Monthly Archives: July 2010

celebrating the intelligence of the worker

As the economy stalls, the earth bakes, oil streams into the Gulf, and politicians and reporters quarrel childishly, misanthropy is a temptation. It is tempting, too, to embrace manipulative or authoritarian politics to compensate for the evident frailties of humankind. This is an excellent time, then to read Mike Rose, The Mind At Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.

I have read the whole volume but would like to focus on chapter 1, “The Working Life of a Waitress.” Rose doesn’t romanticize waitressing or minimize its physical and emotional toll. But he reveals how complex and difficult the job is and how much pride individual waitresses take in doing their work well. By the hundreds of thousands, waitresses demonstrate excellence in ways that can restore faith in humankind, if you pay attention.

Time is in short supply in a restaurant: customers, owners, and wait-staff want things to move quickly. Space is limited, too, and designed to satisfy other people more than the wait staff. A waitress navigates this crowded space under conditions of uncertainty.

    No matter how efficiently designed the physical layout of the restaurant … the waitress’s motion will be punctuated by the continual but irregular demands made of her. … A basic goal, then, is to manage irregularity and create an economy of movement. And she does this through effective use of body and mind. The work calls for strength and stamina; for memory capacity and strategy; for heightened attention, both to overall layout and to specific areas and items; for the ability to take stock, prioritize tasks, cluster them, and make decisions on the fly.

Her interactions are not merely physical, but also emotional. “Remembering orders, being vigilant, and regulating the flow of work all play out in an emotional field.” A waitress must resist abuse, inspire positive feelings that enhance tips, collaborate and compete with co-workers, and use “skill and strategy to regulate the flow of work. ‘The customer has the illusion that they’re in charge’ [one waitress says], ‘but they’re not.'”

Depending on the situation, the waitress has to play “servant, mother, daughter, friends, or sexual object.” One says, “You’ve got to be damned good, damned fast, and you’ve got to make people like you.” Overall, the restaurant provides a place “to display a well-developed set of physical, social, and cognitive skills.”

Rose moves on to describe hair salons, construction sites, operating theaters, and other everyday “arenas of competence.” The net effect is to remind you that you live among people who achieve great things when contexts call on their intelligence and diligence. (Thanks to Harry Boyte for the reference to this book.)

Millennials set the record for low trust in other people

Whether you trust other people (in general) affects whether you collaborate voluntarily. Trust has been linked to prosperity, happiness, and health. It has been falling for young Americans–not in a smoothly downward path, but notably. And 2008 set the record, in a bad way, with just 21.4 percent of young Americans saying that other people can generally be trusted.

I am generally supportive of the kind of analysis that’s summarized in today’s New York Times: “surveys show that the majority of the nation’s millennials remain confident … that they will have satisfactory careers. They have a lot going for them. ‘They are better educated than previous generations and they were raised by baby boomers who lavished a lot of attention on their children,’ said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center’s director. That helps to explain their persistent optimism, even as they struggle to succeed.”

But it’s a mixed picture. Optimism about careers is one thing; confidence in other people is a different story. Perhaps protective Baby Boomers failed to raise kids who trusted the outside world, or perhaps it’s a simplification to say that today’s generation was raised by protective parents. The young man in today’s Times profile was raised by a married couple in exurban Grafton, MA, with a family income in the national top ten percent. But 258 students enrolled in the Chicago Public School system were shot last year–quite a different context in which to grow up. And most young Americans fall somewhere in between: neither coddled nor terrorized, but hardly secure.

moral thinking is a network, not a foundation with a superstructure

When we talk together about public concerns, a whole range of phrases and concepts is likely to emerge. Imagine, for example, that the topic is a local public school: how it is doing and what should change. In talking about their own school, parents and educators may use abstract moral concepts, like fairness or freedom. They may use concepts that have clear moral significance but controversial application in the real world. For example, fairness is a good thing, by definition. It is not the only good thing, and it can conflict with other goods. But the bigger challenge is to decide which outcomes and policies actually are fair.

