I knew a guy in Toronto who was a one-man wrecking crew when it came to creativity.

We were obliged to include this guy in the “brain storm” but he could be relied upon to introduce the forces of entropy to every debate. His techniques were many and highly effective: questioning every term, doubting every premise, refusing every potential moment of departure. This guy was the dark star, the collapsing sun, of idea generation.

We all know people like this. We have all been obliged to work with him. We have all suffered his intellectual predations.

The question is “why?” What’s he doing here? Why does the corporation, the academy, the organization put him with him? Why do we not have permission to murder him in his cubicle?

One chilling possibility comes in a splendid comment from Steve Postrel. Steve suggests that all corporations generate more ideas than they can possibly use. Perhaps, we might surmise, they need Oak trees that poison the ground around them. Say it ain’t so. Surely corporations need all the good ideas they can get. And surely those of us who work for them find our real joy in thinking these up. Let’s hope it’s not an Oak tree effect.

The trouble with these guys (and gals) is that once they get in to a corporation they begin to use its resources to defend themselves against reproach. They know they are without talent, but they can spot it in others. And then they dedicate their careers to making sure that opportunities for comparison are few and far between. Thus does bad drive out good.

Here’s the really weird thing. We all know these people exist. We all know what they look like. We all know the damage they create. But we do not have a term with which to call them, a diagnostic with which to identify them, or a HR method of with which to extract them.

When are we going to name the elephant? How much longer may these enemies of the state continue to operate with impunity? I would be grateful for comments that offer names for the elephant. We need to arm those people sitting in committee meetings with a term that can be whispered in the hall way, written on notes, smsed to colleagues and otherwise pressed into service. Only thus can we hope to name them and shame them.

Cribbing from Hollywood, I wondered if we could do something with Gods and monsters. We would of course be the Gods. They would just as evidently be the monsters. Dark star, as above, might work. Anti-matterers? Anti-mutterers? Idea jammers. Right wankers? For God sake, help me.

References

Postrel, Steve. 2004. Last comment. Here

Yesterday, I went to my first Thanksgiving dinner in the US. It was crowded with relatives, groaning with food, noisy with children, animated by football on TV and in the yard, lively with table talk, and pretty darn joyful.

On the table sat a plate (as above). The internal oval itemized some of the things Americans are thankful for: love, family, peace, friends, hope, health, wisdom, comfort, home, happiness, success, bounty, and freedom. A platter piled high, as it were, with thanks.

Canadian thanksgivings are less inclusive. In 1957, Parliament declared Thanksgiving “a day of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.” No platter called for here. By and large, Canadians are not thankful for “everything.” They are thankful for harvest, defined literally or somewhat more broadly. Family, health, home and bounty might come into it. Love, peace, friends, hope, wisdom, comfort, happiness, success, and freedom probably not.

I think the plate would be out of place on a Canadian table. I would bet that, in many Canadian homes, it would draw comment, even derisive comment, if not at table, then in the car on the way home. “Did you see that plate? She is really overdoing it.”

So what’s the diff? I think it’s that Americans tempt fate more often. They risk more, as individuals and as collectivities. They generate more “outcomes.” In any given year, there is more “in play.” Happiness is, as they say, pursued. Freedom exercised. There is less grey middle. Less “same old, same old.” Love, peace…and freedom are, in a dynamic world, hard won both in the long term and the day to day. So at the American Thanksgiving, more thanks are called for.

Much of Canada has locked itself into a kind of stasis. Things change under protest. To drag out that old psychological stand by, it’s a matter of the “locus of control.” I think more Americans than Canadians see this vested in the individual and the moment. Canadians are accustomed to having the world act on them. They respond as they must. Thanksgiving day is not a time to celebrate outcomes, so much as survivals. You can hear them thinking at the dinner table, ‘the world missed again.”

This could very well be the turkey talking. Or it may be simple gratitude. But freedom, that’s something to be thankful for.

Wow, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to host a blog that gets comments as good as the ones that came in yesterday. Yes, I can. It’s thrilling. Thank you.

Somewhere in the big book of rules, I think it says that a man may not blog on his wedding day. And this is my wedding day. Plus, I have a hangover the size of Baffin Island. (Note to self: you cannot replace all your bodily fluids with red wine. Stop trying.) So I will keep this brief.

SomeCallMeTim, yesterday in a comment, accused me of conflating the Left and the Democratic party, and he is of course right. Many dems regard the corportion is a tolerable thing or a necessary evil. But I am not sure you can run the country if that’s all you think it is.

As Gabriel points out, the state now defers to the corporation because the latter can do things a) that must be done, and b) that the state is demonstrably bad at doing. Indeed, we might see the diminished regard with which “waitresses in Wyoming” regards the state as a cold eyed recognition that the state grows worse at doing anything as the corporation gets steadily better at doing everything. The faster and more dynamic the world becomes, the more this is so.

I have sometimes wondered to myself whether the tax revolts and reticence that have done so much to advance the Republican cause are not so much a refusal to “share,” as they are unwilling to fund incompetence (or programs that have a way of funding the problem they are supposed to fix). Or, to put this another way: if governments were more efficient, I think every tax payer would be prepared to be more generous.

