Dear Professor Unger: You're not helping

By Richard K. Barry 

Some of my best friends are academics. Had my life taken a different twist or two, I might have ended up at some ivy-walled institution discussing Plato's Republic with undergraduates while trying to publish enough to secure tenure. I'm sure it would have been lovely. I have nothing against the life of the mind.

Still, I sometimes wish university teachers would have the discipline to temper their whole-cloth comments about electoral politics. Normative theory is important. Providing a picture of how society ought to work is an essential function. But suggesting that we ought to give up on President Obama because he is not moving the country in an appreciably more progressive direction is ridiculous. Suggesting that progressives ought to wish for the defeat of Obama and the election of Mitt Romney so that "the voice of democratic prophecy can speak once again in American life" is absurd, yet this is what Harvard Professor Roberto Unger is saying.

What does that even mean? Clearly he doesn't mean Romney would do that, so he must mean something else.

Look, I know Obama is not on the left. Many have been saying, and I agree, that the GOP and much of the country has moved so far to the right that Obama's brand of centrism is the only thing providing a degree of sanity in American politics. At the moment, I'm afraid this is the best we're going to do. To adapt a phrase, "we've been right-wing so long that center looks left to me."

Unger provides a list of positions Obama has taken to prove he is no progressive, to prove he has "failed to advance the progressive cause in America." In essence, the critique can be boiled down to Unger's claim that Obama has "delivered the politics of democracy to the rule money." I don't disagree, yet somehow Obama's greatest challenge to reelection is the charge from the right that he is a socialist. Think about that.

Much as I hate being an apologist for Obama, he had a choice: either prop up the very institutions which created the economic turmoil or let it all come crashing down.

I know some academics think the road to the promised land requires an economic melt-down first, as if there is some logical path leading from deep depression to economic justice for all. It didn't exactly work for Nazi Germany. Or maybe Unger thinks that if Obama is defeated, a real social justice movement will assert itself in opposition to President Romney. Don't hold your breath.

In truth, I have no idea what Unger means and fear he doesn't either.

What I know is that elections have consequences and that if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, more people will be living in misery and there will be far less educational and economic opportunity, one of Unger's primary concerns.

Yes, we should always keep in mind the long-run as described by brilliant thinkers like Unger. But let's not forget the world in which we have to live. Please.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

There is no box

By Carl 

A couple of weeks ago, I had my eyes opened wide.

See, I have a friend who was graduated from the same high school that I did, a school that's been awarded perhaps more Nobel Prizes than any other in America. This school is in a liberal bastion of one of the most liberal cities in the country. Our extra-curricular activities could include seminars at an Ivy League college or the local "Moss League" college, NYU. The graudation rate is about 93-95%, and most of the people who drop out do so for financial reasons: they need to support their families.

In other words, we were a sharp bunch of students.

This friend is a New Yorker still. He's artistic, intellectual, deeply devoted to science, politically aware (or so I thought), and unfailingly polite, a trait not to be underestimated when dealing with a blowhard like me.

He's also conservative. This aspect is not a problem. I've grown up with conservatives and their offspring all my life, and counted among my correspondents William F. Buckley, among other notable thinkers. I valued their input and while I disagreed with most of the views I heard, I could at least understand the thinking that went into them.

The shocking part of this encounter was how mis- and ill-informed my friend was, especially about the liberal agenda.

This stemmed out of a conversation shortly after the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, in which I was espousing the liberal agenda through history. You've read this every day at my blog: "Liberals got women the right to vote..." ad sum. The stock answer, the one I expect from the historically uninformed, is "Well, you know, Republicans actually did most of those things," to which I usually respond along the lines of "I said ''liberals' not 'Democrats,' and yes, there was once a time when the Republican party not only contained liberals, but welcomed them," and then drop names like Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Javits.

Knowledge, it's a good thing to share.

This was raised in the course of our dialogue, which sort of surprised me. Our school was well-known for its history curriculum, and I know the classes he had to pass and the material covered.

What I wasn't prepared for, what was the really spine-tingling moment, was the charge that liberals are a) against evolution and therefore b) beholden to the ignorant religious types in our wing.

My first reaction reading this was to laugh out loud. Literally, I LOL'd. And for once, the barrier of the keyboard probably saved me a friendship. I don't know that he would have appreciated the reaction.

My next reaction was "teachable moment!" I responded on that approach, and I think it was effective. I felt that it was more important to lay out the groundwork that ignorance was bipartisan and while there may be a significant number of liberals who might believe in Creationism over evolution, it could not be as large as the number on the right.

Do a thought experiment here with me and you'll see my point: four in ten Americans believe Darwin was right (myself among those). If conservatives all believe in Creationism, that still leaves 20% of Americans (assuming a 40-40-20 split, which seems reasonable) who believe in Creationism.

