A GOBBLING CONCERN

Here’s hoping everyone’s Thanksgiving was grand.  Really, isn’t Thanksgiving the best?  Family get-togethers (a joyful event for this blogger), a grand meal, no gift-giving (or more accurately, gift-buying) hassle, and even a parade (a spectacle this blogger attended as a child) marks the day.  What more can one ask for?  But now, it’s time to move on and, oh yes, prepare for the next holiday or two.

          And that next family-oriented day or days rely on economic conditions to be what one hopes for.  So, what better time to address the economy.  Of course, that’s a topic this civics-oriented blog looks at from time to time.  One writer this blogger depends on for this area of concern is William K. Tabb.[1]  The last posting citing Tabb is entitled “Are They Misdirected Moves?” and it appeared July 5, 2019.[2]  That posting ended with a foreshadowing that Tabb’s work would be revisited again and here is that next visit.

          Tabb points out that among the American electorate there seem to be two polar opinions concerning the role government plays in the economy.  One is that government meddling – or intrusion – can be best considered opportunities for disasters.  Government proves to be ineffective and surely incompetent.  The little good it might eke out is over-taken by the harm it produces.  Usually, that view is associated with conservative people and, in turn, with those citizens that identify themselves as Republicans.

          The others – the liberals or those associated with the Democratic Party – see market participants as being the “out-of-touch” or shortsighted people who engage in mindless herd behaviors.  They refer to the inevitable, resulting crises that spring up every so often causing serious harm not just to numbers of businesses, but to the lives of real people.  Of course, the most recent example was the 2008-09 financial crisis that turned into the Great Recession. 

They blame market believers for being too self-centered to realize macro forces that lead to the downturns.  Good times lead to over exuberance and over purchasing of investment assets – like stocks or real estate – often with borrowed money.  Result is the makings of bubbles which look like the ultimate solution to securing economic riches.  But bubbles burst.  Here’s Tabb’s description of the last crisis:

There is now a good deal of research that links rapid increase in credit creation in an economy with the likelihood of financial bubbles and busts.  When serious economic crises occur, government intervention on a significant scale is required, as [former FED Chairman] Greenspan was to acknowledge … This suggests the unenviable, but necessary, task of taking away the punch bowl when the party becomes too exuberant.[3]

Here’s a thought, Trump’s trade “war” with China is functioning as not currently taking away the bowl but inserting a leak.  And that leak might be discouraging the irrational exuberance alluded to above.  The closest indicator that might suggest a bubble in the stock market, for example, is or has been forming is stocks’ price to earnings ratio (p/e ratio) indicator.  In 2018 it was getting a bit high, but since then it has significantly dropped. 

Perhaps trade woes had something to do with that.  In any event, the economy presently seems strong without the usual concerning indicators – like inflation – causing much worry.[4]  This blogger is not aware of any significant concern for a forming bubble.  There is the concern among some over corporations borrowing too much money.  This seems to be encouraged by persisting low interest rates – as this blogger has asked before:  is this a bubble-like effect?

But this brings up an important distinction when considering economic issues and trends.  There are production issues and there are financing issues.  One refers to the production of wealth – hence, it being called production issues – and the other fuels production.  And leading Western economies, like the US, have become more centered on the financial end of the equation.  Tabb describes how that end has become dominant.

He writes:

Financialization has become the leading organizing logic of accumulation in Anglo-American-style economies and has had impacts elsewhere to a substantial degree.  In its shortening time horizons of production capital, it allows a redistribution of profits from the realm of production of actual goods and non-financial services to speculator profits and enlarges the sphere in which money is made from money.  Speculating on and manipulating the future value of financial assets implies consequences for citizens.  It increases uncertainty and risk with regard to decisions about financing consumer purchases, homes, education, retirement, and other quality-of-life decisions.[5]

And with those sobering thoughts, this blogger hopes the reader’s holiday goes on unperturbed.

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[1] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012).

