Author Archives: Peter

“a different Shakespeare from the one I love”

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“Kids today don’t appreciate Shakespeare.” That is a tired, perennial complaint. It is not the point that the eminent Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt makes in “Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love.” In fact, he admires the way his students approach and use Shakespeare, but he notes two important differences from his own response when he was their age. First, his students are less likely than he was to identify with Shakespeare, to claim his works as part of their inheritance. And second, they are less likely to be moved by the language itself, “touched by the subtle magic of his words.”

Both observations resonate with my own experience. My father was, like Greenblatt, a Jewish-American academic who claimed the English 16th century as his birthright. Dad was perfectly well aware that his ancestors lived in Eastern Europe in Shakespeare’s time and that people like them were banned from–and hated in–England. But if someone had said that Shakespeare wasn’t really my father’s because he belonged to the English (or to gentiles), Dad would have taken those as fighting words. Like Greenblatt, he might have said that the renaissance heritage “was mine as if by birthright, for the simple reason that English was my native tongue. All that I needed to do was to immerse myself in it passionately.” And just as the literature of renaissance England was ours by virtue of our language, so the political heritage of the English revolution (especially its radical wing) was ours because of its influence on the American liberal tradition. In fact, I may have grown up with the shadow of an unspoken idea that Shakespeare and his age belonged most authentically to people like my father, because he had chosen to devote sophisticated critical attention to the texts. Someone with an English name and an English accent who operated an olde tea shoppe in Stratford-on-Avon was, by comparison, an interloper.

Although I recognize huge differences of context and circumstances, I would suggest a rough analogy to the special affection that many African-American Christians feel for the King James’ Version (KJV) of the Bible, which was the other great literary achievement of Shakespeare’s era. As Adelle Banks writes:

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV’s soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

“It’s a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, ‘You don’t count. You’re nobody. You’re at the bottom rung of the ladder,'” said Sanders, who has written about black Christians’ use of the KJV. “If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity.” …

“Although I think young black people are using other translations and finding them useful, we’ll always have a sentimental attachment to King James,” said [Rev. Joseph] Lowery, a retired United Methodist minister who marched with the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I would add that the KJV echoes throughout the great canon of African American writing, including, of course, the works of Dr. King: “Let justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” (Cf. Amos 5:24.)

Rev. Lowery notes a generational shift when he observes that “young black people are using other translations.” Greenblatt suggests two causes for the similar shift that he observes: a growing tendency to treat authors as alien if they are not demographically similar to the reader, and a shrinking sense of direct, affective awe in response to written poetry.

In assessing these changes, I would avoid polemic. Everyone can decide for herself whether to identify with–and claim–long-dead authors and how to respond to written words. Greenblatt’s students are responding to Shakespeare in creative ways that enrich the culture. I am not saying they are wrong. But I would offer two suggestions:

First, you can claim Shakespeare as yours if you speak English, whether it is a mother tongue or a second language. That is an authentic choice, even if your religion, gender, race, and national origin are very different from his. When presented with the Bard as a model, one political response is to say, “Shakespeare was an old white Christian man from the colonial power, and I am not.” A different political response is: “Shakespeare’s words are mine as much as yours, and if you deny my right to them, I will challenge you.” The latter is no less radical or potentially subversive. Which response to choose is a complex and personal matter, and I don’t object to either. I just want to suggest that the second option is available to anyone. And it may be the path less taken today.

Second, I worry that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear the power and resonances of very fine written language. Culture is increasingly visual and oral, which expands our capacities in some respects but possibly weakens our ability to absorb the special power of the written word.

We are living at a time of incessant communication. By one estimate, more words were recorded in 2002 alone than in all of human history up through 1999. The increase since then has been exponential. Even the older formats are exploding in scale. About half a million new book titles are published every year in English, whereas about 147 books were licensed annually in England in Shakespeare’s day: a 3,400-fold increase. When communications arrive in a ceaseless deluge, it may require crude and explosive language to capture attention.

