The Dictionary of the Khazars, pro and con

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Peter

Milorad Pavic‘s Dictionary of the Khazars (1982) was prominent at the end of the last century, translated into scores of languages and much discussed. I didn’t read it then but got to it this past summer. Its subtitle is A Lexicon Novel, and it consists of alphabetical entries that are heavily cross-referenced. To Pavic’s delight, the order of the entries is different in each translation. He says that he doesn’t want you to read it from the first to the last page (as I did) but to follow links at your own will. The book was published just when hypertext was developing, and it surely owed some of its influence to being on that cutting edge. In a current Kindle edition, you can click words to move around–but we are used to doing that now.

The topic is the story (originally from Judah Halevy) that the Khazars, a real medieval people, converted to Judaism after holding a debate among a Christian, a Moslem, and a Jew. The Dictionary consists of Christian, Moslem, and Jewish sections. The book we’re reading is supposed to have had a long and tortuous history (one edition was poisonous), and the entries concern characters and events from the original conversion period, from the 1600s, and from the 1900s. That produces a 3-by-3 grid of religions and eras into which all the specific entries fit. The whole thing is intricately symmetrical, so that there is guaranteed to be a Moslem 20th-century analogue for a Jewish 17th- century character, and so on.

The whole text is very dream-like. It’s too magical to be magic-realism: people are constantly changing form and doing amazing things for mysterious reasons. Dreams are also an explicit topic, since the Khazars’ priests were “dream hunters.” They interpreted people’s dreams and could follow a thread from one dreamer to another when the first person dreamed of the second one. According to their religion, all our dreams collectively formed the body of the original man, or Adam. As you might expect, it turns out there are still dream-hunters among us today.

The Abrahamic faiths derive scriptures from their founding eras. But they also tell many subsequent stories: tales of saints and sages and miracles. These stories are dream-like, by which I don’t necessarily mean they are false. (That is up to you to decide). They are like dreams in that they are surprising stories with strong symbolic meanings and recurrent motifs. And the three religions’ stories pervasively interconnect. The same people often figure in the dream-like tales of Jews, Christians, and Moslems, albeit sometimes bearing different names, or changing their roles from heroes to villains, or appearing in new contexts. In that sense, an interlinked series of dream-like stories is a great way to represent the world co-created by the Abrahamic faiths.

This fictional world seems cosmopolitan (since the religions are equal and related), free (you can choose your own path), ironic and subversive, and avant-garde. You may or may not enjoy it, but it seems fit for enjoyment.

On the other hand … The Khazars themselves turn out to be a self-hating people, consistently favoring the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem foreigners in their midst until they subject themselves to conversion and then actually vanish. Just for example:

As is known, when a people vanishes, the first to disappear are the upper classes, and with them literature; all that remains are books of law, which the people know by heart. The same can be said of the Khazars. In their capital, sermons in the Khazar language are expensive, whereas in Hebrew, Arabic, or Greek they are cheap or free of charge. Curiously, once they are outside their state the Khazars are reluctant to reveal their Khazar origin, preferring to avoid one another and conceal the fact that they speak and understand the Khazar language, hiding it from their own compatriots even more than from foreigners. In the country itself, people not proficient in the Khazar language, which is the official language, are more highly regarded in the civil and administrative services. Consequently, even people who are fluent in the Khazar language will often deliberately speak it incorrectly, with a foreign accent, from which they derive a manifest advantage. Even with translators – for instance, from Khazar into Hebrew, or Greek into Khazar – the people selected are those who make mistakes in the Khazar language or pretend to do so.

This is plausibly how a nationalistic professor of Serbian literature might feel about his own ethnic group inside Tito’s Yugoslavia. Thus a book that was read around the world as a postmodern ironist’s game was apparently read in Serbia as a nationalist tract.

It might be harmless for a writer to adopt aggrieved nationalism, especially in a work of fiction that is pervasively playful. Maybe it was just a stance. However, it seems that Pavic continued to espouse similar ideas even while Serbian armies were massacring other former Yugoslavs. In 1992, he said “I am a Khazar too because the fate of my family was very similar and in the end we went back to our original religion” (quoted in Wachtel, p. 638). It appears that he was completely serious about the Khazar/Serb analogy and genuinely aggrieved as a Serb. At least, he did not distance himself from the nationalistic implications of his work.

I’m not sure what I think about the ethics of having read this novel for fun. Of course, authors do not control their own texts, least of all texts like this one. So maybe the author’s political intentions are not all that important. I certainly did not become a Serbian nationalist as a result of reading the Dictionary of the Khazars, so maybe no harm done. And I deeply appreciate Pound and Eliot, notwithstanding their views. On the other hand, would I read a playful, possibly gimmicky novel that reflected one of the world’s other forms of bigotry? Caveat emptor, I suppose.

See Andrew Wachtel, “Postmodernism as Nightmare: Milorad Pavic’s Literary Demolition of Yugoslavia,” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 41, no. 4, 1997, pp. 627–644; and David Damrosch, “Death in Translation,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 380-398; and cf. Ivo Andric, Bosnian Chronicle, Or, The Days of the Consuls

a way forward for high culture

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Peter

(This is actually a post for Labor Day, although the connection to labor and working-class culture may not be immediately obvious.)

People sometimes say: “This artifact or text is worth your effort and attention. It is less accessible than some other works; it may take more effort to understand and appreciate. But it will make you a better person, or help you improve the world, or give you insight.”

This type of claim requires a justification because it is a proposal for how other people should allocate their time and effort. The justification can be an explicit argument that the work in question is valuable. Or it can be an interpretation, explanation, or reaction to the work that helps people to understand it. Understanding enables appreciation. Like any justification, it can fail because it was not a worthy claim in the first place, or because the reasons were weak, or because they fell on infertile soil.

