Author Archives: Peter Levine

in defense of Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin’s letters from the years 1946-1960 have been published, and A.N. Wilson reads them as the record of a man who was smoothly diplomatic and glitteringly successful in public, but malicious behind people’s backs and never a profound author. I haven’t yet read these letters, but Wilson’s judgment that Berlin was “nothing but a witty talker” seems flatly wrong on the evidence of his great political essays.

Here is an example from Wilson’s review: “The 800 pages [of Berlin’s letters] are peppered with malice about poor A. L. Rowse (a more interesting man than Berlin and ultimately more intellectually distinguished).” While Berlin was writing his “tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters”– Wilson writes–Rowse was “producing those readable, well-researched volumes The England of Elizabeth, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, The Early Churchills, The Later Churchills, etc.”

I happen to have read The England of Elizabeth recently (well, most of its 592 dense pages). It contains a lot of interesting information, some vivid imaginative prose, and strong, idiosyncratic opinions. It is worth something, but it is far from profound or reliable. The author is so strongly committed to his politics (secular, mercantile, hierarchical, nationalist) that he makes all kinds of implausible claims–for instance, that Elizabeth I was privately not religious.

Christopher Haigh’s introduction to Rowse’s book (the text chosen to accompany and advertise the 2003 edition) says:

Rowse was bitter and vindictive, nurturing hatreds and maintaining grievances for decades, but he could be generous, loyal, and sensitive to the needs and misfortunes of others. He was a homosexual misogynist, who would turn his back on female guests at his college, but some of his closest confidants were women. … From the start he was insufferably arrogant: as a little boy he shouted to his family, “Everyone’s a fool in this house but me!”–and he kept saying it to the end of his life, with irrepressible self-congratulation.

Imagine that you were trapped with this person in the tiny, static community of an Oxford college, where all the inmates have life tenure. You are diplomatic to him in person but complain about him behind his back, writing (for example) that he “grows more and more impossible and awful daily.” Should anyone blame you?

Berlin never wrote a magnum opus. His historical work was not deeply sourced enough for professional historians, and he gave up the rigors of analytic philosophy. Most of his ideas were unoriginal; he hastened to show that he had found them in previous authors. But he had the huge gift of being right (something that one can hardly say of A.L. Rowse). I think he was right because his thought was grounded in worldly experience.

A.N. Wilson writes: Berlin “settled down to be a ‘historian of ideas’, but the great book never got written. He accepted the role of being a sort of Samgrass from Brideshead Revisited, the don at the rich man’s table, the brilliant chatterer, who moved among bright worldly people who had not read as much as he had, so were impressed by the idea of someone who had heard of, let alone read, Maistre:

The dinner party consisted of the Queen Mother, the diva [Maria Callas], Lady Fermoy (in waiting), Lady Rosebery, Mr Anthony Gishford (late of Boosey and Hawkes, who used to edit Isis when I was an undergraduate, slightly disreputable and quite nice), Mr David Webster, and the Harewoods. I sat between the QM and Lady Rosebery and enjoyed myself.

That quotation from Berlin’s letters makes him seem too social and glamorous to be taken seriously. In fact, I wouldn’t enjoy reading a lot of pages about dinners with H.R.H. the Queen Mum. But Berlin’s gift was to learn about politics–and life–from diverse people. He could enjoy an evening with royalty, but he could also seek out the tragically persecuted Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad, or guide an American student though her dissertation. He talked incredibly fast and with great self-assurance, but he also listened. For him, sociability was a form of research. Since his topic was people, his method was apt, and he was superb at it.

the Tea Party Movement and youth

On NPR’s Morning Edition, Don Gonyea reports on the efforts of the Tea Party conservative movement to recruit young voters and activists. He quotes me to the effect that young people much preferred Barack Obama in 2008, but they are still forming their opinions about government. They are suffering badly from the economic crisis, and–rightly or not–could decide that their hopes for a Democratic administration were misplaced. Especially if the Tea Party right seems libertarian rather than authoritarian and intolerant, it has a lot of potential to draw young voters. Young conservatives almost certainly stayed home in 2008, contributing to Obama’s 2:1 margin among people under 30. It would not be surprising if that ratio shifted a great deal in 2010 and beyond.

why Spain fell

In preparation for a trip to Spain, I just read J. H. Elliot’s Imperial Spain: 1469-1716. This book is nearly 50 years old, and I don’t know whether Elliot himself or his many students have changed the story profoundly. But the arc is epic and very well told. In 1540, the ruler of Spain also governed the Holy Roman Empire, the low countries (which were the most dynamic economies of Europe), half of Italy, and the Americas from Texas to Argentina. The culture of Spain itself was profound and influential. One century later, his successor could hardly keep Spain itself together, he had declared bankruptcy, and Spanish culture was sinking into a mediocrity from which it would take at least a century to recover.

