Monthly Archives: January 2014

horizon as a metaphor for culture

Leave a reply

(Chicago) The philosophers Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jürgen Habermas use the metaphor of a horizon to describe the background or framework of experience. Without addressing thorny questions of interpretation involving these three disparate and difficult authors, I’d like to defend the metaphor in general terms:

Any person at any given moment has a unique visible horizon–the line that divides the objects on the earth from the sky. Yet if I stand right next to you, or stand where you were a minute ago, my horizon will closely resemble yours. Thus the metaphor captures the uniqueness of individual experience while making difference a matter of degree that is somewhat within our control.

It’s possible for two people to have entirely different horizons–they cannot see any of the same objects. Yet those two people could move until their horizons overlapped. A person could stand between two individuals whose horizons did not overlap and be seen by each. Or a whole chain of people could connect two remote individuals, allowing them to share vicarious experiences.

Your horizon is a function of the way the world is and how you see things. To a degree, you can change how you look and where you stand, but you must start from somewhere that you did not choose.

You have the capacity to see anything within your horizon. But you cannot see it all at once. You can describe and communicate anything within your horizon, but you cannot ever describe it all. You are aware of the horizon as a whole, but your attention focuses on objects within it.

I think if you replace “horizon” with “culture,” most of these sentences will ring true. At any rate, ever since my first book, I have been criticizing theories of culture that presume that everyone who belongs to Culture A shares the same structure of beliefs, which must be different from the structure that defines Culture B. That kind of model promotes unwarranted relativism and skepticism.

big data comes to the social sciences

Leave a reply

Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, has written a manifesto entitled Restructuring the Social Sciences. I have mixed feelings about it, but it’s a useful statement of influential trends in academia. King begins:

The social sciences are in the midst of an historic change, with large parts moving from the humanities to the sciences in terms of research style, infrastructural needs, data availability, empirical methods, substantive understanding, and the ability to make swift and dramatic progress.

King is highly enthusiastic about these trends, asserting that “the social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them.” Solving problems certainly sounds like a good thing. One important reason is that social scientists are moving from statistical models based on samples (for instance, surveys) to the analysis of comprehensive datasets, such as all the job announcements posted in a set of newspapers over many years, or all the votes cast in the 2012 election. Social science thus merges with the kind of research conducted by firms like Google and Facebook, government agencies like the NSA, and political campaigns. Disciplinary boundaries are blurred, as some of the most interesting basic research on society now comes from computer science and business rather than the liberal arts.

In practical terms, King advocates the creation of centers like his own that can provide a shared infrastructure and a meeting place for diverse social scientists who use the new techniques. He claims that qualitative methods will retain an important role, because the masses of data that ethnographers and interviewers collect can also be mined by data analysts.

He suggests that centers for social science can become dramatically more efficient and effective if they apply their findings about organizational psychology to their own operations. For instance, they need lots of IT support, and they can provide that in ways that mimic the best-practices of IT firms. Finally, King would make a place for theorists, arguing that their insights can be helpful. “Moreover, theorists don’t cost anything! They require some seminars, maybe a pencil and pad, and some computer assistance.”

I am left with several questions:

  1. What does King mean by the humanities? He repeatedly describes the social sciences as moving away from the humanities, but what does he think they are leaving behind? Solo research? Unsystematic research? Unproductive research that doesn’t solve problems? (See my post on “What are the humanities? Basic points for non humanists” and also “Stop problematizing–say something“)
  2. How successful are these new techniques, really? In particular, are they generating new general knowledge and frameworks, or simply ad hoc answers to very particular problems? King cites a study that used massive data to demonstrate discrimination against people with stereotypically African American first names. I think that is an important finding. But does it tell us anything about the underlying reasons for racial prejudice or general strategies that we might use to defeat it? (Cf. “Bent Flyvbjerg’s radical alternative to applied social science” and my “critique of expertise, part 1″)
  3. What are the ethical pitfalls of increasing our power to track, predict, and influence human behavior? To put it another way, if the social sciences move from studying problems to solving them, are the “solutions” ethically acceptable in terms of their means, their ends, and the ways that they engage the affected populations? (See my “qualms about Behavioral Economics” and “the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action.”) This, of course, is why the humanities remain so important in an era of big data.

when east and west were one

Leave a reply

(Washington, DC) I am highly skeptical of distinctions between “eastern” and “western” thought, considering the enormous diversity within both domains, the thousands of years of interaction between the two, and the arbitrariness of any border. (Why, for example, should a body of water less than 2,000 feet across be considered to divide two continents, Europe from Asia?)

