Are We Powerless?

Some enterprising tech genius will invent a new device sometime in the future, and you will find yourself compelled to purchase one. Who knows, maybe it will look something like the cool machine depicted in the accompanying illustration by Emma and Lindsey.

This inventor will be motivated less to satisfy an actual human need or elevate the condition of human kind than by a compulsion to tinker and a desire to make a buck. See Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel, pages 242-243, on how “invention is the mother of necessity.” At first, lovers of new contraptions will buy them. Eventually a critical mass of people will own one and then the rest of us will begin to feel compelled to join the crowd even if we would rather abstain—even after it becomes clear that this new gizmo does more harm than good to human beings. I sadly find myself in the latter category now in the case of the “smart” phone. Some anthropologists have suggested that agriculture was one such invention that did more harm than good, but which we embraced anyway. James C. Scott’s new book makes this argument, as does Diamond. According to Scott, as recently as 400 years ago the holdouts had the advantage over the adopters.

Some years ago they started inventing telephones you could carry around outside the home. This seemed like a terrible idea to me, then and now. Bad enough you could be constantly interrupted by telemarketers at home, now they could follow you around all day. I resisted buying a cell phone as long as I could until not having one had become eccentric at best and irresponsible at worst. I bought the least expensive version I could find and used it as little as possible. I sometimes forgot to check it and this trained most people to avoid calling me. Around this time, spring of 2015, most other people had upgraded from mere cellphones to the mighty smartphone.

Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 I have felt, like this blogger, like a character in the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which one by one, the people around him are replaced by aliens who look familiar but something is missing. “Every day, another friend, family member, or even stranger, succumbs to the inevitable, and becomes a blank-faced moron, staring into a tiny screen all day long,” he writes.

But it is hard to resist joining the pod people, even as evidence mounts that smart phones and digital technology in general are really bad for us (they are actually engineered to be addictive). In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle argues that smart phones and other modes of electronic communication are eroding our ability to communicate in person and generating feelings of alienation. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris contends that smart phones have destroyed a whole generation of American children.  There’s been a dramatic increase in depression and anxiety among our kids. Some blame the smart phones.   But we parents keep buying them for our kids, so as to spare them the fate of being a social non-conformist.

I’m old enough to know that life was better before email, that gigantic to-do list that anyone in the whole world can add to at any moment. Before email, you could come home sometimes and leave work behind. You could even go on vacation from work. Do we control technology, or does technology control us?  Apple has figured out how to annoy me into upgrading my Ipad’s operating system every other time I turn it on, it seems, even though I ever asked for an upgrade. Somehow, Ralph Waldo Emerson did not own an Apple product or know about artificial intelligence when he wrote “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

It’s not just technology. Every high school math teacher I’ve talked to thinks that the vast majority of students should not take calculus until college. I’m told that the college professors agree. Yet some mysterious force called “college admissions” insists that every ambitious student take calculus before they graduate from high school.

That same force seems to be responsible for degrading childhood in a number of other ways in recent years. From competitive day care admissions to professional college counseling and SAT test prep, childhood has turned into one long exercise in competitive resume building. A parent once told me that summer is the time for school kids to do extraordinary things—internships, global travel, solving the world’s problems—so as to build the narrative that will get them into a “good” college or university. Surely all of this is another source of all the anxiety our children are suffering.

I remember a time when sports was a thing you did with your friends after school just for fun. Now, middle class families shuttle their kids to games and practices and summer camps, often in the same sport year-round. Sports, and it seems childhood, has become a job. I don’t know any reasonable person, including the coaches and PE teachers I talk to, who thinks this is a good thing. It would seem, contra Martin Luther King, Jr., that change DOES roll in on the wheels of inevitability. Resistance is futile. We are sheep. As John Stuart Mill put it:

Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. (On Liberty)

Somehow, in the face of all this, I continue to cling to a vague notion that humans aren't just helpless pawns altogether, or that, as Marx put it, “Men [and women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Some years ago I did a directed studies course on utopian thought and utopian living experiments with my friend and student Shannon Hou. In the old days—as recently as the 1960s—a lot of Americans spent a lot of time thinking about how we could perfect or at least dramatically improve our unsatisfactory societies. Novelists, communards, and philosophers put a lot of effort into that project. Utopian thinking seems to be out of style these days, replaced mostly by dystopian imagining—how things will inevitably turn out if current trends continue. Think: Hunger Games, a story about what we are doing to childhood. Dystopianism, however, may be a self-fulfilling prophecy if it breeds a sense of helplessness and nihilism.

