Re-reading Hofstadter

Chapter 2 is largely about the difference between intelligence (being good at hard cognitive tasks) and intellectualism (enjoying ideas), and why America disdains intellect (and, increasingly, intelligence). Some choice quotes:
1) On the propensity of intellectuals to get involved in political and social issues:

...it is the historic glory of the intellectual classes of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it on the social scale.  Behind the intellectual's feeling of commitment is the belief that in some measure the world should be made responsive to his capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and order; out of this conviction arises much of his value to mankind and, equally, much of his value to do mischief.

I think the last part is a reference to progressive education.

2) On zealots:

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

The origin of kool-aid, IMHO.

3) Of course, the antidote for kool-aid, the surest defense against the allure of one over-riding idea displacing all others, is a sense of playfulness.  And so I love this quote:

But in using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.

Indeed.  There are few things more wonderful than the serious expression on the face of a child busily drawing or stacking blocks of scooping mud into buckets.  They are engaged in a complicated task of their own devising, working hard to get it right. They are not merely adorable little people (though they certainly are that), they are also showing all the signs of taking seriously their role as members of a species that uses symbols and tools. They are throwing themselves into the glories of being a human engaged in quintessentially human tasks. The most engrossing play is when we are most truly human.

In that sense, "action shots" from a classroom where people are sitting around smiling at each other miss the most important action of all: Focused, concentrated time on task.

4) Also on play:

...in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.

Indeed.  We revel in sports and chuckle at the debate team.

5) Finally, on the disease that ravages my university, and many others:

American education can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise.

In fact, an administrator once boasted to me of her allegedly low IQ. (Her words, not mine.) I actually think she's quite smart, and that the dumb things she does are calculated plays to gain favoritism in an anti-intellectual system. But she felt the need to insist on a low IQ, because that's the system we work in. In this era, I should have asked her if trade wars are good and easy to win.

Next book blogging project: Re-reading Hofstadter

While I'm quarantined I think I'm going to re-read Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, to see how I feel about it five years later.

One thing I definitely don't feel five years later is any better. I don't think that spending so much time reading and thinking about the weirdness of this pseudo-egalitarian academic culture has made me any happier with it.

Our diversity obsession in a less diverse world

Given Jacoby's observation that the world is actually becoming less diverse, why do people nonetheless fixate on diversity?  A lot of reasons.

One reason, of course, is that race and ethnicity are still correlated with socioeconomic class, and there are good reasons to want to do something about that. There's now just enough racial and ethnic diversity in the world of the upper-middle class that we can't ignore the fact that other groups exist, but not enough to declare problems solved.

Another is probably romanticism.  Other groups aren't actually that different, both because of the declining diversity of practices in this world and the ever-present universality of human nature.  Nonetheless, historically there has been enough variation in practices between groups that we find it fascinating.  Somehow this always manifests as ethnic dance troupes, probably because it's the sort of thing that can easily co-exist with Little League: People gather in gyms to engage in physical activity with adult supervision on Saturday morning. More seriously, it's very visual and exciting, and invigorating for those who do it.

A side interest of mine is language, and people understandably lament the death of languages.  I'm not interested in persuading people to hang on to dialects that will act as walls between them and neighbors, but I do hope that languages are at least documented before they die.  There's a lot of history encoded in languages, because the distribution of a language tells you something about past migrations. But my interest is in recording the past, not freezing the present into the mold of the past. Frankly, it's a GOOD thing that people in remote villages can speak the same languages as the judges and officials appointed by rulers in the capital city.

Finally, while a more uniform world means more people interacting and sharing the same experiences, we humans remain a tribal species. We instinctively look with caution upon those we see as outsiders, and now we're suddenly able to encounter them because of global trade, standardized languages, etc.  There are people who are only alive today because they successfully ascertained whether the stranger looking at them funny was a Catholic or a Protestant, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Sunni or a Shia, a Serb or a Croat. This makes us attuned to tribal markers. Yet we have to interact in this global marketplace where cheap travel and rapid migration of workers bring us into contact with people bearing different tribal markers like skin tone, facial features, and hair. No, they aren't infallible predictors of ancestry, as there's huge diversity within groups, but still, some patterns do manifest more often than not. More importantly, whether or not we SHOULD react to those patterns, the masked gunmen at the checkpoint often DO react to those patterns, making our ability to anticipate their reactions a deep-rooted instinct.

Sure, a corporate office today doesn't usually have masked gunmen at checkpoints.  (The Security Professionals at the metal detector wear uniforms and show their faces while providing excellent customer service. :) But we're all descended from people who survived by quickly identifying and steering clear of people from other tribes when relations switched from trade to warfare, so as soon as we look at people we take note of their backgrounds.

Go ahead and deny it if you must, insist that YOU don't see these things, but everyone else does. Bigots note difference disapprovingly, warm and fuzzy people note diversity approvingly, and everyone else at least notes it as an adjective to file away in their mental lists. When I'm learning names and faces in a large group, ethnicity helps me take mental shortcuts to remember.  I'm probably not supposed to admit that, but it's just a fact. My worst nightmare would be to learn names in a room where everyone is the same race, the same gender, and same hair color.

