call for papers: Teaching Ethics in Data Science

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Peter

The 1st Annual Workshop on Methods for Teaching Ethics in Data Science (MTEDS 23) will take place virtually and on the campus of Tufts University on Tuesday, May 2, 2023.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

Short papers (1-5 pages) related to the topic of the workshop; accepted short papers will be given a 20 minute presentation slot in the conference.
Undergraduate Ethics Case Studies for the Tripods Undergraduate Ethics Case Studies Project (see more details at https://sites.tufts.edu/mteds23/samplecase)

Program Committee

Peter Levine (co-chair), Tufts University
Benedetta Giovanola (co-chair), University of Macerata, Italy
H. V. Jagadish, University of Michigan
Andreia Martinho, Tufts University
Karl Schmitt, Trinity Christian College
more PC members TBA

Organizing committee

Peter Levine, Tufts University
Lenore Cowen, Tufts University

Here is the call for papers: https://easychair.org/cfp/mteds23. The deadline is January 10, 2023

the links between capital and education

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Peter

My employer and primary community, Tufts University, appears (along with virtually all US colleges and universities) in two massive studies by Raj Chetty and colleagues. I will use Tufts’ statistics to offer some general observations about the relationships between capital and education in our economic order. Tufts represents one type of institution that plays a significant economic role in the US and even globally.

According to his study of economic mobility, 62% of Tufts students who arrive from the bottom fifth of the income distribution attain the top fifth, which ranks Tufts #7 among “elite” institutions for upward mobility. However, students from the bottom of the income distribution are relatively scarce at Tufts (due, I believe, to our relatively small endowment), ranking us 40th in accessibility out of 65 elite colleges. Putting those two facts together generates a rank of 30th out of 65 for what Chetty et al. call “overall mobility.”

Basically, Tufts students tend to be economically advantaged, but their median income at age 34 is much higher than their family income was at age 18. This is typical of the institutions Chetty et al. call “elite.” (See the graphic with this post, which shows Tufts right in the midst of the elite schools.)

Meanwhile, according to Chetty and colleagues’ analysis of Facebook data, 94.4% of low-income Tufts students’ Facebook “friends” have high incomes, ranking Tufts in the 100th percentile among all US institutions on that measure. Tufts demonstrates relatively low “clustering,” meaning that Tufts students’ Facebook-friend networks are relatively cliquey. But these cliques do not seem to be economically homogeneous (Chetty et al 2022). In short, because Tufts is somewhat diverse and fairly cohesive but also predominantly affluent, students who are admitted from the lower economic strata obtain economically valuable connections while in college.

Chetty follows James Coleman (1988, cited 61,000 times), Robert Putnam (2001), and other authors, mostly Americans, in finding that social capital boosts educational success and upward economic mobility. The argument is basically that individuals–especially children and youth–are more likely to succeed if other people voluntarily support them and if many people support their schools and colleges, thereby making these institutions work better. If we define “social capital” as such networks of voluntary engagement, then having social capital benefits the individual and has positive externalities for the society. It is win/win.

A different literature is equally influential but has a different audience. Pierre Bourdieu sees education primarily as a way of reproducing economic stratification. His most famous idea is that educational institutions mark their graduates as members a specific social class by teaching them how to talk and act (Bourdieu 1983, cited 61,000 times). Members of the current ruling class dominate the institutions that mark people as upper class, ensuring that their children obtain “cultural capital.” Bourdieu also uses the phrase “social capital,” referring to the network-ties that further stratify a society. For instance, if a rich and powerful person knows and likes you, you have social capital. For Bourdieu, social capital is zero-sum, a means of gaining relative advantage over others.

To make these theories vivid, image two concrete stories.

First, imagine a US teenager who has only decent odds of completing high school, obtaining an associate’s degree, and getting a job that pays as much as her parents did when they started out. She will be more likely to succeed at these goals if her family members and other adults and peers offer emotional support, occasional financial support, and connections, and if many people support the local schools, sports leagues, and other community-based settings where she spends her time.

