Cheney Vs. Obama
This will sound weird, but what really bothers me most of all about Obama is that he looks like a kid. His physical type is that of a permanent smart-ass teenager. In much the same way, what bothered me most about Bush was that he was small, “too small for the job.” Like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with the sleeves of the wizard’s robe overshooting his hands. In both cases, the physical seems to stand for something beyond the physical. In different ways, neither man had the gravitas, the weight, for the job.
Bush could be humble, and he could be smug — sure he was right without caring to know much. Obama can be “open” and searching, but arrogant — sure he knows a lot and that that’s more important than being right. They typify the two inadequate responses so far to the flood of new information from science, IT, and globalization: just letting it all go by and not move you an inch, or letting yourself get carried away from all solid ground. Rigidity and floppiness.
But this post was supposed to be about Obama vs. Cheney.
The one thing you sure can’t say about Cheney is that he lacks gravitas. He’s a heavy dude.
I commented on Twitter that the reason, or one reason, I think Obama is retaining so many Bush policies is because he’s really afraid of getting the blame for another terrorist attack. And he will, if it happens. We’ll never really know the backstory of the long hiatus without attacks, or of an attack if one happens. We do know that al Qaeda takes long, patient years to prepare, and we suspect that they don’t want to do less than match or, better, top themselves. If there is an attack, we’ll never know if it would’ve happened regardless of who was in the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter. The human brain in fear seeks bright, clear explanations, and under those circumstances the Republicans’ will be better.
A terrorist attack on Obama’s watch would in one sense be a ripe fruit falling into the Republicans’ lap. No, I certainly don’t think they’re hoping for it. I do think their worldview leads them to expect it, and if it happens, it will vindicate their worldview. It doesn’t matter if the reality is more complicated than that. Complexity is a luxury.
Abortion, Again.
A blogfriend sent me the link to a Chicago Sun-Times column by Neil Steinberg, titled “What’s Behind the Anti-Abortion Frenzy?”, which revives the old canard that pro-lifers are really anti-sex. More interestingly, it links to Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman’s essay “Safe, Legal, and Early,” which maintains that the legal question about abortion shouldn’t be “Yes or no?” but “When?” This was my response.
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Obviously, Waldman’s position (I read through the link) is the one the great majority of people hold, myself included. I’d like people to be a lot more conscious of the real stakes when they consider having an abortion at any stage (or, a significant step back, having unprotected sex risking an unintended pregnancy), but most traditions (the Jewish tradition certainly) have long recognized a continuum on which the woman’s (or family’s) decision prevails early in pregnancy and that shifts as the fetus develops.
I don’t know that it matters whether the abortion debate is a proxy for a desire to make sex safe, legal, and rare (LOL). I used to think that, but second-guessing and psychoanalyzing pro-lifers’ moral convictions has come to seem condescending and insulting to me. What matters is whether they can impose their own choices, noble as they may be, on everyone else, and whether, if they can’t, they view it as an utter defeat by a satanic society. (The rhetoric around Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama — from some of my own blogfriends, I might add — was so overblown, it was really depressing to me.)
Maybe no change happens without absolutist fervor (as a commenter says here, “Seriously, it’s nice to be civil, but Obama has to realize that it took a wild-eyed extremist (John Brown) and the death of 600,000 Americans to end slavery and make it possible for him to be President”), and without the feminist push for “abortion on demand” all abortion would have remained illegal and dangerous, and without the pro-life movement people would have blown off the moral momentousness of the decision and settled down in a very degraded place. To the extent that I’m getting my wish of people being more conscious of the stakes, the push-back by pro-lifers is largely — no, almost solely — responsible. Thanks to free speech they’ve done a beautiful job of dragging our attention back to the gravity of wishing away a unique human being. Thanks to that, we are within reach of finally getting the legal balance right. If the absolutists on both sides will let it happen. Which requires the vast middle to finally speak up.
Thanks, maybe I’ll even post this, although the whole topic hits me on my broken heart. I will repeat that I’m grateful for the change in the culture the pro-life movement has wrought, and that it is culture, not law, that could have tipped my own decision the other way. Just living in today’s culture, instead of on the condom-littered beach where the tide of the ’70s had just begun to creep out, would have been enough. I want us to continue moving, voluntarily, in that direction.
P.S. Steinberg coins a rather chilling term for abortion: “murder lite.” Here is what I think is the most literal and accurate description of what early abortion is and what it does: nipping a human life in the bud.
My Mom Writes a Book Review
My mother has always been a good writer, but now she’s at the top of her powers. She’s 85. So I guess there’s hope for the rest of us.
