Derrick Bell's _Silent Covenants_

 I've been reading Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants. Bell was an influential figure in critical race theory (CRT), a school of thought that nowadays is associated with some of the more batshit things to show up in school lessons and workplace trainings on race and diversity. Defenders of CRT have argued that it is mischaracterized by its critics, and after reading Bell I think they are basically right. Or, at least, I think they are right to say that the idea has roots that are far more reasonable than what the critics currently point to. That's separate from whether the critics are accurate in their characterization of the various trainings currently trotted out. Since this book was published in 2004, I'm not going to use this post to examine workplace diversity trainings in 2022.

Bell's central points in this book are (1) Brown vs the Board of Education didn't accomplish anywhere near as much as was hoped (a pessimistic point, but one that he defends reasonably) and (2) white people only support progress for Black people when and to the extent that it also benefits white people. The second notion is called "Interest Convergence." I think it's basically true: Most people aren't saints, so they will pursue self-interest more than the interests of others. There's a lot to be pessimistic about in that observation, and it can lead to a pretty accurate characterization of the world as being about conflict and struggle. It's a Hobbesian notion about the state of nature.

At the same time, there's a way to view interest convergence more positively: Improvement for disadvantaged groups happens when people see a common good. This is not so different from Hobbes' notion that we can escape a state of nature via a commonwealth.

I don't know enough about CRT, or at least pre-2020 CRT outside of various trainings, to say if other theorists mostly think in terms of common good or conflict, but Bell is clearly a pessimist, and for understandable reasons.

Bell's value judgments are largely unassailable in the way that value judgments tend to be, because they are rooted in premises that you either accept or don't, or accept in some situations. Where I take issue with him is in the later chapters, where he dances around the idea that Black students tend to need different educational models than white students. To the extent that he's explicit about different needs, it's largely focused on pride and role models, and I think those points are pretty unassailable. But he keeps hinting that there's more, and that's a common feature of progressive educational commentary. Needless to say, I fundamentally disagree with him there, and wish he didn't go down that road, because it detracts from his more valid analyses.

Hobbes, Chapter 30

 A few quick thoughts on chapter 30 of Hobbes.

Paragraph 3: Hobbes believes that people should be educated on doctrines that are conducive to peace, and that it is a sovereign's duty to make sure people receive this sort of education. The uneducated or miseducated are easy to seduce. On this I agree, though I don't agree that the ill-educated are drawn to resistance. The ill-educated can easily be co-opted by an authoritarian leader.

Paragraph 6: He concedes that the biggest obstacle to teaching people doctrines conducive to peace (or at least to Hobbes' notion of peace) is that people are determined to not learn things that run counter to their ambitions. True enough.

On the other hand, he also believes that the common people are like "clean paper", essentially blank slates. I guess any authoritarian, even a seemingly cynical one, is ultimately an idealist. He believes that people are controllable.

Hobbes, Chp. 18 & 19

 A few things stand out from the last few chapters of Hobbes:

Chapter 18, Paragraph 9: It is the right of the sovereign to decide what speech is permissible. Of course I recoil from this...but he's not wrong. I say that not to really excuse infringements of speech rights, but to note that even respecting speech rights is a choice. We say it isn't a choice, we say it isn't something the government gets to decide, but they do. And not just in the "fire in a crowded theater" sense and related matters, not just in those edge cases. The choice to respect laws and constitutional rights and court rulings is ultimately a choice. In a free society it's a choice that the government makes frequently and without much argument, but it's a choice. When you dig deep into the nature of power, that fact is inescapable.

And we saw on January 6 that respecting the foundations of a liberal society really is a choice, and it's a choice that the powerful don't always make, and neither do their supporters. We saw that some leaders choose illiberally, and ultimately their resistance failed only because other people in key places resisted them. How great or small you think the threat ultimately was, it was a threat, and it was a threat that was averted by choices.

Chapter 19, paragraph 4: Hobbes argues that monarchy is the best form of government because it ties the monarch's personal interests to the state and people. This is of course entirely incorrect, as plenty of leaders put their own interests ahead of their people's. However, leaders who put themselves too obviously ahead of their people tend to run pariah states. Perhaps we can say that a liberal and affluent society is more likely to be one where the leader sees the affluence and prestige of their state on the world stage as being in their own personal interests, and they thereby foster a dynamics and free society.

