Getting to good enough

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first post I ever wrote on this blog. I can't believe it's gone by so fast. It seems like yesterday. At the same time, my life is completely different than what it was.

*****

I'm not a fan of the Pixar movie The Incredibles. I recognize its craft, as I do of all the movies Pixar makes, but I find it aggravating in its on-the-nose messaging and heavy handedness. I'm not opposed to strong messages in movies. Not at all. But I don't agree with the message of The Incredibles, because I think it's critiquing a phenomenon that is not found within the lived experience of those who it supposedly affects. The movie argues that, if everyone is special, then no one is. It's a critique of the "Participation Trophy" phenomenon. The idea is that we've tried so hard to create equality and to teach every child that he or she is special and valuable that we've threatened to erase the ability to reward and value the truly exceptional, and in so doing removed the incentives to be special in the first place. The movie tells the story of someone who so resents the notion of special people that he is willing to cause incredible destruction to level the playing field, and of truly special people who work to stop him.

I reject that notion because, to put it simply, junior high school exists. And nobody in junior high school could mistake the world for one suffering under too much equality. The kids who get the Participation Trophies know how sad they are. I don't particularly blame those who worry about this. It's just a good example of a parent-child divide: the parent lives at an intellectual remove and can think themselves into these sort of abstract worries about social life; the child lives through gym and lunch. I just don't think children or adolescents live in a world where there's too little judgment or too little inequality or too little understanding that people are unequal. The people who make these observations, to my lights, have thought themselves into a corner and ended up with an intelligent critique of a danger very few actually face.

I'm talking about this because I think that this notion of differing abilities and the rank inegalitarian nature of talent is important for anyone who wants to be a writer to think about; because writing is for me, an amateur, both the only way to get outside of my head to avoid thinking myself into corners and a mechanism through which I do exactly that; and because it is only through writing that I know how to tell you why I think a certain symbolic reading of a nine-year-old animated movie is wrong.

*****

I don't know if this next part is a contradiction of the last bit, or a corollary. 

For me the process of growing up was the process of  coming to terms with the fact that life isn't fair and that you don't get what you want in life. And in the way of the young bookish dude, I turned this necessary bit of life wisdom and made it into a kind of personal chauvinism. I looked around at people who hadn't yet grasped that life wasn't fair and I just steeped in my own judgment. Nobody knows how to bend passion and conviction into sanctimony like someone in their early twenties. I did not want to be uncharitable. I only knew that I looked around and saw desperately unhappy people who could not forgive themselves for not having everything they wanted because they thought that their wanting was enough. I did not bother to indict myself the same way; I knew my failures were both out of my control and deserved.

Then I got a job at a middle school.

Every wall, festooned with posters: if you believe, you can achieve. Never give up on your dreams. The key to success is effort. Dozens of variations on the same theme: you can get what you want if you want it badly enough, if you don't quit. And I just thought, god, how cruel. What a wonderful mechanism for creating a culture of self-hating, unhappy people. And as has happened so many other times, I had to think about my personal judgments, and let them dissolve. I can't and don't blame anyone for holding on too long.

Sometimes people ask me if I'm anti dreams or anti trying, if I don't think that it's good for people to strive. Of course I think people should want things and of course I think they should work for them. But I think that they should frequently ask themselves if it's working, that they should ask themselves if holding on is doing more harm than good, that they should understand that in every
 avenue of human achievement success depends on factors other than dedication and work, and I think that they should forgive themselves if it hasn't happened.

*****

What to Do When Someone Hates You on The Internet

Step one: Close laptop.
Step two: Go outside.
Step three: Look at the people out on the street.
Step four: Realize that not one of them has ever heard of you, heard of the person who hates you, or could possibly care.
Step five: Imagine that person out on the street, with you. Imagine them free from the power of their blog or their magazine or whatever, away from sympathetic commenters and connected friends, free from the distorting power of text-based communication, in all of their limited flawed fleshy humanity, with beating human beating heart, and feel better about them and about you.

*****

On my birthday, a month or so back, I went into the city to visit my brother and see Before Midnight. I loved it, which is no surprise. We've seen all three of them in the theater together. I'm nine years younger than the characters, and the movies are released every nine years, so I've been trailing along behind them.

I thought it was easily the best movie I've seen this year. The craft is so impressive. The acting between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy is as natural as it is entertaining. Richard Linklater, a criminally underrated director, shoots it all beautifully, in the kind of understated style that rarely wins awards but makes for a lovely experience. The setting is the perfect next step for the series. And I loved the dinner scene, where new voices integrated with Celine and Jesse's so well. Getting conversation right is very hard in the movies, and that's always been the great strengths of these films.

More than anything, I loved the movie's take on love and relationships: harsh, but romantic, but realistic, but tender, but conflicted, but sentimental, but pessimistic, but hopeful. It's a beautiful portrayal of deep feelings and real love that never descends into either a false vision of happily-ever-after or a pinched one of cynicism and hopelessness.

The fight is hard to watch. It's also incredibly real, a really compelling and convincing portrayal of two people who know each other very well and know just how to wound each other. That knowledge stems from how deeply intimate they are, and how interested they have been in exploring each other in true depth. They argue like real people: they alternate between perfectly principled and fair points and self-serving bullshit... and don't know, themselves, which is which. They jockey to take the high road against one another. And they argue in a way that shows how the political and the personal can't ever be adequately separated to our liking. Celine has a lot of critiques that stem from her feminism. Some of them are entirely fair. Some of them are self-justifying nonsense. What makes the film brave is its refusal to make her either a long-suffering feminist saint or someone cynically using feminism to advance her personal causes. Instead, she someone with righteous beliefs that mingle with all of the personal stuff that we all carry who can't always sort them out. Jesse is sometimes full of shit, but he's also sometimes perfectly right. And this will piss some people off, but I just think this is true of human life: we very rarely experience black-and-white political conflict when interacting with the people we love. I read some people claiming that this movie is just about Jesse's sexism, or his indifference to sexism, and Celine's having to suffer through it. That's just a profound misreading of what's here. Instead it's a human portrayal of the fact that social justice is not a march from a clearly-defined right to a clearly-defined wrong where each issue can be understood in deracinated politics but rather a constant negotiation between contexts, personalities, convictions, and disagreements.

It's also important that this third film pays a check that was written in the second. I quite liked the second movie, but something was bothering me the whole time: what about Jesse's wife and kid? How can he just be forgetting about them like this? The central conflict in the third movie is precisely about those questions. It makes me appreciate the second movie more: in that movie, where the theme of having less time is reinforced over and over again, Celine and Jesse's time together is portrayed as an escape, as stolen moments. In the third movie, we see all the ways in which reality has rushed back in.

The movie ends, as they all do, ambiguously. It may sound odd about a movie that portrays a really horrifically ugly argument that might lead to the end of a relationship, but this film helped me feel better about romantic love and life-long partnership. Perpetually, magazines and publishers release arguments that love is dead, or was always a lie, or that long-term relationships are contrary to human nature, or whatever. I have come to think that these arguments are exactly as immature and juvenile as the fairy-tale vision of love where two people meet and immediately fall in love and live happily ever after. I have had a life filled with both happiness and tragedy and there is no question in my mind that the portrayal of human life or human relationships as some hopelessly bleak and maudlin journey reveals a teenaged sensibility, a grasping and fussy pessimism that speaks of a refusal to confront life as petty indignities and great victories and terrible tragedies and little moments of grace all stacked on top of each other in nothing resembling a narrative or a plan.

Love is hard but it's probably worth it and anyway, what else? We have this idea that either you have a relationship with The One or you're settling, and that the romantic ideal is to pursue the former and not the latter. But as I get older I more and more think that the real beauty comes precisely from the endless negotiation between two flawed people who aren't perfect for each other or for anyone else but who are willing to work to find a way to live together in order to enjoy the good each has to offer. It's not "romantic life vs. settling." It's getting to good enough with another person out of the conviction that there is nothing else and nothing better. And sometimes it doesn't work. I believe in Celine and Jesse together, and I love this movie for showing two people who both can't get along and are meant for each other.

