Choices

This means monitoring Instagram constantly, identifying those who are close to the edge and alerting the police and ambulance services. She admits to having sleepless nights. She knows that being so distracted by her phone can anger her family and friends, but she worries that without her vigilance, someone might die.

"It goes bad, because it has done before," she says.
The woman who tracks 'dark' Instagram accounts

Instagram, I must admit, lies outside of my expertise. I came late to the personal social media game, and left it when Google+ was closed to the public earlier this year. But I'm also much older than Ingebjørg Blindheim, the young woman the story opens with. The crowd that I connected with had worked through their issues some time back. And so the story, as told by the BBC was something that seemed reasonable, but was completely new to me.

As I read it, I wondered what the world would be like, if we were all as vigilant about other people as Ms. Blindheim is. I have difficulty imagining it, mainly because I can't work out how people would support themselves if they felt the need to spend their waking hours attempting to keep tabs on strangers. Of course, I suspect that I'm over-thinking it. Perhaps, were we all in the habit of looking out for the health and well being of those around us, we wouldn't need to put all that much time into it. Ms. Blindheim presents as having shouldered the burden of a lonely vigil. It would be lighter if it were more broadly shared. But, of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of understanding that I'm just as capable of sharing that burden as anyone else. And so I have to answer the question, "What's it worth to me?"

I don't recall when I first had the thought, but one day it occurred to me that for all that people will argue that human life is priceless, in practice, a life, any life, is worth precisely what others are willing to pay to preserve it. Nothing more, nothing less. It's unromantic, and it sets aside the notion that there is some great purpose to existing, but it lines up with what we often see in the world around us.

So, I find myself asking, what is it about Ms. Blindheim that the lives she looks after are worth so much more to her than they are to me, or to other people? One can point to an empathy born of shared suffering, as Ms. Blindheim once suffered from an eating disorder herself, but that seems empty. After all, there are plenty of people who survived eating disorders and don't feel the same drive to protect others from the call to self-harm. There seems to be an element of choice involved.

And I think that when we ask why people make the choices that they make, we wind up reducing our understanding of their volition. We choose the things we choose because we choose them seems circular and unsatisfying, but it leaves room for people to make choices without needing to tie those choices to other factors. And it leaves room for us to be more free to choose.

Old Volumes

Back in the day, Slate Magazine had a feature called "The Book Club." A small group of notable writers would read a book, and then discuss it in a series of letters to the other members of the group. In 2005, Tyler Cowan and Alan Wolfe discussed Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. I was wandering around the Web, and stumbled across their correspondence. I'm pretty sure I'd read it before. Despite the elapsed time, some of it sounded familiar.

The basic premise behind Bait and Switch is the difficulty of finding white-collar work, and to make her point, Barbara Ehrenreich poses as a job-seeker. Mr. Cowan opens with what he sees as the primary problem with Ms. Ehrenreich's experiment; apart from a few people who have agreed to be bogus references for her, she has no network.

She had no church, no family, and no reliance on friends for financial or even moral aid. It is no wonder she found life so tough and capitalism so demoralizing.

Fourteen years on, however, I wonder if more people are in that situation than might have been the case back in the day. But that's somewhat beside the point. In the third installment of the back-and-forth, Mr. Cowan says the following:

It is unfair that a 56-year-old is now expected to compete in a world for which he was never prepared. But we ought to be realistic. These transitional costs are borne by a class that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen.
Tyler Cowen "Why It’s Harder for White-Collar Workers To Find Jobs"

The conflation between an unprepared 56-year-old worker, and the greater class of people to which he belongs has always been baffling to me. Were you to apply the same logic to the Camp Fire in California, like so: "It is unfair that the residents of Butte County had their homes and/or livelihoods wiped out in a wildfire. But we ought to be realistic. This disaster was borne by a state that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen," you'd be tarred and feathered in the streets for being a callous bastard. And as Mr. Wolfe points out: “Calling them members of a class that is 'the richest and freest human history has seen' does not help them deal with their anger, hopelessness, and dismal prospects for the future.”

The fact that many white-collar workers in this country are (arguably) not required to really compete for jobs is not a sufficient reason to treat those who are required to compete, but unable to do so, as unimportant. Being competent at a line of work, while necessary, is no longer sufficient to remain employed, and it's way past time that we stopped thinking that way. We're overdue for teaching a greater competitiveness in the overall job market (not just a single profession).

Obviously, for some people, this new mode of looking at the world will come too late. They're going to wind up largely unemployable, given the market and the other workers who compete with them for the same limited pool of suitable jobs. But I would submit that it's actually less callous to acknowledge that they're screwed, yet we aren't going to aid them, than to pretend that the affluence of their peers renders them above needing aid.

