Parenting Without Fear

You may have heard the story about the Minnesota mother who faced jail time after accidentally failing to properly strap in her child's car seat. Or the cops who arrived to question a mom who told her neighbors that her 9-year-old could help them do chores. Or the police officers who went door to door hunting for a man after he drove off from the mall with a toddler—who turned out to be his daughter. They'd been shopping. An onlooker had assumed he was a kidnapper and called the police.  We live in an age of fear, especially where children are concerned. Even as the world has become safer and richer, parenting has become a paranoid exercise in removing all possible risk from a child's life. This is exhausting for parents and even worse for children. Too many have been taught that they are fragile, weak, and in constant danger. Instead of getting experience problem-solving and bouncing back, they have grown up unable to rise to the challenges that life presents.  No journalist has more effectively chronicled the strange and dismal culture of contemporary child rearing than Reason contributor Lenore Skenazy, 59, who is not ashamed of being "America's Worst Mom." She got that nickname after she let her son, then age 9, ride the New York subway home by himself in 2008. "Half the people I've told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse," she wrote in a much-read piece for The New York Sun. "As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids."  Skenazy went on to found the Free-Range Kids movement, dedicating her career to investigating and explaining how today's parents became so afraid and what effects that fear is having on their children. In 2017, she co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow with a mission of encouraging schools and families to allow kids to "have some adventures" and therefore "grow resilient."  In January, Skenazy spoke with Frank Furedi, 71, a Budapest-born sociologist now based at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. When Furedi was 9, he had an adventure even more exciting than riding a subway by himself: His family got caught up in Hungary's anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956. "The thing that I remember about that moment," he told Spiked years later, "was the sheer optimism, the sense of power expressed by people who were normally extremely passive and fatalistic." After the Soviets crushed the revolt, the family fled to Canada, where Furedi was drawn into the student left. Anti-Soviet and anti-statist—but not delighted with the West's status quo either—he became a self-styled libertarian Marxist. He "saw the state not as a medium of liberation but as a medium of oppression, as something that limited the possibility for more radical change," he explained to Spiked.  Over the years Furedi has frequently taken stands on censorship, technology, environmentalism, identity politics, and other issues that set him apart from the rest of the left. He is also the author of many books about fear, parenting, and campus culture, including 2002's Paranoid Parenting, 2005's Politics of Fear, and 2016's What's Happened to the University. His latest, How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Continuum), looks at how fear has become the driving factor behind much of contemporary Western culture and the ways that has changed society for the worse.  In a wide-ranging phone conversation, Skenazy and Furedi discussed the origins of today's fearful parenting, how schools and universities became incubators of scared kids, and why a refusal to tolerate risk has, paradoxically, led to a generation of children who are more fragile than ever before.  Skenazy: Tell me the basic idea of your book. How does fear work?  Furedi: What I'm trying to establish in the book is: What do we fear in the 21st century? There is a lot of material that is available on how people feared in the past, and it's very clear that there have been a number of very important changes in the way we talk about fear.  For a start, in the contemporary era we talk much more about it. Fear is an overused word. We talk about it in relation to a lot more experiences than we did before—things that in the past would have been fairly uncontroversial, seen as being normal, not seen as a threat. I try to understand, Why is that?  For example, something as ordinary and banal as children making a transition from primary school to secondary school is seen as a big deal. You need to bring in all kinds of experts to make sure that children are not threatened by going to the big school.  My thesis is that the main reason we fear the way we do is because we have become increasingly prone toward medicalizing the threats we face. We tend to use the language of psychology rather than the language of morality or of politics or of social science to analyze the human condition. We tend to interpret the problems we face in terms of illness categories.  I see this all the time too. Even some grandparents who let their children walk to school and play outside now think that letting the grandkids stand on the sidewalk in front of the house to wait for the bus is too dangerous. But I don't usually think of that as psychological or medicalized. I think of it as just fear inflation.  What you describe as fear inflation is absolutely right. But the reason fear is being inflated so much is because we have a different idea of what a child or human being is like. We now seem to think that children are defined by their powerlessness, their vulnerability. We believe that children haven't got the psychological and the moral and the physical resources to deal with the challenges of everyday life.  One of the most interesting developments is that in the past, adults used to understand that fearing is not a bad experience for children. If children fear the traffic, that's a good thing. In the last 50, 60 years, more and more, we're arguing that the very act of fearing is itself a psychologically dangerous kind of knowledge. It can damage a child. And parents are told almost to insulate children from any possible experience that might induce a sense of fear in their kids.  There was a poll done in your country, England, of the worst fairy tales to tell children. I think the top result was "Little Red Riding Hood," because it's too scary. There's a wolf. The grandma is gone. The child gets eaten. Parents were saying that they were changing the ending because it was too traumatic for kids to hear about Little Red Riding Hood encountering the big eyes, big claws, and big teeth of the Big Bad Wolf.  I think that's happening everywhere at the moment. Old wonderful fairy tales are being Disneyfied to the point at which anything that is remotely scary is immediately censored, and there's this really silly assumption that children are unable to deal with these kinds of stories.  Whereas I'm sure that when you were a kid, you remember, these were precious moments. We remembered those scary stories quite well. We might have been a little bit frightened, but they did teach us a thing or two.  At the moment, what we tend to do is seek refuge in the mundane: banal story lines where everybody's got big smiles on their faces. That seems to be the way we think that children should be socialized and brought up—all the while forgetting that it's totally impossible to shield young kids from the experience of fear. Whether you like it or not, things are going to frighten them. That's part and parcel of growing up.  I think it's a good part. Fairy tales exist to teach you what not to do, but also to inculcate a certain sense of, "Ooh, that was scary….Tell it again!" You get used to it. You get a little comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.  Fairy tales communicated some very important moral messages about what is right and what is wrong, about good and evil. They really helped socialize young kids into a moral vision of the world.  We've become very estranged from using the language of right and wrong with kids. In fact, in America, teachers often tell children there is no right and wrong answer. Everything is possible. Instead of teaching young people what's good and bad and giving them very clear rules, we tend to rely on what I call the therapeutic technique of validating them—making them feel good. We seem to believe that the way to bring kids up is continually raising their self-esteem by smiling at them, by not criticizing them, by not using a red pen to correct their essays.  Children need to understand that failure is no big deal. They need to learn how to fail. They need to learn the difference between success and failure as early as possible, because that's what will give them strength later on.  How did we get to this point? You seem to suggest that something happened after the '70s. What was it?  At a certain point in Anglo-American culture, parents began to believe that they needed to be much more nurturing and caring [and] far less disciplinarian. Some of those beliefs were quite fine. But around the '60s and the '70s, these ideals mutated into ones that basically suggested it was really important that children were under adult protection as much as possible, because unless you were supervising them, they were likely to have very negative experiences.  It takes about two or three generations of parents before these ideals pervade the entire parenting culture. By the time the new parents that are bringing children up in the 1980s begin to become fathers and mothers, these kind of ideals have been totally internalized.  On both sides of the Atlantic, if you look at the elder generations of parents, people at my age or even older, they are far more permissive and far more chilled out than the youngest groups of parents. In fact, the younger generation of parents, the 26- and 27-year-olds, are more likely to be worried about virtually every dimension of a child's experience.  