Will's Convivium

Tea Partiers and Four Tidbits

2010-03-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

It started with an op-ed in the LA Times on Thursday, “Tea Partying like it’s 1968.” The premise was based on research that indicates self-described Tea Partiers are smarter, more educated, and more wealthy that is commonly believed. The lesson drawn by the authors, is that core of the Tea Party Movement are children of the ‘60s, and are “replaying the ‘60s protest paradigm.” (Nice consonance there, too!).

“In their wonder years, they learned that politics was about protesting the Establishment and shouting down the Man.”

Wow. Who knew that the anti-war protesters of the ‘60s became the tax protestors of whatever we call this decade? As a rhetorical flourish, it completely proves that even if the writers were in that generation, they were not of it.

The reality is that coming of age in the ‘60s didn’t define one’s character one way or another. While the period is remarkable for creating a widespread social movement (anti-war morphing into anti-government/authority/establishment), not everyone felt themselves to be in any way a part of that movement. Dick Cheney refused to serve, but that doesn’t make him anti-war. The same can be said of Don Rumsfield.

As in any population, in any culture, a society is as defined by its differences as much as by its similarities. The period we call the ‘60s was a whirlpool of starkly different groupings of values and beliefs. There were significant inter- and intra-generational differences. The pitched battles of the ‘60s are still being fought throughout American culture and institutions, and it is at least silly, if not downright stupid, to simply class it all as the “me generation.”

Once I worked through that issue, I reflected that there seems to be a social need to “explain” the Tea Baggers. As humans, we like to feel we understand things, so we look for patterns and meaning. And we build simple definitions. But to the delight (or frustration) of the pundits, the Tea Party resists easy description or even interior agreement beyond a few core issues.

To the extent they have a common philosophy, it is closest to the values associated with the right’s “base:” low/no taxes, rugged individualism, gun rights, purity of culture (Christian, English-speaking), and a pervasive anti-intellectaulism, a visceral distrust of people who know more than they do, especially if it’s facts. All science is, by definition, junk science.

That still leaves the question why, if they’re relatively well educated they seem so suspicious of factual, scientific knowledge (granted that the level of education isn’t exactly the same as “intelligence”). Which leads to my second tidbit. A couple of days ago, I saw a story on CNN headlined “Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ.” Okay, that might be an insight into political attitudes and mental acuity. Reading the article did not lead to that answer, or not exactly.

Just as the headline says, the correlation of these “liberal” tendencies is to IQ specifically. My thinking is that minds that are open to questioning and that are looking past “conventional” wisdom (more "liberal") are more likely to score higher in an IQ test. That is how the test is written.

The point is that some humans are relatively comfortable with change and ambiguity. Other humans are more comfortable with stability and a clear moral order. Some humans see the value of finding ways to work with others, other people think it self-destructive not to aggressively protect what you have.

These are not absolute categories – but then I would say that because I’m a liberal, atheist, hetero-identified white guy. With a high IQ. So I’m naturally suspicious of categories and simple answers.

So, I ask myself, what would it be like if I was a smart guy and wasn’t liberal and wanted clear directives? And that brings me to my third tidbit: a blog entry a couple of days ago on Ayn Rand and her fascination, for a time, with a serial murderer who became something of a celebrity in the ‘20s.

I admit that I have never understood the popularity of Ayn Rand, especially among people who certainly cannot be called unintelligent. My basic feeling is that her philosophy seemed uncannily attuned to the mental state of certain high-performing, sex-addled adolescents – something that you should grow out of at a certain point. So I’m curious about the pull that John Galt and Adam Roark exert on some people, and how these books describe a better world for Rand’s fans.

The article’s point is that Rand built key characteristics of her heroes on what she saw as the character strengths of one William Edward Hickman. His string of killings culminated with the kidnapping, strangulation and dismemberment of a 12-year old girl. He then showed up to collect the ransom with the torso and head of the little girl, eyes wired open to make her appear alive and attached to wires so Hickman could make her move in a lifelike manner. Nice guy.

What Rand wrote in her notebooks about Hickman was that he had:

"… no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

Which is exactly how she described Roark in The Fountainhead: “he was born without the ability to consider others.”

I am also making a generalization that Tea Partiers are more apt than Democrats to quote Rand . I don’t have quantitative evidence for that, but I feel pretty safe.

Perhaps Rand’s appeal is simply in the assertion that the only thing that matters to me is my implacable will. I don’t really have to explain, I don’t have to question, I just have to act to make me as free as possible.

The problem is that in Rand's world, as in real life, anybody who threatens my freedom (even another Randian asserting his/her freedom?) can be classified as a parasite or insect that needs to be eliminated. By definition, losers don’t matter. In some cases, especially in this culture, it comes to guns.

So perhaps part of our fascination, based on what some Tea Baggers are saying about dealing with traitors/progressives/liberals and keeping a gun close by, is that the rest of us want some warning if they do go off.

I also do expect that there are few Tea Partiers that are really down with the entire Randian superman sociopath thing. Most of us are aware that we are bound to others, whether we were born that way or not.

So the whole Tea Party-Rand thing was echoing in my head for a while, and I found the fourth tidbit of the title, in an article by Niall Ferguson titled Complexity and Collapse. The article itself is worth reading – a warning about the propensity of great civilizations to collapse in a metaphorical heartbeat. But the thing that spoke to me and helped me sort out my TP questions was the reference to an influential article written in the ‘60s by historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

As a general description, “paranoid” seems to describe a lot of the rhetoric coming from the TPers, but Hofstadter gets more specific, for example:

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

“… [The paranoid mind] is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. “

“… The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).”

The point, for me, is that paranoia is a part of the human cultural psyche. What I know of history says that paranoia has always played a role in human social forms. And of course, paranoia might on occasion serve a useful purpose. Of course, the human genius has been the ability to balance caution with action. If you never got to the waterhole because there might be lions waiting, you will die of thirst.

The other genius of American culture is our very fractiousness – it is extremely difficult to create a real mob around any single idea or leader, right or left, paranoid or optimist, Tea Bagger or Coffee Partier. That may be something to be thankful for.

The take-away for me is to remember the wisdom of Michael Corleoni: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

Waves, Markets and the Confidence Game

2010-02-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

There is a school of thought that sees clear patterns in economic activity, especially as measured by markets in stocks and commodities. One group coalesces around the Elliott Wave Principle.

In the 1930s, Ralph Nelson Elliot, an American accountant, observed that markets move in clear cycles, commonly called Elliott waves. His analysis identified the key attributes of these cycles -- dominant-trend 5-wave patterns and corrective-trend 3-wave patterns. Moreover, this pattern self-replicates fractally as you move to larger or smaller time scales, from minutes to centuries. The patterns themselves, as it turns out, also reflect some interesting mathematical affinities: fibonacci progressions and golden ratios.

To his credit, Elliott did not try to identify a cause, other than a collective human personality, or "mood", that reflects the cycles and mood swings of countless individuals. He accepted the fact that the entire system was massively complex, chaotic even, and the cycle was way bigger than any individual actors. His goal was to build in a certain patience, as observers use an understanding of the cycles to pursue their own ends.

In the ‘70s his work was rediscovered by Robert Prechter, a trader at Merrill Lynch, who published Elliott’s findings and became an important theorist for the stock market for the last three decades.

What really interests me about the Wave Principle is that it assumes the dominant role of the collective (un-)consciousness, and that the market indices, like the Dow, are accurate indicators of the general mood.

In the online journal The Scionomist (www.socionomics.net) , an article I found by Euan Wilson, "A Parting of Peaceful Ways: A Socioeconomic View of Civil Wars," correlates market performance and/or GDP per capita to major social events, like civil wars, back as early as 1695 (pretty much the beginning of capitalist markets). The point was that major disruptive events, like wars, follow market declines, and declines follow gains. And that these declines are then manifested in popular fashion and entertainment (“news”), and then, eventually in indicators like peace and war.

The cycles work in both directions, in terms of mood, in a dynamic pattern: every movement is a correction, positive to negative to positive, down to the smallest scale. If you get the scale right, you might have a picture of the next week, or decade, or century, and place you bets accordingly. Wilson also recreates Robert Prechter’s timeline for these peaks and valleys stretching back to 0 AD.

I can not judge the accuracy of Elliott’s theory or Wilson’s vision, either as a look backwards or as it comments on our current situation and outlook. In the numbers-driven world of financial markets it seems to have been well tested and is still highly regarded. That said, I’m still not sure that it doesn’t work better after the fact than as a predictor. Or wouldn’t there be a sizable group of people who made a lot of money on this last finance kerfuffle? Oh, wait, there were some people who made a LOT of money on the “meltdown,” weren’t there. Lol.

Looking at these graphs, it’s hard not to think that the “market” is not just analogous to the general mood, it is inseparable from it. The larger the market, the more widespread the cycle. As soon as Rome started to depend on grain from Egypt and other colonies, it was pretty much downhill for the Empire. A bad harvest on the Nile affected the price of grapes in Germany, as well as confidence in the future. "Maybe those barbarians at the gate wouldn’t be such a bad change." Enter, stage right, Dark Ages.

I also get from these graphs that the trend is remarkably up. There is something that drives human beings to consume more, to have more. We have not got past the lesson of the cave: life is fragile and we are in a constant battle for an advantage just in case the harvest does fail. And the cycles tell us the harvests will fail, sooner of later. The models also suggest that this particular crisis has a long way to fall to actually reset to Zero.

By the way, other research I’ve done into these cyclical patterns suggests that perhaps an even better indicator than the Dow or S&P indices might be the ratio of employment to population. Not many of us actually buy or sell equities, but we are all aware if we are employed or not. And it might give us a more meaningful metric in this oxymoronic “jobless recovery.”

In the meantime, this constantly competitive market means there always losers as well as winners. And concentrations of capital mean many more losers, though in capitalist democracies there is also turbulence, so even a loser might think he’s going to be a winner in the future.

And, that I think, is the driver behind public “mood” -- Confidence. As in, this is in fact a confidence game. The declines we see in financial markets are closely related (if not identical) to confidence in the future -- "this time the lottery will give me what I deserve." So what disruption are we heading for? What sack of Rome awaits us?

I didn’t find much idea in that article of what we should actually do if we do recognize the current trend as a decline. But another Socionomist article, “Sports Scandals and Signs of Shifting Mood” by Gary Grimes, might give us some guidance. Especially if we are celebrities.

Grimes starts by tracking the Tiger Woods story, and especially the point that a number of people knew something about Tiger’s extra-curricular sex life five or six years ago, but the stories never gained any traction with the press or the public until recently. He also makes the point that Tiger began to lose endorsements after the stock market started its decline in 2007. People in a more negative mood were more willing to believe the worst and so his current crisis is another reflection of the deepening bear-market mood.

In fact, Grimes sees a general trend of disillusionment with sports and its stars tracking the emergence of the down market. And he points to one star -- Andre Agassi -- who played the cycles in significant ways. In the bear-market ‘80s he was the wild-child rebel. As the market turned positive he wore white at Wimbeldon and founded a charity. And now he’s back with a tell-all autobiography just right for declining market -- sex, drugs and attitude. Grimes’ advice to Tiger is to consider toughening up the ol’ image, Tiger as predator, perhaps (like the recent Vanity Fair cover shot?).

My advice would be aimed more at the political arena. If we see this as a period of decline, then we understand the appeal of any mad-as-hell rabble rouser. That’s how Obama ran, even if he was an unusually academic sounding rabble rouser. So all that anger may be swirling around out there, and while it hasn’t yet coalesced around anything, it doesn't need to coalesce to disrupt. The wave theory tells us increased bad news will give more credence to somebody who can focus that disaffection. So, we're looking at either chaos or a despot.

Looking at the data, the only thing that really matters is the public mood, and the one way to swing public confidence is to increase employment (and not necessarily GDP, for instance). That would be good for incumbents, and for the country. But for the current opposition party what’s good for the country would be bad for their ambitions, and would be playing against the cycle. And I think we can see how that’s working.

Toyota FAIL: What Toyota Should Know, and Still Doesn't Get

2010-02-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

I have spent a fair amount of my professional life talking about the meaning of “brand.” In my experience, everybody knows what a brand is. And nobody knows.

On the one hand, a brand is what we think of a product, how we react to it, emotionally and rationally. And the evidence is that it is mostly emotional reactions that define a company’s brand, just as what makes your friend unique is not their appearance but how that person makes you feel.

The key is, if people trust a brand, they keep buying it. And people trust brands that have a unique identity, providing some reason to buy it rather than a competitor. If customers at some point decide you aren’t true to your brand identity (as they see it), they will go elsewhere. And all the evidence is that once that trust is gone, it’s almost impossible (it takes more than money and time) to regain it.

So, everybody knows what brand is, because a brand is the sum total of what people think about the product. It can be strong or weak, positive or negative, but it’s only “everyone” who defines brand. Companies build strong brands by combining product, advertising, service, etc. into a set of experiences that all reinforce a “personality.” A brand makes a promise. Strong brands keep that promise all the time, every time. A weak brand is almost always an inconsistent brand. One failure can destroy the trust built by many successes. And it’s all up to the customer.

And so when I see companies react the way Toyota is reacting to its current challenges (and Toyota’s reactions are not unique) I’m convinced virtually no one knows what brand really is.

Over decades, Toyota built a strong brand by focusing on product quality. The growth of the Toyota brand was jump started when Toyota made the commitment to entering the US market. By making workers active partners in identifying problems and improving processes, Toyota built quality cars, while cutting the cost of production enough that they had a clear competitive advantage over their competitors. And customers, especially in the tough US market, came to trust the Toyota brand.

Customers flocked to Toyota dealerships, and if they didn't great memorable service, who cared? They got an exceptional product -- reliable, durable -- at a great price.

But now there are other brands that have high quality, like Hyundai, who can push Toyota with lower prices, longer warranties, etc. The brand line up is changing, becoming more "commidified." In this environment, the thinking is that brand differentiation will hinge more and more on the service provided. And the service has to more closely align with the promise made by the brand.

To see your clear advantage in product quality already challenged, and then have the current recall campaigns unravel like they have, Toyota be a feeling shared by a lot of people these days, looking into an economic abyss.

This could be bad. Okay, this is bad, but I think there some things they can do, in fact must do, one way or another, to stop the slide.

The obvious problem, beyond product issues, is Toyota’s perceived coverup. Whether it’s because of Japanese liability laws or attempts to control costs, consumers are clear that they cannot trust Toyota’s assurances, even if they don’t blame the company for the problems. If they can't believe the problems are fixed now, why would they buy a product anytime before they have proof?

Now here’s the point: Toyota has actually been in this situation before. And they pulled off a stunning feat of recovery. In fact they raised their brand perception by an order of magnitude. Only it wasn’t the Toyota brand, exactly. And it was not exactly the Toyota structure, either.

In the mid-80s Toyota, prodded by US dealers and management, decided to compete with Mercedes and Cadillac in the luxury car segment. Most observers thought the move was nuts, but Toyota committed a big chunk of money to design and build entirely new vehicles that could compete with the best vehicles (and brands) in the world. In 1989, after years of work, they launched Lexus. While critics and customers were impressed by initial impressions, they were looking for flaws.

After a couple of months on the market, while the pipeline was full of Lexus vehicles to be delivered to dealerships, Lexus learned there were a few reports of cruise controls that impeded braking and high-mounted stoplights that overheated. Every Lexus sold had these components. To fix the problem every one would have to be recalled – a PR nightmare. Or they could just keep quiet, fix problems as they occurred, and hope it would all blow over.

Lexus management made the decision, counter-intuitive to many, that they would move aggressively to recall every single Lexus. Every customer got a letter, hand-signed by Lexus GM Dave Illingworth. Lexus offered to pick the recalled cars up and provide the customer a loaner (another Lexus). Every fixed car came back washed and with a full tank.

These decisions established Lexus as totally unique, a brand that went far past the expected promise. Instead of a disaster, Lexus had a brand success. The fact that they were forthcoming with information only built the trust with their customers, and the millions who didn’t own one but read about it in Time or the The Wall Street Journal.

