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

19 -- social aggregates

19.  Individuals are subject to a given intentionality.  Aggregates of individual, properly speaking, are not.  We might speculate, for example, whether a colony of ants has something resembling a group intelligence and by implication a group intentionality and a social consciousness that transcends the consciousness of any one ant, but it remains just that, speculation.  Even if it were true, I have no way of entering into -- no way of being subject to the subjectivity -- of some transcendental subjectivity.   I may feel hunger, you may feel hunger, and all about us may feel hunger, but it is my hunger, not yours, not theirs, that I feel. 

This is an important point, with implications, but first what it does not imply.  When I say conjointly that 'intentionality is given from without' and that 'I am brought into being by intentionality,' I am not making transcendental claims regarding intentionality.  I am saying, on the one hand, that it is given from within the brute facts of my physiological existence (e.g. the felt need to satisfy hunger) or that, on the other hand, it is given from within the constituted facts of my social existence (e.g. the felt need to satisfy the conditions of checkmate).   Moreover, when I say, 'the constituted facts of my social existence,' the past tense of 'constituted' is a recognition, at once, that human beings are born into a "functioning world populated by others," and that society is historically prior to the individuals in it.  I am, properly speaking, no more my desire to satiate my hunger than I am my desire to achieve checkmate, but each intentionality brings me into being in a particular way as a consciousness of the world. 

Although few would think of hunger, and the physiology that leads to our need to satiate hunger, as a "construct of human freedom," our instrumental response to hunger we nevertheless believe, intuitively, "can always be unmade or remade through free human action."  If one thing doesn't work, another might, and most subject to extreme hunger, would continue searching until energy or imagination failed them.  Conversely, however, most would think of checkmate, and the need to satisfy the conditions of checkmate, as a genuine construct of human freedom.  Imagine here someone suggesting that, instead of capturing the king as the desired state of affairs, we each seek to capture the queen, all else remaining the same.  The game would, as a result, be wholly different.   The instrumental response to the newly defined checkmate would likewise need to be unmade and remade through "free human action."  Imagine here, an opponent who simply seeks to capture the queen, without, so to speak, announcing the fact.  The game would fall apart.  I might capture his king, declare checkmate, and my opponent might say, "we're not finished yet.  I haven't captured your queen."  The statement would be meaningless, or irrational, within the game as I have defined it. 

To make the leap, I am nevertheless suggesting that 'social organization' is brought into being by the commonality of a common intentionality.  Although I do not feel your hunger and you do not feel my hunger, we each feel hunger and behave accordingly.   Although I do not feel your desire for checkmate and you do not feel my desire for checkmate, we each desire checkmate and behave accordingly.        

Appendix Concluded

George F. Will, in a recent editorial (Jan 23, Washington Post) characterizes Romney as "the first presidential candidate from the economy’s now deeply unpopular financial sector," though I don't think the financial sector itself is the cause of the anyone but Romney mentality that has been a continuous undercurrent in this primary race.   I think rather Will comes closer when he writes that "Romney is suffering because this sector’s arcane practices and instruments seem to many people, as indecipherable things often do, sinister.  His tax returns perhaps testify to no more than sophisticated exploitation of the baroque tax code’s opportunities for — even encouragement of — tactics to minimize liabilities. This, however, may exacerbate the impression many Republicans seem to have of his slipperiness. And this attribute is related to the suspicion that there is something synthetic about him."  If Gingrich has a saving grace grace relative to Romney, and was able to prevail in North Carolina, it is in part the incipient xenophobia.  As a southerner, Gingrich is on of them, or perhaps more precisely, if not exactly one of them, not a white evangelical Christian, at least he is emphatically NOT a big city Boston or Chicago Yankee, not black or brown, and most emphatically not slippery and synthetic in the way of Romney.  Obama has three strikes against him, and while it is absurd to think of Obama as a socialist, at least in the commonly understood definition of that term, it is somewhat less absurd to think of him as a synthetic product of the secular-scientific machine, one who believes that we can plan and engineer our way out of difficulty -- do it rationally, incrementally, methodically.  Romney has only two strikes against him, and no one is calling him a "socialist," but if the term has expanded to include Obama, it might as well include Romney as well.  He too is a synthetic product of the well greased secular-scientific machine, one who has demonstrated an ability to plan and engineer companies into a personal profitability.  

