Quick thoughts on "We're All Multiculturalists Now"

Much of this book is descriptive, and reasonably even-handed for such a hot button topic as multiculturalism.  There's a lot of discussion of history, both noting that debates over cultural assimilation of immigrants are nothing new (all of this has happened before and will happen again) and also noting that assimilation mostly works.  HOWEVER, what is different is that after decades of ever-increasing attempts at integration, with a large-scale marshaling of resources for a more-or-less benevolent (though not necessarily respectful or well-informed) effort to reduce educational and economic disparities, it's much harder for some people to sustain faith in integration.  It's worked for new immigrants but not for a continuing underclass.  The woes of that underclass arise directly from America's original sin, and will not be remedied easily.  So, some people throw up their hands cynically and say do nothing, while others throw up their hands earnestly and decide to define the problem away by celebrating difference, and declaring that disparities come from policymakers' failures to properly account for cultural difference rather than inflicted pathology.

I think I largely agree with this.  We are desperate to define a problem away, or channel guilt, because if we don't define the problem as arising from some difference worthy of celebration then people will define it as arising from some difference worthy of scorn.

But, as I've said before about how you can have different theories of failure, you can have different theories of difference.  Making difference into too big of a thing will eventually cause some to question whether it is always a positive thing, let alone a positive thing that always favors a group that you are trying to shield from harm.  As unsavory as the motive is, they will be able to wrap themselves in the mantle of disinterestedness and open-mindedness.  Spend enough time saying that groups are different and eventually someone will come along and say "Yeah, groups are different, and I freakin' love my group!  My group is the best!"

And that never takes us anywhere good.

But as easy as it is to scold those who celebrate difference, it's a response to an original sin that we've been unable to wash away.  Its effects linger, they resist efforts at reform, and the legitimacy of the system requires that we either remove the difference, rationalize it, or properly assign blame.  The first has yet to be realized, the third is something that people try to do but don't really get satisfying results from, so we go to the second.

New book and other things

1) I'm currently reading We Are All Multiculturalists Now by Nathan Glazer.  It's about multiculturalism in education from the perspective of the 1990's.  On some level it doesn't feel like it's telling me anything really new, not drawing on things I haven't already read about and thought about and griped about.  But I also feel like parts of it are groping toward explicitly stating something that I've struggled to state.  I won't state it in the midst of a quick post, but I'm thinking about it.  It ties in with an essay I'm working on.

2) I'm reading this 2017 piece on how identity and representation get explored more and more in art criticism.  I don't have time to pick apart the whole piece, and I always try to be skeptical about claims that something only started recently.  At the same time, this excerpt ties into something I've been thinking about for a while:

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment it became evident we’re in a new era of criticism, but a good candidate for that tipping point might be the 2012 controversy over the all-white principal cast of HBO's Girls. 

Some critics had been pointing out for years that TV and movies offered an unrealistically white portrayal of New York City; there was even a song about the inconsequential parts for black characters on Friends. But the idea that there was something wrong with this never got much traction in the wider media; when Friends finally introduced Aisha Tyler as a recurring character near the end of its run in 2003, she said: "I don't think anyone is trying to redress issues of diversity here." 

But by 2012, when Girls creator Lena Dunham was criticized for her monochromatic vision of Brooklyn, she felt a need to make it clear that she respected those criticisms by addressing them on the show.

2012 is an important year because it was the year after Occupy Wall Street.  OWS had a message of "We are the 99%."  There's a lot that's wrong with that (the upper part of the 99% differs from the bottom 90%), and a lot of silliness came out of Zuccotti Park, but at the same time they had a message that resonated, that brought people together rather than dividing them, and that pushed back on some genuinely bad stuff (e.g. bailouts for the rich and austerity for the rest).

Shortly after that attempt at unity, cultural criticism did seem to escalate in its divisiveness.  One needn't be a conspiracy theorist to note that a brief moment of unity was followed by chattering and writing elites--and the companies that market their work--emphasizing difference over solidarity.  It's a bit like how some people feel the need to scold working-class Trump voters about their privilege rather than empathize with their economic anxiety.  Yes, there's a lot that's wrong with Trump, and there are plenty of reasons to disagree with their supporters, but surely that disagreement can be framed in some way other than "You know, you have it pretty good!"  There used to be a word for people who told blue collar workers that they have nothing to complain about:  Republicans.

