Provocation

When I worked with children, it seemed that one of their favorite pastimes was provoking one another. It was a fairly straightforward game; a child would pick their target, and then try to rouse them to fear or anger, such that the target would throw a punch, or otherwise assault them, at which point the provocateur would run to the nearest staff member loudly claiming to be the victim of an unprovoked attack. Their persistence in this was remarkable, in light of the fact that the entire scheme tended to hinge on the idea that we, as staff, didn't know who made a habit of provoking their peers. But of course we knew. Children tend to forget that adults were children once, and no matter how clever they thought that they were being, it was only new staffers who ever fell for it.

As is often the case, it turns out that a number of people have carried the practice with them into adulthood. But it also turns out that something of a cottage industry has sprung up around accusing people of being clever and/or negligent provocateurs. Massachusetts State Representative and Republican candidate for the United States Senate Jeff Diehl has leveled the charge against Senator Elizabeth Warren in the wake of a $500 being placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. I'm surprised by the amount - one would think that it would be difficult to get someone to risk the federal pen for $500, especially given the difficulty of collecting (or even verifying that the offer is real) without being arrested.

Most of it strikes me as simple politics; making charges that one is unlikely to ever be called upon to prove as a form of direct negative campaigning. But there's also an element of motivated attribution to it all; the idea that people on the other side of a political divide have leaders who are both malicious and skilled at manipulating their slow-witted followers to violent criminal behavior without ever saying anything that they couldn't defend in a court of law. And in this, the charges and counter-charges have a tendency to serve all sides of a debate. State Representative Diehl can preach to the choir of his supporters about how much of a despicable villain Senator Warren is, and the Senator can do the same.

And perhaps this is how the political system we have perpetuates itself. By becoming a symbiosis of supposedly opposing forces, who despite their open disdain for one another, couldn't survive alone.

The End of Virtue

I was recently talking with an old acquaintance who expressed frustration that people no longer lived up the virtues that we were raised with as children. But most of those virtues were already obsolete by that point. It's remarkable that they had lasted that long.

The Value of Everything

I was on the periphery of a heated political discussion about wealth and income inequality, and, as one might expect, the bickering turned to executive salaries at large corporations, and whether or not such people "deserved" the size of their paychecks. Also, as one might expect, no one bothered to define their terms. As a neutral observer, it was clear to me that both people were using different understandings of how value is determined, but neither of the interlocutors seemed to understand that they were, in fact, not on the same page.

"Value" is a subjective term. You cannot take an object and use some sort of physics experiment to determine some ironclad value for it. And this means that different people can come to different determinations of an items value, without either of them necessarily being "wrong." And in the political argument I was lurking in, very different determinations of value were in play.

There is a way of understanding value that seeks to place everything within a consistent framework with fixed and/or bounded ratios, so that it becomes possible to make a statement such as "A is worth $10," or "B may be worth ten to fifteen, but not twenty times, C." In this sense. value is viewed, at least partially, as an objective value that allows for comparisons between things. On the other hand, there is a way of defining value simply in terms of what someone has paid for something, so if Alice pays $20 for X, then X is worth $20. Likewise, if Bob is willing to trade twenty-five of Y for Z, then Z is twenty-five times more valuable than Y. And even if we hold that those valuations are only valid for Alice and Bob, in that Carol would have paid $30 for X but only traded five of Y for Z, they still cannot be assailed as "wrong," provided that Alice and Bob freely chose what they were willing to give.

As far as I'm concerned, either understanding is equally valid, but a discussion of value works better if people at least understand that they may be talking about different things, and that was missing from the discussion I was watching unfold (and, to be sure, become increasingly acrimonious). What impressed me the most was that the participants, perhaps because they had become so emotionally invested in the debate, didn't seem to know that they were operating on two very different models on how to valuate things. Looking back on it, it shouldn't have stood out for me, because so many arguments are hamstrung by the same issue.

Perhaps, in order to make progress, American society needs to have a better understanding that not everyone understands the details of the world in the same way as themselves. Although one might make the point that if American society were prepared for that understanding, it wouldn't be in the place it's currently in.

Violin Elf

She was really good. I'm not really that hip to violin, but I really enjoyed listening to her play.

When In Rome

Some time back, I went down the Seattle Art Museum to see a "Roman Art From the Louvre" exhibit. I recall (mainly because I made a note of it) that it was fairly interesting; but personally, the military history buff in me was hoping for more legionnaires and gladiators - reliable information about equipment is hard to come by.

Part of the exhibit dealt with the empire's non-Citizens, foreigners, freemen and slaves. One statue of a slave was obviously African. Even from a distance, it had a cartoonish, minstrel-show sort of look about it; the facial features were exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. Below the neck, however, the youth's statue was clean and buff - the sort of physique that people today would (and usually have to) pay good money for.

In the description of the statue was a curious statement - something along the lines of "Not all Africans in Rome were slaves." Once I got past my initial reaction - which was "Well, duh," I wondered about that. Who had they felt the need to state something so obvious for? Who was the intended audience? I started formulating theories about what the curators meant to say to perhaps Whites, perhaps Blacks or perhaps others who might see this statue, and draw some sort of undesirable conclusion from it. What (and whose) racist message were they attempting to combat?

Or maybe it was just a simple statement designed to draw a distinction between Roman history and what we understand American history to have been. Because I have noticed a tendency for Americans to think that slavery everywhere was prosecuted in the same way that Southern slavery is often stereotyped - beatings were frequent and arbitrary, conditions were nearly universally wretched, there was no such thing as a stable family life and that it was mainly visited on outsiders. (In this, I suppose the Biblical Exodus story also plays a role.) And so I suppose that it may be helpful to point out that the Roman's didn't limit themselves to one place in the same way that Americans (mostly) did.

I suspect it's a flaw in the way that history is taught that America's "peculiar institution" doesn't come across as peculiarly American, such that we do have to point out the ways in which other cultures didn't prototype and/or emulate it. But, of course, it wouldn't be the only one.