A foolish consistency

I've been blogging the last stretch about the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who exerted a huge influence on American literature during and after the 19th century. I have to fess up to a love/hate relationship with old Waldo. Sometimes he seems like a pompous windbag. Sometimes I have no idea what he's talking about. But sometimes he's right on. One such case in point is a passage from Self Reliance about the dangers of consistency. Sometimes we stick to a bad opinion or course of action just because we don't want to seem to change. His advice: get over it.

Here's a great passage with one of his more famous lines:

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

SAD NEWS FROM WV. I'm in Vermont at the moment and was saddened and shocked by the news that Mingo County Sheriff Eugene Crum was gunned down outside the county courthouse.

STILL SAD THREE YEARS LATER. Here's Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo on how we continue to fail coal miners by not enacting tougher safety regulations.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy

Humans are by nature social animals. As Aristotle, whom Dante described as "the master of those who know," put it in his Politics, "to live alone, one must be either a beast or a god." On the other hand, group dynamics can really bring out the beast and drive away the god.

A lot of human evil and just plain pettiness can be attributed to group behavior, conformity, and obedience. Emerson takes a famous whack at those in Self Reliance.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

(I'm guessing this applies to women too.)

LINK TRUCK BROKEN TODAY 

The ruts of tradition and conformity

There are lots of reasons to like Thoreau's Walden (and some to drive the reader up the wall). Some things I've gotten from it are very practical insights that I have found to hold up well in real situations.

Here's an example: I suspect that one reason why people who want to improve conditions may fall short is the human tendency to fall into ruts or predictable patterns. Every situation, every moment, is different and may require a different response. Unfortunately, our minds, like trains, tend to run along the same tracks.

As Thoreau noted in Walden,

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves….The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Rituals are great; ritualism isn't. It seems to me that the compulsion to repeat is more a symptom than a strategy.

WHAT WOULD ALINSKY SAY? Here are some guesses by someone who knew him.

JOBS FIRST, then deficits, argues John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute here.

KING CARBON. Would the founders of the USA declare independence from it?

YOUR INNER FISH. Get in touch with it here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Against purity

Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor under FDR.

One of the many things El Cabrero likes about Jesus was his general disregard for the purity codes of his day. In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), he always seems to be making someone mad for transgressing this or that rule of apparent righteousness by hanging out with the wrong people, doing things at the wrong time or not doing things the "right" way.

I've found that purity codes were not limited to first century Palestine but can be found amongst almost any group. They can be particularly prevalent amongst people working for social justice.

It often happens that people will refuse to work with this or that group because they aren't pure enough or will oppose this or that reform because it doesn't go far enough--even though nothing else is on the table. Sometimes, people even oppose a positive measure because it isn't done with the "proper" motivation.

Whatever. This may be my Scotch-Irish talking, but I believe in playing the cards you're dealt, with the understanding that you try to improve your hand as much as possible. I tend to regard moral perfectionism as the unforgivable sin.

This chain of thought was triggered by reading Kirstin Downey's The Woman Behind the New Deal, a biography of Frances Perkins. Perkins served as secretary of labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and had an amazing record as an effective reformer way before that.

One of the things that contributed to her success was her ability to deal with people as they were, including corrupt old school Tammany Hall politicians. As Downey put it,

Her ability to accept human foibles, to see both failings and strengths was becoming a core personality trait, bolstering her effectiveness. She found that making deals with imperfect people and focusing on their strengths provided a pathway to actually achieving social change.

As the saying goes, "God is a potter, he works in mud."

HOT AIR. Dean Baker takes on lies about the climate change bill here.

ME TOO. Research suggests that community norms and peer pressure influence how people relate to conservation and environmental efforts.

STRANGE DAYS. The giant retailer Wal-Mart has embraced a mandate for major employers to provide health insurance for workers, a major plank in overall health care reform legislation.

AGUA...the new oil.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CRIMES OF OBEDIENCE, WITH TWO HEALTH CARE ITEMS

Caption: This man would shock anybody for a squeaky toy.

This is the third post in a series on the issue of obedience to authority (among other things), which has probably led to more atrocities than all the many individual acts of cruelty combined. The series was inspired in part by El Cabrero's musings on the lessons of psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic and "shocking" experiment.