But if you are committed to the distinction, it’s worth taking a look at the Milinda Pandha.  This is a dialogue written originally in Sanskrit or Pali before the year 200 CE. It describes a dialogue between a Greek king of India named Milinda (who is probably Menander I) and a Buddhist sage named Nagasena.

Menander I is well attested in Greek and Indian texts and archaeological evidence as a Greek king who converted to, and patronized, Buddhism. Here he is on a silver coin that reads “King Menander the Just” in Greek on one side and “Great King Menander, follower of the Dharma” in the Kharosthi script of South Asia on the other.

Nagasena is not known outside of this dialogue, wherein he is described as the son of a Brahmin who, having quickly exhausted the Vedic scriptures, studied Buddhism under a Greek monk named Dhammarakkhita (“Protected by the Dharma”).

Compared to a Platonic dialogue, the Milinda Pandha includes more fantastical details. The gods, for example, are directly involved. But it paints appealing portraits of the human characters. Menander goes around stumping sages with metaphysical paradoxes until he meets Nagasena, who bests him on a couple of those exchanges. Then the King simply asks questions about Buddhist doctrine and Nagasena answers with illustrative similes. The King replies after each one, “Very good, Nagasena!”

I can read the text only through the 19th century English translation of T. W. Rhys Davids. As far as I can tell, the perspective of the original document is orthodox Theravada Buddhism. Thus I am glimpsing Menander I through layers of interpretation, Asian and English; and it is hard to imagine how this European-born king of ancient India might actually have thought. But he and Nagasena seem to share the same social and cultural horizon, and the differences between them stem only from their respective roles as monarch and sage:

The king said: ‘Reverend Sir, will you discuss with me again?’

‘If your Majesty will discuss as a scholar (pandit), well; but if you will discuss as a king, no.’

‘How is it then that scholars discuss?’

‘When scholars talk a matter over one with another then is there a winding up, an unravelling; one or other is convicted of error, and he then acknowledges his mistake; distinctions are drawn, and contra-distinctions; and yet thereby they are not angered. Thus do scholars, O king, discuss.’

‘And how do kings discuss?’

‘When a king, your Majesty, discusses a matter, and he advances a point, if any one differ from him on that point, he is apt to fine him, saying: “Inflict such and such a punishment upon that fellow!” Thus, your Majesty, do kings discuss.

‘Very well. It is as a scholar, not as a king, that I will discuss. Let your reverence talk unrestrainedly, as you would with a brother, or a novice, or a lay disciple, or even with a servant. Be not afraid!’

50 Core American Documents

Leave a reply

I was a little amused to receive a letter that began, “As a leader in the Conservative Movement, you know that ideas matter.” The letter continued, “At Ashbrook we teach young Americans about the big ideas that define America by using original historical documents–avoiding the distortions that textbooks introduce to the story of American history.”

Although I am less worried than Ashbrook is about distortion in classrooms and textbooks, I am grateful for the volume that came with the letter: 50 Core American Documents: Required Reading for Students, Teachers, and Citizens, edited by Christopher Burkett.

It collects quite diverse perspectives. For example, John C. Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill” denounces (as a “dangerous error” and an unnecessary insertion into the Declaration of Independence) the clause that “all men are created equal.” But the very next document is Frederick Douglass’ great speech for equality, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Calhoun should be read; he reminds us that secession was driven by hostility to human rights. But I might have chosen his Senate speech arguing that slavery was a “positive good” as a more illustrative historical example. And if I had chosen Calhoun’s “Speech on the Oregon Bill,” I would not have deleted the beginning. The excerpt in the 5o Core Documents begins:

The first question which offers itself for consideration is — Have the Northern States the power which they claim, to prevent the Southern people from emigrating freely, with their property, into territories belonging to the United States, and to monopolize them for their exclusive benefit? …

In the quoted excerpt, the nature of the “property” under discussion is not clarified; the question is presented as one of interstate migration and commerce. But Calhoun actually began his speech with slavery. This is his first sentence:

There is a very striking difference between the position on which the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States stand, in reference to the subject under consideration.