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Are They Misdirected Moves?”, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, July 5, 2019, accessed November 28, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2019/07/are-they-misdirected-moves.html .

[3] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, 6 (Kindle edition).

[4] One should not make investment decisions based on what a blogger might opine – especially when the blogger writes about civics education issues.

[5] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, 10-11 (Kindle edition).

CONTACT, CONTACT

One instructional program on TV is PBS’s show called NOVA.  This writer can’t claim to be a regular watcher – to his detriment – but from time to time he happens upon one of their broadcasts that catches his interest.  This past week, one did; that episode is entitled “The Violence Paradox.”[1]  One element of the show reminded this blogger of the work of a prominent psychologist, Gordon Allport, and his famous book, The Nature of Prejudice. 

More specifically, the program, while not mentioning Allport or his work (at least this blogger does not recall it does), it did mention a theory that Allport’s work help formulate.  That theory is contact theory.  It was first introduced by government agents as a reaction to what promised to be a violent development; i.e., the desegregation of the armed forces during the Truman administration. 

The NOVA program set out not only to provide insight into the causes of violence, but how knowledge about violence has led to certain remedial programs and strategies.  It points out that overall levels of recorded violence have decreased.  This being the case during a time when the ability of humans to kill each other has increased – or “exploded” – with the technologies of weaponry such as the killing efficiency handheld arms and that of bombs, including nuclear weapons.  In that, the titled paradox exists.

          What this downward trend in actual violence and their related statistics – such as relating to homicides (a decrease of over 90%) – indicate, humans are doing somethings right.  What one of the program’s guest social scientists, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, urges:  people should find out what that is. 

It turns out that not all of that welcomed development emerges from what humans are doing; some have to do with physical evolutionary factors at work.  But for the sake of this posting, this blogger will skip that part of the story and encourage the reader to look up the program online.  What this blog highlights are those human efforts that relate to federation theory.

And that connection draws one back to contact theory.  Simply stated, contact theory postulates that if people of different groups intermingle – it helps if that occurs over common interests or in seeking common goals – people get to know one another.  Once they do, as in the military, then a lot of the baseless fears or misconceptions attached to the others can first be questioned and then mostly dismissed.  But that conclusion gets ahead of the story a bit. 

The first insight derived from applying contact theory is the realization that violence is contagious.  It can be contagious as incidences first might occur in isolation, but they happen in close proximity.  As people perceive these events, some are predisposed to seeing it as part of living.  Or it can be contagious from victimization of prior violence – one wants revenge for violence being inflicted on a relative, a friend, or a fellow gang member.  This naturally leads to a cycle of violence.

Either way, soon an epidemic of violence can erupt.  These phenomena are behavior patterns and are appropriate for social scientific analysis.  Contact theory was first developed in a purely scientific vein – trying to find out what is involved both psychologically and sociologically with outbreaks of violence.  But when social agents – police, social workers, and even educators – want to stem the incidence of violence, this notion of contagion can be helpful and applied to social settings where one sees or seriously suspects that such a contagion is possible.

Some urban areas have organized neighborhood efforts – one national group so organized to assist such efforts is Cure Violence International – that once a number of violent events are noted, street agents go out and start talking to neighborhood resident and seek out what is happening on the streets.  They proactively insert themselves when they see or are informed of a problem or potential problem brewing. 

The effort then has these street agents bringing the potential or actual belligerents to talk to each other.  In this, these agents are trained to implement what contact theory identifies what should be done.  Initially, people might not listen to each other.  They yell their grievance and express how they perceive that the other is responsible for the brouhaha.  They also might communicate they are not going to take it anymore.

 The neutral “peace” worker, though, does listen and tries to verbalize each side’s position in perhaps less angry or antagonistic language.  He/she evaluates how the angry people are behaving – pointing out, for example, that they are not listening to what the other is saying – and works through with appropriate words to get the two parties to at least agree that each is a person. 

