I’LL GET MY FIX

In my last set of postings, I delved into the field of punditry.  More specifically, I related what the political writer, Philip E. Tetlock,[1] had to say about predicting political events or developments.  One observation I made was that pundits aren’t necessarily in the business of changing minds.  Their audiences consist of people who pretty much agree with them.  Pundits serve to reinforce already held beliefs about the political world and, in addition, they can provide talking points.  To be open to new information and/or arguments is to take a reasonable approach to political thinking and calculating.  What it turns out to be, though, is that when it comes to politics and what people who have an interest in it tend to do is not think about politics, but rather feel about politics; that is, “[t]he political brain is an emotional brain” – so says Drew Westen.[2]

Let’s state that a bit differently.  If you view our thinking and deciding about politics and government as a dispassionate process – one in which we take in information, weigh pro and cons over possible courses of action or policy and reason what is best either for ourselves, our family, our community, nation, or the world, you’re wrong.  According to Westen, this is not how the human mind works.  Those in the business of politics, such as those working in political campaigns who assume that is how people think about politics, will not be successful.  Westen and his colleagues came to this conclusion from their research into political thinking; I mean political feeling.

For example, in 2004, during the presidential campaign that pitted John Kerry against George W. Bush, Westen’s team identified fifteen committed Democrats and fifteen committed Republicans, each subject supporting his/her party’s nominee.  The researchers showed them slides from which the subjects read information which depicted Kerry and Bush being dishonest, inconsistent, slimy, pandering, or simply acting poorly in some way.  Through accompanying questioning and scanning their brains, the researchers wanted to see how the subjects reacted to the information for each of the candidates.  To begin with, the reasonable response would have been to condemn the depicted behaviors equally along some standard for appropriate conduct.  By recording the subjects’ responses and then reviewing the information derived from the scanning, the researchers’ aim was to ascertain what was happening cognitively.  To guide this research, they proposed four hypotheses:  (1) the negative information would cause the neural circuits found to be associated with negative emotions to be activated; (2) overall activation in the brain would be geared at “regulating” emotions through such coping mechanisms as rationalization; (3) parts of the brain associated with conflict would be activated; and (4) parts of the brain associated with reasoning would not be activated since they expected the subjects to “reason” from their emotions.  The slides, for example, presented one candidate condemning the Iraq war and another slide showing him praising it.  They also saw the other candidate waxing-on about how we need to take care of the veterans while his administration cut funding for VA hospitals.  Summarily, the researchers found that the subjects found it easy to find fault with the candidate they did not support while only mildly finding fault with the candidate they supported.  But not only was this research able to record the inconsistency in the answers the subjects provided, it, due to the scanning, checked on how the brain physically responded to the information.

The first detection was expected; neurons associated with stress fired up.  This causes an unpleasant sensation within the subject.  To “handle” this, the brain attempts to deny the information causing the negative reaction – this reminds one of the five stages of grief.  It seems that this, if allowed to stand, is a way to turn off the unpleasant chemical business happening internally. What the researchers found interesting was how quickly the brain was able to do this type of mental gymnastics.  “The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced … [a]nd this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.”[3]

If this weren’t telling enough, the researchers were able to detect another finding that surprised them.  Once the false conclusions were accepted by the subject and the neural circuits associated with unpleasant sensations deactivated, those associated with positive emotions were engaged – they fired up.  These partisan subjects’ brains not only found a way to stop feeling bad, but also found a way to feel good, and the neurons so activated substantially coincided with those stimulated in a drug addict when getting his/her fix.  Westen asks:  is there something to the notion of a political junkie?

If this is what a political operative is facing in a political campaign, what chances does reasoned debate have in the process?  The saving grace is that roughly about sixty percent of the population is partisan (just about thirty/thirty between the major parties).  That leaves forty percent not so committed to either one side or the other and, therefore, these people are subject to being influenced by well-run campaigns that can put together a good, well presented argument relevant to their needs.  Of course, to begin with, these are the same people who have less interest in politics.  People who are partisan become partisan by having this interest nurtured, usually from a very young age.  I attribute my interest, for example, to the interest my father expressed around the house (actually the New York apartment) I lived in during my early years.  Once one is exposed to such messaging, it usually comes with the bias built-in.  My father was a union painter who was very committed to his union.  Along with that, there was a partisan bias toward the Democratic Party – my first trip to Hyde Park occurred when I was eleven or so.  I suppose most strongly held partisan emotions are generated in similar ways.  As the years have gone by, I have tried to become more reasonable in my views of politics.  I still love FDR, but I have in this blog pointed out short comings attributed to the New Deal – you can judge how “dispassionate” I have become.  The point is that a civically minded citizen should be reasonable yet emotional enough about politics and the welfare of our commonwealth to be motivated to learn and become involved in our political activities.  This adds to the challenges of a civics teacher.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Westen, D.  (2007).  The political brain:  The role of emotions in deciding the fate of the nation.  New York, NY:  PublicAffairs, p. xv.

