if once white people stopped acting racist, that the problems of the black community would be solved. If only whites became more "woke" and no longer engaged in microaggressions like assuming light-skinned people are white, or wanting to touch black hair. Or supposed macroaggressions such as moving into black neighborhoods. Or moving to neighborhoods where the schools are "good" (read: non-minority).

The focus is always on the personal, the individual - the conscious-raising. But as much as microaggressions are certainly real, and workplace discrimination, teacher prejudice and police brutality exist, they are not the cause of black disadvantage. They are ugly, obvious issues. But they aren't close to the source of the problem.

In white liberals' prostration before Coates, there is something of a Noble Savage act. Our deep guilt and uncomfortableness drive us to embrace a ritualistic display, in which, by allying ourselves with a black authority, we no longer have to be uncomfortable or guilty.

Instead of seeing native peoples as complex - even flawed at times, white anthropology sought to absolve itself from dealing with the foreign other on equal terms. It was an overcorrection, a way to make-believe that cultural understanding could happen in a sort of historical and value-free vacuum.

So too with the black "other". My hunch is that minority critics of the Coates variety find themselves torn between enjoying the attention that their broadsides against "White Supremacy", "Intersectionality" and "Privilege" enjoy among white liberals, and the suspicion that their critiques aren't actually understood all that well - that their harsh speaking of truths is a sort of Kabuki that whites are attending as a form of cheap penance that absolves quickly rather than requiring an advanced interrogation of both sides.

I've always felt that this style of white guilt is dangerous, as a vapid understanding ultimately hurts those who would benefit most from a true discourse. Poor minorities who suffer the actual disadvantage in all this become mere shadow puppets in a theater of faux-deconstruction. All the while, the actual gears of oppression churn on.

While personal identity politics is interesting, and important, it too often gets in the way of a larger discussion about a system which depends on and reinforces disadvantage. Solving that problem may in fact raise many more uncomfortable questions about privilege, and how we may need to radically alter some of our social structures going forward so that we can finally end disadvantage once and for all.

It Never Ends

2017-09-25T17:21:00.002-07:00

The New York Times has a terrible article today, headlined "When Black Children Are Targeted for Punishment".

God, these articles are so frustrating. Black students ARE far more likely to misbehave. But if writers acknowledge this, they feel like they're agreeing with those who would say blacks are inferior. So, they invent a narrative in which nothing has changed since 1965, and white teachers are to blame.

But these people have either never spent much time in poor minority schools, or they are willfully blind.

Here's a question: when a community inherits hundreds of years of discrimination and abuse, it's culture shunned, and levels of low-education, broken families, crime and neglect are far higher, how well-behaved are its children?

Really, you can leave race out of it (to make things a little more clear). I've taught kids from low-SES homes who are white, hispanic, asian, black, Native, etc. They're always the ones who misbehave. Why, because life has fucked them over. Their parents - or parent, or grandparent, as often, have a shitty life. They make crappy pay, live in a crappy neighborhood, with crappy neighbors. They develop crappy habits. They are in survival mode, and try to find happiness where they can. This might mean taking a nap instead of helping their kid with homework. Or watching TV while letting their kid run around outside with the other little hellions so they can get a moments' peace. Or handing out a quick smack. Or forgetting to do the laundry, or pack a lunch.

By refusing to acknowledge the reality of underclass life, with all of its ugly behavioral symptoms and cyclical traps, these would-be do-gooders continue to spin this BS. But by all means, continue to pay your clerks, cleaners, waiters, washers, diggers, scrapers and pickers a poverty wage, yet wonder why poverty exists. Then, wonder why we have such high incarceration, violence and ghettos. Wonder who leaves next to the airports, factories. Wonder who is going to get high on drugs or corn chips.

I used to blog about this shit, but I gave up because I got sick of living in an intellectual wilderness. You can either be Charles Murray or Ta-nehisi Coates. But you can't be both. The Devil or the Angel.

Is it too difficult to understand? Does it require too much explanation and prerequisite information? Do you need a bachelor's of arts to add it all up and grok the thesis? My guess is no. My guess is the subject is fraught with danger - for getting on the wrong side of the wrong people. My guess is that our society reinforces tribalism and punishes free thought. (Even saying the phrase "free thought" irks me because it has become synonymous with literal bigotry - with those who would hide behind it as a hideous shield behind which they lose sight of humanity beyond reach of their cold logic. In their case, the "freedom" has only landed them in another homogenous group of a-holes).

In the end, I am simply saddened because the real questions aren't being asked. The real, lived experiences of these kids remains unseen. Their misbehavior is a cry from the darkness. The educational system is a relentless beast of order and suppression - for those who cannot navigate it's strict monotony, it acts like a vice. The harder you squirm, the tighter the grip becomes. By secondary school, these kids know nothing but to be prey. The day is spent forever flitting from flimsy branch to branch, one eye on the beast, one eye on more games to play, unconsciously desperate to find some silliness, some cruel joke to distract themselves from the inevitable, crushing reality they one day they too will be laid out, exhausted, children nipping - their little resentful eyes now too growing larger, poor quality, dirty belongings tossed about in some previously dreary rush, bills stacked high, with echoes and visions of self-satisfied mid-managers barking orders and counting beans, being told to smile more. Being told that, "One more time and you're fired." Knowing where you live. Knowing where your parents live. Knowing where your children live. Seeing the white people come in, laughing, digesting their fancy sandwiches and laughing easily.

In all of this, horrible, systemic drudgery, this pretty little articles get written. A self-satisfied separatist religiosity permeates smugly. Charles Murray's solution to the "achievement gap" is for blacks to start behaving better. His recommendation is for somewhere, somehow some mysteriously delivered "message" be given to them, such that they'll stop acting like fools. Murray is a racist idiot.

To authors of pieces like this - which do-gooder white liberal types seem to eat up like some kind of periodic penance, which they find distasteful but hope deep down will absolve them from the privilege they can't help but enjoy, but feel an inexplicable yet persistent shame over - the solution is for whites to just stop being so damn racist. See, if white teachers would just allow little black and hispanic boys to raise their hands and turn in their homework like the rest of the class, all of our problems will be solved.

Then everyone can grow up and some can nicely go to college, and some can nicely go into the trades, and some can do the scrubbing, and cooking and cleaning and digging and fixing and watering and picking, and then return to their nice, dirty little houses with broken screen doors and cats that we can't afford to spay and so piss everywhere.

And when the school bus comes in the morning, the nice little poor boys and girls will nicely get onto the bus without their lunches (or if their lucky, with a can of soda and a bag of chips because dad stopped at AM/PM last night after the bar and was feeling generous). And they will ever so nicely wave at each other when they come into class, each knowing how their parents were screaming and throwing things early that morning. And when asked, they will raise their nice little hands, forgetting all about the fact that their older sister got knocked about and how mom didn't have time to help them with their science project because she was taking care of her granddaughter. And when on the playground, and another kid tells them they're sister is a slut (because their father isn't in prison), they will politely ask them to stop, and then maybe tell a teacher, because hundreds of years of social and political oppression doesn't have consequences. And kids from poor, broken, disadvantaged homes are no more likely to misbehave.