To say that a given work deserves unusual effort puts that item in a special category. Even if you make such a claim in an informal and unpretentious way, you are suggesting a value-judgment and implying a rough ranking from better to worse.

We could have a culture in which many people frequently exchanged such claims, coming from diverse perspectives and advocating a wide range of cultural products. People would then allocate some of their time and effort to relatively challenging works because they had been persuaded that these items have special value. “High culture” would be the list of all the works that significant numbers of people appreciated in these ways.

And we do have that kind of culture. People exchange claims about value. Subcultures can be found that love almost any challenging form of culture you can think of. However, the dialogue about which works are especially worthy is constantly challenged–or even threatened–by several factors:

The massive supply of culture that is profitable because it is addictive and easy to enjoy. (Believe me, I am addicted as anyone is.)
A certain reluctance to accept that some works can be more worthy than others. This attitude has shaken the confidence of people, such as humanities professors, who might otherwise be more active proponents of challenging culture.
The kind of defense of high culture that assumes it must be a traditional Eurocentric canon and that students should recognize a list of canonical authors without actually struggling with their works. In my own area of specialization, K-12 civic education, state standards often present long lists of names. Students are supposed to identify the word “locke” with a long-dead man who happened to believe in individual rights, as if that were a worthy learning objective. The backlash is inevitable.
The dominant role that colleges and universities play in generating and consuming culture. Higher education has limitations: it serves mostly young adults, it has been assigned an economic function, and it is run by people (like me) who chose an academic path instead of another worthy vocation. Meanwhile, unions and other working-class organizations, religious denominations, small publishing houses and magazines, and other independent sources seem relatively weak.

In “Culture as Counterculture” (New Criterion, Sept. 2021), Adam Kirsch explains how we got to where we are. I would start a bit earlier than he does and would propose a future phase, but steps 3 to 7 in the following summary match his account:

In aristocratic cultures, popularity indicates a lack of quality. Aristocrats gladly prefer to own unpopular things.
In democratic cultures, popular tastes gain influence and even authority.
As European cultures begin to democratize in the 1800s, people like Matthew Arnold, John Stewart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others–I would add the Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo or the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore–argue that all citizens should have access to “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold). They hope that a classically educated public will govern better.
In the 1900s, industries and governments become increasingly effective at distributing mass-produced cultural products whose markets dwarf those for traditional high culture. Leftist critics like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Dwight Macdonald argue that mass audiences are being exploited and denied access to better works, which people would prefer if they had real access to them.
In the mid-1990s, many students are still required to study canonical works in schools, under the influence of Arnold and other Victorians. A common motif in youth-oriented pop culture becomes the rejection of that canon. “My heart’s beating rhythm / And my soul keeps singing the blues / Roll over Beethoven / Tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
In the wake of that revolt, some highly sophisticated critics argue in favor of pop culture and against status hierarchies. Kirsch’s example is Susan Sontag ‘s 1966 essay collection.
Mass-produced, for-profit popular culture keeps expanding while the market for traditional high culture continues to shrink. Sontag decides that pop culture is mainly individualistic and consumerist; she should have resisted it, but the battle is now lost. Genres like classical music are now countercultural niches, not even worth making fun of.

Today’s surviving proponents of high culture seem somewhat diverse philosophically. They include intellectual successors of Macdonald and Sontag, who still want students to read Kafka or the Bhagavad Gita to counteract consumerist capitalism, plus conservatives who want them to read Locke and Jefferson–or at least to know those names–in order to preserve traditional values. Their choice of texts overlaps more than you might think, but the whole group is small and ineffectual, vastly outnumbered by people who don’t see much value to the humanities in any form.

Or perhaps there are still several “high culture countercultures.” Perry Link writes, “Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair …” Some of my fellow Americans read classical Chinese verse in the original calligraphy. Likewise, the best poetry being written in English today may take the form of rap lyrics, and some people have highly discriminating, deeply informed knowledge of rap. One could add students of the Talmud or Islamic jurisprudence, jazz aficionados, serious fans of midcentury modernism, and more.

Still, even if we combined all the diverse countercultures devoted to demanding forms of excellence, they would be badly outnumbered.

I believe we can move from step 7 to another phase, when claims of excellence are more influential again. To get there, we will need “business models” (defined broadly) for creating, sharing, and evaluating excellent and demanding forms of culture outside the monopoly of the university. Federal subsidies could help, but I would not put all my eggs in a governmental basket. The goal is not just to make fine culture available–there is already more online than you could see or hear in a lifetime–but to help it to compete for attention in marketplaces like Spotify or Amazon.

Meanwhile, there is cultural work to do. We need more–and more diverse–people to make confident, compelling arguments that specific works will reward the hard work needed to understand them. Some artifacts and texts are better than others: that is the claim. A good life incorporates some of the best works. They do not all come from any particular genre, cultural context, or tradition. One of life’s great joys is finding new forms of excellence where you didn’t expect them. Yet we are surrounded by insidiously addictive but highly profitable mediocrity, and it is up to us to do better.

Tufts receives grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to launch new curricular track in interfaith civics studies

Posted on September 3, 2021 by Peter

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 1, 2021
CONTACT: Jen McAndrew
jennifer.mcandrew@tufts.edu | 617.627.2029

Tufts University students will soon have more opportunities to explore the complex relationships between faith and civic life in a religiously diverse world, thanks to a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF). Building on its undergraduate Civic Studies major, the only one of its kind, Tufts University will launch a new interdisciplinary curriculum track in interfaith civic studies. This two-year project represents an innovative collaboration between the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts’ School of Arts & Sciences Department of Religion, and the Tufts University Chaplaincy.

