Posts from ‘Politics’
Sexual Harrassment
A Facebook friend recently asked me what I thought about Anthony Weiner’s attempted political comeback from sexting scandals as a mayoral candidate in NYC and the San Diego mayor being accused of sexual harassment. Â In the last few weeks I have also been sent this article about the University of Southern California being investigated for policies that condoned rape and this one about sexual abuse at a well known prep school. I thought therefore I would make public my thoughts on sexual harassment and abuse particularly in politics and education. I was at different times a member of the board to advise on sexual harassment cases at my former institution, a sexual harassment adviser to students, a dean of students, an associate dean of the faculty and through it all a faculty member. In all of these various roles I have received training in the legal issues and institutional concerns that arise in these situations as well as the human costs, concerns and likely actions of those involved. I also should mention that my wife is a social worker so through discussion, osmosis and inclination I have developed an understanding of the personal issues surrounding harassment and abuse.
At this point we only have allegations about the San Diego mayor and the full story has yet to come out. Â I therefore do not feel I can comment on that one. Â Weiner is another story. Â He has confessed to the allegations and the media has, pardon the expression, exposed the content of his inappropriate sexual texts. He says that they were indiscretions and bad judgments so he should be forgiven. Â His wife says she has forgiven him thus implying that the voters should too. If my training and experience have taught me one thing about these complex cases it is that harassment and abuse are more about power than sex. To me Weiner’s sin is not about minor indiscretions but about abuses of power. Â He has used his political positions, celebrity and employer status to force his sexual presence upon women who had less power. I will never know the psychological roots of his urges toward exhibitionism but I don’t care. When given political power he abused it and now is asking that he be given it again. Â Fool me twice shame on me. I would not vote for him if I were still a voter in NYC.
The same concerns inform my take on sexual harassment and abuse in education. I have known several teachers who met their wives when they were students either taught by them or at least at their institutions.  Some of these have produced committed or long-lasting partnerships that have survived their teacher-student beginnings. Some have cooled to become nostalgic memories of young peoples’ sexual awakening both straight and gay as the partners moved on. Some of the relationships have been consensual while others have been predatory. Most of the abuse and harassment incidents have been student to student rather than faculty to student. Alcohol has been a player in many of the situations as has peer pressure and student culture. While all of these things need to be considered when counselling students and helping students cope with the aftermath of these situations, for me they do not play a role in the ethics of the situation, what is right or wrong. Let me be crystal clear on this. a) Forcing sexual practices or attentions on others beyond their consent or when their ability to consent becomes curtailed, is wrong; b) sexual attentions between people of holding different power positions particularly within the same hierarchy whether that be student/teacher, employer or supervisor/employee, minister/worshiper, older relative/younger relative  or officer/soldier, is wrong because consent is meaningless in these situations.
To take the last situation first in the case of unequal power positions consent cannot be disengaged from the power relations at work here. Is the person of lesser power giving consent because of the attraction to the greater power in the other or because the greater power curtails their ability to object? Either way the power relations have entangled and ensnared any romantic or sexual attraction that may have occurred. In the first situation I believe that no is clearly no and that consent when one’s judgment is impaired e.g. by alcohol or peer pressure is no consent at all. The presence of alcohol should not be used to condone sexual activity but as a warning that any sexual activity in those situations has a high likelihood of being sexual harassment or assault.
All of this gets us back to the two articles that I have linked to above. In the first story University of Southern California is alleged to encourage or at least allow its employees (deans, safety officers and counselors) tell students not to press charges of rape particularly if they had imbibed alcohol at the time of their sexual encounters. I emphasize that these are but allegations at the present and an investigation will I hope determine if they are true. If they are true and even if these are some employees acting on their own, some serious retraining and examination of campus culture are in order. If it takes a judgment that hurts the deep pockets of USC to bring about change then so be it. If I were still a parent of a USC student I would be concerned and think twice about sending my child there. The bad publicity alone should prompt USC to re-examine itself and I hope it leads to an amelioration of the situation rather than a cover-up.