One source of literary depth and power is allusion. But in order for an allusion to work, the writer and the reader must know the same referents. An excellent reason to study Shakespeare and the KJV is that they have echoed so pervasively through such diverse texts. There are still millions who can hear those echoes, as others can hear Quranic references in classical Arabic or the Shijing reverberating in modern East Asian verse. But when new text is piped around the world by the terabyte, the chances fall that an audience will recognize any given referent. The most widely shared references are from contemporary mass culture, which tends itself to have thin resonances.

I was pretty absorbed and awestruck when I saw live Shakespeare as a child and as a teenager. The words themselves could bedimm the noontide sun and call forth the mutinous winds. I think that response is less likely today, not because the language has evolved so much further from Elizabethan English, nor because there is anything wrong with today’s kids, but because a child is exposed to a much larger quantity of professionally produced, highly emotional drama: constantly streaming videos of all kinds. A play has much more to compete with.

We also live at a time of manic linguistic invention and expansion, when new words and phrases seem to enter the language daily, often duplicating existing choices and overriding traditional grammatical constraints. (Witness the constant turning of nouns into verbs in business English.) Shakespeare’s time offers certain parallels. The volume of public speech and printed communication was expanding rapidly then as well, and English vocabulary was growing. It is often claimed that Shakespeare personally added 1,500 or 2,000 words to English. Those numbers may be exaggerated because older sources have been lost, and scholars search Shakespeare’s works for alleged coinages without always consulting other surviving texts that might use the same words. But there is no doubt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries shared our predilection for inventing words, mixing sources, bending genres, and breaking all putative grammatical rules.

But they had to expand their language. English wasn’t very old, and it needed a much larger store of words, phrases, and tropes to rival Latin. You can often sense a writer of Shakespeare’s day struggling to convey an idea that now seems very straightforward, just because we have more resources. Today we don’t lack words and phrases, but we struggle to hear the resonances of the ones we have. We turn the noun “impact” into a verb without exploring the possibilities of verbs that have histories, like “affect,” “change,” “influence,” “modify,” “transform” (and many more).

I am not committed to linguistic conservatism as a principle; languages change as a result of wonderful human inventiveness. I agree with Greenblatt that multimedia adaptations and mashups of Shakespeare can be fantastic contributions. Yet we can perhaps profit more than usual by slowing down and hearing the depths of our linguistic inheritance.

[See also “signal” (a poem on this theme) and the political advantages of organized religion, in which I note the political power of “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones” and its roots in the KJV.]

“a different Shakespeare from the one I love”

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“Kids today don’t appreciate Shakespeare.” That is a tired, perennial complaint. It is not the point that the eminent Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt makes in “Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love.” In fact, he admires the way his students approach and use Shakespeare, but he notes two important differences from his own response when he was their age. First, his students are less likely than he was to identify with Shakespeare, to claim his works as part of their inheritance. And second, they are less likely to be moved by the language itself, “touched by the subtle magic of his words.”

Both observations resonate with my own experience. My father was, like Greenblatt, a Jewish-American academic who claimed the English 16th century as his birthright. Dad was perfectly well aware that his ancestors lived in Eastern Europe in Shakespeare’s time and that people like them were banned from–and hated in–England. But if someone had said that Shakespeare wasn’t really my father’s because he belonged to the English (or to gentiles), Dad would have taken those as fighting words. Like Greenblatt, he might have said that the renaissance heritage “was mine as if by birthright, for the simple reason that English was my native tongue. All that I needed to do was to immerse myself in it passionately.” And just as the literature of renaissance England was ours by virtue of our language, so the political heritage of the English revolution (especially its radical wing) was ours because of its influence on the American liberal tradition. In fact, I may have grown up with the shadow of an unspoken idea that Shakespeare and his age belonged most authentically to people like my father, because he had chosen to devote sophisticated critical attention to the texts. Someone with an English name and an English accent who operated an olde tea shoppe in Stratford-on-Avon was, by comparison, an interloper.