And I think it's a safe bet to say Randians do not believe in Creationism, since Rand herself was atheist, brutally so. We can safely say that not every conservative believes in Creationism. Therefore there must be some percentage, however small, of liberals who do, just as Prop 8 in California could not have passed without liberal Christian votes.

Labels suck, in short.

The incident did start me thinking: here's a man who is at least as smart as I am with such a gravely wrong idea.

I think the problem comes in that last sentence: "started me thinking". Now, I'm not accusing him of not thinking, but of thinking wrongly.

I don't think we are taught how to think properly, either in school or in society. Oh, we learn logic, and mathematics and science and A leads to B leads to C, but that's all manipulable.

Let me put it this way: if you know C, you're going to assume A & B. But C could be wrong, and certainly both A and/or B will be, at least partially. Or C could actually need D to occur or might even really be D, but you wouldn't know that unless you made the connection.

In our school system, we're taught to problem solve, not to think. In our society, we value the path of least resistance to the path that would require work. This is why the rise of talk radio has been so successful: why think of a reason for, say, liberals to outspend conservatives (they don't) when someone will tell you that and either make up statistics proving this, or simply ignore proving it, relying on your gullibility (or good will, depending on how naive you are) to trust their opinion.

After all, they're on the radio or TeeVee and you are not. They MUST have authority, right?

Hmm, I wonder. If Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck had to be vetted for their jobs the way a president has to be vetted for his, they would both be back at their day jobs and Bugs Bunny would have his own show on MSNBC. In truth, there's little difference in cartoon characters there.

(Yes, I just called Bugs Bunny a liberal. After all, he cross-dresses, opposes guns, and is a vegan)

We're taught to think linearly, and for most of the work we do in our lives, math and linearality work fine. You know, you know the diagonal dimension of a room and the closest side and that the corner is a right angle, figuring out the far wall is a snap. Or that you need to put paper in a printer before it will work.

Even though I pick on the right wing here, I've seen it from the left, particularly when I supported Hillary in the primaries over the president. There's a lot of linear thinking and that's something we ought to address on our side, too.

But here's the thing: most of life, most of the really important things in life, are fractal, not linear. The influences on who we fall in love with or marry, what our children turn out to be, whether our lives become better for taking this job over another, are all so widely dispersed as to be meaningless in advance of the choices we make and the turns we take.

I get in an elevator. I meet this ravishing beauty from the subcontinent, and I date her and marry her. She becomes a successful banker, which in turn encourages me to become a successful businessman.

I miss that elevator. While waiting for the next one, a deliveryman walks up to the button, presses it, slips and spills coffee all over my suit. I go home and change, and am late for work. I get fired, and in this economy, I can't find a job. I throw myself off a bridge when the pressure from my creditors, all linear thinkers, becomes too great.

Even more fundamental, I hit the genetic jackpot and am born into a family of great wealth, whereas if Dad pulls out thirty seconds earlier, I'm never even born.

We hear a lot about "thinking outside the box," but if you ask me, there is no box. The box only exists for the low-normals who need that kind of regulation, and even evading that regulation is adhering to it in the abstract. Life doesn't work that way. God laughs at the boxes, and ends up destroying them all eventually.

The key to thinking is to be open to possibilities, to understand that just because your situation demands a logical solution, that logic does not have to abide by the initial conditions that we've perceived. Our perceptions can be grossly wrong.

Think about it this way, in politics: Barack Obama is a Muslim. Therefore, everything that he's done since has been to advance the Muslim agenda in America. It doesn't matter that it might be opposed to, even violently, that agenda (whatever "the agenda" might be). if someone believes he's Muslim, they're going to logically demand a Muslim throughline. Or, he's not a Muslim, in which case we free ourselves to look for other motives to his behavior. If you tie yourself to one initial set of conditions, you force yourself to abide by them, unless you're adept enough to back your way out and rethink the entire thing.

But that requires thought and as I noted above, that's not something Americans do well.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Cooling down the hotbeds

By Capt. Fogg

Every word is a prejudice,

said Nietzsche. That's why one man's pillar of probity is another man's "hotbed" of heresy.

You know these colleges are hotbeds of liberalism!

said the man across the table.

These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides.

He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might be ignorant of or disagree with are not being given equal or preferred classroom time or assigned reading: the voice of the people isn't being heard at Harvard.

Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, and medicine? They only teach one side, and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog comments and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.

In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.

No, what they should be doing at Columbia or the London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of liberal propaganda and academic honesty is reciting the catechism that includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for opportunity and "freedom"; and, like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit, as God and the Founding Fathers intended.

Face it: universities, public and private, are hotbeds, and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong, did and simply close them down? The people know best!

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)