Posts from ‘Recent Events’
An economist, one of my former colleagues, challenged one of the central tenets of economics.  Much like physics intro teachers ignored “friction” to produced examples  to focus on what they want you to learn, economists include free choice in the lessons they want to teach. My friend wanted to argue that there is never free choice in economic decisions because there is differential access to information.  People are making their choices not in a free and unconstrained manner but because of the information available to them.  Those with superior information are more likely to make better choices while those with poor information will make less informed and more likely poor economic decisions.
I was reminded of the general question of un-free choice after I watched this CNN black host’s agreement with conservative Fox News about what is wrong in the black community: Don Lemon. Both he and the conservative folks trace the breakdowns in family, education and income among African Americans to decisions that black folks made themselves. The upshot is that black folks themselves can solve these problems if they make the right choices as they are free to do. Depending on which side of the coin you look at this is “blaming the victim” by rooting the cause of their failures in their own character or saying “they have the agency” to cure what ails them. Both of these positions depend on the fiction that they have unconstrained choice in making their decisions. Continue Reading
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.
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.
News that Arizona has censured its first public school ethnic studies program has prompted me to write about it. I first did so in this blog about a year ago.
- It is counterproductive, i.e. it stirs up more anger and resentment than it prevents
H.L Mencken has written, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” This reminds me of what we called in my un-politically correct youth a “Chinese handcuff.” That was a woven tube into which you placed the forefinger of each hand and then tried to free them. If you did the obvious thing and simply tried to pull your fingers out of it, the tube merely tightened and held you more firmly. The trick was to do the counter-intuitive thing and to push your fingers into the tube more. It loosened and was thus easy to escape. In my thirty years of teaching “ethnic studies” courses at the college level students were much more likely to become angry at the idea that this information had been hidden from them in public education than angry at “whites” for things they had done in the past. In fact those who had taken such courses gained a greater appreciation for America where things like racism and religious bigotry could be confronted and overcome. We should allow increased opportunities for minorities to develop a group consciousness and for individuals to succeed in society despite America’s shortcomings. Indeed the exceptions in the law for native Americans and the Holocaust provide examples where federal or mainstream politics recognizes the value of this. I was at a conference once where the keynote speaker lamented that “we had asked for revolution and a share of the power and all they gave us was ethnic dinners.” In other words the real power sharing demands had been mollified by the acknowledgment and steering of ethnic demands into non-threatening areas. America and capitalism’s ability to absorb and steer challenges to it into things like the marketing of “ethnicity” plays a great role in preserving it.An anti-ethnic studies law conceals things you should know about.
2. I am struck by the “ostrich” aspect of this law.
It is based on the ludicrous assumption that if we don’t talk about something, it ceases to exist. Incidentally the corallary to this is also false” something” only comes into being when we talk about it (take the concern about too early sex education.) What the law calls “ethnic studies,” is most often “American studies” just told from a different perspective. “Ethnic studies” did not make up anti-Native American policies, slavery, Jim Crow laws, the Chinese exclusion Act, race riots, the Japanese internment camps or modern “ethnic” movements like the civil right movement, farm-worker movements, the women’s movement etc. These are parts of American history that all should know about. Whether you spin these into a narrative about an ever improving America or mine it for models to emulate and adapt to conservative causes, it is a history even conservatives should know about. Whether one agrees with “ethnic studies” one has to understand the reality of today’s America to adequately plan tactics and strategies. If there is resentment against or by an ethnic group you need to understand how to use it to support your cause, enlist allies, broaden your message and defend against challenges.
3. “Ethnic studies” teaches and demonstrates values you want inculcated in young people.
The whole anti-ethnic studies movement is based upon incorrect assumptions about what actually happens in such classes. The fear represented in this law is that by teaching people that they have been oppressed they will react as a group and resent their oppressors as a group rather than acting as individuals or seeing other ethnic groups as individuals. This is hogwash. First of all the word has already slipped out that minority groups have been, are and will continue to be oppressed. Some members of minority groups don’t believe it and some do, but their belief will be shaped by the conditions of their lives not what is said in ethnic studies classes. It is these conditions like how and where one lives, one’s chances for success, how others you know have fared and the opportunities available to you, which will determine how you feel about other groups. It is individual circumstances and personal relationships that shape whether you see yourself oppressed as an individual or as a group and whether you see other ethnicities as individuals or as a faceless group. How you are treated now is much more important to you than how your group was treated historically.