Although I recognize huge differences of context and circumstances, I would suggest a rough analogy to the special affection that many African-American Christians feel for the King James’ Version (KJV) of the Bible, which was the other great literary achievement of Shakespeare’s era. As Adelle Banks writes:

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV’s soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

“It’s a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, ‘You don’t count. You’re nobody. You’re at the bottom rung of the ladder,'” said Sanders, who has written about black Christians’ use of the KJV. “If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity.” …

“Although I think young black people are using other translations and finding them useful, we’ll always have a sentimental attachment to King James,” said [Rev. Joseph] Lowery, a retired United Methodist minister who marched with the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I would add that the KJV echoes throughout the great canon of African American writing, including, of course, the works of Dr. King: “Let justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” (Cf. Amos 5:24.)

Rev. Lowery notes a generational shift when he observes that “young black people are using other translations.” Greenblatt suggests two causes for the similar shift that he observes: a growing tendency to treat authors as alien if they are not demographically similar to the reader, and a shrinking sense of direct, affective awe in response to written poetry.

In assessing these changes, I would avoid polemic. Everyone can decide for herself whether to identify with–and claim–long-dead authors and how to respond to written words. Greenblatt’s students are responding to Shakespeare in creative ways that enrich the culture. I am not saying they are wrong. But I would offer two suggestions:

First, you can claim Shakespeare as yours if you speak English, whether it is a mother tongue or a second language. That is an authentic choice, even if your religion, gender, race, and national origin are very different from his. When presented with the Bard as a model, one political response is to say, “Shakespeare was an old white Christian man from the colonial power, and I am not.” A different political response is: “Shakespeare’s words are mine as much as yours, and if you deny my right to them, I will challenge you.” The latter is no less radical or potentially subversive. Which response to choose is a complex and personal matter, and I don’t object to either. I just want to suggest that the second option is available to anyone. And it may be the path less taken today.

Second, I worry that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear the power and resonances of very fine written language. Culture is increasingly visual and oral, which expands our capacities in some respects but possibly weakens our ability to absorb the special power of the written word.

We are living at a time of incessant communication. By one estimate, more words were recorded in 2002 alone than in all of human history up through 1999. The increase since then has been exponential. Even the older formats are exploding in scale. About half a million new book titles are published every year in English, whereas about 147 books were licensed annually in England in Shakespeare’s day: a 3,400-fold increase. When communications arrive in a ceaseless deluge, it may require crude and explosive language to capture attention.

One source of literary depth and power is allusion. But in order for an allusion to work, the writer and the reader must know the same referents. An excellent reason to study Shakespeare and the KJV is that they have echoed so pervasively through such diverse texts. There are still millions who can hear those echoes, as others can hear Quranic references in classical Arabic or the Shijing reverberating in modern East Asian verse. But when new text is piped around the world by the terabyte, the chances fall that an audience will recognize any given referent. The most widely shared references are from contemporary mass culture, which tends itself to have thin resonances.

I was pretty absorbed and awestruck when I saw live Shakespeare as a child and as a teenager. The words themselves could bedimm the noontide sun and call forth the mutinous winds. I think that response is less likely today, not because the language has evolved so much further from Elizabethan English, nor because there is anything wrong with today’s kids, but because a child is exposed to a much larger quantity of professionally produced, highly emotional drama: constantly streaming videos of all kinds. A play has much more to compete with.

We also live at a time of manic linguistic invention and expansion, when new words and phrases seem to enter the language daily, often duplicating existing choices and overriding traditional grammatical constraints. (Witness the constant turning of nouns into verbs in business English.) Shakespeare’s time offers certain parallels. The volume of public speech and printed communication was expanding rapidly then as well, and English vocabulary was growing. It is often claimed that Shakespeare personally added 1,500 or 2,000 words to English. Those numbers may be exaggerated because older sources have been lost, and scholars search Shakespeare’s works for alleged coinages without always consulting other surviving texts that might use the same words. But there is no doubt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries shared our predilection for inventing words, mixing sources, bending genres, and breaking all putative grammatical rules.