*****

Write it so that it's what you'd want to read. Don't ever try to write it to please anybody else. That's the only advice I've got for you.

*****

This is the kind of story I should know, by now, not to tell here.

So spring means babies, and for me it has meant baby birds. I live on the second floor of a beautiful old house. Weeks back, a bird started to build a nest in one of the eaves. I was worried even then; there was just a few lonely inches, on that 2x2, such a precarious spot. But she built dutifully. Before I knew it, there was sweet chirping.

I had walked to the corner store for beer. (Bud Light Lime. Forgive me.) On the way home, I saw some sort of commotion in the nest, and the inevitable: a baby fell from the nest. I walked over with my heart in my throat. I glanced down and saw just briefly a wriggling little body, covered in feathers like hairs, moving slowly the way a newborn infant moves its arm, like through water. So I did what came naturally: I ran. I'm not very proud of it. I just didn't want to see.

The next day, to my great surprise, I discovered the baby bird still alive. He was chirping like mad. Out of my guilt I had spent the night before Googling about what one does in this kind of situation. The internet discouraged trying to take him in and feed him and raise him myself; I was told he would need to eat constantly and that I couldn't teach him to fly. I don't own a car and there weren't any wildlife rehabilitation places I could get to. But they did say that I could try to put him high up, where his mother could see him and feed him. I couldn't reach the eave, but there's a small evergreen right underneath it, against the house. The chick was moving around a lot. I got some paper towel and wrapped it around him and put him up in the branches. He kind of sat there for a minute, and then took a hop into the depths of the tree. I stared for a minute and went inside.

The next morning, I took the dog out. The chick was still alive, and no longer in the tree. I saw his mother fly down and feed him. But he kept chasing after her when she would fly, trying to follow behind her on the ground. She flew across the street and he hopped after her (he could cover a lot of ground surprisingly fast) but when he chased after her into the street he couldn't get back up over the curb. It was a really sad sight, and there were cars all around. I was surprised and happy he was still alive but it seemed like life was conspiring for me to watch him die. So I grabbed more paper towels and chased after him. I was so scared to pick him up because his little body was so fragile that I ended up chasing him under my neighbors car. He hopped up on one of the tires and it took me forever to get him out and my neighbor thought I was fucking with his car. But I got him.

The paper towel was wrapped around him and through it I could feel his little bones like eggshells. He was so mad, squawking at me like crazy. This time I made a little nest out of coffee filters and put him securely in the tree. After I stuck him in there, he didn't move or make a sound for a moment, and I thought, oh shit, I killed him, I must have crushed his little bones in my hand. But I watched for awhile and I saw him breathing. He just sort of heaved some breaths. He seemed utterly exhausted, just spent. So I waited for a minute and went back in the house. That was the last I saw of him. I'm sure he died. But I didn't see it, and if I'm being 100% honest I guess not seeing had become the point.

I stopped hearing a lot of chirping from the nest. I feared the worst. A big chunk of it fell out a couple days later, but I didn't see anymore chicks. All I really wanted was for one of them to make it. I began to see dead chicks all over town in the next week, since I was by now looking for them when I was walking around, but then I also became more aware of adult birds.

Well: one of them made it.

I was coming home from school and I saw this little fledgling chilling on the top of the porch. He was very noisy. Now, if this isn't all too perfect for you (I swear it's true), Mama bird was giving him flying lessons. She would fly from the porch to the top of this tree and he would very unevenly fly out there. It was kind of scary how far he would dip down in the air before he would pop up, little wings beating like mad, but he always made it. Then up to the eave where the nest had been. Then back, following the mother, every time. He hung around the house for a long time. He'd be sitting on the eave or the roof or on top of the porch chirping. I was a little nervous because I didn't see the mama but he looked plump and happy and eventually I saw him fly on his own. I threw a hot dog bun on the porch for him once. I haven't seen him the last few days. I think he was finally ready to really head out on his own.

I named him Little Dude.

***** 

You find people who believe that to make good art, one must have experienced tragedy. I don't believe that's true. It's too neat, too clean, too obvious. But if it's true, don't stress about it. Don't worry about getting in touch with tragedy. Tragedy is going to get in touch with you.

*****

To write a post about getting to good enough is something of a cheat. Because to my surprise, the last few years of my life have been better than good enough. I can tell you without exaggeration that I have been happier the last several years than I ever thought I would be. I am not, generally, someone who expects happiness, given the reality of the world we live in, the ubiquity of tragedy and the profound ambivalence at the heart of the human project. Yet here I have been: more fulfilled and content on a day-to-day basis than I would have thought possible.

It's a funny thing, trying to square your own happiness with a philosophical ambiguity towards human life as a global phenomenon. But I guess that's life's way of telling you to spend more time experiencing and less thinking about experience. I wish I could tell you that there was some grand strategy I employed to get here, but it's just been the process of getting out of my own head and recognizing all the reasons I have to feel happy and fortunate. I can't tell you how much I appreciate my day-to-day existence. I'm surrounded by brilliant people, I have the material things that I need, I drink and eat out with friends often, I get to sleep in a lot, and best of all, I get to teach. When I think about how much contentment I enjoy in my life, I reflect on what privilege really means.

Of course, such things can change, and life has conditioned me to be prepared for the other shoe to drop. But if there's one thing that I feel confident in about myself, it's my capacity to survive, and if my lovely existence now is transitory, I know that I can face what comes next with the confidence that I have earned the ability and the right to enjoy my life. There was a time when I wouldn't allow myself to enjoy good times; now I trust myself to find enjoyment and fulfillment even when things are bad. I guess I just grew up.

*****

Now: you might tell me that I didn't quite pull off telling the true story of the two chicks, and I'd agree. A little too cloying, a little too sentimental. I would not offer it if I wasn't trying to explain something. It may be the case that a story about trying to save a little baby bird just can't be expressed without falling into the maudlin or the overly dramatic. It's much more likely that I can't express it, that such a story exceeds my talents as a writer. Don't get me wrong, I'm great. I got chops. But I don't have that kind of chops. The reality is that, for many of us, with our limited abilities, the most emotional aspects of our lives are going to be the hardest to express. That's the bittersweet part. The great part, though, is negotiating that. It's in the process of self-discovery as a writer where you see if your technique is equal to your material, where you find out if you have the chops to tell the story you want to tell. The answer is frequently no, and that's frustrating, but finding out can be great. And you do get better. It's like exercising. You do your reps and you watch yourself improving, inch by inch.

Which does not mean that you get as good as you want to get. You can work on your jump shot for hours and you will get better, but that doesn't mean you get to start for the Knicks. Talent is not fair.  There is no deserves. And you don't get what you want in life.

But, look, I told the story. It's the only way I have to work out the things that are in my head. And that's ultimately the motivation: stuff happens, in your life or in your imagination, and you get to write about it. That has to be the motivation for most of us, because most of us aren't going to be making money doing this. That's just the percentages. I never said not to write. I could never say any such thing. I just said that you have to practice self-defense, that you shouldn't tie your heart too tightly around something that might not happen, and that you've got to forgive yourself if it doesn't. Then, if you make it, it's all a celebration anyhow. 

I may not tell the story of Little Dude and his sibling all that well, but I have to tell it, and at this point in my life the sentiment and the imprecision have to be forgiven. Because the reality is the whole thing made me incredibly emotional, and when I thought about writing it, I knew that it was exactly those emotions that people could make fun of. And I even get that, I understand it. But at this point there is no turning it off. You do learn about yourself. You learn about what little neuroses you can slowly put away and which you can't. I am fine with the way I look, until I look at myself the wrong way, I like my own voice, until I hear it, I can socialize with anyone, until I see them seeing me. Those things get a little bit better but the slightest cracks, and I'm back to where I was. That's okay. The truth is that at 32 I am no more able to control the intensity of the emotions that I experience when I watch a baby bird fall out of the nest than I would have been when I was 17, and that I will likely live the rest of my days choked by emotions I have no capacity to express. So I can live like that honestly or I can live dishonestly out of fear of displeasing other people.

