The Right Sort

David Brooks came up in conversation at beer night last night.  One of the participants knew him slightly from his political work in DC. Brooks has a recent essay that has set the chattering classes abuzz, but I would like to focus on a subsequent essay, about Trump’s grandfather, father, and son Moral Vacuum in the House of Trump. It is not half-hearted in its declarations of the moral weakness of the family as a whole. It does not mention possible bordellos in passing, but as central to the narrative.

Just for review, because regular readers will likely have already noticed the obvious, but it is still supposed to be my job to point it out.  The facts laid out by Brooks, including the speculation, are probably true, or close enough. What he concludes from those biographies is one-sided, but perhaps not unreasonable. However, I don’t recall similar examinations and indictments that Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s forebears resulted in stunted character development. Both had bigamist fathers and mothers who left them with grandparents at tender ages. Just for openers. Does that matter?  One can say yes or no, but I think one has to give the same answer for all presidents - or even all candidates for office. If it matters enough about Trump that David Brooks should make a big deal about it in the NT Times, then we should be able to find similar warnings about moral weakness from Brooks in the Times on, er, others.

 

I return to a longstanding claim of mine, that liberals are very concerned with being the right sort.  This is a tendency, not an absolute.  There are certainly conservatives who take this attitude, and liberals who do not. Yet the trend is unmistakable. Liberals consistently argue that conservatives are bad people to the core, or ridiculous people who just don’t Get It. To read Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd is to return to highschool, where eye-rolling is argument, and lack of style is a sin.  Late night comedy is much the same (except it has progressed as far as college fashionableness.  Still eye-rolling, though. ) The cool kids, defined narrowly.

Barack Obama “overcame” his background and learned how to signal being the right sort of person, right down to the crease of his pants. He not only went to Columbia and Harvard Law, he be became them.  Arkansas Bill Clinton figured out how to no longer be the stepson of a used-car salesman, by going to Oxford and Yale Law (or more probably, he had figured a lot of that out beforehand but improved his game at those places). They embraced those fashions.  You will notice that in neither of those cases does character enter into it.  That only becomes important if you are unfashionable, like Trump. Or like George Bush cutting brush on his ranch, betraying his breeding.

The scene in Hillbilly Elegy in which Vance is quite overtly being interviewed to see if he can become one of the elite impressed me deeply.  He makes fun of himself enjoyably, informing us that he ordered chardonnay because it was easier pronounce than the other wine they offered. Yet nothing about this dinner with the powerful measures his abilities or his character in any way.  It is all about whether he has the makings of being the right sort. 

I have known conservatives I predicted would eventually become liberals because of this personality type, this being influenced by admiring the fashionable.  Not the popularly fashionable, the hoi polloi, but the deeply fashionable, the Inner Ring, as CS Lewis called them.  I also predicted the same thing in reverse, of people who seemed to be natural conservatives in temperament despite their liberalism, but this has not turned out the same.  I don’t know why.

 

Social Cost

Watching the Trump/Anti-Trump phenomenon is somewhat interesting in terms of popular culture and serious culture. However, we've seen this before - Sarah Palin making her opponents embarrass themselves hating, and the lack of price they paid with their own people comes to mind. There were few voices to cry halt from the left then.  With Trump, there are some from the right very willing to criticise him.  I'm not sure there are many voices from the left consistently criticising the anti-Trumpsters for going overboard, but then I wouldn't tend to see that in my usual online places anymore.  Alan Dershowitz, maybe.

But that's all be fairly predictable, and will likely continue with nothing new to chew on.  What has been new has been looking at myself and my own reactions. I have not liked Trump, and while his coarseness has been odious, that hasn't been what bothered me most. He lies, and he lies reflexively.  He lies more often than the Clintons (though his style is different). Even habitual liars tell the truth most of the time.  When someone asks "where's the butter?" is is a rare pathology which would attempt to consistently mislead people at that point.  This is in fact part of how liars succeed.  The do tell the truth most of the time and so have a lot of practice looking honest.  They mostly lie by leaving things out. Hillary, John Kerry, and Al Gore had strong tendencies to be bullshit artists, making up stuff to look cooler or more important, but their lying about important stuff was usually far more precise and controlled.  They would choose words carefully, they would answer related questions in order to avoid the point. They would flat-out deceive at times, but tried to avoid it as much as possible. Trump does some of that, but much less.  He is much more blustery, off-the-cuff, and careless.