But they had to expand their language. English wasn’t very old, and it needed a much larger store of words, phrases, and tropes to rival Latin. You can often sense a writer of Shakespeare’s day struggling to convey an idea that now seems very straightforward, just because we have more resources. Today we don’t lack words and phrases, but we struggle to hear the resonances of the ones we have. We turn the noun “impact” into a verb without exploring the possibilities of verbs that have histories, like “affect,” “change,” “influence,” “modify,” “transform” (and many more).

I am not committed to linguistic conservatism as a principle; languages change as a result of wonderful human inventiveness. I agree with Greenblatt that multimedia adaptations and mashups of Shakespeare can be fantastic contributions. Yet we can perhaps profit more than usual by slowing down and hearing the depths of our linguistic inheritance.

[See also “signal” (a poem on this theme) and the political advantages of organized religion, in which I note the political power of “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones” and its roots in the KJV.]

unions, communities, and economic mobility

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A new paper by Richard Freeman, Eunice Han, David Madland, and Brendan Duke, Bargaining for the American Dream: What Unions do for Mobility is getting a lot of attention. A key finding is that a parent’s union membership boosts the economic prospects of the children as they grow up and form their own households. The effects are large and especially pronounced for working-class union families.

That result deserves headlines, but I will focus on another significant finding, because it relates to civic engagement. Freeman and colleagues find that labor union membership boosts the economic mobility of all children in the community. They control for a range of relevant factors that might explain away this positive effect (for instance, the makeup of local industry and the progressivity of the tax code.) They find that labor unions have positive effects for non-members.

That finding contributes to a larger literature about the positive economic outcomes of various kinds of civic associations:

  • Freeman and colleagues build on the influential research by Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez (2014). Chetty and colleagues found that the odds of moving up the socio-economic ranks are very strongly linked to the community where you grow up, and the main features of the community that matter are: having less residential segregation, less income inequality, better primary schools (measured by income-adjusted test scores and dropout rates), more family stability, and higher social capital. Their main measure of social capital is an index of “voter turnout rates, the fraction of people who return their census forms, and various measures of participation in community organizations.”
  • In our own work, we also found strong economic benefits from what we called “social cohesion” at the community level. We defined that as the degree to which residents socialize, communicate, and collaborate with one another. Separately, we looked at the number of nonprofit organization in a community. Both social cohesion and nonprofit density were strong predictors of economic success for communities, even after we adjusted for many other factors like those considered by Chetty et al and Freeman et al. Just as an example of our findings, “An employed individual in 2008 was twice as likely to become unemployed if he or she lived in a community with few nonprofit organizations (the bottom five percent in nonprofit density) rather than one with in the top five percent for nonprofit density, even if the two communities were otherwise similar.”

A union could be considered an example of social capital. (It is an organization of members.) However, Freeman and colleagues controlled for social capital and still found a strong effect for unions. Their method distinguished union membership from civic participation, and the result was a distinct advantage for unions. That raises two questions: 1) Why would civic participation in general have anything to do with economic outcomes at the community level? And 2) Is the case of unions special? For both questions, I would like to focus on the benefits to non-members, because belonging to a union, a church, or an NAACP chapter can have direct and easily explained value for the individuals who join.

Social cohesion, social capital, and nonprofit density (which are overlapping but not identical constructs) could have economic benefits because: active and organized citizens obtain better governance and better laws; they gain skills and values from participation that they also use to help others in their communities; the associations they form reduce community-level problems, such as crime; these associations spread information and raise knowledge; or these associations build norms of trust and collaboration that enable people to contribute to the economy. There is literature to support each of these mechanisms, but no way to be sure whether they contribute to the patterns we see here.

Unions could fit into any of these stories. For instance, unions seek legislation and they may teach members how to collaborate and trust one another. Unions could also be seen as a special case because they have collective bargaining power. Also, people typically join a union because the workplace is unionized, not because they go out looking for a union to join. A knitting club seems very different: highly voluntary, trust-driven, but lacking in explicit economic power. So there could be an economic explanation applicable to unions alone, e.g., by bargaining for higher wages in their own industry, they send positive ripples through the local job market.

