Scandinavian family values

To follow up on my rant earlier in this week on "The downside" of women "opting out" of the paid workforce, this just caught my eye in the January 29th issue of The Economist:

A new paper, "The Nordic Way," submitted by Nordic governments to this week's World Economic Forum at Davos, hails Nordic citizens as "secular-rational" individualists, liberated by the state from any obligation to support elderly parents and given the freedom to work by cheap day care for all (in Sweden, more than 80% of two-year-olds attend preschool, often for six hours a day). Mr. Reinfeldt himself suggests that women do not just help the economy by working, they gain autonomy from men, arguing: "At the end of the day, you don't know if your marriage will last."

Mind you, Reinfeldt is Sweden's "center-right" prime minister, not a Marxist feminist, as you might tell from the celebration of "rational individualism" as the driver of gender parity and social harmony. Still. Can you imagine any politician being able to make such a statement in the United States today, without having the Beck-Palin-Fox machinery grind them into sausage?

***

Because a picture is worth a thousand words:

What a racket

You already know what a geek I am, so I will go right ahead and confess to having been fascinated, long term, with Constitutional law. Since high school. When I somehow persuaded my parents to ship me off to a prep school experience for a summer (see my previous posts on The Official Preppy Handbook), and I took a course on law and society. We read the Greatest Hits, like Marbury v. Madison, the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ("separate but equal"), and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

We even read Roe v. Wade, which today might seem rather remarkable. Kudos to the instructors, whose names I no longer remember, for trusting me and a group of other high school sophomores not only to do the reading, but to be able to think and talk about it intelligently, reasonably, and respectfully.

We need more faith in each other, and schooling, like this.

However. I digress.

The racket to which I refer is "originalism." Here is what I learned from historian Jill Lepore in an article (in the January 17th issue of The New Yorker) that is well worth a read as it puts into perspective the current craze for "restoring" the Constitution to the "original intentions" of the Founding Fathers:

Consider the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Historical evidence can be marshalled to support different interpretations of these words, and it certainly has been. But the Yale law professor Reva Siegel has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias.... Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, lawyers for the National Rifle Association, concerned about gun-control laws passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals to bear arms."

In other words, Lepore writes, originalism is as much "a serious and influential mode of constitutional interpretation" as it is "a political product manufactured by the New Right and marketed to the public by talk radio, cable television, and the Internet, where it enjoys a competitive advantage over other varieties of constitutional interpretation, partly because it's the easiest."

What strikes me also are the parallels that could be drawn between Constitutional originalism and religious fundamentalisms, be they Christian and Muslim or another doctrine or dogma: The words of the Founding Fathers and the Word of God?

WT@#$%?!

Already seething about the lack of respect given to women - see my post, below, on "The downside" - I just read this (from Move On) posted on the blog feminist philosophers:

A far-reaching anti-choice bill, introduced by Republican Chris Smith and supported by 173 members of the House, includes a provision that could redefine rape and set women’s rights back by decades.

Right now, federal dollars can’t be used for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger. But the Smith bill would narrow that use to “cases of ‘forcible’ rape but not statutory or coerced rape.”

Somebody had to say it

Classes ended Friday, finals start tomorrow. So, I took advantage of the lull: I put on clothes and a shade of lipstick that make me feel a little frilly, we hired a baby sitter, and StraightMan and I went to a party! Where admittedly we talked to a bunch of our faculty friends and kvetched about how hard this semester has been, especially for the parents who have had to deal with head lice. Remember what I said about "sucks" being the new normal?

What with writing exams and managing students suddenly concerned with their performance (or lack thereof) in my classes, I have had nary a moment to keep up with the Times, but StraightMan just turned to me (literally, from his desk next to mine) and said I should stop whatever it was that I was doing (which happened to be re-reading the exam that I wrote for this Wednesday) and look at this opinion piece: "What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama".

I am glad that somebody said it: The United States has a "black" president, but that does not mean that we do not - or that he does not - have to contend continually with issues of race in the United States. When historians look back at Obama's presidency, they will have to look seriously at how race conditioned and constrained his actions and reactions.

Obama, in fact, cannot enjoy the privilege of playing an avenging cowboy: "What the progressives forget is that black intellectuals have been called “paranoid,” “bitter,” “rowdy,” “angry,” “bullies,” and accused of tirades and diatribes for more than 100 years."

Also, Ishmael Reed reminds us: "When these progressives refer to themselves as Mr. Obama’s base, all they see is themselves. They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos."