I still don't understand what happened in the '70s that made us start thinking we had to watch over them more closely. Was it a crime wave? Was it a certain movie that scared everyone?  The most important overall development that occurred in the 1970s was a shift in culture away from a confident, future-oriented belief in the capacity of society to do big things. You had President [Lyndon] Johnson talking about the Great Society in the 1960s. If you compare that to President [Jimmy] Carter's [1979] speech where he talks about the crisis of confidence in America, you can see a very big shift has occurred.  As you have this loss of confidence, and this happens all over the world, it's paralleled by an emotionalism becoming institutionalized, where psychology becomes the dominant medium through which we interpret everyday human experience, and where problems that used to be seen as normal are increasingly recast in medical terms, as medical issues that we need to have a diagnosis for.  It's in this context that you have a complete redefinition of what a child is, what they are capable of, what kind of risk and pressure they can handle. The whole therapeutic imagination that develops in North American societies fundamentally alters the way we view the child and the relationship of the child to the adults.  Yeah, the idea that fear damages them is really what we're talking about. I read articles that are so disheartening, because they teach parents who might not feel worried that their job is to be worried and their job is to be supervising their children every single second. I feel bad for them. I never put down helicopter parents, because they're being taught that only this kind of helicoptering is good parenting, is safe enough.  The key point for me is the underlying assumption that the real threat is not so much the physical injury that a child might have but the emotional one.  Let's talk about the word vulnerability. You did a study where you looked at how much it's being used today—and not with kids that are chained to the crib in an orphanage. How did we start seeing regular children as all vulnerable to depression and every other kind of trauma?  Mainstream psychology used to argue that children were much better at dealing with mental health issues than adults were, that when it came to trauma of all sorts, children could recover much faster than adults. That was the conventional wisdom. Then what happened was a number of studies were carried out in the late '70s and early '80s which began to suggest, bit by bit, that in fact we were wrong. Almost every dimension of childhood was reinterpreted as a potential threat to their mental health.  If you look at the way children then became educated, we became so focused on preventing them from having major mental health issues that, actually, we create problems that did not exist before. If you go to university in America or in England, you'll find that mental health issues are like the No. 1 priority that all the administrators are focused on.  Right. I've seen that at my own kids' universities. There are a lot of signs around: "Worried? Depressed? Don't hold it in. Come to the mental health center." On the one hand, it's nice. If a kid is having a tough time, I'm glad there's no stigma. But it does seem to assume that these problems are everywhere and that the university's job is to be proactive about noticing and having kids notice any time their emotional temperature is even a little out of whack.  It normalizes the conviction that sooner or later, if not in your first year then in your second or third year, you're going to have a mental health problem. When I go to my university and I'm going into the toilet, I look up and there's an ad for if you're thinking of suicide. If you're lonely and you haven't got friends, there's a clinic where they have therapy dogs so you can feel more relaxed. If you look around, there's about six or seven of these mental health adverts. That to me seems to be a very, very real problem. These days, almost the entire university is meant to be a safe space. The argument is, whenever you feel that you're under pressure, you're traumatized.  In your book you say, "powerlessness, fragility, and vulnerability are considered normal characteristics today." Do young people overcome these finally when they leave the university?  Well, not really. I think that unfortunately we now see the human condition—in other words, what it means to be a human—very much in these terms. So the idea of being vulnerable and being powerless is something we carry on with us, or we're meant to carry on with us, for the rest of our life. Even when we become adults, biologically mature individuals, we still are meant to have what they call "issues." We expect people to have a variety of problems dealing with uncertainty. As a result of that, there's a whole industry of professionals, from life coaches—I don't know if you've ever met a life coach?  I actually have a friend who was very much helped by her work coach. She was doing poorly, and somebody was advising her, like, "Don't say this to your boss" and "Don't do things that way." I don't think she knew how to succeed in the work world, so the coach really helped her.  I'm sure that a lot of coaches can help. But I think there is a problem. If we're now relying on people to tell us how to speak at work, what to say or not to say to our friends, how to bring up our children, how to make love to our partners, how to decorate our houses—so virtually every aspect of our life is subject to some kind of professional expertise—then it does have that effect of undermining our autonomy as individuals where we are, in a sense, making choices on the basis of our experience. [It diminishes] our own capacity for independent behavior and our ability to take responsibility for our action and to live with the consequences of the action that we've taken.  What interests me is that the fear is not just, like, "Oh, I might screw up and then I'll have to deal with the consequences." The fear is that if something bad happens, it's the end of the world and you will never recover. We go to the darkest possible place.  When my mom let me walk to school, I don't think her heart was in her throat every day, thinking, "I will feel so bad for the rest of my life if she's kidnapped, raped, and murdered." She didn't think that way. She might have thought that I would fall down and I would have to get up, but I don't even think she was worrying about that. So how come today we all go straight to "kidnapped, raped, and murdered" every time we let our kids out of our sight?  Worst-case thinking has become the norm in all institutions of society. That's been very much the dominant way that risk aversion—the fear of taking risks, the fear of experimenting, the fear of trying stuff out—takes. I think that "responsible parenting" these days is defined as a kind of child care that assumes the worst thing [that could possibly happen] and takes precautions to make sure that doesn't happen. Very often when you have discussions with intelligent people, they in their heart of hearts actually know that worst-case thinking is not very helpful.  My mom quit her job to stay at home with her kids. So obviously her first priority was us and our well-being. And yet she could let us go outside, ride our bikes, walk to school, go to the beach, even—the big bad beach. How did we get to "I could never forgive myself if…" being this line that all parents say and feel now?  Safety has acquired this enormous significance in our lives. It almost has a quasi-religious quality to it, where people regard everything that is safe as being, by definition, really, really good. And of course, the more we talk about safety and the more we focus on that, the more we become drawn to seeing a growing dimension of life and the world as unsafe.  Experiences that in the past we would have called a good risk are today seen in a very different way. Even that expression—"a good risk"—sounds irresponsible. Risk is by definition bad. It's not an opportunity to make things happen. Risk is entirely a negative phenomenon. So we have this very one-sided way of dealing with risk, where we want to shield ourselves from it.  Safety has become an obsession in a way that is quite unprecedented. I don't think there's ever been a time in human history where so many things were deemed problematic or unsafe.  How do we turn the ship around?  That's not an easy question to answer. It's something I struggle with. I think the way one does it is by personal example. You often get parents who demonstrate through their actions that having a robust orientation to their children's lives is going to make their kids stronger and more independent. I think that helps. The kind of work you guys [at Let Grow] are doing is really important in that respect, because it demystifies the reality that most parents live under.  In their heart of hearts, most parents know they need to give more space to their children, that they need more independence and more freedom to explore the world. I am quite optimistic that it's possible to make headway. Not overnight, but certainly possible.  The other thing that we need is to have more discussions on why taking risks can be an exhilarating and positive experience, not a road to disaster. I just think we need to challenge a lot of this stuff.  In many ways, I regard our safety culture as not unlike the story about the emperor having no clothes.  When the little boy says the emperor is naked. I think that if we basically ask some questions—some pointed questions, and point out the ridiculousness of all the stuff that's happening, maybe use a bit of humor alongside of it—I think we can make a positive impact.  This conversation has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.