Still, I wouldn’t differentiate too starkly between unions and other associations. It is always a bit misleading to see membership as pure individual choice. People join knitting clubs and soccer leagues because someone else has organized these groups (which is hard and skillful work) and has recruited members. So organizing and outreach are always fundamental.

In short, I would posit that all associations–including but not limited to unions–use a set of similar means to improve economic welfare and mobility in their communities. Some of their means run through the state–they obtain better governance–and some of them result from voluntary action apart from the state. Unions do have some special features that allow them to grow to large scale when conditions are favorable and that give them bargaining power. Although their special features are important, unions are also part of a larger story about organized civic life in the US.

See also The Legitimacy of Labor Unions (2001), and my posts on Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown; civic engagement and jobs; and unemployment and civic engagement: the video.

the Latinos Civic Health Index

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The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) released the Latinos Civic Health Index today. My colleague Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg is a co-author and the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts collaborated with NCoC. Overall, the report points to challenges: Latinos are less engaged than non-Latinos in a wide range of civic and political activities. But there are signs everywhere that rates of engagement are rising. For instance, Latinos’ voter turnout is lower, but their turnout rates are improving. As a result, of all young Latinos who voted in 2012, an outright majority were voting for the first time. Meanwhile, their population share is growing. It seems apt, then, to describe the Latino population as a waking giant. The report provides much more detail, including information on non-political forms of engagement and data on differences among the major subgroups of Latinos.

latinos

when a university is committed to democracy

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This is a page from the 2013-14 Rector’s Report of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, an institution that I visited this summer. (Click the image to open the PDF.) The page is headed “A Revolution of Dignity,” and it describes various political–even revolutionary–activities by the university or its members. The next page shows profiles of activists from the university, including a lecturer who was shot to death. It is an interesting combination of American-style glossy PR and strongly worded political commitment.

UkrainianCatholic

I would not hope for a comparable stance from an American university. For one thing, this brochure comes from a country with a war on its own territory and ongoing political crises. We shouldn’t wish for that level of strife here, even if it elicited more political commitment from higher education.

Besides, one can critically assess the position that the university has taken. I’m on the same side, but this position is debatable. Universities contribute to the public discussion by being fair and open to a range of perspectives and by demanding standards of evidence and reason from all participants. When a university commits itself strongly to a cause, it can undermine its ability to be an open forum for debate. It also acquires strange bedfellows–people on the same general side of the political issue who may be quite unsavory.

On the other hand, neutrality is impossible and is the wrong objective. Universities exist to promote free thought and substantive dialog and inquiry, which are incompatible with censorship, oppression, violence, and rampant corruption. Scholars also need intellectual freedom and public support in order to do their work. So universities are closely tied to social justice. They must leave space for a debate about what defines social justice, but they should not pretend that it is other people’s business.

US universities tend to respond to political threats and crises by staying clear of them, at least as official institutions. The Ukrainian Catholic University demonstrates what it looks like when an institution leaps into the fray. The Rector writes in his introductory message “we declared civil disobedience against the government and the president,” which is not what you’d expect in an annual report from a US college or university. He adds:

It’s difficult to summarize the last year, for most of the processes have only begun and are now continuing. We are still experiencing the ‘Revolution of Dignity.’ We are still fighting an external aggressor and internal problems. … From the first days of the revolution we clearly understood what we were fighting for. We were not distracted from running the university for a second. But we also supported our students. …  On December 11 we declared civil disobedience against the government and the president, who used violence against his own people. ….

We should work for victory and for reconciliation. Our weapons are truth and peace. We should already be thinking about what will happen after the war, how to heal physical and spiritual wounds, how to strengthen the country. In addition to the external enemy, Ukrainians need to conquer internal enemies: corruption, anger, hatred. I expect that the spiritual and educational life of the university will help our students handle these challenges.

upcoming talks

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These are public talks I am giving in the next two months. All welcome!