The AVDF grant will catalyze the development of a 6-course sequence in interfaith civic studies at Tufts, provide opportunities for faculty professional development and course design, support a cadre of new “student interfaith ambassadors,” and support a Resident Fellow to facilitate interdisciplinary, interfaith discussions at Tufts.

Peter Levine, Tisch College Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs, who is the lead principal investigator, notes, “Religious traditions, identities, institutions, and conflicts are central to civic life. This generous grant will allow Tufts to develop new insights about the relationships between faith and civic life and to educate students to be effective and ethical contributors in a religiously diverse world.”

Co-principal investigator Brian Hatcher, former Chair of the Department of Religion, adds, “The Department of Religion is excited to join with the Tufts Chaplaincy and Tisch College to develop this new initiative to promote Interfaith Studies at Tufts and Beyond. Thanks to the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, we hope to explore new avenues for integrating the academic study of religion with lived, practical approaches for promoting awareness, knowledge, and engagement among faith communities. Our aim is to help prepare students to address the challenges of interfaith collaboration and religious contestation and to find ways to foster reflection on the role of religion in civic life.”

University Chaplain and co-principal investigator Elyse Nelson Winger is committed to centering student voices in all phases of the initiative. She says, “I am thrilled that our students and University Chaplaincy team are a vital part of this new initiative. Through experiential learning, community-building, and co-curricular programming, the Interfaith Ambassador Program will equip students from different religious, spiritual, and philosophical backgrounds to ‘live the questions’ most pertinent to interfaith engagement.”

Jennifer Howe Peace, Senior Researcher at Tisch College and co-founder of the Interreligious/Interfaith Studies Program Unit at the American Academy of Religions, will work with colleagues across departments to design an introduction to interfaith civic studies course and coordinate the grant. Peace comments, “Young people are eager to creatively tackle the dilemmas and opportunities of living in religiously diverse societies. This grant gives us an opportunity to harness the expertise already at Tufts to educate a new generation of civically-minded leaders with a nuanced understanding of interfaith relations.”

the Dutch secret

Posted on September 2, 2021 by Peter

I have been offline because we’d been enjoying a lovely vacation in Amsterdam. While there, I read James C. Kennedy’s A Concise History of the Netherlands. His argument has general implications.

It’s an argument about why the Netherlands has been so successful–even an “enviable” country. Before addressing that question, we should acknowledge, as Kennedy does, that the Dutch participated actively and influentially in European imperialism, including the transatlantic slave trade. So their story is not entirely admirable–perhaps not mainly so. It is nevertheless an interesting question why the Dutch have frequently been more tolerant, free, equitable, and prosperous at home than their neighbors have been.

It’s common to claim that a long tradition of commercial acumen and mercantile values made the Dutch tolerant. They have been too busy to hate. But this is not really an explanation. For one thing, why were they often so good at commerce? Besides, are we sure that the causal arrow points from commercial interests to tolerance? Couldn’t a tolerant culture be good for business?

Kennedy offers a different explanation. He notes that it has typically been impossible for anyone to dominate the Low Countries. In the middle ages, the region was divided into many counties that fell within different duchies and kingdoms. It also developed many prosperous towns, which were profitable for their various feudal lords but hard to control. Later, the Reformation added several religious sects (Calvinists, Mennonites, Moravians, Anabaptists, Jews, and others, plus the many Catholics). The land has always been carved up by water, creating quite disparate regions. And after industrialization, the society split into multiple “pillars” (traditionalist Calvinist, Catholic, socialist), each with its own parties, schools, unions, and press–none strong enough to dominate the rest.

Yet the Netherlands has frequently faced grave threats: the French, the Hapsburgs, the English, and–always–the ocean. Thus the Dutch have been forced to coordinate or perish. Seeking a central authority to lead them, they broadly backed Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, to acquire titles to their whole region. But Philip had to negotiate with the cities to rule, and his descendants, the Habsburg emperors, faced a successful revolt. Later, the Orangist faction favored rule by the House of Orange as a means to centralize, but they always faced effective opposition. Voluntary association has been more common.

What were the odds that the Dutch would survive as an independent country? Things looked bad in 1421, 1672, 1795, 1940, 1953. It is risky to generalize from one case that turned out successfully. Maybe other people did the same things but failed.

However, it looks as if voluntary coordination has been a learned skill in the Netherlands. The Dutch already founded an extraordinary array of philanthropic and municipal associations, guilds, almshouses, beguine-houses, etc., during late medieval times, to which they subsequently added the world’s first true corporation, a complex republican confederal government, councils of church elders and synods, and many other innovations in self-governance. In this context, tolerance can be seen as a mode of relating to other people when you need their cooperation but you cannot dominate them. Tolerance results from polycentricism. It comes with skills of self-governance and an ability to invent new mechanisms for cooperation.

two dimensions of debate about civics

Posted on August 18, 2021 by Peter

It is good that Americans disagree about civic education. We are a free and diverse people who care about youth and the future of our republic. Agreement is not to be expected and could even be problematic. The question is whether we can disagree well while also giving our students an appropriate array of choices that they can assess for themselves.

I think there are almost as many ideas about the ideal approach to civics as there are people in the debate, and it is a mistake to assume that the field has polarized into just two or a few camps. Many individuals hold nuanced and complex views.

If I had to try to categorize views, I definitely would not use one continuum from left to right. I see two different axes that may help to organize the debate–as long as one remembers that hardly anyone chooses an extreme point on either continuum, and many see value across the whole map.

The vertical axis runs from favorable to critical of the US political system and society. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently tweeted that his state’s schools will teach “unapologetic American exceptionalism.” In this context, “exceptional” doesn’t usually mean atypical; it means better. That places Gov. Lee pretty close to the top of my graph. Someone who wants students to focus on historical and current injustices would fall near the bottom.

