Pindar on hope

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Peter

Cephalus says: “For if, looking at his own life, [an old man] identifies many wrong acts, then he often awakens from his sleep, as children do, in fear and bad hopes, but if he observes no injustice in himself, then pleasant hope is always nearby as a good caregiver, as Pindar says–for he puts it gracefully, Socrates, when he says of a person who gets through life justly and piously:

Sweetness in the heart,
Fosterer and elder-carer:
Hope, the best pilot of the thought
Of oft-twisted mortals

Cephalus adds: “Oh, how wonderfully well he says that …”

But then Socrates breaks the mood by asking what justice is, making Cephalus–a contented old man–wonder whether he has ever really known it.

If I read the Pindar verses correctly, the two main words in the second line refer to the care (respectively) of children and the elderly. Indeed, the course of a human life is a prevalent theme at the beginning of The Republic, from which I have taken this passage (331a). At the very outset, Socrates, an older adult, is physically stopped on the road by a “child,”* who has been sent by an old man, Cephalus. One of the attractions that Socrates is promised, if he agrees to stay, is an opportunity for dialogue with “young men” (328a). But Socrates asks Cephalus to report on what it’s like to be old.

Although The Republic is about justice, the entree to that discussion is the question of how to age well. A major question is why one should have to think about justice at all, and an answer suggested here is that knowing justice allows one to have hope in old age. One irony is that Cephalus is happy because he only thinks he knows justice; a second irony is that Cephalus’ sons will later be cruelly treated by the unjust. In both respects, his hope may be misplaced.

*I drafted this post while preparing for a reading group discussion, and a colleague with infinitely better Greek than mine said that this use of the word pais is unspecific about age. Here, it’s a patronizing word for slave. Cf. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 54. (The quoted verse is denoted Pindar Frag. 214, Loeb. Translations are mine.)

choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Peter

It’s very common for people to use different explanatory and evaluative ideas to describe the same concrete situation, whether it’s the Israel/Palestine conflict, or bias in law enforcement, or almost anything else.

We should navigate between two obstacles, I think. One mistake to view rival ideas as simply subjective, because they are often value-laden, and to view politics as a mere clash among people with different subjective views. The other is to imagine that empirical research can settle such disputes by validating one model or (at least) refuting some of them. We can deliberate about competing models, but the discussion requires more than data.

It is often assumed that a model generates hypotheses, and we can test the model by testing its hypotheses. Nancy Cartwright disputes this assumption. She suggests that models are not like vending machines that yield hypotheses, but more like “fables” that present vivid scenarios and “morals”—suggestions for behavior—that we should look for in the world (Cartwright 1999, 185-6; Cartwright 2010).

Similarly, Max Weber understood an “ideal-type,” such as feudalism or the state, not as a hypothesis but as a “conceptual construct” that “offers guidance in the construction of hypotheses” (Weber 1905/1949, 93, 90). This means that disproving a hypothesis suggested by a model does not disprove the model, although repeated failures to suggest valid hypotheses might encourage us look for alternative models.

The fable of the tortoise and the hare does not pose an inference about reptiles and rabbits, or even a ceteris paribus hypothesis that moving slower yields better outcomes. Rather, it defines two personality types that may be worth looking for in the world; it cautions against arrogance; and it may suggest hypotheses, e.g., that making decisions more rapidly reduces the quality of information (Rae, Heathcote, Donkin, Averell & Brown 2014). Similarly, the model of the Prisoner’s Dilemma suggests that we should look for problems and form empirical hypotheses that involve individuals choosing independently. The model also makes a conceptual contribution by sharply defining cooperation and defection (Johnson 2020). Choosing any such model is a matter of judgment or practical wisdom, not a question of deciding which model is true

Forming and selecting an explanation for a specific situation is the logic of abduction. Deduction means drawing inferences from known premises; induction means generalizing from cases; but abduction involves connecting a single case to a relevant general idea. Charles Sanders Pierce coined the word (Douven 2021). Pierce was a pragmatist, and abduction is a pragmatic necessity, even in the natural sciences.

I would add that it is appropriate to apply normative principles when forming and selecting models of a society. First, the point is to improve situations, not only explain them. Second, any given model incorporates normative elements, even if it pretends to be strictly explanatory, and it should be assessed as such.