I just want to give up a little anger every day. And I want to figure out the things that I need to be harder on myself about and the things that I need to forgive myself for, and I want to stay passionate but to forgive others for everything, and I want to be more fully myself every day. So let's celebrate good enough, and let's get free, and long live Little Dude.

the "Bert and Ernie are gay" thing says a lot

So this trope is old, but here's the New Yorker's new cover:

I would argue that this is in fact a really unfortunate portrayal of common attitudes. First, it's actually not conducive to gay rights or gay dignity to act as though every close male relationship is necessarily a sexual or romantic relationship. But worse, this is subtly a perfect distillation of how your average liberal views gay people, as Muppets: sexless, harmless, inoffensive, childish, silly, and ultimately mere fodder for the condescending entertainment of straight people.

Personally, I don't think that a group that has for decades labored against a brutally oppressive regime that humiliated them, assaulted them, and systematically denied them equal rights should be analogized to imaginary characters that have been built out of felt for the edutainment of children, nor that American liberalism's obsession with meaningless symbolism and empty uplift is a long-term strategy for success. 

how the NBA became a league for snobs

Over at Medium, I've written a piece about a trend in NBA commentary that has bothered me. Please check it out, and share if you enjoyed it.

you don't get credit for being better than absolutely horrible

I post this tweet not because it's uniquely disqualifying but because it's so perfectly indicative of the divide between liberals and the lefties in question. And more, of the reason why American liberalism has such a hard time sustaining success.

The point is not, and has never been, that "both parties are the same." The point is that neither party offers a remotely acceptable alternative, and that attacking the left-wing for criticizing provides a disincentive for the marginally better party to improve. Liberals and Democrats constantly tell us that the Republican party and mainstream conservatism are a uniquely dysfunctional and destructive political force, one which keeps getting worse and not better. That's true. They then say that we must support the Democrats because they Democrats are not as bad. The problem is that when you've already established the total worthlessness of the other option, "not as bad" is a terribly low bar to clear. If you keep supporting the less-awful side in a way that forbids criticism of that side, as so, so many liberals and Democrats do, there is no incentive for that less-awful side to actually be good. That's precisely the condition with the Democrats today: they haven't responded to Republican shittiness by becoming better. They've simply slumped into being worse and worse.

Now I don't take Hayes himself for being the kind to forbid criticism of Democrats, as so many do. But when he or other smart liberals say things like this, they're contributing to an intellectual landscape where the balance is tilted massively towards a belief that supporting Democrats is always the thing to do. And, sure enough, one of the first positive replies to this tweet was someone saying "Nader 2000," which is one of those liberal codes for "no friends to the left of Joe Lieberman." (Always hilarious: people who hate Ralph Nader for supposedly getting us into war in Iraq who love Hilary Clinton.)

And, listen, fuck the Democrats. Seriously. Yes, they're better than the Republicans, just like getting the hair ripped off of your balls is better than getting a tooth pulled out with a pair of pliers. That is not good enough. Fuck the Democrats and their union-busting and their hypocrisy on the surveillance state and their willingness to go to war and their horrid, self-pitying defeatism. Fuck them. Vote for them if you must, but fuck those guys.

Leftists are constantly being attacked for not offering a politically plausible plan. And yet I find that it's in fact liberal Democrats who fail to articulate anything resembling a coherent political strategy. How do you get Democrats to actually govern in a way consonant with your values? During the election, when I was talking about not voting for Barack Obama, between the screams of pure rage and redbaiting, the liberal Dems would say, "criticize him when he's in office to get him to do what you want, but elect him first!" But that time when it's supposedly okay to criticize Democrats and push them in a particular direction never comes. Ever. The election was over, and they still yelled at us, for talking about drones or chained CPI or Syria. The time to defer to Democrats, in the eyes of most liberal Democrats, is always. I'm just recording my experience. Meanwhile, their theory of change is... what? When the only bar Democrats are required to climb is "better than neo-Confederate, warmongering, women-hating assholes," what possible incentive is there to improve? It's Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football, again and again and again.

Now the usual suspects will appear to complain that I'm stating the obvious. And I am. Others will ask why I bother, given that liberal Democrats are incorrigible. Perhaps they are. But look, as long as this notion is expressed by people of prominence, we have to respond clearly: the point is not that they are the same. The point is that neither is good. And if you think "better than the Republicans" is good enough, then shame on you. If you think it's not good enough, express a theory of politics for how it gets better when so many of your number are dedicated to shielding Democrats from criticism of all kinds, or tell those people to stop shutting down criticism of Democrats.

Are the Democrats, in some Platonic sense, better than a party that tries to suppress the black vote, excludes and demonizes Mexican immigrants, pushes for limitless war, guts basic social services, tries to rob women of control of their own bodies, bans gay marriage, and generally sets the country on a path to enrich some small sliver of our people to the detriment of the rest? Yes. Congratulations, guys. What a laurel.

various endorsements

Because I know you're all just waiting intently for me to tell you what writers I like.

1. I frequently disagree with him, but man, Wesley Morris can write. I know it sounds obvious, but if you want to find work as a critic or commentator, get your prose right.

2. I though Sam Biddle was kind of a jerk when he wrote for Gizmodo, but his sensibility and writing style are perfect for covering the absurdity and arrogance of Silicon Valley at the new Valleywag.

3. A couple of years ago, I would have told you that the last thing the internet needed was another tech site. (I often wonder: is there such a thing as Peak Commentary? As of right now, it looks like the answer is no. We seem to have an infinite appetite.) But The Wirecutter, to me, shows that there's still room for new sites if they have a clear editorial philosophy and really invest effort in what they produce. The Wirecutter runs reviews of products, but it avoids the twin poles of bad contemporary criticism, fanboy fawning and snarky dismissal. Instead, they carefully and soberly explore the landscape of available devices for particular needs, compare prior reviews, and recommend options based on budget and need, in accessible and enthusiastic prose. Check out founder Brian Lam's piece on the iPhone. It advocates without engaging in the typical aggressive condescension that's typical of pro-Apple reviews. (Then get depressed when many of the commenters engage in that exact shitty behavior.) As an Apple skeptic, it's nice to see someone who can articulate a case for an Apple product that is based on the actual product, not on weird personality cult bullshit. Great site all around.

4. You should really subscribe to the Slurve, if you're a baseball fan, or interested in new media models. It's surprising to me how different the experience of reading an email newsletter is from reading, say, a paywalled website. An email, for me, has a different sense of obligation than a new post on a site. That might not sound like a good thing for something that's intended to be enjoyed, but for me, it actually is: it forces me to sit down and read the thing and have that mental space devoted for awhile. This summer is hugely important for me, academically and professionally, and it's important to take a regular break where I focus on something completely different. So in the morning, I have my coffee-and-Slurve time. One of the best parts of my day.

5. I like Devin Faraci's writing about movies, Catie Weaver on celebrity weirdness, Steve Randy Waldman on economics and politics, Moe Tkacik on anything, and Charles Pierce yelling at people, when the people getting yelled at are deserving. I also like you.

Is Franz Kafka Overrated?

No.

most students resist being educated

I'm reviewing a book at the moment, and the author included the by-now boilerplate notion that the internet has made traditional education obsolete: whereas once information was locked away in the brains of teachers, or in ivory towers or expensive encyclopedias or whatever, now, information is free, and thus any student who wants to know things can simply find them online, and so teachers are out of a job. This idea is typically directed against collegiate educators, for multiple reasons, most saliently America's deep hatred of our fantastic higher education system. But the elementary logic is applicable to anyone who teaches. I hear it constantly. It's bullshit, though: it misunderstands the nature of education, and more, the nature of students.