The Only Question

2017-08-15T11:18:00.001-07:00

The NY Times has a piece today in its "Fixes" series highlighting The Family Independence Iniative, "an organization that is challenging some of the core assumptions that have prevailed in social service work for decades — particularly the assumption that poor families need a great deal of assistance, advice and motivation from professional social workers to improve their lives." It's premise is that families don't need programs, but rather tools to help them make better decisions, as well as some financial resources to be able to better leverage themselves.

Sounds nice. I'm all for it. It's better than nothing. But here's the problem:

How will we ever eradicate poverty as long as our economy depends on the poverty wages of low-skilled labor? Who will wash the dishes? Who will clean the hotel rooms?

This is a crucial element of the "poverty cycle", in which social misfortune drives people into accepting careers of poverty. This creates property markets that segregate entire neighborhoods of people who make low wages, as well as struggle with social issues. Their children then go to school together, where their high stress levels and lack of preparedness compound the struggle to get educated.

Some will always make it out. But they are the outliers, and give lie to the idea that the system is fair or functioning. Worse, they allow us to ignore the fact that we all depend on poverty wages. Efforts to enforce minimum wages that would eradicate poverty are met with an argument that jobs will need to be cut. Even if true, this is an indictment of the economic system.

Truly eradicating poverty and the social ills that it perpetuates requires eradicating our systemic reliance on a low wage underclass. Do that, and you no longer need the plethora of band-aid interventions we've been trying for over a century - charity, jobs programs, education reform, social work, criminal justice reform, drug prevention, etc. You can't create a system in which social ills get condensed, enhanced, ingrained and perpetuated, and then expect to be able to come up with solutions to help people "rise out of poverty".

The obvious difficulty is how to do this. How do we change such a large system? Raising the minimum wage will indeed limit job growth - at least, as far as I know, and it makes sense. What would it look like if businesses were all required to raise their wages to $20 an hour, effectively doubling or tripling the labor costs in industries that rely on low wages. Hotels, fast food, groceries, retail, restaurants - all of these would be severely hit. They would have to raise prices. But now the $20 an hour worker has to pay a lot more for everything. The raised income, in effect, becomes regressive.

Or so goes the argument, and I'm no economist. But suffice it to say this stuff is really tricky. But "tricky" is not an excuse for maintaining the status quo, and continuing to relegate millions to lives of poverty, and exploiting a system in which social ills create an underclass of low wage workers.

We need to find a way to make every job a non-poverty job. Dishwashing. Picking vegetables. Cleaning toilets. Manning cash registers. Mowing lawns. Stocking shelves. Do that, and the problem goes away. School test scores skyrocket. Families bounce back from hardship. Stress levels in families plummet. Social ills like crime and drug abuse drop. People can afford to live in nice neighborhoods (actually, most neighborhoods become nice). Racial resentment ends.

Sounds nice. But how do you do it? This is the question that needs to be answered. It is a hard question. But it is the only question.

Exciting News

2017-08-15T11:14:00.001-07:00

I'm honored to announce that my article, "A Challenge to the Mentalistic Order: Barriers to the Dissemination o fa Behavior Analytic Philosophy", will be published in the B.F. Skinner Foundation's Quarterly journal, Operants.

"The B. F. Skinner Foundation promotes the science founded by B. F. Skinner and supports the practices derived from that science. In so doing, the Foundation advances a more humane world by replacing coercive techniques with positive procedures.

Our goal is to introduce the new generation of scholars and students, as well as general educated public, to the Skinner’s legacy and relevance.

Established in 1988 the B. F. Skinner Foundation has a wealth of material from Skinner’s literary estate, from donations from his colleagues and students, and from family members. The Foundation has received donations from companies that published Skinner materials or films, thus adding to its already extensive collection. The Foundation continues to maintain contact with professionals and students worldwide who are former students, or colleagues or individuals interested in his work. The Foundation is also the prime contact for permissions for reproducing Skinner material or for translations of Skinner’s works."

You can download it here:
Quarter 2, 2017

NPR's 150 Best Albums by Women - My Takes

2017-07-29T20:23:00.002-07:00

NPR just put out a list of the 150 best albums made by women. Compiled by over 50 NPR women, more precisely as put by Ann Powers:

"It features albums by artists who identify as female — including some by mixed-gender bands, like Fleetwood Mac and X, that, in our view, relied on women's creativity for their spark.... It stands for music history, touching upon every significant trend, social issue, set of sonic innovations, and new avenue for self-expression that popular music has intersected in the past fifty years...."

Powers lays out some of the pitfalls of list-making, even bringing up one obscure feminist notion that list-making itself is hierarchical, and as such might be anti-feminist. OK, so there's that. But we're taking about art here. Perspective and feeling, are defined by subjectivity, and to pretend that we shouldn't have personal hierarchies - to enjoy some thing more than others is just, well... too sad. And not fun. And uninteresting.

So, with that in mind, I present my own, entirely subjective response based on how I have experienced these artists, according to my own repertoire of response.

First, I must say that the list was very political, in that it tried to please a lot of people. It's multicultural, high and low. That's fine. But it is a "list" after all, and that implies a trajectory. Compiling a list by committee is going to be filled with contradictions. Famous critics' lists tend to be from institutions that represent more narrow perspectives, which smooths this out. But that's also the point. Music (especially rock) is generally written, performed, produced, released and written about by men. Enough said.

OK, then. My taste runs heavily towards rock, with smatterings of reggae, hip hop, country, jazz thrown in. I also like a lot of music that is fundamentally Not Great. It is derivative, cheesy, overproduced, and at some level simply soul-less. I would place most popular music in this category. Your Foreigners, your Everly Brothers, your (I'm so going to get a kick out of this... your Beach Boys). Then you have music that is well-crafted, earnest, and yet just not interesting enough. It doesn't move me. I'm talking here about your Paul Simons, your Carpenters, your Didos, Adeles and Sara McLaughlins. To get on any Best Of list of mine your art has to be singular, brave, raw, and at some level have really made an impact on me.

Going through the NPR list, many of the artists I simply haven't heard of. Some, like maybe Aretha Franklin or Roberta Flack, I would agree are great - but just have never been moving enough to me personally. (As for Flack, Killing Me Softly is a classic, but I would be able to name much else from her). So, the following stand out to me:

Breeders (Pod was a better album. And le me just say that the fact that this came in at #144 while Britney Spears was at #92 sort of sums up everything that one might despise in the particular NPR overeducated, safe, milktoast, dumbly arch set. It's just this sort of thing that makes me want to vomit on a pair of Tevas and huck them over the fence into their DMB concert.) Ahem...

Joanna Newsom (milk-eyed mender was better)

Cocteau Twins (Heaven or LV is spot-on)

Sonic Youth (my fave is thousand leaves)

X (Los Angeles hard to beat)

Sleater Kinney (weirdly, can’t really deal with them, but the Woods is a fucking epic)

Portishead (Dummy is excellent)

Hole (Live through This), Kate Bush (really hard to choose), Bjork (never really made a good album, but taken individually, has a handful of brilliant songs)

PJ Harvey (Rid of me was really a lesser album, I’d place Dry as tops, followed by Stories and White Chalk)

Fleetwood Mac (Rumors is correct)

Lauryn Hill (I haven’t listened t it in years, but it was amazing when it came out - has it aged well?)... and, that's all.