Second, imagine a teenager (we will call him “Brett”) who attends a selective private school in the Washington suburbs with a future Supreme Court justice, goes on to Yale, where his grandfather had studied before him, and then to Yale Law School, where he rooms with a future federal judge and plays basketball with the Yale professor who leads the Federalist Society chapter. He gets clerkships, jobs, and appointments that culminate in a seat on the Supreme Court along with his former schoolmate, two other Yale Law graduates, and five other former members of the Federalist Society. Brett was more likely to succeed at reaching his goal–the nation’s highest court–because well-placed friends looked out for him and supported the institutions where he studied.

Both of these theories could be true. They might name dynamics that apply for different segments of our population. I am not aware of empirical studies that explicitly juxtapose them in ways that would allow them to be compared and, perhaps, combined. Chetty’s work hints at some combinations. If he and his colleagues only studied institutions like Tufts, the main findings would be consistent with Bourdieu. But Chetty offers data for all colleges, universities, school systems, and neighborhoods, and often it appears that social capital benefits everyone, as in Coleman and Putnam.

I would also cite the tremendously ambitious Chicago study by Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997). As Sampson presents the results, this study finds very little evidence of economic mobility in Chicago. The vast majority of Chicagoans retain their class position as they move through life (Sampson 2012, Kindle loc. 5138). Nevertheless, individuals are much safer and healthier if their neighborhoods are more socially cohesive. In this model, social capital–which Sampson et al. re-conceive as “collective efficacy”–improves one’s quality of life without challenging the class structure. This is a way of synthesizing Bourdieu and Coleman.

I cannot offer additional empirical evidence, but I would like to suggest some conceptual clarifications. Basically, I believe that the categories in this debate are complicated and that neither Bourdieu’s Marxism nor neoliberal economics offers sufficient nuance on its own.

Capital takes many forms. Let’s define capital most abstractly as a stock that produces some kind of flow. This stock can be land (with our without natural endowments that benefit people), raw materials, equipment, organizational structure, know-how, basic knowledge, specific knowledge, network ties, and/or influence or even control over other people. Depending on the type of stock, it may or may not belong to groups, as opposed to individuals. Depending on the laws and economic system, it actually belongs to some entities and not others. Likewise, capital can have many flows, from money to happiness to prestige, and those outputs either benefit or harm different people or groups. Some flows accumulate while others dissipate. It may be possible to purchase one kind of capital with another. A classic example is the lucky nouveau-riche who buys cultural capital in the form of a fancy educations for his kids. But such exchanges face barriers and inefficiencies.

People want a variety of things: not only concrete goods for themselves but also relative status vis-a-vis other people, feelings of belonging, freedom, and various other people’s welfare.

Education has many aspects. It can mean practical knowledge with social or economic value for the individual, the community, or both; intrinsically valuable knowledge that may not be socially valued; an indication of relative talent and/or ambition; an indication of membership in a specific social category (e.g., the social elite, a religious group, the military); a process of accommodating individuals to current authority and prevailing norms; or a liberation from those norms. People may consciously seek various combinations of these outcomes for themselves or their children and may experience outcomes that they did not intend. For instance, think of parents who believe they are purchasing economic advancement and good behavior, yet they watch their children turn into subversive radicals–or the reverse.

The socioeconomic distribution can be characterized in various ways. Chetty and colleagues write a lot about mobility, which means movement from one income or wealth percentile to a different one. It is important to remember that upward mobility must be exactly matched by downward mobility, holding other factors constant. For every first-gen. student who attends college, one college graduate’s child must not go to higher education, unless total enrollments rise (which will cheapen the relative advantage of college). This explains why the upper strata are so fierce about preventing mobility. Studies like Sampson et al. are focused on absolute levels of human welfare, such as victimization by violent crime. It would be possible for everyone to rise above reasonable levels. Bourdieu might be interested in the ratio of the top to the bottom, although his relatively classical Marxism is more about power than income. (And France, which he studied, is unusual in its combination of economic equality with political and cultural elitism).

