Basic Human Dignity Continued

If labor is indeed to be redemptive, both materially and ethically, it must be available, and therein lies the first rub.   There is, of course, the persistent belief that America is the land of opportunity.   I won't unpack it fully, but the basic outline is this:  the American economy may not produce equal results, but it does offer up equal opportunity to all who apply themselves, those who are able and willing to work hard in pursuit of happiness or as the contestants of American idol, one after another, put it, "in pursuit of my dream."  Anyone who spends over five minutes thinking about it realizes that the American economy produces neither equal results, nor does it offer up equal opportunity, if by opportunity we mean something less grandiose than rock stardom and more conducive to day-to-day life -- the availability of "jobs with decent wages and good benefits."  Even though employment of late has shown some signs of recovery after the great recession of 2008, there remain significant causes of concern.  The Economic Policy Institute headlined a recent report that "The US labor market starts 2012 with solid positive signs, but fewer jobs than it had in 2001."   The most discouraging sign is job growth relative to population.  As the Institute reports, "the labor force has grown by less than half a million workers since the recession started, though working age population has grown by 10 million in that time."  If the number of jobs available does not keep pace with the population, and it shows few signs of doing so, then a significant percentage of our population does not now, and may never have opportunity for legal employment of any sort, much less "jobs with decent wages and benefits."

I should point out that a significant percentage of our population has not had access to work for some time now, and the disappearance of opportunity disproportionately afflicts those who have been historically at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the African American community.  In this regard William Julius Wilson's study, When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor, is instructive.  He describes what is, in effect, a vicious cycle of despair, noting "where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy."  When pundits like Krugman express alarm that "long-term unemployment -- the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more -- remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression," there is a clear and present danger that more and more neighborhoods will be sucked into the vortex, described by Wilson, that more and more Americans will "no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives," and that such "circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market."  It is perhaps a mark of our clandestine racism that writers like Murry, in Coming Apart, when the blight associated with inner-city, black ghettos seems to be spreading into white neighborhoods and the increasingly meth-infested small town America.  When the blight is confined to the inner-city ghetto, it is easier to focus current policy discussions of the welfare state on "the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents,"  changes in society that have produced "certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time" of the sort reflected in hardcore hip hop.   When the blight is no longer the problem of third world America and is bleeding into the larger population, the conservatives it seems are doubling down on the "shortcomings of individuals," with Rick Santorum talking about "the narcotic of dependency" and Mitt Romney suggesting that government programs "foster passivity and sloth."  This may well be true, but the path to redemption is narrower of late, and there is little to suggest that dismantling the various safety net programs will do much to foster engagement and industry without improving opportunity.

To be Continued

Basic Human Dignity Continued

Labor is redemptive on any number of levels, but there are at least two that concern me.  First and foremost, of course, work is wholly pragmatic.  I have suggested elsewhere, mostly in accord with common sense, that there are basic human drives, basic human imperatives that must be brought to resolution.  If one wants to take a Darwinian tack on it, they are those biological drives that must be satisfied for survival, and for the present purposes, it is enough to think in those basic terms, in part because it is difficult, if not wholly impossible, to imagine something like basic human dignity where one is deprived of the instrumental means of fulfilling those basic driving imperatives -- food, clothing, shelter.  One works, at the most fundamental level, to earn a living, and work redeems one from the life of penury and want that is most destructive of basic human dignity.  Second, it is not difficult to imagine how work might be socially organizing.   Imagine the on-going life of a hunting and gathering tribe.  The link between one's innate ability and character, one's ability and willingness to hunt or to gather, had an immediate impact, not only on one's own survival, but on the survival of the tribe.  Imagine too the on-going life of early agrarian societies.  In any hard scrabble existence, one imagines no lack of opportunity for work.  One imagines rather an almost universal approbation of work, an almost universal disapprobation of sloth, and if differentiating roles emerged in the nature of work, they were the differentiated roles of gender, for women the labor of child bearing and child rearing, and for men the labor of provision.  Although more a mythology than anthropology, it is nevertheless a mythology of some standing, an understanding of man's lot in life as least as old as Genesis -- "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to your husband and he shall rule over thee" -- "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."  Labor is redemptive, not only in the immediate and pragmatic sense, but it is the curse levied by God for disobedience, and as such, submission to the conditions of life imposed by God provided the path to recognition and redemption not only in God's eyes, but in man's eyes.  The hard working man, in short, is recognized as the good man, and here again, it is difficult, if not wholly impossible to imagine something like basic human dignity where one is wholly deprived of the means to achieve approbation and recognition.