This bothers me, because you never know how deep this is going to go.  He could do this about something very large. (This next part is not central to my main point, but I think needs to be said just for balance, to avoid giving the wrong impression.) To date, however, accusations against him tend to be big news for a little while, but when you push them for what they definitely are versus what they might possibly be they shrink.  Trump Jr met with maybe a real spy-person!  Therefore, he could have done very bad influenced-by-spy things, and it looks bad! Well yes, that might turn out to be so.  But we don't know it to be so. When politicians lie, we immediately suspect - with good reason - that they are covering something big.  I don't know if that applies with Donald.

Anyway, the point is about observing myself. I find that my default position in such matters is to look for personal cost, especially social cost, and respect the group that is paying that.  Who pays a cost socially for opposing Trump?  Almost no one in my entire circle, including my right-wing friends.  There has been a nice social niche carved out for some conservatives to deplore Trump. Yes, the Trumpsters are louder, and maybe ruder, but there's nothing new here. Liberals, of course get a lot of support from each other, and even some surprising alliance from centrists and conservatives.

They pay no social cost. No new social cost, anyway.

There are families, and districts, and churches where a liberal can be treated badly, and nearly everyone has someone in their universe who can inflict pain on them for their beliefs.  But I don't think being anti-Trump has added to the already-present cost of being anti-Tea Party, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, etc. Being pro-Trump does carry new social costs, however. You get harangued even more than you did for being for Romney or in the Tea Party or whatever.  The liberals hate you more and now even some conservatives are making fun of you as well.

Trumpsters do pay a new social cost.

I knew reacting against social reward was part of my makeup, but I had not realised it was this strong. It doesn't logically extend to the outer limits, because some things are unpopular and subject to social cost for very good reasons, after all. Deploring is a weapon that allows us to forego violence or boycott over every little thing. But I don't think I'm going to back away from this position just yet.  People will land in the places where it is easy to land, yet congratulate themselves on their courage. I find my sympathies lie in the opposite direction. If you are paying a cost, I want to know about that, and I think I am looking for ways to defend you from unfair criticism.

How Will They Look Back On Us?

Twice today I have read someone who is worried what people in the future will think of us.  Have I been seeing this more lately, or is it just an accident?  In both cases, the worrier was an environmentalist. It just seems to both them to think that people in fifty years would look back and not give us a good grade. Some sense of having let the world down, I think.

I have children and grandchildren.  Any idea of someone fifty years from now evaluating my performance has nothing to do with any environmental actions. Those relatives are more important evaluations to me. Yet a general grade from the future is not completely opaque to me. Historians, professional and amateur, look at actions of individuals and groups in the past and weigh whether their decisions were good.  One of the problems with this is that we know what happened next and much of what passed seems inevitable to us now.  We have a hard time putting ourselves into the heads of the people fifty or five hundred years ago, when the outcome was not known.  But we like to have the imagined approbation of those who will come after.

Perhaps the two are related?  Environmentalists don’t seem to be people having a lot of children.  Decades ago I read a magazine article (?) complaining that once the faithful had children they didn’t come around to the protests anymore, stopped volunteering, and eventually let their memberships lapse. I wish I could find it again. Perhaps that’s not true anymore anyway, as popular culture has been known to change.  Still, Bill McKibben’s book about having children was Maybe One. The cart and horse may have gotten disguised on this one.  Those who have less interest in having children may go looking for some other way to have a lasting impact.  Those with children are more likely to seek out religious or cultural continuity to give their time and resources to. (Some without children might prefer those as well. The aesthetic pleasure of reducing carbon doesn’t have the same oomph as a library or a chapel, I don’t think.)

