Distributism

Because it came up in the Chesterton comments, I bring this forward from June 2011. I was going to make some of these points in the comments, but see that I was smarter ten years ago.

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Distributism – You can catch wikipedia here. A more informal, modern take here.

All I had remembered about Distributism is that it had been championed by Chesterton, and its slogan was “three acres and a cow.” I hadn’t even gotten that right, actually, as I had misremembered it in an American fashion, “forty acres and a cow.” It was an individualist twist on the marxist idea of workers owning the means of production, in that individual workers would own their means of production, not The Workers as a group. Which is certainly an improvement, as The Workers always turns out to be a front for New Bosses. Hillaire Belloc was also a proponent (no surprise), and much of Catholic social action of the 30’s, including the Antigonish Movement, was influenced by the idea. My grandfather left Nova Scotia before the Antigonish Movement, and I don’t know if any siblings or other relatives he left behind were participants. But he moved to Massachusetts, and after some grim times and false starts, moved to Westford and eked out a living the rest of his days on…three acres and a flock of chickens. He usually needed another job as well, beyond selling eggs and strawberries. It’s an important addition to the discussion, as it was to Carl’s income.

Nestled in Chesterton’s thought was the belief that not only could a man support a family if he were given such means of production, but that a certain type of historical Englishness would be preserved. “Three acres and a cow” were not the only possible means of production distributism might provide, but the example was meaningfully chosen. He desired a return to bucolic England. So did Tolkien, if his Shire is any indication. There is certainly some element of unhealthy fantasy here – not the elves and magic-imbued artifacts, but the memory of England as it never was, only as it seemed to a child’s eyes. That the fantasy was sustained by continuing examples of charming smallholders even in their adult experience can be attributed to convenient data selection – confirmation bias.

It’s easy to see how the idea arose. Small farmers rented from large landowners, often hereditary, and often contributing nothing of obvious value to society. An observer might well think “if these farmers owned that land and didn’t have to support this ridiculous aristocracy, they could do much better.” By the late 19th C this was already under correction and breaking down, but that might have not been easy to see while living through it. Changes in the law made aristocrats less and less eligible for those rents, and they had to resort to other means of support. Investments was one, and the financiers and money-movers were reaping that reward. Perhaps this is what galled Chesterton and contributed to his early antisemitism – that the money was finally being redistributed, but not in a way that would preserve his myth of Merrie England. Someone else had cut in line, somehow.

Imagine if such a system had come in. It has a certain attractiveness to it, that an impoverished person in Detroit might be able to make a claim on the government and say “give me three acres and a cow further upstate” as a way of getting a leg up. Except you likely couldn’t live on that. A young man I have known since his childhood has forty acres, is very intelligent, works very hard, and is supporting only himself. He still needs outside work to get by. So this original distributism might allow one to subsist – which is historically accurate for preindustrial England but not what Chesterton was envisioning. If we had gone that route, we would be a poor nation. Americans in many cases actually do own their means of production now – a computer and a cell phone being the most obvious examples.

In the debate about job creation a similar, though updated myth has come in. The 1950’s of our imagination, where a man could go to work at a good union manufacturing job and make his way in the world is the same sort of fantasy: not only a type of job, but a type of life that should still be available, dammit! What’s wrong with America that we can’t do this anymore? Well first, we never did. The poverty rate was almost 25% for the 1950’s. My uncle whines about this all the time, and he’s not the only one, dreaming of a world that never was of manufacturing jobs dominating, not in any era. Second, even for those who had it, it is a life that people wouldn’t go back to. How do we know? Because even when it was still available, people got out of it unless they were in the most favored of manufacturing situations. When I was in school, no one waxed eloquent about the great joys of manufacturing jobs – they were referred to as soul-deadening assembly-line, or shoe factory, or electronic assembling employment. It was no more the great nostalgic time of American greatness than Chesterton’s bucolic fantasies were in his day. As Garrison Keillor wisely pointed out. “We think of those as simpler times, because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others.”

But third, and most important, even if we could, we can’t. We may think it a tragedy that manufacturing has gone elsewhere, or think it a great blessing, but either way, that world is not in any possible future. We may be pessimists who believe that 50% of us will be unemployed in 2040 or optimists who believe a technology-supported, human value-added economy is going to be the great liberator, but either way the change is coming.

Government Grant

Originally published January 2011, almost 9 years ago.  Read the last comment, which just came in today.

This does not inspire confidence

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We got word today of our bureau getting a $220,000 grant from the federal government. Exclamation points!!! Cheeriness!!! Yay, us!!!