Along these lines, I find this piece in The Nation's Finest News Source from a few weeks back to be strangely spot-on about the State of the Union. Proving yet again that the fake news can be so much more insightful.

The national conversation that is not being had

The New York Times reported last week on gaps in achievement - as measured in reading and math tests administered in 4th and 8th grade - that exist between black and white boys:

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

What I find interesting is the prevailing acceptance of the idea that "poverty" is the problem here - and the consternation being churned because "poverty" appears not to be the answer, or at least not the only answer:

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

To be honest, I was surprised that the "sociological and historical forces" and the "conversations that people are unwilling to have" referred to "early childhood parenting practices."

From where I perch, the chatter about parenting sounds like a deafening roar.

Has it become more comfortable for we the Nacirema to discuss "poverty" because we will not discuss race?

The case against tenure

Over breakfast, I read Dana Goldstein's essay, "Grading 'Waiting for Superman,'" in the October 11th issue of The Nation. Goldstein, an education reporter, considers what "Waiting for Superman" - a much discussed documentary about the failures of public education - tells us and especially what it does not tell us. Her assessment is similar to Nicholas Lemann's recent comment in The New Yorker, about which I blogged recently: Both journalists note that the film celebrates charter schools as a solution, and teachers unions as the problem.

For my friends who are parents and / or who are concerned about public educations and have questions about charter schools (I confess that I probably know too little about the issue...), I think it would be smart of us to read the criticisms of "Waiting for Superman." I have not yet seen the film - not at the mall cineplex in my neck of the woods - but I certainly plan on it. My understanding is that the film, made by the director of "An Inconvenient Truth," is quite compelling. However. I know that I want to know the rest of the story, too.

What especially caught my eye is the brief comment on tenure for public school teachers, which I think gives insight to the brouhaha over tenure for faculty at colleges and universities. Goldstein quotes from an interview with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who apparently is singled out in the film as The Enemy:

The unions are hurt by public frustration with teacher tenure, a level of job security inconceivable to most American workers, who are barely hanging on during a recession with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate.

"Only 7 percent of American workers are in unions," Weingarten says, adding matter-of-factly, "America looks at us as islands of privilege."

That is the case against tenure?! I call this the "sucks"-is-the-new-normal effect... Never mind that the real islands of privilege might lie located elsewhere...

***

I think it ought to be noted, as Goldstein does, that unionized teachers themselves also want to see their profession do a better job at maintaining their own standards. "According to a 2003 Public Agenda poll, 47 percent of teachers believe 'the union sometimes fights to protect teachers who really should be out of the classroom," Goldstein notes.

So, why not enable, encourage, and support workers themselves to set the standards, and see that they are upheld - and to do so in a way that preserves the dignity of each individual? Which, unfortunately, "policing" too often fails to do. We might have more incentive not to bend the rules, were the rules themselves more resilient...

Mobilize me

It usually feels good when somebody agrees with you. Also, when somebody else is able to articulate what you have been thinking, but have not been able to put into words. Even better when that somebody else has a high-profile perch from which to persuade, perhaps, still others. This is how I felt when I read Malcolm Gladwell's article, "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted," in the October 4th issue of The New Yorker.

Gladwell is critical of the hype surrounding Facebook, Twitter, and other "social media" as instruments of social change. To make his point, he contrasts the example of sit-in's in the segregated south during the 1960s with one man's recent campaign to get back his friend's Sidekick from a teenager who found it in a NYC taxi... In part, what is contrasted is the cause (or in the case of the Sidekick, "cause"), but it is also the mobilization of people behind it.

Notably, Gladwell describes how and why civil-rights organizations of the 1960s successfully organized volunteers to make great sacrifices (including their lives) in pursuit of their cause. Not being an expert on social movements, I do not feel that I can evaluate his suggestion that the success of the civil-rights movement is due, in part, to its hierarchical structure. Then again, this being Gladwell's reporting, I am guessing that the hierarchy hypothesis is drawn from scholarly works that are not cited here. (See my post from yesterday on journalism's reliance on scholarly sources...)

Technomongers today insist that social networks motivate people. "But that's not true," Gladwell writes. "Social networks are effective at increasing participation - by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires." For example, he mentions that the Save Darfur Coalition has a Facebook page with 1,282,339 members, "who have donated an average of nine cents apiece." On the one hand, more than 1 million x 9 cents each still seems a sum worth cheering. Also, it seems to demonstrate what happens when "everyone" shares the burden. However. Pocket change does not make social change. "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice," Gladwell writes. "We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro."