[3] Ibid., p. xiv.

SWANS, TURNS OUT, ARE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

I want to finish with Philip Tetlock’s[1] ideas concerning our abilities to predict our futures in the realm of social and political developments.  There are those among us who count on TV pundits and newspaper columnists to do that for us, assuming there exists a basic agreement between the consumer and provider of such a service.  In our midst, there are those who, with a heightened interest in political and social affairs, regularly take in the predictive insights of such commentators; the problem is, according to Tetlock, these dispensers of wisdom do not enjoy very good “batting averages” in being able to predict accurately.  Lucky for the pundits, their listeners are not so much interested in accuracy as they are hungry for general rationales and talking points for their already held beliefs.  By the time their failure to forecast becomes evident, the attention of their audience has moved on to other matters and so the mistakes go unnoticed.  I saw a video the other day in which President Obama spouts the predictions that pundits warned us about if the president were to be reelected in 2012.  To remind you, one was gas prices in the $5.00-$6.00 range and another was unemployment at levels nearing ten percent.  He then juxtaposed those figures with rates prevailing at the time he was giving this comparison.  Actually, the disparities made for a fairly humorous bit of comedy.

Tetlock’s castigation of these pundits was not so much critical of these predictors, but to address how we might approach this fine skill of forecasting in order to be more successful.  For better prognostication, it turns out, being modest in our ability to predict is helpful.  As I reported in my last posting, research indicates that being less than confident in this endeavor, unlike in playing golf, seems to up our chances of getting it right.  This modesty is enhanced by realizing that political realities are best anticipated with apprehension.  Over what?  Over what is referred to as “black swans.” 

Black swans are unexpected developments or events that disrupt the equilibrium of forces that are holding sway at any given time.  These swans appear recurrently, but without any regularity in terms of their timing.  It’s as if we are going along within certain patterns – for example, the patterns of our presidential campaign cycles – and boom, up comes a Donald Trump to belie all of our expectations as to what will happen next – have you picked out your Canadian domicile?  Tetlock goes on to describe this whole process by which one attempts to responsibly forecast the political future as a cloudlike endeavor as opposed to a clocklike endeavor.  That is, it’s best to see the whole movement of politics as clouds coming and going in no particular pattern, here and there, and not to see it as the fine, mechanical movements of a clock.

Tetlock next draws our attention to the type of mistakes these pundits can make.  But before I share these with you, I want to remind you of what a former secretary of defense once said:  there are things we know we know; there are things we know we don’t know, and there are things we don’t know we don’t know.[2]  Of course, black swans fall into the last category.  With this as context, let’s look at Tetlock’s two-pronged possible prediction outcomes.  There are false-positive mistakes and there are false-negative mistakes.  I will quickly add a third possibility, an accurate prediction.  A false-positive mistake would be an erroneous prediction of something going to happen.  Around this time every year, for example, I predict the Yankees will win the World Series.  I usually make a false-positive mistake, but my “batting average” is higher than any other type of similar prediction for any other professional franchise here in the US.  It is a prediction situation in which I know what I don’t know, namely how the baseball season will unfold.  That is, if there is a World Series this year, there will be a winner, but I don’t know which team will win; I believe a particular team will win, but I don’t know which one.  If I am wrong – heaven forbid – then I would have committed a false-positive mistake.  Implied in this prediction is the assumption, as I just pointed out, that there will be a World Series, but what if there is some development within baseball that I am not aware of that threatens that eventuality?  After all, I can remember a year when we didn’t have a World Series due to a player work dispute.  Now, I have no reason to believe that will happen this year, but say it does.  In my prediction of who will win, I didn’t predict a necessary precondition.  In other words, I didn’t predict something will not happen – playing the World Series.  That is a false-negative mistake.  It also demonstrates an unknown, unknown.  People who study this sort of thing point out that sellers of health insurance face this lack of relevant information all the time.  In selling you a policy, they don’t know what you are not telling them about your health or what you don’t even know about your health.[3]  As for what you know you know, even when the reality is not a hundred percent one way or another, you do know probabilities and can manage any entailed risk the situation presents, but in the world of political developments, those are often not with what one is dealing;  hence, the high occurrence of false-positive and false-negative mistakes in predicting future events or developments.