Being postliberal, I was less excited. Reading the full announcement, I was less excited still. This was my reply to the email, quoting the last paragraph of the official announcement.

I'm glad we got the money and all, but what the hell does this mean?

The grant will be used to implement mental health outcome measures for anyone receiving or requesting services from the designated community health programs around the State. Two public domain tools will be utilized to collect and report on the data: the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) and the Adults Needs and Strengths Assessment (ANSA). These tools have been demonstrated to be highly effective in supporting a person centered treatment planning process, improving communication and collaboration with an individual’s supports and services in the community, empowering individuals and families in the service planning process, and promoting a more effective management of service resources and supports over time.

They're all mad; mad, I tell you. Mad as hatters. We're the only ones left.

#24 - Arch Humor

There is a whole style of comic performance and writing that relies on snark, on archness. It is comic hipness. I won’t try to trace its history, but it includes Carlin more than Cosby, Newhart, or Pryor. You could sense it in Carson and Leno, but it is Letterman’s stock-in-trade. SNL seems to have retained the joys of silliness through its many incarnations, but the attitude of superiority has never been far below their surface. Al Franken breathed it. Monty Python, very little archness. There’s a touch in Steve Martin, and not so much as you’d think in Bill Murray or Will Smith. Very little in Robin Williams.

I must have liked it fairly well over the years – PJ O’Rourke has got plenty, Bryson moved increasingly in that direction. The tone is there in Dave Barry, in Garrison Keillor. But I find it quite tiring and irritating these days. That raising of the eyebrows and looking toward the audience with amusement at how stupid, how gauche, the particular object of ridicule is now provokes a desire to punch their slightly-lifted noses. Except if they can still laugh at themselves.


I have noted how much I value the ability to laugh at oneself as a measure of emotional health. I think some of that is in play here. Rick Reilly used to be able to laugh at himself, and was funny. Now he can’t and he sucks. Bill Simmons still can, for the time being. Barry laughs at himself easily; Keillor can laugh at his young self but less so at his adult self; O’Rourke can still skewer himself (though perhaps less…?), Bryson is a mixed bag on this and always has been. If you go back over the entries in the first paragraph, the pattern holds pretty strongly: those who can self-mock stay funny. Trudeau and Breathed started by being able to laugh at themselves, then lost this. Scott Adams’s pounding on the stupidity and meanness of management worked when Dilbert and Wally’s foibles were also a main focus. As that went, and they became only the hapless everyman observers of the lunacy, Dilbert became less funny.

Ben reads Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris. I can tell they have this snarky humor - it may be the humor of the era, growing up slowly in the 70's, establishing dominance in the 90's. It is certainly the humor of the reader more than the viewer. I don't know if either of them have the ability to send themselves up, but I'm pretty sure that would be the dividing line whether I liked them.

Update 2011: Wow. I hadn't realised it had gotten this bad. I sense a Firesign Theater reunion right around the corner. So topical, so now!

Update 2019.  I had not included the late-night TV hosts in my original essay, but I think it applies to them as well.  I am not especially knowledgeable about the topic, but it is my impression that they started off being able to laugh at themselves but have become less able to over the years.

Wikipedia Bias

Yeah, that could be a whole category on a blog, couldn't it? There was a Ferdinand Marcos link on the Wikipedia main page today. I come from a Marcos-hating era, of course, as his declaration of martial law occurred while I was liberal, and his fall from power occurred when I was apolitical. In the end, I recalled, even the American conservatives dropped him as just too corrupt and too vicious, however reliably anticommunist he was. So I still had extreme negative associations with Marcos.

Yet I recalled a doctor from the Philippines, Melicio Flores, who I had worked with during the 80's and 90's at the hospital. I recall him being very anti-Marcos, pro-Aquino, but also annoyed at some of the posturing his countrymen were doing back home. Something along the lines of They forget how they cheered him then, early on. He did some good things early on, that they benefited from but don't talk about now. Many of the families that are against him now made a lot of their money by being his friends. And they forget how dangerous his enemies were. Still, Dr. Flores was glad to see him go. Fifteen years early would have been fine with him.

Thus, I thought it a good time to read up on Ferdinand and Imelda, to see what good things had been accomplished, however roughly, that might moderate my negative opinion of him.

Apparently there were none. According to Wikipedia there was nothing redeeming about him ever, other than being clever. And American involvement in the Philippines was likewise entirely without virtue until the day that Reagan belatedly cast Marcos aside. I'm going to bet that's not true. Not that I doubt any of the accusations they make against him. I expect that they are sourced and accurate.