If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier entries.

Obedience is related to but different from conformity in that the former applies to people in a higher organization position while the latter applies to people in a similar position.

One generally obeys people who occupy a higher position within a bureaucratic structure and conforms with the opinions and actions of peers. Still, conformity can reinforce obedience. An example would be a society or subculture where people frown on those who question their leaders. (Good thing that doesn't happen around here, huh?)

In his book Obedience to Authority, Milgram writes

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many people obedience may be a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

He was speaking not only of his well known experiment in which subjects supplied what were apparently lethal shocks to another person when commanded to by a scientist, but also of the complicity of many ordinary Germans in the Nazi Holocaust and more recent examples of military atrocities committed under orders in wartime which inspired it. Regarding the experiment, he said

It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation....

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources need to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place.

Next time: possible explanations.

HEALTH CARE ITEMS. There are two good items about the need for comprehensive health care reform in the latest New Republic, including this editorial calling for universal health care and addressing the tax issue head on:

raising taxes to finance universal health care isn't tantamount to imposing a new financial burden. It's swapping one burden for another. And there is good reason to believe that, ultimately, the new burden will be smaller. Serious reform schemes have the potential to restrain costs substantially--whether by eliminating administrative waste, bargaining harder on prices, or reducing unproductive profiteering.

And there's a much more detailed article by Arnold S. Relman showing that market based approaches to universal health care is a non-starter. Here's the punchline:

A real solution to our crisis will not be found until the public, the medical profession, and the government reject the prevailing delusion that health care is best left to market forces. Kenneth Arrow had it right in 1963 when he said that we need to depend on "non-market" mechanisms to make our health care system work properly. Once it is acknowledged that the market is inherently unable to deliver the kind of health care system we need, we can begin to develop the "nonmarket" arrangements for the system we want. This time the medical profession and the public it is supposed to serve will have to be involved in the effort. It will be difficult, but it will not be impossible.

Well said. No shock for them...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE SHOCKING TRUTH

Caption: Ferdinand only obeys the goddess of love.

A long time ago on Saturday Night Live, Fr. Guido Sarducci talked about the Five Minute University, an educational program that would teach you what you'd remember after you graduated.

Sample: Economics...supply and demand.

In the spirit of Fr. Sarducci, if you ever had a psychology class or talked with someone you had, you would probably remember "some dude who told people to shock other people and they did."

That would be the late Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who, in light of the many atrocities of obedience in the 20th century, wondered how and under what conditions ordinarly people would follow orders to inflict harm on people they had nothing against.

Short answer: it was WAY easier than he initially thought.

To briefly recap, Milgram set up a situation in which subjects thought they were participating in an experiment on the relationship of punishment or negative reinforcement to learning. They were to give a task invovling word memory to a learner who was in fact an actor. Each time the learner/actor made a "mistake," the subjects were asked to give them an electric shock of steadily increasing severity.

According to the StanleyMilgram.com website, published by Dr. Thomas Blass,

He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.

(Blass, by the way, wrote a biography of Milgram cleverly titled The Man Who Shocked the World. That's going on my list.)

Milgram tried lots of variations of the experiment, but the above will do if you remember nothing else.

In addition to whatever topics emerge,El Cabrero is going to ponder the issue of obedience to authority, which has probably led to more atrocities and misery than all the crimes of "deviance."

SPEAKING OF (ERODING) AUTHORITY, a new poll released this weekend reveals a further drop in support for the war in Iraq. This weekend, thousands of Americans, including several hundred West Virginians, came together to protest Bush administration Iraq policy. El Cabrero took part in an event at the state capitol sponsored by WV Patriots for Peace, WV Citizen Action Group, and allied organizations.

(Once again, I didn't bring a camera. I keep forgetting that those things work with people too...)

MORE ON PRIVATIZATION AT WALTER REED. Here's a new item that came out yesterday that shows how the administration's mania for privatization eroded the quality of care at Walter Reed:

Documents from the investigative and auditing arm of Congress map a trail of bid, rebid, protests and appeals between 2003, when Walter Reed was first selected for outsourcing, and 2006, when a five-year, $120 million contract was finally awarded.