This gets us back to the poker player’s way of thinking about this game of predictions.  Probability studies come into play and the use of math becomes useful – i.e. visualizing the different possible hands one is confronting.  The irony is that such probability studies are highly dependent on a history of false-positive mistakes and false-negative mistakes as well.  It is the analysis of these mistakes, of reviewing how and why mistakes were made and placing numerical values to the correct factors, that ups our chances (and let me emphasize “chances”) of getting it right.  It turns out that mathematical algorithms have been developed and programmed into computers to work on these types of predictive projects and they actually, by a long shot, do better than their human counterparts.  There are a lot of simulated ways to test this.  For example, there is the playing of chess in which algorithm based programs beat the best players regularly.  But as Tetlock points out, this need not be a competition between humans and machines but a possible collaboration in which the use of machines can up our chances to get it right.  So while the political world is not clocklike, the use of exacting mathematics can enhance our ability to foretell where those clouds are apt to go and where those swans might be lurking.

Of course, the likelihood that the regular viewer of Fox News or MSNBC shunning the more flamboyant pundit for the drier math “nerd” to provide them with a view of the future might not be what is wanted.  I must say, I have seen the not nerdy Nate Silver on MSNBC.  He is one of the more mathematically based predictors who has been relatively very successful at predicting elections and does, apparently, rely on the type of analyses indicated above.  But of course, elections and their counting on votes and responses to survey questionnaires lend themselves readily to such algorithms.  But how about punditry that applies such rigor to foreign relations or welfare policies?  Can we stand watching and listening to this type of predicting, where nothing is “guaranteed”?  If we had measurable stakes such as predicting the stock market and other financial developments with such accuracy, perhaps our need for such forecasting would be enhanced.  Oh, I forget, we do have a personal stake but alas, these stakes are not so quantifiable.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] The exact quote by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is:  “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

[3] For this limited point about health insurance see Huettel, S. (2014).  Behavioral economics:  When psychology and economics collide.  [A transcript]  Chantilly, VA:  The Great Courses/The Teaching Company.

CLOUDS WITH SWANS?

I want to take up the topic I introduced in the last posting, the ability to forecast social/political developments.  My focus was the role that pundits play in providing views of the future, an ability in which they have proven to be less than proficient.  My description of this dynamic is based on the thoughts of Philip Tetlock,[1] a Canadian-American professor and political writer.  I tried to stress the importance of pundits in our political culture in that they provide the rationales for opinion-leaders among the general populous.  Tetlock provides us with certain ideas about how we, and more specifically pundits, can improve on this business of forecasting.

To review his findings regarding pundits, he presents three conclusions:  their rate of success at predicting is a little better than chance; despite this deficiency, they are overly confident in their abilities to forecast and seldom do they express any change of mind or heart when confronted with evidence that they were mistaken.  Central to this back and forth system between pundits and their audience is the fact that the role pundits play is not to inform the audience but to reinforce already held beliefs.  My feeling is that what the pundits provide is not so much information or expert opinion, but phraseology and cherry-picked facts that support what has been established in their minds as being true, good, or bad.  Of course, reality about the social and political world does not help.  After all, that’s what the forecasting business is in business to predict, and one can very reasonably ask whether or not that world is predictable to begin with.

Tetlock uses the notion of Nassim Talib of the “black swan” approach to history.  First, most pundits on TV and columnists in the papers rely on history to provide the evidence they use to justify their conclusions.  Only rarely do they cite social science literature for backing; instead, they recall some historical incident or development that they present as analogous to the conditions they are analyzing.  I have already in this blog voiced my bias for historical research over social science research, but my bias is based on going beyond citing a case or two – a topic for another posting.  In terms of our pundits, it is beneficial to adopt this black swan view.  It encourages us to view history as a record of social relations being in an equilibrium for a time and then being hit by some highly disruptive event or development – the black swan.  Affected institutions take into account the swan and eventually create a new equilibrium.  Is this a way to view Donald Trump, for example, in our current presidential primary season?  Possibly.  But the Trump case illustrates what this phenomenon is like; no pundit forecasted the Trump factor in this political season.  And yet, what will be the consequences of Trump; what new equilibrium point will this candidate help establish?  Time will tell, but I can assure you he will cause changes in the Republican Party.

One consequence of this process that might be overlooked is that during periods of equilibrium, we seem to accept a new set of conditions as “normal” fairly quickly.  We, collectively, seem to have short memories.  The new resulting social environment lulls us into a sense that we can predict what’s coming.  Patterns establish quickly and within those patterns, the more informed and savvy observers can up their accuracy rates of telling us what is going to happen.  But it is not whether a new black swan will appear again, but when.  And as it appears, there goes all that ability to see what’s coming.  So the second consequence is that our ongoing attempts at predicting do have a pattern:  successful periods followed by almost complete disarray primarily due to our undeserved hubris in feeling we know what’s up until the arrival of a newer black swan.