For Weber, an ideal-type is “an attempt to analyze historically unique configurations or their individual components by means of genetic concepts” (Weber 1905, 93). An ideal-type cannot be the basis of deductive conclusions about reality, because “a description of even the smallest slice off reality can never be exhaustive”; the “number and type of causes which have influenced any given event are always infinite”; and “there is nothing in the things themselves to set some of them apart as alone meriting attention” (Weber 1905, 78). Instead, we rightly choose our concepts to address aspects of specific situations that provide insights about our own problems, as we see them from “particular points of view” (Weber 1905, 81, italics in the original). Ideal-types are “model types which … contain what, from the point of view of the expositor, should be and what to him is ‘essential’ … because it is enduringly valuable” (Weber 1905, 97).

Weber objects to the assumption that we study phenomena to derive general laws that we can then apply deductively, as if a concrete investigation were the means to the end of general knowledge. He claims that the reverse is true; ideal-types are means to understanding the unique constellations of events that rightly concern us (Weber 1905, 79).

In the article that originated the concept (now almost a cliché) of “wicked problems,” Rittel and Webber posit that often solutions to social problems “are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.” They write, “Normally, many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions,” and “their judgments are likely to differ widely in accord with their group or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological predilections” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 162-3).

They mention that “‘Crime on the streets’ can be explained by not enough police, by too many criminals, by inadequate laws, cultural deprivation, deficient opportunity, phrenological aberrations, etc.” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 166). In fact, evidence has overwhelmed phrenological explanations for crime, while other explanations have become more persuasive since Rittel and Webber wrote. But they are right that reasonable people may choose different explanatory models and frameworks for the same phenomena. Like Weber, they argue that data cannot settle such choices, but “attitudinal criteria guide” rightly us. People choose explanations that are “plausible” and useful for their “intentions” and “action prospects” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 166).

Our diverse starting points do not guarantee that we must reach divergent conclusions. We can learn from one another, and to do so, we should collect and share evidence. For instance, imagine that my initial model presumes a root cause, such as structural racism. Someone demonstrates that it is possible to disrupt a cycle of inequality by adopting a policy, such as reforming employment contracts for police, that does not address the root cause. My initial model was not refuted, but the evidence may persuade me that I could achieve more with a cyclical model that has no “root.” I have learned and shifted my view, but I have not refuted the root-cause model, which I might even use again on another day.

This is a pragmatist conception of the relationship between evidence and models (cf. Aligica 2014, 166-199). Note that in this conception, evidence is not merely instrumental to an outcome, because it may also persuade us to change the outcome that we think is best to pursue.

See also: what must we believe?; different kinds of social models; making our models explicit; social education as learning to improve models. Sources: Cartwright, N. (1999). The dappled world: A study of the boundaries of science. Cambridge University Press; Cartwright, N. (2010). Models: Parables v fables. In R. Frigg & M.C. Hunter, Beyond mimesis and convention: Representation in art and science (pp. 19-31). Springer Netherlands; Weber, M. 1905/1949. “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy. In E.A. Shils, & H.A. Finch (Eds.), Max Weber on The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe Ill.: The Free Press, 50- 112); Rae, B., Heathcote, A., Donkin, C., Averell, L., & Brown, S. (2014). The hare and the tortoise: Emphasizing speed can change the evidence used to make decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(5), 1226–1243; Rittel W.J. & Webber, M.M., (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences 4, 155-69; Douven, Igor, “Abduction”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Aligica, P. (2014) Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press

Max Weber on institutional neutrality

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Peter

In a recent open letter, the Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression say:

In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.

Most critically, these stances risk establishing an orthodox view on campus, threatening the pursuit of knowledge for which higher education exists.

Their recommendation: “if an academic institution is not required to adopt a position in order to fulfill its mission of intellectual freedom or operational capacity, it is required not to adopt a position.” They advise universities to enact versions of the 1967 University of Chicago Kelven report, and many institutions are doing so.

My own views on this matter are complex and conflicted. I am rarely impressed by universities’ statements on political issues. These pronouncements don’t model good participation in the public sphere, and they might chill dissent. However, I doubt that many people have really thought through what it would mean for an institution to refrain from stating or implying views on contested issues. Also, I am a proponent of institutional diversity and can imagine that we should want universities to adopt diverse missions and relationships to the society.

But I am not writing to adopt a stance. Instead, I want to recommend a close reading of Max Weber’s “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” which Weber drafted during the First World War, when German universities were being called to support one side in a total war (Weber 1917/1949). In many ways, it sounds like a commentary on our moment–and Weber is a deep thinker.

