IT’S A POTTY THING

I feel compelled.  To what?  To write about the restroom situation in North Carolina and other states where there has been legislation or pending legislation to state that in public restrooms, such as in schools, a person is to use the bathrooms dedicated to the biological designation to which he/she was born.  In other words, transgender persons are not to use the bathroom facilities with which they identify, but to the bathroom their biological status – “equipment” – aligns.  This is making it very uncomfortable for transgender people.  The thinking is that if we honor transgender persons’ rights to live the gendered life they feel they have, this would give non-transgender voyeurs the license to opt a transgender persona and gain access to the bathroom of the opposite sex.  I know; I know; it sounds a bit absurd, especially in a school setting where taking on such a persona would be an overly taxing proposition given that everyone knows everyone else pretty well.  Just think about it.  You are a young man (and the fear is always about young men being able to invade a female bathroom) and you would have to dress like a girl, do girl things, be prohibited from taking part in guy things, not to mention the potential derision for being transgender (a condition that should not be, but there it is) and all so you can do is go to the girls’ bathroom from time to time.  Wow.

The North Carolina governor adds the issue of showers.  My experience with this issue does cause me to think a bit.  In my high school days, I played sports.  After a game or practice, I was mandated to take a shower in an open shower area, but my experience goes beyond that.  I happened to attend a new high school that was built on a site where a girls’ high school already existed.  During the first year or so – I don’t remember – we guys had to use the girls’ shower facility – obviously when they were not there.  This was my first experience with this shared shower business (I guess I had the previous experience of showers at public pools), but between individual shower stalls there were walls that came up to about chest high.  There was no curtain behind the user of the stall, but there was this provision, in the form of these walls, for modesty.  When the boys’ shower facility, sans walls, was finally provided, the experience became different in several ways.  But not much thought was given to the arrangement; you showered, dried, and got dressed.  That was it.  Does this entire scene pose a different sort of scenario for the accommodation of transgender students?  I don’t know.  But I feel fairly assured that it will be worked out.  What we need to do is give the circumstances some thought, be willing to spend some money, and find the solutions that respect everyone’s rights.

The reason I am compelled to write about this is that the issue is a federal one.  The fact is:  North Carolina is claiming, through its governor, that it has the right to make such a law; it is a local matter.  Running schools is not one of the delegated powers which the Constitution hands over to the central government.  This is true.  But the thing is, that by joining the federal union, that state, as well as of all of the others, has legally committed itself to abide by certain provisions when it comes to individual rights.  These are seen as integral to the federal agreement in which each entity in the arrangement is to be protected in these rights.  And one of those rights is to be equally protected under the law.  The question becomes, at least as I see it, does gender constitute enough of a person’s identity so that it is part of who a person is?  In denying a person from leading the gendered life he/she feels, does a ruling force fundamentally invade that space and render the action as unequal protection?  Apparently, according to psychological research, it does.  Just “google” psychological factors of transgender or psychological importance of transgender identity and you readily find a literature about the centrality of gender identification on a person’s mental well being.  So the issue is no small matter.  I am not an expert, but what I can garner, for those included in such realities, is that being discriminated against or segregated can be very serious including incidents of murder or suicide.

But all this does not do away with levels of discomfort – for all involved – over sharing a bathroom or shower room with someone who is of another sex, regardless of what gender he/she is.  I happened to be in a Miami restaurant recently and had to use the restroom.  I had not been in that restaurant before, so I looked for some sign indicating where the restrooms were.  Spotted, I followed the sign and then started looking for the second set of signs:  “Men” and “Women” or those symbols with which we are familiar.  No such designations were to be found; instead, there were two doors which had on the doors those “occupied/non occupied” gadgets you find on the doors of airplane restrooms.  I then had the unfamiliar experience of having to queue and wait for an unoccupied room.  I say unfamiliar in that the only time I have had to do that has been on planes, not restaurants.  It was okay; I had an interesting conversation with the woman in front of me, which ended abruptly when her restroom became available.  This system seems to solve any problem with transgender patrons – or is the problem with the other patrons?