Like him/herself, that other person only wants not to be bothered by whatever the concern is and to be respected.  Can’t the other agree that this can be possible for each?  Most often than not, it works out and the belligerents end up shaking hands.  This account oversimplifies the process, but in the main that is what the street agent tries to accomplish.

With significant numbers of these workers on the streets, the number of violent results has decreased in highly volatile, large urban areas.  The worker has worked at establishing a point of contact between the two he/she has identified as the potential violence inflict-or or violence victim.  But contact can be accomplished through various venues. 

The PBS program goes on to hypothesize that one historical development that helped masses of people “contacting” others in an imaginary way, was the expansion of literacy and the availability of the written word.  Therefore, the invention of the printing press and the eventual distribution of written material helped people realize how similar they were to others and encouraged an emotional disposition to feel empathy for others they did not know personally.  The written material allowed them to learn of other peoples’ challenges.

Another study looked at antagonism or lack of understanding between groups that historically have proven to be prone to a great deal of violence.  That would be between religious groups.  When one thinks today of religious violence, one tends to think of the violence in the Islamic lands.  There are others, for example, the violence in recent decades between Muslims and Hindus that characterizes the conflicts between Pakistan and India.  But the problems between the Shiites and Sunni Islamic sects attract most people’s attention today. 

Hidden can be the challenges that Christians face in those areas.  In Iraq an experiment put some to the ideas associated with contact theory to the test.  There, through an effort to mix Christians and Muslims together in soccer teams were tried to see if that contact led to more cordial and interactive results.  To a limited extent it did; perhaps if the experiment continues the effect can not only increase but also become more established.

The PBS show speaks of other developments.  For example, the expanding view of rights seems to have had quite an effect especially if rights are institutionalized.  Here, the US Bill of Rights and the subsequent UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights have had their effects globally to upgrade the general sense as to the importance of life and the liberty necessary to make life meaningful.

This blogger also thinks something that has affected humans’ view about violence and death resulting from violence has to do with the commonality of death.  This possible factor is not derived from contact theory, but this blogger feels it is worth considering.  It seems reasonable that if a people experience a regular dose of death among those who are about them, the perceived value of life would be affected. 

Killing someone doesn’t seem to have the same degree of tragedy generally if the victim stands a good chance of dying shortly from some disease or accident that characterized life in the years prior to modern medicine.  This blogger’s wife tells a family story of how a great uncle in the earlier years of the twentieth century died of a horse biting him on the cheek.  The uncle contracted tetanus – formerly known as lockjaw – and suffered his fate.  Events like that was fairly common.

In any event, the federalist angle to this review of violence and how to avoid it relate to federation theory’s bias toward encouraging contact.  This is augmented with the version of that construct this blog has called liberated federalism.  That version disavows parochial biases, but instead not only tolerates plurality, but encourages it.  Schools, through their curricular choices particularly with civics instruction, can play a very important role in promoting the lessons of contact theory if federation theory guides their curricular choices.

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[1] “The Violence Paradox,” S46/Ep22, NOVA, PBS, broadcast November 20, 2019, accessed November 24, 2019, https://www.thirteen.org/programs/nova/the-violence-paradox-gl0tal/ .

ONE ON ONE RESPECT

One element of federation theory – a political construct this blog has promoted as a guide in formulating a civics curriculum – is the goal to achieve a federated citizenry – hence the name of the construct.  By wishing this characteristic on a populous, one is aiming at encouraging a sense among a people that they view each other as partners.  In turn, that reflects an ideal and that ideal holds that if an advantage befalls one citizens, it befalls all of them.  And the same can be said of disadvantages.

          Before one can approach such an ideal realistically, a lot must be in place – one does not intelligently just think that all his/her fellow citizens’ interests, their honesty, and their general aims are honorable enough and fall in line to reasonably allow such a feeling of federation to bloom.  But that does not preclude that one can hold such a view as a worthy goal worthy of one working toward approaching; all this while knowing that complete achievement, if not impossible, is very difficult.

