Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

"News Illiteracy," Speaking Logic to Power — and Little League

"The power of news illiteracy. At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential,

embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans

are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read.

The willingness to believe purported news stories, often

riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a

liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics.

Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe."

 — Evan Osnos, New Yorker, 16 February 2018

            Since the comments I incorporate here were in an e-mail post on a "thread" that got archived I can tell you exactly when I wrote this version of one of my standard themes; it was "Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 6:03:57 PM GMT." I was responding to a post about Poetry Slams and went on to discuss what I call — and relevant here — "The Little League Syndrome" (a minor obsession of mine). I was pleased to learn about poetry slams since the description had them sound like the youngsters involved are getting good experience using language, and getting back to at least some of the roots of (satiric) poetry: judged competitions. Throw in competitive insults, and you're in the teen culture I grew up in and back to the Old English and Old Irish traditions, and more recent cultures in fiction and the real world.

            The most immediate poster on the thread had used a sports analogy for poetry slams, which I thought a good one. The more hopeful side would be if young people start to take seriously the serious joke among intramural sports organizers that "Something really worth doing is worth doing poorly." The downside is that adults rarely want to let the kids run things. The history is the semi-professionalization of college and then high school sports, with intramurals among high school SAC's (Social/Athletic Clubs) giving way to "the Little League Syndrome," plus varsity sports, and adult organizing of intramurals. There's a good chance well-meaning/control-freak grownups will do the same with poetry slams - and the kids will have to move on to something else.

            This is nothing new. Back in Chicago in 1961, a control-freak senior-class- ... Coordinator(?), well, Semi-Administrator accused me of "never" participating in our high school activities. I told her that I did participate but, indeed, not all that much since, "I can never be elected principal; so I put my effort into groups where I can at least have some clout." When asked by the director of a new Jewish Community Center what they could best do for the local teens, I said, "Mostly, leave them alone. Rent to them - at a fair price - but let them run their own events. Let them learn to organize."

            Alexis de Tocqueville praised Americans for the ability to organize themselves and not wait for some State official to come along and organize things. What with the Little League Syndrome in sports and probably poetry, dance, and music, things may be getting worse for civic life and civil debate. What I learned about politics I partly "absorbed" growing up in the warm, corrupt heart of the Chicago Democratic Organization, but mostly from adult-independent clubs in high school and my fraternity in college. The down sides of such groups have been rightly stressed, but even a street gang teaches important lessons, including the various means of getting your peers to do what you want (them) to do.

            When it came up in discussion — I have no idea what the context was — some of my university undergraduate students were surprised to learn that in the high schools in my area we kids organized our own sports leagues. ("Hey, we didn't build the parks! We just organized a schedule and signed up.") Some kids have never even organized a pickup basketball game.

            Earlier than that 2009 post, I wrote a piece for a newspaper guest column and guest lecturing with a suggested title something like, "Be Happy Johnny Can Talk," riffing on titles like, "Why Johnny Can't Read," "Why Johnny Can't Write." I wrote there about Little-League Syndrome and what has since been called "Helicopter Parenting." Between the two, and other influences, Americans were producing a lot of middle-class kids who make highly proficient (figurative) drones and worker bees in public- and private-sector bureaucratic hives, but not very good citizens.

            Johnny and later Jane weren't and aren't encouraged much to think critically and argue civilly.

            Not in classes in school with rote learning, machine-graded exams, and the student methodology of "cram and regurgitate." Take a moment to think seriously about that last figure of speech. Cram it down; don't "chew on a thought" — and then vomit it out as soon as possible, lest you chew on an idea too long, decide to swallow it, and then digest and assimilate it, making it part of you, maybe changing you.

            But classes are only part of school, and school is only part of kids' lives. Also part of school is "the life of the mind" on the school-yard and with friends — or lack thereof or utter contempt therefor. And home-life counts, especially with actual children.