The various explanations for Spain’s decline are resonant today, and each would appeal to different modern ideological movements.

Intolerance: Spain expelled its vibrant indigenous Jewish and Moslem cultures and repressed the American natives and Protestants, becoming narrow and closed-minded.
Authoritarianism: Governed by a strong monarch, Spain lost the creative advantages of freedom and debate.
Profligacy: The crown consistently spent more money than it had, which was unsustainable.
Inequality: A few aristocrats held vast, largely untaxed wealth, while most people were close to starvation.
Machismo: Castilian culture was warlike. Once there were no more opportunities for conquest, militarism was a poor basis for policy.
A “Resource Trap”: South American silver was like petroleum today–it gave the government an easy source of money that reduced accountability and the need to invest.
The clergy: Even leading priests and friars argued that Spain had too many people in holy orders, consuming too much wealth.
Decentralization: The monarch did not rule a unified Spain, but was simultaneously king of several separate countries with their own laws (and even trade barriers against one another). It was impossible to coordinate.
Corruption: Public officials were expected to live in grand style but were hardly paid. They obtained their wealth by selling decisions, a recipe for poor policy.

I suspect that all these explanations are valid, and the decline was overdetermined. It still represents one of history’s great cautionary examples.

the budget supports broadening education

The president’s budget proposal includes increased support for education outside of reading, math, and science. We and others have documented a narrowing of the US curriculum, especially in elementary schools. We found that the reason for the narrowing trend was not No Child Left Behind. But the decline of civics, history, art, and foreign languages is still a problem that deserves a federal response.

The Administration proposes a new funding area called “Teaching and Learning for a Well Rounded Education,” with $265 million in appropriations. They propose moving civic education out of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (whose main focus is safety and good behavior–a deadly heading under which to place active citizenship and democracy). The $265 million appropriation is roughly on par with the administration’s request for science, technology, engineering, and math.

(By the way, I support the so-called STEM subjects, and we’re not in a competition to get the most money. I only make the comparison to demonstrate that the president wants real money for the topics that make kids “well-rounded.”)

If this plan goes forward, there will be struggles over how to allocate the money among fields such as history, art, languages, and civics; whether to fund states, local education agencies, and/or nonprofits (or for-profit firms); and what to do with the various special programs that were historically funded to support specific topics, such as American history and civics. Those are tough calls, but there is significant promise in the president’s proposal.

a critique of expertise, part 2

Yesterday’s post was Part 1 of a critique of expertise in public policy. Part 2 focuses on the issue of generalization.

Experts generalize. An important aspect of almost all professional training is the identification of general concepts or categories that trigger appropriate responses. Told a story about specific people interacting in a particular context, any professional will look for abstractions. For instance, in medical school, one learns the signs and definitions of diseases, and when a disease is present, a physician knows which treatments to offer. When more than one condition is involved, or when the diagnosis is uncertain, the decision becomes complex, and good physicians fully understand the roles of judgment and luck. Doctors could never be replaced by machines that simply took in data and spat out treatment plans. But diseases and other general health conditions remain central to physicians’ analysis. They look for the necessary and sufficient conditions that define conditions, and then apply general causal theories that say: this medicine reduces that illness.

Lawyers, meanwhile, try to apply general rules from statutes, constitutions, and court rulings. Their advice may be controversial or uncertain if no single, definitive legal rule covers the situation–and they understand that–but their professional thinking involves rules. For engineers, economists, psychologists, and virtually all other professionals, the important abstractions may be different, but the basic habits of mind are alike. Professionals have achieved monumental advances (and prestige) by discovering generalizations that apply widely. For example, the polio vaccine reliably prevents polio, and that is extremely valuable to know.