In describing what Facebook's strengths are, Gladwell references the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter in suggesting that social media "lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It's terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism."

The observations here about weak ties and strong ties led me to think about points that I try to make in ANTH 100 lectures on how / why we need to think about economic activity as cultural and economic activity. The French sociologist / anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) wrote an essay called "The Gift," which has been influential in anthropological studies, not only of economics, but also of kinship, gender, and reproduction. Mauss observed that there are no "free" gifts: Receiving gifts obligates persons to other persons: One must eventually reciprocate. Giving gifts - whether yams, pigs, or women-as-brides - establishes and maintains obligations between persons. In effect, both giving and receiving gifts can "cost" persons. Yet, it might be that the higher the price of giving and receiving, the mightier the obligation, the stronger the tie.

The strength of ties with other persons depends on the demands that we make on other persons and that they make on us. I have been thinking lately about how we see this in our everyday experiences. This is not to say that we in fact expect our friends to give or do - it is that we can. Or could. That is what makes us friends...

Perhaps what civil-rights organizations did so successfully depended not only on hierarchical structure, but also, in fact, on demanding so much of persons?

More buzzkill

One of my favorite feminists, Katha Pollitt, recently mused on the advantages of social democratic systems in Europe and why Americans seem to reject such nice things as paid parental leave and public child care. The column, called "It's Better Over There," tips its hat to a new book, Tom Geoghegan's Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

As a matter of fact, I sometimes think so - and not just because, like, my parents immigrated here from South Korea.

Here is what Pollitt says:

Still, it is hard to understand why Americans fight so hard against the nanny state, which provides so many good things.... My theory is more primitive: a critical mass of white Americans would rather not have something than see black and Latino Americans get it too. No matter how often progressives point out that most welfare mothers, and most poor people, are white, Big Government means the hard-working white taxpayer heaping largesse on shiftless people of color. The Tea Party movement suggests that trope is alive and well. In the twenty-first century, the problem is—still—the color line.

It hurts because it feels true.

Don't believe the hype

This is a follow-up on a previous post, "Academic Economics."

One of the paradoxes of grading is that it can be tedious and time-consuming that it forces me to take breaks. I procrastinate. I read through my issues of The Nation that have been piling on the table. Then I start to read through The New Yorker.

So, I have my ANTH 100 and ANTH 215 students to thank for having been able to read Nicholas Lemann's Comment in the September 27th Talk of the Town, "Schoolwork."

In the piece, Lemann describes the ways in which both public education (K-12 schooling) and higher education are being cast as "in crisis" at exactly a time when there are indications that they might not be. Or in the case of public education, schools have been "in crisis" for some time - in particular, underserving poor, urban, and minority children.

However. Lemann wants us to see also how we might be being told a story:

It should raise questions when an enormous, complicated realm of life takes on the characteristics of a stock drama. In the current school-reform story, there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers’ unions, and a familiar set of heroes.... And there is a clear answer to the problem—charter schools. The details of this story are accurate, but they are fitted together too neatly and are made to imply too much.

In higher education, Lemann tells us that "the reform story isn't so fully baked yet, but its main elements are emerging." From where I perch, they include such black hats as "research" (which becomes opposed to "teaching") and "tenure" and white hats as "assessment" and "efficiency."

Here is the part of the Comment that had me throwing my chapeau in the air with cries of huzzah, huzzah:

Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.

We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken.

We all know - we all feel - how tough the times are. However. The problems of public education and of higher education predate these times. As do a number of the proposed "solutions." Moves to discredit "research" as part of the mission of higher education and to increase "efficiency" had been made before The Economic Crisis, which as an element of the narrative has begun to take on a larger-than-life reality of its own. So, it makes me nervous to hear and see evidence of the ways in which The Economic Crisis is being used as cover to, say, push back against teachers' unions and the large, old, unlovely system of higher education that even now still inspires awe and aspiration around the world. Which could be said also of The Great Experiment that is American democracy. Why bring that into this conversation? B/c today it might be public education and higher education that is being washed away to be rebuilt more neatly and rationally, and tomorrow it might be democracy. Or is this happening already?

***

Why is that the anger that I hear these days seems to come only from the Tea Party? What about the rest of us? If there is one thing I think Carl Paladino has right, then it is not that we ought to be mad as hell, but also that we ought not to take it. The mad (and I think at least moderate) silent majority needs to pull the levers on November 2.

