On Worshiping and Compression

For a long time, one of the most helpful books I've read is Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics. He described conservatives as seeing the world through the civilization vs. barbarism axis, which really helped me understand the way they think.

It's a very Hobbsien view that says the default setting of humanity is sinful ("idle hands are the devil's tools"). In the absence of the institutions that uphold civilization (police, military, church, etc.) we will naturally devolve into barbarism and sin.

Kling described progressives as seeing the world through the oppressor vs. oppressed axis. It's a very Marxist view that views the world as a zero-sum conflict with constant battles for power and resources. 

Although Kling never says so, what both groups have in common is the idea of a default setting and the need to fight against it. In fact, I'm starting to think that most views are some version of this. 

For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States. 

The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.).

I could make the same case for Enlightenment liberals, who believe our default setting is tribalism. The only thing that keeps society from falling into civil war is humanism, liberalism, reason, and Enlightenment values. Here's Scott Alexander proving my point:

"Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully."

Thine Own Self

For David Foster Wallace, the default setting is solipsism:

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence....  It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of."

His solution was the practice of self-awareness and exercising the agency to choose what to worship.

"This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self....

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience....

"The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it...

"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship." 

(In fact, the only people who don't fall under this view are free-market fundamentalists, who think the absence of government is our default setting and any tinkering with the market will set us on the path to communism.)

Implicit Compression

At the college where I work, our DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) officer keeps stressing to us that we need to be aware of our biases and microagressions. This type of practice requires constant vigilance, but it's important if we want to be an ally. In other words, harmful implicit biases are our default setting and we need to be aware of them and check our privilege as we strive toward the work of antiracism.

But there is a tradeoff that comes with defining one's default settings and choosing how to fight against it.

In "Wokeness and Myth on Campus", Alan Jacobs uses the term "lossy compression" to describe how the mind works.

"The term “lossy compression” comes from the encoding of computers files, typically images, video, or audio. Non-lossy encoding — that is, encoding that captures all available sonic or visual information — results in enormous, unmanageable file sizes. So the challenge for programmers has been to reduce file sizes in ways that lose some information (thus “lossy”) but retain vital information to ensure that audio files don’t sound fuzzy or images appear blurry — think of how your streaming Netflix video degrades over a bad Internet connection. Lower-fidelity encodings allow for smaller files that are easier to transfer and store; higher-fidelity encodings offer better quality, at the cost of slower transfer, more costly storage, and more processor resources to perform computations on them, like object and facial recognition. "

So small, compressed files are easy to send but look crappy; large files look crisp but take forever to process. He then goes on to show how lossy compression is a good metaphor for how the mind processes information.

"a recent article by Sarah E. Marzen and Simon DeDeo, 'The evolution of lossy compression,' is very useful in this context. The article argues that all living things need to “extract useful information from their environment,” but to do so without imposing overly great cognitive burdens on themselves:

'… evolved organisms are expected to structure their perceptual systems to avoid dangerous confusions (not mistaking tigers for bushes) while strategically containing processing costs by allowing for ambiguity (using a single representation for both tigers and lions) — a form of lossy compression that avoids transmitting unnecessary and less-useful information...'

I like the example used here. Mistaking a tiger for a lion isn't that big a deal; either way you need to run. But mistaking a tiger for a bush will get you killed, you cannot afford to compress and fast-track that mental processing. 

"For it is safe to say that no human beings have ever lived in a more cognitively complex environment than we do. Faced with the constant inflow of information, we grow increasingly reluctant, if not actually unable, to make subtle distinctions."

Daniel Kahneman called this system one and system two. System one involves mental shortcuts, heuristics, and intuitive thinking. System two is the more rational part of our mind. We use system one to answer 1+1=2. That equation is committed to memory, we don't actually calculate it. We use system two for 247+49. System one works fast. When it cannot process the information, it switches over to system two, which moves much slower. His book is appropriately named Thinking Fast and Slow.

Buffering

This is another challenge of living in a multicultural society with no common values: there are multiple groups of people telling you to process their information in high fidelity, in system two. There is an obvious tradeoff that none of these prophets or DEI officers ever mention: the slow melt of human cognition. With all non-lossy encoding and slow thinking, the mind gets overwhelmed. We can't exist solely on system two. No one would ever leave their homes because they could not stop wondering how each step they took was oppressing some group. Something has to get compressed, but no one is telling you what.

When I used to go to a Zendo, after we had finished meditating and before we all left, our Zen Priest would tell us "take it with you." In other words, take the mindfulness you cultivate during meditation into all aspects of your waking life. In Buddhist philosophy, our default setting is for our ego to control our actions and thoughts, and mindfulness is a way of fighting against that. So it's not enough to just sit once a week at the Zendo, or by yourself once a day. You have to practice mindfulness when you're driving, exercising, talking, writing, etc.