Intersectionality 101

The Women's March came to Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Its purpose was to call attention to the incoming president's history of appalling behavior toward women—behavior to which Trump had all but admitted in the infamous hot-mic moment during an Access Hollywood taping. "When you're a star, they let you do it," Trump had said. "You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy."  This was a statement that rightly offended millions of Americans of all political stripes—Trump's electoral fortunes were never lower than immediately after the tape's release—and thus the march held the promise of uniting the country around a universal, positive message: It's not OK to abuse women.  More than half a million people descended on D.C. for the march, making it the largest protest in the United States since the Vietnam War era. It was a fairly awe-inspiring spectacle. Walking just a few blocks from my apartment, I was greeted by a sea of pink hats. Many of the protesters had chosen to reclaim Trump's own vulgar language, and I saw dozens of signs bearing some variant of the slogan "This pussy grabs back." Others were less confrontational: A young woman with pink streaks in her brown hair held a sign that said, "To love, we must survive; to survive, we must fight; to fight, we must love." Her friend stood next to her, waving a sign that featured a hand-drawn Donald Trump with the universally recognized emoji for excrement atop his head and the words Dump Trump.  All in all, the Women's March was a success for the nascent anti-Trump movement informally known as the #Resistance. More people showed up to protest than to attend the inauguration—something that seemed to infuriate the president, forcing several Trump staffers to make false statements about the relative sizes of the crowds. (This was the genesis of presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's now infamous line about "alternative facts.")  Yet many of the young leftists I interviewed told me they thought the protest was a disgrace. According to them, it became too inclusive.  "That's actually fucking right," said Laila, a 26-year-old Muslim woman and political activist, when I asked if that was why she did not attend the march. Although she lives in Washington, D.C., Laila skipped town that weekend. "I'm tired of being a poster child for someone else's attempt at inclusivity," she explained.  In her view, by including so many different perspectives, organizers had watered down the message and ended up marginalizing the people who should have been the focus. They took "an approach that co-opted the narratives of many who have already been fighting in this space, specifically, black women."  Laila was hardly the only young activist who felt that way about the Women's March. Juniper, a 19-year-old trans woman, castigated the event as "super white" and "super cisgender-centric." (Cisgender, the opposite of transgender, describes people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth.) She was skeptical of it at best, she said. And others were even harsher.  "I hated it," said Ma'at, a student of color at American University. "It was super cis-centric. It was exclusive of trans identities. It was whitewashed. It just in general was very co-opting and ineffective."  "I just felt like it wasn't very sincere," said Yanet, a student of color at the University of Maryland. "It just felt like a moment for people who aren't as involved or didn't care before to feel like, 'Oh, I did something.'"  "Insincere" and "ineffective" will strike many readers as surprising ways for leftist activists to describe the most well-attended mass march in four decades. But it makes perfect sense when one considers the priorities of the new activist culture, which prefers quality—intellectual purity—over quantity. A protest is successful only if it highlights the correct issues, includes the right people—people who check all the appropriate boxes—and is organized by a ruling coalition of the most oppressed. This is what intersectionality dictates.  Though the words intersectionality and inclusion sound like synonyms, they are actually in conflict with each other—a conflict perfectly encapsulated by the Women's March and activists' dissatisfaction with it. In case there was any confusion, Roxane Gay, a celebrated feminist author and voice of the left, tweeted this in response to the idea of people who oppose abortion participating in the event: "Intersectional feminism does not include a pro-life agenda. That's not how it works!"  Intersectionality is the operating system for the modern left. Understanding what it means and where it comes from is essential for comprehending the current state of activism on college campuses, at protests in major cities, and elsewhere.  Put simply, the idea is that various kinds of oppression—racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic inequality, and others—are simultaneously distinct from each other and inherently linked. They are distinct in the sense that they stack: A black woman suffers from two kinds of oppression (racism and sexism), whereas a white woman suffers from just one (sexism). But they are also interrelated, in that they are all forms of oppression that should be opposed with equal fervor. For instance, a feminist who isn't sufficiently worked up about the rights of the gay community is at odds with the tenets of intersectionality. She is a feminist, but she is not an intersectional feminist.  Holly, a 23-year-old Berkeley student whom I met at the April 2017 People's Climate March in Washington, D.C., told me that for her, intersectionality means all issues are "connected and tie in with each other, like indigenous rights, Black Lives Matter, and climate change."  Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University, coined the term intersectionality in her 1989 paper "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex." She needed a word to describe the lives of black women who were discriminated against because of both their race and their sex. Their experiences were fundamentally different from those of black men, who were privileged to the extent that they were men, and from those of white women, who were privileged to the extent that they were white.  "Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another," wrote Crenshaw. "If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination."  Crenshaw got the idea from a 1976 federal district court case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, in which five black women had sued the auto giant. They argued that G.M.'s policy of laying off the most recently hired employees violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits both racial and gender-based discrimination. Since it had been only a little more than a decade since the law had begun requiring G.M. to hire black and female employees, the most recent hires tended to be black women, the plaintiffs argued.  But the court determined that black women enjoyed no special protection under the law—the employees were protected from racial discrimination and gender-based discrimination, but not from the combined effects of these two categories. "The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against," wrote the court. "However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new 'super-remedy' which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended."  DeGraffenreid v. General Motors was Crenshaw's lightbulb moment. Black women lived in the midst of two kinds of discrimination—racism and sexism—and thus languished under an oppressive force greater than the sum of its parts.  "What Kimberlé is saying with intersectionality is that, in order to understand how power operates, you have to understand how people live their lives," says Alicia Garza, an activist and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. "Intersectionality is the very basic notion that we live multiple experiences at once. It's not just, 'Oh, I'm black and I'm a woman and I'm a black woman.' It's to say that I'm uniquely discriminated against. I uniquely experience oppression based on standing at the intersection of race and gender."  Though Crenshaw came up with the term, the concept itself predates her. As far back as 1892, the black feminist Anna Julia Cooper had criticized leading anti-racists for failing to advance the cause of black women. "Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood.…Then and there the whole race enters with me," she wrote in A Voice From the South.  For the Boston-based black feminist lesbian organization known as the Combahee River Collective, which existed in the 1970s and early '80s, "simultaneity" was the word used to describe the cumulative impact of the various oppressions they experienced. Their manifesto called not just for the abolition of racism and sexism but for "the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well." Avowed enmity toward all the various -isms: This is the strategy required by the intellectual framework that became known as intersectionality.  Patricia Hill Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, expanded upon Crenshaw's work, publishing Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment in 1990. Taking a cue from Crenshaw, she used the term intersectionality to refer to the interlocking matrices of oppression that serve to marginalize people. Initially focused on race and gender, Collins gave additional consideration to class as a matrix in her 1992 book Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology. Later, she would add sexual orientation to the mix. "Intersectional paradigms view race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and age, among others, as mutually constructing systems of power," she wrote in 2004's Black Sexual Politics. "Because these systems permeate all social relations, untangling their effects in any given situation or for any given population remains difficult."  That's quite the understatement, since every new addition to the list of interrelated oppressions makes the task even more cumbersome. There are more of these categories than most people might imagine, and every year, intellectual peers of Crenshaw and Collins propose new ones. Meanwhile, intersectionality has become a ubiquitous force on college campuses, where young people are taught to perceive all social issues through the lens of interrelated oppression and to find more grievances to add to the pile. Those who grasp the truth of intersectionality are said to be "woke," slang that describes someone who has awakened to the reality of their own privilege and adopted a progressive worldview.  The spread of intersectionality poses some problems for the left, since the theory divides people as often as it unites them. In recent years, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, a prestige drama based on feminist author Margaret Atwood's beloved novel, became mandatory #Resistance viewing for its depiction of an oppressive society where women have been enslaved by theocratic authoritarians—a future toward which Trump's America is hurtling, according to many on the left. But the second season, which debuted in 2018, drew criticism: The show was accused of a "failure of intersectionality" because it never grappled with racism, only sexism. "This is a show all about gender—it is built entirely around that concept—but until The Handmaid's Tale learns to make its feminism intersectional, it's going to keep letting its audience down," commented BuzzFeed TV writer Louis Peitzman.  In the years since Crenshaw introduced the term, intersectionality has broadened in both scope (that is, more kinds of oppression have been identified) and reach (more people are aware of the concept and what it implies).  The academy loves intersectionality, and the theory's popularity has soared in sociology, psychology, English, philosophy, history, and other social science and humanities departments. Indeed, more and more universities have created entire academic wings dedicated to studying specific kinds of oppression and explaining how they relate to others. Thus the rise of women's studies, African American studies, Hispanic studies, Asian studies, queer studies, and more.  What began at the intersection of race and sex now includes economic class, gender identity (the gender category to which a person feels attachment, which may be different from the person's biological sex), gender expression (the way a person looks and behaves), sexual orientation, immigration status, disability status, age, religious belief (though certain believers—such as Muslims—are perceived as more oppressed than others), and size (whether you are overweight or not).  In practice, intersectionality frequently forces the left to engage in self-cannibalism. Not all victims of oppression get along, since they're quite often in tension with each other. The intersectional progressive says, in effect: "We must fight racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and the Trump administration's immigration policies, and the wealthy, and global warming, and anti-Muslim bigotry, and ableism, etc." There are millions of people, though, who want to fight some of these things but not others—and if intersectionality requires them to commit to every single cause at once, they simply won't.  Some people might decry racism and sexism without fully understanding or agreeing with the demands of the trans community; indeed, there's a community of feminists who specifically reject the notion that trans women should be considered women. Other people might want economic equality for the poor but hold socially conservative views on gay rights, or oppose Trump's harsh treatment of immigrants but feel ambivalent about climate change. Still others might be strident progressives in nearly all respects but dissent from the notion that Muslims deserve space in the club when Jews do not.  That's not a theoretical example. In modern progressive parlance, Muslims are oppressed and Israel is the oppressor. Thus, anti-Islamic bias is viewed as a source of oppression, while anti-Semitism is frequently ignored—even though Jews tend to be much more politically progressive than Muslims.  There are three main problems with intersectionality: the education problem, the perfection problem, and the coalition problem.  First, the problem of education. One important implication of intersectionality is that the sole authority on an individual's oppression is the individual in question. White men who are heterosexual and cisgender shouldn't try to "mansplain" the struggles of black women or people of color: They aren't oppressed, so they can never understand what it's like, even if they happen to be extremely progressive or well-educated about left-wing causes.  At the same time, "it's not my job to educate you" is one of the most frequently recited catchphrases in activist circles. "It is not my responsibility as a marginalized individual to educate you about my experience," wrote Elan Morgan in a popular Medium post, which provided 21 arguments for why that statement was correct. The feminist news website Everyday Feminism has highlighted the work of YouTuber and transgender activist Kat Blaque, who opined in a video that it is "demeaning and dehumanizing to explain to people of privilege why people like them have historically and currently oppressed people like me." And in an article for HuffPost, the feminist writer Melanie Hamlett wrote: "Dear Men, It Is Not My Responsibility to Explain Feminism to You." Doing so, she said, required too much "emotional labor."  