discouragement for young writers

For balance, maybe.

I'm not a writer, I'm just someone who reads and writes a lot. So you may take all of this in a "credit only to the man in the arena" sense, and I wouldn't blame you. But I'll tell you: there are advantages. Not being a writer is a wonderful salve for your writing. I sometimes read things that writers have written and say to myself, if only s/he wasn't a writer, s/he'd be going places.

Consider not telling anyone. I have just found that a lot of people I know have told anyone who will listen, "I'm gonna be X," and then every day they don't become that, they slowly suffocate. "I'm writing a screenplay," I'm 90% sure, is as self injurious as huffing paint. "I'm going to be a writer" is not something to drop lightly. They will eat you up with judgmental eyes if you fail, and you will almost certainly fail. It's not like saying "I'm gonna be an actuary." It's more personal than that. That's why you want it.

More than anything: yes, people who are great at things tend to be convinced that they are great. But many, many people get the causation backwards. Remember that the person who wrote the worst novel ever was convinced it was treasure.

You probably can't make it as a writer. That's the very first thing you should understand. Start everyday by looking into the mirror and saying: I'll never write that novel. I'll never write that novel. I'll never write that novel. Hopefully after you've gotten it through your skull you can get to work on something that will put money in your pocket. (Spoiler: it won't be a lot. Within a rounding error of $0 is a nice, conservative assumption.) You might, if you aren't too hung up on writing that novel, write a novel. There's a small chance someone will buy it, once you've written the one that isn't the one that you think about writing that gets in the way of your work. There's even a remote possibility it'll be good. Even really good. But probably not.

I'm not saying that in some reverse-psychology, "this is a test," I'm-being-superficially-discouraging-but-really-think-you-will-make-it sense. I'm saying it in the "you will try and are far more likely to fail than to succeed" sense. In the time it took you to read the last paragraph some 48-year old was laid off by The Village Voice, and they're smarter than you and have lived ten times what you've lived and can write so much better than you I actually almost feel bad for you, and now they're on the same job market trying to scramble for the same shitty 10-cents-a-word gig recapping a show about couponing for the AV Club in the hopes that they can bang out some soul-destroying tedious bullshit so that a pack of talentless losers in the comments can pick their words apart from the safety of their beige plastic cubicles as they try to distract themselves with pop culture for long enough to keep their all-devouring self-hatred at bay. You might get that gig over them but if so it's only because you're young and cheap and stupid and the scuzzy editor thinks he might be able to fuck you after the Christmas party.

You almost certainly can't make it as a freelance writer. I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm saying: you almost certainly can't make it as a freelance writer. I think the essential thing to understand is that the next level, the really lucrative stuff that you get after you "get your name out there," doesn't exist. The little publications can't pay and the medium publications want to con you into thinking that publishing for them for next to nothing will get you a piece in one of the big ones and the big ones figure just giving you the platform is payment enough. You can't live on publishing in the New York Times and The Atlantic three times a year. Look: a lot of the supposed freelance writers you know of either come from money or work as shills on the side. Everybody's gotta eat, I'm not judging. But many or most freelance writers aren't. Ask other writers, preferably after a couple drinks. They'll tell you.

They'll also tell you who they think sucks. Oh, how they'll tell you. And trust me: every writer you have ever read thinks many, many other writers suck. That's the cliche, after all, and it's true. They all think they're better than most everybody else. (And you should never, ever read one who doesn't.) When they tell you, don't repeat it. I don't mean to play to my reputation. But it's an ass-kissing business. (Protip: all businesses are ass-kissing businesses.) Spend a day on Twitter and just count how much of it is writers congratulating other writers. Like I said: everybody's gotta eat. Lord knows I've spent enough of my real life life shining the right shoes. Sometimes you have to eat shit in your life, so you eat it. It's just a question of what you can accept and what you can't. Just understand that you will be regularly required to say that pieces are good which you know to be bad, to say that people are talented that you know to be shit, that publications are cool which you know to be Thought Catalog. Do it if you have to, I won't judge. Just be mindful when you do it.

Buzz is nothing. Getting your name out there is nothing. All of the positive mentions and trackbacks and Facebook hits from that piece you did for somebody's vanity project website are nothing. Money isn't everything. But you can use it to buy food. Want to call yourself a writer? Get paid. Eat. Pay the rent. Never doubt that a generation of young "writers" is publishing endlessly, never getting paid, convinced that tomorrow some magazine will call and they'll get to sign the Rich and Famous contract like from The Muppet Movie. Those people are idiots. They are also your competition.

Jack Kerouac said that you are a genius all the time. He was out of his fucking mind on speed when he said it.

It's a fact of life that writers, who always aspire to speak with specificity and go in fear of abstraction, tend to give the most vague, useless advice on writing. "Use concrete language! Write about what you know! Listen to criticism!" Thanks, coach. They mean well. They really do. But "be specific in your writing" has as much content as "make a profit in your business" or "score more points in your football game." Useless. All useless.

Don't mistake noble sentiment in offering constructive criticism for accuracy of feedback. Many writers are terrible at giving feedback on specific pieces of writing. They misidentify what's wrong and misapply what's right. They tend to give criticism that is actually a reflection of what they fear is wrong with their own writing and give praise that they secretly think they deserve themselves. Likewise, don't mistake ignoble hating for inaccuracy of feedback. Blind, ugly haters who are motivated by a mere desire to denigrate often give the most accurate criticism.

Still if it remains important to you to know real criticism from mere hating, trust this: only a hater cares about the novelty of what he or she is saying. Someone giving criticism out of a genuine desire to help— or, at least, to tell the truth— doesn't care if they are the first or thousandth person to give that particular kind of feedback. A hater wants to sting in a novel way and grows disillusioned when they learn that you've heard it all before. And if you're serious about this and  you're any good at all, you've heard it before. So: are they right? Fix it and ignore the people who wanted so badly to be the first ones to tell you.

Get your prose right. Sift through the words around you like an autistic child on the beach, picking endlessly through grains of sand until he finds one of pure glass.

Writers love to heap praise on editors. They do both because editing is absolutely valuable and absolutely necessary, and because nobody ever remembers the editors, nor should they. Plus, they sometimes send you checks in the mail. Editors have power over you, but while they're editing you, they know that you are the writer and they aren't. Both are reasons to be nice to them.

The royal "we" is to be used only in the sentence "we are a fucking poseur."

Maybe you'll get yourself a sweet little gig at a magazine with an "alternative revenue stream." Or maybe you'll write ten posts along the lines of "24 Koalas Who Would Rather Be Tasting the Rainbow with New Tart 'N' Tangy Skittles" a week and get to recap the latest pretentious bullshit from HBO twice a month. Or maybe you'll get a sweet gig writing blog posts for WaPo and incidentally teaching three of the nation's most affordable GMAT classes a week. I hope you do, I really hope you do. But you probably won't. Seriously.

Nobody gives a shit that you used to cut yourself. Nobody gives a shit that your parents divorced. Nobody gives a shit that you have cancer. Nobody cares. Can you make them know what it's like to be you for awhile? Then, they'll care. But it's always on their terms, through their own metaphor. That's the deal: you write the words. They make it about themselves. If you can't give that stuff away for them to play with, save it for your diary.

Go ahead and put this in Autotext now: "Congrats to * on the new gig at *! * couldn't have picked a better (wo)man for the job!" In related advice, buy a bottle of gin. It'll help.

If you catch shade from another writer, someone more respected and established, remember that they're bullshit and their work is bullshit and they only got successful because they sucked enough dick, metaphorical or literal. And remember that when it comes to relentless, soul-crushing insecurity, writer are like actors, only less attractive. It's true. Think of that insight like a fireman's axe behind break-in-case-of-emergency glass. You don't have to know what you would possibly do with it to know it can cut people to ribbons. It's for emergencies, for a rainy day.

Writing rivals sprinting or ballet in its inegalitarianism. Many people simply do not have it. You can work your ass off every day and still be terrible. More likely, you will work your ass off every day and be serviceable, while some pretentious jerk with half your dedication can toss off something in 15 minutes that blows your shit away. Yes, you need to read a lot. Yes, you need to write a lot. Yes, you need to practice your craft. You can do all of that religiously and still suck. That's life. It's like Bad News Bears: you can love it, but it doesn't have to love you back. Sift around in your mind for awhile and find every spare concept like "unfair" or "should" or "deserves"  and toss them on the fire. Those are liar's words. They have nothing to do with adult life and nothing, nothing, nothing to do with writing. I don't care what Malcolm Gladwell says; 10,000 hours of practice might be better spent playing Snood. That's the gamble.

Every time you write the word "swagger," you lose 5% of your writing ability. Every time you use it to describe yourself, you also lose 5% of your self-respect. And you should.

Remember that they only cultivate active dislike of you if they are deeply stung by what you write. The people who leap at every chance to criticize you are the ones you should treasure; you've affected them more deeply with your writing than you could have hoped. That guy who sees your @ on Twitter and has to complain about you? He's been moved by you. That's rare and valuable. Cultivate what you have with him. A real, reflexive response like that— that's worth celebrating.