Of course that's idealistic, but the point of ideals is to ask what direction to push in.

I think there's a lesson for leadership: If your organization is one that everyone wants to be a part of, you and your organization will thrive. If you just want to get your own piece of the pie at the expense of others, you will hurt the place.

Chapter 19, paragraph 23: The Romans built a stable empire by bringing people in the provinces under the umbrella of Roman citizenship and rights. This gives some context with the modern interest in inclusion.

Latest Read: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

 I'm reading Leviathan by Hobbes. I previously read about Hobbes in Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God, and now I'm reading the original. I won't blog everything because it's a dense work. Surprisingly readable, but nonetheless dense, in that many points are made in a paragraph and then it moves on. With so many bases covered, there's no way I could blog the whole thing.

As Lilla said, Hobbes approaches problems of society in terms of human nature and what will work, rather than as an effort to discern the mind of the creator and impose those insights on society. So the first 100+ pages (in this edition) are all about human nature and behavior and words and knowledge and rhetoric and, um, well, everything. I obviously won't blog all of it, but I want to note a few points that stood out:

Chapter 2, section 2: He states the law of inertia a few decades before Newton. In terms of political philosophy the point here is that people change in response to either internal processes or external stimuli, i.e. there is always a cause for people's changes. This is important to his later arguments about how to control people.

But as a physicist, it's interesting that he was aware of this. I confess to knowing far less than I should about the origins of the Law of Inertia. Apparently it was known to philosophers decades before Newton's Principia, and already used for analogies.

Chapter 2, section 8: He says that he doesn't believe in witchcraft, but he thinks many witches believe that they have real powers, and they seek to cause mischief, so they deserve punishment. Also, if people were less superstitious and hence less fearful of witches and other potential supernatural threats in the community, they'd be more obedient to civil authority.

His approval of punishing witches for civil good is not terribly surprising from what I previously knew about him. His point about how less superstitious people would be more orderly is an interesting one, however. In general, people who have less fear of their neighbors are less prone to vigilantism, but are also less drawn to "law and order" figures. 

Chapter 8, section 1: Virtue requires inequality. "For if all things were equal in all men, nothing would be prized." I am unsure whether modern egalitarians fail to grasp this or grasp it perfectly.

Chapter 8, section 26: He makes the same point that Galileo made: The Scripture was written to teach us about morality and salvation, not to teach us about the motion of the heavens. He was a contemporary of Galileo, and according to a footnote actually met Galileo, so I should not be surprised here.

Chapter 9, section 48: "...honour consisteth only in the opinion of power. Therefore the ancient heathen did not think they dishonoured, but greatly honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their poems, committing rapes, thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts." I've noted before that polytheistic divinities showcase human flaws rather than enjoying a monopoly on morality. Hobbes has a different take, arguing that even these polytheistic deities are honoured rather than seen as cautionary tales. I have to ponder that. It's certainly true that the Old Testament God acts in ways that would raise eyebrows if a human did it, but his moral monopoly grants Him license.

Chapter 11, section 25: Curiosity drives people to seek for causes and causes of causes, until eventually they postulate a deity as the ultimate cause. This is related to the point Lilla made, that religion in politics provides a sure foundation. God is the ultimate postulate. Take that away and people are adrift.

I think this might also explain why many ideologues of non-theistic sorts (e.g. Marxists, Critical Race Theorists, atheists who have gotten a little TOO excited about not having a lord and savior) behave in ways that often resemble religion: They have a foundation, something that scratches the same psychological itch, so they behave in a similar way.

I'm in Newsweek!

 Long time no post, but I'm back to say that I was just published in Newsweek! My article is a critique of a rather bizarre physics education research article that came out recently. I want to thank everyone in the Heterodox Academy Writers Group, who helped me with very useful feedback, and also put me in touch with a Newsweek editor.

Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu

I just read Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. It's an admirably compact read, taking only as many pages as it actually needs in order to make its case: The Professional-Managerial Class is full of neuroticism, insecurity, and hypocrisy. She focuses on three examples: Attitudes towards child-rearing (everything ever done by neurotic parents looking to get their kids into Ivies), books (a less convincing chapter), and sex (not gonna touch that). Her bigger point is that the PMC has largely tried to identify itself as being more virtuous than the lower economic classes so that they can justify having more. They want to justify it to everyone: Themselves (all that insecurity), the more affluent people for whom they work (again, they feel insecure), and those with less (to try to get the poor to strive rather than revolt).