            A friend suggests any chance you give her that American discourse has gone straight downhill since families no longer eat together and kids don't get supervised practice in arguing with one another. I stress the decline of more or less lawful kid-run activities and the increasing horror of "free-range kids." (Hitchhiking, for example, had its advantages of meeting strangers and talking with them, as well as the danger of the occasional serial-killer psychopath.)

            I suspect a crucial reason John and Jane Q. Public don't think too good is that they're not called upon that often to think much at all, combined with a media and advertising environment where they're encouraged to make decisions based on impulse, emotions, and spurious appeals. "The bigger the burger, the better the burger. The burgers are bigger at Burger King," to quote a classic commercial ca. 1967. Uh-huh. "And," as we wise-ass youngsters and young adults used to ask, "if it's a shit-burger?"

            Certainly American kids aren't asked to do much formal analysis of commercials, propaganda, political, ahem discourse, or the things their superiors lay on them.

            Coach says s/he wants "110% from each of you for the team"? Will Johnny Jock or Jane Sports-Bra get praised for a raised hand and, "Coach, you can't have more than 100%, and even 30% of our time and effort is way too much. We understand that you want a kind of blank check from us — but just how much of our time and effort do you actually want? We have other commitments." I wouldn't count on that going over very well. Worse if instead of Coach it's your boss.

            Indeed, at an older age, approaching 30, I sat next to the President of Miami University as a new, untenured, almost-assistant professor (don't ask), while he looked out the window at a campus traffic jam during New Student Week and intoned, "If we got rid of the 'No Car' Rule, we'd have a jam like that every day." I thought for a half moment — after a full moment I would've known better — and said, "Non sequitur, Mr. President; that doesn't follow." He looked at me. I replied, "Those are parents' cars for the most part; we don't know what it'd be like if the students drove up on their own … or during the year … no parents' cars around." And then some ancient part of my brain that handles survival stuff kicked through to the speech mechanism and shoved a spear into the gears, while screaming without words, "Shut up, already, you idiot! Shut up!!!" A bit after retirement, I asked our now-former President if I recalled that incident correctly — he had a phenomenal memory — and he replied that, Oh, yes, that's how he remembered it; he'd never forgotten it. Which was reassuring about my memory, and ambiguously reassuring on my suspicions on a small part of the reason it took me so long to get tenure, get promoted, get … anything.

            As Kurt Vonnegut points out somewhere, Americans are programmed less to be thinking entities than agreeing machines. Speaking logic to Power is probably not in the program.

            And it's not just our failures to be courageous or exquisitely tactful in talking to others. It's bad enough that we don't listen to other people and take them seriously enough to argue civilly with them; most of us much of the time don't even listen carefully to ourselves.

            Listen to yourselves and others with (for my example for the last few months) "everybody," "nobody," "best," "worst," and other absolutes. With "best" and "worst" and such there's an old tradition here, going back at least as far as Beowulf and other Old English heroic poetry where it's almost always "the best sword," "the best mead hall," "the worst monster" until when you get a simple assertion like "That was a good king," the line stands out. As Mort Sahl pointed out in the 1980s or so, we don't have to give "The Grimmy Award" and something doesn't have to be the worst!! to be bad. Or the best to be good. And if the assertion is about "everybody" or "nobody," it can be refuted with, "Uh, I don't" or "I do." (And if it's on something sexual, check out a porn site: what you think nobody would like probably has its own pages and a standard abbreviation.)

            One of my frosh writing students started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ___________." I asked, "Are you dating 'The Beginning of Time' from the Big Bang or the rise of consciousness, or God's creating the world or what?" And he said he hadn't thought about that at all. Uh-huh, and
Does 'Man' include boys and girls and women and …?" He was getting uncomfortable, so I said, "Let's put it very formally, what's your data-set here — just who-all are you talking about?" And he said it was "me and my buddies back in high school." And I said, "Then you should start out with "Me and my buddies back in high school" — or "My buddies and I" for a formal essay, and then get on to just what you can talk about." I didn't add, I meant talking about without bullshitting his readers, most immediately me.