His conclusion is rather like that of the Kelven Report. He would endorse the report’s view that the “great and unique role” of the university is “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge”–not criticism or advocacy.

To get there, Weber explicitly cites philosophical premises that don’t seem sustainable to me, above all a “complete distinction” between facts and values (“the evaluative sphere and the empirical sphere,” p. 32), and an assumption that value conflicts “are entirely a matter of choice or compromise” that cannot be settled by any “scientific procedure of any kind” (19). Weber assumes that ethical maxims are “in eternal conflict” (16). I agree that there will always be debate about values, but Weber dismisses the scholarly consideration of them, e.g., in philosophy.

However, Weber complicates his premises in interesting ways. He notes that in order to understand and interpret culture, one must have the “capacity for evaluating” it (33). People create culture to advance values, and an inability to think evaluatively would make human choices unintelligible. I would ask: what does that mean about the education of scholars? Might there be room for the cultivation of ethical and aesthetic judgment?

Weber acknowledges that the comparative, empirical study of ethical (or religious) views can undermine students’ faith in all such views. In that sense, sociology is not neutral and may be a corrosive force (14). He also suggests that–“ultimately”–individuals must choose their own “meaning,” which sounds to me like a liberal, individualistic, and secular view, not a neutral one (18).

Weber recognizes that the selection of problems and topics in the social sciences depends on values, and “cultural (i.e. evaluative) interests give purely empirical scientific work its direction” (21-22). However, he gives this issue little attention, even though it seems fundamental to me and he does discuss it elsewhere (Weber 1905). A university could decide not to publish statements in response to major news events yet drastically expand its research on business applications of Artificial Intelligence while closing its classics department. That hardly seems neutral to me.

In his 1905 essay, Weber had acknowledged that a given intellectual institution–in that case, a major journal that he edited–might strive for neutrality and expressly invite “all political standpoints,” yet it could manifest a certain “character” due to the group of people who gravitate to it. For instance, his journal had mainly attracted non-revolutionary economic progressives (Weber 1905, 62). One could argue that modern American universities also have “characters” (one or more per institution) that are not the result of intentional policies but that diverge from neutrality, for better or worse.

Weber’s situation differs from ours because all German universities in his time were state institutions. In a footnote, he considers the Dutch model, which allowed anyone to create a university as long as it met basic standards. This sounds rather like our policy today. He objects that “it gives the advantage to those with large sums of money and groups which are already in power” (7).

That sounds familiar, and so do Weber’s other targets in the essay. He devotes several pages (35-40) to economists who smuggle strong normative assumptions into their ostensibly scientific models. He is annoyed by obvious partisans who define their positions as the ethically neutral ones (6) and by those who claim that a moderate position or a “‘statesman-like’ compromise” is neutral, when it is just another view that may even be harder than other positions to analyze critically (10). In the earlier essay (Weber 1905, 57), he had written that a centrist stance “is not truer even by a hair’s breadth, than the most extreme party ideals of the right and left.”

Weber alludes critically to colleagues who feel that asking professors to separate their political roles outside the classroom from their teaching duties injures their personalities (5). A central Weberian idea is that modernity requires increasing segmentation into roles.

Weber criticizes the kind of academic who uses data to demonstrate that certain political ideas are unrealistic, as if this were a scientific finding. “The possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it” (24).

He acknowledges that students tend to prefer professors who express opinions in the classroom, and that universities need to hire popular teachers to compete for students, but he maintains that the teacher’s proper job is to inspire “a taste for sober empirical analysis” (9).

When he calls for “the professional thinker” to “keep a cool head” and “swim against the stream” of public opinion (47), Weber is targeting German nationalists and revolutionary socialists.

Weber also objects that academics opine on certain contested issues even though other questions–such as the German monarchy–are officially off limits. He says that the dignified response to partial censorship would be silence (8).

He finds a certain kind of (unnamed) colleague “altogether repugnant.”

An unprecedented situation exists when a large number of officially accredited prophets do not do their preaching on the streets, or in churches or other public places or in sectarian conventicles, but rather feel themselves competent to enunciate their evaluations on ultimate questions “in the name of science” in govenmentally privileged lecture halls in which they are neither controlled, checked by discussion nor subject to contradiction (4).

I suppose that many of us today would recognize this description yet would disagree about whom it describes.