          With this general sense or goal, to meaningfully influence a polity, those who seek it have several areas to address but none more important than how citizens interact.  This is a wide field of human behavior and bits of information concerning it can be found in analyzing many sorts of interactions between and among a nation’s populous – both within the citizenry and among the nation’s resident population.

          One area where such information can be “culled” would be how people behave in challenging settings such as when they interact with their doctors.  Ostensibly, that relationship can and should be a cooperative one.  Tort law recognizes that relationship as doctors having legal responsibilities toward their patients and some call this relationship an example of a fiduciary duty. 

And, to wit, there is a great deal of case law in which the main topic is either alleged or proven are in cases of negligence charged against doctors.  One can judge such incidences – as these tort cases – as falling woefully short of the ideal stated above in which federated relationships are formed.

          In this area, the writer, Malcolm Gladwell,[1] shares interesting and relevant information. On the surface, this blogger assumed that a lawsuit involving medical practice reflects poor doctoring or, at least, that a patient perceives that poor doctoring occurred in his/her treatment.  Gladwell disabuses his readers of such a notion in its purer version.

          It turns out that malpractice is not the main factor in determining whether a lawsuit results from a treatment.  As a matter of fact, poor treatment has little to do with it.  And that fact is what makes this insight relevant to the concern of this posting; i.e., how a people advance toward being federated.  Bottom line, it turns out, it is those doctors who are ranked as highly skilled who are more apt to be sued than lower skilled ones.  Actually, many, if not most, poor physicians never see the inside of a courtroom as a defendant in a tort action.

          Yes, a patient who goes to court feels or actually has suffered poor medical service which has resulted in harm, but, as Gladwell claims, something else is involved.  And that something has to do with the personal interaction between a doctor and his/her patient.  Citing the work of Wendy Levinson, one can find that how a patient and doctor speak to each other is a better predictor of whether such servicing will lead to legal action than the doctoring that has taken place.

          For example, according to Levinson, on average, “un-sued” doctors – in this case surgeons – would talk to their patients for three more minutes than surgeons who got sued.  That difference is reported as being 18.3 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes.  But what seems more important is the tenor of the conversations.

           Psychologist Nalini Ambady listened to the tapes of conversations produced by Levinson and with sophisticated analysis, judged whether the conversations could be seen as having “warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness …”[2]  That psychologist concluded, from the analysis she conducted of the taped conversations, that she could accurately determine which surgeons were going to be sued and which were not.  Who were the unfortunate ones?

          They were the surgeons that, surprisingly, sounded dominant.  One tends, this blogger believes, to associate dominance with expertise, something, one suspects, is a good thing when it comes to surgery.  But it turns out that more important is a tone of concern that a surgeon projects.  In turn, a patient reads certain qualities into how the surgeon converses.  Most important – more important than expertise – is respect and caring which is communicated by the softer tone. 

When things go bad, it seems patients are more apt to hold back on legal action if they feel the medical treatment was conducted with respect and this blogger feels that says something in how people get to feel federated with other people.  If one is apt to place such importance on respect and perceived caring in terms of medical services – getting operated no less – then how important is it in everyday interactions?  The obvious answer is very. 

Gladwell writes:  “It isn’t necessary, then, to know much about how a surgeon operates in order to know his[/her] likelihood to being sued.  What you need to know is the relationship between that doctor and his patients.”[3]  One can paraphrase this conclusion to make a broader point.  It isn’t necessary, then, to know much about how a citizen reflects on his/her citizenry in order to know his/her likelihood to being federated.  What one needs to know is the relationship among his/her fellow citizens.  Is it based on caring and respect?  If so, federation is possible.

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[1] Malcolm Gladwell, Blink:  The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York, NY:  Bay Back Books, 2005).

[2] Ibid., 42.

[3] Ibid., 41.