I think that before all of this is over, there will be some rearranging of restrooms and shower rooms.  But first, let’s stop being overly concerned with little girls.  Little girls in public facilities do not go to the bathroom unaccompanied by some guardian – usually a parent.  In schools, I’m sure teachers and other supervisory personnel will come up with a system in which children will be safe from predators or voyeurs, a problem I do not believe exists or will exist. 

To place this in perspective, it is estimated that the transgender population in the US is about .3 percent.  That’s about a million people.  If they were allowed to live normal lives, they would probably be evenly dispersed among our population, meaning that in a nation of over 300 million people encountering a transgender person, the chances would be infrequent.  But what if they numbered millions?  What then?  Then they would have more political clout and accommodations would be secured.  But constituting the smaller number, this does not diminish their legal claims.  It does call on us, collectively and individually, to be mature, honest, calm, and reasonable.  We are, after all, in a federal union; let’s act the part.

Rx: COMMUNITY LIFE

Much of this blog has been about the relative merits of two societal views:  one in which all residents are relatively independent, especially when it comes to determining values and the courses of behavior they choose to pursue those values, and one in which values are defined by the needs of the common good.  Of course, this concern is more complex than just this distinction and a great many words have been dedicated to it, not only through this venue but in the works of philosophers, social scientists, and other social commentators.  On the common good side of this debate, I have introduced a view, a mental construct, that I have termed federation theory.  The view is highly dependent on arguments that support community and I have relied on the works of communitarians such as Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni.  I must admit that a lot of my argument begins with communal aims and then proceeds to argue that acting communally strengthens the community - a bit circular.  But what if we begin with an individual concern?

Now, there are many individual concerns:  individual wealth and income, status, recreation, sexual prowess, or just having a good time.  But what about health and life expectancy?  I would note that just about everyone agrees that life itself ranks as probably one of, if not the most, important concern we, as individuals, have.  I recently attended my fiftieth high school reunion – a grand affair.  I loved seeing those familiar faces, reminiscing, visiting the school site – facing Biscayne Bay (eat your hearts out).  But as any of you know who have experienced such an event, it is bittersweet.  We all know that the bulk of our stay here on earth is spent.  That’s okay, but no one there was volunteering to exit next and when we spoke of those who had not been as fortunate as we have been, we spoke of them with a tinge, at least, of sadness and love.  We miss them.  The point is, our selfish, if you will, desire is to live on.  By the way, one parting message at the reunion is that we want to do it again in not ten years, but five – no surprise.

Within that context, it came to mind something I read not so long ago.  Malcolm Gladwell[1] begins his delightful book, Outliers, with a short description of a relatively small town in eastern Pennsylvania called Roseto.  Attention was drawn to Roseto because it was noted that residents of the town had inordinate low incidences of heart disease among the under 50-year-old age bracket.  A couple of investigators went about trying to see why this was the case.  What they found was not limited to heart disease rates; these people were downright healthy and they didn’t seem to die of anything except old age.  So the investigators, in trying to find out what was going on with these people, reviewed the usual suspects – factors – that could contribute to this longevity.  That is, they investigated the eating habits, geographic location, exercise, and the information concerning their genetic makeup.  To do this, they had to look at the history of the town and get a developmental view of Roseto as well as observing how Rosetans currently lived their daily lives.