But here we have an obvious issue: Asking people about their oppression—even earnestly, out of a sincere desire to become better educated—is discouraged, and there's no other way to gain this knowledge, since the oppressed themselves are the only acceptable experts. This makes it frustratingly difficult to have supportive conversations about oppression, let alone tense ones.  The second problem, which follows logically from the first, is the perfection problem. Very few people can grasp with 100 percent accuracy the various requirements of intersectional progressivism, given that they aren't allowed to interrogate the oppressed, who are the only source of knowledge about their oppression. I once saw this issue explained perfectly in a blog post, written by a woman complaining about all that was required of her. "As an ally, my job is to not impose my own beliefs of what's 'right,' but instead amplify the voices of the oppressed people that I'm trying to be an ally for," she wrote. "Except that I shouldn't bug them about educating me, because that's not what they're there for. And it's my duty to talk about the issue of oppression in question, because it's the job of all of us, rather than the oppressed people, to fix it. Except that when I talk, I shouldn't be using my privilege to drown out the voices of the oppressed people. Also, I should get everything right, 100% of the time. Including the terminology that the oppressed people in question themselves disagree on."  Even the most well-intentioned person is bound to slip up. My Facebook feed recently served up a note from someone asking for help finding shelter for a wheelchair-bound neighbor. The immediate reply was this: "The only resource I have for you at the moment is in regards to the words wheelchair bound," accompanied by a link to a HuffPost article titled "Stop Saying 'Wheelchair-Bound' and Other Offensive Terms." You probably didn't know wheelchair-bound was offensive terminology—I certainly didn't—and in any case, you shouldn't ask someone in a wheelchair what the correct terminology is, because it's not that person's job to educate you.  In The Daily Beast, Kristen Lopez described the 2018 Marvel superhero film Ant-Man and the Wasp as "ableist"—that is, disparaging of people with disabilities—for including a character who suffers from chronic pain and is attempting to cure her condition. "Instead of helping Ava find a way to cope [with] (and not necessarily eradicate) her disability, the film seeks to provide a cure." That's a bad thing, Lopez wrote, because not all disabled people want to overcome their disability.  Who knew you could run afoul of disability activism by making a movie in which a character who suffers from chronic pain tries to overcome it?  The writer, academic, and activist Fredrik deBoer once described an event he witnessed: "A 33-year-old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, [was] lectured about patriarchy by an affluent 22-year-old white liberal arts college student." The veteran had committed a crime of the "wheelchair-bound" variety: He had called on other veterans to "man up" and denounce the war. What he could not have known, since he had spent much of his adult life on a battlefield rather than in feminist studies lectures, is that man up is a gendered term and thus unacceptable.  According to deBoer, these incidents frequently result in would-be allies growing disheartened with the cause. Nobody's perfect—and that's an issue for intersectionality, since it demands total adherence to all facets of its approach.  The third problem, which grows out of the first two, is the coalition problem: The demands of intersectionality make it extremely difficult to form strategic relationships for the purpose of advancing a single issue.  Take legalizing marijuana, for example. There are a lot of Americans who subscribe to a diverse range of ideologies with some interest in the issue. There are liberals and leftists who think using marijuana is no big deal, there are libertarians who think the government has no right to tell consenting adults what they can put in their own bodies, and there are even some conservatives who think enforcing federal marijuana prohibition is a waste of law enforcement resources and a blow to states' rights. People from all three of these groups could and should work together to advance the cause, despite their myriad differences on other issues. But intersectionality gets in the way, since the intersectional progressive only wants to work with people who oppose all the various strains of oppression—not just the ones relevant to the narrow issue of marijuana policy.  It's difficult to imagine that the campaign for gay marriage would have gone as relatively smoothly as it did had intersectionality been as ubiquitous a decade ago as it is today. This was in some sense the last nonintersectional leftist cause: Activists who supported it were extremely disciplined and specifically avoided tying it to other, more fringe issues. Believers in same-sex marriage, in fact, worked tirelessly to bring people on the political right into the movement, stressing that gay couples only wanted legal equality and sought to form the same kinds of family arrangements that social conservatives believe are desirable for society. The marriage equality movement even turned to Ted Olson, a Republican and former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to represent it in the lawsuit against California's Proposition 8, which had banned gay marriage in the state.  One of the strongest voices on this issue was Andrew Sullivan, a gay right-of-center writer who made the case for same-sex marriage in a 1989 New Republic article: "Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone," he wrote. "It provides a mechanism for emotional stability, economic security, and the healthy rearing of the next generation. We rig the law in its favor not because we disparage all forms of relationship other than the nuclear family, but because we recognize that not to promote marriage would be to ask too much of human virtue. In the context of the weakened family's effect upon the poor, it might also invite social disintegration."  That's a fundamentally conservative argument, crafted specifically to appeal to people on the right. And it worked. Support for gay marriage increased from 27 percent in 1996 to 67 percent two decades later. It is now legal everywhere in the United States.  This happy development is in large part due to the work of a coalition that would be impossible to put together in the age of intersectionality. Sullivan and Olson would almost certainly have been chased away by activists refusing to engage with them due to their conservative views on other policy matters.  Contrast the triumph of gay marriage with some examples of the setbacks and infighting that occur within an intersectional framework. During the June 2017 Chicago Pride Parade, organizers asked Laurel Grauer, a Jewish lesbian, to leave. Grauer had dared to carry a flag bearing a rainbow (the symbol of the LGBT community) and the Star of David. She was told her display made people feel unsafe. One might expect everybody who supports equal rights and dignity for LGBT people to be welcome at pride events, but from the standpoint of the organizers, the march was intended to be intersectional—meaning it was both pro-LGBT and "anti-Zionist," or opposed to the state of Israel's existence.  For the modern left, Jews are outranked by minority groups whose oppression is considered more serious than, and to some degree at odds with, their own. The incident at the Chicago Pride Parade is not a one-off. Linda Sarsour, an activist and Women's March leader, has made the dubious claim that anti-Semitism is "different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it's not systemic."  Sarsour and fellow Women's March leaders Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez have drawn criticism for their ties to controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who is widely considered to be anti-Semitic. Farrakhan has compared Jewish people to termites and asserted that "powerful Jews are my enemy." He made the latter remark at a February 2018 rally attended by Mallory, who distanced herself from his rhetoric but would not condemn the man himself—and who was steadfast in her commitment to working with his group.  Or consider an illuminating episode involving the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing group that got a huge boost from Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2018, the DSA tweeted that it would be unveiling its Medicare for All campaign, an effort to extend the national health insurance program to everyone in the country.  This was an unsurprising development—empowering the government to provide more comprehensive health care coverage is a fairly standard goal of liberal activists, not just the far left. More surprising was the furious blowback the DSA received from many of its own members who identified as disabled. The DSA's Medicare for All committee had apparently failed to consult the Disability Working Group about the campaign's rollout, which led the latter to protest that they were being excluded from relevant decision making. Since disabled people are especially affected by health care policy, the Medicare for All group had essentially failed to let disabled people be the experts on their own oppression—an intersectionality no-no.  Amber A'Lee Frost, a Medicare for All proponent and prominent DSA member known for co-hosting the left-wing Chapo Trap House podcast, hit back, accusing her critics of trying to sabotage the movement with their "pathological anti-social behavior." This made matters much worse: The comment was perceived as an attack on the autistic community.  Frost had committed ableism. Several dozen DSA members signed a petition demanding that she "immediately remove herself from any involvement, official or unofficial, with DSA's Medicare for All campaign, and should she not, that she be removed." This was necessary, because intersectionality means casting suspicion on organizing efforts if these efforts do not make the marginalized the center of attention.  College campuses, where the grievances are significant but the stakes are low, play host to some of the most farcical examples of intersectionality-induced bickering. A particularly revelatory crisis emerged at Evergreen State College in Washington during the spring 2017 semester.  Every year, activists there organized a Day of Action during which students of color would deliberately leave campus as a means of protest against racism. But in 2017, the activists decided to try something new: They would ask students of color to remain and white people to leave.  This tactic didn't sit well with Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen. Weinstein was a progressive—he had supported Sanders over Hillary Clinton the year before—and sympathized with the activists' goals, but he felt that the new plan for the Day of Action was unsound. "There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles, and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away," Weinstein told an administrator. The latter, he contended, "is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself."  In response, activists surrounded Weinstein outside his classroom and accused him of being a racist. "This is not a discussion!" they told him. A student named Hadley later told Vice correspondent Michael Moynihan that her message to Weinstein was: "You don't get to spread this problematic rhetoric."  A subsequent dialogue between the activist students and college President George Bridges similarly spiraled out of control. During the meeting, activist students repeatedly belittled Bridges, a meek, bow-tie-wearing white man, even instructing him to keep his hands at his sides and stop pointing at people. "Fuck you, George!" one student said. "We don't want to hear a goddamn thing you have to say." When Bridges asked the students to let him leave the room so he could use the lavatory, they told him to hold it.  Hadley would tell Moynihan that Weinstein should go be a "racist and a piece of shit" somewhere else. The campus police said they could no longer guarantee the professor's safety on campus, and he eventually resigned.  Each of these examples shows how activists who worship at the altar of intersectionality felt compelled to turn on people for committing venial sins. It's not enough to share the intersectional progressives' goals relating to a specific issue: One must also support their tactics, know their language intuitively, defer to the wisdom of the oppressed without either speaking on their behalf or expecting them to speak for themselves, and commit to every other interrelated cause.  The intersectional approach often seems petty and performative. The symbol of the gay rights movement, the rainbow flag, was designed by activist Gilbert Baker in 1978. Its colors were pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet, which he said represented sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity, and spirit. In 2017, Philadelphia debuted a new rainbow flag to celebrate Pride Month—this one including brown and black stripes, in recognition of people of color.  Many members of the LGBT community—particularly younger ones, according to BuzzFeed—liked the new intersectional flag, which takes a stand against homophobia and racism. But many older LGBT activists were confused, since none of the original colors reflected ethnicity at all. Will the flag eventually have to add stripes for Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans? What about the disabled community and those who languish under the oppression of sizeism?  The thinkers who first defined intersectionality probably hoped that by linking all kinds of oppression together, they could force people to fight against a wider swath of bad things. The University of Maryland's Collins hinted at this when she wrote that "many African Americans deny the existence of sexism, or see it as a secondary concern that is best addressed when the more pressing problem of racism has been solved. But if racism and sexism are deeply intertwined, racism can never be solved without seeing and challenging sexism." Collins wanted to tie the problems together so that everybody fighting one would have to fight the other, too.  But the more -isms added to the pile, the more tenuous this approach becomes. It's all well and good to say that sexism is as pervasive a problem as racism, but the intersectional activist of 2019 is reaching much further and making many more demands. From the standpoint of this movement, a woman marching against the Republican Party, against police brutality, against war, against sexual violence, and for Israel's existence is not an ally or potential ally: She is an enemy. She is part of the problem. She has failed the test of intersectionality. She is not, as the poet Elisa Chavez put it, "intersectional as fuck." She might as well have voted for Trump.  A hopelessly divided opposition movement that cannot resist cannibalizing itself over intersectionality-induced disagreements is not going to be very effective. In fact, it's probably a good recipe for the continued political dominance of the Trump coalition.  Adapted from Robby Soave's new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, by permission of All Points Books/St. Martin's Press.