Deerfield is in a similar situation. I think the Catholic Church has provided us with an excellent example of how not to handle sexual abuse in its ranks. Rather than covering it up it must face it head on and institute policies and procedures to prevent its happening again. Most of the time abusers rationalize their abuse as not hurting the people they abuse. This is of course nonsense but it means that the abusers will continue their abuse as long as they can because they see little or nothing wrong with it. The institution has a moral, parental and legal obligation to prevent it happening and to investigate (to fire if necessary) any abusers. This will involve training the students, administrators and faculty to spot the signs of abuse, informing students, staff and faculty of what abuse/harassment is as well as what their rights are, counselling and increased vigilance. All of this need be age appropriate to protect students and faculty alike.
President Obama’s administration has been nothing if not controversial. His impromptu statement on Trayvon Martin is a good example. In it he is articulate, reasonable, aware and pragmatic as has been his hallmark. In the end however it is more rhetoric than action and even that has kicked up dust. The right would have us believe that there is no racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, access to voting, education, life chances or health care when the statistics tell us otherwise. Â Yet they maintain that this discrimination is not racism but calling America on its discrimination is racism. Â It is an Orwellian world in which the word is what the deed is not.
The right hates Obama with a passion that not only opposes his policies but demonstrates a personal animosity that may be unprecedented for any president. The Republican party opposes not only his policies but those of their own that he supports and parrots back to them, simply because he says them. Progressives on the left  oppose him because many of his policies (drone strikes, firm support of Wall Street, looking for compromises with the right wing) break campaign promises or are at best centrist and at worst moderately conservative themselves. Black progressives point to his failure to address issues in the black community where the last recession has wiped out black wealth and structural changes in the economy have produced greater, still growing inequality. African Americans gave him over 90% of their vote yet he has done little specifically for the black community. He has rarely gotten his moderate agenda passed let alone a progressive one. He did get some health care reform passed but even that is a bastardization that is far from the single payer health service that most progressives would endorse. Even so the Republicans keep trying to repeal it when even the health insurers should endorse it. The modest gun control measures he introduced went down to failure at a time when an overwhelming  majority of people, outside the NRA and Republicans in Congress, were in favor of it.
What makes progressives believe that even if Obama heeded the better angels of his nature to advocate a progressive agenda, that he could get it passed by a right wing Congress?  Whether the right wing conservatives have a majority or not such an agenda has a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting heard let alone passage. Even when the right wingers are in the minority they use filibusters, cloture and demagoguery to stop that agenda cold. So let’s be clear: Obama is not a progressive.  In the good old days he would have been a pragmatic moderate Republican.  Hoping he will be more is hoping frogs fly. His modest proposals even though kowtowing to the right are difficult if not impossible to get passed.  He has drunk the balanced budget Kool-Aid and though he wants to balance it at a higher level of spending and taxation, his is still a budget that doesn’t put people, let alone the black community, first. Conservative Republicans will  continue to try to tie Obama in knots over molehill scandals when they have no ideas other than opposing everything Obama does. They shout about  lower taxes or balanced budgets while the middle class goes to hell, infrastructure collapses, and inequality increases.
We should look at Obama not as a failed progressive but as the lesser of two evils or a defensive gesture to prevent the crazies from winning. One can look at the glass as nine tenths empty or one tenth full.  He can be a step along the way if we learn the lesson his campaign taught us.  There is a hidden power in grassroots organization as the election demographics change. Criticism from the left will never make Obama into something that he’s not.  I am not calling for it to stop because it does influence him on things he can change by executive order or through the power of his presidential pulpit e.g. don’t ask, don’t tell in the military.  His endorsement of gay marriage does signal that his opinion can change. He will not however lead us to the promised land.  We have to get there for ourselves with grass roots organizing to finally get a Congress that represents the will of the people. I know it’s an uphill battle.  If Elizabeth Warren has to fight like hell in a liberal state like Massachusetts then we know it’s going to be harder in other states and almost impossible in conservative states. Actions that shape the 2014 and subsequent Congressional elections will decide if even moderate reforms can become law. I do not know or even care to speculate on who the next president will be although I would doubt that such a person would have support and Teflon within the black community like Obama. Regardless of who it is we need to have more progressives like Bernie Sanders, Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren in Congress.  We need to have the Congressional Black Caucus taken seriously by their peers, and we need to have an effective coalition with Latino and women members to offset the old boy’s club that is Congress.  That however is where the real battle is, not the battle over Obama.