I also expect that the account is slanted enough to be deceitful. Perhaps not. Perhaps he really was a Ceausescu, a Saddam, a Stalin, whose virtues were so insignificant as to no longer bear mentioning. Yet is should be noted even with those comparisons that Saddam and Ceausescu started off pretty reasonably those first few years.

Of Pancakes and Candidates - and Feathers

Ben is up from Houston, and is re-experiencing what it was like to grow up here in NH presidential primary season.  We get frequent phone calls, ignoring many because of caller ID.  We didn't have that in earlier years.

We were trying to recall who the candidate was who fell off the back of the stage while flipping pancakes.  Tracy and Ben had been present for the event.  A school snow day, perhaps.  Was that '96 or 2000? Or perhaps even '92?  No, it was all Bush 41 and Buchanan for that one - we would have remembered that.  Was it Gary Bauer?  It wasn't Dole... It wasn't Alexander...Forbes?...Dornan?

It was Bauer, 1996, for those tormenting themselves over it.

We discussed how such foolishness is in many ways a good thing.  Even our stuffiest, most self-important candidates have to venture such things.  They have to risk looking foolish, having to quickly cover, looking a little sheepish.  You can't imagine Vlad Putin putting himself in that position, nor Bashar Assad.  Dictators try to look like a Man of the People by wearing military garb, as Saddam Hussein or a thousand Latin American leaders did.  In the West, and I think particularly in the Anglosphere, we require more.  We make you throw baseballs, and eat kielbasa.

I think Obama is pretty imperious, yet I can easily imagine him covering a pancake-flipping fall with charm and grace. Mao, not at all, and Hu Jintao, just barely starting to make his way into that territory. That tells us something about a country, doesn't it?

It has it's bad side, of course, and isn't exactly a qualification for the presidency.  Plenty of corrupt, glad-handing, back-slapping politicians also have that common touch we like.  But it provides a check on one type of bad presidency, and for that we should be grateful.

It's been that way a long while, too.

McLaren, Bell, MacArthur

Somewhat accidentally, I have recently encountered an essay by Brian McLaren, portions of Rob Bell’s farewell address, and half a chapter of John MacArthur discussing changes in the church. All three referred in rather general terms to other Christians who had disagreed with them or criticised them. In each case, I thought “Y’know, those people don’t put it like that. They have a better argument for what they do and why they do it.”

In each case there were additional comments available – the Amazon book reviews for MacArthur, the comments sections for McLaren and Bell. As these things go, those in agreement were more prominent in all cases, and they in turn were even more pronounced in misreprenting what “those other” Christians believe. But those in disagreement were no better. In all cases, the references were not to individuals, where one could perhaps discern whether the quoted person was indeed central to a Christian group or movement, or even – mad thought - track down an actual quote. It was vaguer than that: the evil old way or new way or other way of seeing things. And we’ve got their number. We can display why they are wrong in just a sentence or two.

Do we all do this? Render ourselves unable to give an accurate summary of other *POV’s, and embed ever more comfortably in our own nests?

*shouldn’t that be P’s OV? That is accurate but strange-looking. What is that acronym's protocol?

No Politics

Very little political this month, and most of that is noting what others think rather than what I think. Looking over the last few months, that has been increasingly true. Replaced by music.

Maybe I'm not thinking as much, and so not writing about my thought.  Much easier to watch other people think.

My current thought is to read absurdists and existentialists and connect it to church and culture.  My fear is that I will have many brief, unrelated thoughts that don't tie in to any helpful ideas.

(Head slap) Lists!  Lists are supposed to drive up traffic, and are traditional at the end of the year.  I imagine they drive up traffic with real readers, too, not the in-and-out kind that come over to download ABBA or meerkat pictures.

AVI's Top Ten...Top Ten...can't think of anything.  Absurdist dramas isn't likely to grip the imagination, nor is ABBA costumes, nor obscure NH villages, and English language trivia you can get on other sites pretty easily.

Note To Self

Events are not interesting to others, even if they care about you, just because they happened to you.  They must be narrated well and/or have some other point of interest.

I deeply fear that all stories are going to end at Westford Center someday. DNR.

If that sounds grim, I'm a pretty strong DNR guy anyway.

Who to thank

For the second time recently, I have seen a car with a few similar bumper stickers on the back. Something like "Got Medicare? Thank Democrats." "Got Social Security? Thank Democrats" And even "Got Equality? Thank Democrats."