You can also hear ordinary people generalize if you listen in public spaces. They say things like, “Of course Amtrak is always late, it’s a government monopoly.” Or, “You’re getting a cold; you should take vitamin C.” Research and data disprove these assertions, and a trained professional would not make them. Even an economist who was hostile to monopolies would not draw a direct line from Amtrak’s monopoly status to the tardiness of its trains. (Other countries have monopolistic railroads that run on time.) Instead of being too quick and bold with generalizations, a good professional is fully aware of complexities and nuances.

Even so, there are drawbacks to using general concepts as the main units of analysis. A person, a situation, an institution, or a community can be apprehended as a whole object. We can assess it, judge it, and form opinions about how the entity should change. Evaluating a whole situation need not be any harder or less reliable than analyzing general categories abstracted from such situations. If we can say something valid and useful about a generality (like diabetes, tax incentives, or free speech), we can talk just as sensibly about this patient, this school, or this conversation. The particular object or situation is not just an aggregate of definable components. It has distinctive features as a whole, and we human beings are just as good at understanding those as we are at generalizing abstractly.

The form that our understanding takes is often narrative: we tell stories about particular people or institutions, and we project those stories into the future as predictions. We may find generic issues and categories embedded within a story: King Lear, for example, was a king and a father, and there are general truths to be said about both categories. But the story of King Lear is much more than an aggregate of such categories, which are not especially useful for understanding the play.

In public policy, non-professionals are often better at the assessment of whole objects than experts are. That is because ordinary members or clients of a school, a neighborhood, or a firm know its whole story better than an outsider who arrives to apply general rules.

Often, professionals have in the back of their mind an empirical finding that is valid in academic terms, but that should not tell us what to do. Even when results are statistically significant, effect sizes in the social sciences are usually small, meaning that only a small proportion of what we are interested in explaining is actually explained by the research. Statistical studies shed some light on why individuals differ, but can tell us nothing about why they are all alike. In research based on surveys or field observations, the sample may not resemble the population or situation that we face in our own communities. Experimental research is conducted with volunteers (often current undergraduate psychology majors) in artificial settings. Even if a particular finding is strong, and the sample does resemble our own, there is always a great deal of variation, and any particular case may differ from the mean. Measures are always problematic and imperfect, and some important factors are virtually impossible to measure. Unmeasured factors may be responsible for the relationships we think we see among the things we measure.

All of this is well known and may be thoughtfully presented in the “limitations” section of a published paper. When carefully and cautiously read, such a paper can be very helpful. But the professional’s temptation is focus on a statistically significant, published result even if its practical import and relevance are low. Besides, it is rarely the author of a paper who tries to influence a practical discussion. Often professionals have not even read the original paper that influences them. They rely instead on their graduate training or abstracts and second-hand summaries of more recent research. The caveats in the original studies tend to be lost.

Of course, people with professional credentials can be excellent observers and assessors of whole objects like schools, neighborhoods, or firms. In some affluent communities, practically everyone holds an advanced degree and is therefore a “professional.” But their judgments of whole objects and situations are best when they think as experienced laypeople, not as specialists. They should draw on professional expertise, but only as one source of insight (and should not rely on only one profession).

Arguments about the proper role of generalization take place within professions, not just between professionals and laypeople. Physicians, for example, are being pressed to adopt “evidence based medicine,” which deprecates doctors’ intuitions and personal experiences in favor of general scientific findings, especially those supported by randomized experiments. Some medical doctors are pushing back, arguing that experimental findings never yield reliable guidance for complex, particular cases. What matters is the whole story of the particular patient.

The same argument plays out in education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 favors forms of instruction proven in “scientifically-based research,” and the gold standard is a randomized experiment. (The frequently accepted second-best is a statistical model, which can be understood as an estimate of what would be found in a randomized experiment.) Like physicians, some educators resist this pressure, on the ground that an experienced teacher can and should make decisions about individual students and classrooms that are heavily influenced by context and only marginally guided by scientific findings.

This debate will never be fully resolved, but there is a logic to the idea that if we are going to train people in expensive graduate schools and rely on their guidance to shape general policies, they should be the bearers of “scientifically-based research.” In other words, the most optimistic claims about the value of expertise rely on a notion of the expert as an abstract and general thinker. When professionals are seen instead as experienced and wise craftspeople, no one exaggerates their role in public life. The physician who is a seasoned healer is left to treat his or her patients; it is the medical researcher with general findings who is invited to influence policy. My claim is that we err when we give such research too much credence.