Here is my point: I don't think I can practice zazen and "take it with me" while also focusing on how my unconscious biases might lead to harmful microagressions against persons of color. We can choose what to worship, but we can only worship one God.

By telling someone: "You need to focus on checking your privilege/asking 'what would Jesus do'/avoiding logical fallacies" you are also telling them that everything else is unimportant and should be compressed.

I think some give and take with your religion makes sense. If I'm a Buddhist, that doesn't give me license to pretend systemic racism doesn't exist. If I'm on a search committee, it makes sense to give a second look to a resume with a black-sounding name, knowing that research shows they get fewer call backs. But I've also been told that "fit" is a racially-charged term I should avoid, as in "refer someone you thing would be a good fit," which I think is ridiculous and I will be adding that to my compression bin.

I wrote about a blog post that contrasted two workplace cultures. The author's conclusion was that workplaces should be transparent about what type of culture they are and potential employees could self-select and find their best fit. I think the same solution is necessary here; people need to be in an environment where they can choose, without fear of getting cancelled, what information to compress and what to focus on. 

Wallace was right, life is about choosing what to think about - what to worship - in order to combat our default setting, which isn't always suited to modern life. If I were to rephrase Wallace's point I would say this: We should choose what to worship with our System Two, rational minds. Because if we do not, our System One minds will choose it for us.

Once we have made that decision, the next step is finding a culture that accepts that which you worship and, more importantly, that which you compress.

Review: How to be an Antiracist

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi was one of those books I felt like I had already read, even though I had not. Now that I actually have read it, I feel like I was right about his central thesis. I still learned a few things along the way.

I've seen people blame Kendi for California's new racial quota for the boards of publicly traded companies, saying it's an example of people taking his ideas and foolishly running with them. But if you read his book, this is exactly the type of thing he argues for: present discrimination to combat past discrimination. It's obvious that these critics have not read his book. I just want to grab their shoulders and shout "He's not Marting Luther King Junior, okay? He is transparent in his arguments for something more aggressive!"

The best criticism of the book is from Coleman Hughes. I am going to try to be more charitable.

I'm going to break my review into the parts where I agree, with some criticism; the parts I think he gets wrong; and finally the overall issue I have with this movement.

The Good

"To be antiracist is to recognize the reality of biological equality, that skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin... To be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape people's lives."

"Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black -- but the unfortunate truth is that their well-meaning post racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world--it allows ruling races and classes to keep on ruling."

I thing there is a general misunderstanding in certain circles about the idea of color blindness. I agree with Kendi that you can never not see color. But when people talk about being color blind, I think they just mean they strive to see past it. 

The way Kendi describes race is like Plato's allegory of the cave. Yes, we know those shadows on the wall are not reality. But if everyone lives as if they are real, we have to work within that framework.

The first bolded part references an earlier part of the chapter dealing with the Human Genome Project, which determined that all humans are 99 percent the same. He later states that "[Assimilationists] fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity."

I think he's right that, even if we could become color blind, it would do nothing to repair the harm done by past racist policies. But here it sounds like Kendi is saying that since humans of all races are nearly biologically identical, there should be no inequity in a world without these racist policies. The problem with that, as I see it, is that culture still matters. And as long as America is a multicultural society, there will be different outcomes among our numerous cultures, which can map pretty well onto race.

Why are Asian Americans among the most successful ethnic groups? We know it can't be race, and unless you can identify racial policies that uphold Asian Supremacy, you're stuck with the only other answer: culture. And when research shows that Asians do things like spending 15 percent of their income on additional educational services when the average household spends only 2 percent, or this New York Times story about how many Asian students "come from families that have scrimped on essentials like food to pay for test prep," you start to come to the conclusion: you can either have ethnic equality or you can have multiculturalism.

Immigration

I was always dubious of Coleman Hughes' writing here:

"The second natural experiment involves comparing the outcomes of black immigrants on the whole with the outcomes of American blacks (i.e., blacks descended from American slaves.) Although black immigrants (and especially their children, who are indistinguishable from American blacks) presumably experience the same ongoing systemic biases that black descendants of American slaves do, nearly all black immigrant groups out-earn American blacks, and many—including Ghanaians, Nigerians, Barbadians, and Trinidadians & Tobagonians—out-earn the national average. Moreover, black immigrants are overrepresented in the Ivy Leagues."