Your ideas are the single cheapest thing you have to offer. No editor ever spent 15 seconds worrying that they didn't have enough ideas to publish.

None of this, by the way, means that I don't think you should write. What else are you going to do? I can't sleep at night, and I don't like the drugs they prescribe. So I write. There are worse things. The decision to try and be a writer is a different equation, but I suppose it's similarly physiological. So do it for awhile and if you don't make it find something else that's good enough. Then you can get all nostalgic about when you tried it out. I'm a romantic at heart, and it's a beautiful thing to attempt.

Sweet people tell you sweet little things that you want to hear. In their telling, everything is possible.

If anyone give you shit, tell them I said they can go to hell. Just remember that, odds are, you aren't very good. But you can tell them to go to hell either way.

Update: My intention is that you take this about a third less seriously than it seems, and since most people take me about half as seriously as I intend, by my calculations you'll take about every sixth word seriously. (Uh, that's back of the envelope math, there.) Besides, I'm one of the people you can tell to go to hell.

(Seriously, though: desire has very little to do with whether you will make any money as a writer or if you will be good at it. Because  you don't get what you want in life.)

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It would be easier to rebut stupid conspiracy theories if the government stopped doing conspiratorial shit

You know, this Ibragim Todashev story is fucking crazy, and it's amazing that more people aren't pointing out that it's fucking crazy. And it's exactly the reason why it's impossible to stop stupid conspiracy theories like 9/11 Was An Inside Job or The Moon Landing Was Faked or chemtrails or black helicopters or whatever: because we've had a history of government conspiracies like the Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the CIA facilitating the inner-city crack trade, and because even when conspiracy theorists are wrong, the government acts in such a monumentally shady way that it creates space for crazy ideas. I don't doubt that the CIA tracked Osama bin Laden to Pakistan, in part through the use of a bogus vaccination campaign, sent a Seal Team to his compound, which then made a nighttime raid in which he and several people in his household were killed. But, you know, when you then throw his corpse into the sea, people are going to talk.

I don't want to reopen the Benghazi can of worms, but you have a classic case of government officials  filibustering, obfuscating, dissembling, switching stories.... As I've said, I think that the Republicans are being partisan and dishonest in how they're pursuing that story, and that the real scandal of Benghazi is about the CIA and our diplomatic service, not the Obama administration. But look, when you've made your entire consular and diplomatic apparatus a tool of your intelligence services, as we have, guess what? People have license to believe all kinds of crazy things. The parts of our government that should be most transparent and accountable, the parts that bring violent force to bear, are in fact the least accountable, to the point of being out of control.

This won't endear me to some of my progressive friends. I've just personally never seen any contradiction in believing that government is necessary, that it can do positive good if we force it to, and that it is absolutely never to be trusted. I find those, in fact, naturally corollaries of each other.

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Slate's Rosetta Stone

Hidden in this piece on hating the band The National, Carl Wilson unintentionally provides the key for understanding Slate:

In the end, it simply seems too repressive and stultifying to demand that we give up entirely on the fundamental pop pleasure of taking a side. Too often that instinct has manifested itself in discarding important genres, or valid modes such as sentimental or aggressive music, and especially in masking a social prejudice as an aesthetic one—hating artist x as a stand-in for hating “the kind of people who listen to x.” In this case, though, I’m the kind of person who listens to the National—adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy. If the competition is merely intramural, merely Beatles-versus-Stones, I get to choose my colors.

Of course, there's no contradiction here: the kind of people adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types hate the most are other adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types. And that is what animates Slate, that annoyance. It's partially self hatred and partially the hatred of those who resemble you in many ways but who, in your own mind, fall far short of your own standards. I'm not suggesting that that's a ridiculous attitude; we all feel some version of these feelings, and unless you're of the opinion that all people are equal in temperament and character, they can be rational. But I am saying that satisfying this desire, to grind away the resentment of the digitally-inclined creative (or "creative") bourgeois, is the real ethos of Slate. The contrarianism is a means, not an end; cheesing off other AWMCLATs will often involve defying the conventional wisdom in a kind of showy way.

I'll tell you: it's a living. You've got to give it up to the people at Slate, as they've found a formula that has made them that rare creature, a consistently successful web magazine. The results, for me, are more likely to be annoying than enjoyable, but then I'm not really the target audience, and often enough they do produce entertaining work. I'm a fan of The National but I quite liked Wilson's piece, in large part because he both takes his aesthetic and artistic commitments seriously (the surest route to my heart) and recognizes the ways in which they're a little bit ridiculous.

You've got to read Slate through the lens of how individual pieces satisfy the central dictum. Given the perception of AWMCLATs as insufficiently devoted to capitalism, Slate's economics tend toward the neoliberal and market-oriented. Given the (false but widespread) perception that AWMCLATs are cultural elites, Slate's art and media criticism tends toward the "poptimist." Etc. etc. As an unapologetic lefty with sympathy towards high culture, I expect to read in something of an antagonistic mode. There's some topics I find it's better simply to avoid; anything about, for example, organic food is likely to be hugely annoying, because that subject fits too perfectly into the AWMCLAT stereotype and the analysis will be too laden with signalling to be of much use. Pick and choose, pick and choose.

Wilson gets more explicit:

And it’s this manoeuver that makes me realize some of my impatience with The National or Radiohead is that they enact what I fear it would be like if I—as a fellow vocationally thinky type—led a rock band.... These bands remind me of myself in earnest-dude mode, thinking I can win someone over if I go on stacking point upon point instead of exposing my unreliable heart.... 

So maybe I hate this goddamn band because I hate my goddamn self, and I should get some goddamn therapy instead of taking it out on the goddamn National. But perhaps my reaction to the National is a healthy form of self-suspicion.

If more people would write with this kind of candor about the tangled web of personality-formation, cultural commitments, and rational arguments that go into our ideas, we'd be more honest and more happy. As much as I tease (or yell at) the AWMCLATs, particularly the fussy types who write at Slate, I think that this reflexive tendency to distrust and judge those that are most like you is bad for them and for you both. It's an unhealthy fixation, one that is the product of a unique combination of the medium of the internet and a set of cultural convictions about art and media that could hardly be more tangled, meta, and self-defensive. I know it's unhealthy for me, anyway.

What really bums me out is that Wilson shows the most distrust for his "earnest dude" self. I suppose Wilson would say that Earnest Dude Chris Wilson is in fact the pretentious, self-deluded part of his personality, the part of him that is sentimental and romantic in its convictions. What Wilson identifies as The National's defensive posture, the self-control that bothers him, is to my mind precisely their refusal to risk sentimentality. If you are the kind of person who regularly reads, say, Vice magazine, you could be forgiven for thinking that sentiment and romance are the worst possible intellectual sins. I don't know, maybe.

But I suspect that, in fact, the earnest part of many people is their least defensive and most alive side, and that if they were completely honest with themselves, the would rather occupy it more often. And so for all of my needling, I fear in fact that these kind of cultural pathologies are bad chiefly because they make a sin of your becoming more fully yourself.

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holidaying

Don't mind me for a little bit. I'm trying to force myself to relax this week, as June begins a period of craziness and necessary academic work. I'm gonna try and spend a little time on interests I don't usually get to indulge, as you can see here, and to avoid the boo birds for a little bit. I generally have a really hard time living up to these edicts, though, so we'll see. Enjoy the day off for those of you who have one.

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my dream: five federal universities

Alan Jacobs reflects on the tuition crisis cogently. You should check out his thoughts.

One thing that I want to point out is that the madcap desire by so many universities to attract the most competitive students— expressed, at its most perverse, as an out-and-out desire to reject more students every year— is implicated in this process. Colleges (and by that I mean their administrators) are desperate to attract the students with the best high school portfolios. But unfortunately, high school students are not that moved by the abstraction of instruction quality. They are, instead, largely moved by the tangible "ooh" factor of dorms, gyms, and dining halls. That's what the internal research of a lot of colleges says, anyway. It's kind of amazing that these young people (many of whom I've worked with) are so mercenary in pursuing getting into an elite college and so systematic in their applications, and yet can make decisions based on such ancillary reasons. But then again... they're 18 years old. Asking them to not just make major life choices but to make ones that specifically require delaying gratification and choosing fiscal sobriety over prestige is a recipe for unhappiness.

Perhaps what's really irrational is having this massive system that depends so much on the whims of teenagers. But listen. There is rational assessment and then there is irrational panic, and when it comes to discussion of college there's far too much of the latter. As Noah Millman says, things that are unsustainable won't be sustained. Reform is possible, and indeed, is far more likely than the doomsday scenarios announced by those who are typically animated by anti-academic resentments.

So how to address the problem? I've made some arguments before about what individual schools can do, and I think they stand up to scrutiny. But we've got to look at some structural changes. The bottom line is that while a university shouldn't be run like a business, and can't if it's to fulfill its fundamental mission, universities have to compete on price for the good of everyone.