To begin with, Roseto is named Roseto because its inhabitants are overwhelmingly made up of the descendants of an Italian town named Roseto.  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the initial immigrants came to America to find a better life.  They traveled as far as eastern Pennsylvania where they settled near Bangor.  There were jobs there at the local quarry.  Soon, the community was established and more immigrants from the Italian town made their way to the new Roseto.  They started local service businesses, backyard farming (with the help of a priest), and thrived.  The town incorporated and resulted in a close-knit “Italian” community that pretty much, because of language and other cultural preferences, stuck to itself with little contact with other nearby towns.  There were high levels of familiarity among these townspeople with multigenerational households, recurring impromptu dinners among neighbors, a common close, religious – Catholic – “congregation,” and a slew of other common experiences.  This is not to say that Italy was recreated on American soil; changes were made to such things as diet, e. g., introduction of lard instead of olive oil for cooking and bread dough to make thicker pizza crusts.  Actually, when it came to eating habits, America represented a less healthy diet in general.

So, to get back to our mystery, as I just indicated, diet was not the cause of these people living so long.  The people were not exercise aficionados – they walked less than what they had done in Italy.  As for geographic region, their longevity was not shared in the nearby towns and, as for genetic factors, when other immigrants, including relatives, were sought out in other areas in America and those who stayed in Italy, they did not have the same long-lived rates our Roseto residents in America had.  No; the only factor that seemed to be different for our long-livers was the communal environment they were able to establish and maintain in eastern Pennsylvania.  Community, it turns out, seemed to be the prescription that led to the longer lifespans.

One can speculate as to the specific attributes of their communal lives that led to such beneficial results.  Here’s Gladwell’s take:

What [the investigator] began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location.  It had to be Roseto itself.  As [the investigators] walked around the town, they figured out why.  They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards.  They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure.  They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded.  They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church.  They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just two thousand people.  They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.[2]

“Where everybody knows your name.”

Is this the description of a “federated” community?  No.  It is too communal for that.  I would describe it as more familial.  But can we learn from this town?  Yes.  We can’t all live in such a homogeneous social environment, nor can we have the good fortune of having such historic factors to create such a place.  But what we can do is approach our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our churches, our schools, as places that can adopt lessons from such descriptions and begin to develop those institutions that make us more caring of those around us.  But all this begins with ourselves, individually, with a willingness to question all of this liberated sense of our natural rights.  We should hold these rights in reverence, but not as a mandate and a challenge to see ourselves as lone wolves answerable to no one but ourselves.  If for no other reason, our health depends on a more “we-ness” in our perspective; just ask the residents of Roseto, Pennsylvania.

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[1] Gladwell, M.  (2010).  Outliers:  The story of success.  New York, NY:  Back Bay Books.

[2] Ibid., p. 9.

A FUNCTION OF EMOTIONS

To date, in this blog, I have addressed the relative strength of emotions and reasons when it comes to moral thinking.  I have so far come to the conclusion that while one needs to be objective – reasonable – in the quest for moral decisions, one must first be passionate – emotional – about its pursuit.  This posting will address the question of how our biological make up functions in this concern.  Of course, when one considers biology, one is delving into the nature of such things.  I mean nature is a distinctive factor as opposed to nurture.  Our mental wiring is an important factor.  By looking into the natural, we get a better grasp of this internal juggling between emotion and reason, because, it turns out, one of them seems to have a more prominent position when it comes time to making moral decisions, although, as I have already reported, prominence, in this case, does not mean dominance.

Jonathan Haidt[1] reports on research that gives us insight into the natural side of this duality.  First, he shares the notion that animals of the ape family have the mental building blocks to think and feel emotionally.  These emotions include sympathy, anger, fear, and affection.  He goes on to report studies that look at the effects of neural damage among humans.  Specifically, of interest are the consequences of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).  For those of you who are curious, it is the region just above and behind the bridge of the nose.  When damaged, subjects had their emotionality practically eliminated.  This was ascertained by exposing subjects with such injury to extremely joyous or gruesome photographs; these subjects indicated no emotional response to such images.  All their other mental faculties, IQ, memory, and the like, were unaffected.  The subjects even scored normally on moral reasoning tests.  These subjects, in their private lives, were known to have made “foolish” decisions or avoiding making decisions in their interaction with others.  This, in turn, caused them to divorce themselves from others such as family members, employers, and the like.  Of course, this is not the recipe for healthy relationships with significant people in one’s life.  Consequently, these subjects had high incidents of shattered lives.