So, one lesson is to be wary of any prediction that is stated in longer-term time frames.  Short-term forecasting is what pundits should be about and even there the listener should be leery.  Or stated another way, view this limited skill as being akin to the skills of a good poker player or hedge fund manager.  Seeing politics as poker has advantages.  For one, a “player” defines the possible events as a range of possibilities.  One can, under such thinking, view potential acts as a sampling universe, not as well defined as with a deck of cards, but more defined than the options entertained by the typical pundit one sees on TV.  This view of possibilities is a landscape of a type in which one’s preconceived assumptions are tested and worked out.  The goal under such an approach is to formulate reasonable probability estimates as a poker player visualizes possible poker hands, and as with poker and an accompanying good sense of learning from costly mistakes, this discipline provides one an avenue for improvement.  One can become better at forecasting, although Tetlock warns it does take time – beware of the young pundit.

As for what comprises the “deck” in politics, Tetlock provides another analogy: that of a cloud – as opposed to a clock.  The forecaster needs to disabuse him/herself of any notion that politics resembles a clock with regular movements.  The sense of a cloud, as it applies to politics, is seen as this conglomeration of events Tetlock describes as follows:

If world politics is more cloudlike – little wisps of clouds blowing around in the air in quasi-random ways – no matter how theoretically prepared the observer is, the observer is not going to be able to predict very well.  … [T]he cloudlike view would posit that the optimal forecasting frontier is not going to be appreciably greater than chance or you’re not going to be able to do much better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee.  One of the things we discovered in the [simulated studies] work was that forecasters who suspected that politics was more cloudlike were actually more accurate in predicting long-term futures than forecasters who believed that it was more clocklike.[2]

Modesty is a factor in proficiency levels when it comes to forecasting; that is, modesty is positively related to the ability to predict long-term political developments.

Does that mean heuristics are useless?  Not at all; the point is that when given the time one should put in the work; figure the probabilities as best one can and calculate what is likely to happen.  Heuristic hunches by the novice or uninformed are more in line with the accuracy of the chimpanzee referred to above.  Heuristic hunches by ideologues are just a bit better.  But heuristic hunches by those who have spent a professional lifetime studying a field of knowledge prove to be fairly accurate.  But even they, if given the time, do not rely on hunches; they put in the time.  And the time among political experts seems to be better spent in not looking at their field as this Newtonian world of predictable phenomena, but as those clouds that come in and out, here and there, and sometimes (with too regular a recurrence) they contain, metaphorically, a black swan to potentially disrupt their best efforts at any given time.  Good luck to them; good luck to us all.

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[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Ibid., p. 26.

WITH LIMITED TIME, A DEPENDENCY

As a civics teacher presents his/her daily lessons, that teacher should keep in mind that in those seats in front of him/her are filled with future adults who will be engaged in a multitude of ways to make a living and that most of their future day-to-day concerns will not be about what their governmental officials will be doing.  They will be concerned with family finance, other family matters, jobs, what’s up with their friends, what’s going on at church, and how their favorite sports team is faring.  What a civics teacher should be about is trying to increase the concern that students have about the privileges and responsibilities attached to their role as citizens.  My attempts in this blog have been to encourage a theoretical slant to that view, one that holds on to a belief and an emotional commitment; that is, I would want that student to begin viewing his/her citizenship as an agreement, an agreement to be a partner with his/her fellow citizens in this project we call the United States of America.  This includes the view of the additional commitment of being a partner within his/her respective state (which in my case is the state of Florida). 

And as a partner, he or she is concerned generally about what is going on, what advances that partnership, and what adds to or detracts from the health of that partnership.  While all this is important, the average citizen can be reasonably pardoned if he/she cannot or will not engage in hours and hours of research related to those issues.  With all that goes on in daily lives, the amount of effort toward becoming knowledgeable and opinionated over these concerns – some being quite complex – will be limited.  How much time, on a daily basis, is it reasonable to expect the average citizen to expend on these civic concerns?  An hour or so?  That’s the time it takes to watch a round of the local news – which is mostly worthless in terms of these concerns – and the national news on TV.  We would hope the average citizen subscribes to the local paper and is able to spend some time at least skimming it for meaningful stories; you know, the ones that don’t cover the latest murder or “kitten up a tree” type of story.  There is an adage today that people don’t read the newspaper anymore, but instead “play” it with all the puzzles and games they print.  But there is always the percentage in the populous that has a heightened interest. 

They view and read more than just the minimum I just described – there is also that portion who views and reads a lot less.  But for those who go beyond the minimum but less than the amount political wonks put in, the function of the pundit is important.  These interested citizens go a bit beyond the hourly newscasts and skimming the paper; they watch news related networks like Fox News and MSNBC.  On those networks, there is a continuous stream of pundits.