First, education is not and never has been about giving people knowledge. I wonder if the people making this argument have ever heard of a public library. People have always been able to get their hands on information, if they've been willing to do a little work to get it. The internet just makes it a little bit easier. If education were as easy as giving people information, then we would not talk about some such thing as education. We'd have no need to. You should know that when the printing press was on the rise in early modern Europe, there was eerily similar talk of educators being out of business. If you can just put all the knowledge in books, and those books are no longer the property of a powerful caste, what purpose do monks serve? But of course, having a book filled with the world's knowledge, and having that knowledge, are two separate things. I assure you: when I teach freshman composition, I could leave my students alone in the classroom with their textbooks for the whole semester, and they wouldn't come out of it with any more skills or knowledge than they had when they first started. My job is to cram the education into their heads.

I don't exaggerate, and I imply resistance for a reason: most students, in most educational contexts, resist being educated. It's true. It's not just true, but banal and obvious. Why do we have truancy officers? Why do teachers device intricate schemes of punishment and reward? Why do we have Norman Rockwell visions of students playing hooky or sitting in the corner with a dunce cap? Because many students have only the barest desire to learn. That's why people made it illegal for them not to go to school!

When Aaron Swartz died, I read a couple people lamenting that not everyone is self-educated in the way he was, that not everyone could enjoy unstructured, self-directed education like Swartz had. And I just thought to myself, god, what a fantasy. What a silly fantasy. Most people are never, ever going to be autodidacts. If such a thing were likely or even possible, we wouldn't have our endless educational debates. Let me tell you a dirty secret about college students: they mostly want more structure, not less. They are constantly asking for rubrics and models and explicit directions on how to get an A. That's the question: not "how can I do this my own way," but "how can I ensure I get the best possible grade?" I am constantly pushing back against their desire to be told how to do every individual step in every individual assignment. There's no sense in which my teaching or my students or my university are unique, in that. Many of my students are brilliant, but they want to do as little as possible to succeed. You will find that they share this tendency with most people. That's precisely why a self-directed, self-motivated, and intellectually curious student is always so refreshing. I love undergrads and I love teaching, and I'm not trying to damn people here. I'm saying that this is the role of an educator. It's not to unleash information and let students find their own bliss. It isn't, it never has been, and it can't be.

Again, the same complaint from me: our debates about education are filled with so much bullshit fantasy about what most students or all students are like, that there's no room to talk about reality. The orthodoxy in education debates is to talk as if every student is some budding genius who needs only to have their potential unlocked and then to pursue their own bliss. Most students are not like Aaron Swartz and they never will be. Trying to erect an entire educational system based on the habits of the extremely rare individuals at the top of the heap is idiocy.

To be useful in the education debate, you have to imagine your average student, in any level of education, as you do the average person. And very few of us imagine the average person to be a budding genius. This romanticized fantasy about what most students want or can achieve is a direct and serious impediment to making education as good as it can be. What's more, it demonstrates the basic poverty of our national conversation on the topic: so many of the loudest voices have never taught anyone anything at all.

it is rational to flee from torture

As I write this, the media is working itself into a frenzy about Edward Snowden fleeing Hong Kong, possibly for Ecuador, and is passing through other countries on the way there. (Frome RED CHINA to COMMUNIST RUSSIA!) The usual suspects are arguing that this is proof positive that he's a traitor, or whatever, under the unassailable logic that only a guilty man would run from the brutal regime whose crimes he's exposed. I would merely like to remind them that a United Nations functionary last year confirmed the obvious, which is that the United States tortured Bradley Manning for actions similar to that of Snowden. It is profoundly rational to flee imprisonment and torture. Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of anything more rational. Might be relevant.

the credulity divide

This piece at Gawker by Max Read is indicative of one of the hardest parts of getting people to wrestle with our country's horrific violence, what I call the credulity divide. The credulity divide refers to the distance between the factual information that Americans will recognize and their default stance towards critiques and accusations leveled against the government. So Read is a guy who seems very informed and reasonably accepting of the vast amount of misdeeds that our government has done, in the recent and distant past. He has to be, like anyone has to: the declassification of old documentation has again and again revealed that our intelligence services and military have been guilty of just about every "conspiracy theory" leveled against them. From the Bay of Pigs to the Gulf of Tonkin to the Shah to the Year of Living Dangerously to Honduras to MK Ultra to cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles to rendition, on and on and on. All dismissed, at one point or another, as the sort of thing our government would never do. All confirmed beyond reasonable doubt with evidence.

I see no reason to believe that Michael Hastings's death was anything other than a sad and terrible car accident, the kind that kills 180 Americans a day. And I understand why people are sensitive to these accusations. I've never been one to talk about taste or what's "appropriate" myself, but I get why people who knew and loved Hastings personally would be put out. Evidence has to come first. But read most of the comments on that piece, and you'll see that's not the spirit in which they're written. Instead, they are mostly merely mocking of conspiracy theorists as a category. What's strange is that I'm sure the large majority of them would admit the long litany of crimes the United States has committed: assassinations, renditions, torture, the destablizing of legitimate governments, the support of illegitimate governments, funneling weaponry into civil wars, providing intelligence to secret police.... That's the credulity divide: how acceptance of the fact of US misdeeds does not influence assumptions about who is or is not credible, or what claims deserve to be dismissed out of hand.

People believe in conspiracy theories about the American government because the American government has never not been involved in violent conspiracies, since at least the end of World War II. I would like to see the default assumption switch from mockery of those alleging conspiracy to suspicion of the government. Evidence still has to come first. But when you're constantly assuming the worst of people making allegations, you make yourself overly credulous towards a government that does not deserve credulity.

how the gay rights movement became conservative

Just briefly-- Andrew Sullivan has been running a long series of reader emails about the topic of male bisexuality. This is well-trod ground, but it's particularly interesting because it demonstrates the degree to which the establishment gay rights movement, epitomized by the bullying majordomo himself, Dan Savage, has become a conservative movement, a movement against freedom.

Today, an emailer epitomizes the closed-minded nature of many older gay men in writing, "You won’t find any truly bisexual men. Your initial reader is either titillated by the taboo of it all or he is a closeted gay man who is in denial. I know from personal experience, and so does every other gay man who finds women attractive in some way." As I've written before, I grew up into a gay rights movement, at a time when its mainstream acceptance was still nascent. My father, a theater professor, introduced my siblings and me to queer people throughout our childhood, and the existence and acceptance of them was an assumed part of the landscape. And these people were queer, in the old sense, not the sanitized, sexless TV gays that are the dominant image of homosexuality today. What I want to point out is how totally alien that emailers attitude would have been to the old, radical, avant garde gay movements of the past. I grew up around self-described homos and drag queens, people often contemptuous of childbearing and monogamy, and deeply opposed to familial and sexual conservatism of all kinds. The central message they delivered was to be yourself and to never apologize for acting in accordance with your own feelings. That remains a beautiful, radical idea, and one worth fighting for. Now, we have someone who probably fancies himself an advocate of gay rights, sneering at thousands of people and instructing them on what they are not allowed to feel. That's the general trajectory of the gay rights movement: from a passionate and celebratory endorsement of self-ownership to a hectoring, narrow-minded movement of conservative scolds, in just a few decades. It's breathtaking.

What, exactly, is the difference between this guy and the conservative housewife who insists that her son cannot possibly be gay? I imagine this modern-day gay rights advocate asking bisexual men if they've just tried not being bi. Now, you'll note that this gentlemen is perfectly fine with psychologizing thousands of disparate people and ascribing broad pathologies to them as the reason for their feelings. Well, two can play at that game. I detect a kind of panic in this kind of response. The urge to say, "I've experienced this, so it must be true of everyone" is a classic game of self-defense, an insistence on what "human nature" is out of a desire to avoid the personal consequences of the alternative. There is a ugly and bizarre tendency for many gay men to want to extrapolate from their own personal experience into a pat explanation for all homosexual desire. Call it the petty narcissism of being oppressed. More than anything, I'd like to ask this gentlemen: what are you so afraid of? Why does this thought threaten you so much? Perhaps such questions are rude, but then, what's good for the goose....