I'm not going to address the MOOC argument here, largely because it's not my focus here, but also because the MOOC argument is so empty as an argument. It's the ultimate example of The Borg Complex; so often, I interact with people who express no coherent argument beyond "it is inevitable." MOOC discussions have frighteningly little to say about if they work, don't reflect on the rampant potential for cheating and fraud, and don't recognize that most undergraduates have no interest at all in living in their parents basement's for their college years. MOOCs can be a great resource for nontraditional students. Anyway. "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."

The first thing: uncapped student loans need to go. The sentiment is noble; the results, terrible. As long as there's loose money tied to the impulse control of people in their teens and early twenties, people are going to find themselves under mountains of debt. As long as students can borrow, colleges have no direct incentive to compete on price. I know: our message has been the sitcom family fantasy of "you can go anywhere you can get into." That just doesn't fly anymore. Yes, it's nice to go to an expensive university, just like it's nice to have a luxury car or a nice house. It is not responsible for government to help people go into debt to buy luxury items.

Second: the states have to start funding public universities again. The cuts in the last decade have been incredible. The states are good about expressing pride in their universities, but pride doesn't pay the bills.

If the state U's can claw some funding back and compete on price, that's a big start. But we should make the competition to lower costs while providing quality instruction even fiercer. Here's my dream: a system of five federal universities. Northeastern American University, Southeastern American University, Central American University, Southwestern American University, and Northwestern American University. They would be explicitly oriented towards providing a cheap, quality education in the traditional sense. I'd like to shoot for a tuition of $0, and I think that is a achievable goal with the right governmental funding, charitable support, and ruthlessness about unnecessary amenities. I would settle for $2,500 a year for any student from within each geographical region and $5,000 for any students who want to go to a university from outside of their region.

Alan puts the essential bargain better than I could:

How about this? Maybe someone could have the imagination to say: By the quality of our teaching. I am waiting for some bold college president to come forth and say, “You won’t find especially nice dorms at our college. They’re clean and neat, but there’s nothing fancy about them. We don’t have a climbing wall. Our food services offer simple food, made as often as possible with fresh ingredients, but we couldn’t call it gourmet eating. There are no 55-inch flat-screen TVs in the lounges of our dorms. We don’t have these amenities because we decided instead to invest in full-time, permanent faculty who are genuinely dedicated to teaching and advising you well and preparing you for life after college. So if you want the state-of-the-art rec center, that’s cool, but just remember that the price you’ll pay for that is to have most of your classes taught by graduate students and contingent faculty, the first of whom won’t have the experience and the second of whom won’t have the time to be the kind of teachers you need (even when, as is often the case, they really want to be). Our priorities here are pretty much the reverse of those that dominate many other schools. So think about that, and make a wise decision.”

Here's the bargain students make. As Alan says, you don't get all of the stuff you get at so many universities. No vortex pool; no sushi chefs in the dining hall; no dorms designed by Frank Gehry. You'll get what you need. We'll have computer labs, but they won't be at every corner of the campus like they are in most. Your dorms will be like dorms from the seventies: utilitarian, not very big, but serviceable and homey. And, sorry: you don't get the truly endless amount of student services on offer at most colleges now. That set of clubs and activities and events that could fill a phone book, we don't have that here. Not just because they cost money in and of themselves but because they take staff, and a huge part of the current tuition crisis boils down to the explosion in administration. You can organize clubs and activities and we'll give you spaces in the common areas to do them, but it's gonna be a shoestring affair. You'll have to make things work with your own fundraising and effort. Intramural Ultimate Frisbee sounds doable. Intramural crew does not.

And I'm afraid you're going to have to settle for intramural and club teams you can cobble together, because there will be no NCAA varsity sports in this university system. None. Sorry. Despite what most people think, college sports are a money loser for the vast majority of schools. And getting new teams up and running would be even more needlessly expensive. No giant stadiums, no rooting for the old college team. Can't afford it. Can't afford it!

So if they're giving up these things, what do they get? They get a school that is dedicated to providing excellent teaching and career and personal development at a tiny fraction of the cost of many major universities. They get a university system that believes that the actual education should represent the value of attendance, not the name on the degree. They get an education that is based on the idea on personal growth, not on "having an experience," which is best left to Disneyland. More than anything, they start their adult lives equipped with knowledge and skills (having had fun!) without the crushing debt that so many others have faced.

The bargain with faculty is easier. The academic job market being what it is, there's tons of published, talented people who are eager to teach and research who would leap at the chance. Here's the case we make. Six figure salaries are not in your future here. (Most humanities and social sciences profs are laughing out loud at that, as that wasn't in the cards for them anyway, but for some in the STEM disciplines, it's a legitimate concern.) You don't get the gleaming palaces. The amenities available to you will not be equivalent to what people at many schools get. That is a special concern for those in fields with major physical and infrastructural research needs. What you get, instead, is a university where the faculty are still the heart of the university. You won't feel outnumbered by administrators, or feel like you've become a cog in a machine you don't control. The faculty senate will be able to effect real change in policy. You're not going to find your control over essential university functions increasingly being taken by miscellaneous admins.

I genuinely believe that there are many fantastic faculty members who would want to be a part of a university system like this.

The discussion of teaching versus research in the contemporary university is complicated, and I don't want to go too into depth about it here. I do think, in broad terms, that the dilemma is a false one. It is the case that in my fantasy university system here, in order to maintain a commitment to tenure-track faculty teaching as large of a percentage of the classes as possible, professors will have to teach a somewhat larger load than those at R-1 universities. It's also true that, in an effort to keep administrative costs low, many jobs previously done by faculty members will have to be taken up by them again. I believe that there is a balance that can be struck where faculty are given credit for research and given opportunities like sabbatical to undertake it, while maintaining the focus on teaching. I also believe that it's perfectly legitimate for individual universities to develop research, teaching, and administrative tracks within their professoriate, and that compensation and benefits can be tweaked in a way that makes all three of these necessary elements respected and valued within the school.

We're living in a time of deep anti-academic sentiment, some of it fair, much of it not. What I observe in my daily life and want to share with others, more than anything else, is just how many people are deeply committed to the fundamental job of the university: to create and house knowledge, skills, insights, and ways of knowing, and to share those with people who want to learn, so that they might better themselves and their society. I will fully admit to a deep and abiding romanticism towards the university. But then I should. Because while I have seen the worst of the academy, I have also seen the best, and I believe in what it can mean for individuals and for our society.

The dramatic increase in tuition, the collapse of public funding, and the attendant rise in crushing debt represent one of the great moral challenges of our lifetime. That challenge can be met, with dedication and with a commitment to the great tradition of societal investment in education and self-improvement. All of us who consider ourselves academics have a deep and personal responsibility to helping college students to graduate with the prerequisite skills and knowledge, and to do so without permanently damaging their economic future. I know of no academic I talk to regularly who does not lament the spiraling costs of college attendance. But we have little direct control. We have to confront this problem through politics, through charity, and through private responsibility. It is possible. This country once had great universities that could deliver education without incurring great costs. It can again, if we work for it. The university, at its heart, is a community of teachers, students, and administrators. That community can represent a great benefit to all involved. It's an idea worth fighting for.

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what neoliberalism is, to a̶ this leftist

I've written on this subject before, but this keeps cropping up, so here goes again. It should be said upfront that I am deeply resistant to neoliberalism so this is necessarily a slanted definition, but I am trying hard to write in a minimally inflammatory way. I don't know what percentage of people who complain that "neoliberal" is a term without meaning actually believe that, and what percentage are merely trying to shut down criticism they don't enjoy, but either way, there is at least as coherent and portable a definition of neoliberalism as there is of liberalism, progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism.

Neoliberals are those who support traditionally left-wing ends through the traditionally libertarian means of minimal intervention into the economy. Those ends include recognizably liberal or progressive ones such as shared prosperity and minimal standards of material security and comfort for all people as actualized in (for example) universal health coverage. Those ends means include recognizably libertarian or classically liberal ones such as free trade in the form of the elimination of tariff walls and other impediments to trade across borders, deep resistance to regulation, and a general embrace of a hands-off approach to economics that sees creative destruction as a necessary aspect of a healthy capitalist economy.

Neoliberalism is fundamentally an economic orientation and the term itself typically has little to say about an adherent's views on social or foreign policy. Almost universally, neoliberals are supportive of typically liberal views on social issues, such as gay marriage, but there is no existential reason for this orientation. (The reason arises in part from neoliberalism's former place as a reformist current within conventional American liberalism; neoliberalism is now the dominant orthodoxy among American liberals writ large and controls the Democratic party almost without challenge.) Neoliberals are all over the map in terms of foreign policy, from the generally dovish early neoliberals such as Michael Kinsley and Mickey Kaus to the committed "liberal interventionists" within the Obama administration. Some critics of neoliberalism, such as Marxist geographer David Harvey, believe that an aggressive foreign policy such as that of the contemporary United States is an inevitable aspect of neoliberalism, as the expansion of available labor markets is necessary for the production of cheap material goods that powers the consumption economy.