And in turn, these citizens who watch and read more than the minimum and less than the “wonk” level, are important.  These citizens are important in that they still speak mostly in the language of the less informed but, being more informed, they can and do become influential among the general population.  People listen to them, if not the pundits, and how they decide to vote or think about an issue can have an augmented effect.  If you know little or nothing about a subject but feel compelled to act in relation to that subject, you might seek advice from someone you think knows more about it than you do.  At the same time, you will seek that advice from someone you can understand and whom you feel is not too different from where you stand in relation to that subject.  There is a literature associated with these phenomena.[1] 

So, if these citizens are influential and they, in turn, are influenced by pundits, how can we view these pundits?  Perhaps one way is to see them as forecasters.  We have weather forecasters and now we have political forecasters.  Their presentations follow a format; either they directly or by innuendo express what will happen if so and so is allowed to happen.  Their stock and trade is to convince viewers how prescient they are in warning the audience what will happen if the political universe is foolish enough not to follow their advice.  They might direct their comments about how good or bad a course of action is or will be, but the ultimate message is a warning.  For a better America, one should heed their opinion.  Of course, this general function can be extended also to columnists in the papers.  If you want to know about any bias on the part of these pundits, either from the network they are on or the paper that runs their column, one can guess quite accurately what side of the political divide they are on – there are exceptions and they are few in number.  What I want to focus on here is on how good a pundit is in forecasting and what some of the factors affecting this level of proficiency are. 

Philip Tetlock[2] provides an analysis of these aspects.  His overall judgment about how good these “political analysts” are in predicting is that they are not so good.  He grades them as poor at predicting beyond a year; they tend to think they know a great deal about what will happen in the future, a lot more than they actually do know.  It turns out that predictions termed as having eighty or ninety percent accuracy, in actuality are in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent.  By the way, I still feel that that rate is not bad.  But, he goes on, that when confronted with less than anticipated accuracy, these pundits do not “learn” from their mistakes and hold on to original claims or derived conclusions.  This means, Tetlock holds, that pundits are predicting only a bit better than chance; they are overconfident and do not benefit from their mistakes.  So right off the top, what the media should be about is benchmarking these predictions and if this were done, the thinking is that either these pundits’ modesty would increase or they would become better at their jobs.

But you might ask why, if the rate of accuracy is so low, does anyone listen to these people?  Well, this question is based on a faulty assumption.  It is based on the notion that people listen to become informed, to become educated.  No, this is not the reason.  People listen to pundits to have their already formed prejudices reinforced; they listen to those who already agree with them on the conclusions – what they believe to be true or good or bad – and can provide the arguments and selected facts that bolster those opinions.  Add to this the pundit’s trick to couch predictions in iffy language – such as, “there could be” statements – and the combination is enough of a hedge to allow the system to sustain itself.  But as we look into this form of political communication, we find even more layers to it.  For example, we find that both pundits and listeners are highly reluctant to question, much less change, their basic assumptions.  They might be willing to dabble with the truth or wisdom of those beliefs on the fringes of their belief structures, but the central tenets are untouchable.  They rationalize when confronted with direct hits on those beliefs.  For example, they might emphasize even greater harm if their advocated position is proven to be misguided, as in we’d better not tempt an even worse outcome by going down a particular road (we’d better not negotiate with Iran because it will use its leverage to bolster terrorists).  This is done when their warnings do not have anything to do with the issue at hand (currently preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons).

In the next posting, I want to pick up on Tetlock’s treatment of this question over forecasting and look at what a teacher can emphasize when instructing students on the role and function of pundits.  Such instruction, for example, can point out a benchmark system that students could utilize and then analyze a set of political pundits from various positions on the political spectrum over an amount of time (sounds like a great term paper project).  But this area has been understudied by the general media although there have been some attempts to judge the factual veracity of what pundits and politicians say in the media.  But since pundits play an important role for our citizenry, civics classrooms need to shine more light on what is going on with these “experts.”

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[1] See for example Lloren, A. and Wuest, R.  (2016).  Are opinion leaders better represented?  Social Science Research Network, retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733045 .

[2] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

A MILLENNIAL CONTEXT

It’s been a few years since we ushered in the new millennium.  The twentieth century is fading in our memories.  Some of its images are not missed; I can live the rest of my days without seeing another polyester suit from the seventies – how did I see the bright yellow sport jacket as cool?  But there are other aspects of the twentieth century we cannot afford to forget.  That century hit untold heights of inhumanity.