From this list, I'd place Kate Bush and Breeders (Kim Deal) as tied for my tops.

A lot there that I haven't heard of. I'm also wondering who I would add. Plenty of bands with women as driving forces that aren't mentioned: Beach House, Camera Obscura, Cat Power, The Dirty Projectors, My Bloody Valentine, Dum Dum Girls, The Fiery Furnaces, Frankie Rose, The Joy Formidable, Laura Veirs, Low, Mitski, Kristen Hersh, Patsy Cline, Quasi, St. Vincent, Stina Nordenstam, Nico, White Lung.

The Man in the Truck

2017-07-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

"The Carousel of Progress" - Walt Disney World

In my previous post, I argued that a large conflict had developed (or at least had boiled over in recent years) between the rural and cosmopolitan classes. The two had very different repertoires of knowledge. The rural valued the concrete and immediate, while the cosmopolitan valued the abstract and global. When these views led to political and ideological positions, the conflict can deepen. Anger over real policy disagreements can tempt ad hominem attacks based not on policy or ideology, but rather the mundane cultural repertoires of food, leisure and folkways.

"The country is more divided as it has been in a long time."

We've grown used to hearing this a lot. It is true culturally. It is true geographically. It is true in terms of our acceptance of previously-thought-to-be objective institutions such as universities, journalism, and published science.

A look at voting maps shows this in stark relief as vast oceans of sparsely populated rural red surround small, densely populated islands of blue.

The patterns can be seen in other countries as well.
France:
(pink = RW populist, LW pluralist)

Austria:

(blue = RW Populist, green = LW pluralist)

Spain:

(blue = RW populist, red = LW pluralist)

England

(blue = RW populist, red = LW pluralist)

The geographic pattern is clear. "Elite" punditry was quick after Brexit and Trump's surprise victory to look around and decry the bubble: they had been too self-involved with people like them to see clearly the upswell of populist sentiment. Much was made of the fact that journalists (and the academic they likely relied on for expert opinion) were located primarily in the big cities, usually on the coasts. Maybe there was, after all, something to what right-wing pundits had been decrying all along. Maybe the "pointy-headed" "coastal elites" were "out of touch" with the "real Americans". Alright everyone, back to Wasila, ASAP!

In 1993, when I was first out of high school I took a job with a friend of mine who worked in Masonry. The fact that I knew him was due to a funny quirk of skateboarding - a sport that, through emphasis on outsider individualism, daring and physical prowess, often crossed class boundaries. As Taylor Hall writes in a fascinating post on the blog Broken Clipboard,

Members of the lower class typically choose sports characterized by violence and uncertainty based on physical strength and daring; partaking in prole sports such as boxing, wrestling, and weightlifting. These sports are often available at low cost and in urban areas and are accessible to all. These sports serve as a legitimate way of establishing self-respect and a sense of masculinity – traits necessary for survival in a modest background.

My friend had no plans on attending college. He was kind of ripped and had a tattoo of batman on his right pectoral. He found me a job assisting him as a "hogger", a position basically defined by the sloppy, dirty, laborious, low-skill tasks of hauling materials, mixing cement and fetching items. The work was dirty, sometimes dangerous or painful, and rewarded a sort of fearless, can-do physicality. It was also my first exposure to a highly masculinized work environment. My sensitive, gender-deconstructed, feminist upbringing made me stick out. I wasn't quite "one of the guys". It wasn't completely Republican. When a grumpy roofer kept blaring Rush Limbaugh, an older Carpenter hollered at him to, "turn that right wing shit down!" He liked me and told me how one of his dreams was to drop LSD on the top of one of the great pyramids in Egypt.

Aside from the back-breaking laboriousness of the job (I used to get home so tired I'd sometimes fall right to sleep), I think back on the experience as really turning me off from blue collar work in general. I had nursed the idea of becoming a firefighter for a time. But I realized that the hyper-masculinized atmosphere would make me uncomfortable; I would never be "one of them".

This was all by design, of course. Both of my parents were college educated. I was listening to post-rock, writing poetry and deconstructing the world around me - rebelling against any local culture I could find. I was trying my best to be abstract and global. I continued to work blue collar jobs. Actually, "pink collar" really, as I found myself interested in social services - a field that tends female. I delivered meals to the sick, handed out pills to the mentally ill and brain injured, all the while taking college courses at night, eventually becoming an elementary school teacher, and now behavior analyst.

I could make a good case that my intellectual interests, my ideological assumptions, have led me to embrace a left-wing politics. But what led me to those assumptions? Surely, I was raised in a left-wing home. And I have lived in left-leaning, cosmopolitan cities - Santa Cruz, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. Culture and geography has had a lot to do with it. I have indeed come to live in a bubble of sorts. None of my friends are really Republicans. My facebook feed is bright blue. I read mainstream (liberal) news sources.

Looking at the maps above, one would think that I would have to leave town to encounter "real America", to understand the white, Christian America.

But in reality, he lives next door. Anywhere a building is being constructed you'll find scores of working class men who will reliably and overwhelmingly be voting Republican in the next election. The carpenters, masons, electricians, fork-lift drivers, roofers, plumbers, truck drivers. They are men who get dirty, work with their hands, drink beer after work, barbecue on the weekend and watch the game. They drive big trucks with big tires because being manly feels good. Like most people, they probably aren't political junkies, and so would much rather listen to country or butt-rock on the radio than Michael Savage or Sean Hannity. But there's likely someone on the jobsite who's plugged in politically, and he is likely influential in reinforcing their worldview. When they go to church it's probably a mega church, which reinforces their traditional values.

The messages from rightwing media and megachurches is one of paranoia and incessant tribalism. Over and over, the message is that a way of life is under siege. Men can no longer be "men". Christians can no longer be "Christians". And who is to blame - the names are legion and all mean the same thing: liberal, elitist, pointy-headed, egghead, atheist, commie, pinko, feminazi, PC, SJW, globalist, snowflake. By its nature, the populist position has an easy target: anyone who is different than them. Often, simply their request for inclusion, if not their very right to exist, is viewed as an offensive attack.

One can see how attractive this message might be - that their identity is threatened - to a group whose occupations have indeed been losing status for decades. In this amazing infographic, in which occupations are charted by political ideology, there is an overwhelming tendency for blue collar, non-college educated work to swing right. Click the link to see the whole page, but just take a look at this portion:

People's occupation is often core to who they are, how they view the world. If not the actual work itself, then the culture of the profession, what kind of people work there and what kind of people are then expected to work there. If I describe the lovely foreign film I just watched while sitting around the dirty igloo cooler with my fellow pipe-fitters, they are going to look at me funny. Just as if, while eating Chipotle with my fellow graphic designers, I describe in detail the 3-point buck I took down last Saturday.

Much has contributed to get us to where we are today. Remember Revenge of the Nerds? Remember nerds? If you work in construction, you probably do. The rest of us, maybe less so. Feminism allowed men to be more sensitive and not be defined merely by a stoic, physicality. The Information Age introduced forms of labor that required abstract knowledge than required no daring, strength or toughness. Gay rights redefined masculinity even further. Transgender acceptance upended it entirely. Global commerce and media have upended tradition at breakneck speed.