OK, so we're noting difference. We can't avoid that.  The question, then is what to do about that.  Well, suppressing it won't work.  People will just note it even more, and treat it a a forbidden fruit. But that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. Just as we have instincts that note difference, we also have instincts that transcend difference, and those that transcend difference are, frankly, the nobler instincts.

For instance, we react with immediate affection to the face of a baby, no matter what color that baby is.  People feel empathy for the lame and sick and elderly across color lines.  Some of that is surely because the very young and very old members of neighboring tribes never took up arms against our ancestors' tribes, but doesn't change the fact that we have these relationships and affections in common with other tribes.

Also, people experience love and sexual attraction across tribal lines.  We know that this phenomenon is widespread, even when interracial relationships aren't, because so many societies have worked so hard to enforce prohibitions on marrying across lines of color and tribe. If nobody felt an attraction across those lines, nobody else would bother to suppress it.

One of our species' greatest survival tools is trade, and that has always happened across tribal lines.  It's what people have always defaulted to as soon as fighting stopped.  We have conflicting attitudes toward outsiders, simultaneously fearing them and wanting to marry them, wanting to build a fortress to keep them away and build a trading port to gain from them. And trade simultaneously requires diversity (different economic parties having different comparative advantages), promotes it (there's always a greater variety of goods available when people can trade freely), and yet also erodes it (everyone can now enjoy the same things).

Storytelling is an instinct that crosses lines, and we are able to appreciate stories from other cultures.  The main reason Disney is making characters with a greater range of colors and ethnicities is that the basic tropes (heroes and villains, princes/princesses and paupers, etc.) transcend race and ethnicity. Little kids want movies with knights and princesses who look like them, but do the same things as every other knight or princess.

Religion is a human phenomenon that some modern thinkers would denounce, but it's an undeniably powerful and widespread phenomenon. For all the evil that has been done in the name of God, a lot of good has also been done in His name, and many religions cross lines of color.  Malcolm X softened his opinion of white people when he was in Mecca praying next to white people.  Christianity has spread around the globe, bringing out the best (and worst) in people everywhere.  I mean, Koreans are some of the most devout Protestants around, and Filipinos are as Catholic as Catholics can be, and both countries are very far (both in distance and culture) from the places where Christianity was founded and grown.

Our conflicting instincts, universal and tribal, noble and feral, are in all of us. The implicit bias trainers are right to note that we can never fully escape from our responses to difference, but that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. I'm more likely to connect with somebody by talking about what we have in common than by achieving enlightenment about the profound importance of difference. This doesn't mean that we should never talk about difference and diversity, but I think we'll get farther with common humanity.

Thoughts on Russell Jacoby's "On Diversity"

I'm part-way into chapter 4. After laying out a broad picture in chapter 1, chapter 2 is largely about the homogenization of the modern world, with fashion being a particularly illustrative focal point. Besides the obvious fact that many people around the world have adopted Western attire, Jacoby also notes that within the confines of Western fashion the visual differences between rich and poor have become more subtle, at least in day-to-day attire.  That's not to say that some clothes aren't more expensive than others, but if you aren't a fashionista and you're looking from a distance, the difference between an expensive pair of slacks and a cheap pair may not be obvious. On the other hand, the finery of an earlier era was often more ostentatious.

Jacoby notes ways in which both the left and right have lamented decried sartorial homogeneity. Conservatives of the modern era may be cautious about saying this out loud (and may not even believe it anymore, in many cases) but in an earlier era there were people who decried commoners looking like their "betters." (In the present, I suspect that conservatives willing to decry modern fashion would lambast the poor for NOT dressing as respectably as their successful "betters.") Likewise, many leftists lamented that with fashion gaps closing between rich and poor the poor were going to feel less solidarity with each other.

Chapter 3 is about childhood and how children spend less time on spontaneous, unorganized play and more time in either structured activities or indoor amusements.  This is hardly a novel observation, and some of this is no doubt a function of class (one sees more kids outside in working-class neighborhoods), but he made two interesting points:
1) This was going on even a century ago, when sociologists went and studied children's games and found that over the decades there was less variation in the rules of games played on streets.  Whereas kids improvised more of their own rules in earlier eras, as time went on more homogeneity set in, even when kids were playing without adult supervision.  I suspect that mass media promotion of professional sports inspired more homogeneous rules.  Formal schooling with gym classes may also play a role.

2) Though the phenomenon of suburban parents spending the entire weekend sitting in various parks and gyms watching kids in organized sports may be more or less modern (at least as a large scale thing), people were noting and lamenting the onset of this phenomenon several decades ago. Adults and leagues impose more uniformity on childhood rites of passage.

Chapter 4 (which I'm only part-way through) is about the concept of diversity throughout the ages.  He notes the many thinkers who spoke approvingly of diversity, of the right of individuals to differ.  But he also notes the efforts to standardize weights and measures in the interests of trade, to standardize national languages and assimilate speakers of local dialects, etc. I don't know that we lose much culturally if everyone measures weighs grain in the same units, but commercial standards enable people to join a global economy, and also enable the global economy to enter the local village.