So if it worked 20 years ago, why isn’t Toyota doing something similar now? At least in spirit?

Obviously, I don’t know why, though I suspect one issue is that Lexus was, in most respects, an American brand. Outside of a few execs, the parent company never fully accepted Lexus as a part of Toyota. If they were even aware (on a cultural level) of the lessons of the Recall Campaign, they never saw how it might apply to a much larger organization. Even though every brand, at every level, has learned the values represented by the Lexus approach.

Using that experience, and a general knowledge of how successful companies operate, I can suggest some effective ways to protect, if not improve, the Toyota brand. I’m going to ignore Toyota’s concerns for limiting financial and legal liability — but I don’t think they should really affect what I'm proposing anyway. And I’m aiming this at the US market (which is where Toyota’s brand problem seems to be greatest).

First, come clean with customers. I don’t mean releasing sensitive internal memos or memos (at least, not yet). I just went back to the Toyota web page on the recall, and it’s still strictly corporate, “this is what we’re doing,” with no context about the scope (large or small) of the problem or the larger conversation. If I were in charge I would have links to key articles and blogs from across the spectrum. I would make it clear Toyota has nothing to hide, or rather, that Toyota values facts and honesty more than plausible deniability. In other words, I would demonstrate trustworthiness.

Second, consumers need a way to connect to Toyota, to engage when necessary in a conversation with somebody who can answer questions. From Toyota’s point of view, following the principles of the TPS, I would think it critical to get more information about problems directly from drivers, even if it means uncovering more problems. Actually, in the spirit of TPS, especially if it uncovers problems.

Third, I would make dealers an integral part of the process. Make sure that they know exactly what customers know, and make it easy for them to funnel me information about their clients’ needs and concerns.

So far, I grade Toyota’s reaction as a FAIL. Their current TV ad seems to be an apology from the production line workers, which is exactly not where the problem is. Akio Toyoda, the family member who just took over the company, has made some brief apologies, and asked for forgiveness. For what? This may be tuned more to a Japanese audience, but he will probably need a different approach when he gets to Washington in the next couple of days.

As of February 10, based on Toyota’s actions and the chatter out there (you can follow #Toyota on Twitter), they have a real problem. And unless there is some fundamental change in the way Toyota connects to its customer base, Toyota will have a tough row to how. And they should know better than to let this happen.

Who's Happy?

2010-01-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

The economic realignment of the last year has been an opportunity for many of us to re-examine some key aspects of how we live. Specifically, the question of living with less — less money and fewer things, or at least, less acquiring of things. I'm old enough to remember a time a few decades ago when most people got by with many fewer things. Was I less happy then? Was I happier in the last few years when I did indeed have more things? I've done enough travelling, seen enough of other cultures, to know that people find happiness in all kinds of situations.

This discussion has had even more relevance the past week as we've seen the pictures and heard the descriptions of the scenes in Port au Prince. There is no doubt that happiness is rare in that city right now, but what are the prospects for the future? After all, much of the conversation has been about how poor and miserable life in Haiti has been for most of its history. So what should Haiti's future look like in the future? If we're doing a reboot of the society, how do we write the new program?

Just for argument's sake, let's say we set "happiness" as one of our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), using France as an example of a country that has done just that. The first issue is how to define happiness. The French, working with Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, define it as "people’s well-being and the sustainability of a country’s economy and natural resources." For France, it's about making measurements of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) reflect not just money changing hands, but the value of the outcomes to the commonwealth. It's also about closing their GDP gap vs. the US (where every oil spill or auto accident boosts GPD).

But there are other ways to measure happiness. In fact, an organization called the World Values Society (WVS) has been looking at this issue and compiling data going back to the 1947 (the data referred to below can be found at the WVS website) . They have developed a continuum of Survival-WellBeing (SWB) as one way to measure basic contentment: "Is my life about staying alive or about getting the most out of what's available to me?" Where you fall on that continuum is where you say it is, your perception. The wealth metric is an entirely different issue, the other axis in a graph.

When GDP-per-capita is graphed against SWB it turns out GDP has little correlation to a sense of well-being. For example, Colombia and Albania have very similar GDP-per-capita, but are virtually on opposite ends of the SWB scale. Colombia and Mexico also rank higher in WellBeing than the USA, at the opposite end of the GDP scale. At the same time, almost all the low scoring SWB nations are also low in GDP. And the high GDP correlates with higher SWB scores. So, greater wealth does bring greater security, but happiness exists across the spectrum of income.

WSV has validated nine key variables that it tracks: subjective well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, GPD per capita, level of democracy, strength of religiosity, level of national pride, tolerance of outgroups, and sense of free choice. From these they compile profiles describing Subjective Well-being, Happiness, or Life satisfaction. For my purposes, I'll lump these profiles together as "satisfaction."

Of those indicators, the one most strongly identified with Satisfaction turns out to be the sense of free choice, specifically in terms of the general sense of freedom in the society. That sense of freedom is also connected to a general sense of tolerance. All in all, as the sense of personal control rises, so does satisfaction.

There is one other factor that seems to matter — the sense of community, or connection. That seems to me to be one key explanation why poorer countries like Mexico or Columbia rate so highly in the WellBeing. Sense of community, when it reinforces ethnic or religious stereotypes may also link to the kind of pride that is less tolerant of “others.” Nonetheless, a culture that combines inclusiveness with connection would be on the road to a new level of satisfaction, and perhaps even “happiness.”

A model for this might be cultures like Sweden or Denmark, which rate higher in WellBeing than the US, or France or Germany for that matter, even though GDP-per-capita is somewhat lower. Those Scandinavian cultures also seem to me to have embraced one other key factor that I think is key to civil happiness: fairness, especially in social areas like income disparities, access to health care and education, and so on.

The current economic reshuffling may give us an opportunity, individually or as a society, to reconsider how we proceed from here. The primary obstacle I see to a more sane, let alone happy, commonwealth is the rising oligarchy in the US, and the growing gulf between the few winners at the corporate/financial casino and the rest of us. Fairness has been overwhelmed by enlightened self-interest and the fiction of efficient markets, at least at this time, in this place.

The larger American culture is deeply entwined in its own stunted mythology: rugged individualism battling with social entanglement, protestant certainty at war with cosmopolitan questioning, I opposed to Thou. If we are to forge our own conditions of wellbeing-as-happiness we will have to do it on some smaller, more personal scale, in the nooks and crannies of the larger society. We will tend our oranges and make our own worlds the best they can possibly be, in this world of infinite personal possibilities.

Green Shoots

2010-01-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

While I'm pretty convinced that the general arc of our political/social/economic history is bending toward decline, if not outright disaster, I have not stopped looking for things that provide reasons for hope, on at least the individual scale. From time to time I hope to refer to those things in these blogs, and this posting will look at two examples: a look at how farmers in Africa's drought-stricken Sahel are using traditional techniques to re-green their land, and a way to use a plentiful, non-uranium, vastly cleaner fuel source for nuclear power-generation.

The Sahel, stretching the width of Africa, has been a poster child for desertification, especially in the west. It has been for most of human history a transition zone between the tropics and the Sahara, with a mix of pastoral herders and farmers finding a way to coexist on marginal rainfall. Historically prone to variations in rainfall, the long-term drought that began in the early 1980s can be seen as an early manifestation of global climate change. Couple that with the political upheavals that have unsettled whole populations and cultures, and over the last few decades the images of the Sahel burned into our minds were of starving cattle and camels, and dust blowing through bedraggled villages. Many countries of the region put in place laws and programs designed to criminalize tree cutting and to reforest the area with plantings. Nothing seemed able to slow the growth of the desert and the retreat of the trees.

An article in the December 7 issue of The Nation paints a somewhat different picture. It looks at the experience of local farmers who have applied an old approach, and learned some unexpected lessons. Farmers in that area used to dig pits, called zais, to collect and concentrate rainwater. A few modern farmers did the same, and some did something that made sense to them -- adding manure to the pit. The fertilizer and water definitely added fertility to the millet and sorghum, but the farmers also found that tiny trees also sprouted in the pits. And, as the trees grew, the crop yields also increased, and the practice spread.

In fact, enough farmers have learned from this experience that large parts of the Sahel are showing up on satellite images as newly green, while neighboring land, often in areas that get even more rain, is showing more and more brown. And this is where it gets really interesting. By and large, those countries that tried to halt deforestation by making trees public property and outlawing tree-cutting are also the countries that are still losing trees. Large-scale tree-planting programs have also proven ineffective.

One of the key changes in farming practice was giving ownership of trees back to the landowners -- "They stopped seeing trees as weeds and started seeing them as assets." At the same time, the success of "farmer managed natural regeneration" made the case that changing their environment was really possible and more and more farmers adopted the practices.

The article quotes Chris Reij, a Dutch geogrpaher who has worked in the region for 30 years, as saying,

"This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel and perhaps in all Africa."

The article also makes the point that the farmers are not planting trees. They are protecting the trees that grow naturally when they use manure to fertilize their soils. To me, it's a perfect example of working inside a natural system -- all the parts (people, animals, plants and environment) work together. Whereas about 80% of planted trees die, the ones that naturally sprout are from parents that have already adapted in that environment. And they're free.

Just to be clear, these new-old techniques would not have spread through the area without the support of large organizations, both governmental and NGOs. But it is not a top-down "program", driven by "experts" with money, like other well-meaning but ineffective (or worse) programs like the Millenium Villages Project. But maybe even the big boys will start to pay attention. Especially when it's becoming visible from space.

On the energy side, there's an article in the January Wired that identifies a proven way to generate power from a nuclear reaction that does not rquire uranium, and produces less waste, with a half life of decades rather than milennia.

The material is Thorium, a close relative of Uranium (232 protons to 238, in their naturally occurring forms), but about four times more abundant. With an added proton it becomes U233, which is fissile. Enriching it for fission is relatively simple. It can be handled differently than Uranium in a reactor, and is much less likely to cause any kind of melt down or run-away reaction. The textbook on Thorium reactors was written in 1958. Several Thorium reactors have been built and operated in the past, and currently Russia, Dubai, India (at least) are considering or planning Thorium reactors.

There are certainly technical challenges to building a Liquid Flouride Thorium (LFT) reactor (considered the most efficient approach). It will take a large investment and the time to test the design, which needs to stand up to the corrosive salts that control the reaction. But there are clear benefits, as well. Compared to a Uranium-Fueled Light Water reactor, an LFT reactor requires 0.4% of the fuel, at 0.2% of the cost, on 1% of the footprint, to produce the same amount of energy. And it produces a small fraction of the waste, which itself has a much shorter half-life -- decades rather than millennia. It may seem like a no-brainer, but ....

It's worth remembering that one reason we (and the Russians, et al.) went down the Uranium path was because we wanted that dangerous stuff. Nuclear power meant nuclear weapons. And we had a lot of Uranium lying around, and a lock on the technology. Today Uranium is getting scarcer and there are a lot of other players who like the idea of nuclear power, and not just for light bulbs. And we still don't have a way to dispose of the waste. At the same time, we are polluting the planet with the by-products of fossil-fuel-fired generating plants. So maybe it's time to rethink this.

In fact, in 2008, the unlikely bedfellows of Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced the Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act of 2008, which would mandate a US Department of Energy initiative to examine the commercial use of thorium in US reactors. Although the bill did not go to a full Senate vote (in fact, it was deep-sixed by the Bush administration), it was reintroduced in 2009, and is one of three bills now circulating.

All this said, not a lot of people are optimistic about anything happening soon on the Thorium front -- politics and entrenched economic interests have a way of avoiding any kind of change, even (especially?) when it could clearly be beneficial. Which is why we need to be aware of this issue, and make sure we are openly debating and planning for the kind of world we want to be living in. Thorium may not be the answer, but at least we should be asking the right questions.

Both these stories represent ideas or approaches that are not exactly new, but have been ignored by those who are caught up in the conventional wisdom. I'm going to keep looking for more similar stories, and hope you will, too, and that we can find a way to share with others. Just like the trees in the Sahel growing out of the shit.

God Jul! And a Hell of a New Year!

2009-12-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

"The winter of our discontent" (Shakespeare, Richard III) describes this holiday season pretty well, at least if you're tracking our progress in dealing with the the financial crisis, the health crisis, or the climate crisis. In my experience over the last five decades, I think this is the year that most people fervently hope next year will be better -- and have no confidence it will. I would say I am one of the least change-averse people around, but I'm finding it hard to look forward to anything I see for the next year or longer.

One way I'm seeing it is that we have been given a clear demonstration of the Golden Rule: those who have the gold make the rules. This is most obvious in the Finance game.

A year after the scale of the financial debacle was becoming clear, after we teetered on the brink of a systemic meltdown worldwide, the players who got us to that precipice are still in charge of how the game is played. And richer than they were. And with no real changes in how they do business.

The reality is that they've been consolidating their power for the past few decades. It took a while to get the pieces in place -- an "efficient market" meme that enthralled Republicans and Democrats, relaxed investment regs and oversight in the US, a consolidated market with little real competition, a bought-and-paid-for body of key decision makers worldwide, and WTO rules that opened up the entire world as a captive market (except for a few skeptics, like Brazil) -- but by about 2000 they were ready to roll. They had known that the US economy had reached its peak production in the late '80s and no new wealth was being created. They just needed a few bubbles to gain control of the remaining assets, and after they got housing in the early '90s and dot-com in the late '90s, housing II in the '00s was the perfect storm, from their point of view. It was a government-protected form of wealth transfer that had the beauty of really only benefitting a tiny number of people in the rarified world of finance. (Goldman Sachs average bonus, for each of 30,000+ employees, this year will be $700,000.)

As the previous bubble inflated in ways that clearly (to at least some financiers) were not going to last, the word around the trading floors was: IBGYBG -- "I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone. Make the trade. Sell the CDOs. And we'll meet again on St. Barts when the dust clears."

It may be that the people in the corporate and political elite were realistic enough to plan for the future by building their own fortresses of solitude: "If I can't save the planet, I can at least save my family, so why even try to save the planet?" Or maybe they were just lucky.

Looking around us now, it is clear today that Copenhagen will not lead to any fundamental change to the behaviors that are speeding climatic changes that will not just threaten people, but whole cultures, the supply and transport of food and products that don't just keep business humming, but keep people from starving.

On the home front, not only is financial regulation become a toothless joke, but healthcare reform is simply a gift to the insurance industry -- another transfer of wealth at the expense of those without the gold. And this in a country that pays more than twice as much per person for health care, and has a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than almost all developed countries. So why should we change it?

Today, Dennis Kucinich made it clear: "The class war is over. We lost. Working people lost. The middle class lost."

So, let's play it out in political terms. With the Democrats unable to create a political consensus that brings any real change, with Obama playing the (smart, but conventional) political game by not leading where there are no followers in-government, with Copenhagen a joke and no clear voice about the real threat of climate change, the Republicans will be be loud, and unified in their negativity, channeling Howard Beal, passion trumping facts. They pick up seats in Congress. And they've learned that, with a compliant news media, they don't even need a majority to say "no." And of course, the entire news media infrastructure is still reporting politics the same way they're reporting Tiger Woods or Sarah Palin: "he-said, she-said, and damn the substance -- it makes my brain hurt. Just tell me who's winning."

So, what we get is, at best, continued stagnation of the real economy, chronic unemployment that is much higher than the official figures, wave after wave of foreclosures, rising bankruptcies, falling industrial output, accelerated decline in quality of life (transportation, infrastructure, prices, education, health care).

Maybe we get to 2012, maybe Obama wins, and it's more of the same, a lot of people dying slow. But maybe Obama loses, and then maybe something will really happen. Maybe, after another two or four years of life under the leaders who got us here, and have no new ideas beyond "no," enough good citizens will see that it's not the Republicans, it's not the Democrats, it is what the system has become, and the system is not set up to have an honest discussion, let alone to protect their interests. Then, and only then, maybe somebody like an Al Franken or Dan Grayson will be in a place to stand up and say BAU stops here.