There are many kind of relevant institutions, from neighborhood public schools that appear open to all but may be deeply exclusive because of residential patterns, to public universities that are genuinely accessible yet internally segregated and stratified, to well-endowed private institutions that heavily subsidize a minority of their students in the interests of “diversity,” which may primarily benefit the best off, and more.

There are many policy options. As I understand it, the elite of Mexico congregate at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM, which enrolls 356,530 students, admitting just 10% of its applicants, and charges $900 for tuition thanks to federal support and a limited budget. About half of UNAM students graduate. A considerable number of affluent but less ambitious Mexican students opt for private institutions in Mexico or US colleges that offer more individual services at higher cost but with less distinction. In contrast, many EU countries do not allow their universities to differ much in reputation or selectivity, and they typically serve students from their local areas, again, offering limited services. Even relative inexpensive and more accessible US public institutions usually provide many more services, beyond classroom instruction, compared to European universities. One would expect different results in terms of mobility, stratification, minimum welfare, median welfare, and equality–which are different measures.

Here are some possible takeaways for different kinds of people:

If you’re prone to admire selective (Akil Bellow calls them “highly rejective”) institutions because many of their less advantaged students move upward on the socioeconomic scale, focus less on those few students and more on the vast numbers who aren’t admitted. Furthermore, if selective institutions offer exclusive social capital, their impact on mobility could not be expanded. Making them bigger would dilute their benefits for their own students.
If you view selective institutions as merely exclusive and all about preserving social advantage, you have a valid perspective. However, you might consider the public goods that these institutions produce (from highly trained physicians to translations from Sanskrit) and ask how we else we might generate those goods.
If you want to promote mobility by giving money to selective institutions, you should at least Google their per-student endowments. Some US universities (but not including Tufts) could already offer completely free tuition for all their students below a high income threshold. You might ask what they are doing with your fungible contributions.
If you think that universities should invest more in services and quality of life to promote their own students’ equitable well-being, you might consider evidence that such investments also make those institutions more selective and less accessible (Bulman 2022). Institutions could instead expand the number and/or diversity of the students they admit, but that means serving a hypothetical constituency instead of an actual one, and it rarely happens.

Citations: Bourdieu, Pierre. Forms of Capital: General Sociology, Volume 3: Lectures at the College de France 1983-84. United Kingdom: Wiley, 2021; G. Bulman, “The Effect of College and University Endowments on Financial Aid, Admissions, and Student Composition,” NBER Working Paper 30404 (2022) http://www.nber.org/papers/w30404; Chetty, Raj, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong et al. “Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility.” Nature 608, no. 7921 (2022): 108-121; Coleman, James S. “Social capital in the creation of human capital.” American journal of sociology 94 (1988): S95-S120; Putnam, Robert D. 2001. “Community Based Social Capital and Educational Performance.” In Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society, edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, 58–95. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Sampson, Robert J.. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press 2012; Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.” Science 277, no. 5328 (1997): 918–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2892902.

assigning students to write cases

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Peter

I think of a “teaching case” as a true story that culminates in a difficult decision that has confronted an individual or group. The decision is typically difficult because of conflicting values, incomplete information, and unpredictable outcomes. A teaching case is useful as a prompt for discussion and to teach the disposition of acting wisely under uncertainty, or phronesis. I especially like cases in which groups must decide collectively, because those stories allow attention to the dynamics of group decision-making. Here is a selection of such “civic” cases: https://sites.tufts.edu/civicstudies/case-studies/

This semester, I have been co-teaching a course with Jennifer Howe Peace, who has extensive experience not only leading discussions based on teaching cases but also assigning students to write such cases. We did just that this fall. Each of our students selected a real-world situation, conducted research, wrote a 2-3 page case about it, and led a discussion.