Though neoliberals advocate for free markets, they are clearly distinguishable from conservatives and libertarians economically. Neoliberals are almost all Keynesian, and prefer a countercyclical economic and fiscal policy that uses central banks and stimulus spending to "prime the pump" of the private sector economy and encourage growth during economic slumps or recession. In this sense, neoliberals tend to see the economy and its cycles as socially conditioned and subject constantly to policy manipulation, as opposed to libertarians, who see the economy as an organic or even spiritual phenomenon that exists independent of the policies and governments that surrond it. This difference makes neoliberals natural foes of austerity measures, which interfaces easily with another major difference with conservatives and libertarians, the push for redistribution. Neoliberals believe that the best, most effective way of eliminating traditional or entrenched inequality is through redistributive social programs. In keeping with their hands-off economic character, their preference is for programs that come with minimal restrictions: food stamps are better than a handout of preselected foods, but cash with which food (or anything else) can be bought is even better. Because of the necessity of paying for these redistributive programs, neoliberals are far more amenable to taxation than conservatives.

While these basic contours define the philosophy, they are inadequate for understanding neoliberalism as a social phenomenon. Critics of neoliberalism frequently complain about the philosophy's tendency to advocate for market solutions to all human problems, for market and economic structures in all human organizations, and for market values as the only values. For example, the neoliberalization of the modern university is lamented because it seeks to impose the logic, methods, and goals of commercial enterprises on institutions that were specifically created for noncommercial ends, namely the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Arguments between neoliberals and leftists are frequently unproductive in part because of a disagreement about whether economic activity is a means or an end, or whether economic growth is necessary and sufficient in the pursuit of solving a particular social program. At an extreme, neoliberalism can involve the elevation of what is typically thought as a means to an end, economic efficiency, to an end of political action itself.

The relationship between the left and neoliberals is typically vexed and unhappy. In part, this is indicative of the fact that arguments are often most personal when they stem from agreement about goals but disagreement about methods. What's more, there are deep, perhaps irresolvable divisions between the two groups. One of the most passionate disagreement involves orientation towards labor, both in terms of labor writ large and organized labor in particular. Leftists such as left liberals, socialists, and Marxists typically describe politics in terms of power, where neoliberals typically describe politics in terms of economics. Traditionally, leftists believe that political progress depends upon the balance of power between corporations and the moneyed on one hand and workers and the poor on the other. Because neoliberals prefer the mechanisms of redistribution and growth through the relatively unfettered process of capitalism, left-wing critics frequently identify a failure on their part to adequately address the power disparity between capital and wage earners. This is particularly acute given the left wing's belief that moneyed interests such as banks and the wealthy have captured the democratic process through economic power.

Traditionally, the left wing in American politics has been the champion of organized labor and union power. Neoliberals tend to run from indifference towards labor unions, seeing them as quaint or past their usefulness, such as with the younger generation of neoliberal pundits like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias, to outright resistant to them, such as with Kaus. This lack of support for unionism typically stems from the belief that unions stand in the way of corporate efficiency, which in turn restricts the economic growth that neoliberals believe is the only effective means to improving living standards. A typical dispute between leftists and neoliberals might stem, for example, from a round of heavy layoffs at a prominent company and a union dispute stemming from same. Leftists identify the power disparity between workers and corporation as an impediment to fairness and humanitarian outcomes, and highlight the human costs of so many workers being denied their livelihoods. Neoliberals insist that the efficiency gained from the layoffs will improve the company's productivity and ultimately contribute to economic growth, and that adequate social safety nets can ameliorate the effects of this "creative destruction." (In general, traditional leftists tend to identify individuals in their capacity as workers, neoliberals in their capacity as consumers.) This leads to accusations from leftists of callousness and from neoliberals of opposition to economic growth.

This contributes to the sense in which neoliberals tend to be proceduralists. That is, they have identified the relatively unfettered flow of capitalism, along with the "dynamism" or "disruption" that causes widespread job loss, as the engine of positive social change, and are deeply resistant to interventions that jeopardize that flow. Leftists, in contrast, tend to be more concerned with outcomes, having far less faith that capitalism will eventually produce the bounty that ends suffering. This contributes to the constant fights about regulation between neoliberals and leftists. A typical skirmish involves leftists arguing that a specific example of regulation will prevent unnecessary risk or suffering, with neoliberals arguing that the regulation will ultimately reduce the incentive for economic activity that will have positive effects in growing the economy.

The procedural quality of neoliberal discourse frequently contributes to a kind of meta-disagreement. Leftists are frequently frustrated by neoliberal claims that they do not propose an alternative. Because neoliberalism is the dominant discourse of our economic policy apparatus, stretching back to the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, and because our political media is likewise dominated, thanks to the synthesis between corporatism and neoliberalism, it is easy for neoliberals to see economic political questions as necessarily a matter of achieving a more efficient economy, whether in the macro or micro sense. Leftists, meanwhile, often admit that a particular economic intervention will have a negative impact on efficiency, but that the benefits in human welfare outweigh those costs. This misalignment in perspective is one of the many reasons arguments between the two groups are so frequently angry.

The "there is no alternative" attitude is related to the controversy over the "wonk." Wonks are policy analysts who tend to conduct their analysis and their discussions in a dispassionate way, typically referring to empirical evidence in chart or graph form (though rarely assembling that evidence themselves), and frequently constraining their considerations to the immediately procedural or technical in a way that, critics say, restricts the boundaries of the possible. Wonks do indeed tend to be neoliberal, although this is not universal. Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute is a left liberal wonk, Megan McArdle a libertarian wonk, Reihan Salam a conservative wonk. Another point of tension between leftists and neoliberals stems from the activist tradition within left-wing circles, which privileges political relationships and solidarity in a long-term effort to change philosophical and moral convictions, which stands in direct and frequently ugly tension with the very specific, narrow definition of adult political discourse typical to neoliberals, who have a tendency to reply to less-direct philosophical arguments by asking "what's your policy prescription?"

That social and communicative tension must be accounted for to understand this broad divide. For while both sides can and do articulate very specific and technocratically-oriented disagreements about best practices, the unhappiness of those disagreements are essentially cultural. Neoliberals, with their embrace of capitalism as the best (or least-worst) method for improving human welfare, are natural optimists. Leftists such as socialists tend to practice a kind of defensive pessimism, out of a conviction that optimism can obscure suffering and the continued need for change. The symmetry between neoliberalism's desire for ever-more-efficient economies and the desires of corporate entities fosters mutual suspicion between neoliberals and the fundamentally anti-corporate left. Neoliberalism, owing to its reformist roots, reminds leftists uncomfortably of the tradition of anti-leftist purges within American liberalism, such as in the Truman era or the immediate post-9/11 era. Finally, the tendency of neoliberals to move rightward over time is naturally of concern to leftist critics, evidence in the extreme by Mickey Kaus, who has become functionally identical to a movement conservative. Note, however, that there are rare exceptions, such as Paul Krugman, who has moved markedly to his left after a long career as a standard-issue neoliberal.

Perhaps no issue better illustrates the differences between neoliberals and leftists than education reform. Most neoliberals are deeply antagonistic towards teachers unions, seeing them as a major impediment to the kind of innovation and disruptive practice that leads to improved outcomes. Leftists identify teachers as workers and teacher unions as a legitimate expression of basic rights. Neoliberals view tenure and job security for teachers as a clear barrier to effective change; leftists, as a hard-earned job benefit that raises the standard of living of a large class of poorly-compensated workers. At issue, too, is what mechanisms best create positive change in society, and whether a corporate model can really be applied to all domains of human activity. For left-wing critics of neoliberalism like me, the broad failure of preferred "market-oriented" reforms like charter schools, private school vouchers, or merit pay is indicative of the limitations of applying market solutions to every human problem. Unsurprisingly, this opinion is not shared by most neoliberals.

Is detente between leftists and neoliberals possible? Perhaps. The short-term political exigency of opposing brutal austerity measures and rebuilding the social safety net is certainly an area where leftists and neoliberals can and should work together. What's more, many or most leftists share with neoliberals a desire to remove restrictions on the kind of redistributive payments governments can make to those who need them. "Just give people money" is a rallying cry that can be voiced by both groups. What's more, the socialist left's recent re-embrace of a Universal Basic Income or similar scheme actually synthesizes quite nicely with neoliberal concerns. For those of us who think that market socialism is a likely next stage of human macroeconomy, this is reason for optimism. In the most basic level, the real and deep commitment among most neoliberals towards providing for the worst off and reducing suffering offers a common point of agreement against those who believe that differences in ability and chance will always create some degree of economic pain and necessary suffering.