 Kendi comments on this same phenomenon, writing:

"studies studies showing Black immigrants are, on average, the most educated group of immigrants in the united states.... 
"Not all individuals migrate, but those who do ... are typically individuals with an exceptional ineral drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional resources."

Indeed, now I have my answer. It's selection bias. Kendi seems to suggest that when you control for variables, African immigrants do worse than non-black immigrants. I'd have to look at the data set, but he might be right.

Language

Kendi spends a chapter talking about ebonics and how America teaches that it is the wrong way to speak and to be civilized one needs to learn they way white people speak, or Standard Written English, an idea he believes is racist. I think Standard Written English was developed as a way of signaling one's highly-educated status, rather than race. But I think it provides a different and important value today.

In that sense, I both agree and disagree with Kendi. David Foster Wallace described the phenomena of language and dialect best:

"there are all sorts of cultural/geographical dialects ... with their own highly developed and internally consistent grammars, and that some of these dialects' usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense than do their Standard counterparts...
"When I'm talking to RMers (Rural Midwestern) I tend to use constructions like 'Where's it at?' for 'Where is it?'and sometimes 'He don't' for 'He doesn't.' Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not get rejected."

Regional dialect is incredibly important to social development and should not be discouraged or thought of as uncivilized. However, especially in a multicultural society, having a "standard" for language is incredibly important for communicating with people outside one's specific culture.

As someone who grew up in the Northeast and spent years living in the Appalachians of Virginia, I can tell you that there is no one way white people speak. When I talked to my family and my Virginia co-workers talked to their families, it was very different from the way my co-workers and I talked with one another at work. Knowing a standard, universal grammatical structure allows one to navigate a complex and diverse society such as America.

Moral Suasion

"Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for the desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after in passage in 2010."

This was a tough pill for me to swallow. Kendi's argument is essentially, "forget civil discourse and making friends. Force through your policies." I hate the means, but it's hard to argue against those ends.

Is public opinion downstream from policies?  I remember how angry people were when states started banning smoking in restaurants, which is now quite popular. In fact, a reversal would probably be unpopular.

However, the 1994 crime bill has gotten more unpopular with time. Legalizing abortion has not made it a less polarizing issue. Desegregating schools might be popular now, but a lot of that has to do with white flight and discriminatory housing/zoning policies that segregated communities anyway. And most of those communities lose their shit when anyone tries to build low-income housing, showing how little we've moved on segregation. 

But with other race issues, Kendi might have a point. I have to think about this more.

The Bad

Spaces

"Comparing spaces across race-classes is like matching fighters of different weight classes, which fighting sports consider unfair. Poor Black neighborhoods should be compared to equally poor White neighborhoods."

Kendi goes on to write that everything from businesses to colleges should be comparing apples to apples. And he's right, which is why I think it's foolish to look at the racial wage gap and not control for these factors. Sure, there is a huge gap. White men have most of the wealth, but that's mainly because Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, and Mark Zukerberg have most of the wealth. So it's really not comparing apples to apples.

Wilfred Reilly has shown that controlling for something as simple as geography can make most of the gap disappear. Black people are overrepresented in the south, which has lower wages (accompanied by a lower cost of living) and drags down the aggregate wage.

While he never comes out and says so, it seems that Kendi defines inequity by comparing black people to white people. I see two problems with this. First, if this is a white supremacist culture, someone forgot to tell Asian Americans. When it comes to things like earnings, educational attainment, incarceration rates, etc., there is a gap between them and everyone else, including whites and blacks. If the goal is total racial equality, shouldn't we be comparing everyone to them?

Second, when it comes to wealth/earnings, I'm kinda okay with inequality as long as we take care of everyone (which we don't). I just don't think it's the healthiest thing to measure, which I'll get to later.

Families

"millions of liberals and conservatives aghast at the growing percentage of black children being born into single-parent households in the 1970s and 1980s - aghast even though my dad turned out fine. The panic around the reported numbers of single-parent households was based on a host of faulty or untested premises..."

In extreme cases, like one he gives about an abusive, father, of course it is better for that child to be raised alone by his mother. But just because Christians promote the nuclear family, doesn't mean it's wrong. 

This Brookings report shows that if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck. I feel like the data on this is clear and Kendi is 100 percent wrong to find it faulty or untested. So yes, families do matter.

Kendi notes that Charles Murray, among others, blames this phenomenon on the welfare system. Kendi blames it on married families having fewer kids (not sure how he reaches this conclusion). Christians blame it on black families turning away from Christ. 

But there is another explanation that I'm surprised Kendi missed. Surprised, because it blames the racist US government. It has to due with an out-of-balance gender ratio caused by mass incarceration. 

