Small Government and Abortion

At the launching of my “small government odyssey,” I provided only a set of characters and a single strategic principle. The set of characters were three sectors present in every societal system.[1] I called them the polity, the economy, and the society. When I get that far, I always remember a very useful acronym from undergraduate days. It is PERSIA. It functions to remind me that a societal system can be profitably considered by looking at its political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic components. In practice, I simply stuff R, I, and A into S and call it good enough.

The strategic principle was that people would continue to transact their business within the sector they were taught was appropriate. Things like buying and selling and producing and consuming goods and services “belong in” the economy. Things like expressing a religious faith, holding any view at all about anything at all, and producing something you think is beautiful all “belong in” society. We are all taught, more by example than by precept, what belongs where and by and large, we pay no more attention to it than that.

There are exceptions, of course. People who value society resent invasion by the economic sector. Social values and relationships can be “commodified,” i.e., turned into a commodity, and thereafter may be bought and sold. Both social practices and economic practices may be “juridified,” i.e., turned into political issues, especially through the courts.[2] The availability of wombs for rent is thought by many to be an outrageous commodification of conception and delivery. Making it a crime to smoke pot is thought by many to be an outrageous juridification of normal market processes.

In any case, keeping relationships and practices in the sectors “where they belong” is the very heart of the case for small government. A government that is not asked to do a great deal will not require a great deal of authority or resources—what we call today, “tax dollars.”[3] In order to keep issues in the sectors where they belong, people will have to believe that they are being treated fairly or that, fairly or not, there is no alternative.

With no more background than that, I thought that I would apply this logic to the question of abortion. By now, this is a full-blown sectoral conflict. Liberals, by and large, think that governments should not interfere with practices that are essentially “social” (doctor and patient) or essentially economic (professional and client). Conservatives, by and large, think that murder, which is how you get rid of unwanted fetuses, is against the law and that it is the natural and appropriate task of government to prevent these murders where possible or to punish the perpetrators, if necessary. It is, as I said, a sectoral conflict.

Let me grant you that this issue has been complicated in many ways. Conservatives are conflicted, for instance, about whether they want to prevent sexual promiscuity or to prevent pregnancies. But let’s just consider the implications for the three sectors under consideration. Everyone agrees that preventing the need for abortions is better than outlawing them and criminalizing the clients and the providers. Bill Clinton’s summary of his views on abortion remains a model of clarity: “safe, legal, and rare.” We are concerned about the “rare,” part.

At some point, a woman is going to be confronted by the prospect that she will deliver a baby she does not want. Let’s back the process up from that point and think of some reasons why she might not want to deliver this child. The child may be born deformed. The more we know about fetal diagnostics, the more we catch those possibilities. Small government advocates would be expected to be in favor of any non-governmental means of reducing these possibilities. If they are caused by inadequate medical attention to women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant, then making sure this attention is available is a superb way to reduce the number of deformed fetuses and the consequent demand for aborting those fetuses.

If the fetus is going to be “one child too many” for a single woman with other children, a small government advocate might want to look at why there are so many single women. The relationship of “jobs that will sustain a marriage” to the number of two-parent families comes immediately to mind. In urban areas, the number of single-parent families skyrocketed when the businesses left to cities for more expansive and less taxed environs. The jobs go away, the marriages go away, the babies keep coming. Some of these fetuses are aborted, who would not have been aborted had they been affordable and they would have been affordable had the marrige-sustaining jobs stayed put.

Or, consider adoption. If adoption were considered early (rather than, as is sometimes the case, abortion being considered late), it would cut down drastically on the number of abortions. For adoption to be reasonably considered early, a robust system of adoption services would have to be available and advertised. There would be adoption counseling. There would be a substantial number of adoptive families. Outcomes for adopted children would have to be comparatively attractive, and so on.

These are all means—starting way back with “adequate prenatal care”—that would reduce the demand for abortions. The process of not delivering an unwanted child would be “bought back” from the economy, where it is an economic transaction featuring willing buyers and willing sellers. It would be “bought back” from government, where it has been incessantly juridified since Roe v. Wade and it would be bought back not by blocking access to the courts, but by rendering the judgment of the courts superfluous.

