Camo

A bird, sitting on a fencepost. I don't know what kind of bird it is, or whether it's resident or migratory. It was close enough to photograph and it stood still for a bit, so I snapped a picture. I thought about cropping in on it, but the busy background makes the bird seem more camouflaged, which they never really seem to strike me as when I see them. Maybe I'm just better about picking out bits of bird-shaped brown out of all of the other brown than the bird's natural predators are, or maybe it's not really optimized for close-range viewing. But I do notice that the bird seems a bit out of focus, even though the fencepost and foliage seem sharp enough. Maybe that's part of the effect. Or maybe I need more practice.

Discriminatory

I was talking with a conservative acquaintance about "cancel culture." Like many conservatives, he was up in arms about it, and the unfairness of it all. So I asked him just what was so bad about it. He replied that it was a form of unfair discrimination, and something that people should be protected against.

Then I reminded him that he opposed antidiscrimination laws, and believed that boycotts were how society should deal with people who behaved in ways they disapproved of, rather than empowering the state to use force to enforce norms.

The conversation went downhill from there. In the end, the whole thing reminded me of a line that I'd read in The Economist a few years ago.

Unfortunately, notes Jacob Mchangama, a Danish lawyer and free-speech advocate who regularly attends the Oslo Freedom Forum, most people are passionate only about the rights of people who think the same way as themselves.

I think that it's basic human nature, but I do find it to be interesting. "Cancellation," I think, hits the same nerve for some people that "cultural appropriation" does for others. It threatens a sense of personal significance and meaning by reminding them that, at any point, they can be deemed expendable. And without them, society will go on as if nothing had happened. Which is pretty much exactly what happens. That's what makes cancellation, especially for those people who hadn't made it into the ranks of the independently wealthy prior to their downfalls, so devastating. When brought to bear, the power of even a relatively small segment of society can simply erase a person as if they had never been; and resist the efforts of others to prevent that erasure. And I think that conservatives have come to fear (rationally or not) that fate befalling them.

Part of that fear is, I think, completely irrational. It doesn't take that large a group of people to support another person, and cushion them from the worst of the consequences. But that's part of the point, I think. What makes cancellation such a bugbear on the American political Right is that it plays into that idea that only cultural dominance can protect them. While the numbers of conservatives in the United States is not small, many people act as if it's positively minuscule. If one views society as kill or be killed, not being strong enough to kill is to be weak enough to be at the mercy of those around you.

Another thing strikes me as ironic about the conservative reaction to cancel culture. When I was younger, one of the conservative knocks on liberalism was over the latter's embrace of moral relativism. This was seen as an unwillingness to call out wrong when it was plainly obvious. It's now become a case of being careful of what one wishes for, I think, and it seems to place conservatives in the position of asking that others be less strident in their moral judgements.

In any event, this is not going to be a permanent state of affairs. I'm curious to see what follows it.

Hang Loose

There is a story on the NPR website, "Why 'Tight' Cultures May Fare Better Than 'Loose' Cultures In A Pandemic." The general gist of the piece is simple; cultures with stricter social norms, greater restrictions and harsher disciplinary measures, which are considered "tight," have significantly lower case counts per capita than societies with more relaxed norms and fewer rules, or "loose" cultures. The working theory is that in tight cultures, people are more willing to accept limits on their actions for the greater good. As can be imagined, when NPR interviewed Michele Gelfand, the lead author of the study, she characterized the United States as too loose for its own good. She held out the idea that cultures should be "ambidextrous," tightening and loosening as befit the situation. No real-world examples of such cultural ambidexterity were offered, however. Nor were there any real hints as to how this would work, other than bromides like "leadership" and "sacrifice."

The piece struck me as something of a missed opportunity in it's "we can have our cake and eat it, too" attitude, since it cast the course of the SARS-2 CoV pandemic in the United States as a result of current inflexibility, rather than the result of a long series of choices that lead the nation to its current state. If "[t]ight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory," it seems unrealistic to presume that cultures that haven't had that sort of history can act as if they have on the basis of a single event, even if it is a relatively long one. Which, in the grand scheme if things, the current pandemic hasn't been.