Many of the the progressive and liberal responses to the gun violence atrocities we have seen lately are directed at violent video games, movies or even hip hop music. Humbly  I would like to suggest that they are the wrong target. For this stand you can pick your own metaphor: swimming against the tide, marching to one’s own drummer, going against the grain, walking in the wrong direction. First I would like to admit that when it comes to violence I am something of a wimp.  I do not own any first person shooter video games; I am not a fan of horror or zombie movies; I have a limited tolerance for violence in movies (although I did see Django Unchained and my son claims that Tarentino’s cartoon hyper-violence is to sate you and then overload you with violence until it becomes intolerable); and I deplore and worry about what the violence and misogyny in hip hop indicate about our African American communities. Yet, I see no problem to which censorship is the answer.
I must admit that this is partly because of my knee-jerk reaction that grows out of the knowledge that African Americans were  (and given the school systems in minority areas) are being subjugated by withholding the ability to read  books and ideas. The common occurrence of linking censorship to subjugation throughout history should give all of us pause before we advocate it. Feeling that we are are pure and righteous while doing it is no excuse. Totalitarian regimes everywhere also claim such righteousness. There is also an air of sympathetic magic to it.  If we censor something the censors believe the problem associated with it will also disappear.  Arizona believes that if we stop ethnic studies programs from talking about America’s history then the ethnic struggles in their state will somehow be eliminated.  If we stop students from reading the n-word in Huckleberry Finn, race relations will be better.  If we stop teaching youngsters about their bodies and feelings during puberty, teen sex and pregnancy will disappear. Finally censorship concentrates on stopping an idea in a certain kind of media rather than the idea itself.  It leads to a whack-a-mole strategy in which one tries to whack it when the idea rears its head.  The problem is that even if you subdued it, it will pop up again in another place, among another group or in a different media.  If people were not able to do it when the highest evolved media producer was the printing press, how on earth are we to do it in an era of cell phone cameras, cheap and small video/audio recorders, blogs, Instagram and You Tube? The current call to limit the availability of violent media is another one of these futile, self righteous, sympathetic magic, whack-a-mole endeavors.
Lest one fear that I have become a libertarian in my old age. let me add that I am in favor of an assault weapons ban, expanded gun licensing checks and limits on clip sizes.  Assault weapons are designed to shoot at armed bands of humans not unarmed herds of deer.  There is nothing “sporting” about them. Obese males may get their “jollies” from annihilating targets with them but the positives do not outweigh the negatives when they are used for more nefarious activities.  I do not see how allowing private ownership of them benefits our society.  For any who argue that they protect against the government, history shows that there has not been a successful American armed insurrection against the government since the South won a few battles in the Civil War.  Spoiler alert, they lost the war. I support most of the gun control measures mentioned by the President in his speech today. With so many guns already in circulation it is going to take years for these measures to produce tangible effects. It is therefore better to start now than later.
These gun control measures however are really nothing more than a band-aid on the cancer that is eating up our society from the inside. The atrocities occur when the easy acquisition of these means of destruction meet individuals consumed by the fear, anger or alienation created in our society. To be fair we are talking about a tiny minority in our society who have turned such feelings into public actions.  The determined loners, political fanatics, gang members and others who feel they have been wronged, are those who have been driven to perpetrate these atrocities. For them other people have stopped being human beings with families and people who love them to become nothing more than the collateral damage of an individual’s outpouring of rage.  There are no shortage of candidates for causes of this fear, anger and alienation: late stage capitalism, the breakdown of family and community, the decline of religion, the rise of religion, racism, materialism, the lack of spirituality, individualism, liberalism, conservatism, isolationism, world domination.  Take your pick or create your own. I know only that until we solve this real crisis in our society we will remain the most violent society on the face of the planet.