It’s not that inhumanity was invented during the 1900s.  Other centuries have had ample examples.  But due to a couple of “advancements,” our capacities to inflict harm, suffering, and death increased many fold.  These changes included industrialization and urbanization – products of mostly the nineteenth century – and a “crease” in history.  By a crease, I mean a turning point from traditionalism to modernism, a process that began before 1900 and continues today.  It is even expanding beyond modernism with its mechanical views of ethics and detached scientism.

Broad historical developments manifest themselves in a variety of ways.  This crease can be noted, for example, in the number of European colonies around the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia, attaining their independence during the century.  It is in those areas that we see the after-flow of the tension between the biases and interests of the developed and the lesser developed worlds.  Of primary focus are our problems with extreme religious groups and their accompanying tribalism.  On one side there are bureaucratic social arrangements that present themselves as legalistic rationalism that, to a great deal, have left behind as mostly unimportant the concerns for interpersonal relations.  At least, that tends to be the persona peoples ensconced in traditional settings and see their counterparts in the developed world.  Yet, the chasm is heightening with the developed world judging the other side as victims of superstition and dysfunctional familiarity that serve as breeding ground for corruption in those artificial nations’[1] polities and businesses.  Their polities are not judged to be based on the rule of law but on whom you know.

That’s our situation today, but during the last century, these countervailing focuses were found within “advanced” nations.  There, we had the deadly concoction of the modern advances – advanced technologies in killing – and the prejudices associated with the traditional.  Preeminent was the role that racism played in the carnage of World War II.

So, a central legacy of the last century is the ability to inflict pain, suffering, and death and the unresolved tensions between traditional modes of seeing social realities and the modernist and postmodernist views of social organizations.  This is the context of our central conflicts.  There are others, but this seems to be central thus far in the new (or mostly new) century.

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[1] I write “artificial” in that many of these countries are the product of borders drawn by Western powers.

NEEDS OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST

I imagine that there are many ways to view politics.  I have offered in this blog a partnership view.  That is, we, through the compacted agreement of the founders, are parties to a grand partnership in which all of our ultimate interests are bound together, at least in the long run.  Sure, we have our individual interests that oftentimes materialize over short-term events, but in pursuing them, federalism offers an ideal:  maintain those interests within the parameters of the common good.  I have also written that while one hopes for the best, one needs to prepare for the worst.  We know that not all of our fellow citizens abide by this general ideal.  On the contrary, many vigorously pursue goals and aims that are contrary to the common good. 

We have the most obvious cases of criminal pursuits such as fraud, embezzlement, murder, drug dealing, computer hacking, and the like.  A bit disheartening is that in our popular culture, we might glorify such behavior.  This has always been a disposition, but under a natural rights era, the disposition to do so has become less guilt-ridden.  There are cases not so well known, but equally distasteful of legal activities when people in power or holding certain assets allow themselves to take advantage of legal means to advance personal interests at the expense of the common good.  The cases of Wall Street executives who received generous bonuses during the months of the financial crisis of 2008 come to mind or the bank executives who received bailouts from the government but then refused to use those funds to support capital investment projects.  We blame the legislation – of which those executives surely played a role through their lobbying activities – but doesn’t some blame need to be placed on those who took advantage?  So prevalent is this type of behavior that any allusion to a partnership is considered merely an illusion.

Samuel P. Huntington some years ago referred to politics as a Hobbesian world: “unrelenting competition among social forces – between man and man, family and family, clan and clan, region and region, class and class – a competition unmediated by more comprehensive political organization.”[1]  In its raw state, this is an amoral arrangement; that is, there is no good or bad, it just is.  But there is an impractical angle; how do a people get anything done in such a social environment?  How can one plan, invest, dedicate him/herself when a constant turmoil surrounds the individual, the family, or any other group?  The obvious need is to impose some sense of morality and this is what successful societies and polities have been able to do.  But there are some (pre)requisites.  Morality presupposes the continued presence of trust born from predictability.  Predictability emanates from repetitive patterns of behavior and activities.  That is where the importance of institutions becomes apparent.  Huntington identifies the interests of public institutions – those established and maintained by our political apparatus – as the public interest.  A healthy maintenance of the public interest is what allows a people to manage the Hobbesian world out there.  My point is that part of that process, a central part, is to construct a view that holds to, believes in, an ideal.  That is what federalism provides and the natural rights construct, I am afraid, undermines.  But let me continue with Huntington’s analysis.