Out here on my own

A blog that I "follow" (i.e., glimpse its content, then occasionally read) is savage minds, a group blog of anthropologists (primarily cultural, I think) that reads like a kind of online graduate seminar. So, sometimes I find it fun (and sometimes I find it tedious), but I find it reliably interesting.

The current post, called "Owning and caring," caught my eye. In it, the blogger considers what it means that when you own, you "care" more, which in housing translates into homes that are maintained and so on. What about public housing? What happens when the state - a focus of concern in cultural anthropology - no longer owns? Does it no longer care? The blogger uses the example of the UK:

As unusual as it is to see governments trying to rid themselves of power, there are questions to be asked about the consequences of governments also ridding themselves of ownership. Does it make the state appear heartless, literally with the heart removed, or metaphorically as lacking in feeling? In practice, in the housing estates, as elsewhere, there was a strong feeling that the state failed to care for residents. A failure to care led to the relinquishing of ownership, but they went hand in hand. You don’t bother to hold on to things you don’t care about. Perhaps owning did, indeed, give the state personhood. So where will it find its personhood without ownership?

Ownership means more than calculated "investment," which is a familiar formulation of owning and caring in the Us today. In anthropology, however, "ownership" entails entire systems of obligation between persons. So, it seems to me that owning / not owning and caring / not caring are at least part of what is being decried in the US also. For example, Americans perceive that big business does not care and that big government has failed to care. Or depending on where along the political spectrum your thoughts lead you, that it always will fail to care and / or should not be relied upon to care.

The punditry on No-Drama-Obama and Clinton as the feeler-in-chief always bothered me - personally, I want my presidents to think, not feel - but I am reconsidering what this means. If the president embodies the state, then what "we" (which I also question who or what this "we" really is...) want is a state that cares. Or at least shows that it does. In other words, it is not about the president, it is about a whole, complex system in which persons feel disempowered, disenfranchised, undervalued, underserved, un-cared for... Which might be a symptom not only that our state, but our society no longer "owns" us in the anthropological sense: There is no obligation. I echo the Savage Minds blogger's question with another: Can we be persons without obligation?

The radical agenda

A bit hectic here on the parenthropological home front: I was invited by the honor society at my campus to give my "Famous Last Words" lecture. So, I wore a suit that I thought might be appropriate to be buried in, and gave a talk about anthropology and reproduction last evening. I am happy to report that two students in my Anthropology of North America class today told me not only that they had attended (without the carrot of extra credit...), but that it seriously made them think that when the time came, they wanted to have their babies with midwives. Two cheers for the re-production of culture!

Yesterday, I also enjoyed a Leftist Moment with a colleague during a Women's and Gender Studies reception. Hmm, I am beginning to think that the reason why there are so few opportunities for faculty to co-mingle and converse is that THEY want to keep us alienated and mystified, divided and conquered. B/c imagine all the righteous lefty talk that professors could engender... Which brings me to this item from Inside Higher Ed. Which I admit that I clicked on because of the titillating title, "Christine O'Donnell on 'Orgy Rooms' at Colleges":

All eyes are on Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. Among the various quotes from her past that surfaced on Wednesday were some views on coeducational dormitories. Salon found quotes she gave to The Washington Times in 2003, criticizing coeducational dormitories. The article excerpt:

"What's next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?" asked Christine O'Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.

All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O'Donnell. "Most average American adults don't use coed bathrooms - if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn't choose it." Coedness "is like a radical agenda forced on college students," she said.

Get thee to a nunnery.

The only thing we have to fear

Today in ANTH 100, I introduced the idea that the concept of culture is one intended to define a field of study - that is, "culture" is a tool that cultural anthropologists use to define / explain what we study. There are lots of ways to study what people do, say, and think, but "culture" lets us see human practices and ideas as learned (and taught) and shared so that individuals identify themselves (and others) as members of particular groups.

As a parenthropologist, I wonder about what we might be learning and teaching today: I just read this post on free range kids about a new book that I plan to put on my kindle wish list: Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear.

I especially appreciated author Aaron Kupchik's assertion: "We’re teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we’re doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment."

I like Kupchik's title and the connection it makes to the culture / politics / economics of homeland security. Although I have not read it in full, I have become a fan (literally, on FB...) of The Washington Post's coverage on Top Secret America:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

We invest so much in terms of economic resources, intellectual effort, and emotional energy - for what?