Truth is always a casualty of political campaigns. Politicians lie, exaggerate and bend the truth to get elected.  That’s not news and in that regard this year’s election is no different from others.  As always let the voter beware especially of television ads. To find out the truth of what’s happening the populace has to dig a little deeper.  The problem is that fewer and fewer of the voters are willing to do that.  They judge politicians on whether their lives have improved or not and their own ideologies.  People feel that they cannot actively judge whether a politican’s platform is going to be good for them or not so they vote based on other things. I was reminded of this while watching a political commercial featuring people who claim that they voted for Obama in 2008 but that he has not improved their lives so they should elect the Republicans.
Okay so let me get this straight.  The deregulation that Republicans advocated led to the greed of Wall Street bringing our economy to the brink of depression, the loss of jobs and the destruction of lives. The tax cuts that they advocated have benefited the rich rather than the middle class so much that they have created the greatest income inequality the country has ever seen. The Republicans and especially the Tea Party have prevented the implementation of policies (even those they proposed or advocated) that would have improved the country because they did not want Obama to get credit for it. They advocate economic policies that have never worked e.g. tax cuts for the rich who are supposedly “job creators.” They have denied well established scientific theories like global warming and evolution in favor of Bible stories.  They want to reestablish male control over women’s bodies. They criticize the stimulus package when in reality it was one third the tax cuts that they advocated and restricted by the limitations that they placed upon it. They would not lessen the tax burden on the middle class unless tax cuts on the wealthy were included. These are the people the RNC want me to vote for?
“Swiftboating” is drawn from the 2002 presidential campaign when the Republicans wanted you to believe that John Kerry, a decorated war veteran, actually did not deserve your vote while George W. Bush who stayed at home and served in the reserves only when he felt like it, did deserve your vote.  While it was eventually proved that the allegations against Kerry were lies the damage was done.  What was one of his biggest strengths had been negated while one of Bush’s greatest weaknesses was also negated.  They did this by lying to convince voters that black was actually white and white was actually black.  The debate over Medicare is the same thing.  The Republicans criticized Obama for cutting Medicare when in reality his cuts don’t affect benefits paid to individuals but payments made to providers in order to become more efficient.  At a less political time these would have been cuts applauded by the Republicans. At the same time they are trying to portray themselves as the protectors of Medicare when the budget cuts espoused by Romney and especially Ryan would cut the number of people receiving benefits and the amount they received even more. This is classic swiftboating; trying to convince you through distortions and outright lies that things are the opposite of what they are.
The problem in believing the lies and ignoring the reality is that the reality eventually comes home to roost. The Republican economic plans will not work and will plunge the economy further into recession just as recovery is occurring. Just look at what the austerity plans have done to Europe. The social agenda of the Tea Party dominated Republicans will shred the social net, curtail women’s reproductive rights, and impose an “American Taliban” as Aaron Sorkin has called it. The middle class will fall further behind the rich and the reserve army of the unemployed will continue to grow.
The recession has shaken the middle class tremendously. The American dream of livelong employment, home ownership and a better life for one’s children, has never seemed so far away. The Republicans are using scare tactics, lies and a shell game to get you to vote for them. They are trying to convince you that the deficit (one that they helped create) is the most serious problem we face when it is actually a lack of confidence in consumers that is preventing business from hiring and the economy from expanding. Their plan will indeed help the rich get richer but it will not help the middle class.  If the middle class votes for them they need to ask, “What cha gonna do when they come for you?”