To return to my point (and I believe I have one): Achbar’s zany view is the strong form of a Democratic disability. It is, to this extent, symptomatic of a larger inability to reckon with what others take to be straightforward. The much vaunted state is not very good at what it does, and as long as this is so, those who would be its champion put themselves in a awkward spot. They must fight their way up-stream against a current that grows ever stronger. We used to be talking the Hudson River. Now it’s the Mississippi.

The Democrats are inclined to see the corporation as cruel, opportunistic, and when it can get away with it, exploitative and abusive. In this view, only the state can make the world a kinder, gentler place. But as the economists are good at showing us, it is out of the dispassionate and interested play of the marketplace that good comes, first individual, second, corporate and third collective. To vilify the corporation or merely to regard it as a necessary evil, so misses what others take to be unexceptionable as to put the Dems badly out of touch. (Or, this could be the hangover talking.)

Could I end on a related point that emerged last night when I was trying to replace my bodily fluids. We were talking about the recent election and at some point, a truth descended. If you could have only one phrase with which to identify the characteristic difference and difficulties of the Democrats and Republicans, it would be this: the Democrats are the party of principle and the Republicans are the party of pragmatism.

No doubt, this is well known, perhaps well worn, but with all that wine it carried the force of a revelation. It did so because it showed how difficult is the Democratic position at its heart. The party of principle must be “big tent,” attracting and accomodating many causes. This means you will be “steered” in part by people driven by righteousness and this is never the road to the center. Still worse, every time the Party fulfills its purpose, and stands for principle, it must necessarily take a counter-hit of sometimes equal proportion. Now that both sides are mobilized, there is no “silent majority,” no red state quiescence in the face of coastal presumption. Your principle will bring out your people and your opponents, sometimes in equal measure.

Republicans (setting aside the religious Right, who are, of course, all about principles of their own), have a vastly easier row to how. They merely insist on what is necessary. They act, that is to say, in the spirit of the corporation, out of the spirit of pragmatism that does not displease quite as necessarily as does principle. The world may grumble, but it will sometimes go along.

The upshot here, again from a strategic point of view, is that the Democrats must find someway to make the necessary world the agent of the desirable world. They must find a way to make the real an engine of the ideal. I believe this cannot happen when they continue to hold the corporation, that preeminent agent of the necessary and the real, in disdain. (John Deighton, Cheryl Swanson, Debbie Millman and Wodek Szemberg were party to this conversation. I don’t mean to suggest that they all subscribe to this view. And I don’t know to whom the credit goes.)

Ok, now to get ready for the wedding. That’s the McGill University chapel above. In a couple of hours, it will be filled with 100 people and a whole lot of joy. (Thank you, Pamela.) Now to figure out how to do a bow tie. Why the heck didn’t I buy a clip on? Apparently, principle still sometimes wins out over pragmatism.

In the last few days, we’ve been talking about the differences between Left and Right, and the great chasm that exists between. One strategy proposed for a rapprochement was to look at the assumptions of the two groups, that they might cultivate a clearer idea of the one another.

In today’s post, I want to examine an artifact from the Left that help illuminates one of its characteristic point of view. Let’s consider the recent documentary called The Corporation.

It was customary in another time to speak of the king’s ‘two bodies.” One of these was the actual, corporeal form of the monarch, his Body natural. The other was his “Body politic,” consisting of “Policy and Government.” A literal rendering of this notion appears in the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan which shows the ruler in his Body politic, a monarch made up of the many bodies of his subjects.

This notion that an organization is a kind of body comes down to us in the present day in the term “corporation.” The Coca-Cola Company, Proctor and Gamble, IBM, these are bodies, too.

Mark Achbar and his colleagues had the nutty, but original idea of taking this notion one step further. If the corporation is an entity in its own right, a body fashioned from the bodies, ideas, Policy and Government in which it consists, we may see it as a person. (This is the monarch re-membered, as it were.) And if the corporation is a person, might it not be judged as a person? Achbar and his crew decided to assess the corporation according to the diagnostic supplied by the World Health Organization and the Manual of Mental Disorders.

To more precisely assess the “personality” of the corporate “person,” a checklist is employed, using actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a “psychopath.”

This undertaking demonstrates several of the characteristics of the Left. It shows an imagination and intellectual agility. Whatever we might think about the outcome, as a thought experiment, this is kind of fun.

It also shows, I think, a kind of desperation. Here is the Left in its characteristic search to find some way to bring capitalism under control.

In the 1950s, American intellectuals rose up to declare suburbs bankrupt, TV a waste land, and commercial culture an abomination. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit came under particular attack for his moral failings. In this view, post-war prosperity was a trick. Corporate man lived a lie.

A couple of decades later, a death certificate for “the subject” was issued by leading European intellectuals. The certificate, written in haste and triumph, reads something like this:

place of death: Paris
time of death: 1972
attending physicians: Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan

This was a patent challenge to the notion of individualism on which capitalism depends. The Smithian view of the marketplace depends on rational individuals engaged in acts of exchange. Vaporize the individual, and we vaporize the great presupposition on which the state depends. Corporate man was a fiction.

Several decades later, the ecological movement declared corporations the villain of the piece. A fragile, blue planet was now being “raped” for profit. Corporate man was a sexual criminal.

Achbar’s latest foray suggests a new, more dramatic undertaking. With the help of the DSM-IV, Corporate man (make that Man) was a psychopath.