When will “big government” happen with reference to this question? It will happen when there are a lot of people who feel they are losers and who feel that their needs would be better met by the intervention of government. Women will feel that they have the right to the professional services of a doctor and doctors will feel that three in the consulting room, where government is the third presence, is one too many. Legislatures will attempt to criminalize these professional services, but women will continue to seek them and providers will continue to provide them. The only reasonable way to keep government small is to keep it from juridifying the abortion question. The most efficient way of dealing with the abortion question is to prevent it. Preventing it will require substantial social change, all in support of women who through intension or inadvertence, find themselves unhappily with child.

So the task of the sector guardians—the people who want social issues to stay in the social sector and not be highjacked by the political sector—is to prevent these urgently felt needs from occurring. If they do occur, they ought to be met and I would expect advocates of small government to agree to the government’s meeting all the needs that can’t be prevented.

It seems only reasonable.

[1] My apologies for “societal system.” I’m saving “society” as the name of one of the sectors and using it both ways would run me into a tautonomy. We don’t want that.
[2] Left to my own devices, I would probably have chosen “politicized,” rather than the narrower “juridified,” but I am following the usage of Frank Hearn in Moral Order and Social Disorder. Hearn is a communitarian, so having pejorative names for the processes by which his favorite values are highjacked is very important.
[3] Or, if you are conservative, “hard-earned tax dollars.”

Launching a Small Government Odyssey

I am about to begin an odyssey. You are invited to accompany me and to keep me from time to time from throwing myself under the bus. I want to think about what proponents call “limited government,” but which is, in fact, “small government.”

I realize that we have a federal system and that the government people have in mind when they call for small government is the central government. These people want the federal government to be smaller not, as a rule, because they want less governing going on, but because they want more of the governing to be done by the regional governments. There are various reasons that might be given for that, some quite ingenious, but we will pass them by just this once.

I am imagining that our system can be thought of as three related parts, as in the diagram.
Just what the रेलातिओंस are of each to the other will be the continuing investigation. I am going to be known as the guy who put the odd- in odyssey, I suppose, but it would by only an –yssey if it weren’t for people like me. For now, I want to suggest one rule for using the diagram and note a couple of implications.

This is the rule: in a well-ordered economy and society, the transactions stay where they are. The buyers and sellers and suppliers and manufacturers and the providers and consumers of various services either like the way things are being done or see no alternative. The adherents of various faiths or of no faith, the family members, the educators and the students, the husbands and wives, the members of various racial or ethnic groups and of various cultures also believe that things are as they should be or that there is no alternative.

In a society like that and an economy like that, we may think of the outer line of the oval as very thick. This line protects the people inside and constrains them as well. Two possibilities thin the outer wall that defines society and economy. Sometimes it seems that there really is an alternative. Sometimes people are really really unhappy with the way things are working out. Or, of course, both. When that happens, people place themselves, figuratively, outside the society or the economy and solicit the action of government.

Government is, in this way of looking at it, an appellate court. It really isn’t as bad as that because in a society and in an economy, there are no necessity that there be any losers. Arrangements can be reached in which everyone is either satisfied or not so dissatisfied as to launch an appeal. In a court, there are losers by definition and as a rule, if you lose and if you have the resources, you start looking around for a second opinion. You appeal to a “higher” jurisdiction.

Now government has its own work to do. It is not only a court of appeals. It has to protect the nation-state from enemies both foreign and domestic. It has to maintain public order. It has to enforce contracts and allow forms of organization favorable to the accumulation of capital, and so on. But government runs on authority and funding and if there is a government, there are people in the government who want more authority and more funding. So they can, you know, provide more “services.” And that’s where the appellate function comes in.

Losers in the economy can solicit the attention of the government and ask for help. Losers in the society can solicit the attention of the government and ask for help. As a rule, the people who are doing well in the economy and the society do not look favorably at the prospect of having their monopolies broken. “Sector knows best,” they will say, meaning only their own sector. The way to keep issues “at home,” i.e., within the sector where they arose, is to keep people from feeling like losers or to keep them from availing themselves of an alternative.

So, just to pick two suggestive examples, a health insurance company might raise its prices by 20% and keep their discretion successfully at home in the economy. If they raise them 200%, someone is going to appeal for governmental intervention. If you have a child with a rapidly progressing illness, you might say that you are faith healers and are relying on God to bring about health. That works sometimes in the sense that no one alleges child abuse and demands government intervention. If you said, instead, that you didn’t want to spend the money on the health needs of your child, there would be a governmental intervention and you would lose control over the child.