Other concepts are easy to recognize in the world but lack clear moral significance. We either bus students to school or we do not bus them, but whether busing is good is debatable. (In this respect, it is a very different kind of concept from fairness.) Still other concepts have great moral weight and importance, but their moral significance is unclear. You can’t use the word love seriously without making some kind of morally important point. But you need not use that word positively: sometimes love is bad, and the same is true of free and achieve.

People string such concepts together in various ways. They may make associations or correlations (“The girls are doing better than the boys in reading”). They may make causal claims (“The math and reading tests are causing us to overlook the arts.”) They may apply general concepts to particular cases. Often they will describe individual teachers, administrators, events, classes, and facilities with richly evaluative terms, such as beautiful or boring. Frequently, they will tell stories, connecting events, individuals, groups, concepts, and intentional actions over time.

All these ways of talking are legitimate in a democratic public discussion. But the heterogeneity of our talk seems problematic. So many different kinds of ideas are in play that it seems impossible to reach any principled or organized resolution. We talk for some arbitrary amount of time, and then a decision must be made by the pertinent authorities or by a popular vote. It is not clear whether the decision was correct based on the discussion that preceded it.

It seems beneficial to organize and systematize public discussion, and several kinds of experts stand ready to help:

  • Social scientists propose to organize public discussions by identifying reliable causal relationships among concepts that can be empirically identified in the world. For instance, success comes to mean passing a test or graduating on time, and class size is found to influence (or not to influence) success. The hope is—if not to end the discussion—at least to focus and rationalize it.
  • Managers (both actual administrators of our institutions and experts on management) hope to limit or organize public discussions by pronouncing on which strategies will work and which are permissible under the current rules and policies.
  • Ideological thinkers try to simplify the discussion by putting heavy weight on certain moral concepts, which then trump others. (For example, personal liberty is a trump card for libertarians; equal welfare, for social democrats.)
  • Lawyers are trained to guide public discussions by explaining which options are legal or obligatory under laws, precedents, and constitutions.
  • Moral and political philosophers have less public influence than the other groups mentioned so far, but they hold the most subtle and sophisticated views of how public discussions ought to be improved. Contemporary academic philosophers are often disarmingly modest about their contributions, yet a core professional goal is to improve discussions by identifying morally clear and invariant concepts that should then influence decisions. Depending on which philosophical school one defends, those concepts might include rational autonomy, maximum utility, or virtue.

All of these forms of expert and disciplined guidance can be useful. But they often conflict, and so the very fact that they all help should tell us something. There is no methodology that can replace or discipline our public discussions or bring them to a close. This is because of the nature of moral reasoning itself.

Moral concepts are indispensable. We cannot replace them with empirical information. Even if smaller class sizes do produce better test scores, that does not tell us whether our tests measure valuable things, whether the cost of more teachers would be worth the benefits, or whether the state has a right to compel people to pay taxes for education.

But moral concepts are heterogeneous. Some have clear moral significance but controversial application in the world. (Fairness is always good, and murder is always bad.) Others have clear application but unpredictable moral significance. (Homicide is sometimes murder but sometimes it is justifiable.) Still others are morally important but are neither predictable nor easily identified. (Love is sometimes good and sometimes regrettable, and whether love exists in a particular situation can be hard to say.) A method that could bring public deliberation to closure would have to organize all these concepts so that the empirically clear ones were reliably connected to the morally clear ones.

That sometimes happens. For instance, waterboarding either happens or it does not happen. The Bush Administration’s lawyers defined it in obsessive detail: “The detainee is lying on a gurney that is inclined at an angle of 10 to 15 degrees to the horizontal. … A cloth is placed over the detainee’s face and cold water is poured on the cloth from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches …” Waterboarding is, in my considered opinion, an example of torture. Torture is legally defined as a felony, and the reason for that rule is a moral judgment that torture is always wrong (in contrast to punishment or interrogation, which may be right). Therefore, waterboarding is wrong. This argument may be controversial, but it is clear and it carries us all the way from the concrete reality of a scene in a CIA interrogation room to a compelling moral judgment and a demand for action. The various kinds of concepts are lined up so that moral, legal, and factual ideas fit together. There is room for debate: Is waterboarding torture? Who waterboarded whom? But the debate is easily organized and should be finite.