It is easy to see what they mean. They mean legislative votes. They are claiming that it was primarily Democrats who designed and voted for these things - and let us leave that part of the argument aside for the present - and you wouldn't have them otherwise. \

But that leaves out entirely the more important meaning of those words. Do Democrats pay for those programs all by themselves? Certainly not, and they would never claim so. But it is fascinating that the deeper who-to-thank question does not even occur to them. They go through all the trouble and cost of discussing, designing, ordering, and distributing these stickers and no one says "Hey wait. There's a problem here we might not want to be associated with. If you've got Medicare you should really be thanking all Americans, don't you think?"

I find these mental slips enormously revealing. People say what they really mean, often unwittingly, if you let them go on long enough. The implication that the lawmaking part is almost the whole deal, with the money-finding part a rather distant consideration is exactly how they do think about such things. The government action is all, the action of the people nothing. (See especially Al Gore, considering the government permissions to be the key to inventing the internet, and the government mop-up the key to Love Canal.)

I will predict, in fact, that even if confronted with being busted as government centered narcissists they will still not be able to really see what the problem is. They will still see the voting for legislation as not merely one necessary aspect of the thing happening, but almost the entire show. That the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of many others is involved will be regarded as "well yes, technically, but..."

I always thought those "If you can read this, thank a teacher" and similar sentiments were badly overstated and inaccurate. But they are enormously more justified than this new offering from the Strafford County Democrats.

Energy

I

I ran into my sister-in-law, then my brother, at indoor lacrosse this week.  We don’t see them much but it is always a pleasure. Yet at nearly every encounter something is said which highlights for me how different that side of the family is from mine. No recitation of the words and description of facial expressions would reveal to an outsider what I mean by that.  Yet many of you will recognise the phenomenon from your own families.

I became a cat in a dog family when my mother remarried. (I hate cats and would like to stick them with that side of the description, but they are dog people and very good ones, so it would be unfair.) Such introductions are usually a prelude to criticising relatives, however subtly, in the manner of a 19^thC novelist gaining revenge on those who did him wrong.  20^th C too, come to think of it.  If anything, this is the opposite.  Twenty years ago, I would have made an effort to show that my microculture, my tribe, had superior qualities, illustrated by anecdotes that put them in a bad light, however subtly.  My review is more mixed now.

Describing one microculture versus another lends itself to phrasing that sounds critical.  If I say “they don’t tend to be a reflective people,” that sounds just a touch disdainful in my culture.  Yet I am increasingly convinced that much of the reflectiveness in my A& H culture is a waste of time.  Only in the minds of a few does reflection actually produce much of value.  For the rest, it is mostly dreaminess, rationalisation, rumination.  That trait is essential to the survival of all tribes, but like most traits, a lot of it lies around in the population without visible positive effect.  Thus, not being “reflective,” means one has energy left over to do other things.  Which my stepfamily does, and very well.

I should note that I consider such qualities to be largely hardwired, though both the reflectives and the actives believe the others could be like them if they “just tried.”

II

Steve Sailer notes that we have excellent and numerous ways of measuring intelligence, but none for “energy,” which is perhaps equally important;

My father is 94. He never smoked, drank only moderately, and comes from a high energy family that needs to be moving all the time. His nephew, my hippie cousin, for example, was an organic farmer for decades, and now that he has a desk job, he spends about 25 hours a week at the gym. When my cousin came for a visit to his parents in Arcadia, CA, at the age of 51, he hiked to the top of Mt. Wilson, a 5,000 foot ascent, every day for two weeks. It's unfortunate that social scientists don't seem to have a reliable quick test of energy the way they have tests of intelligence, since it's obvious that energy differs widely among individuals and is important in influencing life outcomes.

I have said “adaptability, switching sets” will be the ability that will knock intelligence off its perch as most important going forward; most self-help business strategies have ideas of focus and discipline at their core.  Those who succeed often credit hard work, and there is certainly a great deal of truth in that, however much data that overlooks and self-congratulating it sounds.  I think there is a strong relatedness to these described qualities, and I agree we do not measure them well.  They don’t present similarly.  The manic hustle of the entrepreneur looks nothing like the more linear focus of my stepfamily (they never dabble in anything, they either do or don’t do) but I think there is some commonality.  There is a personal energy in them that is not merely cultural and trained, but seems present from birth.  Culture and values reinforce this and refine it, but it is simply visble in them from the start.

Nor is it a single, off-on quality among even those who have it, but a continuum.

My mother used to say that my stepfather was unable to do nothing. Mind and body were always working.  Not plodding – he was too sharp for that word to apply – but dogged, certainly. He had few activities outside of work, but those few received due focus and attention in their time.  He acquired more activities the longer he was married to my mother and our culture.  He was Connecticut Yankee, whose many family lines had come to Hartford and New Haven in the 17^th C and generally prospered – none spectacularly, but many significantly. They seek prosperity and security, but great wealth doesn’t seem to hold much temptation for them.

