what people are made of

Look. It's not about who voted for who after complaining about who. It's not about chopping up the left into a thousand little slices, like you're writing an Audubon guide. And it's certainly not about the learned helplessness that compels people to declare the impotence of the party which holds the presidency and the Senate and that inexorable weight of demographics I keep reading about.

This is what it's about. Liberalism's most sacred belief-- the conviction that underpins it all-- is the belief in the equal value of all human life. It is the commitment to the notion that all human life is equally worthy of protection, that the interdiction against taking that life is equivalent between and among all people. That is not a radical idea or a socialist idea or a Marxist idea or a pacifist idea. It is the fundamental, elementary commitment of liberalism. People who call themselves liberals or progressives who defend drone strikes, and the broader campaign of aggression without due process against the law, are hypocrites because they profess a belief while violating its central tenet. That many conservatives see the brown peoples of the earth as sweaty wogs, eligible for murder without right or review, I take as a matter of course. That some of those who profess liberalism feel the same, I take as something even uglier.

Make no mistake: when you justify the killing of Muslims because of their aesthetic similarities to terrorists, you are asserting that they are less than human. You deny them and only them basic human rights not by denying that those rights are rights but by denying that Muslims are human and are thus ineligible. There is no other logic. You might refer to that as hypocrisy, or as total moral failure. Myself, I don't really care what you call it.

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gating comments for awhile

Hey gang, the spam problem has gotten a little ridiculous, so I'm sadly removing the option to comment without any kind of registration for now. I believe very strongly in the right to remain anonymous (while also believing in the virtue of signing your real name), so I don't enjoy taking this step, but it's looking necessary. Hopefully you all have some dummy accounts to sign in with if you want to remain anonymous.

In the past the capcha has defeated people, so please do email me if that's a problem.

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ethical concerns make it really, really hard to do good educational experimentation

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Kevin Drum is banging the drum for universal pre-K, and good for him. I'm also glad to see that Drum is acknowledging that the earlier we intervene, the better. The metrics for students who start out disadvantaged are quite discouraging; typically, those who are behind grade level early stay behind throughout organized education. What Drum doesn't say, but what is glaringly obvious to me, is that parenting is the great unspoken factor in education reform. But it's a classic wag the dog situation; we lack a framework to intervene in parenting in all but the most extreme situations, so we don't talk about it in our policy debates.

Drum also calls for a lot more empirical experimentation in his post. And there, too, I'm with him in the abstract. I should point out, though, that there is already lots of educational experimentation going on. Like, lots and lots. If Drum is frustrated by the pace of change, I would point in the direction of what many tell me is the single biggest obstacle: ethical concerns. The simple dynamic is that, while standards vary depending on individual institutions, institutional review boards, and researchers, the ethical interdiction against research that might set back students relative to their peers makes a lot of controlled experimentation impossible. If you know, thanks to prior research, that certain conditions are correlated with poor educational performance, it's unethical to expose students to those conditions in a controlled experiment, even if you believe that the benefits of the research will be great in the long run. What's more, if you find in the commission of your research that one of your groups is significantly outperforming the other, many believe (including some professional groups that establish research protocols) that you have to change or end your experiment, in order to prevent leaving the underperforming group behind. And the younger the children involved, the more stringent these guidelines tend to be.

To take an extreme example, there's great debate about the degree to which a lack of exposure to a linguistically rich environment permanently disables a child's language ability. Obviously, you can't isolate a child from language in order to ascertain the degree of this sort of disadvantage; you'd be permanently disabling a living human life (or lives) in doing so. Researchers are therefore forced to rely on disparate, frequently obscure natural experiments, such as with so-called feral children. Similarly, there's a belief among some Chomskyian syntacticians that children who are not exposed to a fluently delivered or functional grammar (such as in efforts to reestablish a dead language) will spontaneously generate a grammar in order to structure the lexical information they are exposed to. Again, you can't perform an experiment to tell if this is true; you'd risk long-term harm to children.

As I said, those are extreme examples, but when I talk to my friends who do educational research on children, it's a constant frustration. They accept and support the ethical principles involved, but they feel that progress is also seriously retarded due to those principles. It's something to keep in mind when examining these issues.

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the "Paperman" problem

This short, "Paperman," which originally preceded Disney's summer feature Wreck It Ralph, has earned a lot of praise, including an Oscar nomination. It is, indeed, a lovely short. But it's also a problem.