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It took me all these years since this book was published (2005) to get up the courage to read it. It is pretty remarkable. For those acquainted with grief–and who isn’t?–there is insight to be gained as you recognize the overwheming humanity of loss and the bewildered responses of the newly bereaved. We do negelct the mourning and grieving that has always been part of existence. Whether this book compensates for that or not, I can’t say.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of a life upended by her husband John’s sudden death, Joan Didion chronicles the craziness, the jumble of events, emotions, memories she endures as she tries to make sense and order out of his death and her life. But what sets this book apart is Didion’s meticulous documenting of her mind’s twists and turns, her application of magical thinking to escape the inexorable rules of time and place and create a different ending for what has already happened. But all the king’s horses can’t repeal the law of the Democratic Republic of Death and alter an outcome. It is her straightforward narration, in all its dignity, complexity, and pathos that makes this such a riveting story. Not a “comfort book” in the conventional sense, it is a saga for explorers into the human heart and spirit, the Marco Polos, the Walter Raleighs, the Shackletons who enter unknown territory.
Maybe part of why I wanted first to make myself read that book and then to write something about it is that being old gives one a changing persepctive on death, maybe even on the act–or art–of dying, the part of the phenomenon of life that we don’t deal with very well. If being alive is a fulcrum, then life is one arm, death the other. I envision a seesaw. The death end is shrouded in fog and fear. Why?
~ Jean S. Gottlieb
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Roll Your Own.
(Wow!! You don’t know how I love this feeling of not being able to keep up with “my own” blog. What a luxury!*!*!*)
Via the Anchoress, John Podhoretz opines that mainstream, mass pop culture is dead. That sounds right. He and the Anchoress both speculate on the reasons. I’d like to throw in mine:
People are now making their culture instead of consuming it. All these new devices and venues have been nothing but empowering, liberating. We’re our own and one another’s pundits and publishers, storytellers and networks. The audience has rebelled, risen up, and thrown off its chains of passivity. The inmates are running the asylum. And the resultant anarchy is creating a rich, deep layer of life, as fertile and self-organizing as soil.
(oh — it’s me, amba.)
Chutes and Ladders [UPDATED AGAIN]
Okay, since economics is what we find ourselves talking about, I’ll bite: here’s an aspect of economics, contentious and critical to economic policymaking, that strikes me as important and fascinating.
It’s the study of how impulses, incentives, and consequences shape human behavior. I think it’s called behavioral economics:
Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.
When we turn to actual human beings, we find, instead of robot-like logic, all manner of irrational, self-sabotaging, and even altruistic behavior. […]
Nonetheless, neoclassical economics sidelined such psychological insights. As recently as 15 years ago, the sub-discipline called behavioral economics—the study of how real people actually make choices, which draws on insights from both psychology and economics—was a marginal, exotic endeavor. Today, behavioral economics is a young, robust, burgeoning sector in mainstream economics, and can claim a Nobel Prize, a critical mass of empirical research, and a history of upending the neoclassical theories that dominated the discipline for so long.
This new field doesn’t just pick the brains of psychologists (to whom, one senses, it could give a whole new useful life), but those of neurologists, and, implicitly, of sociobiologists, who view these hard-wired behavioral mechanisms as winners of the competition to survive:
“Economists specialize in taking really complex things and boiling them down to simple principles,” says David Laibson. “So, rather than treat the brain as billions of neurons, or trillions of neurotransmitters, we want to ask, what is the right level of analysis? It turns out that the brain has two key subsystems. One, the limbic and paralimbic system, rules the intuitive and affective parts of our psyches. It’s shared by all mammals and seems to do a lot of emotional cognition—how we feel emotionally, how we respond to other humans, or to being treated unfairly. This system seems to function unconsciously; we don’t have access to it and maybe can’t even control it. It’s experiential and rapid in function.
“Contrast that with the analytic system, centered in the frontal and parietal cortexes,” Laibson continues. “It controls a lot of the thought processes we learn to do: calculated, conscious, future-oriented thinking. It’s not based on past experience; you could have the rules of a brand-new game explained and the analytic system would be able to figure out how to play.”
Brain researchers have shown that an interaction of the limbic and analytic systems governs human decision-making. The limbic system seems to radically discount the future. While the analytic system’s role remains constant from the present moment onward, the limbic system assumes overriding importance in the present moment, but rapidly recedes as rewards move into the future and the emotional brain reduces its activation. This explains impulsiveness: the slice of pizza that’s available right now trumps the dietary plan that the analytic brain has formulated. Seizing available rewards now might be a response pattern with evolutionary advantages, as future benefits are always uncertain.
There it is right there: the seat of no-tomorrowism!