As a teacher and a historian I feel an obligation to point to examples of people in the past who were agents of their own salvation, or paved the way for improvements to society—dreamers who imagined and brought about a better world.  King is one example. The long struggle for black equality, along with the labor movement, proves that regular people can take action and succeed spectacularly in making their own history—and our own present.  It's hard to feel a sense of historical agency in the dystopian present.  History needs to be taught in a way that counters the fatalistic narratives that are flooding the public mind and conveys a sense of optimism about what is possible and what good people can achieve when they work together. As James Baldwin put it, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive.” It is up to us who are still living to dream hopeful dreams and fight to make them come true.

James Baldwin on History and Optimism and Agency

"History is not the past. It is the present.  We carry our history with us. We are our history.  To pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. . . . I can't be a pessimist because I am alive.  To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.  So I'm forced to be an optimist.  I'm forced to believe we can survive. . . .  The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.  It is entirely up to the American people . . ."  From the film, I am Not Your Negro.  Photo by Allen Warren.

Exonians: Let’s Depolarize America

This is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Exonian, our school newspaper, and which appeared in the Nov. 16, 2017 print edition.

During Tuesday’s assembly, I moderated a political conversation between Amy Schwartz and Townley Chisholm (Teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy). One complaint I’ve heard from some students is that their views weren’t far enough apart. Students may have been expecting something like the political arguments we see on TV every day, between shouting pundits and party functionaries with diametrically opposing views. The networks have found that these kinds of conversations drive up ratings and bring in ad revenue (I recommend the film “Best of Enemies” to see the origins of this phenomenon).

But that is not how most people talk about politics. Think about it. The networks hire people to represent a particular point of view. Their livelihood depends on being able to stick to the party line. They are not paid to be moderate or change their minds. In real life people have all kinds of doubts and change their minds all the time and we don’t go through life with one rigid, fully formed ideology to guide us. We listen to what others are saying and consider new evidence. Political scientists and psychologists who study how people think about politics have found that when we talk to others with different viewpoints, our political positions become more moderate. When we talk only to like-minded people, our ideas become more extreme.

As Americans increasingly separate themselves into red and blue enclaves, they speak to fewer people with different views and the nation becomes ever more polarized. Consider just one of many headlines on the topic: this one from Vox: “We need political parties. But their rabid partisanship could destroy American democracy. We’re trapped in a frightening ‘doom loop’ of mutual distrust.”

In preparing for Tuesday’s assembly, Mr. Chisholm and Ms. Schwartz and I had a number of conversations over two or three weeks. The views you heard expressed on Tuesday were somewhat different than what I heard them saying at different times earlier in the process. Their opinions converged a bit. Like most thoughtful people, these two do not have opinions that are set in stone. They are open minded, intellectually flexible, and open to new evidence. Most importantly, they know that their own knowledge and perspectives are limited, that on any given question, they could be wrong. That’s something Harkness teaches us every day if we are doing it right.

Maybe we would become less polarized if Americans saw more of these kinds of political conversations and fewer of the politics-as-combat and politics-as-entertainment spectacles that the media and the two-party system offer up every day. Perhaps the home of the Harkness method has something to teach the country about how to conduct those better conversations.

A teacher’s confession: There ARE stupid questions

We teachers try to encourage our students to ask questions by telling them this lie: there are no stupid questions.  Here is proof that stupid questions exist:

TEACHER: The paper is due on Friday.
STUDENT: When is the paper due?

It's important to encourage questioning in our students, but lying to them will not help. It patronizes them and undermines our credibility.

Here's what we should say instead: Sure, there are stupid questions and we all ask them sometimes, because let’s face it, it’s hard to pay attention all day long, and it’s hard to pick up every important (and obvious) point in all the readings we did last night. We all have surprising gaps in our knowledge of this complicated world. One person’s valid question is another’s stupid question.  So go ahead and ask that stupid question so you get that paper in on on time.

Instead of pretending that all questions are equally smart, acknowledge that we all need to ask a lot of questions to banish ignorance, some are better than others, and if I tolerate your occasional stupid question you'll tolerate mine and at some point we'll share some really brilliant questions with each other.

The Future is Ours to Make

This week, Ta-Nehisi Coates said he has no hope for the future of America

Historians are sometime asked to predict the future. Surely, the thinking goes, all that study of cause-and-effect in the past must give you insights into what present conditions will lead to in the future. The wisest among the tribe of historians will demure. They know two things for certain about the future.