But then, maybe before that there'll be another bubble and everything will be back to normal. There's something to hope for.

Believing in Science

2009-12-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

One of the comments that popped up more than once in the back and forth around the "climategate" discussion was the claim, by those who deny global warming, that those who support the science of global climate change are like those people who, a few centuries ago, refused to believe that the earth is round or that the earth revolves around the sun.

As absurd as this claim is on its face -- that those who were guided by the science in one case would ignore it in the other -- there is an even more significant insight that comes from thinking about the relationship between that earlier debate and this one.

Most of us know that the polymath Galileo was forced to recant the results of his observations of the cosmos, which he had published in 1632 in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo built a powerful case for the Copernican view of the cosmos -- that the earth, like the other planets, orbits around the sun, and the stars exist outside those orbits -- as opposed the Ptolemaic view -- that the earth is at the center and everything else rotates around that.

Galileo was well aware that just 32 years earlier the brilliant Giordano Bruno had been burned alive at the stake by the Inquisition for making the same argument. To the church, it didn't matter that the Copernican cosmology was the only way to account for observed phenomena; to deny the earth's central, fixed position in the universe was to deny what had become a foundational element of religious belief. Just before the fire was lit, Bruno was offered the chance to recant: "I should not say that, so I will not."

In its early history, the christian church was riven by the claims of two rival schools of thought. One, following the teachings of Arius, a priest in Alexandria, held that while God existed outside of time, the Son (Jesus) was created later, as was the Holy Ghost. Representing what he knew as traditional doctrine in his church, Arius argued against Athanasius, a fellow Alexandrine churchman, who taught that God was three in one: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were the same, begotten before time, equally divine and eternal.

At a time when the church had become intimately entwined with the political ambitions of Rome and Byzantium, these rival views, which probably dated to the earliest days of the church, demanded resolution if the church was to act as a unified power. The Council of Nicea, in 325 endorsed Athanasius' view. After a few more decades of struggle the eternal trinity was firmly established as doctrine, and Arianism as heresy. That's why, in my Lutheran church, we recited the Nicene Creed as a kind of pledge of allegiance every Sunday:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father ....

One of the positions implicit in the Athanasian view was that Earth, where Adam and Eve first sinned, was the one part of creation blemished by death and decay. God had placed Earth at the center of his creation as kind of petri dish of sin and redemption, but everything else was set in perfect motion at creation, and was beyond the reach of sinful mankind, and beyond change. As this view became dogma, any reports of imperfection in God's celestial creation would have to be debunked, and the reporters treated as heretics. In the official view, science had no meaning beyond what God revealed to us. If a star appeared in the East, it must be God sending some kind of message to us.

The danger of Arianism to the Church was that it suggested that the divine order was itself changeable, not eternal and unchangeable:

But those who say: 'There was a time when he was not;' and 'He was not before he was made;' and 'He was made out of nothing,' or 'He is of another substance' or 'essence,' or 'The Son of God is created,' or 'changeable,' or 'alterable'—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.

By choosing the Athanasian path, the Church was committed to the dogma of an unchanging, unchangeable God, and the Church's role as protector of an absolute moral order and authority, which included an earth-centric universe and perfectly circular orbits for the planets and the celestial dome, now and always.

While the earliest observers of the heavens knew that things were not that tidy, they were forced to keep their views to themselves, or to find other ways to rationalize them, or risk being condemned as heretics. With the establishment of universities and the general sharing of knowledge that accompanied the Renaissance it became harder for the church to keep the lid on. Of course, by then the Church had the Reformation to worry about, as well.

As the growth of the middle class meant that learning in all areas was not solely the property of a small elite, the Church responded to this challenge to old rigid moral orders and authorities by trying to deny the emerging reality. Enter the Inquisition. It is illuminating that the Roman Inquisition dates to 1542, the year before Copernicus book on the cosmos, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, was published.

In a rational world, the revanchist forces protecting an irrelevant, inaccurate version of the moral order would have been replaced, suddenly or gradually, by the demonstrable realities being unveiled by scientists from every culture. So why hasn't it worked like that?

The obvious answer is that the ruthless application of power works. An organization like the Church, founded on belief and submission, and willing to use a tool like the Inquisition, can keep enough of its flock in line to hold on at least some of its position. And the Church has altered some areas of doctrine to align itself with new realities, although the pragmatists have now been largely supplanted by the dogmatists.

However, I think there is something else operating here, something that goes beyond the Church to all social life. In its simplest form, I see it as a dialectic of human psychology, with human beings demonstrating either one of two competing ways to comprehend and interact with reality.

On the one hand, the individual sees him- or her-self locked in an adversarial relationship with a world that can, at any moment, overwhelm them. For most, it becomes clear that there are certain hierarchies and authorities that must be recognized and leveraged for survival. You make alliances with the powers that you think can protect the existing order and your precarious place in it. And the ultimate power is supernatural, including the Church. There is a certain paranoid quality to this -- assuming that others are out to get you is the smart move. In terms of communication, this viewpoint is most comfortable with appeals to authority and belief.

On the other hand, some individuals see existence as enhanced by collaboration and teamwork rather than combat: we're all in this together. These individuals are a little more comfortable with change and heuristic logic, knowing that the future can't be entirely known and is constantly being altered by the choices we make in the present. Individual skepticism and curiosity are good things. This viewpoint aligns with a humanist emphasis on the scientific method and rational processes.

In every culture, even at the height of the Inquisition, there were humanists. By the same token, during every period of enlightenment there have been those who rely on faith and authority, and reject human reason. It may very well be that there's some kind of hardwiring at play, synaptical networks and brain chemistry interactions that dispose one to faith or to reason.

The downside of all this may be that there is little to be gained by talking through our issues. If that is true, climate deniers will never be swayed by scientific evidence, and rationalists are not going to be persuaded by appeals to faith. Nonetheless, almost all of us now agree we live in a world that is not at the center of the universe. And that's a start.

Uncertainty and Connection

2009-12-11T18:47:00.000-08:00

Thirty-some years ago I read "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra, a young Austrian high-energy physicist. I don't remember what brought me to the book, but it seemed at the time that it presented a world-view that made perfect sense to me.

I had studied physics only briefly, and had then followed my interests into heroic literature and mystic poets. In those areas I encountered, occasionally, visions of the world that perfectly described both the specific, momentary, personal, real-life experience and the universal, god-view of myth. The macro and the micro. They weren't my myths; they were larger, more encompassing than that. But they also put me inside the skin of a person who was not-me and gave me the words to make connection across those distances. These masterless, wandering bards and god-crazed poets saw beyond any king or church, and they were trying to explain to us what the world is really like.

During that time I was also interested in aspects of science that combined the macro and micro views. I knew something of the history of physics after the General Theory of Relativity and the development of Quantum Physics. I also knew that there was still no Unified Theory to account for the four types of forces or interactions (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational). For me, the easiest way to talk about that world was in terms of Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty. Briefly and loosely it is:

In the realm of quantum (sub-atomic) interactions it is impossible, on one hand, to determine both the location and the speed of a particle. On another hand, it is impossible to observe a particle without also affecting it. And on another hand, it's not even there to be observed until (and unless) you observe it.

The inescapable conclusion is that matter is not a thing, it is a probability. What we think of as reality is ... something else ... when seen in the quantum or relativistic realm. A conundrum, at the very least, but I'm OK with puzzles and vague answers: Borges, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Barth, Castaneda -- writers who were slippery, disruptive, playful.

"The Tao of Physics" struck me because Capra was able to talk about physics and eastern spirituality with the same playful but serious attitude, questioning traditional thinking and language while connecting to a consistent organizing vision about the world as it really is. Along with the wealth of facts and insights, I took away one concept that stands at the very center of this world view:

It's all connected.

It's an example of a meme: a unique concept that also contains a number of other concepts (each one also a meme). This one concept, for example, comfortably contains (in Capra's view) Shiva's dance and a Feynman diagram -- they are each a metaphor and a concrete manifestation of connection. Knowing that it's all connected doesn't make me a physicist, but it does add to the pleasure when I contemplate the world they describe for us.

Everything I've experienced in my life has only reinforced that understanding, but it has taken me a while to fully appreciate it. At the same time, I can't say that it wasn't somehow inborn -- it seems a part of me from my earliest memories. I think that is why I was always an eager reader, content to be lost in a book when there wasn't a game to play with others. And it has been key to my love of travel: there is little I'm threatened by; every-thing and -one I meet has a lesson for me.

The other thing I've learned is that not everyone I've met shares this view, especially when applied to political issues. So the question gets to be whether we can even talk about it. Does this appreciation of interconnectedness need to be inborn? Or is it learned -- as a result of specific experiences or insights? Some get it earlier, some later, some not at all -- but anyone could get it, so can we keep talking?

I'm really not convinced that it is a learnable trait, especially after a certain age. We are learning enough about brain function to appreciate that different brains are structured differently and deal with the world differently. Different types of synapses process signals differently; the brain learns to connect some synapses, not others. But we also know that the brain is much more resilient than thought -- able to recover from serious trauma and "rewire" itself, rebuilding functions using other synapses. We are even seeing evidence that disciplines like meditation restructure the brain.

In the end, the only reality that I experience first-hand tells me that I can learn, so learning is always a possibility, and I'm willing to continue the conversation with anyone who's interested, and to STFU with people who aren't. (Granted, in some cases that might mean it's up to you to stop reading in order to stop the "conversation".) But then, even if you're not listening, the conversation continues because no matter what, my words and actions are still connected to you, even if remotely, just as they're connected to everything.

What I take from that logic is that what I say and do matters. It's my choice, and my responsibility, to make the world as good a place for me to live as possible. In the most real sense, I don't make it better for myself by making it worse for someone else. And not paying attention doesn't mean the connections, or the responsibilities, aren't there. It is also not about guilt -- it is simply about the way things are, the world as it really is.

One of the themes in my blog posts has been the challenge to see the world as it really is. Implicit in that is the idea that we aren't equipped to see it as it REALLY is, especially once we've had to grapple with how it "looks" on the quantum level. We have to accept that our senses are too limited, our physical bodies are not equipped to see it all, macro and micro, not like we observe that part of the electromagnetic spectrum we call the world.

So, "seeing the world as it really is" is a practice, an attitude, a refusal to get lost in what the world appears to be, and the will to keep pushing to get further inside, further outside, deeper into the mystery.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that some humans, even ones close to us, may reject any conversation that questions their perception of the world. One of my first lessons from travel (in books and in person) was that every individual lives in an individual reality. Cultures try to reduce turmoil by creating a reality of conventional wisdoms. In some cultures, any attempt to question those wisdoms, to recognize one's individual reality, results in harsh penalties. Inquisition, anyone? (Or Tea Parties?)

Whether I can help it or not, I choose to stand on the side of more conversations, more allowance for individual realities as part of a dynamic whole, responsibility (but not guilt) for our actions and our words. I have no idea if the arc of history bends in any direction, but I see no real alternative but to act with compassion and joy and hope that it bends to transcendence. And meanwhile, to keep looking.

From Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching:
("Tao means "way" --"Tao" is, in my reading, another word for the world as it really is)

32

The Tao can't be perceived.
Smaller than an electron,
it contains uncountable galaxies.

If powerful men and women
could remain centered in the Tao,
all things would be in harmony.
The world would become a paradise.
All people would be at peace,
and the law would be written in their hearts.

When you have names and forms,
know that they are provisional.
When you have institutions,
know where their functions should end.
Knowing when to stop,
you can avoid any danger.

All things end in the Tao
as rivers flow into the sea.

Ends and Means

2009-12-06T18:07:00.000-08:00

I grew up in the midst of the cold war, which for many of us was a clash between "godless communism" and democratic political systems organized around the judeo-christian tradition. The fact that such a division left out huge parts of the planet did not much concern us.

At the time I was taught (and learned) that the difference between them and us was they believed the end justifies the means. You could explain both fascists and commies by saying they were willing to do evil things if they believed in the importance of the ends achieved. Which is why we were better: we knew that the evil is evil, and no outcome excuses evil deeds.

So excuse me if, over the years, I've been a bit confused at the actions of some of those who define themselves, outspokenly, as christians. The so-called pro-life movement is one example: "violence against clinics, and against doctors, etc., is okay because: ..." -- you know the argument. Let me be clear, I do not say that all christians accept this reasoning. I do say that too many christians, especially those in positions of political influence and power (e.g., Randall Terry), do not make it clear that such logic is immoral and counter to their principles.

At the same time, I don't really think it should be only christians that reject the ends-justify-means formulation. From a humanist point of view, one big problem is that the ends are a promise; the means are the actions taking place in the present. If I'm being asked to trust in a promise I'm being asked to trust intentions, and I have no way to judge intentions. It's all about faith in another mortal. And mortals are inherently unknowable and therefor untrustworthy. So it's more realistic to judge actions on their own terms and leave intentions to individual meditation.

For instance, Dick Cheney et al. may have believed, even knew, that there really were WMDs in Iraq, no matter what the intelligence was saying. So invading Iraq, and incurring more than 4000 US dead, and many (200?) times that number of Iraqui dead, was OK because their intentions were good. Because intentions are as good as ends.

I have come to believe that the most important reason to deny ends-justifies-means is because it explicitly says that a superior moral position allows one to force acceptance by others. "I know what's best for you, so just do what I say." Which, while not only despots might say, is what despots always do say.

One of the other key lessons from growing up as a devout protestant (Lutheran) was that what differentiated christians from Old Testament believers (and other faiths) was the operation of choice. What made christianity meaningful, divine, a clear break from the past, is that it gives us the freedom and responsibility to choose belief. If one is coerced into righteous action, it is no different from sin. The ends are justified by the means.

When Christ commanded his followers to spread the Word, he did not say the evangelist's responsibility was to get everyone to believe. The charge to the faithful was to give a true accounting of the gospel, so that others could make the choice, the commitment, to follow. It is a way to make a believer consider his whole life an example of the power of the Word. Success would be measured by what happens on the inside, not the outside.

I have no doubt that my early upbringing in faith led me to be profoundly skeptical of organized christianity and any other belief expressed as a creed. I find almost all of them have been seduced by the desire to tell other people how to live. Religion becomes just another arena in which humans play out their lust for power. We give lip service to the idea that morality can't be legislated, and then we go try to do just that. And the US ends with up the highest total documented prison population in the world.

My early learnings have left me with the conviction, now tested by decades of experience in many different social settings, that freedom is better than coercion for forming constructive citizens, and building cultures (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.). My travels have also left me with the clear understanding that American culture does not (yet?) have the experience or vocabulary to fully deal with individual and cultural freedom. If it is a learning curve, we are ahead of many, but lag behind others.

There is also the very real possibility that human beings, as a group, will always swing between the dark sureties of faith, putting me squarely at the the center of the universe, and the unsettling brilliance of science, illuminating my insignificance in (and interconnectedness with) the vastness of the universe.

I suppose that sense of interconnectedness may be the most important thing I took away from my early experiences of faith. And it may the thing I see the least of in most people who seem to connect to traditional belief. Are we all part of this universe (which I have come to think of as god), or are we each separate, vulnerable, estranged? Whichever reality I see, you have to find your own. That's what Jesus would do.

Politics: The End of Hope - in the Era of Truthiness

2009-12-03T16:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's post left me unsatisfied, still debating in my mind what it all means, or something. But then today a couple of things came to mind as I thought about how we will know when/if things really have changed. It came from a review I was reading in the Nation on three books dealing with the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and from my memory of what the samizdat-era intellectuals in Poland or Czechoslovakia would say about how they pulled off their defiance of the state: "Live and act as if you are, in fact, free." So, what would the political discussion be like if real change were possible, if politicians felt they could tell the truth?