This vilification of the corporation and its occupants is, of course, at odds with the more conventional view of the corporation. According to this view, corporations are extraordinary creatures, capable of things that states and their governments cannot do. Indeed some would say that as corporations become Complex Adaptive Systems they are the only creatures capable of contending with the new dynamism of the world. (Fed Ex would be merely one case in point. Dell, another.) In sum, the Right and the center are now inclined to look on the corporation as one of the instruments that helps make a difficult world a manageable place.

There is a deep difference here that needs examining. Please forgive my impatient treatment of the position of the Left. (Please also forgive my supposing that Achbar speaks for everyone of the Left.) My sympathies are clear.

But I think this treatment does help to clarify how deep are the differences between us and how much we have to do.

References

Kantoriowicz, Ernst Hartwig. 1957. The king’s two bodies : a study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Website for The Corporation here.

In about 2 weeks, Skype has made itself indispensable. I use it to talk to my fiancée, a couple of brothers-in law, colleagues and friends.

But it’s also anthropologically illuminating and raises questions about what will happen to the self when we are truly ubiquitous.

Skype takes us one step closer to have electronic access to everyone we know with a minimum of interference. The telephone was a big step here, replacing hand written letters and telegrams the content of which would cool quite distinctly as the message inched its way to the recipient. The cell phone took the telephone one better. It means we can make and take calls anywhere.

Phone and cell phone give instant, ubiquitous access, but a certain interference or mediation persists. There was lots of hunting and pecking required, made more difficult by every smaller cell phone. And of course it was necessary to remember phone numbers and to find people when they were “in” or “packing.”

Skype is better still. Forget the fact that its free. What makes Skype a killer app is the fact that it allows us to get in touch with one click. Once it too is wireless there will be virtually no cost in time or effort to make contact. We can imagine a time when we are effortlessly in touch with anyone anywhere. The little microphone in our ears will stream with the voices of the people we care about, as they let us know what they are up to, how they are feeling, and “just stay in touch.” We will then be in possession of a detailed, pretty intimate, daily knowledge of friends and family. Phat-ic!

But there are other benefits that are becoming evident to me as I use the technology. One is the kind of calls you end up having. A couple of days ago, I had an interesting conversation with my future nephew. He was in Connecticut. I was in Montreal. I was talking to Pam, my voice issuing from her iBook. Once he got over the fact that he was being listening to a box of white plastic, he announced, over the general hubbub of voices in the room, that his father’s name is Steven.

We all stopped. “That’s right, David, your father’s name is Steven!” And we had a long conversations about names. (David and I agreed everyone should have an absolutely distinct name and not have to share. We also decided it would be simpler if our first, middle and last names were all the same. He would be David David David. I would be Grant Grant Grant.) Now, this is a conversation David would never have joined were it not for Skype. His aunt would have been holding the phone. He couldn’t have got “in.”

Furthermore, telephone conversations are hard for kids because they are bad at the set up and the sustaining talk needed to make a conversation. They pace badly. They speak out of turn. It is much, much easier in person. But with a roomful of people at Pam’s end keeping the conversation going, and with a microphone to capture anything and everything being said, it was easy for David to just shout out. And, presto, he was suddenly very much a part of the conversation. Now, I have access even to the worst conversationalist in the family (and he to me).

Today I’m watching Saskatchewan play B.C. in a Canadian Football League playoff game. Emmet, my brother-in-law and I will no doubt be Skyping throughout the game. (“Nice catch!” “Great hit!”) We will in effect be watching the game together despite the fact that we are 3000 miles apart. We will not have to talk later in the day or next week about “the game.” We will know exactly what the other thought.

“What,” I found myself thinking over breakfast, “does this mean for personhood?” David, Emmet and I now have something like instant, costless access to each other and the family. Our lives are more porous to one another. We are, as Goffman would say, much more a “we” than we used to be.

Plainly, this is a job for the likes of Judith Donath, the MIT expert in the social consequences of computing (as below), but I would like to take a crack at it. It means that we go back to the kind of face-to-face (now voice-to-voice) proximity that used to exist in the West until quite late in the game. Most of the people Westerners cared about existed within the range of their voices. It is one of the staples of the literature on individualism that people who lived in these little audio ambits had very porous selves indeed. Living in close proximity, they had “blurred boundaries.” Their lives were so overlapping and interpenetrating that it was hard to tell at any given moment were the “I” left off and the “other” began. Social life and personal identity were one large soup of mutuality.

So what happens when we use Skype and its successors and begin to get instant access to everyone all the time? Do we return to that soupy world in which the boundaries of personhood begin to blur? Do we return to an intimate little world in which we live out of one another’s pockets. Does the self become much more a node in a net than a pebble in the stream. And would this mean that individualism, (and the notion that selves are relatively speaking pretty well bounded), end up being a relatively brief period in the history of the West?

I raise these questions only. The rest of up to Dr. Donath.

References

For more on Skype here

Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, editors. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carrithers, Michael, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes. editors. 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1986. Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France. Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought. editors T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. E. Wellbery, 53-63. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Donath, Judith. Forthcoming. Sociable Media. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction and here.

Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

La Fontaine, J. S. 1985. Person and individual: some anthropological reflections. in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. editors Michael Carrithers, Steven collins, and Steven Lukes, 123-40. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Lukes, Steven. 1969. Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’. Political Studies 17, no. 1: 14-30.

———. 1973. Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“They just don’t get it.”

We said this kind of thing a lot during the election. It marked the moment when we despaired at the sheer wrong-headedness of the opposition.