Looking back on ourselves from an imagined future perspective would seem to be less self-centered, anyway. It would bring the mind to larger questions, of what’s really important in the long run? Where are the greatest risks and dangers to our descendants? Those seem at least a step up from keeping the focus on ourselves and whatever stuff we can get now. Thinking of others and all that.

Or not. Those questions are variations of what do I want my legacy to be? It depends on what side of the telescope you are looking into. Neither more nor less self-centered as how I might ask the question of myself.  Answering the question in an environmentalist way is a declaration that culture is less important than physical surroundings.  My opinions on that are definite. Imagining a future world that has important Christian values preserved – no, I should be more direct and say a world where there are still Christians - and western values derived from them such as a generalised egalitarianism, charity, representative government, or self-sacrifice, I don’t much care about whether we have “enough” species, or whether there is some discomfort in living because we’ve broken some important pieces of furniture, and not even whether some places are no longer beautiful that once were.  I would prefer to preserve any good things, certainly, but varieties of shrimp or whether some mountains have houses instead of forests are down the list.

Imagining the other future, where we preserved the world to look much as it does now and even reclaimed some places so that they are theme parks to the year 1000 (BC or AD), but there are no churches, no major thirds, no freedom to choose one’s work or mate or reading material, I don’t want it to exist.  I don’t care what happens to a human race which gave all that up, and I don’t care what grade they give me on my carbon footprint or whether we embraced wind power quickly enough.

At the change of the millennium I sealed up a cheap time capsule in a metal bin designed for the purpose. It may preserve the souvenirs, objects, and writings. It includes some things from my own mother and reaching back into my family’s cultural past.  Some things I wrote are already out-of-date and a little embarrassing. My children might still be around in 2100, given improvements in life-extension.  Some of my granddaughters and any later grandchildren will certainly still be here. If my church or some other followers of Christ get to see it it might have value. I did care at the time how they will view these things, and whether I can reach into the future for one last influence. I care some about what grade they will give me.  But all those will be old at that point, not likely to change much.  Any deeper descendants, great-great grandchildren, if they find what I held dear to be unimportant or even occasion for mockery…

Then screw ‘em.  I could care less how they view me looking back. If my morality seems generally wrong  (I don’t quibble minor changes) and their new improved one much better, then they are wrong and are no kin of mine. Is that harsh? Taken live, I might be even more emphatic, if I returned like Jacob Marley to speak to them. If I don’t care about those, even those, why on earth would I care what the Best People might think of me looking back? 

(This is, incidentally, what I think about space colonization as well. The mere perpetuation of my species is of no interest to me, if they aren’t tied to me in culture, especially faith.)

Ignoring Race

In dealing with psychotic people, I have almost got it into my head that one does not put the energy into contradicting a delusion or misinterpretation.  It is wasted energy.  A favorite psychiatrist was explaining to a beleaguered wife of a veteran with schizophrenia "Let him walk the boundaries thinking he's protecting the family.  Your children have grown, your neighbors understand, and he isn't hurting anything. You only have to step in and forbid him when he says he's going to go down to the town hall, or the police station, or those bastards at the VA and going to do something about it.  You may think you can nip those situations in the bud by intervening when he's just grousing or complaining.  That may work with children.  It usually doesn't work with children (he had five) but sometimes it does and it's our job as parents to try.  But it almost never works with adults.  Postpone all confrontations until you have to."

I still yearn to nip those situations in the bud, because as a person who wants to be reasonable and see the world act reasonably I want to change someone's thinking that 15 degrees that makes all the difference.  But my psychiatrist friend was right, it doesn't work.  Nor does it work very often with people who aren't psychotic, but have long ago made up their minds.  Which includes me, and perhaps you as well.