Sources: Weber, M. (1917/1949). The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics. In E.A. Shils, & H.A. Finch (Eds.), Max Weber on The Methodology of the Social Sciences (pp. 1–49). Glencoe Ill.: The Free Press; and Weber (1905/1949), “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy, in ibid (pp. 50- 112). See also: Activism and Objectivity in Political Research; The Democratic Mission of Higher Education; when does a narrower range of opinions reflect learning?; right and left on campus today; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; vaccination, masking, political polarization, and the authority of science; values of a university; etc.

youth views of Israel/Palestine

Posted on February 16, 2024 by Peter

CIRCLE has published detailed data on young people’s views of the current war in the Middle East. I’ll share two graphs, but I recommend their whole document.

First, compared to older generations, young Americans are much more likely to perceive genocide in Palestine (almost 50% agree that it’s happening) and to support an immediate ceasefire.

Second, young Americans are split on whether to sympathize more with Palestinians or Israelis and are divided about US support for Israel. There are differences by race and ethnicity: white youth are least critical of Israel; Asian/Pacific Islander youth are most critical. To my eye, these differences are not very large–particularly between white and African American youth–and the disagreements within each demographic group are more notable.

(By the way, not being sure what to think of this issue seems understandable–for anyone, and especially for someone who is young.)

Whether and how young people will vote in the 2024 election is certainly not the only relevant or important question. That said, political scientists generally doubt that Americans vote on foreign policy issues; and in 2022, according to CIRCLE, just 4% of young Americans named foreign affairs among their top three issues. But in this cycle, as many as 82% of young people are naming foreign policy. I agree with CIRCLE that many young Americans may be “viewing this conflict through a different lens” and, in particular, seeing it as continuous with domestic US issues regarding race.

a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Peter

In class yesterday, we discussed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which funds green technologies and jobs in disadvantaged communities. I tried to present the Act neutrally, with lots of room for criticism from several directions, but I also conveyed its magnitude and significance as a change of direction for America.

I think the strategy of the IRA was new to these students, which is not a criticism of them–the Act receives extraordinarily little attention and debate. However, its projected price-tag is above $800 billion, and Goldman Sachs estimates that it generated about $282 billion in investment and roughly 175,000 jobs in its first year alone. It’s also closely related to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $280+ billion CHIPS Act. In other words–like it or hate it–it is big.

In July 2023, a Washington Post survey found that most Americans had not heard of the main provisions of the IRA. In that survey, 39% favored and 39% opposed the law, yet majorities expressed support for each of its main provisions. For instance, 65% favored tax credits for solar panels, although just 24% had heard of that provision in the law.

We discussed why this significant policy gets so little public attention. Some of my students’ astute explanations were about the general flaws of our media landscape and public attention. I have previously noted the odd politics of this particular issue, which dissuades both Democrats and Republicans from talking about it much. Even the name of the “Inflation Reduction Act” is so misleading that it distracts attention.

The students also made a good point that hadn’t been clearly on my mind before. They said that the numbers in the bill fail to capture attention because it’s hard to know what counts as a large amount. Politicians and reporters are always talking about billions for this and billions for that, and these numbers just wash over us.

So some comparisons might be useful. …

The IRA is projected to cost over $800 billion by 2033. In the United States, we spend $795 billion per year on K-12 education: teacher’ and administrators’ salaries, facilities, school lunches, equipment, buses, and everything else. So one year’s spending on all of US schooling equals the projected cost of the IRA.

The IRA has many provisions, and I am primarily interested in support for green manufacturing, which represents about $369 billion. This means that if we could take about half the money that it costs to operate all our schools for a year and spend it on green manufacturing, that would be the size of the IRA.

Another comparison: the US federal prison system is allocated about $7.8 billion in the president’s latest budget request. Therefore, the annual amount of new subsidies for green manufacturing will be about the same as the cost of all federal prisons each year for ten years, due to the IRA.

A third comparison: the GDP of Taiwan is about $790 billion, so all the goods and services sold by that country in one year are worth about as much as the IRA over ten years. Belgium is also a pretty close comparison. If you want to focus only the support for green manufacturing, then the IRA’s provisions are worth about as much as all the goods and services sold in the Czech Republic in a given year.

Pagels, the Gnostic Gospels

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Peter

Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels (1979) hardly needs a review from me. It won the National Book Award and has been listed among the 100 most influential works of the 20^th century. However, I hadn’t read it until lately, and I can recommend it with the following summary.

Pagels classifies early Christians into two large groups, each of whom based their beliefs on sayings of Jesus that we can plausibly date to the earliest Christian period.