So one straightforward implication and I’ll let it rest for today. The people who are currently winning in their sectors would be wise to do whatever is necessary to prevent conditions from getting so bad that there will be an appeal to government. The appeal is the hope of the losers in that sector and even if it fails, it destabilizes the sector and makes a new deal seem possible.

"Political Hypocrisy" Isn't Really a Redundant Expression

We aren’t very consistent in our view, I’m afraid. Since we learn what our views are in different settings and under the influence of different values, we are always trying to reconcile one view we hold with another. It isn’t like going out looking for your three dogs who have escaped and are out wandering around the neighborhood. It’s more like this. There is a court somewhere which as part of its duties, declares various dogs somewhere in your state to be “yours.” You have to find out that they are “yours,” find out where they are, go find them, and bring them back to your yard where, just recently, they belong. If this court is active, which it is during the times of our rapid intellectual growth or change (not the same things), you will be out trieving dogs[1] most of the time and most of the dogs that are “yours” will not be in your yard. Ever. ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ That is the fundamental reason we are inconsistent. Of course, there are others. Even people who pride themselves on ideological consistency are not consistent, although their problems can ordinarily be solved by rapidly evolving definitions of the key terms. ******************************************************************************************************************************************************* But my principal interest today is in the common practice of referring to nearly any inconsistency as “hypocrisy.” What does that really mean? The Greek antecedents are plain and back as far as hypocrites = stage actor, they are understandable. They are puzzling if you try to go further back than that. For most of the centuries of its use in English, it has meant someone who pretends to be good and admirable who actually is not. I think the most prominent use of it today displays a kind of moral laziness and I cite the well-known Lord Finkle-McGraw as my authority. In Neal Stephenson’s delightful and unnerving The Diamond Age, he introduces a group called “The New Victorians.” They are a very conservative group, socially, and much respected. Now. As Lord Fink-McGraw explains in this passage, it was not always so. The case that the charge of hypocrisy is mostly moral laziness comes in the passage where the early days of the New Victorians are described. It was way back at the end of the 20th Century. Think back. Moral values had fallen to such a level that no one was willing to take a moral stand. But, as Finkle-McGraw says, “people are naturally censorious,” and some ground for criticism must be found. It was in that way that “hypocrisy” was elevated from “a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices.” ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ In this way of looking at it, the great service that the charge of hypocrisy provides is that you don’t have to have a standard yourself. Any inconsistency in the speech or in the behavior of an opponent is enough to cue “hypocrisy” as the charge of choice. That is damaging enough, giving that it elevates consistency to THE virtue and turns every public person into a piñata. But the classic response is also damaging: “That was then; this is now.”[2]****************************************************************************************************************************************************** How did we get so many hypocrites into public life at the same time? Let me count the ways. Being a member of the House of Representatives requires that you rail against the Senate for being dilatory. When you become a senator yourself, you brush off the House criticism as one that does not respect the “traditions of debate” in the Senate. Right. When you are a candidate for the presidency, you rail against the incumbent’s failure to plot a clear (or a moral—depends on which party is out of power) path. When you are the incumbent and actually have to govern, you dismiss such criticism as naïve, which, in an important way, they are. Right. The activists of the Republican and Democratic parties are well out in the tail of the distribution of opinions of their parties. The Republican activists are well to the right of Republicans generally; the Democratic activists are well to the left of Democrats generally. To secure your party’s nomination, you need to satisfy the activists, who control the nomination process. To be elected, you need to satisfy the majorities within the parties, and the Independents as well. This means that you will be backing away from whatever you said in the nomination phase and under the construction we are exploring, this would be called hypocrisy. It would be turned into a moral offense and the argument the charge cues will be a “morality” argument, ten times hotter than the instrumental one and much less open to the compromises that will be required in any case. ********************************************************************************** Of course, some things actually are hypocritical. Establishing mechanisms by which purportedly anonymous sexual transactions can be prosecuted and then being caught in that mechanism yourself is more than inconsistent. It is hypocritical. Making a political career out of gay bashing, then having to confront your sexual abuse of a same sex member of your office staff is more than inconsistent. It is hypocritical. I do think, however, that we can profit from Lord Finkle-McGraw’s insight and oppose these actions because they are wrong, rather than because they are inconsistent. This may be costly, because “wrong” requires us to offer a standard of value of our own, but it is the right thing to do anyway, and refusing to do it because it is difficult is just typical Washington hypocrisy. Ooops. [1] Since they have just become yours, you can’t really re-trieve them. [2] The form used by the Nixon administration, that a given explanation was “no longer operative” really isn’t worse than the current version. It is just clumsier.