I recommend this pedagogy for teaching the following essential civic skills:

Identifying decisions worthy of discussion. Actual groups often overlook or evade decisions that they should discuss and spend time on matters that don’t require deliberation. (See “a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.”) Writing a case means choosing a topic that should be discussed.
Identifying the tradeoffs and other difficulties, such as incomplete information and unpredictability.
Identifying who is in a position to make which choices. It is a costly distraction to ask what someone should do if they can’t do it. A good written case centers on one or more protagonists who are able to choose.
Deciding when to start and end the story. This side of the Big Bang, every story has emerged from many previous ones. The web of human interaction has no beginning. The choice of when to start a written story frames it for readers; it is an act of judgment. (For instance, does the story of the USA begin in 1492, 1619, 1776, 1789 …?) Writing a case teaches the skill and ethics of picking beginnings and endings well.
Eliciting interest and attention. A well-written case makes its readers interested. Getting people’s attention is a basic civic skill.

values of a university

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Peter

Leszek Kolakowski wrote “How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” in 1978. His short essay is a model of pluralism, in the sense that he intentionally combines values that are necessarily in tension.

Institutions can also be pluralist in that sense. Indeed, the best universities may be conservative liberal socialistic republican democratic anarchistic utilitarian communities. Yet they can also fall short on each or all of these criteria. Here is a framework for assessment:

Values espoused by a university	Characteristic failures
Conservative: Preserving wisdom and excellence from the past and conveying it to young people.	Arbitrary adherence to the past–or faddish novelty.
Liberal: Developing people’s capacity to be free individuals by allowing them to speak and think on their own.	Group-think; social pressure to conform. Or irresponsible individualism.
Republican: Preventing individuals from dominating others by using arbitrary power.	Domination, especially by senior faculty and administrators.
Democratic: Making decisions collectively and teaching that skill.	Bureaucracy and hierarchy–or incoherent decisions by individuals.
Utilitarian: Producing knowledge and applications that increase human (or animal) welfare.	Outcomes distorted by money or fame–or useless work.
Socialistic: Adjusting costs by income, pooling resources and distributing them equitably, and belonging–as a corporate body–to the state (in the case of public institutions).	Social stratification; competition for admission and employment; specifically bourgeois values.
Communitarian: Serving as a supportive, affective group	Leaving some students and employees out of the community–or becoming an exclusive community that sees itself as superior to outsiders.
Anarchistic: The knowledge created by free people within the university is unowned and belongs to a global commons.	Corporate enclosure and/or close affiliation with governments.

The Listeners

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Peter

Low dropped ceilings, buzzing fluorescent tubes,
Dim, orangish light with sporadic
Flashes, damp patches, dusty tables.

On the radio, words mixed with static.
Martinez thinks she might hear a number
That matches a room on the list she’d stuck

To the beige paint on the wall that's nearer
Her desk than where she stacks food in boxes.
She’d better check it out. She picks neither

The hall with endless cartons piled in blocks
Nor the one lined on both sides with locked doors,
But the passage with booths and swivel-chair backs

Receding down one side, and desks and drawers
Dimly visible through the smudged windows 
Of offices on the other. Plump drips

Soak the carpet, and lint collects in wads.
At an intersection, a woman kneels
By a vacuum-cleaner with wet wipes.

Both know neither knows words the other knows.
They stare silently until the radio
Nudges Martinez on with a burst of noise.

Hand on her nightstick, eyes on the long row
Of interior panes and hollow-core doors.
A long walk now, not one you’d want to redo.

You can go in this direction for days,
But are there vending machines stocked with food?
Lights flicker and the radio’s volume drops.

In the sudden quiet, she is afraid.
Something is off. She is watched. Every hair
On her arms rises, taut. What she'd feared ...

She is running, vision jerky, with her
Hands out as if to ward something away.
At the corner, the vacuum-cleaner's there,

But no woman. Martinez thinks she knows why.
She will call it in. "Incident," she says.
"Unresolved. Urgent." Things are awry.

She hears fizzling and some words. Her SOS
May have drawn their attention, or else not--
Martinez can never tell. Her breath subsides.