What worries me is not just that homeroom / homeland security is "not working," but that it clearly is accomplishing other kinds of work. These are intended and unintended: As a parenthropologist, I am not interested in conspiracy theories. A lesson that cultural anthropology teaches us, however, is to question "functionalism" - that is, to recall that there might be stated reasons for why certain activities are undertaken (e.g., to keep kids safe and secure at school), and unstated reasons serving to reinforce still other ideas and practices.

***

Along with what we are teaching kids, implicitly and explicitly, about "security," I have been thinking about what kids are learning or not learning about work. I hear so many grown-ups go on and on about kids need to learn "work ethic" and the value of a dollar earned (or saved).

What I find jarring, however, is that seldom do the same grown-ups talk about the worth of work in terms of what workers ought to have - that is, fair and safe conditions. So that at least some college students see unionized workers as "greedy," and side with corporate interests in "efficiency."

Something you sometimes hear pundits wax eloquently on these days is the issue of "narrative" and controlling "the story" as a significant part of politics. What is the narrative of unionized workers? Why do I feel like I only hear stories that basically train me to adopt the values of stakeholders and stockholders? True that my retirement savings make me an "owner" with a stake (and stock) in the system, but that all still depends on being, in fact, a person who works.

Just some thoughts for Labor Day.

I wish I could tune out...

Sometimes I envy the people who watch Fox as though it really were Fair and Accurate. I wish that I, too, could stick my head in a hole in the ground where all I could hear echoed back at me was what I just want to believe. Instead, I see as a responsibility of citizenship the need to be informed, whether or not I like the news that is being delivered. So, I even force myself to know what Fox is all about - like the "tea party" in DC yesterday, which I cannot help but see as a fitting end to what seems like a Summer of Hate, during which even the birthright to citizenship became challenged.

Because I did not have my head stuck in a hole, I heard this interview on Fresh Air - with journalist Jane Mayer, who published an article in the current issue of The New Yorker on the two billionaire brothers funding the alleged grassroots "tea party" movement.

The article itself had me in half a mind to boycott products like Dixie cups and clothing made with Lycra - two products in the holdings of the Koch brothers. I mean, why should "my" money become diverted to their causes, which ultimately serve their own interests?

Frank Rich, in his column today, commented:

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

Which caused StraightMan to declare that the so-called Giving Pledge among billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates really might not be such a great idea after all. (For more on this, I now have Ralph Nader's novel, Only the Super Rich Can Save Us! on my to-read list.) Do we want to - can we - trust them to give to the causes that matter most to most people? The "right" causes and not the "right-wing" causes?

(I admit my own partiality. OK?)

For the thoughtful billionaire who wants to do good, but is not certain how to do it, StraightMan proposes a solution: Pledge to give more in taxes, which will go to public works like universal pre-K and school nutrition programs and universal health coverage and infrastructure.

True, you will not receive all the adulation given to the Buffett-and-Gates gang, but you need not defer the good you will do until you pass on - which means you also might reap some rewards, like healthy and skilled employees, which contribute to your bottom line. Win-win!

Here is another take, from Slate, on how to "fix" the Giving Pledge.

Given how the summer went, I dread the coming season of mid-term elections.

Brunch for thought

Just read Thomas Friedman's Sunday column reflecting on the BP catastrophe and the question of "responsibility." In it, he quotes from a letter to the editor that appeared in The Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina. "It is the best reaction I’ve seen to the BP oil spill — and also the best advice to President Obama on exactly whom to kick you know where," Friedman writes.

The letter is sincere. It resonates. It expresses sentiments that I think a lot of thoughtful people share right now:

It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word.

I especially like the emphasis on citizenship.

However. (You knew it was coming.) I think about the terrifying speed at which an assertion like this, which I read as the attempt of a citizen (and the other citizens who share it) to take control of the public discourse and direct our efforts and energies in directions like an energy climate bill, financial regulation, and immigration reform (as Friedman suggests), instead will become appropriated or co-opted by, say, BP, Transocean, or whomever has an interest, frankly, in not seeing an energized citizenry.

Is there a way that We the People can take control over the terms of discourse and the agenda for action without (at least rhetorically) blaming ourselves? In part because I fear the hijacking of this narrative and the control it is meant to assert on behalf of citizens. More important because I think it is not in itself the irreducible truth of the matter: I mean, think about the ways in which, as individuals, the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives are structured.