If all our moral thinking could work like that, we might be able to bring our discussions to a close by applying the right methods–usually a combination of moral philosophy plus empirical research. But much of our thinking cannot be so organized, because we confront moral concepts that lack consistent significance. They are either good or bad, depending on the circumstances. Nevertheless, they are morally indispensable; we cannot be good human beings and think without them. Love and freedom are two examples. To say that Romeo loves Juliet–or that Romeo is free to marry Juliet–is to say something important, but we cannot tell whether it is good or bad until we know a lot about the situation. There is no way to organize our thinking so that we can bypass these concepts with more reliable definitions and principles.

A structured moral mind might look the blueprint of a house. At the bottom of the page would be broad, abstract, general principles: the foundation. An individual’s blueprint might be built on one moral principle, such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Or it might start even lower, with a metaphysical premise, like “God exists and is good.” At the top of the picture would be concrete actions, emotions, and judgments, like “I will support Principal Jones’s position at the PTA meeting.” In between would be ideas that combine moral principles and factual information, such as, “Every child deserves an equal education,” or “Our third grade curriculum is too weak.” The arrows of implication would always flow up, from the more general to the more specific.

I think most people’s moral thinking is much more complex than this. Grand abstractions do influence concrete judgments, but the reverse happens as well. I may believe in mainstreaming special-needs children because of an abstract principle of justice, and that leads me to support Mrs. Jones at the PTA meeting. Or I may form an impression that Mrs. Jones is wise; she supports mainstreaming; and therefore I begin to construct a new theory of justice that justifies this policy. Or I may know an individual child whose welfare becomes an urgent matter for me; my views of Mrs. Jones, mainstreaming, and justice may all follow from that. For some people, abstract philosophical principles are lodestones. For others, concrete narratives have the same pervasive pull—for example, the Gospels, or one’s own rags-to-riches story, or Pride and Prejudice.

We must avoid two pitfalls. One is the assumption that a general and abstract idea is always more important than a concrete and particular one. There is no good reason for that premise. The concept of a moral “foundation” is just a metaphor; morality is not really a house, and it does not have to stand on something broad to be solid. Yet we must equally avoid thinking that we just possess lots of unconnected opinions, none intrinsically more important than another. For example, the following thoughts may all be correct, but they are not alike: “It is good to be punctual”; “Genocide is evil”; and “Mrs. Jones is a good principal.” Not only do these statements have different levels of importance, but they play different roles in our overall thinking.

I would propose switching from the metaphor of a foundation to the metaphor of a network. In any network, some of the nodes are tied to others, producing an overall web. If moral thinking is a network, the nodes are opinions or judgments, and the ties are implications or influences. For example, I may support mainstreaming because I hold a particular view of equity; then mainstreaming and equity are two nodes, and there is an arrow between them. I may also love a particular child, and that emotion is a node that connects to disability policy in schools. A strong network does not rest on a single node, like an army that is decapitated if its generalissimo is killed. Rather, a strong network is a tight web with many pathways, so that it is possible to move from one node to another by more than one route. Yet in real, functioning networks, all the nodes do not bear equal importance. On the contrary, it is common for the most important 20 percent to carry 80 percent of the traffic–whether the network happens to be the Internet, the neural structure of the brain, or the civil society of a town.

I suspect that a healthy moral mind is similar. It has no single foundation, and it is not driven only by abstract principles. Concrete motives (like love or admiration for a particular individual) may loom large. Yet the whole structure is network-like, and it is possible for many kinds of nodes to influence many other kinds. My respect for Mrs. Jones may influence how I feel about the concept of the welfare state, and not just the reverse. I need many nodes and connections, each based on experience and reflection.