freedombunker--2019-06-28--Enumerated Powers and the Census Case

Enumerated Powers and the Census Case

Yesterday, in Department of Commerce v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration's rationale for adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census was pretextual and therefore invalid under the Administrative Procedure Act. I think this decision was correct, for the reasons Chief Justice John Roberts explains in his majority opinion. But the Court would have done better to simply rule that the inclusion of the question on the census was outside the scope of federal power under the Enumeration Clause of Article I of the Constitution. The majority's reasons for rejecting that argument strike me as weak.  Article I Section 2 of the Constitution requires Congress to make "an actual enumeration" of the population every "ten years," for purposes of apportioning representation in the House of Representatives. The enumeration is to be done  "in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct." This latter phrase undoubted gives Congress broad power to determine exactly how the census shall be done. But broad power is not unlimited power.  Congress clearly has the authority to include almost any questions on the census that would increase the accuracy of the resulting count. It also has the power to ask a wide range of questions that would not have a significant effect on accuracy either way (especially if those questions involve information-gathering of a type authorized by Congress' other enumerated powers, which would provide additional authorization for them).  But matters are different if the addition of a given question is likely to reduce the accuracy of the count. Some of the powers the Constitution grants to the federal government are powers to regulate a particular type of activity, largely without regard to the purposes for which the regulation is undertaken. For example, Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce can be used for a wide range of different goals, some of which may even conflict with each other.  By contrast, the Enumeration Clause is a power to achieve a particular type of objective: in this case an accurate head count of the population of the United States. Indeed the Enumeration Clause is a rare constitutional provision that not only grants authority to pursue a particular objective, but actually mandates it. The Clause requires the government to conduct a new enumeration every ten years. The power in question therefore cannot be used to authorize policies that actually impede its mandated purpose. And that is exactly what the addition of the citizenship question would do.  Survey research experts, including the federal government's own experts at the Census Bureau, agree that including the citizenship question would substantially reduce the accuracy of the count. The reason is that a significant number of immigrant and other households that include non-citizens would likely choose not to participate, for fear that they or their relatives might end up getting targeted for deportation as a result. Even if people in question ultimately forestall deportation by prevailing in court, a legal battle of this type can be painful, costly, and disruptive. Many would prefer to avoid even a small chance of inviting it.  While the Enumeration Clause gives Congress the power to choose the "manner" of conducting an enumeration, that is not the same thing as using that power to undermine the very goal it is supposed to achieve. The power to do X is not also a power to impede X. If Congress and the president had unlimited authority to conduct the census in any way they want, unconstrained by the requirement that the methods must further enumeration rather than impede it, they could, for example, adopt a law under which anyone counted by the census would have to pay a tax in order to be included. This would clearly be a regulation of the "manner" of enumeration. But, just as clearly, it would be unconstitutional, because it would lead to widespread undercounting by creating an incentive to avoid being counted.  The Trump administration's proposed citizenship question is just a less extreme example of the same problem. Indeed, the administration likely added the question precisely because it would reduce the accuracy of the count in states with large immigrant populations, thereby reducing the number of congressional seats allocated to those states. But even if the administration's motives were pure, the addition of this question still undermines enumeration rather than furthers it, and thereby falls outside the scope of the federal government's Enumeration Clause powers.  A ruling against the question based on the Enumeration Clause would have ended the case immediately (as opposed to the current remand for further consideration of possible alternative rationales for including the citizenship question). It also would have obviated the need for consideration of the administration's motives and the procedure by which it decided to include the question.  Chief Justice Roberts' best argument for ruling that the citizenship question falls within Congress' authority is that a similar question was included in all but one census between 1820 and 1950, and the question was also given to sub-samples in several censuses since then. But this evidence is less impressive than it might initially seem to be.  During the 1820-1950 period, we did not have social science evidence showing that inclusion of a citizenship question would reduce accuracy. While the meaning of the enumeration power was the same, whether the inclusion of a given question furthers the authorized purposes of that power or impedes it is a factual question. This is one of a number of situations where originalists and textualists can and should take account of new factual evidence. The resolution of any legal case depends on a combination of textual meaning (which, at least under originalist assumptions, does not change) and factual evidence (which can indeed change, and often does).  Moreover, during most of the time from 1820 to 1950 there were few or no federal immigration restrictions, and even less in the way of systematic federal efforts to deport undocumented immigrants from the interior of the country. Thus, there was little incentive to avoid participation in the census for fear of deportation. The situation today is, for obvious reasons, very different.  Roberts also notes that the census has always been used to ask a variety of other demographic questions, such as ones about respondents' age and sex. But including these questions creates little or no risk of creating a significant undercount.  Assessing whether the inclusion of a census question undermines the goal of enumeration would require courts to consider social science evidence. But no more so than is routinely done in a wide range of other routinely heard by federal courts, such as antitrust cases and redistricting cases where plaintiffs allege racial discrimination. It might be reasonable to defer to the federal government's judgment in close cases, where the evidence is ambiguous. But not so in cases like the citizenship question, where it is overwhelmingly on one side.  As both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer (in his partial concurring opinion), note, if the federal government cannot include a question on citizenship in the 2020 census, it can still do so in other surveys. Census Bureau experts recommended exactly that course of action. It is likely that a survey of citizens can be authorized under one of Congress' other enumerated powers (especially under the very broad modern interpretations of some of them), even if not under the Enumeration Clause. But the federal government cannot include such a question in the census mandated by the Enumeration Clause.  This flawed part of yesterday's decision probably will have little effect on cases outside the context of the census. In that sense, the harm it causes will be limited. But it is still unfortunate that the five conservative justices (all of whom joined this part of the the Chief Justice's opinion) signed on to such a seriously flawed ruling which allows a federal power to be used for the opposite of its textually required purpose. That goes double for those, like Clarence Thomas, who are generally very careful to enforce structural constraints on federal power in other contexts.  The four liberal justices also deserve some criticism here. They all refused to sign on to this part of Roberts' opinion, which suggests they likely disagree with it. Yet none bothered to explain the grounds of that disagreement. It would have been helpful if they had done so.  UPDATE: It is worth noting that non-citizens (and other non-voters) have always been included in the "enumeration" required by the Enumeration Clause for apportionment purposes. Indeed, such inclusion is mandated by the text of the Constitution, which mandates a count of all "free persons," except for "Indians not taxed."


freedombunker--2019-07-07--Our Big Brains Are Pre-Wired for Love Friendship Cooperation and Learning