In place of panic, anger rises next.
Into the radio, she states: "I quit.
I'm out. Confirm." She strikes a cabinet

To make a bang they'll have to hear, quite
Sure the sound resounds on their end, too.
It does. They hear her and make themselves quiet.

Their strange stillness answers her, an undertow
Beneath the buzzing and the steady drip.
They don't want her to hear them. They wait to
Resume until she lets her radio drop.

(Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” meets “The Backrooms” of urban legend, in terza rima with slant rhymes.) See also: “Arachne,” “the laughter of the gods,” “what it looks like to live,” and “self help: a short story.”

civic leverage

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Peter

The illustration with this post illustrates an idea from my book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life, but it is not included in the book (because I just thought of it.)

The circle labeled “institutional design” refers to a process of establishing rules, norms, membership criteria, etc. for any group. Unless an institution evolves from its predecessors, it is usually designed by a single founder or a small leadership team. An inchoate collection of people cannot design an institution from scratch. Only once the design is reasonably effective will many human beings be able to coordinate their behavior sufficiently to accomplish anything worth discussing. The options for designs include democratic processes, market mechanisms, strong leaders, bureaucratic structures, and many more.

From a civic perspective, a good institution is one that encompasses some variety of perspectives and values and that enables its members to express their contrasting views in ways that inform the whole. The circle labeled “conversation about values” can mean a deliberative democracy, but it can take many other forms as well. For instance, although the Catholic Church does not purport to be a democracy, it is a rich platform for discussion and debate. Conversations about values increase the chances that a group will make wise choices and allow individuals to exercise voice and agency, which is part of a good life.

When people in a functioning group discuss values, they may motivate themselves to make sacrifices (the third circle in the diagram). Even an ordinary voluntary association asks people to spend time attending its meetings. A movement that confronts violent repression may ask its participants to put their lives at extreme risk. The degree of contribution varies, but some level is inevitable. “Organization is sacrifice,” as WEB DuBois once wrote.

Sacrifice can affect the original institutional design. For instance, an ordinary voluntary association will wax or wane depending on who gives time and money, and how much. A social movement may change the fundamental structure of the government itself.

This cycle must occur at a human scale. It’s about discussion, relationships, and individuals’ impact on groups. Participants must know one another. The maximum number of people who can engage together is not clear, but it is much less than the eight billion people who share our earth today. Thus the limitation of this cycle is its size in comparison to the scale of our problems.

The answer must be leverage–smallish groups affecting much larger groups by influencing governments, markets, corporations, or media-producers.

Leverage affords power, but it is problematic because it is unidimensional: some people affect others without knowing them or hearing from them. I think we must accept the moral disadvantage of leverage, but we can mitigate it by expecting the people who exercise power over others to do so as members of groups that are somewhat diverse and porous (or connected to other groups) and that go through the cycle of institutional design, conversation about values, sacrifice, and re-design. That process increases the odds that they will be wise in their treatment of strangers.

Embedding Engagement in Climate Policy

Posted on November 29, 2022 by Peter

On Wed, November 30, 2-3pm ET, the National Civic League is hosting a Promising Practices webinar, “Embedding Engagement in Climate Policy.” To register or get further information, click here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/promising-practices-webinar-embedding-engagement-in-climate-policy-tickets-463833156457

The webinar is based on the report, “Civic Engagement in American Climate Policy: Collaborative Models,” which seeks to develop federal policy designs based upon robust civic engagement models across multiple fields of practice. The report considers how to build the civic and institutional capacity for resilient and just communities in face of the twin crises of climate and democracy. It was published by Civic Green, an initiative of Tisch College.

More than sixty scholars, as well as practitioners from civic and professional associations and all levels of the federal government, contributed to the report. Three of them will join Rebecca Trout of NCL for a discussion:

Carmen Sirianni, editor-in-chief of CivicGreen, and author of Sustainable Cities in American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2020).

Mary Ellen Sprenkel, President & CEO, The Corps Network.