So I think ignoring the race-IQ, race & violence, race and impulsivity, or race and any ability is the way to go.  Liberals may focus on group outcomes, but libertarians, conservatives, and all true children of The West focus on the individual.  We should try to maintain that focus as long as we reasonably can.  This holds true for male-female, straight-homosexual, Christian-nonbeliever, old-young, and ethnic differences as well.  Insofar as it is possible, we should push all those thoughts aside.  Absent any solutions that are real rather than theoretical, there is simply no point.  There is no need to waste the energy.  The worldly world values intelligence, wealth, education, charm, beauty, connections, athletic ability and other values which the Christian is supposed to enjoy but regard lightly.  We are supposed to prize generosity, kindness, faith, wisdom, chastity, courage, hope, honesty, and a dozen other virtues instead*. To use Jesus's calling-on song Let he who has ears hear: the worth of a woman or man is not in these things.

The crunch comes when the discussions turn into actions.  When innocent police officers, or teachers, or school administrators, or employers are being blamed because the explanation for individual behavior is placed on systemic bias or residual racism, then we have to rise up out of the tall grass and cry False! **  As with the veteran with schizophrenia above, only when such things come to action - when they are going into the textbook (or from the textbook to the student); when they are going into legislation; when they are going into a public shaming of a decent person doing his job should we be bound to intervene.  In public debate we should be willing to match arguments when others have introduced race or gender or religion (even while pretending not to), but we should not be eager to bring these up. We should go down those roads when we have to.

I reluctantly think it is fair to bring up when racism accusations are part of campaigning.  I have lo0ng said "If we aren't racist.greedy/sexist then they have nothing to campaign on."  I suppose we should try and take anme-calling away from them as much as possible.

*In the scout law we see Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.  I don't see wealthy, educated, intelligent, or charming in there - though the real virtues may produce the worldly ones at times.

** I am not claiming that systemic bias or residual racism are never present.  It's just that they are too easy to appeal to without warrant.

Untouchable Subject?

This opinion piece came in over the transom and it looked worth commenting on.

 I love McWhorter, and have a few of his books. I also like where he starts this argument: suppose it’s true. I used to love to see that with Bill James about baseball clichés. Pitching is 90% of baseball. What would flow from that?  Wouldn’t pitchers command higher salaries, then, as quarterbacks do in football? Or perhaps, a few would have the bulk of the biggest contracts? In fact, this does not happen.  Therefore, our first conclusion is that whether or not pitching actually is 90% of baseball, no one is spending their money as if that were true – including the people who made the original claim. This freed up a lot of space for the statistical and reasoning arguments he wanted to examine next.

The problem is, McWhorter doesn’t quite examine his supposition.  He looks at parts of the issue but evades others, or at least, does not answer them here.  He moves to the question of Why would people want to talk about it? This overlaps with the question What if the race-IQ gap is at least partly genetic? But it is not the same question. He discusses what motive people could have for discussing the issue (paragraphs 22-25).

You know how much I love discussing motive before establishing  facts.

When you get through all the on-the-one-hand, one-the-other-hand caveats that he puts in to show he really is listening to all sides, and he really is trying to be fair, he gives us the following: we shouldn’t talk about it because no one is going to accept it.  Nice people think the possible responses to believing there could be more than a small genetic component are too deplorable, so there will be no practical effect. I think that is both true, and a terrible, evasive approach. It likely is true that no one is going to believe it so just shut up. However, liberalism in the post-enlightenment sense has scored its cultural victories by doing just the opposite: yes we will too talk about women being able to vote/hold property/go to college/fly jet planes, whether people want to hear it or not. Yes we will too challenge public schools leading children in prayer even though it enjoys 90% approval rate.

 

BTW, as I said, I like McWhorter and I don’t think his boilerplate niceness is insincere. He makes good points about non-black populations showing some of the same patterns, also attributing those to culture.* He has been friends with Charles Murray (who, despite his reputation among liberals, believes that culture is an influence in behavior, and genetics are only a portion). Yet he doesn’t answer the core question, “What if it’s at least partly true and we’re just stuck with it?”

If it were simply a neutral, where everyone could just look away and pretend there is nothing to see, I have no problem with just ignoring the issue. I generally do, because there are many things it doesn't affect.  The problem is that the people who want the Charles Murrays, and certainly the Greg Cochranes of the world to just shut up do themselves talk about race and IQ all the time.  They talk about it by denying it, and insisting at every grade level through college and most graduate schools, and at every major magazine and news source, that environment is the cause of the gap. Our public policies in education, in job training, affirmative action and discrimination, are entirely founded on that assumption. Sometimes it is explicit, as in social science courses where the lack of genetic connection will be expressly asserted, but more often it is just part of the furniture. Making an assertion that something is not racial is just another way of bringing up race.  It's unfair to then accuse others of "bringing race into it all the time." 