One group called themselves catholic (universal) and orthodox (right-believing). They taught that God was omnipotent and perfectly good, which meant that creation must be good, yet distinct from the Creator. The whole story of creation was divinely planned and hinged on the Incarnation, when God and nature came together in the figure of Christ. Jesus experienced physical resurrection, which will also happen to all people, whether saved or damned. By participating in the actual, embodied, and universal church (with its emerging structure of bishops, priests, and deacons), any person could be saved. Salvation required faith in the core doctrines of the Church, which represented sufficient knowledge. Christians were obliged to profess their faith even in the face of persecution, and martyrdom was understood as a sacrifice for the church. Everyone who confessed and practiced the sacraments belonged to that one living body.

Pagels calls the other group gnostics, although few of them may have used that name. They saw nature as rife with suffering and confusion; hence no omnipotent and benign force could have created it. Instead, they told various stories that explained present reality as a mistake caused by at least one powerful force interposed between us and the true divine. Like everything physical, the body was a trap. However, the soul was a piece of the divine, and some people could discover this truth through introspection and meditation—even including the use of mantras. We were not saved by the divine but could rather discover that we had always been fully divine. This discovery or knowledge (gnosis) was liberating. Gnosis was essentially individual, not assisted by belonging to any church, which would attract misguided human beings. Courting martyrdom for an ill-advised church was certainly a waste. True knowledge might be ineffable, or it might require concealment, or it might be specific to each questing soul, but in any case, it went far beyond what one could read in an explicit statement of faith. And the process of discovering it might be more important than the result.

Pagels understands these two views as rival theologies (structures of ideas), but she emphasizes that living persons in social contexts experience ideas, and ideas can influence social institutions that then shape people. She argues that the orthodox or catholic view prevailed because it reflected people’s lived experience of embodiment—we love our own bodies—and because it organized individuals into a functioning institution, the church, that was able to sustain itself. Even today, after many schisms, denominations as different as Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism share the same anti-gnostic roots. Gnostics were too otherworldly and individualistic to prevail.

Gnostic ideas have sprung up regularly since classical times—for instance, Blake was in tune with the gnostics, whether he knew those authors or not—but gnosticism has inspired individuals rather than large movements.

Although it’s interesting to compare religious views, one should be careful. Highly abstract statements of ideas from different traditions can look similar, yet actual religions are networks of people who share experiences, practices, and concrete stories. For that reason, even if a 2^nd-century gnostic sounds like William Blake—or like a Zen practitioner—their experiences were vastly different.

Buddhists and Brahminic Hindus had many actual contacts with gnostics during the Roman era. According to shared Christian tradition, Thomas ended his life in India. Pagels writes that his biography could suggest the influence of Indian ideas on gnosticism and its critics. Thomas is the biblical figure who has the most explicit relationship with Jesus’ embodiment after the resurrection. In the canonical Gospel of John, Thomas doubts that Jesus has returned in his physical body, and Jesus encourages him to touch him—as if to refute gnosticism (John 20:27). But there was also a whole gnostic Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus teaches the disciple that they are equals as fully divine and incorporeal souls.

It doesn’t seem that a huge amount has been written about gnosticism and the Dharmic religions since Pagels. She already cites Conze (1967), which still comes up as the main source on this topic today. I think that recent scholars have been skeptical of Pagels’ categories: they think that the gnostics were too diverse and they overlapped too much with the orthodox to qualify as a separate group. I cannot assess this trend, except to note that categories are always simplifications and subject to challenge, and Pagels seems pretty persuasive. Anyway, I suspect the gnostics would have found more success if they had accepted the Buddha’s Middle Way, but that idea might have struck them as a snare.

different kinds of social models

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Peter

In my public policy course this week, we used a Harvard Kennedy School case entitled “A Rising Storm: Eric Garner and the Explosive Controversy over Race & Policing,” which introduced questions about criminal justice, violence, and race in New York City.

In my own work based on national survey data, I find that being Black raises the odds of being mistreated by the police almost five-fold (4.6 times) when considering gender, education, age, English-language proficiency, household income, housing type, county-level income, and any mental health diagnosis. However, the Kennedy School case also draws our attention to the 75% drop in homicide and 50% drop in rape in New York City between 1990 and 2013, which require explanation and assessment.

I suggested that we all use mental models (simplified representations of the world) to think about such issues. Our models may be more or less precise and articulated in our own heads. If we want to know what’s best to do, we are obliged to clarify our models to ourselves and seriously consider whether alternatives might be wiser.