On the Clarity of Ideologues

I've been having a hard time lately on the New York Times op-ed page. I've been agreeing with the liberals and intrigued by the conservatives. That can't be good, can it?

Ross Douthat wrote a column last week in praise of Sen. Tom Coburn and specifically in praise of his ideological dogmatism. There's an argument you don't hear very often. It is an argument that makes a good deal of sense to a political psychologist and I'd like to say why but first I want to share an Oregon politics story.

When I started my apprenticeship with the Oregon House of Representatives (I was Rep. Bruce Hugo's legislative assistant), Rep. Glenn Otto was widely known for one particular quirk. He strongly disliked having an "emergency clause" tacked onto a bill unless there was actually an emergency. He did not consider the eagerness of the sponsors to see the bill take effect quickly as an emergency. He would not, he said, vote for a bill with an emergency clause unless there was some reason it deserved to have an emergency clause. He was adamant.

There aren't too many principled politicians (I am not disparaging them; they are elected, in most cases, to be pragmatists) and even fewer who are adamantly unwilling to compromise their principles. Many of his colleagues wished Rep. Otto would be adamant about principles that were more ennobling and broadly applicable and even more lobbyists wished it. I saw Rep. Otto vote against his own bill after an emergency clause had been added to it unnecessarily.

And what was the effect of this monomania? If the vote was going to be close and they needed Rep. Otto's vote, the managers of the bill were forced to consider whether they would have to remove the emergency clause. No one considered trying to convince Rep. Otto that the emergency clause was as bad as he thought it was. They knew he wasn't going to change, so they had to consider how they, themselves, might change. That was the effect. It amazed me, as a novice to politics, to see how it played out.

Sen. Coburn's principles are a good deal broader according to Douthat, citing Coburn's influence on the healthcare debate, the financial reform debate, and "the White House's deficit commission." That final entity is "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." You can see why Douthat called it "the White House's" plan and called the plan "the deficit commission."

Here's the point Douthat made that set me to thinking. "Again, his ideological rigor was a spur to creativity: it enabled him to consider the possibility that what was branded as a left-wing idea might actually be better for free markets than [the more traditional conservative alternative]." To someone with my training, that sounded like "category accessibility," and I found myself really appreciation Douthat's point that the categories accessible to ideologues are genuinely different from those available to pragmatists and that the difference might be a vital asset.

Now we need to consider "category accessibility." Consider this passage from cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner, from his article "On Perceptual Readiness." I was twenty years old, by the way, when this article was published and I have been giving it pretty hard use for the last 35 or so years.

Conceive of a person who is perceptually ready to encounter a certain object, an apple let us say. How he happens to be in this state we shall consider later. We measure the accessibility of the category “apples” by the amount of stimulus input of a certain pattern necessary to evoke the perceptual response “there is an apple,” or some other standardized response. We can state the “minimum” input required for such categorization by having our observer operate with two response categories, “yes” and “no,” with the likelihood of occurrence of apples and non- apples at 50:50, or by using any other definition of “maximum readiness” that one wishes to employ. The greater the accessibility of a category, (a) the less the input necessary for categorization to occur in terms of this category, (b) the wider the range of input characteristics that will be “accepted” as fitting the category in question, (c) the more likely that categories that provide a better or equally good fit for the input will be masked. To put it in more ordinary language: apples will be more easily and swiftly recognized, a wider range of things will be identified or misidentified as apples, and in consequence the correct or best fitting identity of these other inputs will be masked. This is what is intended by accessibility.

The "apple" Sen. Coburn is looking for "small government." To see what that means, simple substitute "small government" for "apple" in the sentence above: "Policies leading to reducing the size of government" will be more easily and swiftly recognized..." Or consider this sentence: We measure the accessibility of the category "policies leading to a reduction in the size of government" by the amount of stimulus input...is necessary to evoke the perceptual response, "Say, this policy might work!"

In healthcare, in deficit reduction, and in financial reform, the amount of input necessary to attract Sen. Coburn's attention is extremely low. He will see possibilities where others will see nothing at all. Many of his colleagues will walk right past the "apple" that so excites Coburn.

Of course, everyone has an "apple" and for every other member of the Senate, there is something he or she cares about so much that the necessary stimulus threshhold is made so low that nearly anything will cross it. Douthat writes about Coburn's "apple" because he likes Coburn's "apple." I like Rep. Blumenauer's (East Portland) "apple" better, myself, but it's politics and as the great Walt Kelley said, "One man's [apple] is another man's cold broccoli."