I do not mean to imply that a strong network map is a fully reliable sign of good moral thinking. A fascist might have an elaborate mental map composed of many different racial and national prejudices and hatreds, each supported by stories and examples, and each buttressing the others. That would be a more complex diagram than the ones possessed by mystics who prize purity and simplicity. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, wrote Sören Kierkegaard, and the old Shaker hymn advises, “‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.” A righteous Shaker would do more good than a sophisticated fascist. But even if complexity is not a sufficient or reliable sign of goodness, a complex map is both natural and desirable. It reflects the real complexity of our moral world; it reduces the odds of becoming fanatical; it hems in self-interest; and it is resilient against radical doubt.

Four conclusions follow from this discussion.

    1. We should banish a certain kind of moral skepticism which arises from thinking that moral conclusions always rest on foundations, but alas there is nothing below our biggest, most abstract ideas. For example, you may believe in the Golden Rule but be unwilling to say why it is true. You may feel that there is no answer to the “Why?” question, and therefore morality is merely prejudice or whim. Your moral house has a foundation (the Golden Rule), but the foundation is floating in air. Fortunately, our whole morality does not rest on any such rule, nor must a principle rest on something below it to be valid. The Golden Rule is part of a durable network. It gains credibility because it seems consistent with so many other things that we come to believe. If it or any other node is knocked out of the network, the traffic can route around it.

    2. Moral thinking is influenced by worldly experience, by practice and by stories, and not only by abstract theories and principles. I wrote that it “is influenced” by experience; I have not shown that our thinking should be deeply experiential. But at the least, we can say that there is no reason to put abstract thinking on a pedestal, to treat is as if it were intrinsically and automatically more reliable than concrete thinking. I can be just as certain that I love my children as in the truth of the Golden Rule.

    3. We can handle diversity. If individuals’ conclusions derived from the foundations of their thought, we would face a serious problem whenever we encountered people who had different from foundations from our own. It is hard to tolerate them, let alone deliberate with them. The existence of a different foundation can even provoke vertiginous skepticism in our own minds. If my worldview rests on utilitarianism, and yours depends on faith in Jesus’ resurrection, perhaps neither of us has any reason to hold our own position. But if our respective worldviews are more like networks, then they probably share many of the same nodes even though they differ in some important respects. What’s more, each person’s network must be slightly different from anyone else’s—even his twin brother’s. Thus when we categorize people into “cultures,” we are crudely generalizing. There is actually one population of diverse human beings who are capable of discussing their differences even though they may not reach agreement.

    4. Expertise plays a limited role in reaching good decisions. The moral network in my mind cannot be–and should not be–radically simplified by applying any sophisticated methodology. I can learn from experts about what causes what and about how we should define various concepts and principles. But at the end of that process, I will still have my own moral network map, nourished by many sources other than the experts, and I will have to make decisions both alone and in dialog with my peers. There is no substitute for thinking together about problems and solutions.

why is this not terrorism?

I have no brief for Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on Sunday. But I was struck by this paragraph from the New York Times obituary:

    The C.I.A. is thought to have carried out an assassination attempt against the ayatollah in 1985, in which a 440-pound car bomb was placed along the short route between his apartment and mosque. Ayatollah Fadlallah narrowly escaped the explosion, but 80 other people were killed.

I do not know whether this claim is true; the Guardian attributes it to Bob Woodward. If it accurate, our government murdered 80 people by detonating a car bomb in a crowded urban street, with the intention of killing one person whose main crime was to endorse terror attacks. By what definition of “terrorism” were we not guilty of it?

the corruption that the financial reform bill reveals

I support the pending financial reform bill as about as good a product as our legislative system is likely to produce, but it also illustrates how badly that system is broken.