Specifically, as applied to these players in this environment, it would be okay for Obama (for instance) to discuss the political aspect of his thinking and decisions. He would be able to stipulate that there are members of the political establishment (in government, in the media) who take their positions based on simple calculations of power (them vs. us, Democrats vs. Republicans, etc.). It has nothing do with what's right, or patriotic, it's simply about winning or losing. As it is now, we're all acting like we're in a game that is all about politics, but if you say the word "politics" you lose. Why else would all our chattering class so assiduously avoid that discussion (along the lines of the point I made in yesterday's blog)?

I actually think it would humanize a lot of these figures to just admit that they are political animals. To hear John Boehner or Mitch McConnell parse the power struggle in political, rather than personal-slash-moral, terms make actually make them less creepy and off-putting. I suspect the same might be said about Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reed. There would still be room to get to moral issues, but always with the thought that some reporter is actually going to take it back to a political level and see how it all matches up.

If we all just agreed that politics is by definition a morality-free zone, maybe we wouldn't see so many public figures twisting themselves like pretzels, trying to make their statements about values and morality align with their public statements on topics like capital punishment and the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world, the rewards of corporate malfeasance, high unemployment and rising output efficiency, the moral hazard of universal health care, public education for those who can afford it, and tax cuts for the wealthy.

And we could hear Obama tell the cadets at West Point that this country is perfectly willing to accept the fact some of them will not be coming back from Afghanistan -- "no offense, it's just politics. I'd just as soon not take this step, but let's get real, I wouldn't be able to eat lunch in this town if I tried to do that."

On the other hand, the pundits would hate it. Their whole schtick is based on applying their own personal political filter to whatever happens. They're the ones who get to tell us what any statement or action means in terms of who has got the juice, who's winning, who's losing, play by play, minute by minute. Having the politicians themselves lay that out would only add to the unemployment rolls. That would be a shame, wouldn't it?

I mean, who am I kidding? The chance of politicians talking like that is like the chance of David Vitter telling us he really feels about wearing diapers. Sorry. But you get the point. Politics is not about telling any kind of truth. Inside the beltway, it's like if you do tell the truth you lose respect, you show weakness and invite the other alphas to go for blood, your blood.

The real irony is that some of your power in the beltway environment is also derived from how you appear outside the beltway, where truth telling, or the appearance of truth telling, has value. In fact, if there is one characteristic that typifies the really successful politicians (in terms of getting elected against better-known political brands) of the last 40-plus TV years -- JFK, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama -- it is the singular, and rare, quality of "Truthiness."

Do we have to forget about the truth? I don't know. You tell me. But in the meantime, we (you and I) could at least act like the truth is important. And wait for the next Wall to come down.

Politics: The End of Hope

2009-12-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

As if we needed reminding, every day we see new examples of the gap between expectations and actions in the political world. The President's speech justifying a US presence in Afghanistan is just one more lesson that political reality has little, if anything, to do with moral reality. Shame on us for thinking it could ever be otherwise.

In the political reality that dates to our seizing the mantle of empire following World War II, it is impossible for any president, particularly a Democrat, to appear "soft on defense." This was the political reality that pushed Kennedy into Southeast Asai and then and made it impossible for Johnson to leave Viet Nam without giving up his power, all of it.

The only politician who could pull it off would be one who would willing to be a sacrifice his entire agenda for this moment of moral clarity. And politics, as we should know post-Rove/Bush/Cheney, has nothing to do with moral clarity (although it may at times have everything to do with moralizing).

There may be many on the left who though a vote for Obama meant a vote for that level of moral clarity, a clear break with the devious and unprincipled political machinations of the Bush administration. Such it is with a new face in the political arena, you can project whatever you want on them (positive or negative).

In Obama's case, he had been around long enough to suggest he was fully integrated into the dominant political reality. If anything, he had scrupulously avoided making grand gestures. He knew where the support was and he wasn't going to be far from it. He showed himself clearly to be a real politician, in terms of working for incremental change, rather than grandstanding for a cause that would lead only to defeat. He might try to get his team ahead, but he wasn't going to try to change the rules of the game.

Too bad, perhaps, but it would be well for us to remember the game isn't over yet.

We are in Afghanistan, and we will be there for a while. In political reality, there were few choices available to him. Especially if we pay attention to the key political reality: All politics is local. The real effect of what he does in Asia will be felt here, with US voters and in the Senate and House. A couple of years in Afghanistan (and $30 billion plus some hundreds of soldier fatalities) is the price for some kind of health care reform and a chance to climb out of our economic swamp.

Thinking back to LBJ, he was trying to make the same deal in order to pull off the huge Great Society vision, civil rights and an effective social safety net, by talking about a victory in Viet Nam that he already knew was unlikely. As someone who participated in the anti-war protest movement, I can only say that no matter how important our moral anti-war position was, it would have been more meaningful in the longer run to have completed LBJ's social program.

It may very well be that there was no alternative for Johnson. And it may be that there is no alternative for Obama. In fact, it may be exactly the same political battle, now forty years on, between those who want to roll our society back -- before Roe v Wade, before civil rights, before the New Deal and Social Security, before income tax, hell, before the 14th and 19th amendments -- and those who see this as an interconnected social democracy rather than a robber baron oligarchy.

The iconic image of the last campaign was Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster, but it's worth remembering that Obama's campaign word was "Change." Hope may have propelled him on his life's journey, but I think that Obama is well aware that "hope" is an attitude, not an action or a promise. If we project hope on Obama, that is more our problem than his responsibility. As to change, which is inescapable and implacable, we'll have to see how the game plays out and whether Obama will be the changer or the changed.

As to us, it's time for us to move beyond our hopes, whatever they are, and get to work. If you see the folly of trying to "save" Afghanistan, then it will be up to you (us) to reframe the political reality so we can have that conversation. Ultimately it will be that conversation, rather than force of arms or moral aggrandizement, that will bring real, lasting change.

In the Cave

2009-11-28T18:05:00.000-08:00

I've been tracking some of the online discussions concerning the hacked emails between various scientists associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK). This group is one of a large number of groups that are contributing data and statistical analyses to climate studies, including the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which has acted as a centralized source for climate science. The emails released by the hackers stretch from 1999 to this month and concern a number of issues. The hackers apparently thought they had the smoking gun that would prove climate change (or man-made-global-warming theory as they like to call it) is all a hoax. The RealClimate site has a good summary of the issue. George Monbiot's blog entry has links to the emails as well as a droll take on the thinking behind the climate change deniers.

What has been really interesting, to me, is the heat generated in the blogosphere, especially when a news story or recent study pops up about climate change. The first comments come from individuals commenting on the science and then new voices start to emerge heaping scorn on anyone who does not see that the hacked emails change everything (whether the emails have anything to do with the topic or not). Their arguments are interesting on their own, quite apart from the questions of what the hacked emails do or do not prove.

Most obvious, to me, is the assertion that the climate change "hoax" is driven by the huge amounts of money these scientists are making. If you really think that money is ipso facto the corrupting influence, it should be clear (a "no-brainer"?) where the money is, and it ain't with the academics. The largest corporate players on the planet all depend on business as usual (BAU), especially in regards to their control and continued market for fossil fuels, the main source of CO2 emissions. We know what kinds of profits are at stake for Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, et al., let alone Monsanto or GE or Boeing. We know what they've been spending on directed research, PR efforts, lobbying in every government that matter. So, please, don't insult our intelligence with references to fat-cat scientists.

Perhaps not so obvious, but more telling, is the deniers' emphasis on temperature data and whether or not they show "warming." For one thing, most of the denier-bloggers show a deep distrust of the statistics without much attempt to illuminate what the numbers do tell us. Nor do they answer the solid statistical evidence from other sources.

But then, the proof for climate change argument does not rest on temperatures alone. Atmospheric and sea temperatures were only meant to be indicators of coming changes. The models that have been developed over the last 40 years were meant to give us a warning, to be indicators that would tell us we need to change before the really big, planet-wide systems, lagging some years behind observed temperatures, swing to a new balance point.

At this point, the proof is now distressingly clear -- rising sea levels, thinning ice at both poles, melting glaciers at all lattitudes, disappearing permafrost throughout the far north: Alaska, Canada, Siberia. We can debate the temperature data and models all we want, but the planet-level swing has already happened. The game has changed. And though we could see it, we didn't see it. Why not?

This is where the image of Plato's Cave came to mind. Plato developed this allegory to make a point about the unreliability of sense-derived information, and the need to pursue the truth of the forms that lie behind what we see or hear.

To summarize, Plato (in the character of Socrates) painted a picture of a group of people who have grown up in a cave, restrained so they can only see a wall a little ways in front of them. Behind them, out of their sight, is a big fire. And in between the fire and the watchers there is a constant stream of people, moving and talking, thought the watchers can only hear the echos that bounced off the wall and could only see the shadows they cast on the wall. Plato's point was that the two-dimensional world of the shadows on the wall is, for the watchers, the sum total of reality. If by some chance one of the watchers could escape his restraints and turn to see the three-dimensional world behind him, and then return to tell the others what he had learned, he would be ridiculed, if not ostracized or killed.

I sometimes think that the world we think we live in is actually a highly edited version of the real world, for the simple reason that we can't really process all the information out there (it's chaos!) so we are necessarily selective. Humans need to break a huge amount of input into the signals that really matter, ignoring the static. But the more we learn about the world, the more we learn that it is all signal. Because chaos is not random. But chaos is too much to comprehend, so we watch the shadow that chaos projects on our walls and try to cope the best we can.

"Chaos" (Wiki) describes a dynamic (changing) system that is sensitive to initial conditions -- systems where a tiny change in an input can result in a huge systemic change. The textbook real-world example is the weather. Humans have been gathering weather data for decades. We have powerful computers. But the horizon for accurate forecasting is still hours, not weeks, let alone months. The complexity of the system makes it unlikely we can ever capture and input the right information, even if we had the computational power to crunch it. That's the challenge that comes from trying to predict the local effects of systemic processes by looking at individual inputs. Chaos -- the world -- just doesn't work like that.

Perhaps we are left with the realization that some people will deny a complex truth in favor of a simple answer that doesn't require close, sustained analysis. Change, sometimes inconvenient, is built into the system. We just have to figure out if change, especially when it's not convenient, is built into us.

The Efficiency Con

2009-11-25T17:58:00.000-08:00

Some part of my income the past couple of decades has been driven by the demand, on the part of large corporations, to train its staff in the principles of effective staff management. It has been my good fortune in the past seven or eight years to do this for a company whose history has been built on a foundation that in key ways differs from what many professionals accept as proven management principles. To understand the difference it helps to look at the careers of two key players in building the structure of scientific managment: Frederick Winslow Taylor (Wiki) and W. Edwards Deming (Wiki).

Born in 1853, Taylor was a mechanical engineer who saw an opportunity, in the rapidly expanding industrial world, to improve efficiency by close studies of how work was actually done. He was the original "efficiency expert," armed with a stopwatch and a clipboard. He became famous as the inventor of "scientific management." His basic approach was built on four principles:

Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

However, as indicated in a recent New Yorker article, in practice it worked rather differently. For one thing, there was a wide gap between workers and management, based largely on the understanding (or prejudice) that workers were incapable of understanding the scientific principles that would yield greater productivity. In general, this approach also exalted the role of managers. making them kind of priests in the quest for efficiency and profits. This approach reflects a militaristic attitude that was common at the turn of the 20th century: it was the job of the superior classes to command (and control) the inferior ones.

Another key aspect of Taylor's approach is that it was his business. Even though it was presented as an academic approach, he was selling scientific management to clients where the only meaningful evidence of success was a contract for his services. When confronted with deadlines and payrolls he often ended up using the same "rule of thumb" measurements he was supposed to be replacing. And there were times he didn't get paid.

Scientific management, or "Taylorism" as it was often called, has been impressively influential. It is reasonably accurate to say that the American industrial colossus was built on the principles of efficiency Taylor espoused. And it worked just fine until the American industrial model, rich in resources and markets, was challenged by an approach developed in a war-ravaged society with scarce, expensive raw materials and huge barriers to success, using an approach developed by an American whose ideas differed in fundamental ways from Taylor.

W. Edwards Deming was born in 1900. His career was largely academic (PhD from Yale in math and physics) and then in government, specializing in statistical measurements of quality. The Second World War gave him an opportunity to test different approaches to industrial efficiency and quality control. In the immediate post-war period he worked in Japan in the occupation government to rebuild the industrial sector. The Japanese, fully aware that they needed to exploit any competitive advantage possible, worked to integrate Deming's teachings in various industries. From my point of view, the culmination of his work was his collaboration with the Toyota Motor Company in the 50s and 60s.

The key difference between Taylor's scientific management and Deming's approach, in my view, is who owns the work. As opposed to Taylor, Deming taught that every worker owns the work he (or she) does and has full responsibility for its quality. This includes not just doing the job right, but taking responsibility for the best way to do the job. At the core of this is a fundamental re-ordering of the role of manager.

Instead of "management by command and control," Deming set the standard for "management by objective." In working with Toyota, he was working with a production system that has already made huge strides in the same direction. Where Taylor looked at individual production steps and sought to streamline each one, driven by efficiency, Toyota had already come to understand the value of looking at the entire system, focused on minimizing waste (starting with overproduction).

The Toyota Production System (TPS) benefited from committed, consistent leadership that lived the principles they preached. Specifically, managers understood that their role was to give the workers the tools and support they need, not only to do their jobs, but to improve them. In some ways, it's the workers who tell the managers how to do the job. Deming provided an overall structure, and statistical evidence, that allowed Toyota to compete with the big boys.

Toyota was clearly successful. Virtually every other automaker has tried to adopt their approach, which has been a great boon for management consultants. And though they may be trying to replicate the results generated by Deming, these conusltants seem to be channeling Taylor and scientific management.

To me, the key thing is that the culture of management by command and control is deeply ingrained in virtually every corporate culture in the world. That is the default position: "to justify the title and salary of a manager it's my job to know more than they do and to show it by telling them what to do and how to do it." And because that's the expectation going in, the average management consultant is going to have to align with that if he (or she) wants to keep working. Or get into talking about "tools" or "best practices" or "targets": all anathema to someone immersed in Deming and TPS.

As the New Yorker article points out, even the acolytes of Taylor came to realize it could not deliver what it promised. But something about the dream of "efficiency" continues to keep Taylorism alive and well. And not just in corporate culture.

Why Free Enterprise Isn't

2009-11-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

Among the inescapable lessons drawn (by me) from the current economic tsunami are:

Globalization is absolutely necessary: if we want to keep every ambitious or desperate third-worlder from coming to where the jobs are (here), we have to send at least some of the jobs to where they are.
Globalization means that the American working middle class is history: it was their jobs that got sent wherever.

This is not happenstance. There is a key human, behavioral imperative in operation. It is a trait, an instinct perhaps, which has allowed us to compete so successfully with the other species in our environment. We (you and me) would not be here without it. And it could easily be the imperative that cause the collapse of our global society.

In virtually every human culture we know about, humans demonstrate competitive behaviors, played out in the acquisition of money and/or power . Not every individual is driven by this, certainly, but most cultures reward that minority of individuals who are the most competitive personalities large amounts of control over everyone else. You can argue that ethnic and political cultures gained strength to the degree that they formalized the ascent to power (to prevent endless battles) and balanced the interests of the power elite (who may be less competitive than their founders) with the interests of the plebes (some of whom may be more).

If that balance is lost, the natural urge to dominate is by definition more unbridled, even manic. The American economy has gone through several cycles of this excited, almost pathological activity in its history. We have been shrigging it off as a necessary aspect of an efficient free market. Sounds good. But the definition of "free" is what is at the center of this.

It was a blog posted by Robert Singer on disinfo.com that got me thinking about what free market really means (at least in this version of capitalist democracy) with the statement:

"You don’t eat the hamburger at McDonalds because it’s a dollar: It’s a dollar to get you to eat it."

Singer's point is that Ray Croc could sell a hamburger cheap because the grain (which made the bun and fed the cattle ground into the patty) was subsidized -- farmers could sell it for less than it cost to grow. That was because somebody -- taxpayers -- paid them a subsidy that made up the difference.