“They just don’t get it” was sometimes followed by grand declarations:

“I’m moving to Canada.”

[or]

“I’m moving to a gated suburb.”

Moving to Canada? Dude! You’re that alienated? Moving to a suburb? You must be joking. This is how bad you think it is?

This is separatism. This is exit. This is what happens when we feel there’s no hope of getting our point across. Republicans are from Mars. Democrats from Venus. Let’s call the whole thing off.

But what if this is a symptom of a larger problem: the new reality of culture and politics?

We are more multiple than we used to be. The ideological spectrum has stretched in both directions. The Right is further right. The Left is further left. And both camps are more heterogeneous. The absolute ideological space has expanded extensively and intensively.

We have a systematic problem on our hands. If there is more ideological space, it is inevitable that we should find ourselves dealing with people “who just don’t get it.” How could it be otherwise? They live on one coast. We live on the other. What are the chances we’re going to share assumptions? This is the nature of the new political beast.

It is time to rewrite the rules of discourage. As it stands, we make our arguments with the blithe assurance that they will carry the day by their own their own inherent plausibility. If we engage the opposition, it is to snipe and cavil. (I have done my share of this, as readers have noted.)

It is better to know the enemy, master their assumptions, and address these assumptions explicitly. In the case of the argument for Gay marriage, this means saying things like, “I understand that this proposition threatens your idea of the family. Here’s why [in a very detailed way] I believe Gay marriage would not put the idea or the reality of the family in jeopardy.” On the Right this means saying things like, “I understand that you believe the marketplace stands at odds with social justice. Here’s hwy [in a very detailed way] I believe the marketplace actually serves the goals of social justice.”

Clearly, some differences are non negotiable. Some on the Right will say “but the Bible says.” Some on the Left will say, “only a perfectly equal distribution of resources is acceptable.” Fine, we have got to rock bottom differences. But sometimes some people on the Right and Left are going to say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let me think on that.”

And certainly, they are going to think, “I still believe you are deeply mistaken, but thanks for making the effort.” If nothing else, a detailed engagement with the opponent’s terms does them the courtesy of saying, “I get that you are sincere. I get that you have an idea. And I have done by best to respect this idea in my response.”

The problem is that we are now responding to the great gaps between us by shouting our positions across the chasm. And all this does is create the impression that there is no middle ground…when there might be a little.

And a little is a lot. It begins to rebuild the center. It begins to resupply our now almost exhausted stocks of mutual respect. This is the right thing to do, the Millian thing to do.

But it is also the strategic thing to do. This is the way to split the monolith. A few people on the other side will say, “Oh, interesting.” And that begins the process of separating the lunatics from the party of thoughtfulness, the doctrinaire from those who are truly interested in “building bridges.”

In sum, there is a way to rebuild the center but it depends upon a new mutual interest, a kind of anthropological investigation (forgive me if I see this in parochial terms) of who the other is. It could be that we will come away from this with the grim understanding that mutuality is impossible. But if we continue in our present fashion, we may be quite certain that we will make this so.

Acknowledgements:

Ennis. 2004. Several posts on this blog (for forcing me to think about the real challenges of “discourse”)

Last note:

Another way to begin to close the ideological gap is to see if we can’t fashion a peace treaty for the culture wars. “They just don’t get it” comes in part from the fact that we are unacquainted with the founding ideas and documents of the other party. The problem is not so much that they just don’t get it, as that we don’t get them.

One way to do this is to propose the 20 cultural documents that one side should master in order to “get” what the other side is saying.

A first candidate for those on the Right who would understand the Left is DVD just released by Universal that contains 5 Marx brothers movies: Duck Soup, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.

This will seems an odd choice, but consider this quote from Duck Soup:

A minister of cabinet of Freedonia: I give all my time and energy to my duties and what do I get?

Groucho: Well, you get awfully tiresome after a while.”

The Marx Brothers were one of the founts of my transformation as an adolescent. It was one of the documents that encouraged me to scorn authority. They were in fact architects of the 1960s and its anti-establishment point of few. Some people on the Right believe that this is the time to restore our respect for authority, and they will find this films not the least bit funny. But others will begin to see that even a deeply conservative soul can take pleasure in ludic play. While we are building bridges, this is one place to start.

I’m open to all suggestions for other seminal documents, a kind of briefing compendium for the Left and the Right.

Forget Jon Stewart. Take Michael Moore.

Step 1: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of Mr. Moore’s “propositions.”

Step 2: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of his rhetorical style.

Step 3: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of how Mr. Moore plays in the red states.

Step 4: do a careful, dispassionate, cost-benefit analysis of Mr. Moore’s contribution to the Democratic effort.

The results are clear:

The benefit: as a swash buckling satirist, Mr. Moore made Democrats feel good about themselves.

The cost: Mr. Moore made the rest of the country look at the Democrats with horror. “This guy is your hero? And you want my vote? You have just got to be kidding.”

I don’t care whether Moore is a good satirist or a bad one. And I am not saying that there is no place for satirists. (And I am distinctly not saying that the Republican party does not have loose cannons of its own.) I am saying that Democrats paid dearly for this satirist.

How dearly? Run the election results again on the “scenario” machine. Remove Mr. Moore from the equation. He could have been the difference between victory and loss. That’s how much the red states hate him. That’s how expensive he was.