Students Know When They Are Being Well Taught?

Some do. Some don't. Neither of those propositions is on my mind today. Today's question is this: will the students say what they know and will the result be better teaching?

There was a really interesting piece in the New York Times this morning. It begins with the interest the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has shown in locating good teachers. They have devised a "value-added" metric, by which they statistically calculate how much of a student's test scores can be attributed to particular teachers. A student of mine told me last week that in Los Angeles, these scores are printed in the newspaper next to the names of the teachers. I haven't verified that, but I find it plausible. Horrifying too, of course.

The new interest from the Gates Foundation is to see what other measures correlate with high value-added scores. They have discovered that you can ask the students. That seems obvious, I guess, but I began by observing that some do (know) and some don't. Here are three such observations.

Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.

The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and,

“My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”

This is information worth having and it can not be collected by having an administrator drop into the class, as if by parachute, jot a few notes and leave. The students know things like this and they will safely tell you provided the questionnaire is anonymous and is not used to evaluate the teachers.

Oops. We have just reached the brow of the hill and are peering down the slippery slope. I don't see any vegetation down there and it has been raining for a week. What are the chances we can keep our footing? (Here in Portland, it actually has rained for a week and there are months yet to go.)

When the answers these students provide are used to discipline or to reward teachers, to promote or demote them, to hire them or fire them, the students are presented with a new set of choices. I don't mean to cast aspersions on the students, but this new choice is a challenge routinely flunked by congressmen, judges, and White House staffers.

The choice is this. Do you want to say what you know or do you want to produce the kind of effect your assessment could produce? That's the question I had in mind when I started; that's what's on my mind today. Let me phrase that in a few other ways. Dear student: do you value the accuracy of your observations more than you value seeing justice done in your school? More than you value the chance to retaliate against the teacher whose homework you did all last week instead of going to the coast with your family? More than you value that chance to hurt the teacher who had one of your friends suspended from school last month?

Dear student: do you really think the administration is going to make good use of the information you provide them? Will they not, rather, put this information to their own purposes? Don't you think you can trust the clout you have right now (in answering the questionnaire) more than the clout some administrator might have in using the results for good purpose?

The question for these students, in short, is this: will you be willing to tell only the truth you know rather than trying to have an effect of some kind? The question for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is this: do you really think students will continue to tell you what they know after you have put into their hands a tool that will allow them, instead, to get what they want? Do you really?

I don't.

A decade or so, the legislature in California began a program of sending cash awards to high schools with high (or with rising) achievement scores. The students at some schools began meeting with the administration to talk about what the money would be used for, should it actually arrive. In a number of cases, the administration's vision of the best use of the funds did not match the vision of the students, who were thinking that a day at Disneyland would be really cool. And, since the students controlled absolutely whether the scores would be high or not and since they personally paid no penalty for low scores, they were in a perfect place to blackmail the school. Which they did. And after enough schools did it, the Assembly suspended the program--probably over protests from Disneyland.

Have we taught our students to tell "the truth they know," to admit that there are some important truths they do not know, and to walk past all the inducements of power and influence? It would be nice to think so, but I don't. And until we do, this lovely new source of information that the Gates Foundation has given us will remain a small candle in a very large dark room.

Too Much Month Left at the End of the Money

Sound familiar? Here is a comment that evokes just those feelings in me and did in my Political Psychology class as well. It shouldn't have, but it did.

Here's Robert Reich in his new book, Aftershock.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, assessing what had happened to the United States in the years leading up to the Great Recession, repeated the conventional view that "for too long, Americans were buying too much and saving too little." He went on to say that this was "no longer an option for us or for the rest of the world. And already in the united States you can see the first signs of an important transformation here as Americans save more and we borrow substantially less from the rest of the world." He called for a "rebalanced" global economy in which Americans consume less and China consumes more.

Geithner was correct about the transformation. But he misstated the underlying problem, of which the Great Recession was a symptom. The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able toprovide them.

I highlighted the "hard to swallow" part. I simply could not get myself to take it seriously.
Reich goes on to say--this is the remainder of that paragraph:

The American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

I look at Reich's point at it characterizes the economy as a whole. The output of the economy has been redirected so that more has gone to the most wealthy and less to everyone else. I knew that. The economic inequality of our society is now at its highest levels since--a chilling date in this context--1928. I knew that. We can not expect to sustain aggregate demand without paying American workers enough money to allow them to buy things. I knew that.