I don't recognize the gay rights movement anymore. It's about as vital and energetic as a trade show. Somewhere along the line, the message that arose from that movement changed from being "be who you are, without apology" to "we can't help it, so please let us, thanks." That basic, flawed argument has eaten all of the nuance and wildness and diversity that was once at the heart of gay culture. I always want to ask: what if homosexuality were a choice? Are you really arguing that no one would have the right to choose it? It's led to junk science, with tons of people casually assuming that there is an individual gay gene, even that we've identified it, despite all the many problems with a purely genetic explanation. And it treats basic human rights as if they stem merely from some kind of legalistic loophole rather than through a full-throated defense of every human being's fundamental right to self-ownership.

Here's the reality: some men, maybe very few, feel sexual attraction towards both men and women. They find a culture where not only is their homosexual desire subject to the same brute homophobia and bigotry that dogs us still today, but where their bisexual desire is rejected by many in the communities that should be most accepting and most compassionate. No one supposes that bisexuality is as common as homosexuality. The fact of a sexual spectrum does not presuppose that people are distributed equally across that spectrum. But that is no more of an argument against the existence of bisexuality than the very small numbers of gay men and women relative to straight is an argument against the existence of homosexuality. If we are to take part in a movement for sexual liberation and for the legitimacy of all consensual, adult desires, we must not fall into rules of convenience, driven by short-term and short-sighted political expediency. It's wrong to tell people who the must or must not desire, it's wrong to tell people to feel shame for which adults they have consensual sex with, and I'm just as happy saying so to old gay men as I am to that bigoted conservative houswife.

yet more corroboration

Pardon me for continuing to just throw links at you guys, but I think every drop from the gradual drip of confirmation and support for Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald is important. Via Hamilton Nolan at Gawker, an interview with NSA whistleblower William Binney in USA Today:

the way it's set up now, it's a joke. I mean, it can't work the way it is because they have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. And as long as the agencies tell them, they will know. If they don't tell them, they don't know. And that's what's been going on here... 

Even take the FISA court, for example. The judges signed that order. I mean, I am sure they (the FBI) swore on an affidavit to the judge, "These are the reasons why," but the judge has no foundation to challenge anything that they present to him. What information does the judge have to make a decision against them? I mean, he has absolutely nothing. So that's really not an oversight.....

More importantly, Thomas Drake: "Remember, I saw what he saw." [emphasis mine]

"I saw what he saw." More corroboration, more support. Drip, drip, drip....

skeptics face a burden of proof, too

So as I said when I replied to that piece on Medium.com, the author in no sense seemed to me to be individually incurious or dismissive of privacy concerns. He's just guilty, I think, of the same problem that a lot of people have, which is excessive credulity towards the restraint of the government. There's been a lot of skeptics, trying to gradually poke away at the revelations of the past weeks. I appreciate the importance of skepticism and media criticism, but so many of these people seem bent on arriving at a particular conclusion: that Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are at least wrong and maybe deliberately deceptive. That's without even mentioning the genuine propagandists and apologists.

Well, this seems relevant. Here's CNET:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. 

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that." 

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee. 

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls. 

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

This is exactly what skeptics have been denying that the NSA has the ability to do. Now I recognize that CNET's piece itself has to be vetted and confirmed, and that the exchange mentioned could be interpreted differently. But, again, we've had a guy come forward at great personal risk to directly report on what he had the ability to do in his job. He's been confirmed by both the private contractor he worked for and the NSA to have been employed in the kind of work he said he was. And he felt moved to give up a high paying job and comfortable life in Hawaii by his sense of injustice towards what he saw there. He provided evidence in the form of PowerPoint slides that go a long way towards supporting his stories. No source is perfectly credible. But he has been subject to a frankly incredible degree of skepticism that simply would not exist without a desperate desire among Americans to view their government positively.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation we have people saying that a government that we know for a fact has recently engaged in warantless wiretapping, "rendered" people to remote locations without review or due process, tortured, killed people (including American citizens) without trial, drummed up support for wars on faulty or fabricated intelligence, and in every sense betrayed the spirit of the laws and ideals of this country. I cannot understand how rational people who claim to be motivated by facts can look at the crimes of this government that no one meaningfully disputes and still trust it. The habit is just bizarre.

What's perhaps even worse is the common assertion that, if this information is obtained through a FISA court, somehow, the story becomes a "yawn." The notion that a secret court without any transparency or review is somehow an adequate check on this program is bizarre. But don't take my word for it. Let's ask a retired federal judge who has more information and access than you or me:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced. 

Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said.... 

It’s an anointment process. It’s not a selection process. But you know, it’s not boat rockers. So you have a [federal] bench which is way more conservative than before. This is a subset of that. And it’s a subset of that who are operating under privacy, confidentiality, and national security. To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

Do we have corroboration for this judge's criticism? We do: the 99.97% rate at which the FISA court grants these requests. That kind of number, of course, is what you'd expect from a kangaroo court, one specifically designed to act as a turnstile for our surveillance state. Even if Snowden is lying (for reasons that utterly escape me), and this exchange that CNET reports is somehow a complete misinterpretation, then we're left with a vast system of surveillance that is gobbling up our information and destroying our privacy without anything resembling adequate review. In the face of all of this, the skeptics seem to me to be in fact guilty of a profound lack of skepticism, a lack of skepticism towards a government that has demonstrated again and again that it cannot be trusted. They do so in an intellectual environment filled with serial Obama apologists and those who are bent on expanding the security state. It's time to reorient in the face of the best evidence.

I appreciate the gifts more than I can say

I've been trying to articulate this for awhile, but I guess brevity is best: for months now I've gotten gifts sent from my Amazon Wish List from readers, books from people I've never met. It's an incredible feeling for a guy who does this as an amateur, as well as one who has always assumed that his writing will displease more people than it pleases. And for anyone who grew up spending so many endless hours reading, a gift of a book is always special. 

Thank you to everybody, and thanks for reading.

dear Kyle Buchanan: buildings have fallen on other countries, too

So Kyle Buchanan at Vulture has a piece up which demonstrates that, a dozen years after 9/11, those events are still a permanent excuse for American chauvinism and self-centeredness. He dings the new Man of Steel (which I saw last night) and many others because buildings are blown up in them, and of course because no one was every hurt in a building collapse or explosion before 9/11, these filmmakers are abusing the memory of 9/11. Rather than, you know, titillating the sensibilities of boys who like to see things blown up, many of whom are too young to have any memory of 9/11.

His evidence that these are nods to 9/11 and not just imagery of building collapses, such as it is, is that debris fall on people, people get trapped in rubble, and everything gets covered in ash. Oh, and people run from the collapsing buildings, which you can sometimes shoot from the street, in order to capture the emotion on their faces. (I doubt a bird's eye view would do much, emotionally.) And that's about it: there are explosions, people get hurt, therefore it's all about 9/11, it's all about Americans, it's all about New Yorkers. I would personally say that every last detail mentioned by Buchanan is indicative  of building collapses and explosions in general, but then this is the power of the self-obsessed mind. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan might want to ask the people of Beirut if they are familiar with the concept of buildings being blown up. Or people in Aleppo, or in Belfast, or in Hiroshima.