I suppose that one could say that capitalism is best played as a team sport. People's faith (or civic) communities, families and friends should be stepping up to be the backstop that prevents them from losing hope that modern capitalism will work out for them. But I'm not sure that's really an answer, as it simply presumes that the general public should be sharing their limited resources. It's true that much of the pain that the once-affluent (and now-unemployed) are feeling is actually a benefit to people around the world, who are now less poverty-stricken, because they have the opportunity for the work that was taken from their first/second world peers. Mr. Cowan was correct when he noted that "economic justice is being more widely spread, not eroded." But this, I think, is one of the problems that many people have with concepts of economic justice; poverty simply being more widely spread, rather than eroded. Of course, it may be better to be unemployed in the United States than in Niger, but without ready access to the subsistence forms of living that many third-world citizens have grown up with, the end state may be more severe. While it makes sense that it's more just to have an equal percentage of out-of-work people in the United States as it does in Niger, one wonders what Americans would see in this to recommend it, especially given that the difference in salaries between the two nations is likely to simply be taken as increased profit.

As an aside, Mr. Cowan also advocated "lowering the corporate income tax as a means of encouraging white-collar re-employment." It's a standard free-market solution, but he'd already acknowledged that: "[A]lthough the U.S. economic recovery appears robust, labor markets still show signs of slack. Larger-than-expected numbers of workers have stopped looking for work. Wages are flat even though measured unemployment is falling. Anecdotal evidence does not suggest a rush to hire labor. Something is plaguing labor markets, but we do not know what." Why would lower taxes trigger a rush to hire labor? If there isn't enough demand for goods and services that more labor is needed, lower taxes are simply going to go straight into the pockets of investors in one way or another. And why propose a solution of spending via the tax code, when one doesn't know what the problem is?

Aggregate gains are cold comfort to the person whose individual status is eroded or destroyed. But when individuals benefit without a corresponding decrease in someone else's standards of living, the aggregate benefits by definition. This points to a potential change in how to look at things.

P.S.: There are four letters total in the series, if you'd like to read it. One. Two. Three. Four.

Lowered

In The Atlantic, Megan Garber has an article on what she sees as the death of apologies from public figures. I'm not sure that I agree with her premises.

"There was a time" she notes, "In American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength—a way not only to own up to one’s missteps, but also to do that classic work of crisis management: control the narrative." And it's worth noting that when Ms. Garber quotes Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and (George W.) Bush to back this up, all of them took or acknowledged responsibility. But none of them apologized, in the sense that their statements "clearly admitted wrongdoing." And this leaves aside the fact that the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra and Hurricane Katrina were not personal acts on the parts of the Presidents. Rather, the problem arose with failed government action. And this sets them apart from Louis C.K. and President Trump, whose actions, as noted in the article (Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct and President Trump's mocking a supporter he'd mistaken for a critic), were personal. Taking responsibility for the poor performance and/or missteps of an organization that one is in charge of is not the same as apologizing for a personal act of wrongdoing. And so this leaves us without the apples-to-apples comparison that would allow us (at least within the context of the article) to evaluate whether those perceived as powerful had been more forthcoming with mea culpas in the past.

In any event, the reasoning is that many public figures today operate within a relatively recent paradigm one "in which the true sign of power is not responsibility but impunity." Personally, I would argue that impunity is always a true sign of power, or at least significant power, although it may be more accurate to say that it is impunity that grants power in the first place. This is another reason why I am dubious that there was a culture of apologies at the top in earlier years.

By way of explanation of what may have changed, Ms. Garber notes: "And when humility gets confused with humiliation, defiance becomes a point of pride." This strikes me as somewhat akin to saying: "When carmine is confused for scarlet." Humility and humiliation are not terribly different from one another. Both words, unsurprisingly, have their origins in the Latin humilis, or "low." The difference between humility and humiliation is not in the end state, but how it is arrived at: whether it is one's own choice or imposed from without. It's like another derivative of humilis, "humble." "To be humble" is a different thing than "to be humbled," although again, the end state is the same.

In this, the idea that apology and humility were once seen as forms of strength represents a certain contradiction, but an explanatory one. Offering to lower oneself is often seen as magnanimous, but that doesn't mean that people are actually taken up on it. If we presume that Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Bush were offering genuine acts of contrition, then we must also note that it really went no further than the offer. While President Kennedy was assassinated, this didn't seem to be a direct reaction to the Bay of Pigs incident. President Reagan remained popular enough that George H. W. Bush was able to succeed him in the White House and President George W. Bush's tenure was marred by the "Great Recession" rather than the Hurricane Katrina response.