Now, Ray Kroc could have sold the burger for a higher price and have gotten rich that way. But the genius of Ray Kroc is that the burger he sold bought him both your dollar and a powerful piece of the market. This was about Ray versus everybody else slingin' burgers. Which was mostly diners and cafes run by moms and pops and small entrepreneurs -- gone. The dollars he got from us let him buy a lot of real estate -- the asset value of McDonalds is primarily in the land the stores sit on, not the number of burgers served. The burgers pay the mortgage. Or perhaps we all do.

Singer sees this an example of the "downward manipulation of prices," a deliberate strategy supported by the Federal Reserve and big finance from its inception:

"Butler’s investigation has identified JP Morgan Chase, one of the founding members of the Federal Reserve, as the prime suspect, in the “ongoing intentional, not accidental” great crime of keeping the price of commodities low so the middle class can afford the American dream, a nightmare for the planet."

It's the same strategy employed by Standard Oil (and all its offspring) and the agribus monoliths, in terms of domestic policy and building reliance on chemical fertilizers and engineered seed. And it's the same strategy, but now leveraging global IMF inequities, that WalMart employs to use low-paid, off-shore labor to supply the goods that will purchase our domestic dollars. A subsidy here, a controlled wage there, every little wrinkle lets me buy more customers.

But for now, we should know that every piece of food, virtually every consumer item, is paid for in unseen ways -- by manipulated commodity pricing, and by the use of virtual slave labor to work our farms and factories.

The lesson: if you want to win, you've got to own the market, and one way to do that is to decouple everything from value, make it only about price. It's anything but a "free market," unless you mean that by becoming the dominant player you are now free of pesky rivals, other than those that play by your rules. And the players are now global, concentrating huge capital wealth among a tiny fraction of the world's population. Local communities, national societies and cultural ties mean virtually nothing to them. If you buy the competitive thing, at that level it may only be about dueling with the other big players, mano a mano.

Along the way, in our particular culture, we have undervalued skill and knowledge, and have created a glutted workforce that will take slave wages rather than no work at all. And Wall Street continues to reward those companies that add to the unemployment role, because workers are simply costs, and costs must always be cut.

There was a time when slash-and-burn agriculture was probably key to human survival. It provided sunlight for earth that was rich with the ash of the burned plants. But after a year or two the fertilizer was consumed. It took decades for the biomass on that patch to build to the same level of nutrients. Not a big problem in a big forest with few people.

As the forest fills up with hungry people, slash and burn is probably not a good strategy, except it's always worked before. We know how to do it. It's someone else's problem.

At some point, we may change our short-term tactics to match long-term imperatives. Or the winners will just keep fighting over the remaining forest. For that kind of social disconnect, think London in 1870: toffs in the clubs, corpses in the East End. I've seen articles/ads on Newsmax.com promising to give you the secret to being a "Robber Baron" in this financial crisis. Something to think about.

To get the shot, or not

2009-11-01T21:20:00.000-08:00

Anyone with young children in their extended family has probably come up against the childhood vaccination question, and the debate about causes of autism. And we are all, parents or not, hearing the cases for and against the H1Ni vaccines (and flu vaccines in general).

Flying back this week from New York, and a visit with my grandson who is recovering from flu (assumed by health professionals involve to be H1N1 though no tests were made), I read Amy Wallace's article in Wired. Her strongly worded defense of the science behind childhood vaccinations for mumps, measles, rubella, pertussis, etc. was already known to me from a Twitter storm involving various sides in the debate.

The next day I read an article in The Atlantic that called into doubt the efficacy of flu vaccines, for both seasonal flu and H1N1. The article focused on a few serious scientists who are questioning widely accepted claims for vaccines, at the risk of the approbation of other health professionals.

So, who are we supposed to trust? And, most importantly, what are we supposed to do if we want to improve our odds in a world that seems to threaten our fragile health on so many levels?

Looking at the questions raised by the Wired articles, it seems important to me that the anti-childhood-vaccination proponents often get lost in personal attacks on one or another of the scientists arguing in favor of vaccinations. Such ad hominem attacks are often used by people who may be so convinced of their position that they can overlook the facts in favor of finding a villain to blame. In this case there may indeed be a certifiable villain in the mix: big pharma.

It's a bit like OJ. The LA cops from the time of Bill Parker had so thoroughly lost the trust of black Angelenos that there was no way a jury of peers was going to believe anybody representing LA, let alone a nut case like Mark Fuhrman, who were out to get a black man, any black man. By the same kind of reasoning, because vaccines come from big pharma, who are one of the least credible institutions in the US, there's no way I would believe anything they claim.

Except. Sometimes the bad guys are not the story. For one thing, big pharma doesn't really make much from vaccines. Only a few hundred million bucks a year. What they're focused on is the big payoffs, the one-or-two-a-day-for-the-rest-of-your-life drugs like Lipitor or Cialis. The others, like childhood vaccines, are just chump change.

The most incendiary charge against the childhood vaccines is the issue of autism. And this could easily be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, the term for a classical logical fallacy: just because thing A happens and then thing B happens does not prove A causes B. Autism has become our syndrome de jour, a diagnosis that seems to be growing more common. Like many, I think it may be just a case of different diagnostics applied to a wide range of human behaviors, especially a range of behaviors that is understood to be a continuum anyway.

But the post hoc argument also calls into question most statistical analyses, which only point to correlation, not causation. It was Benjamin Disraeli (and later Mark Twain) who said "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistics can certainly be slanted, but a close examination should be able to discover the bias. And that is the case with flu vaccines.

The argument for getting an annual flu vaccination, it seems, may be based on a conflation of proximity (like post hoc) and causation. The statistical evidence says that people who get vaccinated are half as likely to die. However, a closer look also says that people who get vaccinated are more likely, for a number of socio-economic reasons, to be healthier in the first place. Where statistics indicate a correlation, scientific testing should support or question it. However the case for the efficacy of flu vaccines has never been actually tested, with controls and placebos and the whole scientific method.

I believe our challenge is to see the world as it really is, not just as conventional wisdom tells us the world should be. Which also means that we should not be overly trusting of "experts." Add to that the deep distrust (or misunderstanding) of science and the scientific method that seems to be a part of our culture, and we are naturally set up to distrust those who claim any kind of truth that doesn't align with our beliefs.

My point is that our beliefs must be continuously tested -- and the scientific method is the best model for a way to discern the world as it really is by rigorous examination. It is highly unlikely that any truth is THE truth. But a single isolated truth can be more significant than a passionate belief.

It's all about the testing, and the willing suspension of belief.

Climate for Twitterers

2009-10-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks I've been using Twitter (Im a tweeter!!) in an attempt to get a feel for "social media marketing." I won't say I was a skeptic when I started, but I don't think I had any expectations other than being a researcher, not directly involved. I'm now rather more involved.

If you are on Twitter you can choose people to "follow." In fact when you first register, you'll be given a list of people you can follow. You can go to their profiles and determine if their interests and their past tweets are interesting to you. Every time they post a comment, you will receive it in your "NewsFeed." And your comments must be less than 140 characters.

If you want people to hear what you've got to say, you've got to have followers who will receive your tweets when you post them. Or you can search by topic or key word, and respond (retweet) to those messages, which will be received by the person you're responding to and whoever is following him/her.

I think I am most proud that Timothy Leary (@DrLeary) is a follower of my mine (from his location "On the outside looking in"). I'm pretty sure if you ask to follow him he'll follow you, too. If you want to follow me, I'm @WillBurd (as you'll see below).

The primary way I've used Twitter is to follow news aggregators, with particular reference to eco issues and insights into human behavior. When I find something interesting I retweet it (I now have three accounts with a total of 60 or so followers).

A few days ago I received a retweet that referenced an article from BBC News titled "What Happened to Global Warming?" that deals with temperature measurements and the fact that none of the the last 10 years reports higher temps that 1998, a marked El Nino year, which was indeed the hottest year in modern records. My tweet is below, and was meant to suggest that global temp measurements are selective at best, and there are other indicators, like ice caps and glaciers, that might tell an important part of the story. (My inter-tweet notes are notes in [brackets].)

WillBurd
8:25pm, Oct 14 from Tweetie

Melting glaciers & poles don't matter? RT@arthurtaubo: RT @eachus (Interesting article about global warming) http://twurl.nl/rh717o

A bit later I noticed that I had received a string of tweets (that 140 character limit) in response:

eachus
9:06pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd That's not the issue. 2 things here: (1) the globe has NOT been warmer since 1998. Yet... glaciers are melting. And yet again...

9:07pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd (2) The volume of ice of Antarctica is higher, even given meltings around the edges. What does this all mean? Frankly, who knows?

9:09pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The question is not whether the earth is warming... despite peaks and valleys it has been trending warmer for at least 6000 yrs.

[About the same time human population and culture has been expanding exponentially. Ironic, no?]

9:11pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The question is: is man (and in particular CO2) causing any warming? If so, you would expect it to be evident in recent years.

[As in the hottest decades of the last many centuries?]

9:12pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd But it HASN'T BEEN. Again: Antarctic deposits have been heavier than usual, so that despite edge melting, it has MORE ice.

[Proof, or citation?].

9:14pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Some glacier melting, like around Kilimanjaro (a favorite anecdote of "warmers"), is known to be actually caused by other factors.

[I'm not sure I've ever heard this suggested as proof. Cause for concern, yes.]

9:15pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd (Kilimanjaro melting was shown, years ago, to be due to deforestation at lower altitudes.)

[I think that IS human action, along with the burning of the wood releasing CO2.]

9:16pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The upshot of it all is... nobody knows. The "greenhouse warming" theory has lots of BIG holes in it. Yet something is happening.

[I'm sorry, but this sounds a bit like Ed Grimley.]

9:16pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd But whether that something is overall warming is anything but clear.

I made the conscious decision to engage in this conversation because I sensed that eachus is open to arguments of fact and logic, and because I was willing to test my approach against a different one, even in a format not designed for nuanced discussion.

Limited by the format, I retweeted, focusing on the assertion that Antarctic ice mass was actually growing. I did a quick Google and retweeted the results, and a few minutes later another tweet that focused on what I think are the key issue--much of the anti-change argument focuses on responsibility, as in guilt of humans (see my earlier Blog), and climate is a chaotically complex, interconnected system that goes beyond any isolated indicator.

WillBurd
12:24pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Googled Antarctic Ice Mass, got this study in "Science" that suggests losshttp://bit.ly/oOYqM

12:28pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Less about the "cause" of climate change than observed fact - on a systemic basis. Greenhouse gases one key variable.

eachus

2:42pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Perhaps. But there have been others that claim overall Antarctic gain. I am not surprised that there are conflicting claims.

[No evidence cited.]

2:44pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd No... it *IS* about cause. We know there is a trend upward anyway. If WE are causing some, then why isn't it getting warmer?

2:44pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd ... because it actually hasn't been, overall, for the last 10 years.

[Again no evidence cited, and a search of "global tempartatures 1998 - 2008" yields at best inconsistent evidence and disputes about appropriate statistical models.]

2:45pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Regardless of ice melts, and so on... the world, on average, was cooler last year than the year before.

2:46pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Which is a puzzle, but there it is. The greenhouse model still has some holes in it, too. Evidence for it is actually pretty thin.

2:47pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd When it comes to CO2, that is. We know that CFCs and so on eat ozone. Which has been healing nicely, by the way.

[Of course, CFCs have nothing to do with greenhouse gases, but do prove quite nicely that human activities affect global-scale phenomena, in both directions.]

2:48pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I am not denying... just pointing out that it is not cut-and-dried. There are big questions. Even the basic ones aren't answered.

[Which ones?]

2:49pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Personally I would love it to be a bit warmer. Our last two winters here were a bit harsh.

2:51pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Record cold and snowfalls. I do understand that regional differences mean little. But still, some heat would be nice.
My next response tried to suggest, again, that complex systems are inherently non-linear and that if our planet is becoming less hospitable, for whatever reason, shouldn't we try to do something about it?

WillBurd

5:20pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Wiki on chaos: http://bit.ly/9ziZr - climate is complex, temp measurements limited -- systemic change undeniable - now what?

eachus

5:29pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I understand what you mean except: to what systemic changes do you refer? Known anthropocentric warming is not one of them.
[Anthropogenic (eachus corrected it, below) warming is a possible input, not a systemic change.]

5:30pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Yes, we are seeing strange behavior in the weather. But neither do the changes match greenhouse warming theory, or any other.

[Even the article that started this whole chain doesn't claim that the general trend does not align with the model predictions.]

5:33pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I am very familiar with chaotic systems, and I know how... well... chaotic they can be. But a theory must be proven...

[A misunderstanding, I think, of what a "theory" is in the scientific method, and perhaps a misunderstanding of a key aspect of chaotic systems -- complex interconnectedness.]

5:34pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd ... it is not enough to say, "Look! Lots of unpredicted things are happening, plus a bare few predicted things, therefore ..."

5:37pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Greenhouse warming today is on a par with "string theory": there are other hypotheses that explain observations equally as well.
[A rhetorical metaphor, but climate change studies are dealing with observable phenomena, testable every day.]

5:39pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Both are the "popular" theories (actually hypotheses). Those with other ideas tend to be ostracized, which is anti-science...[Again, science is about testing explanations--and discarding those that don't work to describe phenomena (and humans scientists can be as locked into their own world views as well as any one else--for the short term).]

5:43pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I wrote "anthropocentric" rather than "anthropogenic". Haha. Well, it could be either... :0)

The upshot of all this is that as frustrating as this dialogue was in its form, it still was an opportunity to engage with someone outside my normal circle, someone who was paying some attention to what I was saying, even if in disagreement.

To the extent that eachus' s view of climate change represents the more rational-sounding of the critics, I gained an understanding of the need for us, all of us, to be absolutely clear about where we get our data. If we can build the discussion around that then we all have a chance to arrive at the optimal outcome (or at least the optimal process).

Where I've gotten to is that I am comfortable with the idea that I do not understand all the key issues or facts. It's all open to questioning and reappraisal (which is also key to the scientific method, when practiced). Certainty is not a part of this world view. Nor is lack of certainty, in itself, reason to discard a given view of the world, if the viewer is truly committed to SEEING THE WORLD AS IT REALLY IS.

At the same time, my reading of the data suggests that our limited understanding of these hugely complex forces, and our fascination with our own immediate comfort, may have already put in place a systematic change that will substantially reduce the "comfort zone" for the human race. As realist and cynic Kurt Vonnegut, said, "So it goes." And, perhaps, so will we go.

Invitation to a Conversation

2009-10-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

An article in Science News from September describes how increased use of irrigation in northern India is depleting aquifers over a huge area -- home to one in every ten people on the planet. (And think about why it's so important for China to control the Tibetan Plateau, the source for this water and most of SE Asia's, one in every six people on the planet.)

Use of irrigation in this area was ramped up starting in the '60s, as part of the "green revolution." The goals of the revolution were admirable: produce more food to keep people from starving. But sometimes the actions we take, with the best of intentions, yield unintended consequences, if you'll pardon what has become a cliche.

In every action, some of the consequences can't be foreseen; that's part of life. The damnable part is when the negative consequences are visible, and nothing is done.

And, of course, it's not just northern India. Stories in the past few days have drawn attention to Yemen, Kenya, and China. A quick Google brought up a continuously updated map of current drought conditions in the US, which shows that every West Coast watershed is in drought conditions, It is interesting that the huge dead zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington is not thought to be the result of the reduced fesh-water inflow (partly because lower flow means fewer contaminants washed to sea). The primary cause is large-scale changes in wind patterns. Which is due to climate change. Which is due to ....

Of all the many chains of consequence that we have to deal with, those involving water may be the most important. If you want to track the ecological threat to human culture you can probably concentrate on water troubles. And soon you realize that is about the ways we use water for things (many of them necessary) other than drinking.