It's interesting that Alyssa Rosenberg cites "Paperman" in contrast to most romantic comedies, because I see in "Paperman" a perfect example of a basic problem with the genre. This problem was defined perfectly by The Onion: "Romantic Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested." Think about the behavior here. The protagonist is very forward in pursuing a woman who he hasn't talked to at all. We know that there's mutual attraction, thanks to the nonverbal clues that we (as a disconnected audience) observe. In a Disney short, that's perfectly sufficient, and internal to the world of the movie, I find it sweet. In the real world, I think it's exactly the kind of behavior a lot of women are justifiably tired of. But our culture and media keep reinforcing it, and that contributes to unhappiness.

We are, I hope, slowly but surely moving out of a culture of routine street harassment and justification of rape. Part of that is redefining when it is and isn't okay to approach someone you're attracted to whom you don't know. At this point, I pretty much have a personal policy of not talking to any women who I don't know in some professional or social context. I wouldn't do what the guy from "Paperman" does, obviously, but I also wouldn't have asked for her number. Is that an overreaction to these changes? I don't know. I do know that I have read far too many women complaining about the obliviousness (and frequently, obnoxiousness) of men who approach them in public to want to risk being guilty of that sort of thing. So for me personally, it's out.

I'm not trying to speak for anyone else, and I recognize that this stance of mine is extreme. I'm too much of a romantic to say that a cold approach of this kind is always impermissible. What I want to point out is that the (I hope) increasing recognition that men are often far too aggressive and forward with women is necessarily going to lead to men being less likely to approach women who would actually like to be approached. Because we lack and will always lack perfect information about who is attracted to us. And as I will keep saying, it is precisely the awkwardness and lack of social graces that makes some men unattractive to some women that makes those self-same men incapable of correctly reading interest. Again, the manner in which we know, as the audience, that the female character is attracted to the guy is through a shared smile, a nervous laugh, a gaze-- all the sorts of things that socially awkward men have a very hard time reading, and can invent when it suits them. Indeed, what makes socially awkward men socially awkward-- and, in part, considered undesirable-- is exactly their inability to parse social cues and nonverbal messages. The notion that men who approach women who are "out of their league" or otherwise uninterested necessarily know that what they are doing is unappreciated is deeply wrongheaded in large part because it makes the problem seem easier than it is. If men always knew when women didn't want them to approach, we could at least speak about education and social norming against that behavior. But the problem is a bigger one because it stems from genuine ignorance.

And while we are of course responsible for our own behavior, and while there is a clear line between awkward or unfortunate approaches and outright harassment, I do have this sympathy for clueless men: our culture tells them incessantly that dogged pursuit is the key to romantic success. The importance of persistence as a key to romantic success as a heterosexual male is drilled into you by your culture pretty much constantly. Added to that is the common notion that what women want in a world of changing gender expectations is aggressive men-- a notion that can be hard to combat, because it is true of some women some of the time. The problem is that the sleazy, reductive world of sexual conquest advice speaks in universals and absolutes. Like any particular sexual or romantic preference, the desire to be pursued aggressively depends on the perceived attractiveness of the individual man. What we all want, at the end of the day, is to be approached by people we're attracted to and not by people we aren't. We also recognize this as an impossible request.

Moving towards a less sexually aggressive and more equitable social landscape is going to have consequences, and not all of them pleasant. That's adult life. For me, it seems as though the current reality of street harassment, the culture of rape, and assumed privilege of heterosexual men to approach any women makes it clear that we need to be far more careful about approaching strangers, and to require far more in the way of demonstrations of attraction before we decide to talk to women we don't know, particularly when they're alone. Perhaps that means that women who are interested in being approached will have to be somewhat more demonstrative of that in this future culture. I'm sure, though, that it will result in people not approaching and not being approached when they'd very much like that to happen. But like I said, progress always has difficult consequences.

I think I need the opinion of Phoebe Maltz Bovy on this.

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always try to be the talent

A few people have sent along this exhausting profile of Ezra Klein from TNR-- sorry, from the new TNR-- on the theory that I would enjoy hate-reading it, on the related theory that I hate Ezra Klein. I find this odd. How could one hate Ezra Klein? Hating Ezra Klein would be like hating spearmint or navy blue. He's about as upsetting as an actuary.  He's wrong about a lot of things, but he's so resolutely inoffensive in his wrongness that I can't be bothered to get mad. Getting mad after reading an Ezra Klein column would be like running wind sprints after eating Thanksgiving dinner. Someone like, say, Will Saletan, who marries deep ignorance about what he writes on to a powerful hatred of women's autonomy and delivers it in a self-fellating grandiloquence-- that's worth hating. Klein? It's like picking Labrador for your least favorite dog breed.