The longer term is more difficult. Many neoliberals are among the most enthusiastic of capitalists. Meanwhile, many leftists such as myself see the market economy as necessarily producing injustice and undermining democracy through the capture of political structures by capital. Disciplining capital, particularly the investment banks and financial corporations that produce so much instability in the economy and put so many wage-earners at risk, is seen by many leftists as an absolute key element of long-term progress; most neoliberals are decidedly unlikely to participate in that effort. It's an open question whether there is room to rebuild non-economic civic structures and community ties that could reinvigorate our civic responsibility within the neoliberal macroeconomic frame in which we live. Opposing the market-ization of everything will never produce this kind of solidarity. Yet perhaps there's reason for hope. Though I am a skeptic of political salvation through technology, perhaps the capital-biased technological change that we've witnessed will lead necessarily to a redefinition of the human species writ large not as workers but as the beneficiaries of automation that can secure human welfare. While the wonkish journalists might seem far from potential allies, I see someone like Yglesias as amenable enough to a redefinition of human flourishing away from the purely economic that he could be a partner in solidarity, in a new movement towards universal material security and comfort. Perhaps we can all transcend mutual distrust, I don't know. I'm not optimistic.

What I do know, though, is that there is a coherent ideology called neoliberalism, and that any ideology is necessarily a loose collection of fellow travelers with many internal disagreements. Neoliberalism is no different in that regard than conservatism and liberalism. Just as Andrew Sullivan and Jonah Goldberg can meaningfully be called conservative, so can Ezra Klein and Michael Kinsley be called neoliberals comfortably. I don't know why this point is so often disputed.

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do Muslims deserve human rights?

From today's big speech:

When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

There is a very important, very obvious word that is missing from this paragraph. That word is "Muslim." Because the reality is that we have no "war on terror" or "war on terrorism." The reality is that Abraham Al-Awlaki was not denied his basic human rights because he opposed the United States. (And make no mistake, the right to due process and legal representation is as basic a human right as exists.) He was killed because he argued for the killing of Americans while being a Muslim in a Muslim country. No one would ever imagine sending a drone to Stockholm or to Sydney. The practice is condoned and justified because of who drones target. Likewise, no one would tolerate the decade-long internment of accused white supremacists without due process or formal charges in an off-shore prison as they slowly wasted away from hunger strike. And were Abdulrahaman Al-Awlaki blonde-haired and blue-eyed, his face would be plastered on the cover of American magazines. That's just a fact.

There has never been a time since 9/11 when this country has not been busily killing Muslims somewhere in the world. That's a fact. I am told, even by self-identified liberals, that this is because we have Muslims enemies— extremists, terrorists, Al Qaeda. The evidence that these people have is scanty, amounting to "because the government says so." We deploy ordnance and kill people in foreign countries and all we ever know personally is that they were terrorists because the military or CIA said so. That justification would never be accepted, were the victims not Muslim. It's incredible how little information we actually have about the people we kill. There is no foreign army at work, here, no formal declaration of war, no battle lines, no borders. There is only the word of the administration.

You don't have to take my word for it when I say that the line being drawn here is not against terrorist but against Muslims. Ask Tom Friedman, who said, in the most honest statement of his life, that the point of the Iraq war was to say to the Muslim world "suck on this," in revenge against 9/11. "We coulda hit Saudi Arabia!" he said, mustache quivering. "We coulda hit Pakistan! We hit Iraq because we could." I submit to you that this wasn't some crazy statement by a lunatic but a perfectly accurate summation of the majority opinion of the United States. I think Americans wanted war on Muslims and were searching for any pretense. And I think that any discussion of this endless war that does not frankly reflect that it is a war against Muslims is an act of dishonesty.

During the Bush administration, most liberals could be counted upon to oppose our aggression against the Muslim world. Though there are still many liberal allies, and I am grateful for them, I no longer can rely on the average liberal to criticize our government's incursions into the Muslim world. I can't, because they have instead decided to support the Obama administration, and the administration has dramatically expanded the scope and the scale of a secret campaign of assault in the Muslim world.

We have lived with this "war on terror" for a third of my life. And liberals: speeches do not walk the dog anymore. The time for flowery speeches is over. It's time for action. Saying "we're going to end the AUMF eventually" is not enough. Talking about closing Guantanamo is not enough. It has to actually happen. Like Anthony Romero of the ACLU says, actions are more important than words. If Obama actually closes Guantanamo, I promise I will applaud. If Obama actually reduces or ends the drone campaign, I will celebrate. But those specific policies will only be valuable if they are part of a broad attempt to end the hostilities between the United States and the Muslim world. Given that every Muslim terrorist who announces their motives says that they are based on our incursions into the Muslim world, that can only happen if we withdraw.

Am I intemperate? I am. Does this intemperance make me frequently unfair? I suppose. Am I angry? Yes, I'm angry. I'm angry about the constancy of the death of innocent people and I'm angry about those who justify and excuse those deaths. I have said things that I regret, at times, and I don't like how often I am moved to anger by this issue. But in a country that is so dead set on prosecuting an endless campaign of violence that is waged in secret and without the possibility of an informed people, if I will err, I will err on the side of opposing anti-Muslim aggression. I do believe that Obama's speech today was a step in the right direction. But he has to take the rest of the steps. And everyone who debates this issue has to understand that whether Muslims enjoy or should enjoy the full benefit of human rights is absolutely at question here. If people answer in the affirmative, and they work to affirm and support those rights, we may well make this country a more moral force in the world. If so, I am prepared to make my apologies then. 

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I'm told Obama gave a speech today

And it's got the hearts of Andrew Sullivan, Chris Hayes, and other lovers of human rights allllll aflutter.

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we must be ready to condemn this vicious knifing in the UK as terrorism

Friends, now is not the time to quibble about definitions. It's not the time to worry about words and their meanings. Now is not the time for leftist resistance to the plain truth that we're in a war, and in a war, we must strike and strike hard. The terrible murder in the United Kingdom of an innocent man, brutally knifed to death due to religious hatred, must not stand. We must come together to fight terrorism and avenge the senseless stabbing death of a blameless man in our closet allied nation. We must call this for what it is: terrorism.

I refer, of course, to the murder of Mohammed Saleem, a 77 75-year old British Muslim who was stabbed in the back three times by a white man as he left his mosque on May 2nd. For surely, since everyone is in agreement that the stabbing death of a completely innocent person due to religious hatred is terrorism, there can be no doubt that this instance was terrorism, correct? I'm searching the archives at all the blogs calling terrorism right now and trying to find where they talked about the murder of Mr. Saleem in similar terms. Give me a minute. I'm sure I'll find it. Any second now....

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Journos of Color

Jamelle Bouie and Aminatou Sow have started a new aggregator that follows and promotes work by journalists of color. You should check it out.

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liberal box checking

Liberals and progressives have far more humane and compassionate views on gay rights and gay love than conservatives do, but in my experience, they are often not more open-minded than conservatives.

A telling moment in this Wesley Morris essay on HBO's new Liberace movie, Behind the Candelabra: in one paragraph, he notes that Matt Damon's character Scott (Liberace's live-in boyfriend and employee) "insists that he's bisexual." In the next paragraph, he says that Damon and Douglas are "playing homosexuals." Perhaps the movie makes it clear that this self-definition by Scott is in fact self-delusion, I don't know. But I'm not sure how such a thing could be dramatized. If it's not, why run so roughshod over a character's self-definition? Yes: there is a tradition of gay men who are not just closeted but self-deluded. But the insistence that any man who has sexual or romantic relationships with another man must be gay is simplistic and deeply restricting of the right to sexual freedom and self-definition. (You'll note that this is never asserted when it comes to women.) Morris's piece writ large reflects on homosexuality not as a set of preferences and behaviors but as a totalizing identity. That is neither a productive way to look at a world that is full of complexity nor fair.

Consider this passage from a 2009 article by Amy Sohn on male-to-female transsexuals and men who are attracted to them:

Part of the problem is, there’s no language yet to describe men who are drawn to trannies—or, as a friend of mine puts it, “transgressives.” My own guess is that they fall into four subcategories: closeted gay men who need the T&A so they don’t freak out about the D, bisexual men who can get both needs met at the same time, porn-addicted men who need to keep crossing new boundaries to get aroused, and straight guys who nonetheless have a narcissistic attraction to the penis.

I suppose I'm glad that Sohn has reflected that sexual desires are complex and  idiosyncratic. But consider that three out of these four categories are defined as fundamentally disordered or dysfunctional: closeted men who are lying to themselves, men who are addicted to pornography, and men who are motivated by narcissism. This is flagrantly judgmental about adult, consensual sexual behavior. It's amazing how confident Sohn is in creating a taxonomy of desires that she doesn't share and can't possibly fully understand. Like most affluent Brooklynites, I'm sure Sohn thinks of herself as a modern, forward-thinking person. Yet she is so suffused in the privilege of being able to define others' sexual identities that she doesn't see the offense in reducing the boundaries of the possible, of the permissible.