To be continued

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

Over the last half century, despite the influx of technology, the methods and manner of education has not changed appreciably.  If you walk the halls of higher education today, you will see a lecturer at the front of the room, speaking at and with a room full of students.  Although technology may have been a "disruptive innovation" in other domains of endeavor, it has not had an appreciable impact on education, or at least the delivery of education.  Power point has replaced the overhead projector.  The internet has made it easier to import the occasional video.  Yet the fully on-line course merely imports the physical space of the classroom into a virtual classroom, and has not changed the basic dynamic of a lecturer speaking at and with a room full of students.  Despite the discussions of "multiple intelligences" and the suggestion that some students may be more visual (even kinetic) learners, the principle means of representing our reality, such as it is, remains language.  A strong case could be made for mathematics, but mathematics must be taught through language, and so it is not surprising to see the lecturer talking at and with students, even in the mathematics course.   Having said that, however, a strong case can be made for mathematics as the secondary means, after language, of representing reality in a complex symbolic system.  Students who are not "symbolic analysts," to use Robert Reich's term -- students who cannot follow or make complex, nuanced arguments in one or another or preferably both of the principle symbolic systems -- will find themselves increasing marginalized as they progress within the education system.  No amount of video can be a substitute for the Critique of Pure Reason, or even the Philosophical Investigations, nor can it substitute for the Calculus, or the statistical logic that parses a large and amorphous data set into a relevant pop-up ad on a Facebook page.

Although technology has not appreciably changed the classroom, it has upped the ante for students.  Frank Levy of MIT in a recent paper, "How Technology Changes Demands for Human Skills" answers the question implicit in his title by suggesting that "a technology rich workplace requires foundations skills including numeracy, literacy and reading ability, an advanced problem-solving skill I will call Expert Thinking and an advanced communication skill I will call Complex Communication."  Historically, of course, the need for an educated citizenry could be met with the first items on Levy's list, numeracy and basic mathematics, and literacy and reading ability, and with few exceptions it was and still is a goal universally attainable.  The list, however, has been extended.  Because it is difficult to imagine a workplace that has not become "technology rich," the expert in expert thinking and the complex in complex thinking point at an elevation in what might be called entry level competencies.  I won't replicate Levy's full argument here, but it seems clear enough that the up-front programming and logic skills, and the rhetorical skills necessary to the ubiquitous pop up ad, if it is to successful, places demands on students at a level hitherto not considered.  The expert and complex skills necessary to and well remunerated within the modern economy are not easily attained, and if attained, must be constantly refreshed.  That many students lack the cognitive capacity for "life-long learning" at this level is not lost on many educators.  That many students can retrieve a video from the cloud of unknowing does not make them technologically savvy, at least not in a way that will be remunerated.  Ultimately, it only opens them to exploitation.

What has changed, in other words, is the degree of education necessary to full participation in the modern economy, within the modern civil society that matters economically and politically.  We can wring our hands, bemoan the fact that we are "failing by degrees," that even in a collegiate setting most students are "Academically Adrift," and make various policy recommendations to turn the battle star, but if Murray is correct, if cognitive capacity is heritable and that education at best allows people to reach their full potential but does not change that potential appreciably, then we have some cause for pessimism.  Despite the expectation that most students will graduate from high school and go on to some form of post-secondary education, a significant percentage does not.  Of those that do, a significant percentage drift away from college, and for those that persist to the baccalaureate, a significant number pursue degrees of avoidance -- what a local politician called, much to the embarrassed outrage of my colleagues, "degrees to nowhere" -- degrees that allow students to avoid expert thinking, particularly in mathematics, and demand little or no complex communication, only the most fatuous forms of self-reflexive communication.   If the number of students who are encouraged into college are not only "under-prepared" for what they should find there, but simply do not have the native capacity to engage with and benefit from what they should find there, the question then becomes, "if not college, what then to do with them?"

To be continued.   

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