The horizontal axis runs from classroom-based work (reading, discussing, and writing about texts) to experiential learning. It may also reflect a debate about whether knowledge or skills are the most important outcomes. Lee added, “By prioritizing civics education in TN schools, we are raising a generation of young people who are knowledgeable in American history and confident in navigating their civic responsibilities.” He seems to be open to engagement as an outcome, so maybe he would support the whole top half of my graph.

These two axes are distinct and orthogonal. The most common forms of experiential civics–approaches like service-learning and student government–are often pro-system. They belong above the middle of the chart. In the Positive Youth Development field, service-learning is understood as “contributing positively to self, family, community, and, ultimately, civil society” (Chung & McBride 2015). Service-learning may also encompass critical reflection about systems (Mitchell 2008), but I think the critical aspect has been rare and often superficial.

On the other hand, if you really want to teach some version of critical theory in a K-12 classroom, you are probably interested in assigning and discussing texts. (That is why it is called “theory.”) So you likely fall the left of the middle of my chart–on the same side as the people who want to assign classical texts that they appreciate. The pedagogy is similar; the debate is about which texts to assign, which topics to discuss, and which interpretive lenses to use. Meanwhile, many of us strive to assign texts with diverse perspectives and cultivate a robust discussion within the classroom.

For what it’s worth, my own emphasis is on learning how to build and manage associations. I’d use an academic pedagogy (reading, writing, and discussing texts, data, and models) for a pragmatic purpose: making civil society work. I’d let the students decide the ultimate objectives of their own associations. This approach implies a canon of texts (Alexis de Tocqueville, Gandhi, Robert Michels, Jane Addams, Mary Parker Follett, Saul Alinsky, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Jenny Mansbridge, Elinor Ostrom …) that is neither pro- nor anti-system, as a whole.

I would never claim that this is the only important approach, but I think it is undersupplied.

mixed thoughts about the status of science

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Peter

Science is at the heart of several of our hardest issues, including COVID-19 and global warming. (And even race and policing.) While some Americans display “Science is real” yard signs on their front lawns, Dr. Fauci is the face of oppression for others.

The question of science is not simple.

On one hand …

What individuals think about matters like vaccination and climate change has consequences for everyone else. It can be hard to coexist with people whose beliefs seem fundamentally, even willfully, false.

Some findings are well-substantiated, e.g., that vaccines work and that human beings are causing the climate to heat up dangerously.

For any given question, there are better and worse methods of inquiry. If you want to know whether a vaccine works, a randomized, double-blind, controlled experiment is an excellent method. Google-searching to see what various “influencers” say … is not.

Science is a process of inquiry, not a set of truths. When scientific consensus shifts, that is a sign of learning, not an embarrassment.

The process of learning about COVID-19 has been extraordinarily fast and impressive. It is harder to assess the pace of learning about climate change, but we have learned how to learn a lot better than our ancestors could have done three or four centuries ago.

On the other hand …

No one obtains complex knowledge directly or alone. Science is a collective enterprise, deeply dependent on interpersonal trust. Even if you are an epidemiologist or a virologist, you can’t directly observe truths about COVID-19. You must trust data, instruments, protocols, metrics, and theoretical models that come from other people. For instance, you can only know what you’re seeing through an electron microscope because you trust that device and all the previous science that yielded it.

Science is a set of human institutions that confer power and status on some, while excluding others. Anyone with a doctorate has received a graduate education that cost someone hundreds of thousands of dollars. Americans rank physicians highest in status (7.6) out of hundreds of jobs. Physics professors and college presidents come next. Environmental scientists also rank high (6.5). But many Americans are in no position to obtain these jobs, and many may not want them. By the way, just 5 percent of physicians are Black, and 0.3 percent are Native American.

It is all very well to say “Trust the experts.” But the experts in foreign and defense policy bear responsibility for two disastrous wars since 2001. Experts in urban policy wrecked our cities’ cores by slicing highways through them and forcing people into segregated public housing. Medical experts described homosexuality as a pathology in the DSM until 1973. Some influential nutrition experts insisted that fats were bad and sugar was safe while being financed by the sugar industry.

People like me have deep personal reasons to give scientific institutions the benefit of the doubt. One of these institutions literally pays my comfortable salary. My parents, spouse, sibling, and children have been admitted, supported, and (in many cases) paid by universities. I live in a neighborhood dominated by people who have benefitted from the same institutions; it has good public schools, safe streets, and high property values. Many other people could not get into any of these institutions, or don’t want to get into them, or would not feel comfortable in them, or would not be valued by them. Trusting science comes naturally to me but has no natural appeal for many other human beings.

Partisan and ideological heuristics affect all of us. I find it very comfortable to decry Ron DeSantis’ handling of COVID-19 and to blame him for Florida’s current wave. That fits with what I want to think about Republicans, conservatives, etc. It is a lot less comfortable for me to consider why the highest cumulative per capita COVID rates are in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, while Florida ranks 26th and has (to date) just 62% the cumulative case rate of New Jersey. I don’t think the takeaway is that liberal policies have worsened COVID-19. (For one thing, Mississippi is close behind Massachusetts, and Vermont and Hawaii have done best of all.) But it is no more valid to infer that conservative policies are to blame.

As the last point suggests, there is much that we really do not understand, such as the reasons for the variation in COVID-19 outcomes by state or nation. If we knew the answer to that, it might help us to assess overall social systems. We are deeply divided about what kind of society we should live in, and science has not answered that question. It is not as useful as it could be for public debates, yet it should never provide the solutions, since we must reason about values as well as facts.

There is no such thing as value-neutral data. People always decide what to observe and measure and what to call the results. When I search Google Scholar for “school social distancing COVID,” I see the following keywords in the top results: school closure, workplace non-attendance, school lockdown, mental health, weight gain, nonessential workers, nonessential businesses, epidemic control, and mitigation strategies. Whether these are the most important topics, what is missing (race, for instance), and whether these factors are rightly named–these are value questions, not scientific ones. Besides, in many cases, the data come from mandatory reports, and what we require people to report is a value-judgment.