Racial Hierarchies

Kendi writes: 

"A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way."

"We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group ... Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior..."

I totally agree with these ideas, which is why I cannot for the life of me understand how racist ideas like these can pass by, unchallenged, by Antiracists:

The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu

— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020

The Ugly 

One idea I struggle with is how much to hold accountable powerful people for the unintended influence they have over extreme fringe individuals. He comes across as more tepid and reasonable than many of the louder proponents of wokeism; but I don't see him calling people out for taking his ideas too far, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture I linked to above. And maybe it's wrong to expect him to.

The problem with the racist/antiracist world view is that fanatics will adopt it wholesale.

Consider shutdownstem.com:

"Our research papers turn into media releases, books and legislation that reinforce anti-Black narratives.
"For Black academics and STEM professionals, #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is a time to prioritize their needs— whether that is to rest, reflect, or to act— without incurring additional cumulative disadvantage."

So now some STEM students, instead of studying science, technology, engineering, and math, believe it is their job to produce racial equity. 

Well, maybe they just mean a certain portion of STEM can make antiracism their mission and everyone else can keep on building things and finding life-saving vaccines. Nope.

"Those of us who are not Black, particularly those of us who are white, play a key role in perpetuating systemic racism ... Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it ... #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is the time for white and non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) to not only educate themselves, but to define a detailed plan of action to carry forward."

To be fair, they do make an exception for those working on COVID-19 solutions. Everyone else needs to "get to work."

"Racist"

I don't know if Kendi intentionally chose to redefine "racist", traditionally a pejorative term, to mean something broader,  knowing most people still think of "racist" as a pejorative term.

Me: KICK PUPPIES!

Everyone: That's a horrible slogan! Why would you say that?

Me: Nononononono, the point isn't to 'kick' 'puppies' -- it's far more subtle than that. Read these 10 links explaining what the phrase REALLY means. This will get you on my side, I'm sure

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 10, 2020

The tweet above is actually a reference to the phrase "defund the police" but it gets at the same idea that I'm talking about. Most people aren't familiar with Kendi's work and will hear his readers toss the word "racist" around and think it means, well, kick puppies. I don't think Kendi intentionally did this so he could call anyone who isn't an antiracist activist an emotionally-charged word like "racist." But I do have to wonder if he knew the effect this would have on his more aggressive followers.

When describing his white teacher who only called on white kids, he writes: "I wonder if her racist ideas called up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior..." I can't help but think he's using "racist" here the way pretty much everyone else uses it, in the pejorative sense. 

I just don't think it's wise to take a phrase that has a "kick puppies" emotional reaction and just decide to use it to mean something else and expect everyone to go along with you calling them a puppy abuser.

Neutrality

"A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.... There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy."

The other issue I have is with the concept creep of labeling anything that isn't antiracist activism as racist. I probably overuse this reference, but Scott Alexander best showed the absurdity of this approach:

"Murderism” is the ideology that murdering people is good and letting them live is bad. It’s practically omnipresent: 14,000 people are murdered in the US each year. That’s a lot of murderists, and a testament to the degree to which our schools teach murderist values....

For years, people have been pushing “soft-on-crime” policies that will defund the police and reduce the length of jail sentences – inevitably increasing the murder rate. Advocates of these policies might think that just because they’re not gangsters with knives, they must not be murderists. But anybody who supports murder, whether knife-wielding gangster or policy analyst – is murderist and responsible for the effects of their murderism.

Murderism won’t stop until people understand that it’s not okay to be murderist. So next time you hear people opposing police militarization, or speaking out in favor of euthanasia – tell them that that’s murderism and it’s not okay."

Alexander is, of course, being facetious. But he's showing how you can take any ideology and frame it in such a way that it sounds like there are only two types of people: those who support my simplistic, unequivocally good idea and those who are murderists and racists supporting bad things like murder and racism.

Here are examples of antiracism in practice that do not make sense. If my town changes the speed limit on my street from 30 mph to 25 mph, since that would sustain racial inequity, that would make it a racist policy. If a school decided to suspend two white kids each month, by lottery, that would be antiracist, since it would reduce racial inequity. Despite the policy being literal racism.

Let's say there are two policing reform options. Under one, the number of citizens of each race who are killed by police will be reduced by 10 percent. Under the second option, the number of black citizens killed by police will be reduced by 5 percent, with the killing of every other race staying the same. According to Kendi's vision, antiracists would have to choose the second option, even though fewer blacks die under the first option. Not to mention the fact that fewer total people die under the first option. In fact, choosing the first option, which does not reduce equity, would be racist.