Sept. 23: Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) Webinar, “America’s Civic Renewal Movement,” with me and Eric Liu (Citizen University), Kelly Born (Hewlett Foundation) and Joan Blades (Living Room Conversations project). (Register here.)

Sept. 24, Hamline University (St. Paul, MN), Commitment to Community Keynote Address

October 5, University of Texas San Antonio’s Center for Civic Engagement. At its first Civic Engagement Summit, I will talk about “The Promise of Civic Renewal in America.”

Oct. 14, University of Connecticut: the Myles Martel Lecture in Leadership and Public Opinion

Nov. 4, Educational Testing Service office in Washington, DC, “R&D Forum” on civic learning

why an applied research program is valuable

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As an Associate Dean, I am responsible for a cluster of research programs that includes CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement); the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement; and the Tisch College Community Research Center. These outfits are diverse, but they all supply applied empirical research (rather than theoretical or philosophical research or direct programming or advocacy) on questions related to civic life in America. If asked why this kind of work makes a valuable contribution, this is what I would say:

People who are in a position to affect civic life face questions for which answers are unavailable but would be useful. These questions range from concrete and practical (e.g., What is a good assignment for 7th graders during a presidential primary?) to very broad (e.g., What causes good civic practices to become widespread?)

Our first job is to select questions that are truly relevant to good practice, currently unanswered, and empirically tractable. It is very rare to “answer” a question with a single study, so a question should be chosen to contribute knowledge and move toward a more complete resolution.

It is preferable if practitioners pose or at least influence the choice of questions. They have good ideas because of their experience, and the likelihood that they will use research results is higher if they were involved at the beginning. However, I also believe there is a role for independent researchers to notice and pose questions that practitioners haven’t seen.

Once the question is posed, our role is to address it rigorously, to get the results into the hands of people who can use them, and to receive their feedback as well as ideas for new questions. Completing that whole cycle should contribute to the improvement of civic life, although whether, when, and to what degree it contributes are also empirical questions.

This kind of work also has some ancillary benefits. Conducting cumulative, applied, empirical research on one important topic, such as civic engagement in the United States, can illuminate issues about the sociology of knowledge (How is knowledge defined, supported, used, and constrained?) and about larger social systems. To the extent that I have any insights about such questions, they come from my nearly two decades of work in organized applied research on a cluster of specific issues. Such work also occasionally yields new empirical methods that would be useful in other domains. It provides advanced educational experiences for the researchers and sometimes for their partners in practical organizations. And it can create new working relationships among organizations and agencies that remain useful after a research project concludes. But the primary purpose of the whole enterprise remains to pose and address tractable questions that are genuinely unanswered and relevant to practitioners, and then to share the results.

is Trumpism akin to the European right?

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On the whole, I’m inclined to think that Donald Trump’s large lead in the Republican race is a passing phenomenon, similar to several candidates’ surges during 2011-12, and driven mostly by media attention and name-recognition at a time when most people are not yet following the campaign closely. In Die Hard III, which is 20 years old, Trump and Hillary Clinton are already two prominent references. The Donald has a level of celebrity that may give him disproportionate attention early in a multi-candidate campaign but that won’t win him the nomination.

However, there is an interesting substantive discussion of his candidacy. It’s not about whether he will win but rather whether he and his followers are like the right-wing parties in Europe. That constituency might outlast his presidential run.

Trump’s positions are not consistent with American conservative doctrine. He is fanatically anti-immigrant and lobs verbal grenades at various countries every day, but he also says, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. … Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is.” Apparently, Trump would also raise taxes on unearned income.