Finally, the methods that work best for evaluating the effects of a mass-produced chemical compounds, such as vaccines, may not work best for assessing many social, cultural, and moral issues. In many domains, positivist methods are too influential and not enough credibility is accorded to laypeople’s knowledge.

I agree with Jonathan Badger that the most prominent critics of science are not raising subtle points about the soft despotism of scientific institutions or the tension between expertise and democracy. Instead, they are making false statements with great certainty. That is a disgrace, but it doesn’t negate real questions about the role of science.

civically engaged research in political science

Posted on August 11, 2021 by Peter

Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, and I co-direct the American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER). The 2021 Institute took place online, and Political Science Now has published an article about it.

The first cohort assembled in 2019, and members of that group have since edited a symposium on civically engaged research for PS. Some of the symposium articles are starting to appear in “first look” format and will be published together soon. The preface to the symposium is online and open access: Rasmussen, A., Levine, P., Lieberman, R., Sinclair-Chapman, V., & Smith, R. (2021). Preface. PS: Political Science & Politics, 1-4.

Please watch PS for more ambitious articles from the symposium. They review definitions of civically engaged research, critically analyze various motivations for undertaking it, connect engaged research to teaching, and so on.

the new elite is like the old elite

Posted on August 9, 2021 by Peter

There is much writing–from a variety of ideological perspectives–about a new elite that is said to dominate culture, politics, and the economy. This group obviously bears a resemblance to previous elites (and disproportionately descends from parents who were wealthy and powerful), but perhaps it demonstrates some new features.

Among the novel characteristics could be: high education and technical skills (as opposed to deriving wealth from physical property), a meritocratic ideology, competitiveness and addiction to work, a tendency to cluster together in specific neighborhoods of selected cities and to marry only people of the same group, and a tilt toward center-left parties, which are said to be losing their working-class base in reaction to the dominance of meritocratic elites.

For instance, David Brooks writes:

The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. … But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is.

I found this story perfectly plausible but wanted to examine it empirically. Therefore, I explored it using data from the General Social Survey (GSS). In brief, I do not see evidence that today’s elite have different ideological or partisan leanings from their predecessors nearly fifty years ago, nor have they diverged from non-elites in terms of work hours, religion, or geographical mobility. They are more educated and more racially diverse than elites were in the 1970s, but overall, they look very much like their predecessors. That means that we are not experiencing a scrambling or a situation that has “suddenly” developed. Rather, critiques of a liberal-leaning, highly educated elite have been pretty consistent since the days of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan.

Method: The GSS categorizes jobs by prestige, based on a survey of representative Americans. In 2012, respondents rated a street corner drug dealer and a panhandler lowest (at 1.9 and 2.1, respectively) and a college or university president and a physics professor highest (at 7.1 and 7.2). [Correction: physicians are highest, at 7.6] A lawyer was rated 6.4; a mechanical engineer, 6.6; and a board member of a large company, 6.8 (Smith & Son 2014).

I isolated people who either held jobs in the top tenth of the prestige scale or else were married to people in the top tenth. Although it matters whether one is the worker or the spouse, I was interested in high-status households and wanted to include partners, especially in the 1970s.

I could have defined the “elite” in different ways. Trying various definitions would be valuable. However, it is important not to select on the dependent variable. In this case, one could define the elite as people who are liberal, live in major metro areas, hold advanced degrees, and meet other criteria assumed by commentators like Brooks. But then the conclusion would be foreordained. With equal validity, one could identify survey respondents who are conservative, religious, and powerful and tell a story about them. To avoid this form of bias, I pre-selected a definition of “elite” and then examined this group empirically. To be honest, I was surprised by how little change I observed.

Here are some comparisons and contrasts between the most-prestigious households in the 1970s and the 2010s.

Education: Today’s elite (as defined above) is more educated. Seventy-two percent hold at least a bachelor’s degree, up from 58% in the 1970s. Less than one percent don’t have a high school diploma, down from 6% in the 1970s. The non-elite also have more education than they did in the 1970s; however, just 24% hold a bachelor’s degree or more.

At the same time, a graduate degree certainly does not guarantee admission to the elite. Sixty-four percent of people with graduate degrees are not in the top tenth by occupational prestige.

Demographics: The elite was 93% white in 1970, six points whiter than the non-elite at the time. Both groups are now more diverse, but the change has been faster among the elite (who started at a very white baseline). In the 2010s, 80% of the elite was white, 8% was African America, and 12% belonged to other racial groups.

Party and ideology: Elites have not moved toward the Democrats. Including independents who lean toward either party, the elite has gone from 47% Democrat and 39% Republican in the 1970s to 47% Democrat and 37% Republican in the 2010s. They already leaned Democratic in the days of Richard Nixon, and still do by an almost identical margin.

However, non-elites are considerably less Democratic, down from 56% to 45% between the 1970s and 2010s, with most of that change happening during the 1980s. This trend may reflect Southern realignment more than ideology. The graph below shows ideological trends for elites and non-elites. It is true that elites have become somewhat more liberal since 2000, but the changes are small. Overall, elites were more liberal than non-elites in the 1970s and still are today. (To be sure, what it means to be “liberal” has changed, but this is still a reason to doubt a story of ideological realignment.)

Work-week: The elite worked a mean of 41.5 hours in a typical week in the 2010s– essentially the same as the 41.2 hours their predecessors had worked in the 1970s. The non-elite are down about two hours/week to 37.4 hours.