I asked students to consider models of different forms and types:

A root-cause model explains many phenomena as the result of one underlying cause. Just as you should expect a weed to return unless you pull it up by its roots, so you should expect a social injustice to recur unless you remove its roots–that is the implication of the metaphor. “Radical” comes from the Latin for “root,” and proponents of root-cause models often feel that they are the radicals.

In this case, the root might be white supremacy, invoked to explain police bias, the distribution of wealth and poverty, the unequal impact of public schools, and other current realities.

Classical Marxism recommends a different root-cause model: the economic system always gives rise to the state, and a bourgeois state employs police to protect the economic elite. Substantial reform is impossible without a revolution. Finally–as a student astutely noted–some libertarians might offer a root-cause model in which the underlying problem is state power, always fundamentally violent (regardless of the economy); police violence is a predictable manifestation.

A cyclical model is built of components that affect each other, often reciprocally or in loops. For instance, perhaps racial discrimination worsens poverty, poverty increases the prevalence of crime, and crime exacerbates poverty by raising costs for victims and perpetrators and by discouraging investment. Those elements might be only a few parts of a more elaborate cyclical model.

This kind of model resists the notion of a “root” and instead encourages us to “break the cycle” by acting on vulnerable links. For example, reforming police union contracts would not address white supremacy, but it might break a specific cycle that involves impunity for violent officers, and that change could have positive effects across a connected system.

An organizational model would treat the NYPD as an entity with a mission, budget, personnel, and outcomes. We might presume that by changing the organization, we can get different outcomes. For instance, it may matter what the NYPD measures when it assesses its employees. Should officers be promoted for making many arrests for minor offenses, or not?

We might consider two variants of an organizational model:

In one, the NYPD is fundamentally a bureaucracy, per Max Weber. It is made of people who have clear responsibilities within a hierarchy. Bureaucracies are supposed to make reliable, predictable decisions. However, some degree of discretion is inevitable, and bureaucracies strive to handle human choices by either (a) minimizing discretion or (b) ensuring that bureaucrats are as professional as possible. Professionalism means competence and trustworthiness. Per Michael Lipsky (1969), police are “street-level bureaucrats,” faced with constant discretionary decisions. If data show that actual police officers’ choices are biased or otherwise detrimental, then they should either (a) lose discretion or (b) become more professional as a result of better hiring and training.
In another variant of the organizational model, the NYPD is a public agency. The people of New York vote for elected leaders, who appoint senior police officers as their agents. If we object to the outcomes, then (a) a majority of voters have the wrong beliefs or values, or (b) the electoral system is flawed so that elected leaders don’t represent the people, or (c) those leaders’ will is being frustrated by their agents.

In a genealogical model, the NYPD and related institutions (such as the New York City Public Schools) derive from predecessors. Like you and me, these organizations have ancestors that are responsible for much that’s true about them today. Among the NYPD’s predecessors were slave patrols that arose in 19th century America to prevent enslaved people from escaping to freedom. However, institutions typically have many ancestors, not just one, and the NYPD could also be traced back to village constables in England or to law enforcement bureaucracies in 19th century France and Germany. (After all, the word “police” is French.) The point of a genealogical model is to uncover historical causes that may require recompense, reparation, and repair.

In a behavioral model, you might think of human beings as a species that has proclivities to violence (including sexual violence) as well as tendencies to cooperation and care. You might think that mass societies with high degrees of anonymity will permit violence unless it is surveilled and deterred. Relatedly, you might think of peace and social order as collective goods that pose dilemmas at large scales. (Why should individuals sacrifice to protect strangers against violence?) In that case, police departments might represent solutions to a problem of collective action. This analysis is not necessarily conservative–in the sense of protective of the status quo–because the 30,000 armed police officers of the NYPD represent at least an implicit source of violence. A behavioral model might suggest that the police also need surveillance and deterrence. And we might consider alternative ways of achieving the collective good of peace, without armed officers.

In an interest group model, the population of New York City is configured into many organized groups, although some people (such as unlicensed street vendors like Eric Garner) may not have effective organizations. Groups gain power from numbers and/or money. Among the most relevant groups in this case are the police unions, civil rights organizations, the city’s Democratic Party and specific political campaigns, and business interests. The reality on the streets is the result of competition and negotiation among interest groups. The best way to change outcomes is to form or strengthen groups that reflect the interests that concern you.

Different types of models can certainly be merged. That said, a model should not be excessively complicated, because the point is to enable wise judgement. A huge page of symbols and arrows will not yield clarity.