Earlier I mentioned that white men have most of the money because, of the few people who have most of the money, they are all white men. Matt Yglesias explains why this distinction is important.

"You could, in principle, try to ameliorate the resulting racial wealth gap by making the wealthy elite more racially diverse — a strategy that would do nothing to help the vast majority of non-white people. Alternatively, you could try to narrow the gap between rich and non-rich people, which would help the majority of people of all races."

In other words, an antiracism solution would seek the first strategy, leaving our massive inequality in place.

Cart Before Horse

In my town, antiracists are pushing to stop the police department from using video surveillance because it disproportionally impacts people of color. This is my other problem with Kendi's vision of antiracism; it causes people to conflate cause and effect and treat the symptom rather than the disease.

*Video surveillance is not causing the arrest of people of color. People breaking the law is what is causing them to get arrested; the video is just making it easier for police to catch them. This is the type of shit that makes MAGA heads start frothing from the mouth and grunting "LAW AND ORDER!" 

I am more interested in addressing the policies and issues that cause certain people to be more likely to turn to a life of crime. This type of nonsense is not only ineffective but more likely to get authoritarian backlash.

This is what people mean when they say they are sick of identity politics. I think it is a mistake to base one's ideology on how a policy affects one racial group compared to another racial group, rather than whether the overall human condition is improving. 

And I am in favor of things like major police reform (ending the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, and qualified immunity) that will unwind the disproportionate effect on black communities, zoning laws that hoard opportunity from disadvantaged groups, and baby bonds that could narrow the wage gap. I just don't think those things will totally wipe away inequity in a way sufficient for the "present discrimination" Kendi's vision calls for because some outcomes are more complex than simply blaming it on racism. I prefer policies that improve the human condition rather than ones that improve one's lot compared to another's.

I think most people will agree that at least some of the racial inequity today is the result of past racist policies, so it makes sense to be aware of the impact current policies have on those inequities. Antiracism is a useful lens for analyzing policy. My main criticism is not of antiracism itself, but those for whom antiracism has become their only lens. I hope I have demonstrated how the idea is flawed, which is not to say it's useless.

*edit: After reading more, it appears that research shows facial recognition software has a higher false positive rate for darker skinned people. In that case, count me in for supporting the ban.

When your outgroup uses your label

I've been following some academics who are pro critical race theory. They cannot fathom how people can be so against their ideology. 

It's like that "what I actually do" meme.

Here is what antiwokester James Lindsay thinks critical race theory is:

This is Critical Race Theory in a single image. pic.twitter.com/8ZhljbXlvp

— Sexy James Lindsay, time lord (@ConceptualJames) September 6, 2020

To Rod Graham, critical race theory is more like this:

Take a person who applies their values [value-oriented] to the world.

Then they say something like "this is what is *really* going on [uncovering the true patterns].

That is critical theory.

The irony is they are *bad* theorists, because real CT'ers collect more evidence!

— Rod Graham (@roderickgraham) September 7, 2020

Around the 1:30 mark in the video below, Mia Brett states that none of the CRT materials she uses even mentions the phrase "white privilege."

It has been an interesting 2020 so far.

I went through my #whitefragility phase and my #systemicracism phase. I think I am almost done with my #criticalracetheory phase thanks to the convo I had with @QueenMab87.

Full video:https://t.co/0dsLRQ730L pic.twitter.com/XoNCkVsLiC

— Rod Graham (@roderickgraham) October 19, 2020

While I have to credit Lindsay, he does read enough CRT scholarship to become published in the field himself, in most instances there is a survivorship/nut picking bias going on. Any ideas outside your ideology that make it into your timeline will be the most outrageous version. And the outrageous ideas from your ingroup rarely make it into your timeline or are drowned out by all the sensible takes so that you don't even notice them.

So when Lindsay dedicates his whole life to trashing CRT, Graham cannot understand how something as harmless and ordinary can invoke such a reaction. And the response is usually something like "Well, I guess he's just a racist."

It's like the new executive order against CRT training. One group thinks the training is just diversity and sensitivity training. And who could be against that? Racists, that's who.

The other group thinks it's teaching that, well, All White People Are Racist. 

I realized that I do the same thing whenever someone trashes capitalism. I always think: "You don't want choice? You do realize communism has failed miserably every time it's been tried, right? And you do know that those Nordic countries are capitalist countries, with, in many ways, freer markets than ours, right?"

What I've realized is that when people use capitalism in this sense, they usually just mean greed. And everyone hates greed. There is nothing wrong with trying to imagine a world without greed.