It's not just that liberals define the sexual identities of others constantly. It's that they are so quick and casual in doing so. I personally have long marveled at how the same people who advocate eloquently for the equal dignity of gay love and gay relationships can be so quick to take the right of self-definition away from men who experience them. None of us have access to other people's internal feelings and emotions, and thus we are constrained in how we can assess their own orientation towards their own desires. The fair, compassionate, and liberal thing to do is to let people act as they want to, and trust in the perfect legitimacy of all adult, consensual sexual behavior.

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all races being equal but all people certainly not being

This Zack Beauchamp missive on the Richwine affair has things to like and things to dislike about it. I want to focus on one thing, and in that way shift away from talking about race to talking about parentage.

Beauchamp goes hard on the notion that environment trumps everything when it comes to IQ. Indeed, he goes so hard on that attitude that most readers will likely think that there is nothing to the notion of a genetic basis for IQ. That's simply not in keeping with the large majority of the data. For example, that adopted children have IQs that correlate far more highly with their biological parents than their adoptive parents has been replicated repeatedly. (See, for example, Plomin et al. from 1997, for just one.) James Flynn, who I will remind you is deeply committed to social justice and is also the preeminent researcher in IQ, wrote in 2007, "The most radical form of environmental intervention is adoption into a privileged home. Adoptive parents often wonder why the adopted child loses ground on their natural children. If their own children inherit elite genes and the adopted child has average genes, then as parents slowly lose the ability to impose an equally enriched environment on both, the individual differences in genes begin to dominate." That Flynn piece, I think, is really excellent as a discussion of how to think through and understand the interactions between genetics and environment in IQ. It is not defeatist, and could never be called racist. But it is far more sober and clear about the relationship between genetics and IQ than Beauchamp's piece.

 Beauchamp quotes the well-known Turkheimer et al article that indicates that environment depresses genetic potential for IQ, but he doesn't point out that Turkheimer et al lends more credence, not less, to the fact that identical twins who were separated at birth and placed in unequal environments are far more alike than random strangers. Nor does he really explore what the Turkheimer article demonstrates. It's perfectly possible for environment to depress the IQ ceiling of a twin relative to his brother (I've been arguing that for years!) and for both brothers to have low IQs thanks in part to genetic lineage. Indeed, Turkheimer himself wrote in 2000, "the effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes." No one who reads Beauchamps piece without having been previously exposed to these issues would know that in fact Turkheimer has made some of the strongest arguments for the heredity of IQ. To come away from reading an article on the heredity of IQ thinking that Turkheimer is on the side of environmental causes is a big problem. The entire article lacks similar context.

Beauchamp quotes Richard Nisbett in arguing for early-life interventions as a way to improve IQ. I support early-life intervention. But Beauchamp does nothing to tell the reader what these interventions entail or what kind of resources they require. Nisbett is likely referring to studies of intensive preschool programs like that found in the famous Perry project. But Perry and similar other studies have typically suffered from small sample size and conditions that can't be replicated. What's more, actually investigating the results of that study shows that while program participants had statistically significant improvements compared to non-program participants, they still lagged far behind national medians in every tested category. Finally, Beauchamp himself quotes Nisbett in admitting that the IQ gains (which is what is at issue here) fade by adulthood.

Most egregiously, Beauchamp speaks about all of this by referring to a "new consensus," as if the notion that IQ is dominantly environmental rather than genetic is broadly shared in developmental psychology. This simply is not true. Early in his piece, Beauchamp says that he performed " dozens of interviews with subject matter experts." Well, let's be clear: he conducted dozens of interviews with subject matter experts who are inclined to be sympathetic to his preexisting commitments. I don't think that Beauchamp is being dishonest. I think he's a journalist who approached this question looking to find a particular position and found it. I'm not complaining about media bias or any such thing here, and again, in broad strokes Beauchamp and I agree on Richwine's argument for Heritage. It's okay to both perform journalism and have a particular point of view. But speaking as someone who has been reading academic journal articles and chapters on these issues for years, Beauchamp is presenting a deeply misleading portrait of current opinions on the relationship between heredity and IQ.

I have argued (again, for years) about the limitations of what IQ is and what it means in a human, social context. But it has to be said: if IQ had as little genetic basis as is suggested in that article, it would be extraordinarily out of the ordinary for measurable human attributes.

Why do I point this stuff out, when I've been making the case against the Richwine argument for the past week, and against the general race and IQ argument for years? Well, first, because I think that Beauchamp is simply presenting an inaccurate picture of the extant evidence. He is pointing to the fact that controversy exists on controversial questions and acting as if the existence of controversy is dispositive one way or another. He's cherry picking particular researchers who have particular stances (as all researchers do) and treating their opinions as necessarily dispositive. He's treating the existence of criticism in the literature as disqualifying of the papers Richwine cites, when of course criticism exists in the literature for the studies that Beauchamp himself cites. And he suggests a minimalist relationship between genetics and IQ that almost no one in developmental psychology actually believes. A reader who comes to that article without a background in these subjects will believe in a "new consensus" that doesn't exist.

But more to the point: we don't have to do this. We don't have to misrepresent the importance of genetic parentage to IQ to recognize the importance of environment. Beauchamp makes some very good points about what it means to be Hispanic and about what a race is. I myself have written four times in the last week or two about why we shouldn't listen to Jason Richwine. By misrepresenting the actual extant evidence, well-meaning people play into the hands of those who work tirelessly to establish the idea of a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Removed from the emotional grindhouse of race, why does all of this matter? It matters because our educational debates are dominated by a piety that almost everyone argues but almost no one believes: that all people are of equal ability. If you think that's an exaggeration, consider No Child Left Behind, which insists: 100% must achieve the standard, 100% compliance. Here in the real world, 100% of people will never reach the standard in anything at all. Yet this notion that our problems can all not only be improved upon but literally erased permeates education at all levels. It is the most glaring orthodoxy in our educational debates: you must never suggest that anyone will ever fail.

But here in real life, failure is always an option, and half of people will always be below average at everything, and both the data and the actual lived experience of everyone tells you that individual human beings have radically different abilities.

That's not much of a problem for me: I'm a socialist. I don't believe that human welfare should be subject to the vicissitudes of chance, which includes both environment and genetics. I don't believe in the notion that someone has to deserve material security and comfort. So I don't mind pointing out that human beings are substantially unequal in their abilities because I don't think that this should condemn anyone to a life of poverty. I've long advocated to the "scientific racist" crowd that we can conduct a really powerful experiment: raise the standard of living of black and Hispanic Americans to that of the white American middle class through the brute force of mass redistribution. Then, if their living standards start to decline after they've finally reached parity with the white middle class (which they've never enjoyed at any point in American history), we can go from there. If you think that human beings need to deserve things like housing, education, food, etc., then yes, inequality in ability might be a problem for you. But it certainly isn't for me.

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you are not, actually, in control of your own life

Obama giving the commencement address at Morehouse College:

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination....If you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you.

Setting aside a liberal Democrat making this point, and all the attendant problems with that— the notion that you are in charge of the outcome of your life, and that all it takes is working hard and trying, is not true. Realizing it isn't true is a big part of adjusting the adult world. As time goes on and on, more and more empirical measures demonstrate it isn't true. And saying that to students like these, at this age of their lives, in this economy, at this terrible point in history for recent college grads... it's cruelty. Cruelty.

Update: Of course I don't think that the president should have said, "You guys are screwed! Give up!" What I want the president to do is, in the best liberal tradition, recognize that while hard work and dedication are important, chance and injustice are powerful, so we need to work together. I wanted him to say "You should work hard and strive for what you want, but you should also remember that the things you achieve come on the back of chances and advantages not everyone has, so you should work to help those who find themselves in harsh circumstances. And you should naturally expect, without guilt or shame, to be able to call on help from society if you find yourself in those circumstances yourself."

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reminder: Academically Adrift's methodological flaws

So new research suggests that perhaps college students aren't going through college without learning anything, contrary to the public perception of Academically Adrift. I say contrary to the public perception, rather than contrary to the text, as in fact the book found that not only did the group of college students tested show statistically significant gains between their first and fourth semester (not between their first and last year, a common misrepresentation of the study) as a whole, every individual subgroup within the sample did. I suppose I can't blame the media too much for the misperception that the book showed only failure, given that the authors of the book took every opportunity to play up the idea of a failed higher education system.

Of course, it's easy to show pessimistic findings when every aspect of your methodology is bent towards that result. Richard Haswell, in a review essay from Research in the Teaching of English (PDF):

I should be clear that my final sounding of this book is not that the authors misinterpret their own findings. I believe that their findings cannot be interpreted at all. As regards the significance of their research and its methodology to the college composition profession, my conclusion is terse. If you want to cite these authors in support of the failings of undergraduate writing, don’t. If you want to cite these authors in support of the successes of undergraduate writing, don’t. Academically Adrift’s data—as generated and analyzed—cannot be relied on. 