As many of us did, I watched Monday Night Football last night, and Indiana’s victory over Minnesota. It was an astonishing game between two great quarterbacks. But some of the best shots were of Tony Dungy and Mike Tice, coaches on either side line, working out the options, ruthlessly swapping in and out the right personnel, playing the game as ferociously in their heads as their players were playing it on the field.

This is the way the Republicans conduct themselves. Michael Moore is heartening. He’s funny. And he’s a liability. Time for the Democrats to get in the game.

I have it from a reliable source that the team at Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show is despondent. Stewart and his team thought their satire, most of it directed against the Republicans, would help encourage large numbers of young voters to support the Democrats. In fact, their youthful demographic failed to make an impressive showing at the polls.

This is a puzzle. The Daily Show is almost certainly the wittiest thing on television. But it was also, in the weeks before the election, a platform for mockery. Night after night, Stewart held up Republicans to ridicule. This should have made the show a formidable platform for recruiting the Democratic vote from a constituency that a) does not vote enough and b) could have tipped the balance in this very close election.

So what happened? There is one dark possibility. It is that Stewart actually succeeded in driving his viewers away from the voting booth, not towards it. It may be that this nightly ridicule had the effect not of discrediting the Republicans but the idea that Washington can serve the people’s will. In short, Stewart’s show may have discredited the office as much as did the incumbent.

Don’t get me wrong. Satire is a good and noble thing. No democracy can survive without it. (And we must worry that a newly sanctimonious Right might move against it.) But here’s the thing that Democrats do not seem always to get: that their absolute presumption of certainty that the other is self serving and corrupt makes the electoral system look like a school for scoundrels. There’s a problem here. The absolute refusal to accept that the political other might sometimes have a point, that the Republicans might have ideas, that the opposition sometimes deserves a thoughtful response…all of this begins to corrode politics itself. (Post post insert, with a hat tip to Ennis: I do not mean to suggest that Republicans and other on the Right have not done a good deal of corruding of their own. They have. And no one does certainty and self congratulation quite like the Right.)

It’s an irony to match the one noted Friday. When you act as if the opposition is completely corrupt and craven, you create a little piece of cognitive dissonance. You leave the viewer-voter, to ask “If you’re so right, how can it be you are not in office? There must be something wrong with the office.” In sum, the Democrats’ politics of smugness and certitude may end up demolishing the credibility of the very institution they wish to run.

I’m not sure this is true. I’m just saying.

References

Wikipedia entry for Jon Stewart here

I intend to post “Advice for Democrats III and IV” on Monday and Tuesday respectively. But the weekend is for happier things.

A note of praise for Robert Andrew Powell’s “No Yelling, No Cheering. Shhhhh! It’s Silent Saturday.”

It’s hard to say how good “No yelling” is. It’s an account of what Powell calls a “low level national trend;” the practice of insisting that parents remain silent while watching their children play organized soccer.

There is no shouting, no yelling, no threatening the officials or swearing at fathers from the opposing team. With the sidelines silenced, there is no pressure. The children are free to have fun. At least that’s the idea.

Here’s a glimpse of how completely innovative American culture can be. What is more utterly American than cheering at a sporting event? How many movies have we seen in which the last scene shows everyone in the stands cheering wildly as the victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat? (About 3,500. Yes, I’ve run the numbers.) Cheering takes the “spectator” out of spectator sports and puts the stands in play. Thus do sports become participatory. This is how joy comes to the world…for many Americans every Saturday morning…and Sunday afternoon…and Monday Night…

But America is reflexive as almost no culture has ever been. Suddenly, someone asks “is cheering (and swearing, groaning, booing) a good thing? Perhaps it puts too much pressure on the kids.” (I can’t remember ever hearing anything from the sidelines when playing football and baseball as a kid. But never mind.) So Americans, bless them, create Silent Saturday. They change one of the fundamental rules by which their culture is organized.

Now the frustrating thing from an anthropological point of view is that the attending journalists and social scientists can be relied up to join in noisy judgment of cultural practice. Their vaunted reflexivity turns out to be not very reflexive. It ends almost always in the same criticism: existing practice is bad. Silent Saturday is good. In point of fact, journalists and social scientists will never agree to a Silent Saturday of their own. They will stand on the sidelines of American culture and keep up a noisy barrage of criticism.

In most hands, “No Yelling. No Cheering” would have toed this line. It would have been a sternly approving of the innovation, with a good deal of hand ringing about how viciously competitive kid sports have become. Cue Bill Moyers. Roll the documentary. “America has always been a culture that cares about competition. But are our children paying too high a price? Tonight, we will go to a little town in Texas where…”

And we can some of this from Mr. Powell, no cheerleader he. He gives us several glimpses how terrifying it must be for a six year old to hear his parent scream at umpires and what a relief it must be to left to their own devices on the field. We can’t read this article without admiring the motives and the accomplishments of Silent Saturday.

But Mr. Powell forgoes glib criticism and pat reflexivity for the real effects of the innovation. He shows why cheering is so, well, cheering. He shows how sincere and probably well advised are the innovators. And then, bless him, he gives us the contradictions that must ensue when a culture is prepared to change this dramatically without ever sweeping up after itself.

No Yelling, No Cheering documents what it is to live in a culture that creates innovations without ever quite letting go of the past. Powell gives us soccer moms and dads stretched between the good in the new idea and the good in the old one. This is American culture, something caught, more often than not, between the “x” of tradition and the “not x” of innovation with the “culture bearers” spread out, and sometimes, stretched tight in between.