They are the heart of the Business Tribe, certainly.  All traits need to be found in all tribes for anyone to produce anything of value, but there are skill sets more common in one group than another.  I am quite puzzled over the whole issue of focus and direction for this energy.  The Arts & Humanities Tribe*, whatever my criticism of us, displays far more focus over short bursts than the Business Tribe – a laser intensity for hours in rehearsal, editing, and performance.  At the other end of the spectrum, the Science & Technology Tribe is simply legendary for ability to put in 100-hour weeks for weeks or months to bring a project to fruition.

Perhaps that is its own answer – those who can switch their focus, not in distraction but by design, are the ones who use their energy most efficiently.  Again, I’m not sure one can change oneself by simply deciding to.  We can bend ourselves somewhat at need, but I doubt not permanently. Dei Gratia Sumus Quod Sumus By the grace of God, we are what we are. (motto of the prior borough of Barking, in London.)

*Upon further review.  Only Arts, not Humanites, for that manic intensity.

III

Some thoughts about athletics.

People will claim that sports develop disciplined effort – Benjamin Spock states definitely that “Crew made me,” giving him the discipline he needed to make it through med school.  Others will say that sports simply reveal it.  Let us grant that there are different sports requiring different skills, and that most or all virtues that sports teach could be learned elsewhere – in scouts, in music, in part-time jobs.

Nonetheless, there is correlation between athletics and energy, fairly obviously, and the further connection to the Business Tribe may not be simply a case of Old Boys’ Network in play. Athletics does not create the energy, and may not be uniquely good at developing discipline.  But teenage participation in athletics may be an indicator that the person has the requisite energy.  This connection between adolescent sports and adult status seems stronger in the white, black, and native communities, less pronounced in the hispanic, Asian, and Jewish communities. These latter groups may in the past have participated largely to obtain status in majority-white communities.

All sorts of people participate in youth athletics, and there are many ways to succeed.  I don’t think there has ever been much of an automatic ticket that youth sports punches for later success.  Rather, they may both result from the same quality of disciplined energy.  I wonder if reflexes and hand-eye coordination are even more specific correlates. Successful adults get together for all manner of activities – it was clubs, bowling, and bridge in the 50’s,  – but in business, golf predominates with racquet sports second. Skiing, far more of a suburban upwardly-mobile pursuit than skating or snowmachines, is a reflex, controlled aggression sport, and foot-eye coordination may be identical to hand-eye. (What other sports do business gravitate toward in non-snow areas?)

IV

The mention of athletics comes in because my stepfamily excels at them – sorry I didn’t make that explicit.  Multisport, All-State, several were DII or DIII All-Americans.  They largely drop those after college and switch to golf, with some tendency for women to ski.  Their sports of choice were lacrosse, baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer – all team, all hand-eye.  But though it was their pattern which spurred this line of thought, I was specifically excluding them while writing the last section, not wanting a dozen individuals to be my sample set.  I am casting about in my mind among the people I remember from school, those my boys went to school with (and their parents), folks I work with or go to church with now, folks I have read about.  I would greatly appreciate all of you doing the same, reflecting – hey, that’s our culture, right? – on your own families and coworkers.  I’m trying to build a theory here. I am operating from the traditional view that this energy - this gumption, this pep, this moxie, vim & vigor, dynamism, get-up-and-go, animal spirits – is more pronounced in America than elsewhere, and one of our defining traits. 

These sorts tend to marry each other, correct?  A man from the Business Tribe may take a Science & Technology or Arts & Humanities wife, yet is she ever one of the driven obsessive or dreamy reflective ones?

Socially, are they all over the map in tendency?  Do we see the same percentage of the garrulous, the standoffish? How does the energy play out socially?

Jumping To Conclusions

Reserving judgement, and being open to the counterintuitive or even disagreeable idea has been a recurring theme here, and I have a few examples from the last week. Daniel Klein had an earlier study about liberals knowing less about economics than conservatives and libertarians. I remember reading it - I don't think I posted on it. My recollection is that it was slanted toward certain questions which might favor libertarians, but was otherwise plausible-sounding. I thought if the study were improved it would show a similar result, though likely less strongly. Yet when other researchers challenged Klein to run the same race over a different course, with basic economic questions which conservatives might be more likely to get wrong and liberals right, that is in fact what happened. Both sides did well on their home course, poorly on the other's, as his Atlantic article I Was Wrong And So Are You records. Of greatest concern, perhaps, was that education did not seem to help much in any group. It did not increase objectivity more than a tiny amount. What then, should we do to remedy this?