Much has been said about the loss of manufacturing, economic insecurity and the rust belt swing from Blue to Red. But while those are a significant factor, certainly with respect to electoral politics. What is more important is the redefining of the American Male and his place of work. There is nothing about working with your hands that requires a traditionalist view of masculinity. However, work is to a large degree identity. It becomes family identity, it gets passed down through generations. These generations develop different repertoires of knowledge, emphasize different values. If a child grows up in a home that doesn't watch foreign films, debate global religion, critically deconstruct modern art, he is going to view the world differently.

But do these worlds have to be in tension? Do they have to collide with such dangerous friction? What can we do, as a society, to be more inclusive? This is the question for our time.

I Don't Hate You

2017-07-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

This post is for the rural man, or at least the man rural-at-heart. It is for the working class, high-school educated, plainspoken and plain-minded man. He's a man of common sense. He's a man of modest means and traditional values.

And similar women, who like a man's man.

These women are stay-at-home moms, or if they work they stick to traditional professions that don't require a college degree, such as clerking, waitressing, or dental hygiene. The men tend to work in trades, or operate small businesses. They build stuff, fix stuff, make stuff with their hands.

They know how to change the oil and they'll be damned if they're going to pay someone to do it for them.

They speak their mind. What you see is what you get. (What else could it be?)

Adherence to gender roles. Common, popular pastimes such as hunting, fishing, and quilting. Popular music such as country, rock, and pop. But mostly country.

They believe in God. Or at least assume they do - maybe they don't really need to give it much thought. That's just what you do.

You just do what you do. There's a reason you do it: because everyone does it. And so do you. Because once you start questioning things, well, then you might as well start questioning everything. You begin to sound "fancy", think a little high of yourself. What, do you think you're better than us?

Well, that's the point of this post.

----
Much has been said after the election of Trump about the "forgotten man", the "silent majority". One of the things that has been said is that liberal, cosmopolitan, coastal "elites" such as myself look down on, and feel superior to these people.

Kevin Drum outright assumed it to be the case.

-->

"is there really any question that liberal city folks tend to sneer at rural working-class folks? I’m not even talking about stuff like abortion and guns and gay marriage, where we disagree over major points of policy. I’m talking about lifestyle. Krugman talks about fast food, and that’s a decent example. Working-class folks like fast food, which explains why Donald Trump liked to show pictures of himself eating McDonald’s or KFC. It’s a sign that he’s one of them."

He was responding to Krugman column that dismissed the idea. Krugman said his inbox was flooded with people accusing people like him of sneering at them.

Do the liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, I’ve never heard it — the people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and aren’t especially judgmental about lifestyles.

But conservatives weren't having it, and published Drum's piece as a stunning admission.
----

It kind of makes you wonder, what is it to sneer? When I play complex music, go to an art museum, follow a niche fashion trend, see a foreign film, eat an interesting type of food.... am I sneering?

It's hard to say. I've tried Coors beer and it is terrible. So many of those pop songs are written by committee, and don't do anything interesting. I don't like hunting because it seems mean. I stopped believing in God when I was a teenager because my questions very quickly overtook their answers. Why can't guys cry? Have you seen the scene in Latcho Drom where everyone in Romania comes out of their houses at once, their gypsy music synchronized - it's incredible!

So, am I sneering? I suppose more info would be required. Let's assume I'm not merely being a jerk. Jerks can "sneer" at anything they don't like. That tells us very little about the rural/cosmopolitan, white collar (WC)/ blue collar (BC) divide. Let's focus on the element of "sophistication" in our interests.

But what is "sophistication"? It is difficult to define. From Wikipedia:

Modern definitions include quality of refinement — displaying good taste, wisdom and subtlety rather than crudeness, stupidity and vulgarity. In the perception of social class, sophistication can link with concepts such as status, privilege and superiority.

Quality of refinement. OK, so something labored over, come to after much thought, maybe an evolution of iteration. But not necessarily the product of enjoyment itself. An ancient text is the exact opposite of this. However, how we come to appreciate the text definitely requires a cultural refinement. One does not get up one day and arbitrarily set out to find and read ancient texts.

So, we're onto something here. An appreciation that has been refined, delicately labored over - maybe for hours, months, years. The refinement can be a repertoire of understanding of a class of things (music, food). But it can also be an attitude or response to certain things (religion, culture).

Yet is this type of appreciation the province only of the educated, cosmopolitan class? I can think of many ways in which a rural BC type has refined tastes. His interests and abilities will be greatly refined. How to weld, how to ride a horse, how to tie down a load, bow hunting versus bow fishing, the difference between Hank Williams Sr. and Hank Williams Sr. Note: I'm shooting in the dark here because it ain't my culture. But let's just assume that every culture has its own tangled history of refinement.

But these types of refinement have different value in society. They come from different places and mean different things. Sure, tying down a load is an important skill when you're hauling lumber, but it doesn't help you understand modern art. And understanding a Pollack surely won't tie down a load. But they each have different significance in different groups. In the country, knowing the Allegory of the Cave won't help you by the barbecue. In the city, changing your own oil isn't so useful if everyone is riding the subway.

One way to think about types of refinement might be in the degree to which they are defined locally, either geographically speaking or by concrete utility. A narrow cultural group identifies what it refines, the utility of a type of knowledge guides its refinement. For example, a traditional recipe for mashed potatoes. The best way to fish for trout. By contrast, other forms of refinement are defined globally, and by abstract utility. For example, coffee from different continent. The difference between liberal and illiberal democracy.

But beyond being useful in conversation or daily living, what about the value of these types of knowledge in larger society? What does it mean for a society to value a type of knowledge?

You could get at the question empirically, once you decide what determines value. How useful is the knowledge in one's life, and then how will people treat you when you demonstrate that knowledge? When high status people demonstrate certain types of knowledge, or an appreciation for them, the knowledge is being "valued" by larger society. It is a reciprocal process, as high status both reflects the knowledge - the knowledge plays a role in their attainment of status, as well as amplifies the knowledge - the knowledge becomes more valuable as it is displayed by those with high status.

When the president endorses gay marriage knowledge, it gains status (at least among some segment of society). But his endorsement as well shows us that that gay marriage knowledge has become valuable enough to have been a part of the president's rise to his current position. In the case of Obama, he never campaigned on it, but when he came out in support, it fell in line perfectly with his progressive values.

So, I think we've arrived at a couple of things here. First, the more certain forms of knowledge are identified with status, the more valuable they become. Likewise, the less other knowledge is identified with status, the less valuable they become. Secondly, some forms of knowledge are political, which inherently implies conflict.

Our political moment, occurring across the globe, in the West and East, between the rural and the cities, is very much about a clash of status. The march of globalism is aligned with a march of liberal, progressive values. The modern world has given enormous status to global, complex knowledge, in terms both of utility in personal achievement, but as well in terms of what the "elites" are seen as valuing. The world leaders, the TV pundits, the movie stars, the professors, the scientists - are all giving status to the refinement of global, complex knowledge.

One can imagine how someone who has not spent their time refining their global, abstract knowledge, but instead has spent their life refining the local, concrete knowledge, and sees their knowledge losing status, might feel resentment creep in. It must not feel good to be in the possession of low-status knowledge.