Of course I don't read him, but judging by that profile, I get the impression that he doesn't particularly want people to read him, in the old-timey "move your gaze along lines of text to obtain propositional content" sense. Rather I think he wants everyone to kind of politely accept that there's blocks of print under those lovely graphs somebody else made and not look too deeply into it. You might find that profound emptiness in there. It's like that guy you know who wants to be a writer in the sense that he wants to do everything but write-- to have ink stains on his fingers and wear tweed and hang out at independent coffee shops and be known as a writer, but not to bother spending time at the keyboard. If Klein is a writer, he's a writer who hates words; I've never had much use for Ideas, myself. Klein has recently taken to showily eschewing the labels of liberal or progressive, but of course what he really wants is to be known as a progressive who doesn't want to be known as a progressive.

There are, to be sure, many things to object to both in the TNR profile and the general Klein phenomenon. He has that habit of believing entirely contradictory things that is common to the professionally bland. He claims that he is a stoic empiricist, yet lionizes David Brooks, a man who simply invents facts about the world around him and uses them to justify all manner of policies. (Pro tip: empiricists are people who undertake empiricism, not those who just read empirical reports, or read the abstracts, or have their younger, brighter researchers read them.) He claims to operate from a  pragmatic belief in the power of good governance, but famously brought Paul Ryan to manual release because of his intellectual bona fides; never mind that Ryan is a man who would like very much to defund government to the point that the average American city looks something like the Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket. Like all of those bright young things, he supported the Iraq war when it was polite to do so, then pivoted, effortlessly, to opposing it, once that became the fashion. Here is a man who has developed every conviction as if, well, as if he would one day have them presented in a profile for TNR. And he complains that we care too much about personality in politics while participating in a puff piece where he asserts the importance of wearing jeans to his personal brand. 28 is a little young to want to be the cool dad, Ezra.

Yet I am, in fact, quite like Klein in one sense: I too believe in the power of systems over the power of personality. For as much as you likely have heard that I dislike so-and-so personally, I have always (always) grounded my critiques of the DC koffee klatsch in the notion that social capture is systematic to elite media, and if I lived in a different age, I'd complain about reporters at press clubs instead. Let me be plain: all of the profound failings of what Ezra Klein is have very little to do with who Ezra Klein is. Klein is just a doofus with good enough looks to appear on cable. The profoundly ossified world of professional blogging is not the way it is because Ezra Klein lacks personal virtue. It is the way it is because of structural and material realities in the age of American decline, the combination of self-perpetuating familial success and the mythology of meritocracy and the inoffensiveness of whiteness and that peculiar notion of likability-- which always seems to attach to the people who already have everything going for them. They all congeal, until suddenly, you've got the President's ear. I'm saying: if I thought that the problem was that the boys on top weren't good enough dudes, the problems would be easy to fix. The dudes are just dudes. The system is failed. Ezra Klein? Ezra Klein is Zelig.

Ascending to the position of the Lord High Broder does not come without disapproval. Here's a scoop you won't have to dig very far to hear: Klein, "such a nice guy" reputation aside, is more feared than loved. Like all ambitious men, he must know that it's better for them to fear the consequences of disloyalty than desire the embrace of friendship. Bright young things who pile their gear into mom's SUV and arrive in DC with an internship and a dream-- they have a habit of ending up unsatisfied. In the five years I've been doing this, I've gotten dozens of emails from them, on the way up, or on the way out. And the overwhelming impression is that they are afraid of the Ezra Kleins of the world. I think that makes all the difference, though I know many disagree. But then, that's the problem with conceiving of yourself as still being the kid at the keyboard: you will always fail to understand your own power over people. The people who came up from the bottom in some shitty newsroom at some shitty paper in some shitty town, slitting throats all the way... they know the power they wield. When you've made your whole living by being known as a good guy, who's ever to tell you that you exercise power, that you have the ability to make and break the white-knuckled strivers of the world?

Would I feel any differently, myself? I'd like to think so. But then, I've known what gig I've wanted since I was 11 years old, and it has little to do with Ezra Klein. If what I wanted was to be in his world? I'm sure I would find him enchanting, or barring that, fear him enough to fake it.

Ultimately, there isn't much to worry about, when it comes to Klein, other than the miserable death of the American left-wing, that last betrayal of the egalitarian dream. If it isn't glaringly obvious, "Unkind writing is unthoughtful writing" is how social justice dies, how you strangle the child of equality in her crib. Nobody who ever materially suffered could be so luxurious in their disdain for anger; nobody who has ever been desperately afraid of the rent coming due could mistake bloodlessness for maturity. It turns out, in fact, that a chart tends to serve precisely its purpose, which is to express injustice in language quotidian enough that no one will ever be inspired by it. I started writing because there was no other way to deal with a world of human cruelty; if what I had to say made mothers want me to marry their daughters, I'd slit my wrists.