Orin Kerr over at Volokh comments on a report that the American Bar Association has given more "Not Qualified" ratings to Obama's prospective appointees than it had to either Clinton's or Bush's in their whole eight years each. The immediate thought would be that Obama is nominating more unqualified people. Yet Kerr, in his last paragraph, raises an excellent question wondering whether something has changed in the Democratic Party's method or infighting instead. The comments discuss. Interesting.

NFL culture has been able to tolerate one white premier wide receiver at a time, so Wes Welker was only mildly unnerving. But now comes Jordy Nelson of Green Bay, and it is apparently difficult for everyone - not just black WR's and DB's, but coaches and analysts of all colors - to absorb. Because we all know that blacks are just faster, and whites can only succeed by "knowing the defenses" and "running precise routes." Steve Sailer has fun with the topic - just because blacks are faster on average does not mean there are no fast white WR's (Jordy ran a 4.37) - and ESPN analysts have a refreshingly open discussion (video) about it.

My uncle (of course) sent the recent news story about the study which shows that Fox News viewers know less about current events than people who watch no news at all. I turned it back on him to do the work of looking behind the story himself, but I'll give you a hint: read the longer versions of the news stories to the bottom, and search around for the actual data behind the study, not the media reports. There may indeed be something of concern about Fox viewers here. But there are immediate qualifiers and ambiguous conclusions as well.

Note: No TV. I have never seen Fox News, except embedded videos on websites, where a person was trying to demonstrate Fox Yay! or Fox Nay! Nor have I discussed with my friends what they watch, so I have no idea which of them, if any, get their news from Fox. I know that the station drives liberals crazy for being so conservative, unfair, and inaccurate. That sputtering would be a recommendation* in my book, but only a mild one.  The only dog I have in this fight is that it irks me when people so quickly trumpet "studies" that agree with their existing prejudices, and I readily concede that I am harder on liberals than conservatives on that score.  I'm not 99th percentile on objectivity (at least, I hope my level of such isn't as good as it gets), but I think I'm 80th percentile, maybe 90th.

*50% clue to the truth, 50% personal entertainment value.

Free Will And Moral Behavior

Reason's Ronald Bailey has some excellent commentary on Gazzaniga's much-discussed new book about neuroscience and free will.

"Gazzaniga is right to worry. He persuasively cites a 2011 study in which researchers found that inducing disbelief in free will decreased helpfulness and increased aggression among experiment participants. He also notes that other recent studies reported that people were more likely to cheat in psychological experiments after reading passages that encouraged a belief in determinism. The researchers note with irony, “Perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”

We have been over some of this territory in the May We Believe Our Thoughts series:  if we can demonstrate that there are times when our thinking is less free, it follows there are times when it is more free. (I have made a similar argument for altruism, whenever folks try to show that it does not exist.)  Free will versus collection-of-neurons-reacting is not an either-or choice, but a continuum.

HT: Bird Dog at Maggie's

Photos

I was sent a link of some Farm Security Administration photos from the late Depression

The vividness of the color puts me in mind of my commentary, dating back to 2005, on the emotional influence black-and-white photography has on our experience of earlier times, and even on our social and political understanding of the times.

Swedish Model Reassessed

Link fixed. Thanks to James From Bird Dog's links over at Maggie's is a report by a Finnish think tank on the Swedish economy, It's not as long as it looks.  I am always irritated by truncated graphs, but these seem less bad than usual.  I'd like folks to read it before I put in my two kroner.

To bear in mind:  left-and right- of center in this context refers almost entirely to economic, free-market issues, not social or foreign policy ideas.  There are scandinavians more right of center on those other issues than Americans, but there aren't many.  In free-market ideology, however, their categories are roughly comparable to ours.

Much of this was half-known to me, but this is more complete and organised a summary than I have encountered over the last few years.

Cain And Accusations

Mona Charen at NRO wonders whether Cain is being borked or is being evasive because there is something to this.  Her thoughts are here, and I have little to add.  Nor do I know much about the accusations and their likelihood of being true.

And that's a revealing limitation on my part.  I am very likely to make my decision about whether Cain is guilty on the basis of how he responds to the accusations, not any basis of examining the facts.  It's a shortcut we use a thousand times a year - does Jack seem to be lying?  A great timesaver.