I was reading an article by Harlan Green (here) which raised the question of why the poorer states, particularly those who receive more in federal aid than they pay in taxes, support candidates who promise a smaller government and fewer entitlement programs. He refers to an article by Paul Krugman which lists three answers to that question:
- The answer that Thomas Frank gives in his book What’s the Matter With Kansas, that is, Republicans and conservatives have used social issues like abortion, gay marriage etc. to convince people to vote for them even when it was against their economic interests to do so.
- The opposite tendency of affluent voters in the Northeast to vote against their economic interests (voting Republican) because of their stand on social issues explained by Andrew Gelman.
- The fact that 40 to 44% of the people receiving government benefits like Social Security or Medicare do not recognize that they are receiving government benefits that the people they vote for want to cut.
To me none of these explanations is broad enough or goes deep enough to explain the behavior even though in some instances they may be true. Long ago when my wife was working as a teller in a bank a little old woman came in and was complaining that she feared the President was going to cut her Social Security. When my wife asked her who she had voted for she said “President Reagan.”
Green veers off on what seems like a tangent when he is answering a different question – what makes these states poor in the first place. He says there is a correlation between these states and the states with the lowest amount of passport holders. He notes that passport ownership usually marks wealth, experience in other cultures, education, and what he calls “openness”, all of which create social liberalism. By implication the lowest passport owning states would have lower wealth, lower education, fewer experiences with other cultures and a “closedness.” He then offers an argument that the support for conservatism comes from holding a social Darwinism and free market belief even among the poor who haven’t risen to the top. He doesn’t explain where that belief comes from, only that it is an outdated 19th century belief in the 21st century. The presidents he believes instituted the most deregulation to remove controls on the free market were Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush. Our economy went into its most severe depression or recession as a consequence.
Now I haven’t checked on Green’s economic history nor do I want to go into the lack of logic in his arguments. What I want to ask is whether the same things that keep the residents of these states poor are the same things that make them vote for conservatives? Right away I want to emphasize that this is a social science hypothesis; it is a probabilistic statement not an absolute. I am not saying that all people in these states vote conservative, nor that all in these states are poor, less educated and “closed”, nor that only such people vote conservative. I am sure that there are many wealthy, well-educated conservatives out there. I am asking whether there is a statistical correlation between states with large blocs of these characteristics and current voting patterns. If there is, does this correlation mean there is a causal relationship between the two? I am not asserting that there is; I am only thinking out loud. Are people willing to vote arguably against their economic interests because of ideology, philosophy or other such abstract beliefs. Have their real economic interests been hidden or mystified? Do people in fact vote their economic interests or do they vote as they do for other reasons?
In the current political season a popular media game is catching someone saying something today that is the opposite of what they said on videotape some years ago. The person is thereafter vilified either for hypocrisy, lying, being indecisive or for cynically saying something he really doesn’t believe in order to gain votes. Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show is by the far the best at this. While any of these is possible I think these “gotcha” moments ignore a third possibility: the person simply may have changed his position. I am not saying I agree with either the previous or the present position (take Mitt Romney for example) but I disagree with seeing change only as a sign of weakness instead of potentially one of strength.
A few weeks ago “60 Minutes” did a profile of the person who had developed a pledge that many Republicans had signed vowing to reduce the size of government. He said that this idea of smaller government was something he had been pursuing since the age of thirteen. He said this as a badge of pride but I immediately began to wonder. I certainly don’t still believe in many of the things I did at thirteen and if I did I would be more embarrassed than proud. I would like to believe that I’ve learned something since then, grown and matured. It was kind of frightening to hear that Republican congressional representatives had agreed with and promised to enact the political and economic ideas of a thirteen year old boy. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” 1 Corinthians 13:11.