Moreover many of the values which those who support this law say they hold are taught by the “ethnic studies” courses. An ethnic group’s spirituality, the importance of family, the meaning of liberty, the value of making up your own mind, one’s own uniqueness and the viewing of pronouncements critically are far more meaningful things that one learns in an ethnic studies course. To deny students these teachings for fear they may resent your group historically seems to me throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I am a fan of the NBA though not of the Los Angeles Lakers. However after the lockout I was so starved for professional basketball that I even watched the two Laker games that were offered nationally during the last few days. They were both Laker losses incidentally and the announcers and commentators were mostly talking about their decline and Kobe Bryant. They only talked a little bit about Ron Artest’s name change to Metta World Peace. Now name changes in the NBA go all the way back to Lloyd B. Free’s change to World B. Free in 1981. More recently in football Chad Johnson changed his last name to Ochocinco to match his uniform number. It certainly made sense for Ron Artest to change his name. Not only has he become an erstwhile rapper but the name itself has become remembered for a basketball brawl when he went up into the stand after a fan during a Indiana Pacers- Detroit Pistons game. Artest grew up in Queensbridge, New York, went to college at St. John’s University in Queens. He got a reputation as a tough defensive player and was in fact the NBA defensive player of the year in 2004. There is of course the inevitable racial angle that he was looked at as the stereotypical “angry black man”. This was never made more clear than in the brawl when he stirred up racial fears by going after a white man who had thrown beer at him. I don’t want to condone his actions in any way, but only to point out the racial elephant in the room. The NBA didn’t want to stir up fear among its white fan base and punished him severely.
So changing his name made perfect sense. Changing it to Metta World Peace has made the Laker games much more fun than I had anticipated it would. One announcer on the ABC televised game on Sunday referred to how much fun it was to hear the deep voiced arena play by play announcer say “World Peace” from time to time. The on air announcers also had fun with it: “score one for World Peace.” “World Peace enters the game.” “Kobe gives it up to World Peace.” “World Peace is fouled.” The possible puns are endless and I urge you to come up with your own. He is of course the same hard nosed defender he has always been although some skills have inevitably diminished with time. He is to be commended however for making his name now be the opposite of what the old one had become and for making it so enjoyable for the rest of us. Let us enjoy World Peace while we can.
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.)”
Neal Gabler, with whom I seldom agree, has written a recent article in the NYT Magazine bemoaning the lack of “big ideas” in American society. One passage in particular struck me:
It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.
He goes on to argue that it is the flood of information from the internet and social media that has squeezed out the the analytical modes of rationality, science, evidence, logical argument etc. to open the floodgates to superstition, faith, orthodoxy and opinion. Continue Reading
1. Mount a legal challenge to it.
I am no legal expert but common sense and a historical perspective make me suspect that the right of a state school board to dictate what should or should not be taught in local schools may be a legal principle that has been reaffirmed several times. However the right to exclude a class or group of Americans from the curriculum may indeed provide grounds for a legal challenge. Here I would defer to those who have more knowledge and experience of the legal system. Whether it does or not I hope that this law gets challenged in court like the Arizona anti-immigrant law. At the very least this court case would provide a valuable educational forum for a debate. Is this a case where local or community rights supersede state rights? Do state laws supersede federal laws or constitutional rights in the fourteenth amendment for example? I would hope that civil liberties groups might take up this issue or that other organizations might see in this a threat to the ethnic minorities and provide free or low costs legal services or at the very least raise money for a legal challenge.
2. Use this as an occasion to organize, organize, organize.
Organize for political action. Whether it is to punish those who voted for this law, help those who opposed it or to run new candidates more respectful and sympathetic to the educational needs of the local community. The law gives the power to the local school boards to enforce its dictates. Pay more attention to who is on those school boards. Run and support candidates Continue Reading
Arizona’s new immigration law has justly been receiving attention and legal challenges. However, lost in its wakes has been the other anti-ethnic studies law which targets ethnic studies programs mostly at the high school level. The actual text of the law (which was House Bill 2281) says:
A. A SCHOOL DISTRICT OR CHARTER SCHOOL IN THIS STATE SHALL NOT INCLUDE IN ITS PROGRAM OF INSTRUCTION ANY COURSES OR CLASSES THAT INCLUDE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:
1. PROMOTE THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
2. PROMOTE RESENTMENT TOWARD A RACE OR CLASS OF PEOPLE.
3. ARE DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR PUPILS OF A PARTICULAR ETHNIC GROUP.
4. ADVOCATE ETHNIC SOLIDARITY INSTEAD OF THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS AS INDIVIDUAL
It goes on to say: Continue Reading