The weakness is rather apparent, though.  It's a good rule of thumb, but not a perfect one.  In particular, excellent liars exploit this human tendency by imitating innocent people, and distracting us with how terrible the accusers are.  Bill Clinton was exceptionally good at this.  He didn't act like a guilty person, and he didn't go over-the-top by trying to act like a completely innocent person.  He acted just like a person who was guilty of some small, unimportant thing, but outraged that people would accuse him of something large.  Of course he drove 6mph over the speed limit, but really...

Even after some large things turned out to be true.

And now here I am, doing what I complained about others doing, because it's a timesaver.  I don't want to put in the energy to read up on this.

Sherlock

Here's the place that AC Doyle ran into trouble: more than one explanation can fit a fact. When Sherlock and Mycroft compare notes on the gentleman walking by in the street, they speak with definiteness that a particular gait can only come from having been at sea, and the only possible explanation for his carrying certain items is that he has children. Or, when Sherlock notes that a particular form of the letter "a" used declares the writer to be German, and of a certain height, it all ties together so nicely. The possibility that the man (or women) had a German schoolmaster who forced him to write that way, or that he reverted to that form because he slipped and had to make the accidental line into something, simply does not come up in the reasoning.

It is a comforting fiction, that we can read a set of clues which point us to a single answer, but real life isn't like that. All evidence is ambiguous and could point in several directions. It is the accumulation that points us in a direction.

It stems from our preference for resolved narrative. Reading a story of a woman who had an unhappy childhood and difficult life for 75 years, who found love, or meaning, or acceptance over the last five years of her life strikes us as a good life. It's a good story; it would make a good movie; therefore, it is a good life. The woman who has 75 wonderful years but ends it being sick or lonely the last five years seems to be a sad story, and a sad life. Funny thing. We rather think that even when it's our own life we are talking about. The drive for resolution is powerful. But if you had to choose going in which scenario you wanted, most of us would take the one with the good 75 and endure the lousy 5 as a small offset.

In mentioning The Moth, and relating it to testimony Sunday, I saw this same phenomenon. We insist that our life be understood as some sort of story, that it is going somewhere. Some of us feel at some deep level that belief in God necessitates belief in a narrative or trajectory of our lives, which we are tasked with discovering and enacting. I don't know that this is actually true - we just think it. Jesus's command not to be concerned for the morrow or what we should wear, but to let the day's trouble be sufficient unto itself, would likely speak against that interpretation.

Rob Bell - Part I

It may be all parts, not just Part I.  But just in case.

I was tempted to call the post Sniveling Sells to make fun of his book title Love Wins.  But that would not only be childish of me, it would not be accurate.  The book is at least better than that, in general.  It has moments of sniveling, and I do not think they are unfortunate stylistic accidents that a good editor could have removed, but central to Bell's style.  He is clearly young, full of himself, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

He is nonetheless still more right than wrong in what he is trying to accomplish, and irritating as he is, he deserves attention.  First, the preface is excellent.  It is not flawless, but it bears a message to evangelicals that they need to hear, and it is done with kindness, and earnestness, and even a fair bit of wisdom.  If you can get ahold of the preface and nothing else, I suggest you read it and contemplate it.  My guess is that your contemplation of the legitimate issues he brings up will be more valuable than what he writes.

I think that the garden must be weeded before we can judge how this crop is doing.

Bell's style of rapid-fire questions is not merely stylistically irritating.  It reveals an unfairness, even akin to dishonesty, in his entire approach.  He does not merely question, imitating Jesus's return questions to his critics, as Bell claims.  These are different questions, not at all like Jesus's.  We have seen this before, and I have mentioned it in a post about Chesterton last year, A Note of Interrogation. Or, you may pick up the thread of this by reading Bell, not from the perspective of a like-minded accuser trying to get general evangelical authorities to listen, but from the POV of a person who is hearing the questions and attempting to answer them.  Very quickly one understands: Oh, I get it, it's not just impatience that prevents you from waiting around for attempts at an answer.  It's that you don;t want answers.  You want to tell me answers.  Got it.  I get the impression, and perhaps it is an unfair leap on my part, that from the perspective of  Mars Hill, some people get to ask questions and others don't. 


Nor is it just a device in the first chapter to set out all his questions at once.  He's still doing it by page 103.  These are not bad questions.  In fact, nearly all of them are excellent questions.  They are just not being honestly asked to elicit discussion.