Geography: The elite have not diverged from the non-elite in geographic mobility. Both groups have become about 3-4 percentage points less likely to live in the same city where they lived when they were 16 years old. In each decade, the elites have lived in places with larger average populations than the non-elites, but community size has shrunk for both groups–presumably, as a result of movement to the suburbs and exurbs.

Marriage: Most non-elite adults (72%) were married in the 1970s. That proportion fell to just over half (54%) by the 2010s. Most of this large shift was to the “never married” category. Elites were less likely than non-elites to be married in the 1970s, and even less so in the late 1900s, dropping to 35% married by the 1990s. However, the marriage rates among the elite has risen to 46% in the 2010s, approaching the rate of the non-elites. A consistent one in four elites reports never being married in each decade.

Religion: In each decade, elites have attended religious services a bit more often than non-elites (on average), but religious attendance has fallen for both groups.

Sources: General Social Survey; Tom W. Smith & Jaesok Son, “Measuring Occupational Prestige on the 2012 General Social Survey,” NORC at the University of Chicago GSS Methodological Report No. 122, 2014. See also: why the white working class must organize; the Left between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Buddhism as philosophy

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Peter

Let’s say that a religion consists of beliefs–and, often, practices–that many people consider deeply important and that unite them as a community.

By this definition (derived from Durkheim), communism and some forms of patriotism may be religions, but there is no such thing as a solitaire religion. For one thing, most believers value unity and belonging. In the Abrahamic faiths, professions of faith are singular (“I accept Jesus as my personal savior …”), and an adherent could prefer–or be forced–to worship alone. Nevertheless, the basis of an Abrahamic religion is a revelation made to a group of people who formed a community when they accepted the revealed truths. To believe is to join that community. In other traditions, it may make even less sense to be a solo believer.

Finally, many religions claim–to various degrees–to be comprehensive and final. They offer conclusive answers to all the most important questions. This feature helps them to unify their believers and to occupy a major portion of their adherents’ inner lives.

In contrast, let’s call a philosophy a list of beliefs–and the relations among them–that a person arrives at by reflection. One’s reflection need not be rational as opposed to emotional, but it is personal. Everyone can arrive at a different philosophy. If we are wise, we assume that the beliefs on our own list are provisional and incomplete. When we bring our ideas into a public space, we expect disagreement, which may sometimes cause us to adjust our ideas.

By these definitions, a specific belief may play an important role within one or more religions and also one or many philosophies. The belief has the same content but a different function.

Over its long history, Buddhism has been a philosophy for many and a religion for many more. Ideas attributed to the Buddha and his influential followers have served to define and unite believers and have been deeply interwoven with other aspects of the believers’ shared cultures, such as their art, music, and ritual. In that sense, we can talk about Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist architecture–cultural categories.

Meanwhile, individuals from diverse backgrounds have sometimes assessed ideas from Buddhism and have adopted one or more of them into their own thinking, often in an eclectic fashion, without considering them complete or final, and without necessarily feeling any sense of belonging. The latter is Buddhism as philosophy.

The philosophical approach involves assessing each belief associated with Buddhism, asking whether it coheres with your own experience and your previous reflections and with the other ideas on the list of Buddhist beliefs. This process actually requires a prior step: deciding which ideas are important to Buddhism–a sensitive task, given the variety of views held over more than two millennia of development. The outcome is a list of zero or more ideas that you feel you should provisionally endorse, along with any the other ideas from any other sources that you also hold. For example, I would ask whether each Buddhist idea coheres with major findings of 21st century natural science.

By the way, there is some textual evidence that this is how the Buddha wanted to be received, although I don’t know whether that evidence is historically valid. In any case, I would start the philosophical analysis with the Four Noble Truths, which are fundamental across the whole tradition.

The first is the truth of suffering. It is not wrong to try to phrase this as a proposition, in which case some candidates might be: “Suffering is inevitable,” or “Suffering is universal,” or “Suffering is intrinsic to life.” You can also consider which propositions are incompatible with it, such as “Everything happens for a good reason and works out well in the end,” or “Only people who deserve to suffer ultimately experience suffering.” Buddhism rejects such claims.

But there is a good reason that the noble truths are not usually presented as propositions. To endorse the first noble truth is to feel the significance and ubiquity of suffering: not only one’s own but also everyone else’s. The truth is closely connected to the mental state of compassion. To endorse it is to be compassionate, and vice-versa. The philosophical question, then, is whether such universal compassion is virtuous and valid.

The second noble truth is the truth of the origin of suffering. Spelled out in propositional form, the origin is said to be craving, desire, or attachment (tanha). This is certainly a claim that one can reason about. Does desire inevitably yield suffering? If so, why? Is the reason metaphysical, or is it a feature of human psychology? What kind of emotion (or action?) qualifies as tanha? These are issues within Buddhist philosophy and worthy of inquiry. But, again, the second truth is not typically phrased as a proposition because it is equally important to try it out. Does it seem right that craving, or clinging, or some such emotional state is involved (often or always) in the suffering that one feels and observes?

The third truth is the truth of the cessation of suffering. Removing the cause, which is craving, will remove the suffering itself. This claim is philosophically contestable. Assuming that craving does cause suffering, are we confident that ceasing to crave will remedy the damage already done? Is a life without craving and without suffering a good life? Is it the best life? Again, I think these are questions within Buddhism, not critical of the tradition.

The fourth truth is the path to the cessation of suffering. In medical terms, we have already explored the condition (suffering), the diagnosis (craving), and the cure (ceasing to crave). We need a prescription to accomplish the cure. The prescription is a set of right actions and right thoughts, often spelled out in detail. The specific content is contested and has varied within the tradition, but we can identify some typical elements.