The pro CRT folks I follow don't preach that all white people are racist or uphold Robin DiAngelo as their spokesperson. But they also don't speak up when the Smithsonian says things like "showing up on time" and "perfecting a task" are functions of “whiteness”. And I'm not sure it's their job to police their own, but it would help with outgroup understanding and coalition building, if anyone cares about those things anymore.

So I am going to try and give more charitable responses to people trashing the labels and ideas of their outgroup. 

• I'm going to assume that James Lindsay just means he doesn't like language that has the (possibly unintended) effect of dividing people racially and that people should have the freedom to not have to be exposed to this belief.
• When someone says Black Lives Matter, I'm going to assume they just mean that they think if a cop kills an unarmed, non-threatening person, they should be held accountable. 
• When someone says Back the Blue, Blue Lives Matter, or shows support for their local police department, I'm going to assume they just think that cops have a tough and dangerous job and they want them to know they acknowledge and appreciate it.
• When someone says All Lives Matter, I'm going to assume they mean that they believe in equality and don't understand the purpose of BLM.

If Rod Graham is correct, since I just wrote a whole blog post about "what I really think is going on," then I guess this blog post is Critical Theory. So there you go.

The Purpose Social Capital is to Spend It.

One of the ways I use this blog is to think through ways to reverse the decline of social capital. I'm starting to think my approach has been putting the cart before the horse. In order to increase social capital, there has to be a need for it.

What if the reason social capital and the strength of community have declined is because the market has gotten so efficient? What if the reason people played card with friends and family, went to church, joined civic groups, and volunteered in their community had less to do with selflessness, and more to do with selfishness?

In other words, people partook in these activities to build up goodwill and social capital in case they needed to ask a favor. The more people like you, the more likely they are to help you. 

People today ask fewer favors, which is a good argument for the effectiveness capitalism or government programs.

I want there to be more social capital and civic engagement. I want a stronger community to balance out the overwhelming growth of state and market. But to do so, I'd probably have to change the incentives for why people build social capital in the first place. 

Lately, I've become less convinced that, through policy, you can increase social capital and the strength of the community. The incentive might have to come about on its own through the weakening of the market or the state.

Here are possible scenarios that might create the incentive for more social capital.

Pandemic-related scenarios:

• The homeschooling movement and pandemic pods require coordination between families who work remotely. 
• The closure of many bars and restaurants, unable to survive covid-19 regulations, creates a need for social interaction that neighbors fill by hosting meals more frequently. 
• Limitations on school busing leads to families working together to coordinate rides to school.

Market-failure reasons:

• automation puts more people out of work, so they rely on social capital and the help of neighbors to help them for networking or basic sustenance.
• protectionist policies, a lack of innovation, or debt-fueled inflation leads to a shrinking economy and a need for community support for sustenance/basic needs. 

Government-failure reasons:

• due to the decline in fertility and tight immigration policies, social security runs out of money. Senior citizens move back in with their kids since they can't afford to retire.
• Increasing debt leads to the devaluation of the dollar. Eventually, the government must balance its books via slashing spending on social security and medicare/medicaid, plus raising taxes. This not only shrinks the economy, but puts senior citizens in a bind, who then turn to family for support. Without access to a public healthcare option, people will return to the old model of negotiating with private insurers through local civic organizations.
• Even after a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available, parents who switch to homeschooling find that they like it better than public schools and continue to coordinate their pods with local families, leading to smaller but tighter friendships. 

Unfortunately, all of these scenarios require something bad to happen before social capital can increase.

To be an American

I ended my last blog post wondering what simple response would most Americans agree on to the question: what does it mean to be an American? A good follow up question is to ask how we can ritualize that answer?

We are a large and diverse population but we are all protected by the Constitution. We too easily forget about those protections. Here is what I propose: a bizzaro Purge day. Instead of one day a year when there are no laws, one day a year we exercise our rights protected by our laws. Some examples:

• Exercise your freedom of speech. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, a blog post, or a social media rant about how terrible your elected officials are. 
• Enjoy your free exercise of religion. Pray to a different God for a day (this clearly breaks a commandment, so proceed at your own risk). Attend a different church. What are they gonna do, kick you out? So what. Then stand outside the church with a sign that says—oh, that reminds me ... 
• Exercise your freedom of assembly! Attend a rally, even if you're the only person there, even for something completely benign or senseless. "No More Mondays!"
• Share on social media the most searing journalistic critique of the government, something controversial. Your Facebook friends might be able to block your unpopular views but the government cannot.
• Use your right to petition. Send an email to your congressional representative about how much you hate Mondays.
• Second amendment time! Buy a gun. Don't like guns? Buy a used gun and turn it over to your local police department.
• Third amendment time! Let a soldier into your home ... then kick their ass out! (Thank them for their service.)
• 21st amendment! BUY ALCOHOL. 
• If it's a voting day, vote. If not, register to vote.