What all this means is that this type of research further bolsters the claim that one needs emotions to think reasonably.  Apparently, the vmPFC acts to regulate and coordinate the amount of information the brain is receiving, at various levels of consciousness, and allows our reasoning mechanism to function.  Without its services, a person is dealing with all possible options in a decision-making situation.  It seems, having an emotional function does filter certain possibilities from consideration.  It does this, of course, at a price.  But the price is not all bad, necessarily.

Haidt’s own research looked at subjects responding to situations in which they were asked about certain social taboos.  In one case, he offered a scenario in which a brother and sister engage in a sexual event, but that was not repeated nor subject to pregnancy (the sister was taking birth control pills and the brother used a condom).  Subjects were asked whether the event was immoral.  The subjects overwhelmingly responded that it was.  They held on to that conclusion even when the researcher took on a “devil’s advocate” role and extensively knocked down every reasonable claim the subjects gave for their opinions.  Frustrated, the subjects simply claimed that that is just how they judged the sibling’s behavior.  The implication is that emotional judgments simply trumped reason even though the scenario indicated that the sexual act served as a bond for the two “sinners” in their relation – a shared secret.  Believe me; I would be among the ones who judged this as unacceptable behavior - even atheists among the subjects responded to the event as did the religious ones.  Now, it is hard to believe that such a bias is inborn; it stands to reason that people are taught such a taboo.  Supporting this is the fact that there are recorded historical incidents when incest has been allowed, even mandated.  But the study seems to say we can be so thoroughly socialized to believe and accept such biases; we are wired to accept them.  And by so doing, we allow efficient decision-making to take place.  The emotional dispositions place parameters in what will be acceptable and, therefore, considered.

Given this, the current political campaigns become even more interesting.  In my lifetime, we have gone from the taboos that we would not elect a Catholic, a divorced man, a person who used profanity publicly (with the exception of Harry Truman and his occasional “damn” and “hell”), or a person who engaged in distasteful (as in crude) attacks on opponents – the other candidates in the field.  The Catholic taboo fell when I was young and Reagan took care of the divorced disqualifier; with this election cycle, the rest could very well fall as well.  With all that, our options for the presidency become more numerous.  A good thing?  Our reason would indicate that it is, yet our conventional emotions might be trumped by forces beyond their control; that is, a sea of raw emotions that is overruling a great deal of reason.

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[1]  Haidt, J.  (2012).  The righteous mind:  Why good people are divided by politics and religion.  New York, NY:  Pantheon Books.

FEDERALISM IS NOT JUST ABOUT STATES’ POWER

In this blog I have tried to make an important distinction, at least important to the overall aims of the blog.  The aim has been to introduce you to the construct, federation theory.  In our common parlance of politics, federalism is associated with a structural arrangement; that is, the arrangement between federated entities; in our case, the states, and a central authority that “governs” the relations among the federated entities, in our case the central or federal government in Washington, D.C.  Each level of government in our national arrangement claims sovereignty over various areas of governance.  Our constitution identifies those powers that were delegated to the central government, such as regulating interstate commerce, and the Constitution also states quite clearly that those powers not delegated to the central government, such as educating the young, are reserved by the state government or the people of the various states.  But of course, such language is always open to interpretation and debates as to what exactly is a delegated power, what its attributes are, and those discussions have been an ongoing aspect of our domestic politics ever since the original 1787 document was proposed and ratified.  These debates increased in intensity from time to time; no more so than the years following the Civil War.