Our Big Brains Are Pre-Wired for Love, Friendship, Cooperation, and Learning

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, by Nicholas A. Christakis, Little, Brown, 544 pages, $30  We finally have an answer to the nature/nurture debate, and it appears to be yes.  It took billions of years of biological evolution for bacteria to morph into humanity, but the human ability to learn and to teach each other new tricks means that useful behaviors and ideas don't have to take biological time to spread through the species. Their emergence, the ways we spread them, and the ways they change over time amount to a kind of cultural evolution.  A cultural discovery—our pre-human predecessors' capture of fire—externalized the digestive system that evolution had shaped for our variety of ape. That freed biological energy to grow a big brain. In Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society, Nicholas Christakis argues that this coevolution has equipped us with a "social suite" of traits that arose through genetic evolution and that have been amplified by cultural evolution, which has in turn influenced our genetic evolution toward propensities that support the social suite. These include the "capacity to have and recognize individual identity," "love for partners and offspring," friendship, social networks, cooperation, "preference for one's own group ('in-group bias')," "mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)," and "social learning and teaching."  Christakis, a physician and a sociologist at Yale, buttresses his arguments with evidence from social science, evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, and network science. He presents evidence from beyond the laboratory, drawing examples from the history of shipwrecks and communes and from studies of elephants, bonobos, and dolphins. He even addresses philosophical objections to his claim that our genetic and cultural history prepared humans "to make a particular kind of society—one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning."  Christakis embraces a "glass is half full" interpretation of human sociality, but he doesn't shy away from the inseparable shadow consequences of the same traits: Our ancestors learned to be kind when they learned to be more effective groups of killer apes. People all over the world observe social norms of fairness and reciprocity, even without direct reward, in part because our otherwise different societies punish non-cooperators. We cooperate with others in our in-group in order to compete with out-groups. In gene-culture coevolution, contradictory and conflicting behaviors can power a kind of evolutionary arms race. Nature (pre-wired capabilities, such as the capacity for cooperation and social learning) and nurture (cultural development of teaching) can act as complementary forces, together driving the elaboration of cultural forms and the expansion of the social suite.  "Evolution," Christakis writes, "provides the underlying foundation for human culture by equipping us with the ability to cooperate, make friends, and learn socially."  Key to Christakis' arguments are the concepts of pre-wiring and exaptation. While a hardwired trait might equip a species of bird to voice the same tune everywhere in the world, a species pre-wired for birdsong might invent different songs in different environments. The former is often used to describe traits that are reflexive or instinctive. Hardwired compels; pre-wired enables.  Exaptation is an evolutionary trick that human beings are not alone in exploiting, although we are particularly good at it. It means that a species can repurpose a trait like feathers, which probably evolved as a form of thermal insulation, to do other things, such as fly. Exaptation also bridges genetic and cultural forms of evolution. While long, slow, biological evolution provides us (and other species) with a strong tendency for parents to form lasting partnerships—"pair-bonding"—human cultures provide a wide variety of cultural forms, such as monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry.  The biological advantage of pair-bonding is that the father stays around to help the mother take care of the offspring they have produced. This close partnership assures the father that he is indeed helping raise his own children, which is particularly useful in our species, which requires an investment of years of care before a child can act as an adult. And it assures the mother that she has help finding food and shelter while she births and nurtures offspring. As Christakis puts it: "The evolutionary psychology of both men and women is to exchange love for support."  Christakis claims that over time, humans learned to extend the affection and partnership we have with our mates to our kin, then to our kin's friends, then to all the members of a strongly defined group—an expanding circle of attachment that enables us to form social networks and complex societies. When maternal love becomes marital love and those forms of love expand to create friendships, a norm of expectations spreads through the group: Friends expect reciprocity, a balance of favors asked and offered. Relationships with in-laws take a variety of forms in different human societies, but in all cases they expand the circle of people one expects to trust. As networks of trust grow, a norm of cooperation emerges: Everybody expects others to help further the aims of the in-group. I may do favors for people in my group, even if they aren't kin and even if they haven't done anything for me, because I know that I can also count on other members of my group to do me favors.  In any group, some people will be willing to cooperate and others will "free ride" on the work of the cooperators. When free riding reaches a certain point, cooperation breaks down. Extensive research suggests that "altruistic punishment" may be a kind of social glue that maintains an acceptable level of cooperation. Think of how you'd like to tell off that person who cuts in line ahead of you. That's altruistic punishment—a norm upheld not by a police force but by public opinion.  Culture, as Christakis defines it, is "knowledge that is transmitted between individuals and across time, that can be taught and learned, and that is distinctive to groups…a set of beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts that are shared by members of the group and are typical of it, and that are socially transmitted." Other species exhibit social learning, but human beings are by far the best at deliberately inculcating other members of our group with useful knowledge. In other words, we're the best at teaching.  Human beings have compulsions and talents—some that most would consider "good," and some that most would consider "not good." We also have tools to create workarounds for the "not good" part: norms that enable people in groups to cooperate, even if they don't know each other; punishment that keeps "free riding" low enough that people will contribute to public goods; reputation that enables trust among people who may not have dealt with each other before.  The critical uncertainty is choice: Will our pre-wiring—together with toxic cultural forces, such as racism—lead to fiercer, meaner, better-armed tribal conflict? Or will the part of us that expands love from mates to friends to shipmates come to dominate? Christakis is optimistic. I hope he's right.


freedombunker--2019-08-14--Why Read Economic Theory

Why Read Economic Theory?

What is most exciting about the Austrian methodology of economic inquiry is that, to quote Mises himself, it does not relegate economics to the classrooms, to the “statistical offices,” and to “esoteric circles.” It instead offers to all who seek such knowledge, a body of insights as to how men relate to other men and how society itself developed from conditions of impoverished despair to a world of abundance and comfort.  One of the most devastating aspects of the rise of mathematics and modeling as a method of economics is that this shift pushed economics as a science outside the interest— and grasp— of the layperson. It became a field of “expertise,” for professionals who were well-trained in complex formulas, statistical analysis, and arithmetic activities. But economic phenomena cannot be properly or even accurately understood by downplaying the role of human action in society. After all, what is an economy except a metaphor for the thousands of activities, judgements, allocation decisions, preference scales, and interpersonal relationships between real, living, and reasoning human beings?  One of the lessons that we derive from studying economics is that the world of wealth that we see around us is not a given in nature. Man did not suddenly appear in the context of a highly refined structure of capital, where there was a completely built out division of labor and developed set of production factors. These things needed to be built and established over the course of thousands of years and, importantly, they were built by human actors who withheld consumption and instead invested their savings into the structure of capital. Over time, the more that this was done, the more later generations would benefit from such past decisions.  But they were, in fact, decisions. These decisions were made by human beings who determined that in their choice to push gratification into the future, they would receive more satisfaction than if they had consumed in the present. Moreover, such decisions could only take place to the extent that they were allowed; to the extent that states were unable to prevent such decisions from being made. That is, it was from the freedom of private property owners to freely allocate their resources without state prevention that was the source of the wealth that surrounds modern society.  In ages past, in the pre-capitalist era, life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short. It was Darkness and Old Night, where men lived lives of mere subsistence. It was the buildup of capital and the ability for mankind to become more productive with the advent of industry that ultimately created the setting for a more prosperous age.  The world that we see around us is a result of the free market order and we know this not because we have tested and compared societies that have the market with those that do not, but because we understand the necessary relationships that men have with each other, with scarce resource allocation, with the capital structure, and with nature itself. It is in studying economic theory that we have the tools required to interpret the course of historical material progress. And with the ability to interpret, we also have the ability to appreciate and hold in high regard the contributions of capitalism and the market order.  Liberty can be lost, but so can the benefits of capital accumulation. The well developed capital structure is not a given. It can be eroded by central banks, by government policies and regulations, by a mob of people who do not understand economics but who nevertheless swarm Washington on behalf of policies that will only undermine the progress afforded to us by capitalism. Capital is not self-sustaining; once built up, once it has provided benefits to the world, it can been destroyed, undermined, and consumed.  This is in complete contradiction to the narratives of Marxists like Thomas Piketty, who argue that the return on capital is deterministic; merely to own capital is to guarantee future cash flows to oneself. But this is monumentally false. Among the most important roles that the capitalist plays is as a preserver of capital; he bears the burden of ensuring that capital is invested in ways that consumers demand and is allocated toward ends that fulfill not merely the capitalist’s own whims, but the actual demands of society, as communicated via the price mechanism.  This means that economic progress depends on the decisions of the owners of capital, who respond not to a marketplace that nudges and suggests arbitrarily, but that threatens to wipe out the value of the capital upon a mistaken interpretation of consumer demand. But while the chance of a capitalist making a poor decision is always present in a world of uncertainty, it is the state, which is always eager to intervene in the market, that is the more systemic and economy-wide threat to the capitalist order.  In our time, the intellectuals, the masses, the politicians, and the media all continue to suffer what Mises referred to as the Anti-Capitalist mentality. They propagate the very ideas that will, if employed, undermine the living standards and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. The narratives that they push about wealth, about economic progress, about inequality, and about how the state can save the world are the narratives of destruction and it is the burden of the student of sound economics to counter this message.  This is why the understanding of economic theory is important. In the history of the social sciences, we only recently came to understand the nature of economic activity; economics is, as Mises taught us, the youngest of the social sciences. But in our time of bastardized economics and the false hope of state-driven progress, it is imperative, now more than ever, that we attain the intellectual ammunition to counter these themes. There is beauty in understanding the logic of man’s material progress, of gaining appreciation for a world of abundance that is not a given, in seeing the actual cause and effect relationship between liberty and prosperity. Mankind cannot expect continued progress if the components that led to prosperity are decimated. And in studying economics, we have the ability to see these components with staggering clarity.  And further, we have in sound economic theory the lens through which we can properly decipher the various problems of our time. So often, we are met with competing storylines by statists of various stripes, all working to offer their own government solutions and centralization schemes to the troubles of the day; from inequality to joblessness to the provision of various goods and services. But in so many ways, the lack of a sound economic theory is precisely what unites the technocratic advisors and bureaucratic shapers of public policy. Thus, it is incumbent on those of us outside this realm to continue the depth of our own knowledge and to advance a better interpretation of the economic phenomena that surrounds us.  We must read and understand economic theory because in knowledge of the truth, there is hope. To quote Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false, indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.”  We read, and we share what we have come to understand with those around us. We share our knowledge with our children, to the next generation, in hopes that what has been gained shall not be lost. In our embrace of an Austro Libertarian grand narrative of the modern world, we must point out again and again that it was the freedom characterized by the private property system and free enterprise that brought mankind forth from the ravages of nature; and it is by the same that mankind can continue with such progression despite the narratives of statism in all its forms— from interventionism to socialism and everything in between.  That is why we read economic theory.  The post Why Read Economic Theory? appeared first on LewRockwell.