There are endless opportunities to take advantage of the freedoms afforded to all citizens. Make sure you're using them, even if you don't need them. 

All right, so when do we do this? Easy: September 17, Constitution Day. 

I know you can piss all over this post with some "until all of us are protected under the constitution, none of us are." Sure, civil asset forfeiture is a clear 4th amendment violation that happens every day in many poor communities. Sure, voter suppression clearly violates people's constitutional rights to vote. We should not ignore these things. 

But one day a year, put that all aside and just be grateful. Join your fellow citizens and participate in this universal experience of celebrating the rights we do have. It's the American thing to do.

Assimilation vs. Multiculturalism

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

In How To Be An Antiracist, Ibram Kendi examines three approaches for dealing with race in America: Assimilation, Segregation, and Antiracism. 

It's fair to say that segregation as a theory has lost. In its place, it evolved into some combination of desegregation, antiracism, and integration into a new term that, when you get down to it, is not all that different from segregation: multiculturalism. It's segregation without the coercion. (I'm describing theories here, not practice. In practice, housing discrimination and zoning have resegregated communities, not multiculturalism.)

In the essay "Unbecoming American", Johann N. Neem writes beautifully about being an Indian immigrant, what it means to be an American, and how that meaning is fading.

"Last year, when I ran into my son’s coach at the mall, he stumbled awkwardly after asking me if I was Christmas shopping, as if he’d committed an offense against my brown skin. In fact, I was Christmas shopping and I was as miserable as he seemed to be about finding myself at the mall. Why would he think I would feel more welcome by being excluded from American traditions? There is a big difference between asking non-Christians to pray and inviting them, as fellow Americans, to sing carols, eat cookies, and share good cheer. The inability of well-meaning progressives to understand that difference may result in an America with many small tents next to a larger but less inclusive one."

It's a long and wonderful essay, but this paragraph nicely describes his three different versions of America. 

• Assimilation: asking non-Christians to pray. 
• Multiculturalism: many small tents next to a larger but less inclusive one. 

He also describes a third way, which I will get to, that includes an invitation to "sing carols, eat cookies, and share good cheer."

Spaces

Kendi also wrote about the concept of black spaces. Professor Roderick Graham explains the idea here, quantifying it by measuring levels of anxiety among African-Americans in spaces where they are the minority (non-HBCU colleges, white-collar offices, etc.). This is why we now have "safe spaces."

In the political landscape, the idea of spaces is kind of like the libertarian idea of federalism or localism; instead of a strong central government, you divert power to the many individual state and local governments. 

In order to unite the 13 original colonies, the founders had to agree to respect some level of sovereignty. States needed to be safe spaces, but in order to unite, they needed something similar to assimilation. Or, as Stephen Pinker explains in Enlightenment Now, an appeal to Humanism.

“History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that 8 of the 13 British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministries salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right."

The states didn't agree on a single religion, but they agreed on the right to practice and not intrude on other states' religions.  

Universal Programs or Universal Culture

I think the crux of many contemporary American problems is that we still haven't decided if we are a multicultural or an assimilationist society. Are we going to have our own spaces or are we going to expect shared spaces? The answer is important because this decision will affect policy.

Multiculturalists tend to be progressives, and progressives tend to want strong national programs like Medicare for All, Universal Pre-K, and free college, in addition to more support for current national programs like social security and public education.

Progressives have not made much progress on these issues. My theory is that on things like healthcare, there are too many cultural values baked into it. How are we ever going to get a country to decide on a national healthcare plan that includes things like abortion, birth control, gender transitional surgery, hormone therapy, or conversion therapy? 

It's the same reason why is Tom Cotton trying to ban the 1619 Project from being taught in public schools? Because everyone is trying to insert their own space into a national program that is supposed to serve everyone.  

Multiculturalists 🤝 Libertarians

One solution is for space-loving multiculturalists to create a natural coalition with space-loving libertarians: abandon national programs and use states and localities as spaces to create their own unique cultures.

I saw a progressive friend retweet a tweetstorm from Martellus Bennet about the education system. I wonder how many libertarians nodded along as they read this tweet, using the same argument they use for the dissolution of the Department of Education.  

Not just some generic idea of what education is. Geography plays a major role in what kids are interested in and how the learn. Design the schools for the communities that they exist in.

— Martellus Bennett (@MartysaurusRex) August 3, 2020

The uniformity of national programs necessarily rejects multiculturalism. 