We all know that one of the issues, if not the most important issue, that pushed our nation to that highly destructive war was slavery.  After the war, the victorious side, led by the radical Republicans, wanted to make sure that the dehumanizing conditions that characterized the “peculiar institution” were eliminated.  In 1866, (the war ended in 1865) the Republicans who controlled Congress passed and enacted, over a presidential veto, the Civil Rights bill of that year.  The new law addressed the questions of citizenship, its provisions, and the rights it guaranteed to the former slaves.  This law predated the eventual proposal and ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments which further solidified those guarantees.  My limited interest in this posting is the issue of how the law undermined the sovereignty of the states when it came to civil rights and how this tension really gets at the distinction this blog has made between the structural view of federalism and the more political/cultural view of federalism I have advanced by my introduction of federation theory.

On the one hand, by taking over a reserved power from the states, the governance over protecting civil rights from the states – a power which was generally viewed as a reserved power – the concern was that the central government was seriously threatening the entire federalist arrangement and setting up a centralized system much like what existed in most European countries.  The fear would be that this would, in turn, centralize so much power that the structural elements for despotism would be put in place.  One of our foundational values had been the demand for countervailing powers – such as in separation of powers among the branches of government and between the central and state governments.  Centralization would also provide for a removal of meaningful governance away from the people in their localities and vesting it in far off Washington.  There is no mistake; these concerns are central to federalism and a viable intrusion into state powers would place all these core values in jeopardy.

But let me provide another federalist concern, one that gets at the more political/cultural aspects of the equation.  Equality is central to federalist thought.  That is, a federal union is one of equal entities (parties) uniting to accomplish some goal or set of goals.  The instrument by which the agreement to join is stated and defined is a covenant or a compact – a solemn promise – in which the parties swear their allegiance.  Of course, that would be, for our nation, the US Constitution.  Prior to the Civil War and legally codified by the Dred Scott decision was the claim that those among us who either arrived from Africa or descended from those arrivals – blacks – were not among the people comprising that promise.  Therefore, they were not entitled to the rights and immunities guaranteed by the agreement.  Congress, after the war, wanted the legal instruments, law(s), to end this distinction.  By first enacting the Civil Rights Law of 1866 and later having the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution ratified, the aim was this change by legally defining the citizenship status of African-Americans as those of any other citizen.  To me, this is not a step away from federalism, but an important step toward it.  Not only would this clear up the unjust exclusion of African-Americans in our political partnership, but it would provide the language that led to other discriminated groups attaining their full-fledged status as equal citizens.  What groups?  To begin with, the post-Civil War amendments almost immediately were used to begin the discussion of granting women full citizenship status not only in terms of suffrage, but in terms of property rights.

But before we go too far in crediting the radical Republicans of the late 1800s with ushering in a more complete respect for the principles of federalism, the initial vehemence which characterized their efforts of the 1860s was short-lived and soon they were guilty of back-sliding.

Republican supporters of the Reconstruction amendments and the civil rights statute acknowledged the revolutionary changes they had wrought in American federalism by delegating plenary authority over citizenship and civil rights to the national government.  Before the Civil War, the states had exercised almost exclusive jurisdiction over fundamental rights.  Under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as Republicans understood them, Congress could conceivably supplant states in securing civil rights. … Republicans acknowledged the constitutional revolution in which they were engaged, they carefully avoided carrying this revolution to its ultimate conclusion of creating a unitary political structure.  Republicans did not wish to supplant the states in providing a foundation for ordinary civil and criminal justice.  On the contrary, they consciously preserved federalism by avoiding unnecessary intrusion on state authority over civil rights … [restricting] its protection of fundamental rights to situations in which states and localities failed to protect them.[1]

As the nineteenth century progressed, the national government became less concerned with the plight of the former slaves and the southerners instituted strict discriminatory and segregationist policies.  Of course, we are all familiar with the turbulent history which extends to our current times of race relations.  But, when we discuss the federalist nature of our union, we must remember that federalism is not just a structural concept; it is a whole construct of governance which includes ideas, ideals, and values concerning our views over citizenship, rights, and how we relate to each other.  I like to think of it, as I have often stated in this blog, as a grand partnership where ultimately all our interests are tied together.  It is a perspective of inclusion in a pluralistic land.