globalresearch--2019-02-06--Why the War on Conspiracy Theories Is Bad Public Policy

Why the War on “Conspiracy Theories” Is Bad Public Policy

A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski  On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying  At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.  But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying.  When you watch YouTube videos, the YouTube search engine algorithm displays links to other videos that you are likely to be interested in. These obviously do not constitute “recommendations” by YouTube itself, which exercises no editorial oversight over content posted by users. (Or at least it didn’t until it joined the war on conspiracy theories.)  The second and larger problem is that while there may be near-universal agreement among reasonable people that flat-earthism is wrong, there is only modest agreement regarding which health approaches constitute “phony miracle cures” and which do not. Far less is there any agreement on “claims about 9/11 and other historical events.” (Thus far the only real attempt to forge an informed consensus about 9/11 is the 9/11 Consensus Panel’s study—but it seems unlikely that YouTube will be using the Consensus Panel to determine which videos to “recommend”!)  YouTube’s policy shift is the latest symptom of a larger movement by Western elites to—as Obama’s Information Czar Cass Sunstein put it—“disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories.” Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule’s 2008 paper “Conspiracy Theories,” critiqued by David Ray Griffin in 2010 and developed into a 2016 book, represents a panicked reaction to the success of the 9/11 truth movement. (By 2006, 36% of Americans thought it likely that 9/11 was an inside job designed to launch wars in the Middle East, according to a Scripps poll.)  Sunstein argues that conspiracy theories (i.e. the 9/11 truth movement) are so dangerous that some day they may have to be banned by law. While awaiting that day, or perhaps in preparation for it, the government should “disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories” through various techniques including “cognitive infiltration” of 9/11 truth groups. Such “cognitive infiltration,” Sunstein writes, could have various aims including the promotion of “beneficial cognitive diversity” within the truth movement.  What sort of “cognitive diversity” would Cass Sunstein consider “beneficial”? Perhaps 9/11 truth groups that had been “cognitively infiltrated” by spooks posing as flat-earthers would harbor that sort of “beneficial” diversity? That would explain the plethora of expensive, high-production-values flat earth videos that have been blasted at the 9/11 truth community since 2008.  Why does Sunstein think “conspiracy theories” are so dangerous they need to be suppressed by government infiltrators, and perhaps eventually outlawed—which would necessitate revoking the First Amendment? Obviously conspiracism must present some extraordinary threat. So what might that threat be? Oddly, he never explains. Instead he briefly mentions, in vapidly nebulous terms, about “serious risks including the risk of violence.” But he presents no serious evidence that 9/11 truth causes violence. Nor does he explain what the other “serious risks” could possibly be.  Why did such highly accomplished academicians as Sunstein and Vermuele produce such an unhinged, incoherent, poorly-supported screed? How could Harvard and the University of Chicago publish such nonsense? Why would it be deemed worthy of development into a book? Why did the authors identify an alleged problem, present no evidence that it even is a problem, yet advocate outrageously illegal and unconstitutional government action to solve the non-problem?  The too-obvious answer, of course, is that they must realize that 9/11 was in fact a US-Israeli false flag operation. The 9/11 truth movement, in that case, would be a threat not because it is wrong, but because it is right. To the extent that Americans know or suspect the truth, the US government will undoubtedly find it harder to pursue various “national security” objectives. Ergo, 9/11 “conspiracy theories” are a threat to national security, and extreme measures are required to combat them. But since we can’t just burn the First Amendment overnight, we must instead take a gradual and covert “boil the frog” approach, featuring plenty of cointelpro-style infiltration and misdirection. “Cognitive infiltration” of internet platforms to stop the conspiracy contagion would also fit the bill.  It is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that Sunstein and Vermeule are indeed well-informed and Machievellian. But it is also conceivable that they are, at least when it comes to 9/11 and “conspiracy theories,” as muddle-headed as they appear. Their irrational panic could be an example of the bad thinking that emerges from groups that reflexively reject dissent. (Another, larger example of this kind of bad thinking comes to mind: America’s disastrous post-9/11 policies.)  The counterintuitive truth is that embracing and carefully listening to radical dissenters is in fact good policy, whether you are a government, a corporation, or any other kind of group. Ignoring or suppressing dissent produces muddled, superficial thinking and bad decisions. Surprisingly, this turns out to be the case even when the dissenters are wrong.  Scientific evidence for the value of dissent is beautifully summarized in Charlan Nemeth’s In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business (Basic Books, 2018). Nemeth, a psychology professor at UC-Berkeley, summarizes decades of research on group dynamics showing that groups that feature passionate, radical dissent deliberate better, reach better conclusions, and take better actions than those that do not—even when the dissenter is wrong.  Nemeth begins with a case where dissent would likely have saved lives: the crash of United Airlines Flight 173 in December, 1978. As the plane neared its Portland destination, the possibility of a problem with the landing gear arose. The captain focused on trying to determine the condition of the landing gear as the plane circled the airport. Typical air crew group dynamics, in which the whole crew defers to the captain, led to a groupthink bubble in which nobody spoke up as the needle on the fuel gauge approached “E.” Had the crew included even one natural “troublemaker”—the kind of aviator who joins Pilots for 9/11 truth—there almost certainly would have been more divergent thinking. Someone would have spoken up about the fuel issue, and a tragic crash would have been averted.  Since 9/11, American decision-making elites have entered the same kind of bubble and engaged in the same kind of groupthink. For them, no serious dissent on such issues as what really happened on 9/11, and whether a “war on terror” makes sense, is permitted. The predictable result has been bad thinking and worse decisions. From the vantage point of Sunstein and Vermeule, deep inside the bubble, the potentially bubble-popping, consensus-shredding threat of 9/11 truth must appear radically destabilizing. To even consider the possibility that the 9/11 truthers are right might set off a stampede of critical reflection that would radically undermine the entire set of policies pursued for the past 17 years. This prospect may so terrify Sunstein and Vermeule that it paralyzes their ability to think. Talk about “crippled epistemology”!  Do Sunstein and Vermeule really think their program for suppressing “conspiracy theories” will be beneficial? Do YouTube’s decision-makers really believe that tweaking their algorithms to support the official story will protect us from bad information? If so, they are all doubly wrong. First, they are wrong in their unexamined assumption that 9/11 truth and “conspiracy theories” in general are “blatantly false.” No honest person with critical thinking skills who weighs the merits of the best work on both sides of the question can possibly avoid the realization that the 9/11 truth movement is right. The same is true regarding the serial assassinations of America’s best leaders during the 1960s. Many other “conspiracy theories,” perhaps the majority of the best-known ones, are also likely true, as readers of Ron Unz’s American Pravda series are discovering.  Second, and less obviously, those who would suppress conspiracy theories are wrong even in their belief that suppressing false conspiracy theories is good public policy. As Nemeth shows, social science is unambiguous in its finding that any group featuring at least one passionate, radical dissenter will deliberate better, reach sounder conclusions, and act more effectively than it would have without the dissenter. This holds even if the dissenter is wrong—even wildly wrong.  The overabundance of slick, hypnotic flat earth videos, if they are indeed weaponized cointelpro strikes against the truth movement, may be unfortunate. But the existence of the occasional flat earther may be more beneficial than harmful. The findings summarized by Nemeth suggest that a science study group with one flat earther among the students would probably learn geography and astronomy better than they would have without the madly passionate dissenter.  We could at least partially solve the real problem—bad groupthink—through promoting genuinely beneficial cognitive diversity. YouTube algorithms should indeed be tweaked to puncture the groupthink bubbles that emerge based on user preferences. Someone who watches lots of 9/11 truther videos should indeed be exposed to dissent, in the form of the best arguments on the other side of the issue—not that there are any very good ones, as I have discovered after spending 15 years searching for them!  But the same goes for those who watch videos that explicitly or implicitly accept the official story. Anyone who watches more than a few pro-official-story videos (and this would include almost all mainstream coverage of anything related to 9/11 and the “war on terror”) should get YouTube “suggestions” for such videos as September 11: The New Pearl Harbor, 9/11 Mysteries, and the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Exposure to even those “truthers” who are more passionate than critical or well-informed would benefit people who believe the official story, according to Nemeth’s research, by stimulating them to deliberate more thoughtfully and to question facile assumptions.  The same goes for other issues and perspectives. Fox News viewers should get “suggestions” for good material, especially passionate dissent, from the left side of the political spectrum. MSNBC viewers should get “suggestions” for good material from the right. Both groups should get “suggestions” to look at genuinely independent, alternative media brimming with passionate dissidents—outlets like the Unz Review!  Unfortunately things are moving in the opposite direction. YouTube’s effort to make “conspiracy videos” invisible is being pushed by powerful lobbies, especially the Zionist lobby, which seems dedicated to singlehandedly destroying the Western tradition of freedom of expression.  Nemeth and colleagues’ findings that “conspiracy theories” and other forms of passionate dissent are not just beneficial, but in fact an invaluable resource, are apparently unknown to the anti-conspiracy-theory cottage industry that has metastasized in the bowels of the Western academy. The brand-new bible of the academic anti-conspiracy-theory industry is Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford University Press, 2019).  Editor Joseph Uscinski’s introduction begins by listing alleged dangers of conspiracism: “In democracies, conspiracy theories can drive majorities to make horrible decisions backed by the use of legitimate force. Conspiracy beliefs can conversely encourage abstention. Those who believe the system is rigged will be less willing to take part in it. Conspiracy theories form the basis for some people’s medical decisions; this can be dangerous not only for them but for others as well. For a select few believers, conspiracy theories are instructions to use violence.”  Uscinski is certainly right that conspiracy theories can incite “horrible decisions” to use “legitimate force” and “violence.” Every major American foreign war since 1846 has been sold to the public by an official theory, backed by a frenetic media campaign, of a foreign conspiracy to attack the United States. And all of these Official Conspiracy Theories (OCTs)—including the theory that Mexico conspired to invade the United States in 1846, that Spain conspired to sink the USS Maine in 1898, that Germany conspired with Mexico to invade the United States in 1917, that Japan conspired unbeknownst to peace-seeking US leaders to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, that North Vietnam conspired to attack the US Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and that 19 Arabs backed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and everybody else Israel doesn’t like conspired to attack the US in 2001—were false or deceptive.  Well over 100 million people have been killed in the violence unleashed by these and other Official Conspiracy Theories. Had the passionate dissenters been heeded, and the truths they told about who really conspires to create war-trigger public relations stunts been understood, none of those hundred-million-plus murders need have happened.  Though Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them generally pathologizes the conspiracy theories of dissidents while ignoring the vastly more harmful theories of official propagandists, its 31 essays include several that question that outlook. In “What We Mean When We Say ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason Magazine, exposes the bias that permeates the field, pointing out that many official conspiracy theories, including several about Osama Bin Laden and 9/11-anthrax, were at least as ludicrously false and delusional as anything believed by marginalized dissidents.  In “Media Marginalization of Racial Minorities: ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ in U.S. Ghettos and on the ‘Arab Street’” Martin Orr and Gina Husting go one step further:  Unfortunately, though Orr and Husting devote a whole section of their article to “Conspiracy Theories in the Muslim World” and defend Muslim conspiracists against the likes of Thomas Friedman, they never squarely face the fact that the reason roughly 80% of Muslims believe 9/11 was an inside job is because the preponderance of evidence supports that interpretation.  Another relatively sensible essay is M R.X. Dentith’s “Conspiracy Theories and Philosophy,” which ably deconstructs the most basic fallacy permeating the whole field of conspiracy theory research: the a priori assumption that a “conspiracy theory” must be false or at least dubious:  I hope Uscinski finds the time to read Nemeth’s In Defense of Troublemakers and consider the evidence that passionate dissent is helpful, not harmful. And I hope he will look into the issues Ron Unz addresses in his American Pravda series.  Then again, if he does, he may find himself among those of us exiled from the academy and publishing in The Unz Review.  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  Featured image is from The Unz Review