Merlene Mazyck, Acting Director, Workforce Development Partnerships Civilian Climate Corps Coordinator & NRE Liaison, US Forest Service

are we forgetting how to read?

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Peter

I really enjoyed Ezra Klein’s recent interview with my former colleague Maryanne Wolf, who is a great expert on reading: the neuroscience of this activity and how we learn to do it.

Klein notes in the interview that there are many very different forms of reading, and Wolf discussed two in some detail. Skimming (or scanning, or scrolling) is a type of reading that involves quickly looking over large amounts of text in search of information. In contrast, deep reading means becoming immersed or even lost in an invented world and leaving one’s regular life behind–except that we sometimes push beyond the author’s thoughts, forming connections and making creative leaps beyond the text. Whenever someone reads deeply, the whole brain lights up on an fMRI machine.

These days, people like me constantly practice scanning and scrolling. My phone reports that I do that for more than five hours every day. We reinforce this skill and habit, and our devices are cleverly designed to encourage it further. On the other hand, people like me are losing the habit of deep reading, and our devices discourage it.

Maryanne Wolf’s interview did not exactly alert me to this problem, because I have been explicitly worried about it for several years and I try to counter it. But Wolf and Klein offer a lot of relevant detail and context.

Why should we care? Scanning has many practical benefits, but it promotes confirmation bias (looking for scraps of information that we already agree with) and it is addictive. To feed this addiction may require more confirmation and more excitement–pungent details that reinforce what we already believe. Looking for these rewarding tidbits is like running on a treadmill.

On the other hand, deep reading may teach empathy and broaden the mind by exposing us to someone else’s perspective. Even if deep reading doesn’t educate us, it is still worthwhile. A life should not be completely filled with activities that prepare us to conduct other activities later on. The material of life is time, which should be spent in intrinsically valuable ways–or else, what’s the point of it all? Becoming immersed in a well-crafted fictional or historical narrative (or an elaborate argument) is one of the intrinsically valuable ways of being.

I’d have liked to hear Maryanne Wolf talk about comparable activities. In the interview, she mentions daily meditation and listening to music, and she models an in-depth dialogue with Ezra Klein. To that list we could add performing and composing music or dance, deeply studying works of visual art, making art, tinkering with machines, closely observing nature, and prayer. Some of these behaviors are older than reading and may be less susceptible to being distorted by new technologies. (One of Wolf’s influential points is that reading developed long after language did. Reading is not hard-wired, and people have constructed it in many different ways already.)

I suspect that the close observation of human-made visual objects affords many of the same advantages as deep reading and is threatened in the same way. Just as we scroll text, so we scroll images–risking our ability to see pictures closely. Close attention to works of beauty is a learned skill, and it is affected by the medium and context. It is, for instance, much easier to stare at a painting on a wall of a museum than on one’s phone.

I have great respect for serious meditation, but I am afraid that some versions may function as short-cuts, almost like apps that promise brief relief from the constant flow of information. To meditate seriously can enhance empathy and equanimity and is arguably an intrinsically valuable state of being. But why would we expect that five minutes of listening to one’s own inner voice (or to a recording of someone else) would provide the kind of expansion and “flow” promised by a major novel? We know that a novel will take many hours to read. This time commitment is a benefit, not a cost.

I generally presume that technological change was more rapid in the richest countries of the world between 1800 and 1970 than it has been during my lifetime. Industrial tools transformed life and nature during that period, and the pace has actually slowed since then. However, technology may have changed reading in a more dramatic way in the last decade than it did before. Klein confesses that, as a father of young children, he is often distracted by his phone. That couldn’t have happened to me in the first decade of the 2000s, because I owned no wireless devices. And for our kids (who are still young adults today) the only screens that could compete with books were the TV (with no streaming services) and a desktop computer. Books easily held their own against these possible distractions. I sympathize with parents and children alike if they can no longer concentrate on printed texts.