The combination of grievances against foreign countries and immigrants plus enthusiasm for state intervention in the domestic economy is a position that tends to be called “populism” in Europe. I resist that terminology for the US because we have a very worthy political tradition officially known as Populism (on which Laura Grattan‘s forthcoming book is excellent). Another term could be “far-right.” As Mathew Yglesias writes, “several of [the European parties] have institutional roots in old fascist political movements.” That would indeed make them far-right. But, as Yglesias adds, “their current ideological positioning is generally much more complicated than that, and some of them have no such institutional roots.” They typically combine extreme positions against immigration with economic policies that would be left-of-center in the US. So perhaps the most accurate term is “economic nationalist.” It can then come in varieties that range from truly chauvinistic to plausibly mainstream.

Similar views make a popular combination in the US as well. As Lee Drutman shows, if you screen for people who favor expanding Social Security and decreasing immigration, you get 24% of the electorate. They may or may not be chauvinists, since their views on immigration could be moderate. But they are out of step with the Republican Party on Social Security and could accurately be called “economic nationalists.” Meanwhile, those who would expand Social Security and keep immigration at least at current levels constitute 26.5%. This second group is in sync with the Democratic Party’s leadership. The strong conservative position (trim or privatize Social Security and restrict immigration) draws just 2.4% of voters, one tenth as many.

Trump is aligned with the 24% who are economic nationalists. If we use Social Security and immigration as the two proxies for that view, then Trump’s constituency is comparable in size to liberals and much larger than conservatives. A third measure would be attitudes toward policing, on which Trump takes an aggressive position that may also be fairly popular (with similar people).

It’s common for a combination of views not to be represented in a two-party system. Antiabortion progressives, for instance, have nowhere to turn in presidential politics in the US. But economic nationalists represent a big enough bloc to possibly destabilize the political system. Antiabortion progressives are typically Democrats who are badly outvoted within their own party on that issue. Economic nationalists, in contrast, seem to be Republicans who represent a large force in their party but are at odds with its elites.

While Trump’s support (about 30% of Republican voters right now) may be boosted by his attention-grabbing style during the silly season of the campaign, it is conceivable that someone with similar views and a less rebarbative and risible style might actually perform better in the long term. Republican elites disagree with half of economic nationalism and will have to figure out how to keep it at bay even after Donald Trump no longer threatens the nomination.

why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics

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Yesterday, I introduced the substance of Brian Epstein’s book The Ant Trap. Epstein analyzes the metaphysics of social phenomena, such as groups. Here I want to argue that social scientists should be more attuned to metaphysical issues in general.

In social science, we think naturally of certain relationships, such as correlation and causation, and of certain kinds of objects, such as individuals and groups. But other relationships are present although less explicit in our work. For instance, the members of the US Congress do not cause the Congress; they compose it. Composition is a relationship that is named (but rarely explored) in standard social science.

One can ask, more generally, what kinds of relationships exist and what kinds of things are related to each other. Constitution and causality are two different relationships. Groups, moments in time, and ethical qualities are three different kinds of things. These types and relationships can go together in many ways. We can ask about their logic or their epistemology, but when we ask specifically, “What kinds of things are there and how do they go together?” we are putting the question in terms of metaphysics.

Social scientists should be concerned with metaphysics for two big reasons. First, in our actual writing and modeling, we often use some metaphysical terms (e.g., object, composition, causation), but only a few of those get explicit critical attention. In my experience, most of the meta-discussion is about what constitutes causality and how you can prove it—but there are equally important questions about the other relationships used in social science.

Second, professional philosophers have developed a whole set of other types and relationships that are typically not mentioned in social science but that can be powerful analytical tools if one is aware of them: supervenience, grounding, and anchoring being three that play important roles in The Ant Trap.

Since metaphysics is a subfield of philosophy, and since philosophers are probably outnumbered 50-to-one by social and behavioral scientists, it’s easy for the latter to overlook metaphysics. In fact, I suspect that the word “metaphysics” (as modern academic philosophers use it) is not well known. If you Google “metaphysical relationships,” you will see New Age dating tips. But all scientific programs involve metaphysics, and it is important to understand that discourse–not only to be more critical of the science but also to develop more powerful models.

is social science too anthropocentric?