First, right action is moderate. It is the Buddha’s “middle way” between asceticism and self-indulgence. You can’t remove the cause of suffering either by rejecting all pleasurable experiences or by filling your stream of experience with pleasure. You are wiser to put temporary pleasures in their proper place within a life that is ordered and responsible and attainable by actual human beings. By filling your life with this kind of moderation, you occupy time that would otherwise be colonized by immoderate will, which would worsen suffering.

Second, right action helps other sentient beings but without ignoring the actor’s condition. In Owen Flanagan’s phrase, the ideal is “equanimity-in-community.” By being a helpful part of a community while also tending to one’s own mental equilibrium, one fills the time that would otherwise be occupied with indulgence or asceticism, which would worsen suffering. This balance between individual and community complements the moderation of the middle way.

Third, right thinking (and right action) must be consistent with the noble truths. To start with, the first truth implies–or actually is–compassion; therefore, good thought and action must be compassionate. The more mental space we occupy with compassion, the less will fill with craving. The desire that others escape suffering has the unique feature of not causing the desirer to suffer. And if we are truly compassionate, we must act in others’ benefit. Emotion and action come together.

Fourth, right thinking reflects correct metaphysics, which has at least two important features.

The doctrine of no-self holds that there is no autonomous, durable (let alone immortal) self, the kind of thing that might be labeled a “soul” in other traditions. Introspection identifies many specific thoughts and experiences that arrive in a rapid flow. It does not ever identify the self that “has” these experiences, because there is no such thing. Per the second noble truth, the impulse to find a self and to preserve it amid the flux is a form of craving that inevitably yields suffering. Really believing the doctrine of no-self helps to accomplish the cure promised in the fourth truth. Apart from anything else, it makes one much less concerned about oneself, thus leaving more space for compassion.

The doctrine of dependent origination holds that everything happens as the inevitable outcome of the conditions that were in place before it. This is very much like a core metaphysical assumption of modern science. It rejects the notion of a “final” cause (in Aristotle’s sense). Things do not happen because of some independent end or purpose. For instance, I may believe I am raising my hand in order to get attention, but the real cause is the firing of neurons, which happens because of prior neurons’ firing and other physical circumstances. A related doctrine is impermanence: everything inevitably changes.

We should believe in dependent origination and impermanence because they are true and also because they help us on the path from suffering. Believing in final causes–that things happen for good reasons–and in permanent objects of value causes frustration because we constantly observe bad outcomes and change. Instead, we should acknowledge that things just happen. That includes suffering, which arises because of prior conditions, but especially because of prior expressions of craving. Compassionate action interrupts that causal cycle.

What about two famous doctrines that seem much less compatible with modern science and with the moral experiences of modernity: reincarnation and karma?

One way to interpret these ideas would be as background assumptions from the cultural milieu of the Buddha and his South Asian followers. Other Indian traditions also teach karma and reincarnation. In the Mediterranean region, the comparable background assumptions were the survival of the soul after bodily death and the existence of an afterlife. We don’t find it especially interesting when an ancient Mediterranean thinker assumes that souls go to the underworld. We could likewise attribute karma and reincarnation to the cultural milieu and not take these ideas seriously as core ideas of Buddhism–much as we might dismiss the classical Buddhist list of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), which they shared with Mediterranean peoples. To be a Buddhist today does not imply belief in the four elements, and maybe it doesn’t imply karma and reincarnation.

A different response has the advantage of being more interesting. After all, the popular summaries of both karma and reincarnation contradict major points summarized earlier in this post. If there is no-self, how can the soul transmigrate to a different body after death? And if everything happens through dependent origination, why should good actions always yield benefits to the person who acts well? Why would the universe be set up so nicely?

Perhaps we should revise these doctrines to make them more compatible with the rest of Buddhist thought. In fact, the best any of us can do is to adopt the background material of a culture and revise it in the light of our own best thinking to create a framework that illuminates something about the reality of an existence that is too complex for human beings to grasp in full. In that spirit, let’s reconstruct what a believer in the four noble truths, no-self, and dependent origination would make of reincarnation and karma.

I think reincarnation becomes a doctrine of continuous rebirth. There is no self, just a stream of experiences. In that sense, the self is constantly being reincarnated. Furthermore, most of our experiences are not original to us. We feel things that others have felt before and that still others will feel after we are gone. Even the words we inwardly use to name these experiences belong to languages spoken before and after our time. Thus the components of our experience travel from organism to organism, and the process of rebirth outlasts the natural lives of individuals. This theory is but crudely expressed by the literal idea of reincarnation.

And I think karma gains an ethical gloss. It is not that some cosmic scorekeeper gives us positive points for good behavior and demerit points for bad behavior and calibrates our suffering accordingly (in our current and future lives). We are not literally paying the price for bad actions that we performed in past lives, for there is no self that carries over from yesterday to today, let alone from one death to another. Rather, there is a tendency for craving to cause suffering and for compassionate thoughts and acts to reduce it. Craving is like any other factor in a deterministic world of cause-and-effect: its influence tends to ripple out and affect other people. The best way to block it is to exercise compassion instead. Ideally, that will radiate out positively. In this sense, each of us experiences the total of the good and bad karma of many past lives. There is, however, no one-to-one correspondence between a specific past life and a specific current one.

If these glosses are correct, why are they not communicated more clearly and prominently, at the expense of the literal versions of karma and reincarnation? Here the “three vehicles” idea from Mahayana Buddhism is helpful. We can reduce suffering in several different ways, and any way that works is valuable. If it helps to believe that every bad action accrues to the actor and causes suffering later on–in the next life if not in this life–then that is a welcome result. One who believes this theory will strive to be compassionate and will thus tend to suffer less. However, this theory isn’t Really True. You might instead believe that everyone should be compassionate for its own sake even though the outcomes are uncontrollable and determined. This theory has the advantage of being more philosophically defensible, but it is not very inspiring–except for the wisest among us. So people need a choice of vehicles that they can ride on the path away from suffering.