Harsh judgment on a book published by the University of Chicago Press. But consider two research scenarios. Research Team A wants to test the null hypothesis that students do not gain in writing skills during college. What do the researchers do? Whether using a cross-sectional or longitudinal design, they make sure the earlier group of writers is equivalent to the later group. They randomly select participants rather than let them self-select. They create writing prompts that fit the kind of writing that participants are currently learning in courses. They apply measures of the writing that are transparent and interpretable. They space pretest and post-test as far apart as they can to allow participants maximum chance to show gain. They control for retest effects. They limit measures and discussion to no more than what their statistical  testing and empirical findings allow. Meanwhile Team B is testing the same hypothesis. What do they do? They create a self-selected set of participants and show little concern when more than half of the pretest group drops out of the experiment before the post-test. They choose to test that part of the four academic years when students are least likely to record gain, from the first year through the second year, ending at the well-known “sophomore slump.” They choose prompts that ask participants to write in genres they have not studied or used in their courses. They keep secret the ways that they measured and rated the student writing. They disregard possible retest effects. They run hundreds of tests of statistical significance looking for anything that will support the hypothesis of nongain and push their implications far beyond the data they thus generate. 

I am not speculating about the intentions or motives of the authors of Academically Adrift (AA). I am just noting that AA follows the methodology of Team B and not Team A.

 But, of course, that college is worthless is a conclusion that pleases many with flagrantly anti-academic biases in our media, so I doubt this new study will get much press.

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the right to live in history

Andrew Sullivan: "That’s the core problem with debunking the Richwine thesis. The policy inferences are repellent to me. But the data are real."

I want to argue by analogy, here.

I've seen this blog post get passed around a few times. It's about the origins of homosexuality. The post argues that there are good reasons to doubt the straightforward genetic theory, that gay men and women possess a specific gene or genes that cause them to feel sexual and romantic attraction to members of their same sex. I possess nothing resembling the expertise to make that determination. In my own limited way, though, I'm sympathetic to questioning the purely genetic hypothesis, as it's always seemed overly simplistic, and the extremely common discordance in sexual orientation between identical twins is a major suggestion against a purely genetic cause. It's important to say: homosexuality can be physiological and unchosen and still not be genetic. Personally, I think that the perception of political necessity has caused a lot of people to assert a purely genetic cause in a way that outstrips the evidence. I understand that though "they can't help it, so let's let them have rights" may have had short-term political power, it is not a satisfying way to defend gay rights or the equal dignity and worth of gay love.

Yet when I read an argument that homosexuality is caused by a pathogen, it gives me pause. I read it with defensive skepticism. Why? Because, of course, the notion of "homosexuality as disease" is old, and has been used for a long, long time in the oppression of gay people. I read the post, and it has superficial plausibility to me. But there's no proof, yet. And when I read the comments, or find blogs that have linked to the post, my worst fears are confirmed: the commenters are repeatedly and explicitly comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, they are talking about gay sex as "wanton sex," they are using the language of deviance and disorder. The author of the blog post himself says: "Of course it’s a mental disease: a Darwinian disease, which is the only reasonable definition of disease. Curable? Who knows? Preventable? Likely." Whatever the truth of the origins of homosexuality, I want nothing to do with the people who are arguing that the origins are pathogenic.

It turns out that people who are inclined to see homosexuality as caused by a pathogen are also people who are inclined to see homosexuality as disordered, deviant, and wrong. Could any functioning human intelligence be surprised by this? And yet if I apply the kind of thinking Andrew endorses when it comes to race and IQ, I would have to ignore this connection and suspend skepticism, as though doing so is somehow in service to science.

Because this dynamic is exactly the same when it comes to race and IQ. People insist: hey, you've got to let the science be the science, you've got to look at the facts, you've got to let them make the case. And I try. I read their essays. I follow their links. I do make a good faith effort. But I do not make that effort with similar credulity or sympathy that I do when I read someone write about tweaking the Earned Income Tax credit or make an argument about alcohol licensing. Why? Because one of these arguments has been used for the perpetuation of a system of chattel slavery and racist domination. That's why. And, sure enough: whenever people pop up to tell me, "Here, check this link, read the facts," and I click and read around, and then I follow more links, inevitably, I end up at Stormfront or similar houses of explicit racism. Inevitably, the people who are arguing about inherent black and Hispanic tendency to be unintelligent are also arguing about "black aggression" or "hypersexuality" or "inherent tendency to criminality." This will apparently come as a shock to Andrew: racists love race science.

Is the correlation between belief in race science and racism 1? No. But it's a lot closer to 1 than it is to 0. Is that dispositive of the question? Of course not. If there's a racial bias towards low IQ, and if IQ is really an adequate gauge for real-world, lived intelligence, then the truth will out, just as it will if homosexuality is pathogenic. But to pretend as if people who are pushing the idea of inherent racial inferiority in IQ don't tend to be the kind of people who believe all sorts of racist things is stupid. It's moronic. It's exactly the kind of willful failure to see connections that Andrew is accusing other people of.

Take Steve Sailer. If many of the commenters who pop up here when I talk race and IQ are to be believed, Sailer is a great guy who has been wrongfully vilified by liberals. Well, setting aside the inherent moral questions of race and IQ, Sailer has also argued that Andrew's passionate style is not a part of his intellectual and moral makeup, but is a consequence of the medication Andrew is to control his HIV. Sailer has also argued that Brian Beutler was shot because he was a guilt stricken liberal who was too embarrassed to avoid the dangerous black neighborhood. (That happened in the comments at one of Matt Yglesias's blogs, and I can't find a link, so you'll have to take my word for it.) Sailer has also argued, without evidence, that Matt Yglesias's beating was a racist hate crime, black against white. This is the guy I'm suppose to see as an unfairly marginalized figure.

I am not arguing that these connections and associations prove anything. I am not arguing that we shouldn't consider these questions or these consequences. I am, however, arguing that recognizing these associations and allowing them to color how I read and interact with these arguments is not some unfortunate refusal to be appropriately scientific. It is a natural and principled way to act in a world that remains full of racism and in a country in which the cost of racial discrimination has been incalculable. What I am asking for, again, is the right to live in history. I am asking for the right to let the legacy of racism and attempts to use science as an argument for racial domination inform how I read arguments in the present. Is that really a bad thing? Is that somehow a failure of intelligence? I find it, instead, the only smart way to proceed.

When Andrew says "I don't like the policy prescriptions, but I believe in the data," he is once again acting like there is no question between the two. But it is precisely the people who want to find the ugly policy prescriptions that are most enamored of those data. We don't need to guess if Jason Richwine's opinion on the data led to policy prescriptions we find offensive! He did let his stance on the data lead to ugly policy prescriptions. Richwine wasn't criticized just because he believes that Hispanics have lower IQs. He was criticized because he believed that those lower IQs render Hispanics so undesirable that we should harshly restrict Mexican immigration into this country. That is the black letter argument in his work.

I appreciate that Andrew has, as he always does, engaged with criticism and opposing opinion on this issue. But I am frustrated by Andrew's continuing ahistorical credulity on this issue, his tendency to read the people making these arguments with the most possible charity. And he matches that with a distinct lack of charity for those resisting them, the constant invocation of liberal piety and political correctness. I would like very much for Andrew to consider whether his long history with this issue, and the attendant criticism he's received, has rendered him too ready to see those pushing the race-IQ connection as principled empiricists untouched by emotion or animus. To posit that they are sober-minded, rational minds merely pursuing the scientific truth disinterestedly while their opponents are motivated by groupthink and emotion is a pretty great way to make yourself gullible on an issue where gullibility has profoundly negative consequences.

Race is the central political question of the American experience, and racism a stain on our national character that has never wiped off, and if I and others are suspicious of arguments that elide with those of racists because of this history, then so be it. That doesn't mean I won't listen or look at the evidence. It just means that my suspicions will remain. I can live with the consequences of being too vigilant about racism far easier than I can live with the alternative.

This will have to be my last word on this, for awhile.

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Breaking: CIA corrupt, incompetent

I've been saying for some time that the Benghazi story is, in fact, a big deal, just not for the reason Republicans keep saying it is. The two major issues are 1) that we entered into a civil war without the slightest pretense of a national security rationale and removed a regime, helping to install a new Islamist regime that has brought with it harsh new oppression for disfavored groups like homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans. And 2) that the CIA was involved in up to its elbows, and that the CIA has demonstrated once again that it is both willing to do flagrantly immoral and illegal things to advance US interests and yet very bad at advancing US interests. The knee-jerk partisan dismissals of Benghazi by prominent liberal Democrats represent a major missed opportunity to take part in a national dialogue about our continuing program of enforcing our will militarily in the Muslim world, and about the CIA. The Republican idiocy of trying to make this all about Obama is, well, Republican idiocy.