As Faulkner might have said, in America, the past is not dead, it is not past. Everything is in play. For every cultural precept there is its opposite. For every clarity, a contradiction. This is no place for platitudes, for vapid social science and journalism. This is a job for someone with a feeling for what it’s like to live in a culture that can reinvent itself continually while taking all the old ideas with it as it goes. A few writers have risen to this challenge. If this piece is anything to judge by, Robert Andrew Powell is a writer who might some day join the pantheon.

There are the grace notes, as when Powell says, “When the ball is blown into play, the players on both teams follow it around as iron filings would trail a magnet.” Come on. Big points on the rhetorical score board for this one. And the crowd goes wild.

I haven’t done the article justice. Have a look for yourself. And we must encourage Mr. Powell to liberate this piece from the “subscription required” clutches of the New York Times, that we may all gather in wonder, a crowd now silent with admiration.

References

Powell, Robert Andrew. 2004. No Yelling, No Cheering, Shhhhh! It’s Silent Saturday. New York Times. November 5, 2004. subscription required here.

Democrats must understand several things about Republicans to beat them in 2008. (I am your devoted anthropological servant, without regard to party.)

First, Republicans (and the people who vote for them) must be understood to hold a moral and intellectual position. They are not, as some Democrats insist, “asleep,” “ignorant,” or developmentally challenged (as noted in yesterday’s post). They are not selfish. They are not mistaken. They are not 4 years away from “seeing the light.”

Republicans and TPWVFT have an idea of what the body politic is. That this is not the Liberal Left and the Democratic Party idea does not mean it is not an idea. It may not be dismissed as cavalier, craven, or some species of false consciousness. Ad hominem attacks feel good, but, as Melinda pointed a couple of days ago, they don’t get the political job done.

The idea: every tub its own bottom

Republicans and TPWVFT believe every tub is its own bottom: every creature must make its own way in the world. It will be rewarded for its successes and punished for its failures. This is the Republican idea of justice and fairness. No, it doesn’t conform to the Liberal Left notion of justice and fairness, but it is wrong to insist that it is a cover for selfishness, moral indifference, or a demonstration that Republicans and TPWVFT “just don’t get it.”

Nicholas Kristof

Thus when Nicholas Kristof refers to ‘the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates,” he fails to see that these people vote Republican because they believe this party thinks as they do: that it stands for individual effort and accomplishment. To insist that the voter is just too dumb to understand his/her own interests is a simple anthropological failure to see how Republicans & TPWVFT chose to define these interests. It is no good scorning these people because they do not agree with you. This is the moment to do the right thing anthropologically, and grasp the very points of difference that make the Democratic message unappealing or unintelligible.

A cocktail party

Have you had this ethnographic moment? You are standing at a cocktail party wondering how you might beat your way to the bar for another glass of red wine, and someone from the Liberal Left engages you in a recitation of the things they believe in. For some reason people always take me for a fellow traveler (I think its my haircut), and the song is always the same. “Here are the issues I care about,” says the someone. “And, behold, look how deeply I care,” is the larger message. “Sharing and caring,” this is the thing the someone wants you to know about them…as if there were some doubt about their liberal credentials, their moral character, or their capacity for fellow feeling.

There’s always a pause here. The “someone” is waiting for me to sing my own song of liberal generosity—the ritual reciprocity of cocktail chatter, apparently. I say nothing. But here’s what I would say, if I weren’t so darn Canadian:

“I don’t doubt your liberal credentials. But I do wonder if you have talked to a farmer or a waitress lately. The ones who voted Republican did so because they suppose this party is more likely to create a country in which their individual effort and accomplishment will be rewarded. This means, among other things, that they would prefer to keep their tax dollars to fund their own enterprise in the world than surrender it to a more collective approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Oh, well,” says the Democratic someone, ‘then you’re just a selfish, uncaring, so and so. You don’t get it. You don’t understand that we’re all in this tub together.” I get this. I really do. I live in a province, Quebec, in which I pay the highest marginal tax rate in the G8. I am happy to do so. (Believe me, I pay a tax bill so staggeringly high it would turn most Democrats into Republicans instantaneously.) But not everyone feels this way. Some people actually resent when the state puts its hand in their pocket. Especially when they believe they can with their own modest gifts and philanthropy fund the common good more effectively than a government that is, well, famously inefficient. (Have Democrats thought through the implications of American philanthropy?)

To say the waitress does not understand her self interest…well, isn’t this what people mean when they say Democrats are a little arrogant and elitist? If I may hazard another ethnographically undocumented guess, isn’t this the sort of thing that makes some waitresses want to reach for a pot of hot coffee.

“Let me decide how to deploy the value I create in the world,” I think the waitress might say. To which she would add, “While you are accusing me of not understanding my self interest, what shall we say about a NYT columnist who helps promote the position that keeps Democrats out of the Whitehouse?”

It comes down to this: the waitress who believes she is entitled to decide what her interests are and how she wishes to deploy her wealth in the world versus the NYT columnist who presumes to know better and, insult upon insult, to scold her for her choices.

I don’t know. Maybe the Democratic Party is the right party to run the country. But you can’t absent yourself from the mainstream, and then be surprised when the country does not put you in the White House. You can’t scorn the voter and then expect her to slap her forehead and say, “yes, here’s my vote!” You can’t refuse an anthropological understanding the voter, and then expect to lead the country.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the general will should be decided by a columnist at the New York Times. And I think it’s up to Mr. Kristol to explain this to the farmers, factory workers and waitresses of America.