None of this is meant to be original–it just represents my personal effort to explore some aspects of Buddhism as philosophy. If it has any value, it is as an example of a worthwhile exercise.

It is not final. I assent to several of the Buddhist theories because of my other experiences and my commitment to contemporary science, but experiences and scientific findings change. Also, I did not discuss in any detail my skepticism about some of the theories.

It is not comprehensive. What I have written here says nothing about political institutions or social justice, epistemology, or aesthetics. It is all about ethics and metaphysics (and incomplete on those topics). Of course, thinkers who identify as Buddhists have developed political, epistemological, and aesthetic ideas, but that doesn’t mean that their ideas are implied by the core tenets of Buddhism. If we treat Buddhist ideas as philosophical, we would expect any list to be incomplete and for specific ideas to appear in various philosophical structures that also draw on other sources. Comprehensiveness is impossible.

Finally, the result is not redemptive or salvific. The advice may be good, and you may tend to benefit if you follow it, but you will not be able to honor it completely enough to banish suffering. (It is said that the Buddha experienced headaches even after his enlightenment.) On the other hand, it is possible to envision a person who has followed these principles thoroughly enough to have overcome existential dread. That requires no suspension of the usual physical or metaphysical rules. It is a psychological accomplishment, and it offers as much consolation as one would derive from the news that there was a life after death.

legislative capacity is not zero-sum

Posted on July 28, 2021 by Peter

One way to think about the power of any legislature is the decisions it can make–for instance, to raise or lower taxes or to ban or legalize various things. Its power is almost always limited by other institutions, such as an executive or courts. And its power is finite, which means that the distribution of power within the body is zero-sum. If one party bloc makes a decision, the other parties do not. If the speaker, prime minister, or legislative leader gains influence, the rank-and-file loses power. If the committees are powerful, the whole body is weaker.

Given this model, it is puzzling why power sometimes centralizes within a legislature (as it has in the Massachusetts State House). Since each member has an equal vote, why would most members vote for leaders and rules that empower the leaders as opposed to the rank-and-file?

Perhaps the members of a large body face a classic coordination problem: they don’t really like the distribution of power but cannot organize themselves to challenge it. Perhaps they would rather have a strong leader than be walked over by the executive branch. Perhaps the party leadership obtains loyalty by influencing election outcomes. Or perhaps the average member is simply content without a lot of influence. There could be a vicious cycle, in which the kind of person who wants to influence legislation gets frustrated and leaves, and the remainder vote to empower the leadership.

The other way to think about this issue is in terms of capacity rather than power. A legislature does many things. It collects input from stakeholders, investigates the other branches of government and public problems, considers policy proposals, assimilates research, develops proposals, builds consensus within and beyond the body, amends and refines bills, and (finally) makes decisions by voting.

It can do more or less of this. At a minimum, it may barely scrape by, passing the laws that are constitutionally required, such as a budget (or may even fail to accomplish that). At the maximum, it can operate like the US Congress in 1965, which wrote, refined, and passed landmark bills to create Medicare and Medicaid (plus the NEH and NEA), enfranchise people of color, involve the federal government in K-12 and higher education, and open the US to mass immigration. Whether you like those laws or not, they represented much more lawmaking than usual. In fact, the year 1965 perhaps saw more federal lawmaking than has occurred during my entire lifetime, and I was born in 1967.

Power (in the sense of the first paragraph) is zero-sum. But capacity is not. Just because one group of legislators is working away on school reform does not mean that a different committee can’t be holding hearings on taxes.

Total legislative capacity can be expanded. That requires attracting talented and dedicated legislators. It may require a favorable climate beyond the legislature. It also requires nuts-and-bolts support. For example, legislators have more capacity if they have more staff, both in their own offices and shared by the body. In the Massachusetts legislature, the typical House member has one employee, which is not enough to do much legislative business.

Less capacity in the legislature can mean more power for the other branches, particularly the executive. That is a finding of Bolton & Thrower, “Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism,” American Journal of Political Science, 60(3), (2016), pp. 649-663. However, it is also possible for an entire government to lose capacity.

Newt Gingrich cut congressional staff in Washington, especially the staff of the nonpartisan legislative-branch bureaus, which employ fewer than one third as many people as they did before 1990. This made sense for what he wanted to accomplish. If total capacity is smaller, it is easier for the leadership to control the body. (In that way, zero-sum power is related to capacity.) Besides, Gingrich’s legislative agenda was very simple–tax cuts, above all–and it didn’t require nearly as much capacity as center-left legislation would. Still, the result was a national legislature that cannot do much legislating of any kind.

There is an interesting wrinkle in the two graphs below, taken from Bolton & Thrower 2016. Congress was at its most active and ambitious while its staffing was rapidly rising, but not yet at its peak. The peak lagged a decade or so behind. That fits my general impression that the modern welfare state proved challenging to manage and sometimes overburdened our institutions–meaning all three branches of the federal government, states and localities, interest groups, and the press. After Congress enacted the major elements of the Great Society, it turned to managing those programs and gave that task serious attention for about fifteen years. Then conservatives tried to cut the programs (consistent with their principles and their mandate) but also cut the capacity to manage them without actually abolishing them. The result has been successively worse implementation.

From Bolton, A., & Thrower, S. (2016). Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism. *American Journal of Political Science,* 60(3), 649-663.

Today’s Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recognizes the problem. They call for increasing the capacity of Congress, “increas[ing] the funds allocated to each Member office for staff,” raising staff pay, and hiring “bipartisan [committee[ staff approved by both the Chair and Ranking Member to promote strong institutional knowledge [and] evidence-based policy making.”

This is an important agenda, and we need similar changes in Massachusetts.

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