For me, deep reading (to whatever degree I actually obtain depth) is closely related to writing. My most recent post here was about The Tirukkural, by Thiruvalluvar, which I read too distractedly and disconnectedly but in an effort to read deeply. I don’t think I would have made it through that text or given it as much attention as I managed if I hadn’t begun to envision a written response as I read. The text began to confirm some theories I had formed about it, but it also challenged my theories, and as I read on, my mental draft evolved.

As the Internet age has progressed, my capacity to lose myself in someone else’s narrative has definitely weakened, to my deep regret. However, I can still become completely lost in the act of writing–unaware of how much time has passed or even where I am sitting while I type. For me, deep reading almost always involves writing, as does the close inspection of a work of visual art. I type quickly (albeit with two fingers), but I revise constantly. WordPress tells me that I saved 24 different drafts of the short post on the Kural. Revision is a process of listening to oneself, which can be solipsistic, but I am almost always writing about what other people are saying or have said. In that sense, I think writing is a process of empathy–at least at its best.

It’s possible that I need the idea of an audience (even the possibility of one reader) to motivate writing. That is probably unwise; we should be more self-reliant. Still, writing works for me as a partial path back to serious listening, and we all need one path or another toward that destination.

See also: “signal” (a poem on these theme), “a Hegelian meditation,” “Hilary Mantel and Walter Benjamin” and “information, news, and meaning” (from 2016).

The Kural

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Peter

The Tirukkural (or Kural, for short) by Thiruvalluvar is one of the acknowledged highlights of the Tamil literary tradition, which spans 25 centuries. The new English translation by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma has been highly praised, and I recommend it.

I usually find “wisdom literature” (didactic, aphoristic poetry) hard going, regardless of its background or main teachings. But The Kural is widely reported to be subtle, paradoxical, allusive, and lovely in Tamil, and Pruiksma’s English has those virtues. For instance, here is a paradoxical verse about renunciation:

Hold to the hold of one who holds nothing—to hold nothing
Hold to that hold [350]

And here is an example of a memorable metaphor:

Riches attained by those without kindness—like milk
Soured by its jug [1000]

I don’t know another unified poem that encompasses ethical directives (part 1), advice for monarchs (part 2), and erotic verse (part 3). The whole poem concludes with a section on “Sulking and Bliss,” which recommends playing hard-to-get. The narrator is never identified, but part 3 seems to weave together the voices of two lovers, their friends, and other characters, almost like a drama:

Though he’s done no wrong pulling back 
Brings him closer [1321]
...
Even free of wrong there is something in keeping 
From my love’s soft arms [1325]

Sweeter than eating—having eaten—sweeter than loving—
Sulking in love [1326]
...
Sulk my bright jewel—and may our night
Of pleading be long [1330]

The text was probably complete by 600 CE. There’s a long tradition of identifying Thiruvalluvar as a Jain, although many other religious traditions (including, implausibly, Christianity) have claimed him. David Shulman reminds us that we know nothing about the author, even whether a single person wrote The Kural. (Almost certainly, the text incorporates numerous quotations.) Shulman writes, however, that the milieu is the “mobile world of the [South Indian] city, with its face turned toward international seaborne trade and also toward heterodox religions, like Buddhism and Jainism, carried throughout South Asia and beyond by wandering monks and holy men.” Furthermore, the text largely avoids the kinds of claims that typically divide religious traditions, such as the identities and roles of deities or the origins and end of the world. A Buddhist, a Shaivite, or a Stoic could embrace The Kural, and that may be intentional. After all:

Delivering the complex simply and discerning
What others say—that is knowledge [424]
...
Those who can’t speak a few faultless words
Love to speak many words [649]

In the sections on personal ethics and the good life for regular people, The Kural advocates what Owen Flanagan has called (writing about Buddhism) “equanimity-in-community.” We should cultivate inner peace by restraining desire and craving. But we should use everyday ethical interactions to fill the space that might otherwise be occupied by those vices. The Kural emphasizes hospitality, generosity, friendship, forgiveness, nonviolence (ahimsa), “husbandry” (in the sense of cultivating one’s land and animals), and family. I didn’t pick up anything about yoga, meditation, or ceremony and ritual. Instead, passages like this evoke sociable, generous members of communities who are not overly concerned about their individual desires:

A well of abundant water—the wealth of the wise
Who love the world 

A tree bearing fruit at the heart of town—wealth
In the hands of good people [215-6]

The implied reader is generally male, and the division of roles is patriarchal, but we can modify the advice to be more egalitarian. The text charts a middle way between pleasure and renunciation. An adherent to a Hellenistic philosophical school, such as Stoicism or Skepticism, could endorse much of The Kural, except that nonviolence is more explicit and prominent here than in late Greek philosophy.

The long middle portion of the book–on leaders, politics, and governments–belongs to the “mirror of kings” tradition: encouraging rulers to be responsible and moderate. Although The Kural strongly urges nonviolence and vegetarianism as components of personal ethics, it depicts good leaders as honorable and effective warriors. Some of the advice here is about how to win wars and retain power.

The third part comes as a surprise, because it is suddenly about ardent sexual desire, which had been criticized earlier. The style is more lyrical now, and the speaker is sometimes female.

Apparently, in classical Tamil love poetry, the lovers wake up under separate roofs, spend the day together (perhaps illicitly), and part unwillingly at twilight, which is a confusing time of shadows and dimness. In this verse, the “it” is passionate desire:

At dawn it buds—all day it swells—and at dusk
It blossoms—this disease [1227]

And here the (presumably female) lover resents the evening but tries to summon some empathy for it:

Is your husband hard-hearted like mine—bless you
You wretched bewildering evening [1222]

Although love is a “disease” that causes much sighing and suffering, surely the conclusion of The Kural celebrates it.

dialogue and de-radicalization

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Peter

Some people argue that the deep problem with US democracy is polarization. I have some doubts about that thesis.* However, let’s assume it contains at least some truth. One possible remedy is direct: recruit people from opposite sides of our political divide to engage in dialogue so that they develop empathy and perhaps discover some common ground.

This remedy implies a moral equivalence between the ends of the spectrum, which I cannot endorse at a time when one end is flirting with fascism. It may imply a bias toward the political center. And it asks people who are targeted by hate to participate in encounters that may be difficult or even dangerous for them. I appreciated Stanford Prof. Hakeem Jefferson’s response to an experiment that brought representative Americans together across ideological divides:

Fair enough, but then how should we go about de-radicalizing people? In a report for the Democracy Fund, Andrew Blum assembles evidence from international sources that support eight types of intervention:

Assistance to individuals who want to exit from violent-extremist groups
Targeted outreach to individuals who are at risk of extremism
Voluntary codes of conduct for political and community leaders and media figures
Intergroup engagement
Setting norms against violence in existing groups
Peace education
Documenting and tracking acts of political violence
Improving police-community relations

Number 4 on this list encompasses dialogues between people who hold strongly opposing views. Thus dialogue is one of several strategies for de-radicalization that have empirical support. Blum argues that many of these approaches should be combined in a coordinated way, and he offers examples of communities, like Medellin and Oakland, that have done so.

Similarly, john a. powell argues that dialogue (or more precisely, “bridging”) is a remedy for toxic polarization, but only if the process attends to deep inequalities. People should not be asked to talk under conditions of oppression.

We should address all forms of violent political extremism. In the USA today, I think a large majority of the people who would meet a neutral definition of violent extremists would be right-wingers, but if there are left-wing extremists (or centrist ones), they need attention, too.

I encountered both sources cited above at an excellent meeting of the Kettering Foundation. See Andrew Blum (2021) The Costs of Political Violence in the United States: The Benefits of Investing in Communities, Democracy Fund; and john a. powell, Overcoming Toxic Polarization: Lessons in Effective Bridging, 40(2) Law & Ineq. 247 (2022), DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/25730037.645.

*class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; affective polarization is symmetrical; the “America in One Room” experiment etc.

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