Other countries can get away with universal healthcare because there is a dominant culture and civic pride. In “This Is How Scandinavia Got Great” David Brooks writes:

“They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person...

Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town...

Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms."

Why don't we have something like bildung taught in our schools? It's simple: we are diverse and multicultural, the Nordic countries are not. They assimilate. We sort. (side note: Canada might be an exception. They have a very diverse population and universal healthcare. With the Canada Health Act being signed in 1984, it looks like they got it passed right before a surge of immigration. I wonder if it would pass today, as their affective polarization is increasing and ethnic diversity tends to decrease trust.)

If you want space, you cannot have national programs. If you want national programs, you'll need something like Humanism, and a dash of assimilation.

Infinite Reversals

Noah Smith wrote a column arguing for expanding Medicare. He tweeted about hating market-based solutions to healthcare.

Yep. If someone says we should move toward "free market health care", don't take them seriously. Free markets are great for some things, but not for health care. We need government health care to free our businesses to focus on markets that actually work. https://t.co/sO2NuBpYng

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 13, 2020

I decided to ask Noah what he thought of Switzerland's model, which uses only private insurers and has 100 percent coverage. This was his response: 

We tried something like it with Obamacare but it was too vulnerable to political reversals.

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 13, 2020

I worry that this is the trend for all newly proposed federal programs; they are all vulnerable to political reversals. 

Inclusive American Culture

Kendi might argue that assimilation is just whiteness, just giving into Tom Cotton's world view. I would argue that a better version of assimilation is more like Humanism: we should be many small tents under one big tent. 

We shouldn't push our religious or ideological views on others, but we should view things like singing Christmas carols and decorating a town tree as more American than religious, an invitation to celebrate the human spirit in a uniquely American way.

An example of good cultural appropriation is the Holyoke St. Patrick's Day weekend. Holyoke, Mass. was known as the Paper City for all the downtown paper mills that sprung up during the industrial revolution. The city attracted many Irish immigrants, setting the stage for what has become the second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country, in a city of roughly 40,000 people. 

Today, more than half of the residents are Hispanic, and yet St. Patrick's Day weekend is livelier than it has ever been. Show up and you'll see Puerto Rican children with green shamrocks painted on their faces. You can grab a Guinness at an Irish-themed bar, walk across the street and order Dos Equis at the Latin American Motorcycle Association. The phrase "Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day" has never felt more real because the event celebrates the community and welcomes everyone.

Like the Holyoke St. Patrick's Day Weekend, there has to be a national common human experience that holds us together. Something more unifying than libertarian and multicultural spaces. Something more inclusive than monoculture. Something less coercive than a national program infused with one tribe's values. 

If both tribes can agree on a simple question, we can solve this problem. 

The question? What does it mean to be an American?

Cheat codes

I was reading an assigned poetry book for a college course several years ago. One of the poems began like this:

Up up down down left right left right B A start. 

The professor, a gen Xer, and I, a Xennial, were the only ones in the class of early Gen Zers who got the reference. That sequence is the cheat code to the game Contra on the original Nintendo system.

When I was a kid, everyone knew that code. It passed from gamer to gamer, like a piece of juicy gossip. The author of the poetry book is a Gen Xer who grew up in North Carolina. I had no idea how prevalent this code was so far from my home town. Although my generation's childhood was more sheltered than, say, the Boomers, we still grew up before the Internet was a thing. That means this cheat code spread due to the strength of social capital.

I'm not sure the same phenomenon can happen with today's kids, especially in a post-COVID world. But I'm not sure that it matters. 

The other day I finally gave in to my eight-year-old son's pleading and played Minecraft with him. His depth of knowledge of the game exceeds the cumulative knowledge of all the games I have ever played. He knows how to craft and enchant complex weapons, how to build portals, and he beats me in combat with ease, all while calling me a "newb."

He's played online with a friend a handful of times, otherwise he has learned all of this on his own. When he's not playing Minecraft, he's watching videos of YouTubers playing Minecraft and learning from them.

When I was a kid, playing video games was a social event. You learned how to beat Don Flamenco (dodge his big uppercut, then alternate left and right hits to the head until he falls) by playing with friends. My son learns these things on his own. While he is probably lacking in the development of social skills, his technical knowledge has far surpassed any level I could ever have attained.

I definitely worry about the decline of social capital, and if this is evidence of that, but I also wonder if it even matters. I wonder if technology has made it so he'll be able to solve problems on his own. 

I still think social skills are important for mental health. Having a community reduces the odds of being a mass shooter or being seduced by radical ideology. But I'm no longer convinced you need it for professional success.