But then that, too, is one of my forbidden opinions, the type that get the patient explainers patiently explaining. That's why I want to take Klein's opinion that "we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system" and show it to him, and his admirers, and my own frequent critics, to ask if that system does not happen to include the lives of those who write about it. I'm only trying to play by the rules that he's dictated.

In that, I share a condition with many people I admire: playing by the rules of men (always men) who aren't quite sure how they got to dictate them. The depth of Klein's privilege is that he gets to decree that the system he wants examined stops at his door, as the throbbing, gendered power dynamics that seep from that profile make plain. Staring at the piece, from the newly rebranded TNR, owned by a Facebook millionaire who speaks in cliched aphorisms, in a profile of someone who has meticulously curated an image for just this moment-- there's some sort of perfection there. Such a profound monument to everything unimportant, such a preference for emptiness and the status quo, such a failure for the people whose lives are dictated by "policy." But oh, those eyes! And oh, that web design!

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real and virtual

So I've been having one of my little periods where I am choked by emotions I can't begin to express, so it's best I don't write a lot publicly right now. I do want to link to this piece on violence in video games by Kirk Mckeand, who interviewed me for it. He was a great interviewer, and the piece is thorough and fair. Hopefully I'll get my shit together psychologically over the weekend and be able to write something of greater substance about it then. In the meantime please do give it a read.

(video unrelated to text obviously)

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what I mean when I talk about empiricism and self-determination

In my Bloggingheads appearance, I mentioned to Conor my prediction that the empirical case against the notion that you are mostly responsible for your life will grow to be inarguable. In that, I was thinking largely of essentially the entire field of developmental psychology, which for several decades now has undermined the notion that the human brain is an endless mutable organ and established the great power of early-life conditioning to determine later-life educational and intellectual success. But there are certainly many other metrics of social mobility, genetic constraints, structural inequality, and the power of chance that contribute to this phenomenon. The point is never to claim that one's own decisions or actions has no impact on the outcome of his or her life. The point is to define how much of the variance is attributable to factors that are within the control of the individual. My belief is that the answer is not much, and that this will become more clearly the case as our research becomes more sophisticated. 

I am, of course, referring to an argument that actually has to be prosecuted. In large measure that argument will happen as it already is, through the steady accumulation of empirical research. I have at many points wanted to assemble and synthesize the extant research-- including, of course, the research that contradicts my thesis-- but I have come to the conclusion that in order to present the argument in a responsible way, the project would have to be book-length. Writing a book just isn't in the cards for me in the near future. Within the next few years? Maybe. So, for now, I can't make the argument. I'm not ready, and I don't have the opportunity to be ready. Yet.

What I do want to advance at this point, though, is that it is an empirical question. The degree to which an individual is responsible for the outcomes of his or her own life is a question that subject to empirical investigation. We have the tools to assess the impact of parentage, of inheritance, of demographics, of economic mobility.... In the future, if you want to talk about these issues responsibly, you'll have to recognize that they are not a matter of ideology or theory. They are subject to empirical review.

So take this essay by Jamelle Bouie, and the attendant pushback in the community he is critiquing. Bouie is saying that there are structural inequalities in play that limit the number of minority journalists covering technology. Jason Calacanis argues, with considerable certainty, that technology journalism is a "pure meritocracy," that anyone can succeed if they are smart and hardworking. Leaving aside the question of external factors that condition intelligence and work ethic, it's unclear whether Calacanis has considered the possibility that these questions are material and thus subject to empirical investigation. His argument will be familiar to anyone who has heard some version of bootstraps mythology. He says that outcomes are based on "the resolve of the individual." If that's true, it has to be proven, not asserted through reference to national character.

Calacanis, like so many others arguing for the meritocracy-- almost always those themselves that have been served by it-- seems to think that it's sufficient merely to address broad principles. The next stage of this conversation must be made through reference to evidence, and not through waxing on about abstruse philosophical commitments. I expect that the argument about the percentage of variance in an individual's material outcomes that are under that individual's control will be quite heated. I welcome that controversy, looking forward. But for them to be useful and responsible, they must be conducted through reference to evidence. That's the precondition for the argument that we have to get to first: an acknowledgement of what we're arguing about, and in what terms it must be argued.

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