A LACK OF PRODUCTIVE CONCERN

This blog has often made the claim that since the years following World War II, this nation has shifted from holding federalism – as a mental construct describing and explaining its governance and politics – as the dominant construct in favor of the natural rights construct.  Its writer has hinted at evidence through many postings that support this claim.  Most of that evidence has been anecdotal. 

In the political science literature, this writer is not aware of reductionist studies – studies that have delineated relevant variables in independent/dependent hypothetical formats which are then tested – concerning this claim.  He has cited the work of respected theoretical scholars that report on the role federalism has played in American politics – e.g., Daniel J. Elazar.  Their work, in turn, is based on empirical as well as historical studies. 

But despite this state, this blog writer feels he can cite the work of social scientists, respected social commentators, and respected journalists when their work seems to support or refute this claim.  He believes the journalist, Sam Quinones, provides, in his book reviewing the explanatory elements of the opioid crisis,[1] evidence that seem to indicate that the social/political landscape of the US has gone through serious transformation in the history of this nation since World War II.

This posting limits its commentary to Quinones’ introduction to his review of what he found to be the current conditions in the US.  What seems to have particularly changed in America is the segments of the population that is being victimized by illicit use of drugs.  This blogger remembers when he was young, what constituted the nation’s drug problem.  During the fifties, the problem was an urban one and, in terms of heroin, was limited to jazz musicians.

Since then, of course, a lot has happened.  In terms of drugs, the sixties saw an upshot of drug taking – mostly marijuana and psychedelics – among college students.  Then there were soldiers coming home from Vietnam with heroin addictions – the drug was easily obtained in that country.  Later, there was the popularity of cocaine and crack.  But all of that has, in the US, been by-passed in terms of the numbers of users and in terms of the extent of health issues including deaths resulting from the use of opioids.

Today, that class of drugs accounts for more deaths than car accidents which was the major cause of accidental deaths for decades.  Easily, one can see how Quinones judges this more current scourge of opioids – in the form of pain killers and heroin – as the worse one this nation has ever experienced.  And yet, until recently and still to a certain extent, this tragedy has been relatively invisible.  And that not only refers to its rate of incidence, but also in terms of its victims – knowledge of who and where they are.

It is true that the incidence of opioid consumption seems to be concentrated in certain areas, but these areas of numerous and one can consider this plague a truly national one.  Some of the areas where kids are dying include the Rust Belt of Ohio, the Bible Belt of Tennessee, and areas of Southern California including Mission Viejo and Simi Valley. 

Cities hit by this drug epidemic vary; they include Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, and Albuquerque.  Clustered cases can be found in northwestern states, southern states, and mid-western states – Oregon, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Alabama.  And in these areas, there are numerous deaths, but also, for each death, there are hundreds of addicts.

That’s an idea of the where; here’s the who:

Kids got hooked in college and died there.  Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia.  But many more were from the U.S. middle class.  They lived in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.  They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners and bankers.

          And almost every one was white.[2]

          And what is the connection of this tragedy to the claim that this nation has drifted from federalist thinking?  A federalist based political culture might not have totally avoided the growth of this epidemic.  During years in which federalism was dominant, the nation suffered from an alcohol epidemic.  No, the number of deaths attributed to that earlier problem does not compare, but the nation’s experiment with Prohibition was not initiated without cause. 

But that problem was faced and known among the general population – even Tocqueville wrote of local efforts to address it back in the 1830s.  He wrote:  “Societies are formed which regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils under which the State labours, and which solemnly bind themselves to give a constant example of temperance.”[3]  Under a nation with a federalist outlook, such a problem would not be allowed to hide.

Yes, of late, one can find news items concerning the opioid crisis.  Most of them have to do with the legal liabilities facing drug companies that aggressively marketed these opioid products.  Much rarer are stories of local communities facing the problem and actively combatting it – at least on the national news broadcasts.  In that demonstrable apathy, one finds a significant negative effect that the shift away from federalism represents.  This social problem needs, if not demands, a more communal and collaborative approach to face its challenges, challenges that include treatment, law enforcement, counseling, and moral support.