Strangely, even more interesting to me than the study of human motivation (which is only going to end up proving what the wise have always known, verifying millennia of maxims and canny clichés) is the engineering angle: the study of how to motivate humans. It interests me, I think, because it’s what so much of the disagreement between right and left comes down to. What optimizes motivation? Struggle or security?
America, relatively speaking, lacks a social safety net. There’s a feeling — I’ve felt it — that you have to succeed to survive. It’s very starkly Darwinian: there isn’t much middle ground. Is it this anxiety that spurs us on to great heights as a nation? Or does it actually sap creativity, condemning all but the entrepreneurially fierce and fit to waste their lives and gifts struggling to get by? Does assuring people’s basic survival, at the root of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, free them to climb that tree and be curious and creative? Or does it take the edge off and make them lazy and dependent? I don’t know the answer, but suspect it’s not totally either/or. On the one hand, our nervous systems are tuned to peril and triumph. On the other hand, beyond a certain degree of stress we lapse into “learned helplessness,” the depressed state of experimental animals that have learned there’s nothing they can do to predict, avoid, or prevent random electric shocks. The Maslovian view posits way too much Rousseauian optimism about human nature. The social-Darwinian view selects for manic extraversion, creating a bit of a one-note culture. Introverts must medicate to keep up.
A related question is: what is definitely in society’s collective interest to provide, overriding concerns about the effects on individual self-reliance and moral fiber? The common defense, clearly. The internal version of defense — law and policing, the maintenance of public order. Sanitation, a no-brainer. I think a strong case can be made for education: not that the public sector should monopolize education, but that it should make it available to all as the default. Very much in the collective interest — anyone care to count the ways? Scientific competitiveness (from Sputnik to the new spur of globalization) is only one.
Far more controversial: various forms of the basic income guarantee, and health care. To many liberals it seems self-evident that providing single-payer health care is in the collective interest. Conservatives say that market incentives make American health care, for all its problems, much more innovative and effective. You saw the arguments that Natasha Richardson would not have died in the U.S.
Incentives and consequences are the most fascinating part of the picture, on every level. The elusive preventive aspect of health care, for instance. This is one of the areas where the limbic system presents a major stumbling block. When the supermarket is packed with snacks and advertising issues perpetual siren songs for supersized this and that, how do you help the analytical forebrain override the impulse with remote concerns about longevity, economy, and even vanity, a limbic reward that requires an analytical abstinence? The limbic brain doesn’t get the time lag between eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and gaining a pound.
And then, when there are penalties for good behavior, and rewards for bad behavior, what do you think you’re going to get?
Front page story of today’s NYT discusses the small, well managed, profitable, risk averse banks.
Indeed, as Chris Whalen has so frequently noted, the vast majority of banks in the United States are Triple A by his standards. Its just that these 6,500 banks hold a minority of the total deposits in the nation, with biggest dozen or so banks sitting on 65% or so.
Talk about burying the lead: The Times also noted — in the very last paragraphs — how the big incompetent banks and their very pricey bailouts are screwing these small healthy banks:
“At DeMotte [State Bank, an 11-branch operation in the northwest part of Indiana, Bank President] Mr. Goetz is bracing for a steep increase in a crucial overhead cost: the bill from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is basically an insurance fund underwritten by banks.
Last year, DeMotte paid $42,000 into the fund. This year, because of failures in other parts of the country and particularly among national banks, that sum will rise to $500,000 or more.
“Isn’t that the American way?” he says, folding his arms. “Whoever is left standing, whoever was prudent, is always the one who has to pick up the pieces.”
Thus, yet another reason why these bailouts are so absurd: They punish the risk averse and reward the irresponsible . . .
Why do we have different standards for large institutions and little guys? I’ve long been fascinated by what I think of as “selective Darwinism” — applying the stringency of survival of the fittest to some categories while bailing out others. (I guess you could argue that getting too big to fail is a form of fitness, a special case of the general point that mega-success is the surest path to survival.) Our thinking, both right and left, seems extremely muddled in this regard. Incentives and consequences — chutes and ladders — are what it’s all about. Both the sages and the neurologists will tell you that.
I wish I could do a better job of thinking this through, but I’ve already stolen too much time from work. Please jump in.
UPDATE: And speaking of incentives, what do you think of paying kids to learn, promoted by Newt Gingrich?
[T]he Learning Makes a Difference Foundation […] focuses on innovative learning programs, such as Learn, Earn and Achieve, which offers students financial rewards for studying math and science.
[…P]reviously uninterested students not only improve their math and science scores but discover the thrill of learning for learning’s sake.