9/11 continues to demonstrate the degree to which even supposedly cosmopolitan, progressive people are captured by a manic American self-centeredness. There's an insistence, still, that what happened to us was worse than what has happened to everyone else, that when push comes to shove, our pain rates higher than that of everyone else's. That's a profoundly American way of thinking itself, of course, folding tragedy into a narrative of competition. I truly long for the day when Americans realize that there is nothing inherently special or important about Americans, and that tragedy and terrorism have happened to many other people in many other places two. But better than a decade after September 11th, I'm not holding my breath.

heads I win, tails you lose

So here "Allahpundit," reflecting the rapidly-hardening conventional wisdom, provides a masterful example of squaring the "damage done" circle: Edward Snowden is telling us things that we all already knew, but he's doing so in a way that nevertheless damages the credibility of the United States. It's breathtaking, really, the sheer illogic, the simultaneous adoption of a yawning countenance and an enraged one, and the relentless focus on personality and individual character, rather than grappling with the actual issues at hand. And this particular pundit merely reflects the attitudes of the establishment media that is far more comfortable celebrating power than questioning it.

Anyone hollering about this, of course, can be disarmed with very simple questions. Does a country have the right to spy on another by infiltrating its electronic communication through technological deception? If the answer is yes, then the people complaining about this must abandon any pretense of judgment towards China for doing so to us. They are very unlikely to do so. If the answer is no, then the people complaining must accept that Snowden has exposed an immoral and likely illegal program undertaken by the United States. They should celebrate Snowden's exposure of the United States's bad behavior. They are very unlikely to do this, as well Either way, you cannot rationally excuse the one and judge the other.

Now I don't doubt that many people will find a way to excuse what the United States has done and rail against China for doing the same. The essential hypocrisy of childish nationalism is something you just have to live with, in today's world. But it would be nice if the people who embrace it would be forced to actually talk their way through it, to own up to the fact that their moral convictions are not in fact convictions at all but are purely dependent on who exactly is being considered. It's the same way with the "this is devastating to us/but it's no big deal" fandango. If you want to embrace both sides, out of a simple emotionalism that compels you to portray Snowden as both damaging and ineffectual, go ahead, but it would be nice if you admit that's what you're doing.

Snowden has done more than expose the American surveillance state. He's exposed the way in which fidelity to nation trumps the most basic concept of morality, that moral judgments should apply equally regardless of who (or which nation) is being judged.

various problems with NSA defenses

This piece criticizing Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, by a web developer named Mark Jaquith, is both an intelligent piece of writing and emblematic of the problems in this kind of piece.

Blaming the victims of limitless government secrecy. This is the the biggie. Over and over again, I've seen critics of Snowden and Greenwald referring to aspects we don't know about the program, those who implement it, or its capabilities, and suggesting that this ignorance is a defense of the surveillance state. This ignorance is in fact a terrible indictment of the surveillance state. That we don't know to answer these questions demonstrates what a terrible blow to democracy these programs really are. Democracy requires an informed public; that's part of the basic intellectual justification for democratic governance, going back to the ancient Greeks. When we as citizens are incapable of actually debating the particulars of a program enacted by our government, something is deeply wrong.

Jaquith uses this ignorance as a reason to criticize Greenwald and Snowden. In fact it's perhaps the biggest reason their revelations are so important. I agree with Jaquith that the distinction he identifies matters. What's bizarre to me is what he fails to understand: if Snowden had not come forward, he wouldn't know that there is a distinction to be parsed!

Squaring the "damage done" circle. As others have done, Jaquith suggests that this story is secretly no big deal, that if the feds lack unilateral and direct access to these communications, these are all revelations that we have heard before. (Specifically, he calls the story a "yawn.") I find the "ho-hum" pose aggravating on something of a visceral level. Personally, even if I knew everything that I know now ten days ago, I would be angered by the existence of a vast, expensive architecture of surveillance, operating under the specific edict to snoop on American citizens. Setting aside the emotional reaction, though, there's the simple contradiction between the response of the yawning crowd and the response of the "string 'em up" crowd. If you feel that what was revealed was not a big deal, it would be nice to send a note to Representative Peter King, who is calling for the prosecution of journalists who report these stories. And you might ask yourself why, as Eli Lake reported, the NSA is now in full "freakout mode" over the revelations. The security state is now scouring the earth to find Snowden, if they don't already have him. The reaction against Snowden is proof of the importance of what he's revealed.

Presuming innocence of institutions instead of individuals. Jaquith demonstrates a common but scary credulity towards government and corporations throughout his piece. He writes that, "the only way their story is true is if all the companies involved are lying, and the NSA is lying, and Senators Feinstein and Rogers are lying, and the President is lying, and the New York Times’ sources are lying." This, we are to take it, is supposed to be some sort of damning passage. Jaquith apparently finds the government's denials about a vast system of surveillance that they have worked tirelessly to hide from public view more credible than those casting light on those programs. He similarly seems to think that it's quite unlikely that a bunch of corporations, with every self-interested reason to deny the stories, would lie or obfuscate, or that their very carefully-worded responses (which contradict many facts in the public record) might be hiding something. As far as an anonymous source in the Times, well, how can I possibly adjudicate that? I don't know who this person is, what they benefit from speaking to the Times, or why they were granted anonymity. I remember some anonymous sources for the Times that, in the run up to the Iraq war, should have been viewed with more skepticism. You will forgive me for reading another anonymous source with several grains of salt.

Governments do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. The history of the American state— not the conspiracy theorist history, but the mainstream, documented history, supported with reams of declassified documentation, eyewitness testimony, and physical evidence— is the history of bad behavior, lawlessness, and deceit. One of the weird aspects of American intellectual life is that its the people who distrust the government who are treated like cranks, when we have a mountain of recent evidence that shows us why it should be the other way around. Jaquith should ask himself why he views the power and scope of the surveillance state with a yawn.

Not knowing the actual requirements of the FISA courts. Like many, Jaquith places an inordinate amount of faith in the FISA court process. I would argue that any secret court system, where the public has no ability to understand the proceedings or parse the results even after the fact, is inherently problematic. But even so: the FISA warrant process has many holes. Via Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry I read this fascinating blog post, which references investigative work by David Kravets of Wired. Kravets's reporting demonstrates the degree to which people like Jaquith, Andrew Sullivan, and Josh Marshall have underestimated the scope of these programs. For example, the NSA can investigate someone for a week before triggering a FISA request, and can continue to do so even if they must appeal a FISA rejection— rejections which almost never happen.

What's more, Kravets writes,

For example, an authorization targeting ‘al Qaeda’ — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad — could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

This goes so far beyond the way that the program is represented by skeptics of Snowden. Do they know how broad these programs really are? Are they aware of just how much the government can do before bringing any accountability onto themselves, even the accountability of a secret court that rubber stamps almost every government request? I don't know. I do think that they are guilty of overestimating the amount of oversight in the system.

 What makes this disturbing to me is that I don't think Jaquith is some sort of NSA stooge or government mouthpiece. Quite the opposite; he seems genuinely interested in parsing these distinctions and raises important questions. What worries me is that generally intelligence and sober people seem so often to fall into assuming the benign nature of these programs.

authoritarianism from the inside

The conceit of this piece by Josh Marshall is that there's some great mystery to why some people feel differently than he does about whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. In fact it's brutally simple: Marshall sees nothing to fear from authority and the state, because he is one of the Chosen People of authority and the state. Meanwhile, those who are not among the elect fear and distrust authority, because it daily oppresses them. This fear and distrust is as rational as a thing can be, but Marshall cannot bring himself to believe in it.

Marshall has that in common with Jeffrey Toobin, Richard Cohen, and David Brooks: no reason to fear the police state. Why should they? They are, all of them, American aristocrats: white, male, rich, and properly deferential to anyone with a title or a badge or authority or an office. Of course they don't know why anyone would worry about limitless surveillance. They themselves have nothing to fear because they are the overclass. They can't imagine what it might be like to be Muslim or black or poor or to have any other characteristic that removes them from the ranks of the assumed blameless.