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[1] Sam Quinones, Dreamland:  The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York, NY:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

[2] Ibid., 7 (Kindle edition).

[3] Alexi de Tocqueville, “Political Structure of Democracy,” in Alexis de Tocqueville:  On Democracy, Revolution, and Society, eds. John Stone and Stephen Mennell (Chicago, IL:  Chicago University Press, 1980/1835), 78-101, 78-79.

ENTRAPPING BIASES

Laszlo Mero[1] has been cited before in this blog – see the successive posts, “In for a Pound,” March 9, 2018, and “The Reluctance to Admit a Mistake,” March 13, 2018.  That writer brings to his readers an interesting treatment describing how people conduct moral calculations by using the mathematical model, game theory.  In short, utilizing the idea of a dollar auction, he provides a run down on how moral, logical people can find themselves stuck in the consequences of illogical decisions and even leading them to commit immoral behaviors.

Here, in a very shortened form is the dollar auction format:  The game is one in which a dollar is put up for auction with the proviso that while the top bid wins the dollar, the second highest bidder also must also pay his/her bid.  Experience by the developer of the game has claimed he has auctioned off dollars, on average, for $3.20.

          The use of the dollar auction illustrates how one, in taking advantage of an opportunity to profit, lands up being trapped.  That is, he/she finds that the opportunity is not an opportunity at all but a situation in which the person, in order not to lose initial investments or to save face or to avoid communicating weakness, will continue on a course of action costing more and more as the experience unfolds. 

On average, while the dollar sold for $3.20, what did the next highest bidder loose?  Say $3.15, not to mention the lose of face for being considered stupid for losing that amount on the hopes of earning a dollar?  The rational choice is not to play in the first place.

Mero cites the long-lasting war in Vietnam as being a case where the Johnson administration found themselves in a dollar auction style situation.  That administration feared, after initially anticipating a winning result from the conflict, all the above negative consequences befalling them if it withdrew from Vietnam.  Such a withdrawal would equate to the US finding itself in a more weakened position in the world. 

Of course, that example is an extreme one.  But the principle can be applied to a dysfunctional marriage, an unprofitable business arrangement, or an ill-advised investment.  Any one of these can befall anyone leading a mostly private life in just about any country around the world; that is, these are common enough as most people will be confronted by a dollar auction type situation from time to time.

          Here’s another image Mero shares.  Two animals square off.  They are both after the same mate.  They don’t fight; they just stare at each other making antagonistic noises and projecting hostile postures – that is, they pose.  What’s the calculation of each?  The animal wants the mate but there are other wants or needs involved. 

Securing that day’s nourishment is one.  How long should this standoff continue keeping each from finding and securing that next meal?  The animals could fight but success is not assured, and injury could prove fatal or incapacitating one or the other animal.  What to do?  One of them finally succumbs and leaves the field and the prize goes to the other.

At an elementary level, that point is reached when the costs – actual or potential – outweigh the potential reward.  This resembles in very real ways the dollar auction.  Mero writes:  “The animal thereby determines how much time it can afford to spend on posing.  It is not worth posing for a longer time; the animal is not a human being – who can afford such irrationality.  (Why is it that we humans can afford such irrationality? …)[2]

          Message:  animals, at least some of them, behave more rationally than humans.  Through whatever calculating they do; they seem to pay a cost that is equal to the value of the item sought.  But for humans, the potential, given their ability to reason, if utilized, can be more profitable than what seems to be the case when they play or find themselves in dollar auction type situations.