1. It is hopelessly unpredictable. Historians have such a hard time pinning down the causes of things that have already happened that they know it is foolish to identify effects for which the conditions and causes are still in flux. There are too many variables and factors, unknowns and unknowables, even in the distant past. The course of history is marked by radical contingency.

2. The decisions and actions of human beings will play a major role in shaping the future, and these are the most unpredictable factors of all. 

But if historians can’t predict the future, they can play a role in shaping it.

It is not yet determined which human individuals and groups will play the biggest role in shaping the future, but it is likely that those who feel a sense of efficacy will be more likely to act. Certainly the presidents of countries and corporations, governors, legislators, bankers and billionaires will continue to feel a great sense of empowerment, and will in the future as in the past, have an out-sized impact on the course of events.

Less certain is whether the great mass of people will play a role, and whether people motivated by greed and prejudice or a sense of fairness and justice will get the upper hand. And here, the historians can possibly have an effect.

Most historians have ignored the role of average people in shaping their own history. Part of the problem is that while leaders left behind endless written records, most others did not. Since the 1960s, however, a revolution has taken place among professional historians who have found creative ways to uncover the historical roles of ordinary folks.

Historians who ignore or downplay or dismiss this new history perpetuate the great lie that only “great men” will shape the future. That fosters a feeling of cynicism and defeatism among the good people living today who might bend the arc of history toward a better and more just world, if only they believe it is possible.  They need historians to tell them inspiring stories from the past to show them how it is possible.

2020 UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates has found reason for optimism. More recently, he expressed a feeling of hope after watching the George Floyd protests. When asked to compare them to the urban riots of the 60s, he noted that the people participating in those events were exclusively black but the riots of 2020 represent a giant interracial mix of people.  See Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful.

As if to illustrate Coates' point, the Mayor of Washington DC had city workers paint, in gigantic yellow letters, "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a street leading to the White House.

Coates, Race and the 2016 Election

Photo credit: Eduardo Montes-Bradley

I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article on the Trump presidency and the 2016 election in the October edition of The Atlantic.  As always, his writing is provocative and enlightening in many ways. One of my frustrations in reading the exit polls was that they didn't break down the results by race and income—even though the dominant narrative about the election has been that white working class voters were largely responsible for Trump’s win.

Coates shows that all whites, in every income category, supported Trump. Perhaps surprisingly, given the narrative about the working class, Trump’s white voters were more affluent than Clinton’s, and his strongest margin was among voters who should probably be considered middle class, those making above the national median income, from $50,000 to $100,000.

Coates seems to be wading into the heated debate within liberal/Democratic Party/progressive circles about how to interpret the results and what they say about whether Democrats should emphasize “identity politics” (a category that Coates helpfully complicates), or economic/class issues. Coates is highly critical of many of the politicians and writers who are calling for a more populist emphasis on economics and class and a de-emphasis of “identity politics.” But then he voted for the party's stalwart class warrior, Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries last year, and there are subtle hints in his article that he understands the necessity of getting more white voters into the Democratic coalition.

For example, after excoriating Sanders for defending white working class Trump voters against charges of racism, he concedes that “candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths” (82). But Coates focuses mostly on the question of whether white Trump voters were motivated by race and he seems to conclude that Hillary Clinton was guilty only of underestimation when she said that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist.... But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one,” he writes.

Since the TV show “All in the Family” premiered in 1971, liberals and the Democratic Party have been wracking their brains to figure out why working class white people would vote for Republicans. Why would Archie Bunker, “an old trade union man,” support the anti-union party? (Cowie 196). Norman Lear, Thomas Frank, Arlie Hochschild and many others have pointed to race as only one of the relevant factors.

More urgent questions less directly addressed in Coates’ article are these: How can Democrats form a winning coalition in the next election? And: Is it possible for an anti-racist party to attract enough white votes to form a winning coalition?

Coates's writings suggest three alternatives for winning white allies to the cause of racial justice. First, instill in white Americans a searing sense of guilt for their racist inclinations, for America’s racist past. Second, appeal to their empathy and altruism by teaching them the details of that horrifying past. Third, convince white people that racial justice is good for them too.  This last option is easy to miss in Coates’ writings, but it is embedded in his concessions to the importance of coalition politics and in his predictions of national disaster in the last three paragraphs of the Atlantic article (87).