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Consider these statements: “A group just is the people who make it up.” “If a group can be said to have intentions at all, its intentions must somehow be the intentions of its members.” Or: “When a convention arises, such as the convention that a dollar has value, it must exist because the people who use dollars have imposed some meaning on material reality.”

In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences, Brian Epstein criticizes an assumption that is implicit in these statements (which are mine, not his): that social phenomena can be fully explained by talking about people. It’s obvious that non-human phenomena–from evolution to climate change–influence or shape human beings. But the thesis that people fully determine social phenomena is worth critical scrutiny.

Epstein’s book is methodical and not subject to a short paraphrase, but some examples may give a flavor of the argument. For instance, is Starbucks composed of the people who work for it? Clearly not, because the coffee beans and water, the physical buildings, the company’s stock value, the customers and vendors, the rival coffee shops in the same markets, and many other factors make it the company that we know, just as much as its own people do. Indeed, its personnel could all turn over through an orderly process and it would still be Starbucks.

Likewise, if the Supreme Court intended to overturn the ban on corporate campaign contributions, was its intention a function of the preferences of the nine individual justices? No, because in order for them to intend to overturn the ban, they had to be legitimate Supreme Court justices within a legal system that presented them with this decision at a given moment. I could form an opinion of the Citizens United case, but I could not “intend” to rule for the government in that case, because I am not a justice. And what makes someone a justice at the moment when the Citizens United case comes before the court is a whole series of decisions by people not on the court, going back to founding era.

In general, Epstein writes, “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” And it’s not just other people who get involved. Non-human phenomena can be implicated in complicated ways. For instance, the Supreme Court is in session on certain days, and on all other days, a “vote” by a justice would not really be a vote. What makes us say that a certain day has arrived is the movement of the earth around the sun. So the motion of a heavenly body is implicated in the existence and the intentions of the Supreme Court. That is an apt example, because Epstein calls for a Copernican Revolution in which we stop seeing the social world as “anthropocentric.”

Note that we are talking here about grounding relations, not causation. Public opinion may influence the composition of the Supreme Court and its decisions. The movement of the earth does not influence or affect the Court, and you wouldn’t model it that way (with the earth as an independent variable). Rather, the court is in session on certain dates, and the calendar is grounded in facts about the solar system. Likewise, a president can influence the court, and you could model the president’s ideology as an independent variable. But the composition of the court is grounded in decisions by presidents and senates in a more fundamental way than causation. To be a justice is (in part) to have been nominated and confirmed.

When people criticize anthropocentrism, usually they mean to take human beings down a peg. But in this case, the critique is a testament to our creativity and agency. Human beings can create groups in limitless ways. We can intentionally ground facts about groups in circumstances beyond the control of their members, or indeed in facts that are under no human’s control (like the motion of the earth). It can be wise to limit the power of group members in just these ways. Epstein writes, “Our ability to anchor social facts to have nearly arbitrary grounds is the very thing that makes the social world so flexible and powerful. Why would we deprive ourselves of that flexibility?” But the same flexibility that empowers the human beings who design and operate groups also creates headaches for the analysts who try to model their work. “Compared to the social sciences, the ontology of natural science is a walk in the park.”

The Ant Trap does not offer one model as an alternative to the standard anthropocentric ones, because social phenomena are diverse as well as complex. But if we narrow the focus a bit from the whole social world and look at groups, they tend to require (in Epstein’s analysis), a two-level model. Various facts about each group are grounded in other facts. For instance, the fact that the Supreme Court is in session is grounded in facts about the calendar (as well as many other kinds of facts). In turn, these grounding relationships are anchored in different facts–for instance, facts about how US Constitution organized the judiciary system.

My day job involves very conventional social science. We study various groups, from Millennials and voters to Members of Congress. After reading The Ant Trap, I won’t think of groups in the same way again. I am not yet sure what specific methodological implications follow, but that seems an important question to pursue.

See also Brian Epstein’s TedX Standford talk, which captures some of the book.