At this point, this writer feels it is profitable to consider an African proverb.  That is, “If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”[3]  How does that relate to the dysfunctions associated with the dollar auction situations?  It relates because it offers a contextual platform by which people would more readily choose rational choices.  Here Mero explains this line of reasoning:

We have the capacity to agree without fighting, and where we cannot bargain, we can develop internal ethical principles that serve the good of the community better than brute force.  Sometimes we really do this.  At other times, however – as shown by the dollar auction – we find ourselves paying unrealistically high prices.  It is as if the price of the ability to behave as ethical beings were the loss of our animal rationality.[4]

To this blogger’s sense of what is involved, he suspects that a nation more inclined to see social interactions as competition as opposed to being communal, will favor viewing such interactions as zero-sum situations.  If one wins, the other loses.  On the other hand, it will shy away from win-win situations, usually because win-win tend to accrue lower profits for each participant.  Another saying comes to mind:  “win big or go home.”  The allure of higher profits, even if unlikely, is palatable.

A nation that holds a natural rights view predominantly will tend to choose zero-sum options.  It will seek competitive arrangements over communal ones.  A nation that holds federalist values predominantly will tend to choose win-win options; that is, communal arrangements. 

The natural rights view promises to lead people, despite initially being able to utilize rational choices, becoming subject to the irrational, and eventual developments styled by or highlighted by the dollar auction.  Yes, this account in this posting oversimplifies the various opportunities and challenges one encounters in normal interactions with others.  It ignores probabilities, for example. 

But at its core, this game theory view can help one gain insights over various situations people confront and helps explain how people can get trapped by some of them.  Afterall, life is complicated and nuanced, and one should probably give more thought before engaging in what might seem harmless or so amenable to current emotional infatuations.

This blogger offers this relationship as a source by which related questioning can be devised in civics/social studies classrooms and in everyday reflections over pending or past decisions involving social costs.  So, for example, in studying the Vietnam War, one can ask:  how much did that tragedy reflect the decisions of a society following a path of natural rights biases?

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[1] Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations:  Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty (Springer-Verlag, NY:  Copernicus, 1998).

[2] Ibid., 11.  A side question one can ask on this type of competition among animals:  how does it affect the evolution of the various species?

[3] Quoted in Leslie R. Crutchfield, How Change Happens:  Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t (Hoboken, NJ:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2018), 116 (Kindle edition).

[4] Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations:  Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty, 14.

NATURALLY ANTI-SOCIAL?

The last posting of this blog got into the development of a fetus during gestation.  This posting picks up the idea of development, but after birth.  That posting was concerned with abortion rights, this one is about something else.  It is concerned with the question:  what determines behavior, nature or nurture?  This last question has been the topic of many a discussion or argument.  This posting relies on the reporting of a conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg.[1]  This blogger finds Goldberg’s take on this matter intriguing.

          Today, the consensus has discredited John Locke’s view that humans are born with a blank slate.  According to Locke, all behaviors, thinking, and even feelings are/were the product of experiences a person, beginning as an infant, experiences.  Those experiences have their effect and either at a conscious or subconscious level they make their mark within one’s thinking.  How one behaves, thinks, and feels reflects the cumulative effect of those experiences.

          Goldberg reports that this view has been discarded by all serious students of human psychology.  Instead, he points out that the consensus is that people through their biology are born with certain internal messaging and dispositions.  He analogizes this by using the image of an app.  A lot of what people encounter can be congruent with the content of that app or it can challenge what the app informs or leads the person to believe or feel.  So, the question becomes:  can a person override what the app leads people to believe or feel?

          While the app can’t be replaced, add-ons can be acquired.  That is, nurture – e.g., how a person is brought up by his/her parents or guardians – can affect the disposition of a person and that can lead to beliefs and feelings that would not be believed or felt without those experiences.  Having made that concession, though, there are limits.  Some built-in programming cannot be replaced.  It might be tweaked, softened, redirected, but it cannot be dismissed or dashed by that parenting or what other “learning” efforts provide.