I went to a talk a few years ago by that 80-year-old political veteran and former presidential campaigner Eugene McCarthy who said something interesting. Looking back on his political career he thought that the best president the country could elect was one who could change from strongly held positions once elected. He cited Richard Nixon whose hawkish view on communist China did not prevent him from being the one to bring about formal political ties and a rapprochement between the two countries. This of course led to one of my favorite moments in the Star Trek movies when Mr. Spock quotes that old Vulcan saying “only Nixon could go to China.” The increased information flow of the presidency, political reality and simply learning on the job should produce growth and maturity that allow presidents to change. It is the ideologically charged atmosphere, the no compromise mentality, and the increased media glare that has caused us to undervalue a quality that we should look for in our presidential candidates.
In his essay Self-Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” In the essay Emerson is trying to convince people, especially politicians, to break away from the conventional wisdom and to take principled stands based on morality and ethics. In modern politics the idea of principled stands has been perverted into holding “foolish consistencies” rather than the change he was advocating. Even worse those foolish consistencies are themselves made up strangely inconsistent things like being pro-life and also pro-death penalty. Life for a president, to cite the obvious, will be complex. We need someone who can improvise around a theme rather than blindly follow a melody laid down beforehand. We need someone who can grow. We need someone who can learn from both mistakes and new information. We need someone who can change as circumstances change. In short we need a flip flopper.
I have refrained from saying anything about the Republican primary field because I am, in Obama’s words, waiting for them to throw people off the island. After all it is only the winner of the Republican nomination with whom we should primarily (pun intended) concern ourselves. I have therefore not commented on the insane economic plans, moral hypocrisy, corruption, ignorance of foreign affairs, distortions of history, and plain recklessness and irresponsibility (not to mention outright lies) the field has heretofore produced.
Candidate Newt Gingrich has however made comments about “the poor” which need to be addressed. He has advocated paid internships doing maintenance work at schools to teach poor youngsters responsibility, punctuality and to give them experience doing something and getting paid for it. This is not only ignorant about the lives the poor live but it is insulting as well. The millions of working poor where men and especially women work one, two or three jobs to support a family, the people who have lost their jobs due to the recession, and their children should say “Hey Newt (insert Cee Lo Green song refrain here.)” Newt’s conception of the poor is part of a conservative fantasy where people who live on public aid have a problem with even conceiving of holding a job or having a work ethic. If we decode “the poor” to mean people of color then we have the same justification for low wage slavery that we had in the 1800’s for actual slavery. Read the defenses of slavery, oh I forgot, Newt is an historian so he may have done so already. We have the same “culture of poverty” arguments that we have had since the 1960’s. Newt acts as if the changes in the welfare system under Clinton and the Congress of which Newt was House speaker, don’t exist. The actual amount people receive on welfare, the time restrictions, the need to supplement it that Newt himself helped create, don’t exist in this Neverland that is in Newt’s head. He took his plan which is only in the hazy beginning formulations and consulted that expert on the poor, Donald Trump. This is farce becoming tragedy.
But what if we accept Newt’s argument that kids are not learning the proper work ethic even if the parents themselves are working hard? Surely this is not confined to the poor. How many middle class or even upper class kids have not properly consumed the work ethic Kool-aid. I don’t hear Newt calling for them to work as low wage interns for their schools. Wouldn’t that create an uproar among those very parents whose votes Newt is courting. What about the charge that no one is teaching them how to hold down a job? Wouldn’t that be insulting?
The crux of his statement is not that he cares one bit about the welfare of poor youth. If so wouldn’t we have been able to see it in the long time that Newt has been on the public stage? His real goal is getting votes by using his mock “concern for the poor” to perpetuate a racist, classist, outdated and imaginary vision of the poor among potential voters who share that vision. This is politics at its most cynical and hypocritical. So I too say “Hey Newt, (insert Cee Lo Green song refrain here.)”