And here's the kicker: what if your knowledge is now not only seen as uninteresting, but harmful? What if your views on civil rights, feminism, homosexuality, religion, regulation, government, science, etc. are seen by those with global, abstract knowledge as damaging to people and the planet? It must be tempting to take this personally, and see them as hating you. Even when they say, "we don't hate you, just your ideas", would they believed? After all, when the fundamentalist Christian says, "We don't hate gays, we just don't believe homosexuality is a sin", are they to be believed?

Well, maybe that is a good question. If they act to limit the rights of gays, treat them unequally, or in any other way insult their character, then they are acting in a way that has historically been synonymous with hatred. The bible is followed by interpretation, and that is an interpretation that aligns with hate.

So, the question has become: when I drink my microbrew, when I watch my foreign films, am I acting in a way that resembles hate? Surely not. But what about my thoughts on political issues? Here I acknowledge that many of my views can be considered hateful. I hate discrimination against women, gays or people of color, the treating of them in any way as less worthy. I hate the dismantling of regulations that would protect people or the environment. I hate the ignoring or dismissal of science, especially when it impacts our world. I hate the callousness with which some would rather see less government even if it results in more misery and less opportunity for others.

I might even sneer at those who would act in such a way as to support such actions.

But do I sneer at you simply because you have spent your life refining a different type of knowledge? Do I hate you?

I really don't.

The Flat Earth Society and the Art of Conversation

2017-07-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

I came across this very strange article today on a meeting of a Flat Earth Society in Fort Collins, CO.

The Fort Collins group — mostly white and mostly male, college-age to septuagenarian — touts itself as the first community of Flat Earthers in the United States. Sister groups have since spawned in Boston, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Chicago.

Before I knew it I was watching one of their youtube videos. I'll just leave out the substance of their bizarre belief for now. Something else piqued my interest. The video was - as one might imagine - very conscious of the fact that what was being said sounded crazy. And so special attention was given to the notion of civil discourse. You can only imagine how much ridicule these people must face.

“Believe me, there’s only humiliation in this. We do it because we believe it.”

But this stood out to me as a very good point.

I find the notion of a flat Earth ridiculous and disturbing on many levels. But there is no reason I can't also be respectful and kind to people I disagree with. We can never be reminded enough to lead with love. If I've learned anything in the last decade or so of the internet age, it is that changing people's minds is nearly impossible, and that nothing good ever comes from being disrespectful or ungracious.

I've come to be very hesitant in engaging in argument online because I only seem to be the worse for it. When someone types something I find insulting or needlessly offensive towards me or my ideas, my emotions rise. I can either choose to respond, hopefully alleviating the discomfort by delivering a well-placed rejoinder. What sort of relief, I'm not sure. Maybe it is that my words will stand as a corrective, showing the individual and the world that they were wrong and I was right - worthy, respectable, smart, etc. after all. My identity, my pride, was restored. However, this is rarely the case.

The conversation - limited in expression by the nature of the online, text-based format - more often becomes even more heated. My sense of offense increases. And of course, during the time in which I have typed my reply and the response appears (sometimes, minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days) my discomfort lingers. It gnaws at me. I'm personally offended. I'm offended for my fellow thinkers. I'm offended for the world. This feeling is the product of what people often describe on the internet as toxic.

So what is really the point, then? What are we doing, hammering away at our keyboards?

The New York Times has a great feature in its comments section. You are able to sort the comments into "readers' picks", or "Times Picks". The former distinguished by number of upvotes a comment receives, the latter by having been chosen as interesting by Times staff. I find myself often times spending as much time exploring the comments as the piece itself. The comments give a quick-take on what average readers think of the subject - what stood out to them, what they agree or disagree with. They sometimes share an anecdote that confirms a perspective in the piece. Or they might add a perspective that was missing. The number of votes a comment receives telegraphs how much the point resonates with the public. There is a reply feature, however the design of the comments doesn't really provide for any real back-and forth.

And I'm fine with that. There is a special kind of person that enjoys internet bickering. In theory, the formation of thoughts, the civil exchange and mutual quest for knowledge is a good thing. But it is so rare. The anonymity of the internet, even just the constrained nature of the written word, makes friendly, compassionate dialogue difficult. Tone is lost. Nuanced inflection is gone. Uptilted, winking, eyes-rolled, wincing, knowing smirks - all of the saucy, spicy bits in human communication are lost. In the real world (the "meat world", I've recently heard it put, which I think is brilliant), this is all quickly and deftly added to language as spoken. Great writers can capture this spirit, but only with difficulty and great labor. Children learn it before they learn to speak.

So, hamfisted internet commentariate, let that be a thought for thee: no matter the brilliance and depth of your thought, before you click "submit" on that comment, remember that even a 2 year old likely has you beat in nuance of delivery. Something even a Flat-Earther can teach us.

On Behaving "As If" There Is Free Will

2017-07-01T11:26:00.001-07:00

I can't find the quote, but it is as long the lines of "Free will doesn't exist, but we must behave as if it does."

I wonder if this "as if" behavior can be described in a behaviorist account?

In behaviorism, we talk about the concept of stimulus prompts and "rule following". A stimulus prompt is basically a cue for us to engage in certain behavior. Through learning (repeated reinforcement delivered after prompted behavior), the prompt takes on stimulus control: it changes our behavior. Think of a checklist, "wash hands" sign, exit sign, etc. Rule following is much the same, whereas the rule is like a prompt, however the rule doesn't have to have previously been directly reinforced. Rather it can have been inferred, and is generally defined as under stimulus control of previous rule-following behavior. That is, if we have followed similar rules before (and have been reinforced), we will be more likely to follow them in the future.

In this way, thoughts can function as either prompts or rules. In our daily life, we behave according to a mixture of external and internal prompts. Behaviorists call these discriminative stimuli, as they have been followed by either punishment or reinforcement, and are thus defined by our discrimination of them as signals for the availability for reinforcement of punishment ("exit" means leaving behavior will be reinforced; "open" means entering behavior will be reinforced; "poison" means eating behavior will be punished, etc.).

Behaviorists also have a way of describing consciousness (which of course can mean many things) One of the meanings of consciousness though, is the behavior of labeling, via verbal behavior. This is described as operant learning in which certain stimuli take on stimulus control for verbal behavior, either spoken or thought, after having been reinforced in a specific verbal community. For instance, when I see a chair, I can say "chair" or think "chair", because as a child I received reinforcement from the community for emitting that behavior. It could have been direct praise, or conditioned praise in the form of a good grade, or simply the ability to communicate which led to some other kind of reward. We call this "tacting". (We have a different way of describing requests, as their reinforcement is defined as coming directly from the obtaining of the request, i.e. "water" means we directly get that thing. A seemingly minor difference but has important implications for the early acquisition of language). The reverse of this, of course, is listening behavior, in which a stimulus controlling for verbal behavior (tact), is reversed. The chair object controls for the word "chair", but then the word "chair" controls for the object chair.