A recent review of Gingrich's new polemic (Jan 12, NYRB), To Same America, is essentially a re-write of his earlier polemic, To Renew America, and "the main difference between the 'renew' book and the 'save' book," as Bromwich points out, "is the overlay of piety."  Gingrich is a recognizable type -- political opportunist, and the opportunity of the moment lies in an affected piety.  Bromwich tell us that To Renew America is "a work of right wing utilitarianism" and its "whole method and appeal" lay in "its trust in fast-track innovation on the corporate model."  Given the spectacular success or failure of that model (depending of course on whether one is among Romney's income strata or among the expanding low-income sub-strata) it is not surprising that Gingrich has had a change of heart, the sincerity of which need not necessarily be too deeply questioned, in part because it is a political opportunists "representative" change of heart.  It is not surprising that he has taken on some of the apocalyptic tones of the evangelical right, "the phraseology of 'secular oppression'" and the convenient conflation of the Bible with the Constitution -- that  is to say, secular oppressors who "do not merely violate the spirit of the Founders," but who are "holding the constitution hostage."  A good portion of the constitution was framed of course to protect the people, not from "secular oppression," but "theological oppression," but Gingrich's assertions have no more to do with history as it is understood by most historians than the snake oil salesman has to do with medicine as it is understood by most physicians.  It strikes me as odd, not that someone like Gingrich is on the circuit selling the snake oil of revisionist history and pseudo piety and doing it in grandiloquent tones -- there will always be opportunists among us, and they will always bamboozle some.  No, it strikes me as strange rather that so many know it's snake oil and prefer it regardless.  That it will neither renew nor save America seems a wholly secondary concern.                  

Appendix Continued

Gingrich's title, To Same America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, begs a number of questions.   Whether the evangelical frame of reference is ipso facto anti-socialist being one matter.  Just last MLK day, I listened to an academic speaker use similar Gospel-based arguments, while railing against the capitalist machine.  His frame of reference was overtly Marxist, with several direct quotations of Marxist thinkers winking among the Biblical references.  Because he had made several slighting comments about the right's use of the same Gospel, I asked if that, in an of itself, might not be the danger -- the theocratic justification of political positions -- and he responded, as did several of a sympathetic audience, that one could not read the Gospel well and come to the conclusions of the evangelical right, that any good reading would lead one down King's path of liberation theology, a path necessary to America's salvation.  I didn't dispute the response, but it did reinforce for me a version of the two-cultures-argument -- setting secular pragmatism against the religious right, but on a broader scale setting those who Hayek referred to as the "planners" against those predisposed to "faith."  It is not simply, or not only, a distrust of government, but as Hayek put it, the "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer," and here one might add, the "social scientist," particularly those who practice the dismal science of "economics."  Hayek, of course, was concerned with just "how these at the same time tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate," those spheres which should be left to the invisible hand of the market and, by extension, the equally invisible hand of God in the fulfillment of His plan for mankind.  The "planers" have engineered an assault on the more accessible truths of revelation, and the absolute personal recognition implied in the evangelical versions of salvation -- one need only believe.  For the "planers," not only is the individual reduced to a data point, but the truths of science and engineering, the truths of the economists, have grown so arcane and often so counter-intuitive as to be inaccessible to the lay public, those who do not have the 10,000 hours that it takes to become expert in a field.

To be Continued

Appendix

I have made the claim, adapting Lilla, that there are essentially two types of American conservative, those whose interests are largely secular and economic, and those whose interests are redemptive and theocratic.  There is an uneasy alliance between the two in their distrust of government in its current historical manifestation.   The Jeffersonian sentiment -- that government is best which governs least -- might well be a watch word.  I should point out that I am thinking of the federal government.  Those same conservatives are often quite willing to allow local and state government to intrude into the lives of citizens in as much as those laws reflect the prevailing opinions and attitudes.  The arcane liquor laws in the state of Utah, a bastion of conservatism, are a case in point.