globalresearch--2019-07-28--Cubas Revolution in Thinking To Live and Not Lie

Cuba’s Revolution in Thinking: To Live and Not Lie

In Dostoevsky’s Demons, liberal academic Stepan Trofimovich says before dying:  It’s because lies are behaviour. Dostoevsky’s characters “eat” ideas. They don’t believe them, but more important, they don’t know they don’t believe them.  Some beliefs are tacit, presupposed, not acknowledged, just lived.  This aspect of thinking is known in Cuba. It is why its independence traditions, centuries-long, are so interesting, philosophically, although it’s largely unrecognized. In 1999 in Caracus, Fidel Castro said,  It is not trivial. It has to do with lies that are lived and how to know them.  José de la Luz y Caballero, in early 19th century Cuba, taught philosophy because of a lie: slavery. Progressives accepted it.  They couldn’t imagine life without slavery. Luz taught philosophy so privileged youth could know injustice when injustice is identity: lived lies.  José Martí, later, identified another lie. He built a revolution around it, not just the lie, but how to know it: a revolution in thinking. He said the South didn’t need to look North to live well. That lie is lived still. We can’t imagine life without a dominating North.  Both Luz and Martí taught that “people think and feel”. It’s about reciprocity. A new book on the US medical system identifies just such thinking, known to science, but hard to practise. Reciprocity involves experiencing – that is, feeling – relations between people, and becoming motivated, even humanized.  Anyone seriously ill (in Canada too), knows medicine is not about care. Soul of Care, by Harvard psychiatrist, Arthur Kleinman, explains why.[i] The failure is systemic. He cites an educator at a major medical school, who feels like a “hypocrite” teaching about care. She knows doctors don’t have time to listen and aren’t supported to try.  Medicine is about “cost, efficiency, management talk”. Survival “depends on cutting corners, spending as little time as you can get away with in human interactions that can be emotionally and morally taxing.”  As Kleinman tells his personal story, of caring for his beloved wife, Joan, he offers a different view.  Caregiving is not a moral obligation; it is existential. At its heart is reciprocity, the ““invisible glue that holds societies together”. In caregiving, one finds within oneself “a tender mercy and a need to act on it”. Caregiving, Kleinman argues, made him more human  Reciprocity offers solutions not identifiable previously. It matters for science, for truth. But the capacity must be cultivated. “Being present” means submitting intellectual judgment, on occasion, to experience of feelings. One can’t just decide to do it without preparation. Yet such training is not happening. It’s not likely to. It contradicts “politically useful fictions” like the “self-made man”.  Kleinman says medicine needs help from sociology and “even philosophy”. But the myth of the self-made man is taught in philosophy. It’s called philosophical liberalism, providing ideas of identity, rationality and autonomy assumed in social sciences.  It denies person-making reciprocity.  Marx taught such reciprocity – the kind that recognizes receiving back, cause and effect, giving. So did Lenin, the Buddha, and Christian philosophers, Thomas Merton, Jean Vanier and Ivan Illich. We don’t teach these philosophers. We barely recognize them.  Caregiving is so alien to medical practise that Kleinman’s “modest proposal” is to omit it from the curriculum altogether. Nonetheless, health institutions claim to care about care. Kleinman’s colleague says: “We can’t even tell ourselves lies we can believe in”.  But they can. Whole societies can. I was reminded of this reading a recent book on hippie communes of the 70s.[ii] Having lived in such communes most of that decade, I spent subsequent decades figuring out lies: How to explain to students. Those communes weren’t about love and peace. They couldn’t be.  You can’t love when you’re self-absorbed and morally superior. It doesn’t work.  We didn’t know that we didn’t believe in love, or even know what it is. When Dostoevsky’s characters begin redemption, they fall, or are thrown, to the earth and “water it with tears”. Raskolnikov, after confessing, berates himself for “submitting”. But he:  could not understand that even then, when he was standing over the river, he may have sensed a profound lie in himself and in his convictions. He did not understand that this sense might herald a future break in his life, his future resurrection, his future new vision of life.  He must wait for “something completely different” to work itself out. Waiting, submission, is not the “self-made man”. The “self-made man” seizes control of their destiny.  That’s what autonomy means, supposedly. Che Guevara saw the myth as an iron cage, blocking truth. If you believe it, there areno lies, not about you. Truth is whatever you want it to be. It’s easy but limiting – humanly so.  Some understand Cuba’s famous medical internationalism as a mere moral achievement. They undervalue it. Being “good” doesn’t motivate sacrifice. Reciprocity does. It energizes, compels.  It beats “smart weapons” because it’s about truth. Che Guevara told medical students in 1960:  He meant capacities direction. Reciprocity means giving but also receiving back, humanly.  José Engenieros, brilliant Argentinean psychiatrist, early 20th century, dedicated himself to educational reform across the continent. Philosophical liberalism, grounding medical education, had convinced Latin Americans, with its false freedoms, to support imperialism in World War 1.  It convinces North Americans to “follow dreams” just because we have them. It makes it hard to live and not lie.  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.