A study on the Human Appropriation of the World's Fresh Water Supply hits some of the high points:

The planet is largely water -- but only seven one-thousandths is available for human use
As the population has grown for tens of thousands of years people have used more water, and contaminated more water, but the water supply remains the same
About 65% of water humans use is for agricultural irrigation and is returned to the system mostly contaminated

And, the point that really got me interested, the thing that made me want to write this, a point backed up with daunting numbers and graphs:

The evidence is that over the last 40 years we have found more efficient ways to use water -- the increase has been much less than increases in population.

Efficiency is higher in some regions than others, which means there are still opportunities to reduce consumption. "We" are learning something.

No matter what the skeptics believe, humans do have an effect on their surroundings. It's not a sin; it's a fact. The sin comes when we don't accept responsibility for our actions and choose to ignore our legacy. And we are learning that we can learn.

We may not be perfect-able, but we are absolutely improve-able.

If we're going to start somewhere, we might as well start close to home --

What is the water picture in my area in terms of sources, storage, distribution and usage tracking (and every part of the US has dealt with drought and water-supply issues these past 10 years)?
And what is being done to deal with current threats, like a three- or four-year drought (let alone long-term climate change issues)?

I think of this in terms of starting a conversation with the people around us, a conversation could change the larger meme that sets the environment in opposition to near-term prosperity. "Choose the environment and you're out of a job." Of course, get enough people out a job in the next few months and things might change. But the conversation needs to change.

At this point I get to a place where I can only be skeptical. I'm not a cynic -- I have a great faith in individual humans. Groups ... not so much. But I have to start questioning the "call to action" tone of my last paragraph and that "absolutely improve-able" shot. I don't want to be seen as unrealistic about the odds for change, for more evidence of intelligence and for more long-term, humanistic thinking.

So you tell me. Take a second and write a brief comment below -- basically , answer the question:

"Is change possible"

"Yes" or "No".

If you wish to elaborate, please do. This is a chance to start one of those conversations, and now is as good a time as any to start.

A Call to Action?

2009-10-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of comparisons between this Depression and the last one, and the challenges facing Roosevelt then and Obama now. There is, however, one huge difference: the possibility of an actual revolution, based on the political strength of the Communist Party in virtually every country affected by the collapse of the global financial system.

In fact, the '30s Depression was a powerful recruiting tool, as the failure of western economies seemed to validate Karl Marx's prediction of inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. By the time Roosevelt took office there were probably fewer than 100,000 CP members in the US, but there were millions who thought this might be the last gasp of the ancien regime and good riddance.

So Roosevelt was working with a dynamic where corporate and finance capitalists were up against a potentially powerful adversary, and he could propose a middle road of evolutionary change that built in limited social safety networks. The oligarchs had little choice, and so went along with it -- for the time being. Once the War was over, it has been the underlying raison d'etre of the capitalist right to overturn the New Deal and re-establish corporate hegemony.

As we know, starting with Reagan, they were able to put in place the elements they were looking for. Specifically, they have created a judiciary with a vastly different style and attitude, one that is dedicated to preserving the prerogatives of wealth and position, and the dominance of the financial elite. Beyond that (with the help of a compliant news media), they were able to reframe the discussion around the fundamental evil of government and taxes.

For periods they actually ran the government, or enough of it, that they were able to strip out New Deal limitations and return to "free-market" values and policies. And they blew it. Their ideas about economic governance were put to the test ... and failed.

Many of them have also suffered some pain, but the real blow has fallen on almost every other area of our culture, including many who thought they had achieved the class status that would protect them. All has been sacrificed to protect the few at the top of the pyramid.

Simon Jones' article in The Atlantic this May called it "The Quiet Coup". And it almost sounds as if the meltdown were actually part of the plan to bury the New Deal -- which is exactly what happened. (FYI: Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He's one of the money guys. And his analysis is devastating. He also shared it with Bill Moyers earlier this year.)

To those patient oligarchs, government is of no longer of any real consequence in the areas that matter. And with the Supreme Court poised to grant full First Amendment "personhood" to corporations, they will have absolutely nothing to worry about on that score. It will be the new global corporate order -- energy, medicine, military, communications, finance, agriculture, water -- and its only obligation will be to shareholder value. And there is a core part of the right that has aided and abetted this takeover.

With a power grab this naked, this devastating to American (and world) culture, the critical question is why there hasn't been a public uprising. Not the so called Tea Baggers -- they're stuck repeating the lines they got from the oligarchy's mouthpieces. It is the triumph (for now) of emotion over facts, fear over reason. If they were to "win," that would just be another way to bring the whole structure down, which might lead some "strong-man" types to think they could end up in control over a fragmented opposition, left or right.

But then, the safety net put in place by the New Deal and Great Society reforms have meant that we (American workers and "middle: class) haven't yet hit bottom. In a few months -- if more people are on the street, going to bed hungry, seeing their families broken up by this new poverty -- we may see a more public display of indignation, even revolt. And which side will they be on?

For now, one can only wonder at the right who seems oblivious of what the "fire next time" might mean to them, and to all of us.

Trusting reason

2009-10-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

In the last post I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma "game" and the question of trust. This morning I read an article in The New Yorker that looks at the financial meltdown as "rational irrationality."

One of the article's points is that almost all the players in the debacle of sub-prime mortgages and CDOs knew that it was unsustainable, but the way the game was set up they had to opt for short-term gain and rely on their knowledge to get themselves a chair when the music stopped. Well, we know how that worked.

The article also discussed the issues involved in the prisoner's dilemma, specifically that a key factor for each prisoner is trying to guess how the other prisoner is going to act (especially in the single-iteration version, where there is the possibility of a high penalty for dual defection). The role of the investor, like the prisoner, is not to see the world as it really is, but as he thinks others see it. What's the harm in that?

It made me think back to Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund and investment company founded in the early 90's by John Meriweather. LTCM used not only seasoned traders, but some extremely high-powered mathematicians, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who in fact went on to share a Nobel Prize. They were "quants" who had developed equations that helped LTCM discover and take advantage of certain discrepancies in the arcane realms of fixed income arbitrage and foreign government bonds. The rate of return on each trade was tiny, but leverage allowed them to turn a tidy profit. For a few years their annual return was in the area of 40%.

The point of this is that LCTM knew that their advantage depended on using an approach that only they used. They had discovered an opportunity where the information (equation) available to them was asymmetrical to anyone else's knowledge. And they knew that when enough other people figured out what they were doing, the advantage, and the profits, for LCTM would disappear.

So, of course, as the market caught up to them, they kept on doing exactly what they had done. Of course, there were other factors, such as the Asian collapse and Russian crisis, but then, their trades were affecting those very markets. In September of 1997 their value fell from $2.3 billion to $600 million (for the same portfolio).

This led to a bailout of close to $4 billion organized by the Fed. (Can anybody say the word "counterparties?") Eventually, all the banks that participated by purchasing pieces of the portfolio realized at least small profits. LCTM eventually went out of business but Meriweather started another hedge fund, JWM Partners, supposedly having learned his lesson about leverage. That knowledge was not enough for the recent crisis, and JWM went bust in July of 2009. Some lesson.

My point is that, on the one hand, we trust what we know. The killer equation is always going to be the killer equation. And, on the other, we may think we can gauge what is in the other prisoner's mind and change our thinking accordingly based on our hard-earned experience. Unless our own perceptions (and killer equations) get in the way, because that's what we've learned to trust.

I suppose we are left with the moral that "rational irrationality" is more a tautology than an oxymoron. Many of us may try to be rational in the way we deal with the world, but but we just don't always know enough about how the world is really working, so we keep doing what worked in the past.

The only rationality is to accept the irrationality -- the asymmetry of information -- as a fundamental fact of existence, closely tied to constant change. Even the smartest quants need to be reminded that the world is more complex, and more changeable, than any equation. And every bubble bursts. Again.

Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt

2009-10-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

As I have become aware in writing these blogs, and some intrepid souls may have discerned from reading them, these essays are ways for me to play with, and test, some of my basic convictions. The challenge is for me to, within the space of a few hundred words, apply some basic filters to the chaos we call life and project a coherent image on the wall of the cave we happen to be sharing. And this current economic crises is casting some very interesting shadows.

One of the filters that I use to see human behaviors as motivated by some a simple but universal concern for fairness. Somehow, people are constantly observing what is going on around them and keeping up a running computation of what they're getting compared to any one else.

The behavior is well observed in children down to a few months old. Monkeys are acutely aware: "Female brown capuchin monkeys tend to turn uncooperative, and sometimes even throw things, if they see a neighbor receiving a lovely grape in exchange for the same token that gets them only a cucumber." -- Science News, September 20th, 2003. Even dogs get it, as the article from the January 9 Science News reports that dogs will go "on strike" if they are not treated fairly:

Dogs got increasingly fidgety and finally stopped shaking hands when a researcher repeatedly failed to supply rewards for a trick but gave another handshaking dog bread bits, Range says. The dogs cooperated longer, though, if their neighbors didn’t get a snack either.

What's more, as reported in the same article, both dogs and primates allowed for more inequity if they knew or were related to the lucky one.

In other words, my well-being is as much about what I compare myself to the well-being of my cohorts as it is about my absolute safety or comfort. I think about the certain comedians and memoirists of the '50s and '60s (and even more recently) whose schtick was riffing on "We were poor but we didn't know it." Right now we are seeing another Great Depression-type leveling, another rebuke to the acquisitive urge and , perhaps, a lessening of envy.

Envy may be one of the seven deadly sins, but who's really causing trouble, the one who has "too much" good stuff (the envied) or the envier? After all, we can't claim that the lucky one doesn't know that he's got more than the sad sack. That seems to be the one thing humans do pay attention to, all the time, in every situation. And because everyone can point to someone else who got a better deal, there doesn't seem to be an end to it. So maybe greed is just the other side of the fairness coin: fear of inequity (I lose) leads to inequity (I get, if not win).

Human nature, no? "Humans are acquisitive, some more than others, there will be winners and there are losers. That's the natural order of things." But in the planet's history not all cultures lived like that. The fact that they were sitting ducks for the ones that did doesn't mean they were wrong. We've gone pretty far down the road to planetary annihilation in just a few centuries, where many of those cultures functioned effectively for perhaps tens of thousand years. The fact that we can all do the math on fairness is what makes the Golden Rule universally honored, so why isn't it actually practiced more often?

If it seems our culture is basically acquisitive, that may not mean that the impulse was always there for a given human being. How you see the world right now is not the same as when you were young: we've all learned to use new filters to help us survive in this culture. But there are still vestiges of what may be deeper, more universal values.

A recent study, reported on the Science News (no this is not a plug, but I've been reading SN for 20-plus years and is an excellent overview of science reports and studies), suggests that children from about age seven to early adult years, in cultures around the world, generally agree that the best way to solve disputes and make decisions is by reasoned discussion and sharing of ideas, rather than by withholding affection or rewards, or relying on the authority of the family or the culture. For example:

Even in rural China, most 12- to 19-year-olds favored democratic decisions reached by a public vote or the consensus of elected representatives. In all settings, teens said that democratic systems ensure that the people have a “voice,” let different segments of society contribute to decisions and give the public a chance to remove unpopular government officials.

Government rule by the wealthiest or most knowledgeable people was generally deemed to be unfair, especially by older adolescents.

The study pulls together a broad range of research that reinforces the understanding that children and adolescents are naturally democratic. Especially in the sense of wanting their voices to be heard.

So what happens after early adulthood? Why doesn't every new generation bring the revolution with them? How hard can it be to create a society based on our common understanding of fairness? Maybe it's because they learn that their voices are not going to be heard.

Just to make it clear (to myself as much as you), I don't write these essays because I have all the answers (assuming there are answers). I write them because I hope that somehow they might kick off a conversation in which we can all share what we've learned and what we're looking for.

In this case I don't know why the forces for institutional inequity are so strongly defended, in many cases by the very people who've got the fuzziest end of the lollipop. Of course, this could only be the period before the tipping point, that any day the barricades are going up, and the aristos will have to reconsider inequity from some other position as the plebes opt out of the confidence game that's been running for much of the industrialized era. Could happen, but ....

For myself, the only meaningful, consistent action or attitude I have found is that I should think less about whether I'm being treated fairly and more about whether I am acting fairly to others. And, when I can, I learn something from the kids, the monkeys and the doggies, anybody who can teach a lesson.

[The title is from the instructions Wavy Gravy gave to participants in the Whole Earth New Games Tournament, 1973. Not a bad philosophy generally.]

Prisoners of Our Own Device

2009-10-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

One of the themes that tends to recur in my blog-essays is "trust." In a social world, we are constantly making decisions about how we accept or reject what other people say, which is largely a function of how much we trust them. (I suppose we can trust someone to always say something unacceptable: that's pretty much how I feel about Glenn Beck, or Glenn beck feels about Barack Obama, but that's another issue.)

Game theory has had an amazing impact on how we approach life. A relatively recent variation on the kind of puzzles with which mathematicians have been testing each for as long as there have been mathematicians, game theory actually gets close to questions of how people act in real life. In fact, game theory underlies much of the academic and political approaches to economics, political science, business, even biology.

(This would be the perfect place to get into the whole Chicago School of economics and the fundamentally flawed assumptions that helped the tribe of Friedman (and Greenspan) to drive our economy into the ditch. But no.)

Suffice it to say that game theory is often based on the judgment that there is something called "norms of rationality" -- people can be counted on to make choices that optimize their success, especially if success is measured as money. Not everyone agrees that a rational norm is so easily described, but that has been the dominant assumption of the last several decades.

One of the competing approaches to norms of rationality can be found in the posing of the "Prisoner's Dilemma." This math game goes back to 1950, and a pair of Rand researchers, Merril Flood and Melvin Dresher. I first became aware of it in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas column in the Scientific American in the early '80s. He laid out the parameters of the game in terms of two prisoners, kept apart and incommunicado, who each had something the other wanted. Because each passed the same spot in prison at different times each day, they worked out a way to communicate a way to exchange items. The challenge was that the first prisoner had to trust the other -- no point in leaving the goods unless he trusted the other to leave his -- and the second could just take the goods if they were there and leave nothing. So the set-up had to be that it would take several exchanges to transfer everything each prisoner wanted -- an iterative game.

Hofstadter then challenged computer programmers to write programs that maximized a prisoner's gains, or profits. In the classical approach to the game, where you can either "cooperate" or "defect," the strategy that best reflects normative self-interest is to defect, give as little as possible and take whatever is offered. There were already those who did not agree that that strategy reflected the way real people make decisions.

For one thing, there is evidence that people -- some people at least some of the time -- act in way they want other people to act. You could look at this in terms of the Golden Rule or Kant's categorical imperative, but it seems to be a part of human life.

Hofstadter developed rules that recognize that at least some (but not all) prisoners would act that way, and then challenged computer programmers to devise the most successful program, the one strategy that a prisoner would use to maximize his gains. Over several iterations the winning strategy was almost always the simplest: "tit for tat:" start by cooperating on the first move and every subsequent act reflects the partner's previous action: defect after defection, cooperate after cooperation.

Okay, great. That's an argument for trust. But didn't I just say in a previous blog, "Trust no one?"

I did say that, and I still do.The lesson from the Prisoner's Dilemma is that you do best by starting with cooperation, but it's only provisional. Be prepared to defect. Two or ten or 100 cooperative acts do not "prove" trustworthiness in the future.

I want to trust other people. Or rather, I want people to earn my trust. So I have to demonstrate trust. When it's appropriate. I also have to demonstrate that I'm paying attention to what they actually do and will answer a defection with a defection. And cooperation with cooperation. I think, in reality, we have a bigger social problem from trusting people who have not earned it, who have, in fact, defected.

That approach kind of takes the idea of normative rationality and refigures it as provisional, or contextual, rationality (my term, as far as I know). It's based on a moral decision (what I do matters, and what I want is a community based on trust) that gets applied to a world of social interactions that are largely unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. The rational basis of my decisions reflect a constantly changing reality -- the world as it really is right now. And it is informed by a desire to see things get better. We may not be prisoners (even if it is the Hotel California), but we're all looking for a jail break.