But when it comes right down to it, you have to say that there is too much month left at the end of the money, and I just can't get myself to take that seriously. All my life, the only people who were characterized that way were ridiculed. Women especially. The family income just doesn't seem to keep up with the way I am spending. Oh dear! I guess we need more income.

In the macroeconomy, the situation is entirely different but my ears hear it the same way. The emotional revulsion I feel comes whether I understand it to be appropriate to the national economic picture or not. Thank God you can choose to vote what you think, rather than what you feel.

This is complicated for a lot of people by the fact that a lot of people they trust--members of the media and of Congress--are telling them that they ought to feel just this way--and that they should call this "feeling," thinking. I don't have that particular difficulty. When I hear those people, I say, "Oh...them again." I am not confusing what they call thinking with what I call "feeling." But I still have to fight the feelings.

Two chapters later, Reich tells the oft-told story of Henry Ford who paid workers at his Highland Park, Michigan assembly plant three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal called it "an economic crime." Ford thought that if he paid his employees enough money that they could afford to buy the Model T they were building, they would buy them and Ford would make a lot of money. Which he did.

It's a well-known story. I feel the sense of it in my body as well as in my mind. I feel it in just the same way I feel the shame of thinking there is too much month left at the end of the money, although the implications for policy go in exactly the opposite direction. What a mess.

Reich says that people bought what they could as long as they could afford it. When they ran out of money, they took on extra jobs. When that didn't do it, they maxed out their credit cards. When that came to its predictable end, they borrowed on the eternally rising value of their homes. Then the housing market crashed. There really isn't anything to do except to do what Henry Ford did. What we call the "economic crises of our time" are only symptoms of our inability to buy what we make.

I really hope I don't enjoy my disparagement of overspenders so much that I can't really feel the truth Reich is preaching. I can think it now, but I really believe that until we can feel it, it won't do us any good.

The Politics of Self-respect 1

I’ve worked on this one for a few weeks recently. As you see by the caricature, however, I’ve been working on it for a lot longer than that. The Politics of Self-respect is a course I designed and offered as part of my doctoral program in 1973.[1] So as I look at the topic, I see that I’m going to have to take it in two parts. This one will be about what “self-respect" is. The next, about how our need for self-respect affects our politics and, of course, how it affects us.


Self-respect. What is it? Particularly, how is it different from “self-esteem?” Let’s start with the etymologies, although there are only about one and a half to work with. Scholars are wary of saying what the roots of esteem are. The OED doesn’t even try. My old red Webster’s says it comes from a hypothetical root *ais-temos, “one who cuts copper,” so someone who mints money. The meaning given for the noun is “favorable opinion, high regard.” Respect is a word that is not about the value of the object; it is about the process of looking. The past participle respectus is formed from respecere, “to look back on, to look at.”

I think it would be easy to take “looking” as fundamental, when it is, in fact, a metaphor, but let’s take it seriously for just a moment. I recently posted a celebration of this year’s return to school and called it “The Eight Answers.” The conversation I am about to recount occurs in the same movie (Born Yesterday) just a few minutes later.

Billie, the Vegas dancer, has learned “the eight answers” and has used them very well at a party. As they are walking out, Paul, who taught her those answers, is giddy at their success. Billie is not giddy. She knows she is not the person she seemed to be when she delivered those answers, but in doing that little bit of theater, she had an experience no one could have foreseen. Here’s how it goes.

Billie: But, Paul, there was a time right in the middle when I was sayin'
something and everybody was lookin’ at me like I knew what I was talkin’ about
and I liked it so much.

That’s not respect, certainly, but…pardon me, briefly…it is “spect.” The looking at her as if she knew things, as if they had “a high regard” for her, is a way she can not look at herself. She knows she’s a fraud. But the simple experience of being looked at like that raised in her mind the faint possibility that she could come to look at herself that way; that she could have that respect for herself. Which is what the rest of the movie is about, but we will have to leave it here.

Self-respect is a respect, a high opinion, you have as a result of “looking at yourself.” It is, in the beginning, an inference drawn. It isn’t “feeling like you are a good person,” so much as it is thinking you have done something well or, more generally, that you do that kind of thing well. You might value knowing how to repair a car engine or knowing how to project yourself at a meeting so that you will be listened to or knowing how to hear those wonderful dissonances that English-speakers produce, often accidentally, and how to enjoy them. If you value those things generally, and perform them well, you will have respect for yourself in that area. If there are other such areas, you will come to have respect for yourself generally. You will have self-respect.
I know there’s more to it, but sometimes you can’t say it all at once.