OK, so I have a hard time describing the behaviorist description of these phenomenon because there are just so many basic concepts that need to be understood to truly appreciate the position! But returning to consciousness, what you might call an active consciousness, in which we are aware that we are conscious, is this process of labeling. When I am thinking about thinking, I am "tacting" my thoughts. Likewise when I am thinking about what someone else has said. However, "tacting" only refers to stimuli that are physically present (chair, desk, apple). We have another level of description for things that are under stimulus control of verbal behavior, but are not in the environment - and may have never been physically contacted. We call this "interverbal" behavior. Most of language involves this type of verbal behavior, as well as abstract thought such as mathematics or literature. This is also the kind of thought we need to engage in for complex thought, such as when planning for future events, or recalling an order of events.

So, what is the implication of this for our thoughts? We can have thoughts that are direct responses to our immediate environment, our distant environment, or responses to words. Our fluency in all of these is determined by a number of factors. First, we have to have been reinforced for the response ("knowing" the verbal behavior), but we also need to have the establishing operation in place. What we mean by this is that there must be a basic desire in place that is being satiated by the behavior. For instance, if you have been reading all of this and trying to understand me (and hats off to you!), you will have to have been motivated to do so. The motivation is maybe generalized social reinforcement, in which you have been previously reinforced for the behavior of engaging in verbal behavior with others. You may also have been previously reinforced for acquiring new ideas and achieving constancy in your thoughts and how they align with the world - truth feels good, right? But maybe I haven't been making sense, and therefore the opposite has occurred, and my words have been extra work for you, in which case you aren't receiving reinforcement from them - they are not rewarding.

The establishing operation - how motivated you are - is not verbal behavior, and largely hidden within the skin. You can learn to tact this behavior, by noticing your heart rate, stiffness, or certain negative thoughts that may arise - "This guy is ridiculous!", and therefore tact your motivation as decreasing for continuing to read my writing. Or, maybe you enjoy arguing and my writing is actually reinforcing, because it is stimulating something else in you - maybe your enjoyment of "tearing down" my argument. In which case, the response I get to this might have been evoked by an establishing operation (EO) for argument, followed by my writing, which was a stimulus (SD) for the availability of reinforcement (R+), which in this case was the satiation of that desire for argument (socially reinforced, of course, by the internet community).

Behaviorists see every behavior (thought or action) as taking place within the 4 term contingency (EO - SD - Bx - R+). Further, this can only be understood as "molar", as opposed to "molecular". That is, as taking place in large chunks, over time. We take place in a continuum of phylogenic (genetic organisms) and ontogenic (life history) interaction.

So, for any given behavior, there is no room for "free will". We are constrained by our past and environment. We will go on behaving no matter what. Even if we were to protest and lay down motionless on the floor, that behavior will have had to have been the function of the four-term contingency.

If we then throw up our hands and say, I must behave "as if" I have free choice, we are basically tacting our behavior, or examining it interverbally, and establishing a rule, or prompt for ourselves. However, as for its effect on our behavior, it will only function as an SD for future behavior's possible reinforcement. That is, the way we behave following having this thought will encounter a consequence in the environment. So it can effect behavior change - you can effect behavior change, but the SD will always be a part of the environment.

In terms of this larger discussion, the way I relate what Garfield is saying about Buddhism and "awareness of the self" and behaviorism, is that the "self" as free actor does not exist, but rather refers to an organism existing within its environment. However the way that we often use the term "self" is as an efficacious agent somehow acting out of time. That incorrect narrative leads both to inaccurate narratives of others, as well as ourselves. How this inaccurate narrative causes problems is interesting, but that it is an incorrect narrative, as a behaviorist, I would say is established science.

My Favorite Albums of the Last 17 Years

2017-06-24T09:26:00.003-07:00

I've been toying with an idea to see what I can come up with as my favorite songs for every year, going back fifty years, to 1967. It's somewhat daunting. You can't pick just one, of course. Or can you? Different genres mean different things.

Different songs have different resonances. It's one thing to take a song on its own, by its own merits. It's another to add one's own response, which then must incorporate space and time, one's own history. When I heard Corey Hart talk about wearing his sunglasses at night, I felt some serious emotions at the age of 8. There were certainly many more interesting things going on in 1986. I say now.

But I'll get my feet wet here. A friend recently lamented that nothing good is being made anymore. Now, that's just cranky. So I figured I'd make him a list.

My favorite albums since 2000. With a favorite track from each.

1. Split: Rumah Sakit - Self-Titled / Faraquet - The View From This Tower (2000)
The first, well, what happens when your favorite people make your favorite music? And you are way too picky about both? ... The second, Ryan Jones turned me on to this. I still swear the singer is channeling someone. But I can't figure out who. Maybe firehose, but that can't be it. Math + emotion doesn't happen often enough. runners-up: Radiohead - Kid A; PJ Harvey - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

2. Pinback - Blue Screen Life (2001)
I first heard Pinback on John Baez' answering machine. It doesn't get any more pop than that. runner-up: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - No More Shall We Part; Califone - Roomsound
3. Hella - Hold Your Horse Is (2002)
OK, I'll admit that I didn't like Hella when I first heard them. It was through Ryan Jones' (again) tinny computer speakers and sounded like some kind of malfunction. But when it clicks, and you realize there's method to the madness, your head kind of explodes. Seeing them live with Quasi at the Khyber Pass in Philadelphia was a highlight of that particular misadventure in residential planning. runners-up: Mum - Finally We Are No One; Baxter Dury - Len Parrot's Memorial Lift; +/-: Self-Titled Long-Playing Debut Album; Dilute - Grape Blueprints Pour Spinach Olive Grape; Howard Hello - Self-Titled

4. The Notwist - Neon Golden (2003)
When I first put this on I was put off by the unabashed electronic instrumentation. But it quickly grew on me, bowling me over with hook after hook, as well as the rich, earnest German accented vocals. runner-up: Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway; Frog Eyes - The Golden River; Jaylib -Champion Sound; A Perfect Circle - Thirteenth Step; TV On the Radio - Young Liars

5. John Vanderslice - Cellar Door (2004)
There are a lot of interesting touchstones in this album. Overwrought narratives somehow hang around like overstayed guests who just won't leave, but somehow possess key information. Runner-up Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat; Madvillain - Madvillainy; Arcade Fire - Funeral; Joanna Newsom - Milk-Eyed Mender; Mastodon - Leviathan

6. Sleater Kinney - The Woods (2005)
The weird thing about that record is that, despite not really liking much at all of the band's previous or subsequent work, this album stuns from start to finish. The constant clipping is beastly, a bold move that only puts the whole thing over the edge as epic. runners-up: The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows; Bloc Party - Silent Alarm; Wilderness - Self-Titled;

7. Mew - And the Glass Handed Kites (2006)
Umm, I'm not sure I even want to listen to their latest album. Which is really too bad, because this may be the greatest album ever recorded. It's complex, sublime, bizarre, cheesy, sentimental, and pushes about the most ambitious hooks I've ever heard. The melodic choices are consistently odd and inventive, but completely directional. runner-up: Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies; Beirut - Gulag Orkestar; Tool - 10,000 Days; Lavender Diamond - Imagine Our Love

8. Shugo Takemaru - Exit (2007)
A post-punk Legend of Zelda. Your welcome. runners-up: St. Vincent - Marry Me; Band of Horses - Cease to Begin; Deerhunter - Cryptograms; Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond; PJ Harvey - White Chalk

9. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Modern Life (2008)
Somehow I manage to embrace the constipated Fear-core vocals as the guitars slowly build their sweet machinery. This is an example of synthesizers being our friend. runners up: Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel; Crystal Castles - Self-Titled; Frightened Rabbit - Midnight Organ Flight; Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple

10. The Joy Formidable - A Balloon Called Moaning (2009)
More math in service of sweet tension and release. Many of these songs were redone on their following release, but it was kind of downhill from there. A brilliant moment in time though, methinks. So much delicious noise. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest; Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca; St. Vincent - Actor; Real Estate - Self-Titled; Beirut - March of the Zopotec/Realpeople Holland; BLK JKS - After Robots

13. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today (2010)
So, maybe don't go and see this band. Some things might be better behind the veil. But that said, imagine if you took Karen and Richard Carpenter, sent them to a seance with Bootsy Collins, and had them all channel Lou Reed. runners-up: Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz; Twin Shadow - Forget; Wild Nothing - Gemini; Baths - Curulean

12. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong (2011)
OK, my Smashing Pumpkins weakness is showing here. It isn't done as well, but that's also part of what makes it so good. If you know what I mean. runners up - runners-up: Cut Copy - Zonoscope; Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost; Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow

13. Beach House - Bloom (2012)
Something weird to note about the LP: it's 2 discs and played at 45rpm, which is totally annoying. But also totally worth it because everything about this album is honey. Victoria Legrand finally decides she isn't fucking around. runners-up: Frankie Rose - Interstellar; Lotus Plaza - Spooky Action at A Distance; Grizzly Bear - Shields; Joyce Manor - Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired
14. These New Puritans - Field of Reeds (2013)
Fun fact, the drummer is a former (?) male model. Which makes perfect sense somehow. When you listen to the record, you'll have no idea what I mean. But then you will. This is the kind of music that needs to get made. Neither fancy rock, nor dorky classical. Just good, tasteful, serious music. runners up - Bombino - Nomad;

15. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else (2014)
The nice thing about punk rock is just how good it can be, how much it can do with so little. runners-up: Real Estate - Atlas; TV On the Radio - Seeds

16. Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Style (2015)
This is still new to me. In time, things may change. There's just so much music, and I'll admit I probably haven't listened to this enough. But it's one of those things where you can just tell. runners-up: Mew + -; Angel Olsen - My Woman; Tame Impala - Currents

17. Mitsky - Puberty 2 (2016)
There's something about this kind of woman that frightens me. In a good way. It's probably some kind of weird statement about my male ego. But PJ Harvey and Cat Power would I think also agree that I need to just shut up and listen. runners-up: Blood Orange - Freetown Sound; Case/Lang/Veirs - Self-Titled
Well, until next time. I'm going to see if I can add some runners-up. And look for my more ambitious 50 year list of songs. It isn't fair, of course. But why not?

Oh yeah, then there's my little album from 2016. I have to say it's my favorite, but I'm biased. It exists secretly on my tiny planet. Eli Rector - Summer

Confirmation Bias as Ratio Strain

2017-06-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

A Witch Surfing on A Sieve (Turner ,1807)

I wonder how much the notion of confirmation bias can be thought of in terms of what in behaviorism is called "Ratio Strain".  

A reduction in the rate of a target behavior and an increase in emotional behavior resulting from an increase in the ratio of behavior to reinforcement.
In order to understand ratio strain, it is important to understand a basic principle of behavior, the Matching Law.

A description of a phenomenon according to which  organisms tend proportionally to match their responses during choice situations to the rates of reinforcement for each choice (i.e., if a behavior is reinforced about 60% of the time in one situation and 40% in another, that behavior tends to occur about 60% of the time in the first situation, and 40% in the second)

Behaviorists talk about how we all live in something you might call a "sea of reinforcement and punishment".  That is, our behavior is a product of a countless number of contingencies that have and are currently operating on us, either reinforcing (increasing) or punishing (decreasing) our behavior.  

At this moment, for example, I am experiencing various reinforcements, a "schedule" if you will, in my environment.  There is a constant ebb and flow, or push and pull between reinforcement and punishment.  Every time I sip my coffee, that behavior is reinforced - it will be more likely to occur.  However, as my bladder is filled, drinking is being punished.  

As I type, when I come up with a good, satisfying sentence, my typing is reinforced - I will continue.    But if I struggle, I will encounter less reinforcement.  

My chair is comfortable at first, which is reinforcing, but after a while it might become punishing, and I will get up, which removes the stiffness, and is reinforcing (next time I will "know" to get up.  I put "know" in quotes because usually I won't even be conscious of it, and thus "unknowing").

The Pink Floyd song playing makes me feel good, and so is reinforcing.  I will put it on again!  But not too frequently, as like food, I become satiated, and so engage in the behavior of eating and listening according to my biological needs - whether dietary or sonory.  

So, back to what is called "confirmation bias".

The seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis at hand.

It occurred to me this morning that confirmation bias could be explained in terms of ratio strain: the reduction of behavior according to a ratio of decrease in reinforcement.   I had been reading a comment thread.  Someone posted an argument I disagreed with.  Someone else then posted a response which I agreed with.  The original poster then rebutted... and I realized that I was skimming - barely reading - the response.  I didn't feel like reading it.  Reading it seemed a chore.

The behavior of reading verbal behavior we agree with is much "easier", as it involves relations that have already been reinforced.  However, verbal behavior that challenges us in some way, is much more aversive.  It requires engaging in behaviors (types of thinking - recalling, classifying, comparing, interpreting, etc.) that can be quite effortful.  Not do these behaviors require work, but the greater the ratio strain, the more likely are they to evoke "emotional behavior", that is, uncomfortable feelings such as anger, fear, etc.  And that is aside from the content!  If, as we further understand the content of an argument we disagree with, it may challenge our preconceptions - our expectations of the world, which had been reinforced.  The fact that they are suddenly no longer being reinforced - a process referred to in behaviorism as "extinction" - can produce uncomfortable side-effects.

Findings from basic and applied research suggest that treatment with operant extinction may produce adverse side effects; two of these commonly noted are an increase in the frequency of the target response (extinction burst) and an increase in aggression (extinction-induced aggression).

Noticing this, much of our tendency towards "group-think" and ideological rigidity would seem to be explained.  It is simply easier and more enjoyable to read what has been previously reinforcing.  Encountering contradictory views is more effortful, fundamentally less reinforcing, and possibly uncomfortable and anger-inducing.

Now, the nice thing about behavior is that we can change it by altering the contingencies in our environment.  We can learn to tolerate delays our reinforcement, as well as create rules to help us along the way, as sort of mental prompts.  We can learn to find enjoyment in difference, and even come to be reinforced by the process of having our beliefs changed and enjoying the benefits of expanded knowledge and, ultimately, closer synchronicity with reality.  

How to go about doing this, of course, isn't simple or easy.  In this post, I'm merely laying out a behavioral case for noticing the process.  Who knows, maybe it will allow me to more easily notice (or "tact" as behaviorists call it), and become aware of a trap I might be falling into, and to this make choices that might be more rewarding in the long run.

Maybe I'll go back to that comment thread and spend more time reading that comment with an open mind....

A related paper:

A Behavioral Analytical Account of Cognitive BIas in Clinical Populations

Whose Property?

2017-05-28T10:40:00.001-07:00

Samir Chopra, professor of philosophy at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, reminds us that property is a social and legal construct.