At one point, Mr. Garber quotes psychologist Harriet Lerner thusly: “For some men, the very act of apologizing, of simply saying ‘I was wrong, I made a mistake, I’m sorry,’ may feel unmanly, uncomfortable, if not intolerable.” And here I think is the important piece: The impunity that gives power also means that people who have it, generally men, don't have to lower themselves, nor suffer themselves to be lowered by others. And I think that it's worth noting that for many people, both humility and humiliation are undesirable in their leaders. Given this, it seems unlikely that the pattern that Ms. Garber sees will go away any time soon. There isn't enough benefit in being low that it's a universally rational choice.

Unwhite

One of the most glaring holes in the logic of current “authentic” black thought is that one is to revile the old one-drop rule as racist, and yet to tar as a self-hating elitist the person who is of only partially African genetic ancestry who declines to classify themselves as “black.”
John McWhorter

I’ve read this statement over and over, and I'm not sure that the logic is as flawed as Mr. McWhorter makes it out to be. From where I stand it’s simple; Whites are to consider those of mixed-race one of them, but those of mixed race are to reject them. Maybe in that sense, it’s as straightforward as demanding that everyone play a part in people wanting something they can’t have.

In this, perhaps, it’s designed to invert what Martin Heidegger called “the dictatorship of the They.” If “authentic” Black people resented aspiring to the social acceptance that came with “Whiteness” and constantly being denied by the exclusionary power of racism, perhaps they sought solace in the idea that they could take the affections of the mixed-race from Whites’ desiring grasp.

While to be “biologically” Black in America is to have visibly sub-Saharan African genetic ancestry, cultural Blackness, especially “authentic” cultural Blackness is a different kettle of fish. Whether that’s Paul Fussell’s “class sinking” as described by Thomas Chatterton Williams, or the observation of a Black youth in New York that “Your African identity has to be defined by ignorance,” “authentic” cultural Blackness has less to do with anything related to Africa, and more with opposition to perceived cultural Whiteness. And to some, the fact that this puts it at direct odds with the promoters of Respectability Politics is a feature, rather than a bug.

As Mr. Williams quotes Albert Murray, “Critics? Man, most critics feel that unless brownskin U.S. writers are pissing and moaning about injustice they have nothing to say. In any case it seems they find it much easier to praise such writers for being angry (which requires no talent, not to mention genius) than for being innovative or insightful.”And that anger is often the thing that people search for when determining “authenticity.”

But anger isn’t the same as the power to create change. Conflating street culture with broader Black culture, and invoking “the dictatorship of the They” for peer pressure to conform to it isn’t making things better. Not that I can honestly say that it can’t or won’t, but as long as it doesn’t, demanding that everyone live within that paradigm is unproductive. When people say that an individual mustn’t allow others to define them, that goes for all others. The motives and the impacts may be different, but a person can chafe under the demands of “their” people just as easily as they can others. “The dictatorship of the They” doesn’t care which “the They” sits on the throne.

The Phantom Meddler

With the Democrats in the House of Representatives having formalized their investigation into impeaching President Trump, well, nothing really changes. Democrats are still more or less convinced that the President is guilty, Republicans are still more or less convinced that he can do no wrong, and everyone else is still left to make their own way. The idea that the impeachment inquiry is leading to a hardening of partisan attitudes supposes that there was still some softness there, and I'm not sure that I buy into that line of reasoning.

I'm also not sure that I believe the criticism that the debate will invite more overseas meddling in the 2020 Presidential election. After all, why bother to meddle when the major political parties are busily undermining the perception of legitimacy in government on their own? Of course, this is based on the presumption that the purpose of meddling is not to suborn a sitting President into becoming some sort of foreign agent. While it's certainly true that a lot of people find President Trump to be a little to friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it's still a long way from there to the idea that the Kremlin is calling the tunes that President Trump dances to. It makes more sense for the goal of meddling in American politics to be simply leaving people with the sense that there was something fraudulent about the election, and therefore, the winner is suspect. And as Democrats and Republicans move more and more from simple disagreement over means to actively believing in the other's bad faith, the idea that an outside party would actually need to do anything for the losing side to shout "foul!" seems more and more naïve. After a point, it kind of seems counter-productive. After all, actual meddling may leave evidence of itself. Simply having people believe that there was meddling (when there wasn't) leaves none. And since to true believers, that lack of evidence can become evidence that the investigators may be in on the plan, one can see how the belief in meddling can do more to undermine faith in the outcome than actual meddling would.

And with the two political parties becoming more and more convinced that the other is an active threat to the nation, many people already have all the evidence they need that something shady is going on.