Liu is far-left on economics, more lefty than I'll ever be, but you don't need to be lefty to (1) agree with her cultural critiques of the PMC and (2) think that actual material living conditions should be a bigger concern than whether somebody spoke about a social issue in precisely the right language. One could support reforms from any number of angles, left, right, or otherwise, and think that those reforms should concentrate on tangible economic issues instead of culture.

My most important takeaway from her book is from the intro: The contrast between the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th and the PMC of today. Educated professionals were prominent in that progressive movement as they are among today's self-styled progressives. However, the progressives of the earlier era were often in sympathy with the working classes, while today's PMC finds the working class appalling.

I'm not convinced her history is strong there. I'm hardly an expert on this, but labor movements were generally aligned with the Democrats, at least by the time of FDR, while many (not all) progressives were identified with the Republicans. Yes, FDR came after the days of the capital-P Progressives, and I'm no expert on that history, but it seems clear that the story was probably a bit more complicated than hinted at in Liu's intro. (I'm quite certain that historians will always agree with the statement "[Insert movement here] was more complicated than a short summary.")

Still, to the extent that she might be capturing some truth, it's worth noting (as Liu does) that the educated professionals of the PMC are largely salaried people working for bigger organizations. They don't own the means of their production (her wording, she's very proudly leftist) the way that many small-town professionals did a century ago. Hofstadter noted that the progressive movement of a century ago had plenty of professionals and businessmen (not normally a leftist bunch) who felt threatened by corporations. They had enough ownership of their jobs to feel threatened AND enough ownership to have some ability to push back. Today the educated professionals mostly work for someone else, not themselves.

I'm also reminded of Claudia Goldin's observations about how working for corporations closed gaps between male and female pharmacists. On one level this is unambiguously good: Of course we want to see men and women enjoy the same opportunities. And it is obviously something that the PMC would and should celebrate, both because of the wider gender implications and because it is in their self-interest. However, Liu would note that the victory doesn't necessarily trickle down to women working in other jobs (e.g. the low-paid cashiers in those pharmacies). A segment of the PMC gained equity in the sense of fairness by giving up their equity in the sense of ownership. Maybe it's a very good thing from many angles. Maybe it's better for patients, especially certain kinds of patients. If I traveled a lot I'd probably want to be able to go to any CVS in the country and get my prescription refill.

On the other hand, I know from family experience that certain specialty services seem to be easier to get at independent pharmacies.

But whatever the bigger-picture pros and cons of corporate vs independent pharmacies, the main point is that the PMC prioritizes certain social goals and has partly achieved some of those goals...at least for themselves...by accepting the economic power of larger entities. And so we can't really stand up to larger entities. I'm just a guy with an inconsequential blog. If I actually caused real trouble for a big entity I'd lose my job and health insurance. We all know this.

I think this is Liu's best point, separate from her critiques of various books and sexual politics.

"Souls of Black Folk", Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1 is a summary of the book. At the top of the second page he mentions the question that white people pose: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Like Baldwin discussed, black people are never just discussed as people in the US. They're a problem. Even the most sympathetic seeming see only problems. Problems to solve, solutions to fund, outcomes to assess and study. I can see the influence on Baldwin. I also see some echoes of this chapter in Fanon, when du Bois discusses the feelings of inferiority in a people whom du Bois saw as still very "underdeveloped."

Much of the second chapter concerns the roots of the under-development in the Freedmen's Bureau, which tried to protect African Americans during Reconstruction, but ultimately failed on so many levels. There's the aspect of the task that could never be done in a manner beyond reproach--taking millions of people and trying to help them join a new society while that society is being (hopefully) transformed in the aftermath of bloody war--and then there's the part that is fully deserving of reproach: The decision to end it.

I won't recount all the many failures, I'll just note one anecdote: Tthe New England school mistresses who headed south to introduce the idea of universal elementary education, and along the way introduced it to white and black alike. The whites of the south were kept in as feudal a state as the slaves were, because it was a feudal society.