Clearly, you need to get enough distance from yourself to see what you are doing. You need to have a framework that allows you to evaluate your work in the same way you would evaluate the work of anyone else. All that seems clear to me. But how to do you get that framework in the first place? You have to choose a framework that enables evaluation and you aren’t competent to build that framework yourself. We turn here to Alisdair MacIntyre’s notion of “practices.”
I’ve hyperlinked a section from his best-known book, After Virtue, here, but I can summarize the point he makes. Then, after, a simple application and a modest little rant about the rage for self-esteem, and I’ll bring this part to a close.

MacIntyre says you have to value “goods internal to the practice.” It seems a very powerful argument to me. Here are three pieces of it.

A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. it is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice.

I asked earlier how you can get far enough away to “look at” yourself, potentially to “respect” yourself. Here is the beginning of the answer. You accept “the standards of the practice” as right and your own performance, where it diverges from those standards, as wrong. You stand where the standards are; that’s how you get the distance.

Practices…are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far.

Notice that questions of authority precede questions of respect. They do not precede questions of esteem. You can be taught that your performance is good because you are a good person or because you tried really hard or because, despite all the other things you might have done, you simply showed up.

If, on starting to listen to music, I do not accept my own incapacity to judge correctly, I will never learn to hear, let alone to appreciate, Bartok’s last quartets. If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not, I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.

This series of examples is what clinched the argument for me on first reading. Bartok and baseball. There is also an extension of the argument here. Not only will you never learn competent performance without accepting the authority of the practices; you will also never learn to appreciate the competent performance of others. And you know he’s right about that. How many times have you had to suspend your own initial judgment—you called it “my own judgment” at the time—to really hear a piece of music or really watch a ballet or fully appreciate a quarterback draw?

If you can accept the standards, which may make no sense to you at first, then you can look at yourself from the vantage point they give you. And as you play up to the standards, you can appreciate your own work and value yourself—value your self—for doing that work. You value yourself by the same standards that you would value in anyone. It is the judgment of the standards, not of the insatiable inner “me first,” that are valued.

The question this raises, in the model of a “politics” of “self-respect” is this: can we have a politics that enables, recognizes, and rewards the development of self-respect by its citizens? Yes, I think we can. But the trip is going to lead us into some unfamiliar territory and it’s a trip we will have to postpone until next time.

[1] This caricature was drawn by Kathy Kriara, who was supposed to be taking a final exam, but who couldn’t remember anything at exam time. This is what she turned in instead of an exam paper. It’s a little odd of me, but the fact is I can’t remember anything about that exam except that Kathy gave me this picture.

Reconsidering Poverty (It isn't fun)

The determination of what does and what does not become a matter of governmental action is, therefore, the supreme instrument of power.

So said Richard Neustadt in one of the most powerfully formative sentences of my professional life.

There is very little sentiment in the wider population for tackling the extensive problems faced by poor and poorly educated black Americans. What is needed is a dramatic mobilization of the black community to demand justice on a wide front — think employment, education and the criminal justice system — while establishing a new set of norms, higher standards, for struggling blacks to live by.

So said Bob Herbert from his editorial page perch in the New York Times this morning (8/21/10)

I want to introduce you to Ruby K. Payne, author of A Framework for Understanding Poverty, 4th Edition. I’ve been a teacher for a long time and I am here to tell you that it is hard to “see” poverty. Also, it isn't any fun to see it. And after you learn to see it, it is even harder to want to do anything about it. If you add “recategorizing it” to my two emphases of “seeing it” and “wanting to do something about it,” you have Dr. Payne’s contribution to the discussion. We’ll pick up Neustadt and Herbert as we go along.

Here’s Dr. Payne’s account of how students speak. None of this connects with my experience as a teacher, a fact to which we will return. Let’s distinguish the different “registers” of language. Every language in the world, according to Martin Joos, has five registers. The same five. Of those, we will be concerned with two: the “formal” and the “casual.” The formal “register” is characterized by “the standard sentence syntax and word choice of work and school. Has complete sentences and specific word choice.” The casual “register” is, like, “language between friends and is characterized by a 400—800-word vocabulary. Word choice general and not specific. Conversation dependent upon non-verbal assists. Sentence syntax often incomplete.”