Also, there is a risk of letting our initial assumptions drive everything, so that we go looking for any components that confirm what we already thought. (A genealogical argument here, a bit of root-cause rhetoric, a specific proposal for breaking a vicious cycle ….) I think we are more likely to learn something new by following the logic of a particular model to its conclusion and then seriously considering alternatives to it.

a different way in which the 2024 election is a failure for democracy

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Peter

Here’s a modest and basic account of democracy: While they seek office, candidates make proposals. Voters select the politicians with the proposals they prefer. The winners try to implement their ideas. Voters observe, discuss, and evaluate what happens. In the next election, voters decide whether to stay or change the course.

In 2020, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats ran on a fairly clear platform of spending money to stimulate green manufacturing in disadvantaged places. They then managed to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act, and the $280+ billion CHIPS Act. The total was less than some of them had proposed, but it was more than I had expected, considering that congressional Republicans were also elected who opposed these ideas.

The net effect is not only a significant change in policy but also a turn of the steering wheel. We’re now at the beginning of a long journey toward a green industrial policy.

In 2024, the voters will–as they should–determine whether to stay on this route or hit the breaks. But they will not make a conscious decision. The federal budget will not be a decisive issue, or perhaps even a prominent one. Whether the country shifts to an industrial policy will be an unrecognized side-effect of votes cast for other reasons.

Biden does not seem likely to emphasize the federal spending because it doesn’t poll well. Perhaps that’s partly because voters (including liberal ones) do not believe what Democratic incumbents claim about their own policy successes. Instead, Biden will run on Trump’s unfitness, Jan. 6, and abortion, and he may well win on that basis.

Trump will not run against the federal spending because he has other grievances on his mind. Besides, he does not really oppose ambitious and expensive federal interventions. The rest of his party will take pot shots at the deficit but not challenge the spending because doing so would concede that the Democrats have made substantial changes. They prefer depicting Biden as feckless rather than wrong.

And the press won’t cover the spending because its results are not yet very tangible, and it no longer qualifies as a live political conflict. As a rough proxy for press attention, consider the trend in Google searches for “Inflation Reduction Act” since 2020. The current rate is one fiftieth of the brief peak that occurred while the Act was political news.

I favor the Biden-era policies. I understand principled arguments against them from several directions. We should be debating green industrial policy and deciding whether or not to continue this course.

One reason we will miss this debate is that Donald Trump has given us other grave matters to discuss. Indeed, it would be problematic if voters failed to consider the threat he poses to the constitution. But I don’t think Trump is the only reason. The failure of a major ideological change to register on the public consciousness is symptomatic of a breakdown in news, attention, and public discussion that prevents the people from controlling our government.

Frontiers of Democracy 2024: Violence, Nonviolence, and Robust Democracy

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Peter

Dates: June 13 (5pm) until June 15 (1 pm) at Tufts University in Medford, MA

Frontiers of Democracy an annual conference at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life that convenes practitioners and scholars from across the United States and overseas.

Please hold the dates (June 13-15), register and purchase tickets at the “early bird” discount rate until March 29, and consider proposing one or more sessions for the conference by April 16.

This year’s special theme is “Violence, Nonviolence, and Robust Democracy.” We anticipate robust conversations (and disagreements) about what defines and causes political violence and about the potential and limitations of nonviolent strategies. This year’s plenary speakers on the nonviolence theme will include Damien Conners, Maria Stephan, Thupten Tendhar, and others to be named later.

This theme is not exclusive; we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star”: building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. In particular, we are eager to continue last year’s rich conversations about religious pluralism and democracy and would welcome proposals in that area, whether or not they relate to violence and nonviolence.

Although we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we generally prefer proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats.

The conference agenda will develop over the next several months.

Cost: $240 for a standard ticket with discounts for current students. This includes hors d’oeuvres on June 13, breakfast and lunch on July 14, and breakfast and lunch on June 15. Other meals and lodgings are not provided.

Zenobia of Palmyra

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Peter

Supposedly, many American men think more than once a day about the Roman empire. This seems implausible, but I must admit that Rome often comes to my mind. For instance, I recently read Zenobia; Shooting Star of Palmyra by Nathanael Andrade (Oxford University Press, 2018).

A powerful female monarch from Syria, Zenobia has been a figure of fascination for 18 centuries. She’s been a symbol for misogynists and feminists, for European imperialists, Arab nationalists, and cosmopolitan modernists. She appears in Christian histories, the Talmud, early Islamic sources, and bel canto operas.