It's a Wiki world - Pt. 2

2009-09-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we looked at the changes in journalism and the reliability of the press, and used Wikipedia as the new model of distributed intelligence. My point, in part, was that we should not place absolute trust in any source of information: nobody gets it exactly right, and some get it disastrously wrong (or are disastrously wrong-headed).

This understanding also relates to the idea that asymmetrical information -- when one person has more info than the person she is negotiating with -- is in itself a moral hazard. If we want to deal with moral hazards, we don't need to get tough with punishment so much as make sure that everyone has access to the same information.

I find this casts an interesting light on the idea of privacy. If we are all human, what is there to fear from someone else knowing our human-ness? That's meant to be a rhetorical question, but the fact is that some parts of this society know a whole lot more about us than we think they do, or that we know of them. That type of asymmetry can easily be turned into impositions of power that is markedly asymmetric.

It's not so much about privacy as it is about guilt and shame -- we fear that our personal foibles and failings will makes us vulnerable to someone with intimate knowledge of us, especially if that person also has political power. But what if we all know so much about each other that we recalibrate guilt, and separate private human weakness from psychopathic, destructive behavior? What would that do to our astonishing homicide rate?

Small, cohesive social groups, like tribes or villages, are often marked by low levels of violence or crime. It could be argued that one reason for that is that in those cultures everybody knows everybody, information about people is pretty equally shared. The village works by both setting standards of conduct, and by helping identify and deal with personal problems before they are catastrophes.

Very few of us live in that type of village. But some of us are experiencing a heightened sense of personal community as we observe and engage in the conversations that flourish on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media networks. As a corollary, Wikipedia is an instructive model of how distributed learning creates a process that engages people across a broad spectrum while it also delivers a product of high (if not perfect) reliability.

I have great hope for Wikipedia, and for all the other tools that help us build meaningful social networks. We are just beginning, still learning how to handle these new sources of information, but perhaps this can be a way to share what we learn with a larger and larger part of our planet. I think that may be an unprecedented way to understand the unexpected ways we are, indeed, connected. To my mind, there is no more important lesson to be learned in our lives. Wiki on.

It's a Wiki world - Pt. 1

2009-09-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

An article in the current Atlantic looks at the Sotomayor nomination news cycle in terms of demonstrating how "news" content is coming largely from political ideologues who are effective at skimming all those feeds out there in order to isolate the most incendiary moments. The author, Mark Bowden, calls this "post journalism."

The article then repeats the meme that serious journalism -- the pursuit of a story that is focused on understanding context and background and worrying "truth" out of a mess of facts -- is dying, if not dead. As the profession of journalism becomes smaller and smaller, the time spent on news programming is more often filled by uncritical commentary on little splinters of reality. The point is not to find the truth: "No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right." And the Internet has a lot to answer for in promoting this type of post-journalism reporting.

That may explain a lot about our current political debate and the tenor of our news media, but just how long has journalism been around in any form? From its beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries, journalism flourished as a tool of different power groups. Slanted, vitriolic, aggrieved -- the truth had little to do with it. We have been fortunate enough over the last 100 years or so to have, somehow, been blessed with an enlightened practice of journalism that did make, at least some of the time in some places, an effort to find the truth. We can bemoan its passing, but why should we expect anything different, people being what they are?

Which brings me to Wikipedia. The idea of a user-generated encyclopedia struck fear into the hearts of those who believe in experts and objective truth. While I accept that experts are important, there are a lot of "amateur" experts out there who, taken collectively, have a lot to add to our understanding of factual reality. The stories of bogus articles and slanders got a lot of attention, but a recent study showed that Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. In other words, even the experts don't get everything right.

The real question concerns how we know whether something is a fact or ... something else. That comes down, I think, to trust. My own rule of thumb is simple: In matters of truth, trust no one." My second rule of thumb, a corollary if you will, is: "Trust everyone -- to get it wrong."

Every story is incomplete, slanted, infected with an incomplete understanding of which facts count, which ones don't. But all those stories might help you (me) understand what the larger truth is. And as you pay attention to who tells you what, you might be able to trust some people a bit more than others. Which does not relieve you of the obligation to test and verify. And to keep track of those who just don't seem to get anything right about the facts.

Wikipedia is a fantastic tool, but you shouldn't rely on it as your only source, any more than you should rely on the Encyclopedia Britannia as your only source. Wikipedia is here to stay, and it should be. The power of the decentralized and distributed learning, I think, opens the door to views of reality with a less restricted point of view. And I believe that where we are right now with blogger journalism is just an early phase of this development towards a more subtle, varied and variegated understanding or factual truth.

As more of us learn how to participate in the Wiki world -- sharing our knowledge with others in a cooperative and skeptical conversation about our world -- I have great hope that we can all learn important lessons. Especially about trust.
But then, perhaps I'm a little too trusting.

Moral Hazards

2009-09-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

One term that keeps popping up in discussions of the finance bailout (e.g., John Stossel a couple of weeks ago and in the WaPo this morning) is "moral hazard". The term has also been referred to in debates about health insurance. But you probably haven't heard a good definition of what the words actually mean.

The term dates back to the 1600s and was widely used in the British insurance industry by the 1800s. Wikipedia defines it as a special case of information asymmetry -- the advantage that goes to a party who has more information than the counterparty being negotiated with. In this sense, the moral hazard arises in that if one has special or inside information he will be tempted to use that information to "game" the transaction. At bottom is probably the idea that he would be a fool not to do so, and so the hazard or asymmetry must be identified and mitigated before the transaction is final.

In the current debate, commentators on the right, like Stossel, are appealing to another sense of "moral," in the sense that it is immoral not to properly punish a bad decision or mismanagement. Just like we make sure a house fire is an accident before putting it out, and lifeguards make sure the swimmer didn't just decide to venture too far out, and ER doctors first decide who's wrong or right before treating a gunshot. Oh, right. That's not the way life works in this modern, western, judeo-christian culture. Correction and improvement is one thing; punishment is something else entirely.

This is not just abstract, soft-headed charity, agape or eros. We have learned, through many hard lessons, that a neighbor's fire can burn our house, no matter who started it. It used to be that if you hadn't bought insurance from the fire fighters, your house was going to burn, no matter who started it. As a society we decided the price was too high -- to everybody.

In the last few years, there are some individuals, mostly but not entirely on the right, who have argued there is a moral hazard inherent in robust health care insurance -- people will use too much of it. If health care is too cheap, they'll just go running to the doctor for any frivolous reason at all. It doesn't matter that real life doesn't support this psychological tale; it was a textbook example of moral hazard, as defined by health insurers. And it was their argument for making the system difficult and mean: "We are removing the moral hazard for their own moral good. (And our profits.)"

So let us return to the failure and bailout of the financial sector of the economy. It is ironic to me that the system, again largely defined and sold by the right but support by key characters on the left, actually installed moral hazard in the system more than 30 years by assuring information asymmetry in the system itself. The key reason for removing oversight of banks and brokerages was that they -- the finance pros -- knew best, only they had the info to make the best choices and make the market work at its optimal efficiency. Left to these wise men, the market would just take care of itself. And I'm not even talking about quants! (Some other time, perhaps.)

This gospel was largely preached by the so-called Chicago School economists. The neoclassical offspring of von Hayek and Friedman, they believed they understood how to insure efficient markets. They leveraged a uniquely adolescent understanding of the world (Rand-ian objectivism/libertarianism) into an economic theory that valued concise measurements and simple predictive models, predicated on (universal) rational self-interest. They have stood astride the global economy of the last three or four decades convinced of the perfectibility of their models, and look how well it's worked!

Former Fed chief Paul Greenspan (a youthful acolyte of Ayn Rand's) rode his absolute conviction about the ultimate aim of economy's arrow right to the ground and only expressed mild chagrin that he hadn't -- that the industry hadn't -- foreseen the role of inefficient greed and self-destructive ambition. He still doesn't have his head around that. Who is John Galt, indeed.

When they talk to themselves, the right seems to be pretty comfortable trotting out "moral" issues. But what can be said about the morality of letting others suffer -- in terms of under- and un-employment, inadequate and uneven health care, a growing disparity between wealthy elites and not-quite-making-it proles -- while preaching moral hazard? Even if you don't actually say "Let them eat brioche?"

Our American character

2009-09-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

What is it about the "American character" that allows the kind of looney-tunes debate now taking place around our attempts create a rational health care system?

This debate goes back to the beginnings of modern medicine, which came at a price. The first insurance companies, in the thirties, were more like philanthropic organizations for groups like the Elks. It was the fixed wages of WWII that made employer-supplied insurance a way for GM and others to attract needed workers.

President Truman tried to deliver universal health care as a natural extension of Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," but a resurgent Republican party branded the policy, and him, as "communist." And it certainly helped that once the big employers realized how big that pool of insurance money was, there was no way they were going to give it up.

After decades of health care under this model we have a body of evidence that's pretty hard to ignore -- unless you want to. Consider:

We are the only industrialized country in the world without a universal public health system (link).
We pay almost twice as much per capita for the care we do get,
Spend a much lager percentage of GDP,
And our life expectancy is towards the bottom of the pack (link)
Last year, in more that 62% of US bankruptcies, medical bills were the main cause,
And most of those people had life insurance (link)

And it's not as if this information is difficult to find. A few minutes with Google will give you hundreds of studies and sources that tell the same story.

Even more confounding, as reported by Robert Creamer, "a poll conducted for Americans United for Change by the respected firm of Anzelone and Liszt -- completed last Friday -- shows that, by a 62% to 28% margin, likely 2010 voters would be more inclined to support President Obama's healthcare reform plan if it included a public option that gave people a choice between private insurance plans and a public health insurance plan."

An excellent piece in Slate by Timothy Noah, "A Short History of Health Care," makes the observation there is are two realities in this discussion:

"The trouble with the policy debate that's slowly beginning to emerge as the medical-industrial complex spins out of control is that it pays maximum deference to Reality 2 (political reality) and minimum deference to Reality 1 (the thing itself). "

The take-away is that our legislative system is not, in itself, democratic. Specifically, the Senate's function is to blunt the voice of the people. It was formed to protect the interests of the large land-owners (who were also largely slave owners at the time). In the past few decades the Senate has been also become the guardian of the large corporate interests, and there is almost no corporate interest larger than the alliance of insurers and pharma. The fact is that a relatively small number of Senators can effectively block any action that threatens their corporate allies. Rep. Jim Wilson (a protegee of Strom Thurmond) calls the President a liar and immediately raises a half million dollars (which is about what he received the last few years from insurance companies).

Add to that a few entertainers who see an opportunity to build an audience, and have no compunction to ignore the factual evidence, and you can motivate a few thousand disgruntled (if not exactly unified) partisans to assemble and grab a few minutes in the media spotlight.

The fact is there are many people unhappy with the political process. From the left side of the spectrum we it looks like our modern Know-Nothing, troglodyte party is about to take down the one chance we may have to create a rational health care system. But it ain't over yet.

For one thing, the American character may not be patient. It may want instant decisions, and not much palaver. We want the 80-yard touchdown play. Every time. But it seems we have a specific character in the White House who is comfortable enough with the reality of the thing as it is that he's willing to outwait the opposition, to stay with a strategy that is realistic about strengths and weaknesses and the critical importance of this opportunity.

It just might be that because of a singular American character, history, and time, is on our side.

Waiting for History

2009-09-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

I started this post yesterday, trying to think about the lessons we've learned, but got hung up trying to sort through a number of conflicting thoughts about the whole 9/11 industry, and so put it off. The delay proved (to me, anyway) once again the value of leisurely cogitation. Deadlines are all well and good -- I probably get more accomplished with them than without them -- but sometimes the timely is the enemy of the good (and, pace Ms. Huffington) first thought is not always best thought.

Like many, I can remember precisely where I was when I first heard about the plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just as I can remember clearly where I was when I first heard that JFK had been shot, when I first heard Eleanor Rigby on the radio, when I first saw my future wife, when the Northridge Quake hit.

Each of those was clearly a point in time when I was aware this is a discontinuity, a break in the seemingly seamless narrative of my life. Some moments are shared with others, but the truly profound impacts are always personal.

The fact that I and millions could watch the towers burning, see video of the second impact, and watch in real time as the first, and then the second tower fell, even though I was thousands of miles from New York, created a public moment of almost unprecedented scale. Out of that public moment came a shared agreement that this changes everything, that now we have learned something important about how the world works.

So, that's what I'm trying to ask myself now: What changed? What have we learned? (And by "we" I mean the political and news elite, largely based in New York and Washington, who define what passes for conventional wisdom in public discourse.)

We learned who the hijackers were, and how they spent their last days and hours, but did we learn why they chose this course of action? We learned that the bulk were from Saudi Arabia, but did we learn anything about the bizarre alignment of sybaritic sheiks and wrathful Wahhabi priests that share control of the Saudi kingdom? Did we learn anything of the Bush family's three generations of intimate relations with the Saudi royal family and oil interests? Of the festering popular discontent, in Arabia and elsewhere, with the huge role the Saudis (royals and Wahhabi) play in regional politics?

On the other hand, did we learn that the US is not an island, that we share a larger world with other people, other cultures, with many different ideas about personal and cultural ideals? Did we recognize that a nation is not defined simply by its leaders, any more than the US can be solely defined as Republican or Democrat, no matter who's in power?

Did we learn that in order to understand current conditions, we have to allow that unintended outcomes must always be taken into account? That our role in geopolitics, especially post-WWII, makes us the antagonist to many other cultures, that our vaunted power is most easily seen as a threat? That no matter what we think the cause or justification, aggression will be seen as aggression? That it can take decades, or even centuries, for these forces to play out?

And, critically, did we learn from the profoundly human tragedy of September 11, 2001, the tragedy we've been witnessing again the past few days, that individual lives do matter, no matter what the country, the politics, the religion?

When I referred to the 9/11 industry, I was thinking specifically of the common thread in almost everything I saw or heard yesterday on the news, an agreement that somehow what happened at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, on Flight 93 was all about our tragedy, best displayed in personal terms of our loss. That is powerful, and real, but it is only a first step in learning the lessons we need to learn.

The Greek playwrights (and their audiences) valued tragedy because it allows people (as a community, as well as individuals) to re-experience that sense of discontinuity, and to start fresh, one more time, to try to get past the ignorance and hubris that contributed to the tragedy in the first place.

I suppose the real lesson is that eight years is too short a time to really assess what we have learned. At the same time, there is no excuse that allows not asking the key questions whenever we can. We just have to be patient, and wait for history's gears and wheels to do their slow, pitiless work. And, while we're waiting, keep pushing for better answers here and now.

Common Sense

2009-09-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

For the past several years I have paid close attention to the use of "common sense," especially in political discussions. Most often the term is used by people who would describe themselves as conservative. So how does common sense work to support a conservative viewpoint and criticize a more liberal viewpoint?

Dictionary.com posts this definition of "common sense":

"noun -- sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence."

In other words, common sense is judgment that does not depend on intellectual questioning, but on recognizing what has worked in the past, the conventional wisdom. The sun comes up about the same time day to day, but over weeks or months gets earlier or later depending on the time of year. Cows need to be milked twice a day. A watched pot never boils. Red sky in the morning ... oh, wait, that doesn't really work around here.

Common sense is a way to get through the day without getting hung up in details that will keep from getting done what's gotta be done. It is, simply, a way to keep from thinking too much and acting too little.

But sometimes you won't be able to solve a more complex and singular problem without delving deeper. In those cases, relying on common sense may, eventually, add to your difficulties, or even bring disaster. Sometimes using common sense results in "Ready, Fire, Aim" types of strategies when the only way to really deal with a problem is to make sure you've got the right target and your aim is true. (I highly recommend Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" as way to think about the limits of common sense on a cultural level.)