For the past forty years—at least since Richard Nixon adopted the “Southern strategy”— Republicans have been making the case that racism is good for white people, that is, policies that help blacks and other people of color, hurt whites, and vice versa. Meanwhile, Democrats have done very little to convince white voters that racism is bad for all of us. Bernie Sanders’s campaign was a notable exception.

In the end, self-interest is a stronger motivating force than guilt or empathy or altruism, and so the key to the success of a party that is opposed to racist policies is to tie them to the self-interest of at least some part of the white majority.

Trump’s margin among all white people in the 2016 election was one point greater than Romney’s in 2016. A point that Coates failed to note, though, is that Romney won 59 percent of white voters and Trump got one point less—58. His increased margin was due to more white voters rejecting both major party candidates. And how about this: White voters liked Obama, a black Democrat, more than they liked last year's white Democrat, Hillary Clinton. Obama got 43 percent of the white vote in 2008 and 39 percent in 2012. She got only 37 percent in 2016.

Whatever sentiments about race lie hidden in the deep dark recess of white peoples’ hearts, one thing is for certain. The Democratic coalition cannot afford to lose any more white votes if the party wants to win any more elections. White people made up about 53 percent of Clinton voters. 

They also can't afford to lose any more people of color.  In 2016, 8 percent of blacks and 29 percent of Hispanic and Asian-American voters pulled the lever for Trump, a greater percentage in each case than Romney got in 2012. Coates does not mention this, but he should be disturbed that almost a third of non-African American people of color “felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to” a man he considers to be a white supremacist. 

The red triangles indicate percentage increase in  Republican vote for president from 2012 to 2016.

Demographers predict that future population growth will be greatest among Hispanics and Asians. Some party strategists thought Democratic victories would become ubiquitous and inevitable as the population becomes more diverse and whites become a minority. For these population trends to work out as Democrats hope, non-whites will have to be remain unified against candidates who channel racist feelings (probably even more unified than they are now) and it would help if they continue to consider themselves to be non-white.  But a big chunk of white voters will still have to vote for Democrats, especially in the near term.

The Politics of Car Prices

The $150 car

These dollar amounts help to explain how Trump was elected:

$150 
$4,317
$30,000 
$150

Cheap cars were a key to the economics of my working class family growing up. In the absence of public transportation in our town, Dad drove to work and carted the family around in cheap, rusty, high-mileage used cars. I commuted to the nearest state university in a 1973 Mercury Comet that cost me $350; when that died, I splurged on a 1972 VW Beetle--$650.

I saved even more money by doing a lot of my own repairs, or exchanging a six-pack for a day’s labor from one of my more mechanically-inclined friends. That’s how I got the transmission replaced in my first car, a $150 Chevy Townsman. But cars have become so complicated that even the simplest repair is beyond most backyard mechanics, and even professionals have had to fight the car companies to get the computer codes they need to repair modern cars. And the complexity of those cars has led to skyrocketing repair bills. Have you had your ignition key duplicated lately?

About a year ago, the Car Connection reported that more than half of American families cannot reasonably afford to buy a new car. In 1977 the average new car went for $4,317 ($17,000 in today's dollars); today the average new car goes for more than $30,000. Edward N. Luttwak (whose TLS essay is well worth reading), sees in these statistics an explanation for Trump’s electoral victory last November.

Had journalists studied the numbers and pondered even briefly their implications, they could have determined a priori that only two candidates could win the Presidential election – Sanders and Trump – because none of the others even recognized that there was problem if median American households had been impoverished to the point that they could no longer afford a new car. This itself was remarkable because four wheels and an engine might as well be grafted to Homo americanus, who rarely lives within walking distance of his or her job, or even a proper food shop, who rarely has access to useful public transport, and for whom a recalcitrant ignition or anything else that prevents driving often means the loss of a day’s earnings, as well as possibly crippling repair costs.

The $150 key

Luttwak tells the story of how the back-up camera came to be mandated for all 2018 vehicles thanks to a campaign by a “wealthy driver” and “Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for more regulatory decrees.” Undoubtedly, backup cameras will save some lives, but they will also place new cars out of the reach of a few more families.

When liberal Democrats pushed for more and more safety and environmental regulations that have pushed up the prices of cars, they did nothing to mitigate the impact on family budgets. Just like when they promoted free trade and did nothing to mitigate the impact on blue collar workers who lost their good union jobs in the manufacturing sector. All of this comes down to a powerful example of how, contra Thomas Frank, working class people might not be voting altogether against their economic self-interest when they support Republicans who want to reduce regulations on industry.