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[1] Kaczorowski, R. J.  (1992).  A revolution in federal civil rights.  In K. L. Hall (Ed.) Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I:  The colonial era through reconstruction (pp. 584-592).  Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, p. 590.  Many of the historical facts of this posting are derived from this article.

TRUMPING THE PROCESS

Last August 18^th I posted a piece that reflected on our subconscious abilities.  I related experimental work about how we discern winning patterns in card “games” fairly quickly without much conscious figuring; they’re hunches, if you will.  And all of that mental work is done by our subconscious as it, much like a computer, reviews and analyzes a heavy dose of data – by some estimates, over eleven million bits of data.  Let me quote Malcolm Gladwell, “… [see the subconscious] as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as a human being.”[1]  I applied that ability to the initial developments of the present presidential race and commented on any early appeal Donald Trump had.  Well, the months have passed since those early days; a lot has taken place including name calling, immature references to body parts, fist fights, and a slew of candidates dropping out of the race.  We have five names left and the two nominees of the major parties seem to have been chosen even though there are outside chances that one or the other of the apparent winners could lose by some unforeseen development.  So has Trump trumped any chance for a more traditional campaign season between the conventions and election day?  It seems he has.

What seems to have happened, and I am not an expert on these matters, is that those early gut reactions to the candidates’ messaging have solidified.  Trump followers have become unyielding Trump supporters.  We are led to believe that due to his popularity among certain segments of the electorate, seldom voting segments, they have found their man and little to nothing will budge them from that support.  Many, the media tells us, don’t necessarily like many of his off-the-cuff comments, but they dismiss those in the same way they may say things at times or perhaps their neighbors would say things; that is, offensive comments they would probably take back if given the chance.  After all, a great part of his appeal is that he is neither a politician – a claim he could make when he first entered the race, but no longer – nor politically correct – a term the meaning of I am not exactly sure.  I believe, since politics is not what many people like to think about once a decision is made in that area of concern, a person is likely not to want to revisit it again.  Instead, it’s more fun to appreciate the “show” quality the Trump phenomenon provides.

While subconsciously developed hunches, especially by experienced commentators of whatever area of concern the hunch is about, tend to be uncannily accurate, they are subject to mistakes.  And the thing is, we are mostly not experts on most things about which we have to decide.  So let’s look into this subconscious mechanism we carry around. 

First, evolutionarily speaking, we as humans would not have survived if we had not augmented our ability to predict or form conclusions on the conscious level.  We needed this faster mode of decision-making to meet the challenges of the day.  By subconscious, the reference is not the Freudian sub-consciousness we have come to know about; instead, it is this calculating mechanism described above.  As such, we are dealing with an adaptive portion of the brain, dealing with quickly changing environments.  And hence, our survival ability, such thinking permits, developed over centuries.  Some of its functions include taking stock of the environment (with all its variety of information), issuing necessary warnings when needed, setting up short-term goals, and even sending the necessary internal signals to initiate action, all done in a very efficient manner.  That’s one very sophisticated bit of “hardware” with compatible “software” programing built in – truly, a biological wonder.

To illustrate these capabilities, Gladwell shares an experiment that demonstrates them.  In a study in which students were shown ten-second video tapes of teachers to students, the students were asked to rate how good the teachers were.  The study then compared these quick evaluations with student evaluations which were done toward the end of a term of the same teachers and found the correlation of results between the “ten-second” evaluations and the term-long evaluations overwhelming.  I would probably want to know what constituted a good teacher in these students’ minds, but the point is that in ten-seconds they were able to predict what students thought about those professors at the end of a semester, usually ten to sixteen weeks long.