Huntington goes on to admit that ideals and values have been used to bolster the trust factor, to assist in the formulation and maintenance of public institutions.  The problem is that these constructs have been either too vague and general or too specific in their implementation.  Other constructs include the “divine rights of kings” view or Marxism.  By their nature, ideals tend to be broad as they are to be applied to a vast variety of situations.  And then when they are applied by political actors, they tend to be interpreted in too specific terms so as to offer advantage to those actors.  No; the solution to this lack of functionality is not to rely on constructs, but to count on political institutions advancing their own interests.  Let the president protect the Presidency, let Congress protect Congress, let the Supreme Court protect the court system.  In this way, a competitive arena is established (by the way, this reflects a federalist value for countervailing powers) and, by doing so, the regularization of political action can be established and preserved.  In short, it is these institutions defining and protecting their institutional interests that define for the polity the public interest.

An important distinction, though, needs to be made.  An institutional interest is not the interests of those who are involved in the institution.  Individuals die; institutions, which are successful, do not die.  Therefore, individual interests are relatively short-lived; institutional interests are long-lived.  This is what I refer to when I write about our long-term interests.  I disagree a bit with Huntington.  He refers to individual interests as short-lived.  I take his point, but being a person who has had my share of years on this planet, I can definitely identify interests I had as being short-termed and interests that I have had and continue to have as long-term.  I can also see that pursuing some short-term interests interfered, threatened, and even destroyed some long-term interests.  Yes; I will die, but I am glad that in my life I respected important long-term interests.  Today I can enjoy the continued benefits of having been able to do that.  It also allows me to further appreciate Huntington’s greater point: that a society and its members need to respect our collective long-term interests as exercised through our institution and why this current presidential election cycle is causing some deep rooted concerns over what I see unfolding on my TV.  That is also why the complete obstruction by Congress of the president and his agenda has also been worrisome.  Short-term interest of the opposition party can make the system dysfunctional, which has repercussions in the electorate.  Can the current atmosphere of the presidential campaigns be the manifestations of such strategies; the short-term threatening the long-term interests of our polity?

I believe Huntington captures this sentiment in the following:

In another sense, however, the legitimacy of governmental actions can be sought in the extent to which they reflect the interests of governmental institutions.  In contrast to the theory of representative government, under this concept governmental institutions derive their legitimacy and authority not from the extent to which they represent the interests of the people or of any other group, but to the extent to which they have distinct interests of their own apart from all other groups. … [For example, t]he interests of the president … may coincide partially and temporarily first with those of one group and then with those of another.  But the interests of the Presidency … coincide with no one else.  The president’s power derives not from his representation of class, group, regional, or popular interests, but rather from the fact that he represents none of these.  The presidential perspective is unique to the Presidency.[2]

Huntington goes on to argue that this level of institutional protection is what furnishes realistic expectations that in turn allow trust and ultimately morality to our otherwise “dog-eat-dog” world.  It is this respect for institutions that is missing in parts of the world where we see one turmoil replacing another and where outside intervention seems to have no effect.  “Their political cultures are often said to be marked by suspicion, jealousy, and latent and actual hostility toward everyone who is not a member of the family, the village, or, perhaps, the tribe.”[3]

An interesting study is that of societies who have gone from being traditional – that is, lacking modern institutional arrangements – to being modern.  Japan is one such society.  Can one view Japan’s activities prior to World War II in this light?  Still and all, Japan offers a model of how this transition can be done successfully.  Are there any models of the reverse?  For example, is the US, as exemplified by our current politics, showing the way toward a “traditional” political landscape?  I don’t for a minute believe this, but when a candidate is offering a “cult of personality” form of campaigning, do we see a drift toward something unsavory?  Stay tuned.

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[1] Huntington, S. P.  (1968).  Political order in changing societies.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, p. 24.

[2] Ibid., pp. 27-28.

[3] Ibid., p. 28.

STEP RIGHT UP

With this posting, I will complete a series of several postings which review Richard C. Sinopoli’s[1] reaction to certain criticisms people have leveled against the natural rights perspective.  The first criticism is what Sinopoli calls the “rights illusion;” i.e., the criticism expands the natural rights’ moral basis to encompass “the whole of morality.”  In other words, as long as one lives within his/her rights, he/she can go about doing whatever he/she wants and be able to claim a moral posture by so doing.  The second criticism is the claim that since one has a right, one can insist on exercising it even when such behavior is deleterious to others.  The last two postings address these two criticisms.  This posting will look at a third concern.

The third criticism is that there is in liberal societies a proclivity to downgrade or deny the contributions of others in one’s successes.  As an aside, this proclivity does not seem to ameliorate any tendency to blame others for one’s failures.  But the general sense that one is solely responsible for one’s successes has become a sort of battle cry among the political right.  At least President Obama was criticized for pointing out that no one is completely responsible for his/her success.  Again, as with the other two claims, Sinopoli does not deny that people feel this way in our liberal society, but that people who feel this way are not exclusive to liberal societies and that liberal beliefs are not responsible for it.  He certainly does not attribute a person’s lack of understanding of how societies operate and create the conditions that allow success to natural rights (what he calls liberal) thinking.  I disagree.  I would associate this lack of attribution to any individualistic society like our own and that, in our case, a causal link does exist between a bias toward natural rights thinking and this sense of self-aggrandizement.