The Democratic Party, bless it, has defined itself as the party that takes America somewhere. This is its strength, its noble calling. But Kristof, dude, you have to get out more. Republicans & TPWVFT are not wrong, ignorant, asleep, selfish or insufficiently self interested. They have an idea. This would be a good time to find out what the idea is. I am starting the count down now. You have four years.

References

Kristof, Nicholas. 2004. Living Poor, Voting Rich. New York Times. November 3, 2004. subscription required here

“It just made me cry,” Terry Mitchell, 54, an audiologist in Oakland, said of Mr. Bush’s re-election. “I am sad that America is asleep at the wheel.”

“I am depressed, but I am also just really angry at the rest of the country’s ignorance,” [Jennifer] Sloan said.

Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other[‘s do].

In the immortal metaphor supplied by Gary Cruse on this blog this summer, the blogging world today wears a potato down the back of its swim trunks, instead of the front.

Yesterday, we believed the exit poll data. Mind you, so did both parties, with gloom at the Republican headquarters and premature joy in Boston.

These polls showed Kerry beating Bush by two to three percentage points in the popular vote and they showed him taking Pennsylvania and Ohio. Two of three surveys in Florida showed Kerry winning there, too.

In the words of the Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, the exit polls invited us to believe that “Kerry [was] on the verge of winning the three states most pundits believed could sway the election.”

Now the question is this: why was the data unreliable? Maybe it’s a methodological problem: the pollers put the wrong questions, to the wrong people, in the wrong way, or something. We will hear lots on this possibility in the next few days.

I want to raise the issue I cribbed from Diane Francis a couple of days ago: that, in the pre-election surveys, many voters who were claiming to be undecided were in fact concealing their intention to vote Republican. It looks as if the same thing may have been happening at the exit polls. People who had just voted Republican were claiming to have voted Democrat.

Diane Francis suggested that in the case of pre-election surveys, Republicans had been shamed or brow beaten into lying. This is possible, but not compelling.

But alternate suggestions are not forthcoming. Could this have been a difference between what the voter wanted to do and what the voter felt he or she had to do? “I wanted to vote Democrat but I felt obliged to vote Republican.” Did they claim to have voted Democrat because this was the better, the more winning, the more becoming choice? Did they claim a Democrat vote as a fashion accessory?

None of the alternatives to Francis’ suggestion is very plausible. But clearly something very odd happened here, and we may have to resort to a very odd explanation to make sense of it. Why did people lie?

References.

The earlier post, The Bush Victory: you read it here second, may be found here

Diane Francis’ post from the National Post may be found here

I want two (more) things from my technology:

1) Full access to everything everyone knows.

2) Better access to everyone I know.

1) Full access to everything everyone knows.

Google already gives me a pretty good facsimile of this first condition. A few well chosen key words and it’s all there (somewhere…sorting that’s another problem). Eventually, when we have everything on line and Google is more and more tunable as a search engine, we will have access to everything.

But the next step here is wireless connection to the internet and voice control. So that I can perform a Google search anywhere by voice. To be still more demanding, I want the result to play on the surface of my choice. I point a little camera at a wall or a desk top to see the search results. Or my glasses supply the screen.

Now the technology has simulated what I like to think of as the “Victor Li experience.” Victor is a Burmese Canadian I met at Cambridge who can recall virtually everything he has ever read. That’s what I want from my technology. The simulation of perfect recall. But forget Victor Lee. Now we are a little like a God. We can summon all knowledge, anywhere, by voice. Well, perhaps not like a God, but certainly like an angel.

The Renaissance distinction said God was knowledge while angels had knowledge without the need of mediating senses. Humans of course can only know effortfully. This is what the tech. does for us. It moves us up a notch in the great chain of being. And this is why the William Gibson, Bruce (merely) Sterling notion of “jacking in” is mistaken. The technology is about disintermediation, not reintermediation. Ubiquity means the technology comes to us and gets steadily better at doing so…so we don’t have to jack in!

2) Better access to everyone I know.

When I was in Korea earlier this year, I saw kids using 3G technology to build and maintain social networks much larger and more interactive than was possible for their parent’s generation. They were using web-enabled cell phone cameras to take and send pictures to everyone in their net as a way of “pinging the hive.” Now, they were communicating smaller bits of information more often to more people. They had found a way of maintaining a larger social network with roughly the same investment of time required by the old fashioned face to face networks. Phone to phone networks cost the same as face to face networks, but they are larger and the connections are strangely more intimate and less mediated by social convention. One Korea teen sees what is happening to another Korean teen more directly.

The new P2P telephone technology called Skype gives us a glimpse of this. Pam and I used it all weekend. I was using a headset and my PC in Montreal. She was using the microphone and speakers built into her Ibook in Connecticut. Voice quality was very, very good. I got to be the voice issuing from her laptop. This meant that Molly, the kitten, could listen and, once or twice, pipe up.

Skype is weird. You are “just speaking.” And your voice is emerging somewhere else, gratis the elaborate voice box provided by the PC, ISP and P2P telephony from Skype. And you have very ready access to everyone on your list. And this is weird too. I had no idea how much I resented hunting and pecking the tiny buttons on my cell phone. Skype is all point and click. It’s a pretty glorious way of disintermediating the technology, so that less and less stands between us and the task, and more and more people are readily accessible to us when we do so.