So, yeah, it is interesting that division overtook solidarity in elite commentary shortly after 2011.

3) As long as we're talking about commentary on art and entertainment, I highly recommend this piece by Lauren Oyler.

A strange moral reversal

Gillette, the razor company, has received considerable attention for an ad campaign that talks about how men have to be better in their conduct and their approach to others' conduct.  Many are applauding it while others are recoiling from the criticism of men.  There's no point in me trying to say whether the ad does or doesn't paint with a broad brush, whether the message is or isn't ultimately positive about men (while there's surely criticism, there's also a clear implication that men can be better), because it's very much a Rohrschach test.  You see what you see, not what I argue that you should see.

What fascinates me is that the critics of the ad, many of them nominal conservatives, include in their ranks people who say that the ad is condemning the inherently aggressive nature of men, while those praising it, many of them nominal liberals, speak of the need to teach men discipline and self-control.  In an earlier phase of the culture war, it would have been considered hippie-ish to say that people need to celebrate their own inner nature and do what feels right for them.  It would have been considered conservative to say that discipline and structure and conformity to rules and ethical norms are what matter.  Now, granted, the hippies would have said that people should follow their natural instincts for love, not war.  Likewise, conservatives would have wanted to discipline men to channel their aggressive natures into healthy competition and the use of force for the enforcement of laws and protection of national security.  This just means that while history rarely repeats it often echoes.

Still, the echoes are strong, and inverted.  And they bring to mind a recent chance conversation with someone who turned out to be an elderly professor, and also an outspoken conservative.  The topic of the #MeToo movement came up, causing him to speak quite adamantly about how modern political correctness is denying men the chance to act on their instincts.  I was dumbfounded that a conservative would call for a social order in which men follow their instincts, rather than one in which they are disciplined to submit to the order of society, and channel the best parts of their instincts into worthy pursuits that are governed by rules, while taming and suppressing the worst parts of their instincts. Conversely, liberals have become quite rule-oriented.

I'm not necessarily a fan of every rules-oriented move by liberals, especially on the topic of political correctness in speech and entertainment, but surely some self-restraint in matters of sexual behavior is a necessary prerequisite for civilized society.  Surely we can enjoy some jokes while also keeping our hands to ourselves.

Of course, there are still some hippie types on the left, and some restrained types on the right.  But I think that this era of a genital-grabbing TV star as head of state has caused some on the right to walk away from the virtue of restraint.  I'm not wholly in favor of ever-increasing restraint in all aspects of life, but academic fields are called "disciplines" for a reason, and I am a proud academic.

Thoughts on Pinker's _Blank Slate_

I very much enjoyed The Blank Slate, but I haven't been in the blogging mood lately.  So I won't be doing chapter-by-chapter blogging.  I'll just comment on a few over-arching themes:

First, people obviously fear theories of genetic factors underlying intelligence and other abilities because of the attraction that such theories hold for racists, sexists, and other foul bigots.  Pinker concedes the need for caution, but also notes that the idea of humans as malleable blank slates was beloved of Marxists.  And the Marxists have managed to hold their own when it came to killing and oppressing.  Ultimately, the problem with racists is the same as the problem with communist:  They want to control people on the basis of their theories, and kill anyone who gets in the way. If we conclude that individual abilities are strongly (but not solely) influenced by genes we can either oppress people whom we deem to be genetically unsuited for certain paths, or develop a plethora of different educational paths for everyone to find and hone their strengths.  One of these things is very different from the other.

This is somewhat reminiscent of my observation that a theory of success is not enough; you also need a theory of failure.  If you have a theory of success, your theory of failure could be that disadvantaged people lack the characteristics that lead to success, or that they are denied the opportunity to utilize/develop those characteristics.  There's no such thing as a standalone theory of success that blames or exonerates the disadvantaged; to have such a theory we have to supplement it with a theory of why the disadvantaged didn't or couldn't do whatever it is that our theory says is critical for success.

Second, Pinker argues that the effects of parenting are smaller than people want to believe. I think he's over-stating his case (more on that in a moment), but to whatever extent parents don't matter, teachers must matter even less.  Also, he argues that neural plasticity isn't as powerful as people like to think, i.e. brains aren't as malleable as people believe.  As a person responsible for teaching 18 year-olds, I wish he'd also said that to whatever extent the brain is plastic, that plasticity decreases (which is different from saying that it completely disappears) with age.  You can't expect me to change people as much as a kindergarten teacher can, and you can't expect a kindergarten teacher to change people as much as a parent can.