The point is not to recuse ourselves from these proceedings or absolve the actions that we take. I think the impulse to take the blame comes from the desire and the ability that we have to understand what is happening, even when it is painful and unflattering to ourselves. So, let us continue to take that hard look: We tend to see ourselves as people with biographies, or our own life's stories, or to use another word, memories. We fail to recognize ourselves as people with and in history, which apparently happened somewhere "in the past" with little to do with individuals. (Unless you happen to be one of the Great Men or Great Women of History.)

So, I want to stop talking about "blame." I want to talk about history. We need to see ourselves as the people who have been making histories that we do not approve or even especially wish to claim, much less control, and the the people whose histories have made us what we are.

As an aside - this reference to the difference between memory and history has haunted me for the last two days since I read it in the June 7th issue of The New Yorker, in a review of Hirsi Ali's Nomad: From Islam to America - A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. The review tells us that Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Somali woman who has rejected Islam. I appreciated this observation in the review, in response to Ali's comments on visiting a neighborhood of Muslim immigrants in London:

Whitechapel has much in its past - oppression, bigotry, poverty, radicalism - that would have helped Hirsi Ali understand not only the neighborhood's newest inhabitants but also her own family. But "Nomad" reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam - fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism - are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity.

The last bit I find to be rather a sweeping statement that could be explained further - like, how individualism and modernity are never quite a done deal, but constantly being claimed and asserted, and that the problem is not a retreat in "traditionalism" in the face of modernity, but that the so-called confrontation or more precisely the process of modernity can be seen as itself producing such effects. For example, social anthropologists over the decades have suggested that "witchcraft" and "sorcery" become reintroduced and reinvented in moments of historical instability. Tradition is not the problem per se. "Modernity" - and this concept, like tradition, needs to be unpacked - is.

The BP catastrophe, including the laying and claiming of blame, clearly represents the problems of modernity.

Soap box

At some point every night for the last few weeks, I have turned to StraightMan and said: "I just don't get it."

I believe that I am not entirely hyperbolizing when I say that I live if not in fear of, then at least in anxiety about messing up. For example, just the other week, I was making lists of my students' grades in each class, checking them twice, the whole Santa Claus and naughty-and-nice maneuver. I do not like messing up for a range of reasons. Like, I do not relish receiving rude e-mail from irritated or irate students, but also, I figure assigning grades to students in a clear, consistent, and fair manner is just part of my job, and I like to be good at what I do. So, call it not fear or anxiety, but conscientiousness.

Which brings me to that I just don't get it that anyone, esp. anyone as extravagantly paid as the executives at BP, is allowed to make mistakes at all, much less at the colossal level that we are witnessing today.

Being the thoughtful anthropologist that he is, StraightMan suggests two readings of the situation, one generous and one that could be described as either cynical or realistic:

The generous reading. The executives and engineers and everyone down the line actually are conscientious about their jobs, but being human, they will commit errors. Making mistakes, in and of itself, is to be expected - which, to mix my metaphors, is why there are multiple links in the chain that check and balance each other.

So, the BP disaster is an example of how a series of relatively minor "ordinary" mistakes, made during the day-to-day on the job, can accumulate catastrophically. Also, it is an example of what modernity means - the speed and scale at which we produce, distribute, and consume being ever faster and greater, so that the ripple effects of our errors are felt that much faster and greater.

Not to mention taking and managing risk is what BP does as part of the day-to-day on the job. Risk being what puts us in the way of ordinary and extraordinary fortune and misfortune. Everyone benefits, or potentially benefits, from risk taking. I mean, it was no doubt a risk to leave the trees and go bipedal. In the day-to-day on the job, financial institutions take calculated risks, in part that they will not be called on their deals. The Meltdown of 2007 illustrates what happens when the takers and managers of risk make a mistake. The spillover affects everyone.

So, I wish the pundits would stop calling the BP disaster Obama's Katrina. This is more like his Lehman Brothers or his AIG. Which, by the way, he also presided over containing.

The cynical / realistic reading. Wherever you happen to stand on the political spectrum, I think it is generally the understanding that an important and necessary role of government is to protect and defend the interests of We the People. Now, We as the People might disagree about how exactly this happens and what it means to protect and defend and even which people, but I think this is an underlying principle of the good that government can do and be. In 2007 and again today, We the People see what happens when government's ability (and arguable, even will) to defend and protect Us has been itself so devastated.

How could this happen? I just don't get it, but We the People need to understand and to know.