The content of the app is so enmeshed in what makes people human.  So, what are the attributes of a person’s psychic app?  One, Goldberg reports, is that babies are preprogrammed to have a moral sense.  Six-month-old babies already bestow a character trait on puppets that are shown to be helpful or detrimental to another puppet trying to accomplish a simple task.  They ascribe to those puppets who are helpful as “nice” and those who hamper the other puppet as “mean.”  They further indicate they prefer the nice puppet.

          This finding is further supported by other studies that indicate a person is born with a basic sense to being empathetic, altruistic, cooperative, and other moral predilections.  But how those initial biases develop depends on the experiences the baby and then child encounters. One category of such experiences can be attributed to the culture in which a baby finds him/herself during those early months and years.

          Another programmed indication is shown early on; a baby demonstrates preferences in the language he/she primarily hears – even before he/she knows how to speak or understand what is being said.  That is, he/she is naturally drawn to pick up the sound of the prevailing language minutes after being born.  That is, the fetus, in the womb, already seems to “hear” and “appreciate” the rhythm and pace of the language being spoken by his/her mother and those people with whom she converses.

          In addition to voices and language, the infant demonstrates intense interest in facial appearances.  Surely, being able to identify mother and other relatives can be, under certain dangerous situations, lifesaving.  This sensitivity is more pronounced than the child’s ability to verbalize any differences he/she perceives.  What seems to strongly affect these abilities is familiarity with images that are similar.  “Who out there is like me and my mother and my father,” etc. seems to be important.

          And for Goldberg’s concern, this element of the app – the bias for unity and familiarity – seems central.  Why?  Because, in Goldberg’s conservative bent, it helps bolster conservative assumptions.  It does this in more than one way.  For one, it bolsters the unifying role markets play in a world where people are naturally disposed to avoid or otherwise shun those who are different – the Other. 

Yes, one can be naturally suspicious of unfamiliar, dissimilar people, but one wants to sell or lease him/her something like labor, a car, a service, etc.  A market – by its role in allowing a people to make a living – encourages people to come together and deal with each other despite their natural aversions to the “Other” – those who are different.

But there is another function conservatives seem to accept.  Goldberg writes:

Children and adults are constantly told that one needs to be taught to hate.  This is laudable nonsense.  We are, in a very real sense, born to hate every bit as much as we are born to love.  The task of parents, schools, society, and civilization isn’t to teach us not to hate any more than it is to teach us not to love.  The role of all of these institutions is to teach what we should or should not hate.[2]

He further states that until recently racism has been an accepted belief bias.  It was not considered as evil, but natural.  Goldberg uses this bit of evidence to support the notion that it is natural – not desired – and that one needs to count on society – culture, laws, taught notions of evil – to instill a more prudent view of race – one that proves to be more conducive to societal advancement.  That is, racism is bad and counterproductive to the general good.

          He also points out that all political ideologies – humans seem to naturally devise these belief systems – have their Others.  That goes for capitalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, and even contemporary liberalism – this last group disparages evangelical Christians.  They all hate someone or someone-s to some degree.

          This writer finds Goldberg to offer a set of ideas that a federalist needs to think about seriously.  If federalism is based on humans being able to come together to form a polity under a set of values that support community, collaboration, equality, and even liberty, then he/she cannot ignore any truths, if any, Goldberg points out. 

To begin with, given what Goldberg argues, one can see how early versions of federalism were parochial.  This blog has claimed that that was the case all the way back to the nation’s colonial past.  Truly, while America held federalism as dominant, one can readily see how parochial it was.  And that’s despite the onslaught of varied ethnicities that found their way to American shores.  It further explains slavery, mistreatment of the latest immigrant group, and the inhuman treatment of the indigenous peoples.

          While this treatment of the Other still plagues current American politics and social relations, at least there now exists a language that more honestly reflects those realities.  The polity has enacted meaningful policies to address those biases, but much needs to be done.  A civics program guided by a liberated federalism would be immensely helpful.  But, if one can accept Goldberg’s claims about the Other, such instruction needs consider what those claims indicate.

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[1] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

[2] Ibid., 24 (Kindle edition).