Not quite Gods. But a lot like angels.

Never in my lifetime have I seen the electorate so passionate, and never before have the two sides seemed so utterly, unshakeably certain of themselves.

Campaigns are not the best places to seek out public confessions of self-doubt, but the certitude on display in this race has long since crossed the threshold from confidence to delusion, and whoever is elected on Tuesday (or whenever it ends) will soon be smacked in the face with the cold hard truth.

So speaks Matt Welch in the present issue of Reason Magazine. And he’s right, plainly. We are looking at a mighty standoff between the two parties.

What’s missing are all the old ear marks of thoughtfulness, deliberation, and judiciousness. That long, searching pause in which we try to search out the best response: “Well, yes, that’s a good point, but the way I see it…” “I have to think about this a little more, but I think its possible that…” When was the last time you heard one of these phrases in a political conversation between Democrats and Republicans. Now, it’s more like “Jane, you brainless twat…”

Anthropologically, this is interesting. What can we say at a minimum? That the friends of the two parties now hew to opinions that are not just different but oppositional, that one person’s truth is another’s poison, that the opposition is supposed to be not just wrong, but fundamentally, utterly mistaken. The political other is no longer “different from you and me,” they are now the anti-Christ, wrong to their very core, corrupt in their very essence. Sometimes you wonder whether a Holy War is not just something for the international stage.

Anthropologically, this is challenging. Do we know what one party believes to be true of the other? Can we parse these out, if only in a very preliminary way? I think this would be useful. For we are constructing one another when we engage in these debates. And it is precisely because this construction is so vilifying and condemnatory from the beginning that debate is so…little like debate.

What does the Democratic side believe to be true of the Republican side. 1) That they have no moral compass, 2) that whatever is is right, 3) that the state should not intervene to correct or protect, 4) that they refuse moral responsibility outside the boundary of the self, family, church and community, 5) that all the rest is a Darwinian free for all, 6) that the success of the republican regime means we are very close to going to hell in a hand basket, 7) that the environment, international politics, and the succoring state are all distinctly tipped in the direction of something cataclysmic (this way comes). Roughly.

What does the Republican side believe to be true of the Democratic side. 1) that they have no moral compass, 2) that they are deeply committed to a dangerously self indulgent individualism on the one hand, and a intrusive state regime on the other, 3) that they presume to know better than the individual, 4) that they will not allow the marketplace to be a (perhaps the) agent that reveals collective interests and intentions, 5) that they would choke off this marketplace in order to restore the world to order and in the process frustrate the most adaptive device at our disposal, 6) that they will fundamentally will not let the world be, but insist instead on a vanity of interference, on a presumption of knowledge in a world that long ago passed into complexities and dynamisms that are essentially inscrutable. More or less. (Hey, it’s Sunday afternoon. I am trying to watch the Giants beat, um, the other team.)

What’s scary from an anthropological point of view is how completely counter paradigmatic these assumptions are. What you believe I can’t imagine thinking. What I declaim you find virtually unintellligable. Surely, its time to start the debate again with a careful eye to what the deeper differences are. They may not be any negotiating them, but the terrible din of mutual incomprehension has surely run its course.

One thought on the difference. If you stand way back, squint your eyes, and look for the forest, here’s one thing that leaps out. The Republicans dislike the Democrats’ presumption that “they know best.” And the Democrats, when they examines the argument of the Republicans, content that “they just don’t care.”

These are two notions of morality. The Democrats say morality means caring, sharing, and making an effort. From their point of point of view, the Republicans’ notion of less government and more marketplace looks like a refusal of morality, a declaration of indifference, a Darwinian brutality. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. They believe that it indexes an absense of morality.

The Republicans say morality means staying out of the way, letting individuals do, risk, engage as they will and collectivities to shape themselves accordingly. From their point of view, the Democrats’ notion of intervention looks like a bleeding hearted presumption that the Liberal Left must know better than the world. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. The believe it represents a self flattery, an addled refusal to respect the emergent will of the world.

This is bullshit, I’m sure. But you see what I am trying to get at. The fundamental terms of the disagreement to which Matt refers. How is it that the two parties are now so utterly mutually exclusive in their assumptions? We need to get to the bottom of this. We need one set of terms that can encompass both points of view. How very pre post modern of me.

Besides, there are more pressing things to think about. Like whether the Vikings can make up a 22 point deficit in the remaining 12 minutes. Frankly, I don’t think so. And that’s the thing about Vikings. Really, they just don’t get it…

References

Welch, Matt. 2004 The Great Divide. The National Post. Reason Magazine and available at Welch’s website

One of Canada’s most interesting and able columnists, Diane Francis, has come up with an ingenious account of why the American polls may be misleading.

I suspect that most of the so-called “undecided” voters are voting for Bush but are embarrassed to say so. The dislike for Bush, among his opposition, has become so vicious that any of his supporters are regarded as stupid or worse.

This interesting little suggestion implies that poll respondents believe that they are more likely to be talking to Democratic supporters than Republican ones when being polled. It also implies, as Francis points out, that the Democrats are more likely to heap scorn upon the Republicans than the other way around.

Anyhow, if there is an unexpectedly large Bush victory on Tuesday, you heard it here second.

References

The Francis article from the National Post can be found here.