Cultural and technological innovations spreading across the world is hardly a new thing.  Wheat was domesticated in the Middle East, the horse was probably domesticated in the steppes of Eurasia, and the wheel was invented in the Middle East, but these things quickly spread around the world, and even entered into religions. Writing originated in a handful of places, but religions based on holy books came to supplant religions based on oral traditions.

Still, what is new is the extent to which everyday life becomes similar around the world. We're actually becoming less diverse, not more diverse.  However, we talk so much about diversity because we're bringing more people under this common umbrella, which means that we sometimes encounter a wider range of skin tones, facial features, hair types, etc. in our standard-issue malls, recreational sports leagues, chain restaurants, and corporate employers.

(Never mind that even today, the lower economic classes continue to live in neighborhoods that often have more small businesses than comfortable suburbanites sometimes realize, perhaps because catering to low-income consumers is something that not every large company wants to pursue, whereas everyone loves to go for affluent consumers.)

My next post will deal with the implications of this.

Next read: On Diversity by Russell Jacoby.

My next book blogging project will be On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by UCLA historian Russell Jacoby. I'd read a few things since the previous project, including the controversial American Dirt (enjoyed it a lot, I guess I'm evil) and Rushdie's Satanic Verses (never really grabbed me, but I was stubborn enough to finish it). Now I'm starting another 180 page popular book on the problems with diversity politics.  I guess I'm a sucker.

Only a few pages in, but I appreciate some insights.  For instance, on page 6 he notes that despite the talk of difference, people mostly want inclusion and assimilation.  Calls for diverse hiring, diverse casting in the arts, etc. are calls for inclusion in the mainstream.  He contrasts with some ethnically distinct groups who maintain pretty substantial social and even linguistic separation from the mainstream, while adhering to decidedly unique cultural and ethical perspectives:  The Amish and Hasidic Jews.  There are no activists demanding that corporations hire Amish people.  (Well, there's probably one, because in a big weird world there's always one, but there certainly aren't a lot.) They genuinely want to be different, so they don't demand to be included in the diverse rainbow of people all doing the same things in the mainstream.

None of this is to say that if it's OK to not hire Amish software engineers then it's OK to not hire whoever else. Jacoby makes that clear.  But just as we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of identity, we don't necessarily need to go around insisting on the value of diversity in order to insist on treating people ethically. A rainbow of skin hues may not actually improve the outcome of whatever group effort, but that's no reason to not give everyone a fair shake regardless of skin hue. People should be given fair treatment because they are people with basic human dignity, not because a melanin balance allegedly benefits everyone else via cultural enrichment (that will happen on its own, with or without initiatives, as evidenced by the great interplay of artistic styles in our world) or because Studies Have Shown that diverse groups allegedly boost the corporate bottom line. A person could be a mediocre worker and still deserve decent treatment and basic human dignity (while hopefully finding a better niche in the job market, eventually).

Jacoby also acknowledges how fraught it is to critique diversity politics in an era where our head of state refers to Nazis and Klansmen as "very fine people." However, he says (page 8):

My object, in any event, is not to criticize the jargon of diversity for something worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological is to understand what devitalizes it, an endeavor to realize, not junk it.

I look forward to seeing how he does that.

Caldwell, cont.

By the standards of 279-page popular-audience books written by conservatives, Caldwell is not too bad. (That's not much praise.) In the chapter on gender issues, whatever its flaws, he concedes a lot in places.  For instance, he makes a point that had not previously occurred to me: The GI Bill, for all the good it did for America, also temporarily set back gender equity in higher ed via a massive influx of men (WWII vets). Women had been growing as a share of college students for a few decades, but the GI Bill re-adjusted the balance, setting back the trends of institutions learning to accommodate women.

More promisingly, he admits that Ronald Reagan drove the debt sky-high, and that the Laffer Curve is a flawed concept. He even concedes that the 1980's, during which Boomers were all over the workforce and America could have been saving lots of money, were a giant missed opportunity for fiscal policy.

And then he screws it all up by saying that Reagan's debts bought America social peace via domestic redistribution programs.

Yes, that was part of the budget in the 1980's, but the military was an even bigger part. And it's the part that Reagan worked hardest to expand. I will grant that Reagan avoided "guns vs butter" trade-offs, but let's not kid ourselves about which side was larger.

Some might argue that Reagan did for Johnson what many presidents have done for predecessors of the opposite party, declining to substantially reverse signature policies (i.e. Johnson's Great Society), but the ratification of the Great Society happened under Nixon and Ford; it was a fait accompli by the time of Reagan.

Another take on racism and the American constitutional system

I forgot to link to this article, arguing that "limited government" arguments in America are doomed by their historic association with racists. The argument is somewhat different in tone than Caldwell's, reproaching the right from a position of sympathy, but reproaching nonetheless.