Property is not discovered; it is made, not by the act of mixing labor with supposedly ‘fallow land,’ as Locke would have had it, but by the scaffolding provided by the surrounding legal system.

So an agreement, designed according to what makes sense. Of course, this "sense" gets rather complicated.

The simple story is that property should be fair, distributed according to one's desert. However, how to establish desert? If I inherit a million dollars, I certainly did nothing to deserve it, in that I played no part in its creation. But maybe it is fair to respect the wishes of the deceased. But what if they inherited it, and so on?

Let me toss another piece of wood into the fire: as a behaviorist, I can make a rather solid case that all of our actions in life are in a sense "inherited", in that they are entirely a function of our genes and our environment. As such, any action we take to create wealth is inherited.

This may seem a fanciful stretch, even if you accept the premise that our actions are not our own. Surely we must act as if they are. As a practical matter, maybe this is true. However, we certainly don't act this way at a societal level. In criminal justice, people are judged to be responsible for their actions, and thus deserving of a range of punitive measures. In our economic system, people are assumed to have "earned" their fortunes - or lack thereof. As such, property is hardly given a second thought as the direct result of personal action.

If our actions are inherited, then all forms of property inequality (not to mention other forms of capital) are injust. As a practical matter, remedying this injustice in a complex society is obviously no easy task. History is riddled with horrific results of experimentations in equality. However, it is also filled with examples of successes (public schools, libraries, parks, social security, medicaid, etc.).

Many of our political arguments are over the practical effects of social responses to equality - whether or not they would work, whether we can afford them, whether they have secondary negative effects and so on. Yet, first we must establish whether or not there is a moral imperative, a problem to address. And at this point, a good-as majority of the country simply disagrees with the premise that we inherit our actions, much less that social interventions might be effective.

(A strange irony is that many of these very same people view social interventions as having negative effects on motivation, which is a completely behavioral analysis, and would as such seem to agree with the premise they deny in the first place!)

A Couple of Bold Ideas for Education Reform

2017-05-05T19:58:00.004-07:00

Unite States Housing Authority poster, 1940

Keith Humphreys has an important piece in the WaPo today highlighting the nuance of poor black communities with regard to violence and incarceration.

In his new book, Locking Up Our Own, Yale University Law School Professor James Forman Jr. points out that in national surveys conducted over the past 40 years, African Americans have consistently described the criminal justice system as too lenient. Even in the 2000s, after a large and sustained drop in the crime rate and hundreds of thousands of African Americans being imprisoned, almost two-thirds of African Americans maintained that courts were “not harsh enough” with criminals.....Through a compelling mixture of personal stories and wonky data analysis, Fortner and Forman document how African Americans have grappled with an anguished choice. On the one hand they want to protect themselves from crime, on the other hand they know that the more active and powerful the criminal justice system grows, the more African Americans will be caught up in it, some of whom will be subjected to grossly racist treatment.

As for Forman's policy recommendations - "expanded employment opportunities, improved housing options and better schools" - I'm not sure how far they will get into the problem. Even if you had all of these things, the black community would still have a lot of difficult contingencies to reckon with.

Education always seems most meaningful to me, as you're getting kids while they're young. But without a solid home, you're going to be spending a ton of money chasing maladaptive behaviors. A lot of the so-called innovation we see in creating "good schools" is really about selectivity, as the parents who go the extra mile for their kids are exactly *not* the problem. Instead, we want to target the overworked, stressed, dead-beat, angry, confused, overwhelmed, etc. parents. These parents are not in a position to make good choices, they are barely able to keep it together as it is. They won't be signing up for special charters, enforcing homework, looking out for their children. And these kids are the ones who are the dirty little secret behind "bad" schools.

Traditional schools continue to fail them, with neither the funding nor comprehensive strategy to deal with them. Charters just plain avoid them.

But they are the result of a larger economic system which segregates by property value. Middle class neighborhoods populate schools with children of middle class parents and all the stability that represents. Poor neighborhoods populate schools with children of poor parents and all the lack of stability that represents.

I have two ideas for intervention. The first is to simply implement economic integration. Each school must have a certain percentage from different socio-economic levels. If you really wanted to get creative, you could create an SES scale that goes beyond mere income, and takes into account things like education, health, family support, issues, etc. (all of the the contingencies that go into supporting the development of a child). Families would be assigned a score based on filling out a new card each year. This would require a certain level of busing, which has its downsides. But it would "spread the hardship" across our neighborhood schools. There would likely be some downwards pressure from these struggling kids on the rest of the student body. But there would likewise be upwards pressure from the rest of the students. However, with this method, you're still not directly addressing the particular need of the student. With a 30:1 ratio, and few other interventions, stressed out kids in stressed families who don't do their homework or get read to at night will still be highly at-risk. The other way of going at this would be to incentivize economic desegregation by offering tax rewards to poor families who move out of poor communities and wealthier families who move in. This brings up a gentrification worries for many, as ethnicity is so tied to income. Personally, I wonder if actual economic desegregation wouldn't make the notion of gentrification irrelevant though.

A second option would be to forget busing, and focus on interventions at the local level instead. Poor schools would get 10x the funds, the ability to cut class sizes by a half or even two-thirds. Instruction and support would be much more differentiated to the needs of the individual student. Similar to the IEP model for students with physical disabilities, every child would get an academic, "wrap-around" team to monitor performance both at school - and as would be central in this case - home. On the television show The Wire, a so-called "Hamsterdam" experiment was invented, in which the police created a decriminalization block where drug users could freely use and pushers to sell their wares. The idea was to end the violence of the trade, and allow the users to come out of the shadows where they would be able to be targeted by social service workers. While poor, struggling families aren't quite drug addicts, I'm struck by the similarities, as well as our social response to their plight - which is a muddled mix of disdain, pity and victim-blaming. Rather, these are fellow humans who need all of our help. The bonus being, of course, eradication of a major source of social ill.

Both of these ideas are radical, but in my view more directly align with our values, and support fundamental notions of fairness in public education. If we must have economic segregation in our capitalist economic system, then we must also reckon with the fact that we are going to be creating segregated economic ghettos, defined by their lack of resources and societal capital.

Revisiting Societal Capital

2017-04-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

An article in the Root today on White Privilege put me in mind to revisit my thoughts on what in the past I have termed "societal capital".

I like to think of privilege as a form of capital, and capital as: that which can be leveraged to gain advantage in society. There are many forms of capital - financial (cash), emotional (regulation), cognitive (learning, vocabulary), neighborhood (safety, networking), educational (classmates, teachers), community (stores, libraries, services, parks), parental (this one is huge, maybe most important as it affects all others: family dynamics, stress, relational development, cognitive enrichment, vocabulary spoken), racial/ethnic (treatment and assumptions in society).

These are all interwoven and dynamically linked, interacting in non-linear ways. In combination they open up new avenues of privilege. However, when subtracted and de-linked, they do the opposite. They cut off avenues of opportunity and actively place in the individual at risk for further devaluation of capital. For instance, having a car opens up new job opportunities. But living in a poor neighborhood and having a car stolen can make traveling to work more difficult, which increases stress, increases costs if car payments are still due, limits family engagement, lowers status, etc.