Now, hunches based on quick judgements are fallible and knowing the subject under evaluation does help in these hunches – the more one knows, the better one’s hunches are.  Our subconscious mind can be misled, distracted, or otherwise given wrong information.  So that leaves us with two areas of interest in considering this other mind.  One, why are we, in using our subconscious, right when we are right?  And then, why are we wrong when we are wrong?  The practical concern would be:  how can we improve in using our subconscious computer?  I will further explore these questions in future postings.  If nothing else, a better understanding could lead us to selecting better political leaders than we seem to be doing currently.

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[1] Gladwell, M.  (2005).  Blink:  The power of thinking without thinking.  New York, NY:  Bay Back Books, p.11.

THE LANGUAGE OF EXCHANGE

I have in these postings written about a relationship among citizens that exists in an ideal federalist arrangement; that is, of a sense of partnership.  What I have not done is give this idea much substance other than to express that people in a partnership see the arrangement as one in which the advancement of one partner is the advancement of all partners.  It follows the call of the Three Musketeers:  one for all and all for one.  Of course, this is the ideal and, in its truest sense, not a reality that can be achieved in a society of any size where interests are constantly in competition.  Actually, we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Competition in the real world promotes excellence as one competitor tries, for the sake of earning some limited resource, to outdo the others so as to win the resource.  In business, this is profits, but it can also include status, recognition, and other rewards.  But even here, an understanding that such competition advances the common interest can give resulting relations a hue of federation in knowing that the advancement of the common good advances all citizens even if the short-term results can be disappointing as one loses a sought-after compensation or other positive result.

In a way, all this is a bit of irony.  Trying to do in your opponent can elicit a focused attempt to better someone else, but by doing so, the advancement of society is gained and even the “loser” can benefit by such a turn of events.  Consider the Wright brothers winning the competition to be the first to fly.  Yes, they won the competition at the expense of their competitors, but I am sure that their competitors benefitted by living in a world that cracked the secrets of flying, or at least their children or grandchildren did.  The point is that even if one ascribes to a federalist view of ideal citizen relations, that does not mean one condemns or even bad-mouths competitive contests among citizens particularly in the realm of economic activity.  What one would expect is that any associated behaviors in this competition are conducted under fair rules of engagement – rules that would truly advance the common benefit and give each competitor the fullest, yet equal, opportunity to win the competition.

Many values contribute to this ideal; one is trust.  Let me explain.  To begin with, this language provides metaphors that are useful in explaining this irony.  To an audience “raised” on natural rights imagery, placing trust as a sort of medium of exchange, one can illustrate basic relationships.  It also allows a civics teacher to metaphorically speak in market terms; terms that while metaphoric, are true to what federated expectations are.  I have stated that trust is earned, at least by prudent people.  This is the case if one is the dispenser of it or the receiver of it.  Yes, we do give others the benefit of the doubt in most social and economic transactions – one can probably add political to this list – but if the stakes become at all meaningful, one is dealing with a level of trust that has to be felt and such levels should only prudently be extended to those who by their past behaviors have demonstrated trustworthiness.  As an earned quality, one is dealing with a level of morality or goodness by some shared standard.  Even among thieves, one hears about a code of “honor among thieves.”  So, the first relevant metaphor is one of accounting.

Trust, in this view, represents moral credit, an asset not yet earned, per se.  Using George Lakoff’’s description of this relation (as I did in a posting from last May, Due Sentimentality):

When you do something good for someone, you give something of positive value to him [or her] and what you get in exchange is “credit.”  Credit for acting morally can accumulate.  It is a form of capital. …

To place your trust in someone morally is to give him [or her] advance moral credit, credit he [or she] will repay you by acting morally.  If someone that you place your trust in acts very immorally, then you “lose trust” in him [or her], that is, you lose the moral credit that you gave him [or her] in advance as prepayment for acting morally.  He [or she] is “discredited” and “morally bankrupt.”  “Trust” is a prepayment of moral credit for future moral action.  But in general, people do not trust just anyone.  To be trusted, a person has to “build trust,” to establish a history of being trustworthy, a moral credit rating.[1]

And with this basic understanding of trust, we have the introduction of justice, at least from this angle of “exchange.”  Justice can be seen as those developments in which moral accounts are settled, as in people getting what they deserve and in the process cancelling moral debts.