Second, two psychological bits that most readers are going to miss, but need to be pointed out by the few of us who have the necessary experience (not much wisdom needed) to notice.  Bell uses an image in the preface of black letters on a page, while he and others read into the "white space."  As if that is a good thing.  It sounds like a clever image, whose only flaw might be being too clever by half.  But "reading the white space" has a very specific, and not very complimentary, meaning in the Rorschach.  It refers to a person being unnecessarily oppositional, often in a showy way.  It is one of the most accurate bits of interpretation in that much-maligned projective test.  When the psychologist tells you "He saw four pictures in the white space, three different cards," diagnoses of personality disorder begin to float into the conversation as possibilities. One, maybe, but it better be pretty offhand.  It's not a good thing.  I'm not suggesting personality disorder, much less diagnosing it, in Bell.  I am noting that he is showing one symptom.

Also in the psychological sphere is his early quote of Renee - I intentionally do not mention her last name -  who has written a book, and in it are accusations that her father sexually abused her while reciting the Lord's Prayer, and such like.  Bell clearly takes this at face value in part of his accusation of evangelicals.

How does one put this nicely?  People with Borderline Personality Disorder sometimes make accusations that are poetically true, but not literally true.  Taken that way, there are indeed evangelical children who have had their perpetrator's Christianity as an inseparable part of their victimization.  I looked up the woman's name, went to her website and read extensively of her story, and found much to like about her.  I don't doubt she experienced horrible abuse, and has done well building some kind of reasonable life out of the broken pieces.  But her romance with victimhood, and how it still rules her and gives her a club of self-righteousness to bring to her social and political beliefs, remains obvious.  It's very typical.  Setting oneself up as a defender of the oppressed is a pretty good response to one's own history of oppression.  Except you can then never see the victim as having any part in their fate, nor the "system" that oppresses them as being any sort of a balance or compromise between goods.

Why then, would I object at all?  Isn't it true enough?  (See how my questions can be sly and unfair?)  Because it's a lie, and I have seen people ruined by accusations from people with that diagnosis, who will admit when in therapy that they aren't really sure what the reality of their past is and what people mean now, and that's part of their problem, yet are still quick to accuse.  I say this as one who counts well-recovered individuals of this type as among my favorite patients, most admired people, and even sometimes friends, as much as we can allow that in this business.

It was an unlikely accusation, wouldn't you have thought?  If you were going to use it to prove your own point, wouldn't you have wondered, just for a moment, whether you should perhaps make some effort to find out if it's actually, uh, true?

Of course not.  You need the victim to be a victim.  Case closed.  So by page 7 I am not only irritated by Bell's style, but I don't trust his judgement and honesty.

And yet.  And yet there is still much in this book that is wise.  It deserves to be noted that the criticisms of Bell have often been less Biblical, and display less ability to listen, than Bell does himself.  I wish someone else had written the book.

New Harmony

New Harmony, Indiana, was founded by the Harmony Society, a German utopian, socialist, anarchist, pietist,,,well, you get the idea - group that got going around 1800. My favorite line from the description:

The experiment was established in 1825 and dissolved in 1829 due to constant quarrels.

Figures.

Complex Systems

David at Photon Courier has excellent commentary on Doerner's The Logic of Failure, experiments on complex decision-making and how it goes bad. All three links from within the article are worth pursuing.

From his review: 

The subjects who fail at this game, Doerner finds, are those who apply rigid, context-insensitive rules...such as "always keep the units widely deployed" or "always keep the units concentrated" rather than making these decisions flexibly. He identifies "methodism," which he defines as "the unthinking application of a sequence of actions we have once learned," as a key threat to effective decision-making. (The term is borrowed from the great military writer Clausewitz.) Similar results are obtained in another simulation, in which the subject is put in charge of making production decisions in a clothing factory. In this case, the subjects are asked to think out loud as they develop their strategies. The unsuccessful ones tend to use unqualified expressions: constantly, every time, without exception, absolutely, etc...while the successful "factory managers" tend toward qualified expressions: now and then, in general, specifically, perhaps,... 

The connection with government interventions seems inescapable to me.

Labeling

I have succeeded in labeling the last year's posts. I tend to use too many labels, because I don't want to have to do it again, I suppose. I doubt it will come as much of a surprise that a particular cluster - self observation, self observation (liberal), anosognosia, irony, trusting our thoughts, May We Believe Our Thoughts - is strongly represented, with a bible/church and culture cluster, a music/nostalgia cluster, and political also strong. I do think that self observation is key, and I do think that liberals are especially bad at it. But fundamentalists are, if anything, worse, and I haven't picked on them much. Not fair of me, perhaps, but I'm just not that interested. I also try to put in special effort to subject my own thoughts to observation when I am being critical of another group. That is a fairness I am apparently attached to.