It seems the evidence is mounting that, in fact, the CIA was deeply complicit in the fuck ups, and that as is so often the case, where we find violence against the United States we find bad behavior by our espionage service. I expect that increasing clarity over the CIA's role will neither get Republicans to back off the State department, nor get liberal Democrats to take the story seriously. But it's a shame nonetheless. I cannot for the life of me understand why more people don't reflect on the fact that our intelligence services have not only undertaken flagrantly immoral acts, constantly and deliberately, but have actively undermined the security of Americans by creating anti-American rage. I just will never understand it.

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history and social science

One of the commenters on that Ta-Nehisi Coates piece from the other day lectured Coates about how he should "learn some statistics." It was, as you can imagine, not a helpful comment, and whether the commenter would have said the same to a white writer or not, it echoed traditional condescension towards black writers and black intellectuals in a way that was really unfortunate. This is a sticking point in arguments about race all the time. People complain that they are judged on the symmetry between their ideas and historical racism rather than their intent. But we live in history, not in a land of pure ideas, and the insistence on sensitivity and care in our racial dialogue is a necessary product of a legacy of oppression.

I've been thinking about statistical analysis of social phenomenon and history lately. Coates, as much as any other blogger, bases his work on history. History and the social sciences, particularly those pursued quantitatively like experimental psychology, have always been tense neighbors. Why? Because the purpose of history is to establish context. History's enduring message is that no condition can be understand without understanding the conditions that created it. History is an effort to contextualize. Statistical examinations of human life are just the opposite: they rely on the decontextualization of sampling and stratification, where we divide humanity into various groups, based on demographics and features, on the theory that this is the key to getting to the causal relationships that we want to find.

The people who conduct such research (and I read and interact with many) are often themselves quite candid about the limitations of stratification and the existence of uncontrolled variables. The important question, always, is the details, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. When we point out that poverty has a large impact on a variety of life outcomes, particularly metrics of education or intelligence, you often hear the reply that poverty has been accounted for in the research. What that means in practice, typically, is stratifying the sample for income level, and then "comparing like with like." The question is whether these stratifying mechanisms are actually accounting for the influence of confounding variables adequately. You might point out, for example, that poverty is a holistic phenomenon that extends far beyond the simple question of income strata. When people talk about the role of parentage, people will say, "we've controlled for parent's educational level." But surely, parenting contains a vastly larger amount of variation than can be explained with that control.

Adjudicating those disputes has to be conducted by people with a deeper grasp of and greater expertise in the philosophy of social science than me. I do want to say: that there are people who dispute the degree to which key variables can be adequately controlled for in social scientific research, and people who point out that there are some potentially key variables that researchers have almost no ability to investigate, such as childhood lead exposure in adult subjects. These people are perfectly mainstream scholars. People asserting the case for racial inferiority through these mechanisms often express them with considerable certitude over the experimental mechanism, even when the most anodyne parts of the data analysis are subject to legitimate debate.

But even beyond the specific and limited questions involved with stratification of variables in the social sciences, there is a broader question of locating observed results in the context of history. Even if we are perfectly confident that individual variables have been isolated, when it comes to end results, it's our responsibility to place their observed values in a broader social context that helps to explain discrepancies. That is more true than ever when it comes to race. In a very real sense, the effort to combat racism has been the effort to insist on history: the history of slavery, the history of Spanish conquest of indigenous American people, the history of the decades in which Southern black people lived under slavery in all but name, the history of systems of racial discrimination, the history of immigration, the history of our war with Mexico.... Isolating variables can be a key part of socially just research. It is from the attempt to isolate variables that we can say with great confidence that poverty has an impact on education, for example. But we must return always to the reality of a history that has witnessed systematic and relentless oppression of nonwhite people. What aggravates me so much about many who raise the race and IQ question (often while refusing to speak plainly about their feelings on it at all) is the shortsightedness of their considerations, the denial of history. It happens so frequently that, yes, I think it is fair to ask about their motives.

Will Wilkinson put it well:

I don't think the subject or conclusion of Mr Richwine's dissertation is out of the bounds of reasonable discourse. Yet I think a suspicion of racism is perfectly reasonable. Grad students can choose from an infinite array of subjects. Why choose this one? Who are especially keen to discover a rational basis for public policy that discriminates along racial lines? Racists, of course. Anyone who chooses this subject, and comes down on the side vindicating racist assumptions, volunteers to bring suspicion upon himself, to expose his work to an extraordinary level of scrutiny.

Precisely so. It is not racist to ask these questions. James Flynn, one of the most important researchers of the question of human intelligence in history, has used this sort of research precisely to agitate for social justice and left-wing politics. But it is perfectly natural, in a country with such a long legacy of racism, to expect those arguing that race leads to inferior outcomes in as existential a quality as intelligence to be held to very stringent consideration. That is particularly true when, as in the case of Jason Richwine, that argument is levied in the service of further discrimination, a reactionary call against immigration and deepening racial diversity in the United States.

I think that the idea that is being combated here is not merely the question of whether non-white people are prone to low intelligence, but an idea that is rarely voiced but frequently floats around in the ether the way taboo ideas do. The idea is the notion that, whatever historical oppression for nonwhite people we can accurately identify, they've "had long enough," that all these decades after the Civil Rights Acts— after people decided that we had "solved" racism— nonwhite people should have figured it out. But this attitude depends on an ahistorical account: black and Hispanic Americans have never reached outcome parity with white Americans. We can't claim that they have failed to maintain the conditions of American middle class lifestyles when they have never enjoyed them. I could list a dozen metrics for quality of life and economic security on which black and Hispanic Americans have never enjoyed equality. To act as though it is their fault for not meeting those standards when they are working from a legacy of entrenched and deliberate exclusion is precisely to deny history.

What we ask for, when we dispute the conclusions pursued by the race science crowd with such zeal, is that they be forced to live in history, that they not try to argue as though human life is a series of disconnected variables but rather that it is an interconnected fabric of phenomena that cannot be separated without rending the garment. If we force those discussing race and IQ to live in the history of racial oppression, we are merely asking them to occupy the same position as those they are describing. People of color have never had any choice but to live in history.

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summer time in the springtime

Suavi vs Spiderman

Tenure track professors admitting they didn't read arguments they refer to critically and responding to criticism of same by literally saying "LOL" aside, my summer break is off to a really swimming start. It's been lovely around here. And I've been reading for pleasure! Like, 100% because I have to, not because I need to. Lovely, really lovely.

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Erik Loomis is a dishonest person.

So in the past I've pointed out that standard operating procedure at Lawyers Guns and Money has been to tiptoe up to saying nasty things that the bloggers know they can't get away with, aware that the rabid Obots in their comments will be sure to say it for them. I have, as in the past, become the target of that tactic recently.

Today, Erik Loomis wanted to call me a proponent of race science, because Andrew Sullivan quoted me in a post talking about race and IQ. Unfortunately for Loomis, he has an evidence deficit on that position. See, since I've been writing about politics publicly, I've been arguing against The Bell Curve and the purported scientific case for racial inferiority. If Loomis was confused about this, he might have read when I said yesterday "I believe that the case for scientific racial inferiority is wrong." But he wasn't confused. There can be no doubt, given the many times I've written against these ideas at considerable length, that I am opposed to the idea that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people.

Rather, Loomis doesn't like me, because I believe that Muslims should not be murdered via drone strikes, and that my antipathy to murder of Muslims via drone strikes was enough to compel me not to vote for Obama (after voting for him in 2008), and further that I often praise Glenn Greenwald. And so Loomis goes for pure guilt by association. And of course, his commenters take the bait, and engage in one of the Two Minute Hates that seems to be the only way they have of interacting with the world at all.

Loomis is someone who, when his academic freedom was disgracefully challenged by his institution, the University of Rhode Island, made a point of standing up for himself, as well he should have. At the time, I signed the petition insisting on Loomis's academic and intellectual freedom. I was proud and happy to do so, in no small part because I am an alum of URI and someone who was deeply embarrassed by its conduct. Today, despite his loud stand for his own academic freedom, he threatens my own.

Please understand: as a graduate student, I am very vulnerable to the opinions of tenure-track professors like Loomis. When I hit the job market, a professor attempting to associate my name with an argument for the legitimacy of racism could easily render me incapable of getting a job, even though I've repeatedly and explicitly objected to that argument. Loomis knows that. He knows what he's doing. Make no mistake: that post is a threat. In the incredibly competitive world of the academic job market, it's very easy for vague innuendo to ruin a career. Loomis is aware of that.

Now, were Loomis an honest person and Lawyers Guns and Money an honest forum, he would post again, this time pointing out my actual views on the subject through which he is making me guilty of association. But he won't, because he is not an honest person, because his commitment to academic and intellectual freedom extends precisely as far as it concerns his own employment, and because of the cause of his personal resentment, which is that people of prominence actually link to and interact with a grad student like me.

He's says it himself: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something DeBoer writes?" Pretty much all you need to know. Remember that, next time he makes a martyr of himself for academic freedom.

Update: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something DeBoer writes?"

Update II: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something"

Update III: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post"

Update IV: "I obviously didn’t read"

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