The disputes involved hospital management, the Pentagon, Congress and IAP Worldwide Services Inc., a company with powerful political connections and the only private bidder to handle maintenance, security, public works and management of military personnel.

While medical care was not directly affected, needed repairs went undone as the staff shrank from almost 300 to less than 50 in the last year and hospital officials were unable to find enough skilled replacements.

SELF ADMINISTERED FILM CRITICISM. I'm still getting used to having DSL, which is way cool. I admit that this short Ferdinand flick is not exactly Citizen Kane. They should get better though.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONFORMITY AND DISSENT, PLUS STUFF ON TRADE, TAXES and POLAR BEARS

Caption: Venus is a non-conformist.

It seems to El Cabrero that most of the horrors and crimes committed by humanity over the ages have not been perpetrated by the occasional sociopath but by fairly "normal" people either doing what they are told or going along to get along.

I call them "sins of obedience."

Partly because we are inherently social animals (or else we wouldn't have lived this long), there are powerful pressures on us to conform to perceived social norms. Much of the time,that's not a bad thing. But it often can and has led to disastrous consequences.

"Group think" has been blamed among other things for the bad intelligence going in to the unnecessary war in Iraq, to use just one example.

A famous psychological experiment Solomon Asch first conducted in the 1950s shows how conformity can lead people to ignore the obvious evidence of their own senses.

As Cass R. Sunstein describes it in his recent book Why Societies Need Dissent,

In these experiments, the subject was placed in a group of seven to nine people who seemed to be other subjects in the experiment but who were actually Asch's confederates. The ridiculously simple task was to "match" a particular line, shown on a large white card, to the one of three "comparison lines" that was identical to it in length. The two nonmatching lines were substantially different, with the differential varying form an inch and three quarters to three quarters of an inch.

At first, everyone agreed about the right answer. But in the third round, all the other members of the group picked the wrong line.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, most people ended up agreeing with the group when it was obviously wrong at least once in a series of rounds. And,

When asked to decide on their own, without seeing judgments form others, people erred less than 1 percent of the time. But in rounds in which group pressure supported the incorrect answer, people erred 36.8 percent of the time. Indeed, in a series of twelve questions, no less than 70 percent of people went along with the group and defied the evidence of their own senses at least once.

And, while the experiment was first conducted in America, the general pattern was fairly similar when repeated in other countries, although there were some differences.

Asch drew two conclusions. First, some people are independent most or all of the time (about 25 percent all the time and the rest not conforming 2/3 of the time. But, to quote Sunstein, "Most people, at least some of the time, are willing to yield to the group even on an apparently easy question about which they have direct and unambiguous evidence."

This is where it gets interesting. If at least one other person dissented from the group, the subject was much more likely to stick by his own observations. As Asch put it, "dissent per se increased independence and moderated the errors that occurred."

Need I say more?

TRADE, FAIR AND OTHERWISE. Although it's too soon to draw conclusions, it looks like the new Congress won't necessarily be a rubber stamp for fast track on future trade deals. Here's an interesting article on the possibilities by David Sirota on the subject.

A VOICE OF REASON ON ESTATE TAX REPEAL. This is some good news. Bill Gates Jr. of Microsoft and Gates Foundation fame, i.e. the world's richest man, came out yesterday against repealing the estate tax on those who inherit large fortunes:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the world's richest man, said Wednesday that he agrees with his father that the elimination of the estate tax would be a bad idea. Gates' father, Bill Gates Sr., has led a campaign against efforts to repeal the tax. "I do agree with my dad, I think what he's doing there has a lot of merit," Gates told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, in response to a question from Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt. Gates said he hasn't spoken out extensively on the issue because he is focused on innovation issues important to Microsoft and global health issues at the center of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's mission.

GAG ORDER ON THOSE POLAR BEARS. The NY Times reports today that the Bush administration issued a memo to Fish and Wildlife personnel ordering them not to discuss climate change, sea ice or polar bears if they were not explicitly authorized to do so. This must be because polar bears hate freedom.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED UNLESS SOMEONE ELSE THINKS IT ISN'T