But the story of America is the story of people with reason to fear power. It's the story of how very dangerous it can be to find oneself outside of the overclass, how relentlessly the state and the moneyed work to crush difference. Marshall's notion that men like Manning and Snowden should simply have backed off and played by the rules is one of the most consistent and dishonest messages in American political history. It was the message delivered to the AIDS activists who are profiled in How to Stop a Plague. It was the message delivered to Martin Luther King and the rest of the Civil Rights movement. It was the message delivered to the suffragettes. It was the message delivered to the abolitionists. It was the message delivered to the American revolutionaries. In each case, self-serious men told those who perceived themselves to be oppressed and suffering to get on board and play by the rules, in deference to the community.

Would Marshall have told the Black Panthers that they should have colored within the lines? Would he have told them that they had nothing to fear from the state? Ask Fred Hampton if he had anything to fear from the security state. I don't know how Marshall would regard the Black Panthers. He might be the type of liberal to cluck his tongue at their radicalism. The other movements I mentioned have all become lacquered in bronze in the American mind, and I don't doubt that he'd rush to say that of course he would have supported their movements. And that, really, is the contemporary American liberal in its Platonic state: supportive of all resistance movements, so long as they live in history. Today's movements never rate. They are too challenging, too impolite.

That's part of Corey Robin's point, in this post. He points out that Brooks's limp appeals to family and community are in keeping with traditional methods used to bring radicals and subversives to heel. For someone like Brooks, there's no contradiction between communal fidelity and deference to power. His community is power. His family is the overclass. He wants you to defer to society because he knows no society but the society of the comfortable, of the safe, of the privileged. Perhaps Josh Marshall has, in the realm of pure theory, a greater regard for those who find themselves outside of the benevolent embrace of the American establishment. But as he demonstrates, he cannot see to really understand what it means to be disfavored by power, to be disfavored by government. Again and again in the past few days, we have read people delivering some version of the same argument. "I don't see what they have to worry about." That's the real crime, of the people who attack Edward Snowden instead of grappling with what it means to be a subversive in the eyes of the state: a profound failure of imagination.

nota bene

Andrew Sullivan has replied to my post on the conflict between his conservatism and his skepticism towards Edward Snowden. I also encourage you to read Corey Robin, Conor Friedersdorf, and Hamilton Nolan on this issue.

to understand terrorism and threat assessment, look to Aum

Consider, if you please, Aum Shinrikyo, the cult responsible for the terrible sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. And consider what it means for an appropriate response to terrorism.

I've been studying Aum recently, as a way to think through terrorism and the appropriate response to it. It's hard to imagine a more dangerous terrorist organization than Aum. Aum was a highly coordinated organization, with a clear chain of command and effective communication within the organization. It was fabulously well-funded, raking in millions of dollars from its devoted followers and pushing that money into complex and lucrative investment schemes. It had an incredibly devoted collection of followers, who were subject to constant brainwashing techniques and daily tests of loyalty and devotion. The network was vast, with cells and headquarters in dozens of countries. The ideology was mutable and portable, making it easier to spread; the cult's teachings incorporated aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and others, which helped increase its appeal. Its technological expertise and capability were incredible. The cult attracted many of Japan's brightest minds, brilliant scientists from the top universities with advanced degrees in chemistry, biology, and technology. They poured their funds into advanced labs and workshops and gained access to extremely dangerous chemicals and weaponry. They had groups devoted exclusively to weaponry and defense, to intelligence and surveillance, to loyalty and retention. They had large compounds in remote locations, spread out through Japan and in the rest of the world. They had loyalists ensconced in the military, the police, the government, and the media. They enjoyed the protection of being an officially recognized religious group. And as their most basic and cherished belief lay in the imminent coming of the apocalypse, and their religious duty to speed it along, they were absolutely bent on murder and destruction.

In almost every sense, this is the worst case scenario for terrorism. This is what people imagine when they think of the destructive potential of terrorism.

Yet what's as remarkable as Aum's potential for mayhem is how little of it, on balance, they actually caused. Don't misunderstand me: Aum's crimes were horrific, not merely the terrible subway gassing but their long history of murder, intimidation, extortion, fraud, and exploitation. What they did was unforgivable, and the human cost, devastating. But at no point did Aum Shinrikyo represent an existential threat to Japan or its people. The death toll of Aum was several dozen; again, a terrible human cost, but not an existential threat. At no time was the territorial integrity of Japan threatened. At no time was the operational integrity of the Japanese government threatened. At no time was the day-to-day operation of the Japanese economy meaningfully threatened. The threat to the average Japanese citizen was effectively nil. 

Just as important was what the Japanese government and people did not do. They didn't panic. They didn't make sweeping changes to their way of life. They didn't implement a vast system of domestic surveillance. They didn't suspend basic civil rights. They didn't begin to capture, torture, and kill without due process. They didn't, in other words, allow themselves to be terrorized. Instead, they addressed the threat. They investigated and arrested the cult's leadership. They tried them in civilian courts and earned convictions through due process. They buried their dead. They mourned. And they moved on. In every sense, it was a rational, adult, mature response to a terrible terrorist act, one that remained largely in keeping with liberal democratic ideals. 

All of the evidence we've acquired since 9/11 suggests that Al Qaeda is not like Aum. Al Qaeda is not nearly as coordinated. It is not nearly as hierarchical. It lacks basic inter-organizational communication or leadership structure. It lacks clear goals and leaders who can articulate them. It lacks operational infrastructure. It lacks clear sources of funding. It lacks technical and scientific expertise. It appears now to have always been a loosely connected fellowship of groups and sects, often at odds with one another philosophically and practically, lacking the kind of cohesion or leadership necessary to coordinate major attacks. All or most of that was true before more than a decade of international military and legal assaults on the organization. The near-total inability of Al Qaeda to wage large-scale destruction has been seen in the lack of mayhem caused by the group in recent years. The Boston Marathon bombing, waged not by Al Qaeda itself but merely by sympathizers, failed to killed more than three people despite having taken place amidst a literal throng of humanity. Again, a terrible tragedy and a horrific crime. But by any rational, adult estimation, nothing resembling a national threat to the United States.

Yet despite the near-total failure of Islamic terrorists to actually harm the United States in a meaningful way, we learn every day of vast new encroachments on our civil liberties and alterations to our basic way of life, enacted in response to our fear of terrorism. To debate the wisdom and prudence of this is to step into a weird world where claims no longer require evidence and assertions qualify as proof. People tell me constantly: there's vast throngs on terrible terrorists out there, and we have to give up our freedoms to fight them! And I ask: where? Who? In what numbers? Of what destructive capability? How do you know? Where's your proof? Always: nothing. No meaningful response at all. They just know.

That is the definition of irrationality. In the years following the subway attack in 1995, Japan did not live in a post-Aum world. They did not allow their day-to-day lives to be defined by those attacks. A dozen years after 9/11, our national character has been totally consumed by Al Qaeda and fear of it. It underpins everything we do. It has infected our culture. I don't know why so many otherwise rational, sane adults are so incapable of looking at this threat rationally, of disconnecting their legitimate moral revulsion from the sober threat evaluation that is the responsibility of citizens in a dangerous world. We have examples of adult responses to terrorism. Instead, we betray ourselves, in every sense a terrorized, terrified people.

Andrew Sullivan's two selves

Few writers have devoted more of their writing to understanding themselves than Andrew Sullivan. That is not a dig. The process of self-examination can be an essential guide to understanding broader issues in the world. I would in fact say that this process has been one of the more successful ways to explore political questions of the past century or so. The end result has been that we have a lot of material on what Sullivan's particular brand of conservatism amounts to. This is probably best expressed in his book The Conservative Soul, a text I've read through twice. On the second read through, undertaken within the last four months, I read it not as an explanation of a particular writer's politics, but as an object lesson in how far someone can stray from their philosophical commitments without changing them.