The pilot program is called Learn, Earn & Achieve. It may not be idealistic — it turns my vestigial hippie stomach, sure — but it’s realistic, isn’t it? Remuneration is one of the reasons why we do what we do. Getting up, getting dressed, and “going to school” in the morning already trains you for getting up, getting dressed, and “going to work” in the morning. School is a kid’s job. It has the same structure. For better or worse, it’s training for adult life in our society. Why not teach them that good work brings good pay? Instead of an allowance? (And instead of the basic income guarantee?) Of course, then parents would have to help them decide how much of it they should save for college tomorrow and how much they can blow on gear today. That could be good training too. What do you think?
I guess the part of it I might question is that last: discover the thrill of learning for learning’s sake.” Would kids who got paid for learning ever see any point in doing it voluntarily for free? But then, school as it is today doesn’t exactly consistently convey the thrill of learning for learning’s sake. Raise your hand if you enjoyed the Great Novels you had to read? The thrill of learning for learning’s sake depends most on the quality of the teacher.
UPDATE II: @newtgingrich “Learning IS the most important civil right in the 21st century and it should apply to every american of all ages to compete with china”
And, as stated above, in society’s collective interest to provide, for many reasons, scientific competitiveness being only one. Think of the advantages of having an informed, critically thinking populace — or more to the point, a populace with the skills to inform itself. Or, even more to the point, think of the disadvantages of not having such a populace.
“You’ll Die, But Not in May.”
Romanian proverb. Written, no doubt, on a day like today.
If This Blog Were Called “Change” . . .
. . . it’d have to be illustrated with nickels, dimes, and quarters. It turns out that if politics doesn’t go deep enough to address what ails us, only economics does. Or not “only”: economics is a symptom of human nature, or better yet, of the interface at which human nature collides with the laws of impersonal, if not objective, reality . . . and then what? Either submits (with secret relief?) or tries to bend, break, or dodge them.
But here we are, about as un-“ambiancey” as you can get, mostly talking about money. So that’s where it’s going, and that must be where it belongs. Talking about the economy is a way of talking about everything, one that has the advantage of being embodied and concrete, practical and at the same time wildly philosophical.
OK, so apropos: @blondaccountant, whom I’m following on Twitter, has a long rant/thread that takes off from a 1994 GAO report, “Financial Derivatives: Actions Needed to Protect the Financial System” [PDF], that now sounds like a bureaucrat-prophet crying in the wilderness. Attention was so not paid.
What I’m thinking about at the moment is what I’d call no-tomorrowism. It’s our own personal end-times mindset. We can’t bear our lack of knowledge of or control over what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the fact that we’re not going to be here one of these tomorrows (even though our children and grandchildren are), so we (a lot of us, enough to have momentum) live as if there is no tomorrow. I sometimes wonder if the more fervent end-times believers almost wish there weren‘t a tomorrow, for some of the same human reasons: we can’t predict or control it; we won’t be a part of it; as the Buddha said (approximately), “Everything you care about will change, fall apart, and be taken from you.”
And ironically, unavoidably, our no-tomorrowism becomes a major factor in shaping tomorrow. Maybe making it worse, in some ways, than it has to be. Maybe making it better, in some ways, than if we were more prudent. What do you think?
We’re exiles in our handmade history, outcasts from the old paradise of cycles, the hundreds of thousands of years when what went around, came around, again and again. There was the occasional natural catastrophe. The occasional schism where members of one tribe stopped speaking to each other and became two. The occasional destabilizing discovery. The constant nagging fear of witchcraft and predation. But also, the great natural world that never changed much in one person’s memory, that would always be there, per omnia saecula saeculorum, world without end, amen.
We got on a juggernaut called History, headed for the stars.
Dude, Where’s My Nose?
Ever since I saw the “before” picture of the face-transplant lady, I’m having trouble using my former favorite smile emoticon :)
~ amba
Not “Happy Mothers’ Day. Not “Happy Mothers Day.”
As Sissy Willis (Sisu) pointed out on Twitter this morning, Mother’s Day was deliberately established with the apostrophe firmly between the R and the S. It is to be celebrated one mother at a time. (Or as Anne Lamott would have it, bird by bird.)
This is a stunning vindication for the copy editors of the world. PUNCTUATION MATTERS. Not only is it a form of musical scoring or choreographic notation, telling your inner voice and your thought when to flow and where to pause; it is also a tiny lever moving worlds of meaning, a focusing device directing your attention precisely where it belongs.
On you, Mom. This one’s for you: my one mother, my fellow copy editor. I love and honor you — not just today.
~ amba/Annie
Even Michael Reynolds Will Have to Admit …
(because he’s a parent) that sometimes conservatives get it right. H/T joanofargghh via Twitter (from her blog Primordial Slack). HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!
(Hey, we need a blogroll.)
Ambiance 