Lakoff points to the idea Martin Luther King used in his March on Washington speech when he claimed that the blacks who were marching in Washington to “cash a check”  and that within the history of our nation, the African-American race had not been treated with justice in this basic exchange of trust between blacks and the nation.  What is the exchange?  As stated by a Supreme Court justice, the exchange is implicit with citizenry:  allegiance as expressed by performing one’s duties as a citizen – a partner – for the protection of one’s rights as a citizen.  Rights are categorized as being of several types, e. g., life, liberty, property, but also the right to participate in the collective decision-making processes of the polity among other rights.  And what of the duties?  What are they?  Let me offer a list:  to obey the law, to defend, when called upon, the security and interests of the nation, to engage in one’s economic activities that while providing compensation, are aligned with the common good, willingly and conscientiously performing civic requirements (e. g., jury duty), and beyond the base line provisions of the implicit covenant or compact, assist and support legitimate familial and communal endeavors.  Under the language of the exchange, rights are property which can be earned or inherited.  So the exchange takes on a formulated structure.  Someone has a right, someone has a duty, and this reflects the exchange.

Rights need protecting or, in some cases, a medium by which they are experienced.  The main agent to see that they are protected or providing the medium of expression is government.  This service is not free.  We pay for that service by paying taxes.  Generally, fewer taxes means fewer rights.  By viewing taxes through this perspective, one adopts a counter natural rights language; a prevailing language espoused by self-appointed natural rights spokespeople such as Grover Norquist, who is famous for holding Republican representatives to never raise taxes.  In the natural rights language, taxes are castigated as being anti-rights.  They are a form of tyranny, despite the fact that the US has some of the lowest effective tax rates among developed nations.  While the language proposed in this posting, a more federated view, taxes take on the role of monetarily allowing the flourishing of rights among the different segments of the population, of the partnership.  Of course, the language does not promote an unbridled level of taxation, but it does support reasonable levels so as to protect and promote a level of rights that justly corresponds to the exchange between rights and allegiance.

So what is the result of not honoring King’s check?  What happens if allegiance is met with deficient protection and promotion of rights?  We have theft, if either the appropriate levels of rights or duties is not forthcoming, there is stealing.  If this stealing is pervasive, there is an immoral system and certain implications become real.  First, these notions of exchange and moral debt do not just appear among our social relations or within our conscious view of things.  Those functions are satisfied by institutions – the family, the schools, the churches, our businesses, our government – and so a community or nation depends on institutions to defend and promote the resulting supportive values related to the exchange.  Another implication of this exchange is that those who benefit most from it have more duties and that this heightened sense of duty is a moral claim.  It is so moral that we have codified in law as with a progressive taxes code.  To the extent that we promote laws that shield the more (most) benefited from rendering the higher rate of duty – as with implementation of a flat tax – such policy is immoral; it’s stealing.  Therefore, if those who benefit more accrue political power and use that power to avoid accompanying duties, they are engaging in immoral political action.

Of course, such language is speaking metaphorically; equally metaphorically as when one refers to taxes as a form of tyranny.  Speaking more objectively, one can have taxes so high that they are tyrannical, but one can also have such low taxes among favored or advantaged citizens that one can objectively describe the situation as stealing.  At least, that is how I judge the actions of some corporations that enjoy the protection of the US government while keeping enormous amounts of cash off-shore to avoid (?) taxes.  When the rates become so lopsided, one can legitimately ask: is there stealing going on?

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[1] Lakoff, G.  (2002).  Moral politics:  How liberals and conservatives think.  Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, pp. 55-56.

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.