Basic Human Dignity

As an addendum to the previous discussion, Paul Krugman in a recent editorial (NYT, 2/101/12) writes, "so we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals."   He engages in his own form of snooty and dismissive argumentation familiar to most academics, but behind it is an implicit egalitarianism.  We shouldn't be too quick to reject the rationality of the uneducated.  If the legitimate jobs available are so poorly remunerated that they do not in themselves support a decent life, why then would one subject oneself to the often demeaning and demoralizing conditions of work?  It is a rational calculation that most would make, particularly when there are other means of support available, and there one can take one's pick -- the anemic socialism of the existing welfare state or the shadow capitalism of the drug trade.  It is a question of which comes first, the moral failings or the lack of meaningful opportunity, and how you answer that question, of course, puts you on one side or another of the ideological divide in this country.  Krugman, who falls off on the liberal side, tells us, "reject the [conservative] attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.  Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause."

In American culture, if we are to look for a moral core, one that transcends the theocratic table thumping of comprehensive religious doctrines, one that transcends the ideological head thumping of comprehensive political doctrines, one that ultimately mitigates differences of ethnicity and race, it is the redemptive value of labor.   The hard working man, the productive man, is the good man, and one sees that mythos reflected in any number of cultural artifacts.  I am thinking at the moment of the Clint Eastwood film, Gran Torino.  It is set in a diminished Detroit.  The background is the sort of urban blight Murray describes in Coming Apart, and the story line is rather simple, a young Asian immigrant is subjected to every form of stereotypical bigotry imaginable from the white and retired auto-worker played by Eastwood, but the character is ostensibly sympathetic because he also represents a set of "traditional American values," the self-sacrifice of patriotism and hard work.  The young Asian is redeemed in Eastwood's eyes, not by a sudden conversion to Christianity and Christian values -- the folk religion practiced by the immigrant family was portrayed sympathetically as a set of traditional family centered values -- but by his willingness to work hard.  A pivotal scene shows the young immigrant struggling in the rain to remove a dead stump from his neighbor's yard.  In the end, the young immigrant inherits the Gran Torino, the symbolic exemplar of America's hardworking, industrial legacy.  The hardworking man, the productive man, is the good man, and while Krugman takes the argument one step further, suggesting that a good society is one which provides the opportunity for productive work, it is nevertheless the labor that redeems.

To be continued.        

  

The Bell Curve Revisited Conclusion

I like to think of myself as a cautious optimist, but the prognosis may be more intractable than Murray can admit to himself.  I do not want to draw too close a connection between education, money, and basic human dignity, but most would concede that they are entangled, if not causally related.  The sorts of jobs that one can do without an education are not very many, are growing fewer, and regardless are not particularly conducive to human dignity.  They do not pay well, and while money cannot buy happiness, its absence makes the pursuit of happiness altogether, shall we say, more challenging.  Nearly universal access to education, including higher education, has done little to change the basic dynamic.  That a few are up to the challenge and a growing majority are not should come as no particular surprise.  At all but the most selective institutions, any administrator at any college will tell you that a significant number of students arrive, as we like to say, under-prepared.  They lack the basic intellectual skills, the numeracy and the literacy necessary to even begin developing expert thinking and complex communication skills.  They are consigned to remedial education courses in math and English, high school and in some cases even grade school level courses, where a few find they are up to the challenge and develop the necessary skills, but most founder for a while and drift away.  The euphemism, "under-prepared," is a convenient one for those of us in higher education.  It allows us to defer responsibility to those who struggled before us -- if only the high schools had done a better job of "preparing" the students for college.  Even better, we can avoid making invidious judgments about the students themselves.  To say one lacks proper preparedness is one thing, to say one lacks intellectual capacity for full participation in the economic life of the country is quite another, and yet as technology keeps "upping the ante" for a growing number of our students that may well be the necessary judgment, and again, the question becomes, "what to do with them?"

Murray's argument seems to be deeply flawed in at least one respect.  On the one hand, he seems to credit genetics as the underlying cause of the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy.  Like is attracted to like, and under an assumption of homogamy within the marriage market, the smartest people are drawn to each other because they share similar tastes, interests, and values.  The smartest people tend to accumulate the most wealth and gather together in communities of the wealthy reflecting and reinforcing those tastes, interests and values.  The smartest people tend to have the smartest children who are socialized to those tastes, interests, and values, and because they have the means, the smartest people send their children to the best schools, where the virtuous cycle repeats itself.  On the other hand, he seems to blame the modern welfare state for a good deal of the decay in the moral and ethical standards of industriousness, honesty, family, and religiosity among the lower income Americans.   The modern welfare state has trapped the American poor and working poor in a Pavlovian cycle of dependency and entitlement, drugs and crime, and single parent (or even worse absent parent) households.  Those in the upper income tiers don't seem to share in those problems, at least not to the same degree, or in the same way.  It is the nature/nurture argument writ large.  Nature and the invisible hand of the marriage market is responsible for the virtuous cycle.  Nurture and government social engineering is responsible for the vicious cycle.  It is questionable, however, if a dismantling of the welfare state will produce anything like a great awakening of personal responsibility.  In the absence of even the most modest of alternative proposals, the welfare state seems to be wrapped in an ideological chicken and egg dispute.  Has the welfare state caused the decline in moral and ethical standards or has it emerged as a palliative answer to the pragmatic question, "what to do with those who have been intellectually and economically alienated from the modern economy?"   The answer is likely "yes."