The New York Times (Jan 17, 2012) recently reported "Discord in G.O.P. as Conservative Air Differences," and there has been speculation that the party might unravel at the seams, though from my perspective, it seems more a struggle for ascendancy between those more moderate, more mainstream candidates represented by the likes of Romney, who have made their fortunes within the secular state, and the evangelicals who favor Santorum and, almost inexplicably, Gingrich.  I say, almost inexplicably, because there is much to dislike about Gingrich, from an evangelical point of view, not least his philandering, but he is, perhaps, more than any of the other candidates, an evangelical by temperament. Gingrich ultimately had the best argument, telling voters "if you vote for Senator Santorum in effect you're functionally voting for Governor Romney, because he's not going to beat him.  The only way to stop Governor Romney for all practical purposes is to vote for Newt Gingrich."  They did, and they put a crimp in the candidacy of Romney, effectively ignoring the advice of Huntsman, who endorsed Romney, suggesting that "the party needed to focus on defeating President Obama in November."

Whether the squabbling will ultimately be of benefit to Mr. Obama is an open question, but it is clear enough that there are competing interests within the Republican Party, and at the federal level, where it matters most, the secular wing has a clear interest in the creation and conservation of wealth.  One might argue that insofar as wealth is the principle instrumental means of wielding agency within our contemporary society, they also have an interest in conserving the power of the "monied" one percent, to include their political power wielded for the most part indirectly through the shadow governance of the so-called super PACs and influence peddling.  I wouldn't necessarily argue against this incipient paranoia, but I wouldn't argue for it either.  There is nothing nefarious about money in and of itself, and even if there were, I don't suppose a cabal of the monied one percent would be any more successful at subduing the rabble than Mubarek or any other tyrant.  While the super PACs have amplified political discourse, particularly on the right, they haven't changed the basic message that, as Hayek put it, "political freedom is meaningless without economic freedom," and economic freedom means a freedom from the restrictions placed on wealth creation that come of the regulatory state and the encroachments on wealth conservation that come of taxation. 

I don't think there is much illusion that the creation and conservation of wealth in the hands of small percentage of Americans does much in the way of job creation.  Although of late, with unemployment still at 8% or better, everyone has jumped on the jobs bandwagon, there is no compelling interest in jobs, per se, at least not on the secular side of the conservative party.  Within our economy, as the labor unions have always known, jobs and the labors costs associated with jobs are the principle means of redistributing wealth.  Jobs play against the creation and conservation of wealth.    At the risk of over-simplification, in business terms, jobs are an expense, often a necessary expense, but an expense nevertheless, and as everyone knows, expenses are to be minimized if profits are to be maximized.  It's a relatively simple calculation, and Romney's work at Bain Capital, as his apologists have pointed out time and again, was predicated on this simple calculation.  He may well have eliminated jobs, but he did so to enhance profitability and preserve those jobs that remained.  It's a tough job, but someone had to do it, and he did it well enough to amass a considerable fortune.  He also invested it wisely enough to avoid the earned income taxes that most American's pay, to end up with an effective tax rate hovering around 15%.  If the creation and conservation of wealth is the object of the game, then Mr. Romney has played it well, better than most of us can imagine.

The so-called social conservative wing of the party, the political theologians, has a deeper distrust of government, at least any government that is not predicated on the basic assumptions of Christian evangelicalism.  I should point out right away that the assumption of shared assumptions has a much broader reach than actual shared assumptions, and devolve quickly more to a set of common fears than anything resembling a coherent intellectual frame, or a theology proper.  It is tacitly, if not overtly racist, and xenophobic, and I would feel slightly embarrassed making these claims today if it weren't so apparent.  Despite the actual declines in Mexican immigration, despite the actual evidence to the contrary, the various "tough stands" on immigration, among other things, probably have more to do with incipient racial attitudes and a fear of the foreign than any actual threat to the job pool for locals.  Alabama has discovered this the hard way.  There is perhaps a slightly more subtle fear, one that wraps candidates like Romney in its maw for mastication.  The presumptive fear is not the loss of power, not even the loss of a privileged social position relative to blacks and Hispanics (though that might be more a factor than we are willing to admit), it is rather a loss of revelation to what Gingrich in the title of his most recent tome called the "secular-socialist machine," and the imperative to save America from it. 