As with the other two contentions, Sinopoli cites John Locke to bolster his position that natural rights thinking has no causal relationship to the offending belief: 

He who travels the road now, applauds his own strength and legs that have carried him in such a scantling of time, and ascribes his own vigor; little considering how much he owes their pains, who cleared the woods, drained the bogs, built the bridges, and made the way possible; without which he may have toiled much with little progress.[2]

But as I have indicated in previous postings, the ideas comprising the natural rights perspective today, at least as it is generally held among the populous, is not the natural rights of Locke in the seventeenth century.  In this blog, I have cited expert opinion that has placed Locke’s contributions in an era in which his main arguments were against the legacy of feudal privilege and, in addition, against the idleness of the poor (based on their misunderstanding of what caused poverty).  As late as the nineteenth century, other writers can still offer a greater appreciation for the social context for success.  Sinopoli reports this as he cites the French writer Tocqueville.  Tocqueville could see how in aristocratic and classical republican societies,[3] a clearer sense of how the individual is well ensconced within the social matrix of society prevailed.  Who the individual is or what that individual can accomplish is very much dependent on the social milieus in which he/she is situated.  We had a sense of this in the TV show, Downton Abbey, especially during the early years of the program.  As a matter of fact, many of the story lines of the show are about how the more liberal notions of the twentieth century constantly conflicted with traditional, feudal beliefs and values.  Generally, the show depicts the heroic struggle of individual characters striving to be themselves – to become viable individuals – and, by doing so, rejecting the more circumspective roles individuals were expected to adopt in the good old days.  What saves the day in these plots is the binding relationships demanded by family, even among two warring sisters.  Again, there is a surviving reliance on a collective source of strength and an inability to totally shed the support a communal structure provides.  This will come later on, at least in our development in the US.

My point is simple:  to deny there is no relationship between a basic lack of understanding of how society works when it comes to success or failure and a general belief system that promotes the role of the individual in determining life’s values and goals is unreasonable.  Even, in the end, Sinopoli has to hedge his bets.  Let me quote him:

The relation between liberalism and community cuts in several different directions.  The more categorical claims of an inherent opposition between rights-based liberalism and community are not sustainable.  In fact, liberalism can claim as one of its virtues a profound recognition of the centrality of community to virtually any conception of the good; further, a recognition of the inviolability of each person can enhance community by assuring each member of the polity that her vital interests will not be sacrificed for the sake of others.  Yet, if there is no inherent opposition, it is at least empirically plausible to contend that liberalism can be destructive of community in some instances.[4]

You think this might be a little modest?

To begin with, the fact that Sinopoli claims a positive relation between liberalism and community interests exists does not make it so.  I agree that a respect for individual rights is essential to a healthy society and its polity, but more needs to be explained.  Let me cite a problem or two.

First, Sinopoli does not explain how self-interests need to be defined or somehow constrained in order for their pursuit not to negatively affect the common good.  When the individual is not only allowed, but also encouraged, to shoot for the moon and there is no sense of mutual responsibilities and accounting for mutual contributions, we experience many of the self-indulgent views and behaviors we currently see in our social interactions.  But beyond that, rudderless morality, our current history tells us, tends toward sensationalism.  Even the most important aspects of life become stages for the thrill seeker who is always trying to outdo the last escapade.  The wanting of something becomes more important than the satisfaction, partly because the satisfaction is short-lived and the anticipation for the next thrill becomes all-consuming.  We are told by Donald Trump, for example, I could act “presidential,” but if I did, only about twenty percent of his audiences would show up; to be presidential would be so damn boring.  So there goes another institution down the path of “barker-ism;” our lack of substance belittles another essential process in our political and social landscape.  Is this level of the problem just our version of a common diversion found in many other times and places or is there reason to believe we are embarking on a serious projection that will lead to highly dysfunctional results?  The contention of this blog is that we have reason to worry.  As I have argued, civics education is a factor in all of this and we need to change how we are going about “doing” civics if we hope to turn this projection around.  A good first lesson in a more responsible civics classroom is an explanation of how we, as individuals, are not totally responsible for our successes – or our failures – but that we are part of a greater whole.

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[1] Sinopoli, R. C.  (1992).  The foundations of American citizenship:  Liberalism, the constitution, and civic virtue.  New York, NY:  Oxford University Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 32.

[3] A federalist polity can be classified as a type of classical republican society.

[4] Op cit., Sinopoli, p. 33.  Emphasis added.