The Bell Curve Revisited Continued

If indeed cognitive capacity is an inheritable trait, how then should we feel about education?  Can school work overcome our native stupidity?  At the most general level, of course, nearly everyone can benefit from one from of education or another.  It is a truism that both democracy and capitalism needs an educated citizenry, and as a matter of policy and priority, most states provide for public education at the elementary, the secondary, and at the collegiate levels.   Education too holds a more or less unique place in the ideological dispute over social justice.  School work creates opportunities, and both ideological camps accept that getting an education is a necessary, though hardly sufficient, prerequisite for a human being to reach their full potential.  Both camps accept that an educated citizenry is necessary, not only to informed decisions at the polling booth, but also for their full participation within the economic and social life of their communities.  We believe, or we want to believe, that school work overcomes native stupidity to the degree necessary, and if students stick it out, it does so more or less universally.  School work, in short, is no different than any other sort of work and is subject to the same mythologies that inform our attitudes about work.  It is inextricably redemptive and remunerative.  Those that apply themselves to their studies, those who burn the midnight oil and work hard at them, as most students do, those developed habits of mind and heart will not only save one from a life of penury, but will reward one with happiness and success, however one might want to measure happiness and success.    

There is some truth to the mythologies, else they wouldn't survive as mythologies, and we in higher education are fond of trucking out the statistics that show higher life time earnings for those who achieve higher forms of education.  We worry over "retention" and tsk-tsk the fate of those who fade from the education system, in high school, in college, ostensibly before reaching their full potential.  We worry even more profoundly if we accept the results of recent research into employment, the suggestion that nearly 66% of the adult population needs some form of collegiate education, whether technical or academic if the US is to maintain a viable economy.   We worry, and we tinker, but part of the on-going dissatisfaction with the education systems might have little or nothing to do with the system per se.  It will always subject to ever more tinkering and correction, and there are few political bodies that do not feel some urge to propose simplistic solutions to intractable problems.  Rather, the on-going dissatisfaction might have more to do with the failed promise of education itself, and the on-going denial that its failure may be as inevitable as entropy.  If cognitive capacity is heritable, and if there are limits to the degree that school work can over-come native deficiencies, the education system may well be failing to produce the desired results, not because it is systemically broken, but because it is being asked to do what it cannot do -- change the cognitive capacity of students.  I taught in an open access institution, a community college, and had a broad cross section of students of all abilities.  To buck myself up, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, I would say to my wife before going off to teach, "I am off to fight the forces of ignorance and apathy," and to a certain extent I could address both.  I could give them facts to bank, and for some I could even be inspiring, but for those students who lacked the cognitive capacity for collegiate work, for the creative analytical and synthetic work that will be more and more in demand in the emergent economy, I could not begin to exercise capacities they lacked.  They were often fine young men and women, personable and sincere and willing enough to work hard, but their hard work produced little or no appreciable difference in the past and would produce little or no appreciable difference in the future.  Too often, they lacked the discernment to even grasp the difference between their own work and the work of their more capable peers.

To be continued.          

The Bell Curve Revisited

I have been reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart: the State of White America, a book that I find more than a bit disturbing, not because I believe it to be false, but because in large part because I believe it to be correct.  The prima facia thesis that there is an ever-widening gulf between the classes in America is not particularly starting or unique.   The gulf has been apparent for some time to anyone who has been paying attention, and it can be seen in any number of ways, perhaps most obviously in the differences between the social milieu portrayed in a television series like The Good Wife and that portrayed in something like Raising Hope.  For Murray, it is not simply a matter of money, though of course money has its role to play.  It is more an attitudinal and behavioral divide predicated on the foundational American virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.  I won't enter into a critique of either television show, but it would take only about five minutes of viewing of each to see the differences between the upper middle class lawyers that populate the The Good Wife and the lower middle class grocery workers that populate Raising Hope.  Although the latter are held up for ridicule -- it is after all a situation comedy -- Murray I think would agree that the illegitimate child that gives its name to the show's title and the prevailing slacker mores, the if-I-can-get-away-with-it-why-not duplicity, provides a more or less accurate portrayal of the attitudes and behavior that Murray uncovers in survey after survey.  That the characters of raising hope are white is to Murray's point.  He focuses on the state of white America, in part to avoid the controversy that surrounded his earlier work and to keep presuppositions about race from tainting his underlying premise which hasn't changed from The Bell Curve.

The differences in income can be explained easily enough by the increasing premium placed on cognitive capacity, or as he put it, "the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy."  I will not debate any particular measure of cognitive capacity.  The whole notion that it can be measured is tainted of late, in part because any measure reveals uncomfortable data that we would prefer to discount than confront.  Nevertheless, suffice it to say, any measure of cognitive capacity is inadequate and culturally biased if one's goal is to measure against what is most likely a mythical absolute standard of intelligence.  If one's goal is more modest -- simply to measure one's ability to function within a given intellectual context within a given culture -- then there are many thoroughly adequate measures that reveal significant differences between individuals and make predictions about their likelihood of success.  My previous college used the compass, my current college uses the ACT, and both are statistically reliable as predictors of success within a collegiate context.  Most of us concede the statistical reliability of such measures, for others, and if they provide disconcerting data about our own ability, well then we are the individual exception to the statistical rule.  Murray's follow on assumption is a bit more disconcerting, and it is buried in his use of "homogamy" above -- that cognitive capacity is as heritable as athletic ability.   It is one thing to say, "he's inherently clumsy," quite another to say, "he's inherently stupid."  Neither may be completely permissible in a cultural context that demands "eumenical niceness," as Murray puts it, but it is clear enough that "being clumsy" may limit one's opportunities with the Chicago Bulls, but it does not limit in any appreciable way one's opportunities for the good life in the same way that 'being stupid' limits them.

To be Continued