Congress has negotiated for months to produce a bill that is 2,000 pages long, full of special exemptions and breaks that no individual could even count, let alone understand, prior to passage. The legislative process has offered rich opportunities for professional lobbyists and their clients. Steven Brill estimates that $15 million was spent to lobby on one particular technical provision that reduced corporate tax obligations by $10 billion–an excellent return on investment. Brill observes:

    Complexity is the modern lobbyist’s greatest ally. Three lobbyists showed me three different proposals for rewording what may be the bill’s biggest-money section: a provision in the Senate version that would force the five major banks that do most of the country’s trillions of dollars of trading in derivatives–and make nearly $23 billion a year doing so–to spin off those operations. Even holding the dueling paragraphs side by side by side, I found it difficult on first read to appreciate the differences. But with some pointers from the lobbyists, it was clear that billions in profits depended on the variations in this nearly impenetrable language.

The passage of the bill will by no means end the process of negotiation. Binyamin Appelbaum writes in The New York Times:

    Well before Congress reached agreement on the details of its financial overhaul legislation, industry lobbyists and consumer advocates started preparing for the next battle: influencing the creation of several hundred new rules and regulations. The bill … is basically a 2,000-page missive to federal agencies, instructing regulators to address subjects ranging from derivatives trading to document retention. But it is notably short on specifics, giving regulators significant power to determine its impact–and giving partisans on both sides a second chance to influence the outcome.”

Part of the problem is campaign finance: firms that are regulated by the federal government also fund elections, in a scandalous conflict of interest. Another contributing factor is the fillibuster, which gives individual Senators far too much leverage. But I would like to draw attention to a different problem that will persist even if (unlikely as that may be) we remedy the other two flaws.

Law-making has been substantially replaced with rulemaking and administration. In a republic, “law” classically means consistent, durable, binding principles that are enacted after public deliberation. Laws should not change arbitrarily–without substantial changes in the outside world–nor be subject to exceptions and negotiations after passage. The Constitution (article 1, section 1) vests “all legislative powers” in Congress, although the presidential veto power gives the White House a role in lawmaking as well. Under our system, Congress and the president are supposed to make laws that are as durable and coherent as possible. Interest groups and party blocs will inevitably negotiate before a law is passed, although there is also supposed to be a public deliberation about matters of principle and philosophy. Once the president signs the bill, it is supposed to be fixed until significant changes in the world require reform.

But meeting those standards would be hard for elected politicians. They could be held accountable for their own momentous decisions, and they would have nothing to offer interest groups once they had passed any important law. They are tempted to act in quite a different way. First, instead of deliberating and passing coherent, durable statutes, they issue voluminous and constantly amended statutes–too long for anyone to read before the vote. That may be inevitable in a complex modern society, but Congress compounds the problem by delegating its lawmaking role–not so much to the president and the cabinet as to administrative agencies, civil servants, and special courts within the executive branch.

They do this by passing statutes that empower regulatory agencies to make policy within very broad outlines. In 2004, federal agencies generated 78,851 pages of proposed rules, filling 69 volumes of the annual Federal Register. The number of pages has crept almost steadily up, from one volume of 2,620 pages in 1936 (when the government was more powerful and activist, but also more coherent, than it is today).

This process has several advantages for legislators. It defers decisions and makes them provisional and negotiable, so that no interest group ever loses a fight definitively. It allows elected officials to take credit for general principles, even if they conflict, and then blame bureaucrats who actually make choices. A classic but not atypical example is the “dual mandate” that Congress gave to the Federal Reserve: to maximize employment and control inflation. Those goals often conflict in practice, but Congress claims to have mandated both and can critically question any Federal Reserve Board Chairman who fails to achieve both. Finally, a process of continuous negotiations favors organized interest groups, the very ones that give campaign contributions and physically appear on Capitol Hill.

James Madison explained why such “mutable” policymaking is disastrous, using words that now seem prophetic:

    To trace the mischievous effects of a mutable government would fill a volume. … It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed? Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce of revenue, or in any way, affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY (The Federalist, number 62).