Sullivan has written of himself often as a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, who (with apologies to Corey Robin) are known in the popular telling as standard bearers for a kind of conservatism of skepticism. This skepticism is not a skepticism in the sense of a narrow materialism or aggressive atheism. It is instead a skepticism towards people and institutions, towards both their goodness and their capability. It's a kind of conservatism that leads one, for example, to oppose welfare programs not out of a rejection of their purported ends but out of doubt that these programs can reliably reach those ends, or that they can do so without destructive unintended consequences. Sullivan's conservatism, I have always understood, is predicated on the notion that even fundamentally good people are corruptible and fallible and that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This, to me, is the message of The Conservative Soul.

This commitment, outlined in a book published in 2007, has been severely challenged by the events of 2008. The presidency of Barack Obama has changed Sullivan's politics and his writing, by my estimation. His support for Obama is neither unconditional nor free from criticism. But it is considerable, and defined by a deep belief that Obama is playing both a political and policy "long game." In this telling, any apparent failure, scandal, or bad decision of the Obama administration can be understood as merely one part of a master plan that will lead to victory, both political and moral. (Sullivan recently wrote about his desire to find a better cartoon character to represent Obama's political advantage over the Republicans; Sullivan has repeatedly used the Roadrunner's dominance of Wile E. Coyote as an allegory for Obama's mastery of the GOP.) Sullivan's regard for Obama has also involved an iconography that has been, at times, somewhat disconcerting for someone of my temperament.

As I've said, there is no fair accusation that Sullivan has shielded Obama from proper criticism. As someone who argues with the truly zealous Obama defenders on a daily basis, he cannot be accused of the kind of unhinged hero-worship that has grown among some partisan Democrats. Yet I still find myself disturbed and confused by this transformation. If you asked me to define one trait that would be least reconcilable with the conservatism espoused in The Conservative Soul, it would be deference to a particular leader. I cannot square the recognition that all political leadership is subject to corruption and failure with the kind of faith Sullivan regularly shows in Obama. And this becomes a deeper confusion when you see how this trust has filtered down from Obama to the people and programs beneath him.

This faith in the goodness and constraint of a particular government has reached, I hope, it's zenith in Sullivan's yawning response to a vast system of government surveillance that must involve thousands of people with disparate agendas and different characters. Here, more than ever, I would think a conservatism of skepticism, which recognizes the ample possibility for human failure, would create great suspicion and criticism. Even if you have far more faith in Obama's goodness than I do, even if you think that goodness is represented in his senior advisors, you have to recognize the vast potential for abuse in a system like this. The history of powerful human systems is a history of their corruption. All it takes is a small group of people working within such a program, one which by design lacks accountability and external review, for this kind of information be used to silence dissent, to pursue personal vendettas, or to unfairly harm without due process. This country should know very well the destructive power of functionaries and bureaucrats when they are armed with power and a lack of accountability

Just today, Sullivan wrote this:

the tradition I have long studied and thought about is not a conservatism finding solutions to problems. It is about finding solutions to problems you suspect may not be solutions at all, and may be moot once you’ve done your best; it’s about the elusive nature of prudential judgment; the creation of character through culture; the love of what is and what is one’s own; and a non-rational grasp of the times any statesman lives through. It is about a view of the whole that keeps politics in its place. It is, in the end, a way of being contingently in the world.

How can these beliefs possibly be reconciled? How can a man who admits the elusive nature of prudential judgment trust the judgments of thousands of totally unaccountable government functionaries? How can he believe that a system bent on total secrecy and total  denial of oversight or restraint would represent a culture that could instill character? How could he look at this vast, dehumanized and dehumanizing surveillance system and not see a potentially failed solution to a problem that is, in perspective, a fact of life in the modern world? I cannot reconcile the philosophy with the individual commitments. I no longer really know how to read Andrew, at this point.

Perhaps this is a consequence of 9/11, and the way that the one-time destructive power of a small group of disparate lunatics challenged the American psyche, in a way that has caused many people to lose any notion of proportion or of rational threat estimation. Or more simply, maybe I've simply been misreading Sullivan's discussion of his own politics. Whatever the case, I would like for Sullivan to consider the possibility that he is placing far too much faith in a bureaucratic apparatus that contains a multitude of agendas and all of the potentially for mismanagement and bad behavior that engenders... a scary thought, when that apparatus is connected to military power. These programs are run by people, and people are fallible and frequently immoral. (It's worth noting that many of the people working in these programs are the same people who worked under the Bush administration that Sullivan has rightfully criticized.) It would take so little for all of this to go wrong.

I don't expect anyone to have a fully articulable or consistent political philosophy. I don't. My politics are filled with weird tensions and paradoxes and contradictions. I just wish that someone who has spent so much time trying to articulate his political philosophy would take a step back and consider how that commitment fits with his affection for a particular leader, and perhaps, rediscover some of his skepticism.

Reminder: Obama promised to end the Bush-Cheney surveillance state

One of the constant defenses offered of Barack Obama by his many zealous defenders is that any particular awful conservative thing he does is something he never promised not to do. "You fell in love with a liberal fantasy in 2008! You can't blame him for what he never said he'd do." Well, as with prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries and closing Guantanamo, it's not true here, either:

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.) 

It's hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.
In our own Technology Voters' Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: "No."

 But of course, there is only one variable in the calculations that Obama loyalists perform: did Obama say or do it? Then it is right. Besides, if you don't like what Glenn Greenwald's reporting has revealed, you can always engage in innuendo about COMMUNIST CHINA!

I can deal with anything but the apathy

More and more often I find myself fearing that the central political divide of our time, the crude division between government and business that has become a kind of stand-in for all of our major disagreements, simply won't be relevant anymore. It won't because institutions of all types and kinds will be slowly crushing us in some vast bureaucratic machinery, on the command of distant and shadowy and unaccountable figures that we can neither access or understand. Whether it's the NSA or Google or Chinese hackers, there's forces out there fucking with you that you can't control. Whether you call them government or corporation or conspiracy will prove irrelevant. When Major League Baseball is engaged in all sorts of quasi-legal investigations and influence, we've reached a point of repressive systems, not just repressive governments.

I can deal with fighting this stuff and losing. I can't deal with the proud apathy that pops up around all of this. The terrible thing about being increasingly trapped in these systems— besides the obvious, I mean— is that it makes people more and more likely to act like they have no control. So many people I see are reacting to these many revelations with some version of "there is no alternative." I can at least accept the learned helplessness, that classic Democrat, Droopy Dog "we can't do anything, siiiiiiiigh" attitude. It's a kind of bullshit self-defense, where you are responsible for nothing because you preempt personal responsibility by saying you're bound to fail. But at least it acknowledges these problems as problems. What I truly cannot stand is the studied pose of blase and indifference. "Hey, what revelations are we really seeing here?" Hey, times change. Hey, it's technology, you can't fight it. Hey man, that's the world. It's the worst kind of cool kid pose, where something bad is asserted to be no big deal, because to accept it as a big deal would be to risk the carefully manicured pose of "cool" apathy. That's what I can't stand: watching human rights be given away in the name of posturing.

I called these intrusions authoritarian on Facebook. Somebody made fun of me. "You sound like some conspiracy loon!" I wondered what it would take to convince him of the term's use. How far are you willing to go before you will grapple with how bad things can get? How important is not sounding like "that kind of person"?

The best book ever written about totalitarianism isn't actually 1984. It's A Tale of Two Cities. And in that book, the most commonly repeated image, the central symbol, is of a giant eye. What Charles Dickens understood, and what the book argues, is that there is no such thing as freedom without privacy, that being truly free means being free to do things that you don't want other people to know about. And what I insist is that all the people who are busily denying that these revelations really mean anything recognize: if we give up these rights, we are choosing to do it. Every aspect of this is a product of human choice. We might be trapped in systems. But those systems are made up of human beings, and they are choosing to erode our basic freedom. Nothing can be chalked up to slogans or "the arc of history" or technology or Just the Way Things Are Going to Be. If our rights are getting eroded, it's because we're choosing to let them. Tell that to the defeatists and the apathetic alike.