Texts won’t teach or explain themselves. They must be presented in some way. Political texts make complete sense only in institutional and historical contexts. For instance, a reader must understand that John C. Calhoun was a Senator, that the Senate has specific powers, and that Calhoun represented South Carolina as a slaveholder and apologist for slavery when the Senate was deciding whether to admit new states (such as Oregon) as slave or free soil. Students cannot avoid an interpretive framework that has some kind of ideological valence. Thus I don’t fully endorse the premise that an anthology of original texts suffices.

I am also not so keen on presenting history as a series of statements by national leaders (even if some of them are insurgents and critics). Ordinary people have roles as well, and they can be given voice. But certainly this volume presents a welcome diversity of views, including, for example, presidential defenses of the New Deal and Great Society. The idea of choosing fifty documents is worthy, and I would recommend the book as well as the website on which all the contents are available free. Although it makes some debatable choices about which texts to include and how to excerpt them, the debate is valuable.

Meanwhile, the Pioneer Institute, which is generally considered conservative, held a terrific session on the Civil Rights Movement with the goal of deepening how it is taught in k-12 schools. They invited my colleague Peniel Joseph, who said, “we live in the belly of the beast… we live in the American Gulag”; and Robert P. Moses, “who blasted a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that he said invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act.” Jamie Gass, director of Pioneer’s Center for School Reform, writes:

Where one comes down on any one aspect of history matters very little. People will always disagree — otherwise, historians would have little to do. But learning about the depth and richness of our nation’s civil rights movement, the injustices that existed and still persist, the blood that was shed, lives lost and destroyed, and the real progress that has emerged, ought not to be an adjunct or afterthought in our schools. It should, rather, be front and center in every curriculum.

Our civic responsibility as Americans demands nothing less.

programs for poor people are poor programs

Leave a reply

Georgetown Law professor David A. Super argues that the technical problems with the Obamacare website are unusual mainly in their mildness and the degree to which they have been rapidly addressed. Obamacare was heavily scrutinized because of the political stakes for the president–and because many middle-class American voters were trying to use the website. The White House jumped to address the initial failure. But when only poor people are involved, services can be far worse and nothing is done to address errors. Among the “epic” meltdowns that Super lists, Georgia recently neglected to send renewal notices to 66,000 food stamp recipients and then terminated their benefits for failure to respond to the unsent messages.

He cites failures in electronic services, but the adage that “programs for poor people are poor programs” also applies to face-to-face services like policing, health services, and (too often) k-12 education.

The ideological valence of this point is complicated. Progressives (like me) believe that poor state services for poor people should receive more attention; this is a core explanation of social inequities. But in making this point, we are indicting governmental agencies, the very tools we want to use to address inequality and suffering. At a minimum, the argument for more state action requires an extra step: some plausible strategy for improving the quality and responsiveness of state services.

One piece of that strategy may be adequate investment: decent services always cost money. But we know that some urban school systems have high per-student spending and still deliver unsatisfactory education. So cash per recipient hardly guarantees success.

Another piece of the strategy may be political empowerment. The White House jumped to fix Obamacare because voters were mobilized. But voter turnout among poor people is low. That is one reason that leaders don’t care about welfare services. But again, political empowerment is no panacea. Some cities have demographically representative electorates and leaders and still deliver poor results.

The people who most emphasize poor quality in governmental services are reformers who want to disrupt unionized bureaucracies by introducing competition or radical decentralization. I am not talking only about glib politicians, but also about hard-working founders of charter schools and social enterprises. They are usually labeled “conservatives,” but the label can be confusing. Witness the way that charter schools appeal to both left and right, or the scrambled ideological debate about education reform. Some people hold inconsistent views about unionized public services, defending prison and police forces while demonizing teachers and social workers–or vice-versa.

In my book We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, and in other work, I argue for culture-change within institutions and communities: the Gramscian “long march,” if you like that kind of terminology. The very concept of “service” needs to change, because citizens who interact with government are more than service-recipients. Market mechanisms may have a place, but markets have special limitations for the delivery of welfare and education. (See also this post on housing vouchers.) Top-down reforms may sometimes do some good, but technocrats always set objectives incompatible with the legitimate values of diverse poor people, and top-down reforms always run out of steam. Serious improvement does require political empowerment, but that does not mean more voting alone. Better skills, better processes, more collaboration, more discussion, and better relationships are essential. Of course, the question is how we can get that–and I do have some suggestions in my book.