So the answer to McWhorter’s question, a challenge to those who are “obsessed” with race and IQ, “What, precisely, would we gain from discussing this particular issue?” is We are already discussing it, all the time, but only one side gets to speak. The correct translation of McWhorter (though he likely doesn't intend it that way) is “What, precisely, would all of us gain from letting you talk back?”**   

Let us here pile on and note that when they speak they offer the insult of "racist" about anyone who disagrees. It’s not a neutral discussion where one side is politely and reasonably avoiding confrontation, clucking at those "obsessed" fire-breathers who keep bringing up hurtful things all the time. There are some who do inject race into any discussion, who may fairly be called "obsessed." They seem about equal on all sides. 

It gets worse, as this discussion usually does.  McWhorter believes, and hopes very much that the science will eventually bear him out, that “culture” is a major driver of the gap, specifically “orality” versus “literacy.” (See first footnote.)  He argues that culture persists over time, even when the reasons for it have vanished or even reversed. An oppressed group, especially one which came from a non-literate tribe, might regard literacy as less-important even when the oppression has lifted and incentives for literacy are great.  That sounds very believable. It could well be so. Conservatives are actually very big on believing that cultural factors are a big deal. Many more of them tend to those explanations of fatherlessness, expectations, future-orientation, and diligence than to genetic explanations. 

So now try to take that culture discussion national, hmm?  When you open up the door that says “culture,” once you have gotten past the Originally Comes From Oppression part, you can’t say anything else.  Let me correct myself.  One can also say “If only those black children could be encouraged to understand that it’s worthwhile to do well in school.”  Gosh darn it, why didn’t I think of that? Beyond that, "culture" is becoming a radioactive subject.  Try and go public with what is essentially a “black people have to raise their kids different” answer. I don't want to go there myself, but it's sort of hard to avoid at that point, even though we didn’t mean to go there. 

Try and have a discussion about culture that doesn't involve parenting.

It wasn’t where anyone wanted to go, but it once could be said by black people to each other, and the very liberal Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson used to do that.  I’m not sure you can do even that now.  I think that experiment has been run. If you want to go "culture," then Theodore Dalrymple, Thomas Sowell, and a dozen other guys you want nothing to do with are suddenly on the scene.  Oh, and Charles Murray. I think that dog won't hunt myself, but you're welcome to try.

What has come from the culture emphasis is a rejection of the norms of success because those are called arbitrary white norms.  That is partly true. But showing up on time is intimately related to a view of time that allows space launches, round-the-clock coverage for firemen and hospitals, paying people accurately, or the transportation of millions of people. The qualities one must learn to be a shepherd might be just as honorable, to man and to God, as the qualities of an accountant. But there just aren’t that many jobs for shepherds, and they don’t pay that well.

*But again - group IQ  could be a sufficient explanation for orality versus literacy in both those instances. While culture looks like a possible explanation at first glance, we get into a cart/horse problem.  The average white IQ in West Virginia is estimated at 95.1.   We get into complicated discussions of what IQ actually measures, and how sensitive it is to whether your culture wants you to go to school, try hard on the test, or not. It may not be that low, and Massachusetts may not actually be as high as 104.4  (For reference, #5 - #47 is only a  4 point range, 98.4 - 102.4). The Uzbeks have been isolated since the Silk Road became obsolete when the Europeans got their sea-trading going, centuries ago. But McWhorter has already ceded those grounds for purpose of this  discussion in his early paragraphs. Culture may derive from intelligence more than drive it.

  

**The answer might actually be “nothing.” The Assistant Village Idiot has no so-obvious-but-unspoken-advantages to point out.  But I would like the question to be framed that way before answering, to illustrate that is what we are really talking about.