Andrade selects and sorts the ancient written sources (all of which are biased in various ways) and relevant inscriptions, coins, and statuary. He is especially helpful at explaining the context of Palmyra, a thriving merchant city with a distinctive hybrid culture. The protagonist of his book was Septimia Zenobia (a Hellenistic monarch), Iulia Aurelia (a Roman woman of the senatorial class), and Bathzabbai (a Palmyrene clan leader), and she probably inhabited all three roles fully.

We know almost nothing about her inner life, but her story is dramatic. The 240s and 250s saw the Roman empire often at war with the nascent power of Sassanian Persia to its east. In 260, the Romans suffered a catastrophe when their emperor, Valerian, was defeated on the battlefield and taken prisoner. At the same time, the empire was beset by Germanic invasions and a rebellion in Gaul. The whole eastern Mediterranean was at risk, but it was saved by a Palmyrene leader named Odeanthus (a.k.a. Odainat), who bore Roman titles, including commander, governor, and consul. With the Empire in disarray, Odeanthus essentially ruled an important region from his capital in Palmyra, calling himself King of Kings, albeit without openly challenging Roman sovereignty.

After four years of rule, Odeanthus was murdered by assailants who remain unknown to this day. The initial propaganda from Rome implied that Odeanthus was killed because he’d become treasonous. It’s likely that a pro-Roman faction in Palmyra expected to replace him. Instead, his widow, Zenobia, quickly gained political control and reigned as a regent in the name of her minor son Wahballath, a.k.a. Septimius Vaballathus, a.k.a. Athenodorus. Now some of the Roman propaganda suggested that an evil and unnatural woman had killed her husband to gain his throne.

Zenobia seems to have led a tolerant and culturally vibrant polity that may have seen itself as Palmyrene and/or Syrian, although she presented herself and her son as Roman officials and claimed to be related to the Greek-speaking Egyptian queen Cleopatra. She ruled various kinds of pagans, Christians (both orthodox and gnostic), early rabbinic Jews, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, and others. The Greek philosopher Longinus was a courtier and reputedly Zenobia’s personal mentor, although he was not actually the author of On the Sublime, which was attributed to him in later centuries.

Zenobia’s territory dramatically expanded when her forces captured Egypt, the breadbasket of the Roman empire and the terminus of sea routes in Asia. It’s not clear why she launched this invasion, but it could have been on behalf of Palmyrene merchants who competed with Egyptians. Zenobia was now calling herself Augusta (a title for an empress) and using the title Augustus for Wahballath. She was empress of the richest third of the Roman imperium. One can imagine a stable new entity forming in the Levant. However, In 272, the Emperor Aurelian invaded and defeated the Palymrenes, taking mother and son to Rome as prisoners. The unified Roman empire still had another century and a half to go.

Andrade deals sensitively with the horrifying events at the site of ancient Palmyra in 2015-2016. The site had been controlled by European imperialists and then by Syrian secular nationalists, each of whom had exploited Zenobia’ memory for their own purposes. ISIS destroyed the ruins and their living guardians as an attack on both Assad and the West.

Out of the countless depictions of Zenobia since her time, I’ll mention a set of paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo. These works hang in different museums and had miscellaneous titles. In 1974, Fern Rusk Shapley first noted that they all depict scenes from the life of the Queen of Palmyra. Shapley conjectured that the Zenobios, a noble Venetian family who were unrelated to Zenobia but who happened to share her name, commissioned them for one room in their palazzo. Knox (1979) accepts that they are all by Tiepolo but thinks that the artist painted them over several decades for the Zenobios.

Of course, these paintings are not realistic or consistent with modern scholarship–or even very serious–but I appreciate that Tiepolo could imagine Zenobia as a heroic soldier and as a stoic victim. The National Gallery’s Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (1725/1730) shows her in a martial pose–see above–while the Prado’s Queen Zenobia before the Emperor Aurelian (1717) depicts her as gracious in defeat. Both look like scenes from an opera.

References: Shapley, “Tiepolo’s Zenobia Cycle,” in Robert Enggass, Hortus imaginum: essays in Western art (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974): George Knox, “Giambattista Tiepolo: Queen Zenobia and Ca’Zenobio: ‘una delle prime sue fatture’,” The Burlington Magazine 121.916 (1979): 409-418. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; Goya’s Familia del infante Don Luis; and three great paintings in dialogue

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