To be Continued

      

Conservatism & Liberalism Concluded

If the recent primary cycle for the republican presidential nominee has shown anything, it is showing that the odd convergence of free market capitalists and social conservatism in the Republican Party too is showing its signs of stress.  The two are bound together only by an ostensible distrust of government.  On the one side of the republican party, it is chaffing under the reigns of the regulatory state, all that which limits the acquisition of profit, corporate profit in particular.  It s the republican party of Mitt Romney, a member of the 1%, whose tax rate of 15% is likely less than that of his secretary, whose Caymen Island accounts all signal a life unavailable to the vast majority of Americans.  That no less than Newt Gingrich and his conservative opponents are referring to him as a vulture capitalist signals an irony, if not an outright hypocrisy.  For the proponents of the free market, like Hayek, "the right of choice," the right of economic self determination, "inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."  Of course the most recent banking crises and recession has raised the question of just who carries that responsibility.  The most passionate proponents of laissez-faire economics, it seems, are those least damaged by the crises, giving some credence to populist writers like Noam Chomsky, who points out that "for you, market discipline, but not for me, unless the 'playing field' happens to be tilted in my favor, typically as a result of large-scale state intervention."  The American economy has never really been, nor can it be wholly, a free market economy, but is rather a state sponsored capitalism.  The ideological wars of the 20th century, and the military-industrial complex they spawned, provided a level of sustained government intervention supporting, if not guaranteeing, a certain level of Keynsian prosperity.  This is money, taken from the tax-payer, laundered through the government, and placed in the hand of defense contractors, who returned it to the tax-payer in the form of wages.  While it supported corporate wealth, one could also argue that it supported national wealth, that it was a cycle both vicious and virtuous.  The Bush attempt to reinstate the cold war dynamic in a crusade against terrorism failed in part because the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan simply did not require the infrastructural support required by the cold war, the sustained investment in everything ranging from uranium mining to missile silos, most accomplished by American workers on American soil.   Beyond that, the Bush attempt to reinstate Reganomics with the laissez-faire deregulation of the banking industry, among others, served simply to tilt the money trough in the direction of the wealthy.  The subsequent democratic bail outs of those deregulated industries once again took money from the tax-payers, laundered through government, and placed in the hands of bankers, who in turn kept it, thank you very much.  It is the welfare state -- a welfare state predicated on nothing resembling social justice, but a welfare state nonetheless. 

It is not a story that inspires much confidence in government, and gives some credence to the argument advanced by Robin that "conservatism is a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."  It is difficult to imagine the conciliatory centrism of Barak Obama as much of a threat on this front, but perhaps any threat is a real threat and deserving of the hyperbole heaped upon it.   In the meantime, on the other side of the republican party, the social conservative side, there may have been a sense of power possessed under the Bush administration, and the evangelical tone of his administration may invoke a momentary nostalgia, but the social conservative tilt of the Republican party, I believe, portends something more ominous than power politics pure.  The redemptive reactionary, like Christ, is in possession of Truth, revealed incontrovertible Truth,  not power.  Their conservatism is not so much "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes." The rank and file of the social conservatives perceive themselves to be members of a subordinate class, an oppressed class, and they are distrustful of wealth as any liberal, and if they can occasionally bring themselves to forgive it, they can do so because wealth, as such, is not the principle threat.   Their conservatism, if it can be called conservatism, is a reaction to and resentment of that which threatens their Truth, whether it be the Roman Empire or the secular state represented by the conciliatory liberalism of Barak Obama.  Robin is right in part.  If I can quote him out of context, the social conservative "reaction is not reflex," and goes on to write that "it begins from a position of principle -- that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others -- and then re-calibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below" or rather, re-calibrates that principle, not simply in light of, but rather more directly as a challenge from below.  The social conservative seeks their own freedom from subordination.  It is the re-emergence of the Puritan America, the desire to be free from a corrupt and cynical state, the desire to be free to create a state under God's law -- one that at the very least prohibits abortion and sanctifies the nuclear family -- one that, in short, exemplifies an evangelical frame of reference.  Those who are fit, and thus ought, to rule others but as one evangelical, quoted recently in the New Yorker, put it, "I teach our congregation that we should make our political decisions like we make all our other decisions: based on how closely aligned the candidates are to the Bible."  The liberal state, a state predicated on the great separation, should be replaced with the new Eden of the evangelical state.  That such a state would be anything but free, in any conventional sense of the word free, and would devolve into the same sorts of factionalism that plague the middle east, is an irony lost on those who most desire the evangelical, the Christian, state.