Third, when he argues that parents matter less than we want to believe, he refers to the fact that well-designed studies of parenting practices and household characteristics don't find that those variables explain much of the variance of various outcomes.  However, the proper control groups are people from similar social classes, neighborhoods, etc.  I think it follows that if we just vary one characteristic of a household but keep everything else in that household similar to the rest of the neighborhood (i.e. the rest of the control group) then not much will change.  Well, that just means that what matters is that parents provide the same general baseline as everyone else, not that they get everything right or jump on every fad.  A parent who doesn't provide the same overall baseline as the rest of the neighborhood could very well produce a different outcome (better or worse) than a parent who does the same as the rest of the neighborhood.  A particular fad or whatever doesn't matter, but overall adherence to the big picture does.

Of course, he also says that even if parents don't matter for various long-term sociological outcomes as many people would like to hope, so what?  Parents matter as long as they are in a child's life.  Failure to do the basics would matter, provision of the basics matters a lot, and loving family relationships enrich life.  They might not move the needle much on sociological outcomes but who cares?  Not every moment of our lives has to be calibrated to some social reform agenda.  We can simply live as social primates with loving bonds and make the most of that.

Finally, I like his point about how literature, poetry, and other artistic endeavors might be better windows into human nature than much of the ideologically-constrained and often non-replicable social science out there.  That doesn't mean that every poet, novelist, or sculptor out there is equally possessed of timeless insight, but if something is widely-recognized as brilliant it might be resonant with something in human nature and human experience.  We can learn a lot about humans by pondering those works that have resonated with us throughout the ages.

So I guess I'd better keep reading.

Next book: The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

My next book will be The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.  He talks about human nature, its biological contributors, and why people deny it.  Since human ability is a constant concern of educators, this should be well worth reading.

Nietzsche: Eh.

I agree with much of his cynicism about human nature, but I want insight, I want to understand the origins of bad ideas more deeply, and I want to know the origin of GOOD ideas as well.  I agree with him that most people will never free their minds, but I freely choose to use my mind for some end that betters society, because I actually do believe in my endeavors, and in service.  I am not getting that from him 80 pages in.  I'm getting increasingly tedious prose.

The one point I really liked was when he noted that there are people who could free their minds but choose to follow the leveling impulse and pursue fuzzy egalitarian agendas.  I suppose I'm at a midpoint between him and them.  I'll never drink their kool-aid, but I do want to make things better.  I just want my eyes to be open as I do it, because I honestly believe that it will be better for other people, better for my sanity, and better for the bigger intellectual project that I actually care about.

The other point that I really liked, as noted in the previous post, was that all philosophies only contain what philosophers want them to contain.  I think the deeper point is that no idea can contain more than went into it.  This is something that I think about a lot in physics.  I still can't quite believe that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, which gets us within an inch of quantum mechanics, is an inevitable consequence of Newtonian mechanics (with time reversibility made more explicit than Newton made it).  I need to think more deeply about this, and figure out where the hidden assumptions are.

So, auf wiedersehen, Herr Nietzsche.

"Beyond Good and Evil", chapter 1

Chapter 1 is a rant about what philosophers get wrong.  I don't have a lot of time, but he seems to make 2 big points, plus an ancillary one relevant to a hobby of mine:
1) Philosophers and scientists haven't really come to terms with the fact that humans and their brains are material things, operating by the rules of the material universe, and aren't really separate from the universe. So where do thoughts and sensations come from?  How do we separate our thoughts and sensations from the outside world?  How can we honestly consider thoughts as something of conscious volition?

2) A philosophy is what the philosopher wants it to be.  He might portray it as the inexorable consequence of some defensible assumptions, but those assumptions were chosen to give a particular conclusion.  If he didn't like the conclusion he would modify his assumptions.  Honestly, this sounds particularly post-modern.  "All ideas just reinforce your preferences in service to the power structure, man!"

3) He thinks the similarities between German, Greek, and Indian philosophies arise from grammatical similarities of Indo-European languages, and ventures that speakers of Uralic languages would philosophize differently.  That is an extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Very extreme.  Since linguistics is a minor hobby of mine (I have a dictionary of Indo-European root words) I am amused by this hypothesis.