And the characterization of tight and loose cultures also stood out for me. Because tight cultures could also be seen as those with very far-reaching and consistent social norms across the whole of the society. Looking at it in total, I don't actually believe that social norms are more relaxed and that there are fewer rules in the United States; they just don't have the same reach. Social norms in the Seattle area, where I live now, are as rigorously observed as they were in my previous hometown of Chicago. It's just that the norms are different between here and there. Professor Gelfand holds up New Zealand as a nation that's gotten it right. But New Zealand is roughly the same area and population as Colorado. Taiwan, likewise, is very small, although it has a large population. The United States is in the top four in both land area and population. And it lacks the ethnic homogeneity of India or the controlling government of China to enforce a single set of norms and rules on the whole of its population. And while Professor Gelfand says that "We shouldn't confuse authoritarianism with tightness," she also notes that "Tight cultures have a lot of order and discipline — they have a lot less crime and more monitoring of [citizens'] behavior and [more] security personnel and police per capita." Maybe it's just me, but I'm sensing a correlation there.

It's possible, and honestly, I suspect, likely, that the course of the pandemic in the United States is a foreseeable outcome of a society that's made up of a disparate groups of people from around the world and who live in a vast area that's been relatively free of serious existential threats for the past two centuries. Maybe there's nothing wrong with taking the bad with the good in this case. I understand that when people are alarmed, they are clamorous to be led to safety, as H. L. Mencken put it. And that they can resent factors that stand in the way of this. But I don't know that it's reasonable to expect that the distance and diversity of the United States can be ground out of the populace on short notice. And a year is, in the grand scheme of things, very short notice. Many much less significant changes than everyone suddenly deciding to trust whatever some "leadership" tells them to do have take much longed to come into being, even if it took some time to actually notice the differences. It's understandable that people want to always have the best of all possible worlds; to have all of the advantages, and none of the downsides, of everything. But that's not a realistic way of looking at life. Nor is it a useful one.

Gamble

Although operation warp speed was successful, at least in comparison with Europe’s efforts, part of its victory came down to luck. If the vaccines that the U.S. scooped up so many doses of, by Moderna and Pfizer, had failed clinical trials, “the U.S. would look extraordinarily stupid right now,” [Scott] Greer[, a health-policy professor at the University of Michigan,] says.
The One Area Where the U.S. COVID-19 Strategy Seems to Be Working

I suppose that it's part of how people tend to see the world, but the conflation of unlucky and stupid (especially in many modern contexts, where "stupid" is a descriptor of moral, rather than intellectual, failing) has struck me as being unfair for some time. Part of me wonders if this viewpoint is a cause of people being loss-averse or an effect of same, but the outcome is the same: the expectation that bad outcomes are always predictable. There is some irony, I think, in the fact that one of the "unfair" things about the world is that so many people believe that the world is in fact, "fair." If one inhabits a world where the difficult events that befall other people are generally of their own making, then it makes sense that the person who gambles and loses has revealed that they are of flawed character, even if the precise nature of the flaw remains unknown.

But there is something else that occurred to me when I read Professor Greer's words; that hint of mistrust that people often have for one another, especially people who work in the corporate world. Had Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccines not turned out to be effective, I suspect that a lot of people would have been prepared to claim that the companies had acted in knowing bad-faith; understanding all along that either the task before them was impossible, or, since the money was theirs either way, not worth the expense of doing well. Bad faith and ill-intent are things that many people pride themselves on being able to suss out in others, despite the fact that people generally are quite poor at it.

In any event, there is always an understanding that people need not really ever deal with uncertainty. The person who gambles and wins is credited with being able to put together all of the clues that pointed to an inevitable outcome. The person who rolls the dice and loses is faulted for not having seen the same.

It's interesting that Operation Warp Speed was deemed a success because the vaccines turned out to work. One wonders if that was actually the criteria when it was proposed. After all, the whole point behind funding research and development into anything is to try out a number of different approaches and ideas and see not only what works, but what doesn't. In that sense, even if the program hadn't directly lead to a single effective intervention, it still would have been useful, in pointing out the blind alleys quickly. It does a disservice to forget that.

A River Rushing