For myself, when I hear the term "common sense" I get suspicious. It is the close equivalent of hearing "trust me" from a salesperson: I am being asked to suspend my skepticism and intelligence in order to go along with someone else's program. First question: Who benefits? Trying to discern the answer to that will make common sense thinking all but useless. For one thing, you soon realize that someone else's common sense is rarely exactly the same as yours. Appeals to common sense are too often emotional appeals to blind obedience, more about being negative than actually solving a problem. "Stop asking questions, just do what I say, it's common sense."

In this current political discussion, there are some who are making appeals to common sense based on connections to the revolutionary pamphlet penned by Tom Paine. If they would read that work they might see that Paine's use of "common" had more to do with using the common language of ordinary people than rejecting the value of rational inquiry. Few people have made a more damning indictment of common sense and conventional wisdom.

"Common Sense" was meant to arouse a political reaction -- it was avowedly provocative in its rejection of the divine right of kings and hereditary wealth and power. It was in effect a direct attack on the prevailing common sense.

If you're really interested in understanding Tom Paine's attitude towards politics and society you might want to read his later works "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason." These books were unapologetically based on the use of deep, intellectual questioning of the conventional wisdom of the time, and advanced a view of social responsibility that would have 2009 conservatives (justifiably) shouting "socialist." At the time, these works were reviled by many, particularly in Britain, where he was tried in absentia for seditious libel.

In other works Paine also let it be clearly known that he viewed private property as theft from the common inheritance, and slavery as an absolute iniquity. None of these positions made him many friends. When he died there were only six mourners, two of them black freedmen, perhaps because they recognized his basic, and uncommon, humanity.

That Tom Paine should be a hero to our current clique of fear mongers indicates that they know little about the real person or his writings. They want to be revolutionaries without the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, it also indicates how little we know about either common sense or "Common Sense."

Old Habits, Old Fears

2009-09-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

According to an article in today's LA Times, President Obama is losing support among a particular group of voters -- those who consider themselves "white." The reason for this drop, according to the article, is Obama's policy stands. Oh, really?

I beg to differ. To anyone who watches TV or reads the news, the dominant voices have not been policy wonks engaged in a rational discussion of specific proposals and likely alternatives. The voices I've heard have been loud, angry, pushed beyond reason. The words generally reflect the chatter coming from Fox and the radio rightocracy, and that chatter has been focused on the "otherness" of Obama. In other words, his blackness.

No matter what issue is raising the right's ire, the argument comes back to "it's bad because it's Obama. You just can't trust him." That's why the health plan must be called "Obamacare," even though the plan is being written in the House, or the current version of the bailout, first cobbled together by Bush apparatchiks, must be called "Obamanomics." It's the frame, and it's all the right seems to have.

It is also racist. And it's working, if the poll released today is accurate, and if you think raising suspicion among white folks about Obama's otherness can be called "working."

Just to be clear, let me provide a brief but workable definition of "racist."

First of all, I use it to refer to actions and to speech, not to intention (because I really can't know anyone else's intentions, only their actions).
Second, a word or action is racist when it ignores the individuality of any person, and judges them as a member of a group, as if every member of the group can be assumed to share those characteristics.
The more negatively you view the group, and those characteristics, the more invidious the racist word or deed.

Racism is, then, the denial of human individuality. It does not belong to any one culture or skin color, and there is probably no one who does not sometimes at least use racist language or thoughts. To me, the only thing that matters is how we respond when a racist word or deed is pointed out. This is not about guilt (one of my recurring themes), it is about taking responsibility for being a human being on this planet trying to coexist with other, separate and only partly knowable human beings.

There have been times and places when humans protected their families or villages by shunning the "other," by seeing them as less human than us, easier to reject, to enslave, to eliminate. That is a perfect definition of ignorance. But we live in a world where the interconnectedness between families, villages, nations makes ignorance a liability. We have learned too much about plague, war, and global financial breakdown. It's time to leaves those old habits and fears behind.

Once again, we are talking I suppose about intelligence, and the ongoing responsibility to see the world as it is, to push ourselves beyond our preconceptions and prejudices. I'm trying to do my best, and to make it easier for others to do a little better and realize their best as we glimpse and appreciate the ways we are ALL connected.

Happy Labor Day.

Religion: A Modest Proposal

2009-09-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

Critic James Wood, in a recent article in the New Yorker (subscription required to read the entire article), looks at the dispute between "God and the new atheists." With recent books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hithchins attacking "the god delusion" there have of course been a number of counter-arguments defendng the power of faith. As there have been for hundreds thousands of years. Nothing new.

In this particular dispute can I ask for one point of linguistic clarity? Can we make a distinction between that which is "spiritual" and that which is "religious"?

To wit: the word religion describes a community of belief much more than it describes the relationship of the individual believer to whatever is held to be holy. There may be one Holy Roman Catholic church, but there are many beliefs about the specific nature of god or Jesus or specific saints or teachings held by the members of that church, no matter what the pope says. Perhaps as many beliefs as there are self-professed catholics.

The article looks at a recent work by the Oxford don Terry Eagleton, who pulls off being both a Marxist and a Catholic. As soon as Wood tries to summarize Eagleton's defense of faith you can see the basic problem.

On the one hand Eagleton recognizes that the god of Aquinas (or Maimonides) is so far distant from the concerns of this planet that he (god) can only be talked about as the sum of all reality, the Thing that Is. This language is indistinguishable from the way that even atheists talk about the universe, or from the descriptions of the Tao or of the operations of sub-atomic particles. That is the Spiritual view, human beings trying to come to grips with the limits of our minds in comprehending the vastness of the exterior world. There may be elements of faith in the spiritual discussion, but it is still grounded in the open-ended process of approaching the numinous in the swirling, random dust of our lives.

It's when Eagleton starts to talk about the specific nature of god and the relationship to our daily lives that he goes to a different level entirely -- that of professed and shared belief whose main value, in the manner of Wittgenstein, is to connect us to the culture around is. That is Religion -- and it has almost nothing to do with spirituality. It may have much to do with social orthodoxy, and obviously has a great deal to do with forging political support and religious armies prepared to do battle with ... whomever.

When we talk about creeds or sects or organizational entities, we are talking about Religion, not about the nature of god or spiritual transcendence. When we try to understand why Life (in every sense) is what it is we have entered Spiritual realms.

For one thing, the individual on a spiritual path is, almost by definition, on an individual path. This has always been a major problem for any church -- keeping firm control of all those shining-eyed mystics who have experienced god for themselves, and don't need to go through a priest. Individual knowledge, then, threatens priest and church, while shared superstition and fear strengthen them.

At pretty much any period in human history (since the rise of cities and government and all that) religion was a kind of counterbalance to kings and earthly power, with dangers to both sides from either too cozy or too hostile a relationship. But both sides gain from subjugating the spiritual individual to the religious/political organization (and promising an afterlife better than this one -- the ultimate retirement benefit).

Somehow, the spiritual has survived, and perhaps you and I can agree (as individuals) to treat religion as Religion and spirituality as Spirituality. That might be a good start.

Losing Control?

2009-09-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

A Financial Times article on the redoubtable Glenn Beck, starts with the statement that the White House "lost control of the healthcare debate in August," a meme that reflects the conventional wisdom inside the beltway and repeated by most (but not all) national news pundits.

The article looks to the Glenn Beck phenomenon -- rising viewer numbers as national advertisers separate themselves from his incendiary attack on Obama et al -- as a learning opportunity. But what is learned?

First of all, control is in the mind of the pundit. The corollary is that control, outside the pundit's mind, does not correlate to the loudest voices and heat from a partisan crowd.

Glenn Beck has learned that incendiary language can deliver an audience big enough to provide a substantial income to him. Rush Limbaugh is a role model in this regard. I have a family acquaintance who has been a social friend of Rush's for some years. In social situations his political opinions are well hidden, or far short of his caffeine- and whatever-driven on-air rants. Perhaps Glenn has a private life, as well.

Being a talk show host is a job. If your goal is to build an audience base that delivers revenue, then you're certainly incented to keep pushing the language to keep pushing the audience. And Glenn is just doing his job.

Now, about that audience. After decades of scientific polling, through every vagary of historical upheaval, it is clear that are large groups, on both ends of our political spectrum, who are so identified with that viewpoint that reality that they are not likely to change, no matter what the opposing argument or candidate. However, those groups do not share the same values.

To make a gross but useful generalization, the right is less open to intellectual arguments than the left. Glenn Beck has found that his audience responds to emotional stimuli -- fear, anger, frustration -- and he feeds that emotional rush. But this is not the same as controlling the argument -- unless his audience controls the apparatus of government. And they don't.

Pundits, no less than Glenn, live in the present. "Today is the end of history. Political reality is the only reality. And no one will ever hold me account for what I said yesterday, or last week."

Now, that's control.

Climate and Guilt

2009-09-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

As noted, in earlier posts, one of my general themes vis-a-vis politics is taking a close look at the language used and understanding the frame (or meme), in order to get at the "real" message represented by a particular statement -- no matter who the source.

Tracking the discussion on "global warming" is one of those activities that can make you crazy if you only react to the frame. The fact that the LA Times persists in giving Jonah Goldberg a prominent spot on its Op-Ed page has made me a little crazy in the past, but I'm trying to take the time to apply the de-framing exercise to his screeds, and I'm finding there is a lot to learn about Jonah and his fans, whoever they are.

Take today's column, "Maybe it's the sunspots" (it has a different title online). Along with a shallow dip into the science of sunspots and their correlation to warmer or cooler climatic periods, Jonah gets to the meat of his argument in the last third of his column, as he talks about being "lectured and harangued" about his choice of toilet paper or cereal or shopping bags. That's what really cheeses him off -- being made to feel guilty by some snotty environmentista.

Look at what most of the right says about climate change (or global warming, or whatever) and it comes down to an argument about who's at fault, buttressed by how expensive it will be to fix it, even if it is our fault, which it's not. After all, we exhale CO2, how could it be bad for us? Fox News even had their own viewpoint last Friday.

In other words, for those folks who see such issues in terms of a divinely defined moral order, how could we be doing something immoral? Don't tell me I'm guilty! George Lakoff (earlier bog) has an interesting anlaysis of the political identities that see the world in this way.

For those of us whose experience of the world demonstrates that we are responsible for our actions -- and that responsibility is NOT the same as guilt -- we are confronted with this basic disconnect. We accept that we don't know all the answers, but that doesn't mean that we ignore what we do know while we keep asking the questions that will get us closer to the truth, inconvenient or not.

In some future blog we will also look at the role of "common sense" in terms of this disconnect.

Dreaming

2009-08-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

I'm short of time today, but I have a general question(s) about dreams. Call it research for our current project.

Do you pay attention to your dreams, as in trying to record them?

Do you try to interpret them?

What are your recurring dreams?

What is the most frightening dream you can remember?

Do you dream often? Rarely?

Reality vs. Rhetoric

2009-08-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

Back a few decades, at the start of my second year as a Teaching Assistant in English, we were given a new course of instruction to follow. Instead of teaching "English Composition" we were to present "Rhetoric." The idea being, I think now, that a knowledge of rhetorical strategies would better equip our freshman readers with the tools to understand the difference between what somebody said and what was real. This was at the precise time that UC was under fire. New Governor, ex-second-billing actor Reagan had just fired Chancellor Clark Kerr in retaliation for the Free Speech Movements disruptions a couple of years before.

I don't think the curriculum change had anything to do with the political shift. And I certainly don't think our muddled approach to Rhetoric was was any more effective in raising political consciousness than what we had been doing -- reading, discussing and writing about the books that in various ways tried to explore what was both true and human.

At the same time, in the past few years I've used what I learned about rhetoric those many years ago to help understand one of the most vexing issues for progressives -- why have conservatives, over most the last 30 years, "owned" the political debate?

A few years ago, my friend Nick Hanauer had turned me onto the work of George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist and author of numerous books. many focused on the issue of language as apolitical tool, and on the values that are represented, sometimes subtly, focused on some key words and constructs. His term (used by many) was "framing." He exhorted those on the left not simply to harrumph and argue about these terms, but to find ways to reframe the argument. In other words, it's all about rhetoric as key to controlling reality.

At that point (2007), Nick, was trying to find ways for non-rightists to amend the framing of the political reality, was finishing co-writing and publishing "The True Patriot." The book draws quotes from key Americans, and intersperses them with an argument that neither the right nor left owns "patriotism." The book, in other words seeks to "reframe" the idea, the word in terms other than how the right was using it.

Also in my mind: in October of 2004 a writer in the NY Times, Ron Suskind, quoted a white House aide:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."^[link]

In other words, again, Rhetoric trumps Reality. A sophistic talent for rhetoric is certainly a valuable tool in acquiring power (vide Shakespeare's Richard III, or Marc Antony in "Julius Caeser") or moving multitudes (Prince Hal in Henry V), but often it is a tool clever people can use to avoid really thinking about something and to make appeals to emotion and fear. (FWIW, there was much speculation that the "aide" was actually Karl Rove himself.)

And if power is your highest goal, I suppose you'd be a fool not to use rhetoric to destroy an inconvenient truth.

Until it doesn't work any more.

It may be possible that we are seeing that tipping point now. No matter how loud the voices of Tea Baggers, Birthers or Death Panelists, they are not creating any kind of mass movement, other than a vague unsease, if not outright disgust for the whole process and all the actors. We've been hearing the same scary claims, rhetoric if you will, since the '80s. There's a solid line that connects Lee Atwater (deceased) to Roger Ailes (Fox News) to Karl Rove. With Rove in sole control the right is in disarray. His key strategy has been ... to label the congressional health care debate "Obamacare" (there's framing for you) and to make claims that don't even survive half of the first news cycle. You can smell the desparation.

I'm all in favor of change, but the cold reality is that most people will resist making a decision about change until they are convinced things are so bad that any decision is better than the status quo. As weird as it seems right now I think we're still a way from any tipping point. And I think Obama does, too. But that's the thing about tipping points.

And if at some later stage we get to the point (after going through a little hell) that we are better at seeing the reality behind or beyond the rhetoric, that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

Another quote from John Erskine.

2009-08-27T16:20:00.001-07:00

"Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information."

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

2009-08-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the last century, John Erskine, a young scholar in European literature and Columbia professor, delivered a lecture at Amherst on the subject of Virtue, as seen through the eyes of the western literary tradition. He observed that, at least since the time of the Anglo-Saxons, intelligence was considered a peril, and that English (and American) literature continued to support that judgment. I can think of clear examples in Beowulf, Paradise Lost and Tom Jones, for example. His essay also points to the English writers who thought that Intelligence was at least as important as Will or Innate Goodness, but makes it clear that our Anglo-Saxon-derived intellectual history generally distrusts the clever hero, and sides with the "natural" individual who has, at least, good intentions. (Pace George Bush and Karl Rove.)

In an introductory paragraph to a reprint of that address he summarizes with the thought that:

"... intelligence is one of the talents for the use of which we shall be called to account--that if we haven't exhausted every opportunity to know whether what we are doing is right, it will be no excuse for us to say that we meant well."

For me, this encapsulates the key divide in our political reality and challenges the dominant ethic of the neo-conservative right, which I interpret as: it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you meant well (or it achieves the ends you desire). Which only begs the question of how I am supposed to know what you meant.

I propose a couple of rules of thumb:

First, I cannot know with any certainty what is in your heart, nor can you know what's in mine. Any claim along those lines is by its nature inappropriate and untrustworthy; it cannot be part of any meaningful dialog, no matter how important as interior monolog.
We are left then with words and deed. Words are important, but must be verified, over time, by deeds; and deeds must be verified by consistency. Do your words match your actions? Do your actions display a rational guidance? Do mine?

My takeaway from this: Intelligence is not a trait, or a gift, like perfect pitch or sprinter's speed. Intelligence is a practice, a discipline, a commitment to questioning what we often call common sense and conventional wisdom. It is a recognition that our primary task is to see the world as it really is even when our perceptions and environments--and the tenor of the political and intellectual discussion surrounding us--seem to make it impossible.

In the sense that intelligence is a moral obligation, it is an obligation that this culture does not much respect, and of which much of our news and communication media seems to entirely unaware.