Before I settled in to the humanities I was into the “dark side” that is science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). In fact as a child I was enough of a math prodigy to take an enrichment math course at Columbia University while sill in sixth grade. This course introduced us to new math systems like calculus and Boolean algebra. The most important thing it taught to me was that math systems are all based on a set of freely accepted and unchallenged assumptions called postulates. For example the math system we commonly use is based on several postulates like the agreed principle that a x 1 = a, that is, anything multiplied by 1 is itself (2 x 1 = 2; 145 x 1 = 145 etc.) The course showed me that if we change the postulates, for example if we agree that a x 1 = 1 (anything times 1 equals 1), we will get an entirely different mathematical system with different consequences and properties. Some of these postulate changes and new systems are useful because they fit some real world phenomena and others are little more than intellectual curiosities.
Over the years I have seen that this also applies to non-mathematical systems of thought which for convenience I will call ideologies. They are based upon some basic assumptions that are either jointly agreed upon, accepted as truth, or believed in as “faith” and as a consequence are unchallengeable. These systems of thought form what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called a “model of reality.” Take for example a road map, it is a symbolic representation of where the roads, buildings, scenic attractions etc. in actuality are. It is what Geertz means by a model of reality. With this road map you can make a plan for your behavior. Google Maps for example draws a line on its map of reality to show you which streets you should take to reach your desired destination. Geertz calls this route on the model of reality a “model for reality.” In other words depending on what your model of reality tells you, you plan what you are going to do, how you are going to live your life accordingly in a model for reality. Your system of thought is based on assumptions that that ultimately determine your behavior.
What that math class taught me was that systems of thought are not only based on accepted assumptions but that those assumptions can be changed. Just as you don’t have to assume that a x 1 = 1, you don’t have to believe that the sun rotates around the earth, that things happen for no reason, there is an afterlife or people do things only out of selfish motives. One chooses (or perhaps your culture and society chooses for you) what assumptions to accept as simply the way things in actuality are and you simply live in the world with the model for reality which that model of reality allows or creates. Accepting this has, I think, allowed for good things in how I approach the world. First of all it has created flexibility when thinking about the world. As experience has demonstrated otherwise, I have been willing to change assumptions I held dear to refine my model of reality and therefore change my model for reality. It is a long way from the “ghettos” I grew up in and the rarefied atmosphere of academia in which I have spent most of my life. I have also found it provides a way of thinking “outside my box” by trying out alternative assumptions and seeing where that leads me. I have tried to teach that to students. What happens if just for argument’s sake you assume that the accepted wisdom is wrong, that the place where you should start is just the opposite of what you first thought? Does that open new ways of thinking for you? This flexibility has produced a healthy skepticism and yet it has not left me adrift. It has not led me to believe that all systems of thought are arbitrary but rather confirmed that my system of thought is one I chose, one I believe represents a reality.
It has also led to a healthy respect for other systems of thought even if they lead to behaviors I find abhorrent. For example if one assumes that “black” people are inherently inferior, of limited intelligence and sub-human then it seems perfectly reasonable to prevent them from voting, limit their education and avoid living near them. This is based on a faulty model of reality and not irrational behavior, impossible to understand reasoning or so forth. When I encounter behavior that makes no sense to me I try to see the system of thought upon which it is based. Rather than see their actions as insane, evil, stupid or just emotional and not rational, I see them as misguided or mistaken yet based upon some “ideology” that I just don’t yet understand.
Finally it has led to a model for reality in my own life. If there are behaviors I think should change in other people, I understand that I need to do one of two things. I either need to work to change the models of reality on which those behaviors are based or I need to try to argue for a change within the parameters of that ideology. Nelson Mandela’s genius was in realizing that he should convince the people in power that the model of reality on which they based their fears and actions was wrong, untenable, expensive and would lead to their destruction. Once they were convinced that Mandela and his comrades were reasonable men like themselves and not the subhuman brutes in their model of reality, they could begin to contemplate the end of apartheid.
Changing postulates is not easy. They are buried under layers of what we believe to be truisms and it is hard to dig through our thoughts to the bedrock assumptions most of us take for granted. It is even harder to question those because we fear it may leave us adrift.  If we do make the effort however we may find whole new worlds opening to us.