Do you see where this is going? I come to the word “register” from a music background. I know what it means to play notes in the upper register and the lower register. The idea that one of these registers is, in some way, “better” is ridiculous. And that is why Dr. Payne uses the word “register” to distinguish how middle class kids talk in school from how lower class kids talk. And, speaking now from more than ten years as a professor at an urban university, a university where many of the incoming students are the first in their families to attend college at all, that also distinguishes the way my middle class students write essays from the way my lower class kids write essays.

Now, as I pointed out above, it is hard to “see” poverty and, as a rule, I don’t manage to see it in the classes I teach. I see students who, from all appearances, wasted their K-12 educational years. I see students who are the products and victims of ignorant or apathetic or overburdened teachers. Why, in God’s name, didn’t someone teach these kids how to write a sentence!?! I see students who say “y’know” when the question of the moment is whether they know; they “refer” to things I am trying to get them to specify. Those are what I see. I don’t see poverty. I don’t even see the inappropriate use of “the casual register.”

And if I did, it would blunt significantly the disapproval I feel about these students’ performance. And the satisfaction I take in the writing of the students who “take the trouble to do it correctly.” I want to deal with “good papers” and “bad papers” and I want to praise the former and condemn the latter. The whole notion of language “registers” gets in the road of that desire.

That’s what it looks like as a moral problem and in this formulation, I am the one who is doing it wrong. I deny the notion of “register.” I deny the implications of different student “registers” because I am so eager to condemn the bad papers and praise the good ones.

But is this really political psychology? Of course. Let me defer to the redoubtable Joe Allman, the chair of my dissertation committee at the University of Oregon. Just before I went into “the room” to defend my dissertation, Joe characterized it as “two parts competent and one part brilliant.” I was anxious. It was the day before a make or break defense of my last three years of work. I asked, “What is the brilliant part?” He said, “The way you’ve devised to call all of “this”—he gestured to his copy of the dissertation on his desk—‘political science’...brilliant!”

Let’s look at Bob Herbert’s formulation. Some people, “poor and poorly educated black Americans” are “facing problems.” It’s a shame, but there it is. The “wider population,” that’s us, has the resources to deal with this problem, but not the will. There is “very little sentiment” for tackling these problems. Herbert argues that “the black community,” widely believed to have insufficient resources for dealing with “poor and poorly educated black Americans” should address this problem because they do have the will. Or Herbert thinks they should have the will. And on what basis? Justice. The black community should demand “justice” on a wide front—employment, education and the criminal justice system. It didn’t take very long to get that political, did it? And, you’ll notice that by the introduction of “justice,” we are also back to “moral” as well.

Now let’s pick up Richard Neustadt in closing. I have all these students who can’t write. For me, it isn’t really a racial question. The middle class black students I get are fine. The poor students I get, regardless of their race, are not fine. They are truly awful essayists and I have to read the essays. It's rubbing salt in the wound—and my doctor says I should be cutting down on salt. Neustadt’s question is, “What are the alternatives?” And, more potently, "who controls our notions of what the alternatives are?"

There are the ones I come naturally to. I don’t approve of being stuck with these alternatives, as you’ve noticed, but they are completely authentic. I take the students as they come. I take the papers as they come. I spend on the papers the time “real professors” can’t afford to spend to convey to the students that someone actually cares and they are doing this well and that poorly. I identify good behavior and reward it and identify bad behavior and punish it...I mean I allow the natural consequences to follow. I am not part of “the wider population” who does not have the will to confront this. I am one dedicated professional fighting the fight against sloth and indifference. Those are the alternatives.

For Herbert, the alternatives are different. The problem is there. The “wider population” has no taste for dealing with it, although its effects effect them both directly and indirectly. The alternative is for the black community to rise up in holy wrath and demand justice. Those are the alternatives. The problem continues to get worse because of white indifference or the problem begins to be addressed because of black vigilance.

This puts Herbert, with whom I agree wholeheartedly in principle, and me in direct opposition. Neustadt is calling the balls and strikes. Into this dispute comes Ruby Payne, who says that “the casual register” is the first language of poor kids. It isn’t wrong any more than notes above middle C are wrong. But it isn’t adequate for the lives the children aspire to lead, either, nor the lives we want to have available to them. Someone needs to teach them the formal register and to do it not because it is “right” but because they will have need of it.

Way to go, Ruby.