The book I read the most during my undergraduate career decades ago was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it Kuhn analyzed the difficulties of changing from one set of scientific (read ideological) accepted truisms to another. Scientists might howl at calling their systems of thought “ideologies” (a word they associate with religion or other “false” systems of thought from which they want to differentiate themselves) but if it quacks like a duck treat it like a duck. Kuhn believed that each scientific ideology whether that of Ptolemy that the sun revolved around the earth or Newtonian physics could resist failures because of built in “fail safes.” These fail safes explain away (or not) the inabilities of the ideological system to account for certain phenomena. It might be something as simple as “God’s will” which was used to explain anomalies that don’t fit the system. He hypothesized that it was only when these anomalies built up so that too much remained unexplainable, that a new “system” of explanation was considered and eventually adopted. Thus the Copernican revolution (the earth revolving around the sun) succeeded the Ptolemic or quantum physics followed Newtonian physics.
Kuhn’s book has been justly criticized over the years and I want to point out it does not consider the social context of ideological change enough either on the micro or macro levels. How does an individual undergo ideological change? How does an entire society change ideologies? I was reminded of these things while watching the new movie Moneyball about Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane. The movie and the book it is adapted from consider the latter of these two questions. How does baseball “society” consider a new ideology based on sabermetric statistical analysis which flies in the face of accepted baseball “faith.” The baseball traditionalists who have their jobs, self-worth and view of the world conditioned by the old ideology are immediately threatened by any challenge to their system. Of course Beane is ridiculed and disparaged at first but as anyone who has read the book or followed baseball knows, eventually many of the principles he implemented are adopted by others once he demonstrates that they can be successful. That is the arc of the movie. For me the interesting thing is that the ideological change is driven not by the repeated failures of the old system as Kuhn would predict. Indeed the old system fails only as often as it always has but still succeeds enough to be firmly in place. This is not uncommon among ideologies; we still have Newtonian physics don’t we? The reason for Beane’s conversion and for the system’s acceptance is not system failure but fiscal constraints. The “small market” teams cannot compete for the most “valued” players (they seem to always windup on the Yankees or lately the Boston Red Sox) so they are willing to at least try a new baseball “ideology.” The fact that Beane shows that a team can be competitive with this new strategy is quickly adopted by other team owners who see a chance to become profitable as well. The key ingredient for its widespread acceptance is that you can get lower paid employees and still be competitive.
As a parable of ideological change I cannot help comparing this to the current conservative political ideology. Since the “Reagan revolution” fiscal conservatism has been the dominant political ideology among both Democrats and Republicans albeit with differences between them. The liberal “traditionalists” have gone the way of the dinosaur as the recent passing of Charles Percy reminds us. Both Democrats and Republicans have vacillated on how deeply conservative and libertarian to be. Republican spending on items dear to their hearts coupled with an ideology of tax relief has driven the budget into the deficit they say they abhor. Deregulation for business is offset by the extreme government snooping embodied in the Patriot Act that makes any true conservative turn white with fear, red with anger or blue with frustration. The Tea Party wants to implement an even more stringently conservative ideology which calls for minimal government intrusion in the nation. My point is that none of these ideological revolutions from Reagan to the Tea Party are based on the failure of the old system. Furthermore there is no evidence that the new systems produce jobs, economic prosperity for the middle class, a better educational system, adequate health care for the masses or any other benefit for the majority of Americans. The best they produce is lower paid employees without health care as in Rick Perry’s Texas. As in Moneyball the only constant is more profitability for the “team owners,” those rich folks at the top of the system. Politics is different than baseball and that to succeed a plurality of voters must be convinced of your ideology rather than one Billy Beane. Over the last few years this has led to a Republican effort to restrict voting, a politics of fear, the injection of irrelevant so-called social issues into campaigns, and to a politics based on emotions rather than issues. As time has shown us this will benefit the team owners more than anyone else. Just look at the economic numbers about income gain and wealth distribution.
Billy Beane’s teams have never won a championship and the tax cut ideology will never produce the kind of society we say we want in this country.