            "The worst disaster to hit America in modern times"? You've heard variations on such a line. I don't think they had what we'd think of as America in Medieval Times. Does that just mean "recently"? "That I can remember?" "That me and my buddies back in the newsroom could think of off-hand?" And a worse disaster than the burning of Washington DC during the War of 1812? Worse than the Civil War? Spanish Flu? The Great Depression? The attacks of 11 September 2001? Does some bad thing have to be the worst before your audience will pay attention?

            Maybe

            So we get the sort of language-inflation and hyperbole we have gotten used to — and inured to — in advertising.

            About once a year back when I was in the Ed Biz in English, I'd write across the chalkboard in large letters, WORDS MEAN. And meaningful words should go into sentences and paragraphs in at least a vaguely coherent manner and add up a fair amount of the time as an insightful description or useful set of instructions or even a rational political analysis and sensible recommendations for action.

            Meanwhile, it'd be nice if people could as least read such discourse and differentiate it from what we can compact into a set labeled bullshit.

Teaching Americans to Argue Civilly

             In a quietly inspiring story in the USA Today network of newspapers, Gabe Cavallaro tells how Meg Heubeck of the Center for Politics' Youth Leadership Initiative (UVa) "works with teachers nationally to help students respectfully deal with the divides of our society through civil discourse, debate[,] and compromise."

            From what I've seen in comment sections of articles on line, and based in 40 years teaching courses in rhetoric, "the art of ethical persuasion," I'll suggest a broader project.

            One of the reasons so much of our public discourse is uncivil is that too few Americans know how to put together an argument and therefore fall back on personal attack. (Too few Americans can argue well privately with a spouse or other family member or friend, which is a related issue.)

            For the last three generations, middle-class kids have gotten little practice arguing in contexts they care about. Their families have fewer children, and family dinners have become rare, so young children don't get supervised practice arguing with siblings, with feedback from parents on the order of "'Johnny is a doodie-head' is not an argument!" Older children aren't routinely shooed out of the house to organize their own games, and by the time they're teens moving toward adulthood, economically-privileged kids are trapped in what I've called "The Little-League Syndrome."

            Little League Baseball and similar organizations for other sports, and grammar school and high-school athletic teams, teach kids to play the sports well, and these adult-organized and coached sports have been excellent for father-daughter relationships. They have been bad, though, for allowing American kids opportunities to organize their own activities and learn how to persuade their peers.

            On a couple of occasions, my students were surprised to learn my age cohort really didn't have Little League when and where I grew up, but teenage boys had high school fraternities and social-athletic clubs and ran our own leagues. "It's not like we built the parks and playing fields," I told my students, but we did put together teams, arrange schedules, and, sometimes, had to decide what to do with some schmucks who'd embezzled the money the clubs had chipped in for trophies.

            And there were year clubs for boys and for girls that arranged social events.

            Poorer American kids still have gangs — which look to me authoritarian and led by adults — but current fashions in middle-class American parenting and school management seem to preclude kids' organizing their own activities.

            So, one thing that can be done to improve American discourse is for parents and other adults to teach children basic manners and insist on basic decency to others — including no bullying — and to draw back a bit at a time to allow older kids to run more of their own activities and have to persuade one another to do what they want them to do.

            Little League and such teaches kids how to fit into a bureaucracy and follow orders; kid-organized activities teach democratic organizing, which includes persuasion of peers on issues kids care about (and some activities that may legitimately horrify their parents and others in authority).

            The schools need to teach things kids may care less about: argument as a kind of summation of skills, but also description and definition and analysis and other "modes" of discourse. For a slogan for this kind of teaching, we used to have "Unplug the Scantron machines!": i.e., get rid of multiple-choice tests (as an ultimate goal) and have students write out present orally descriptions, extended definitions, analyses, and finally arguments.

            Logical thought isn't exactly natural, and kids need to be taught, and adults need to be reminded, how to use evidence and present a logical argument (if one with enough of an emotional appeal to get it accepted).

            And young adults and some older ones need to be taught how to debate with one another on matters for adults, and for citizens.

            This doesn't mean just pure politics, but — obviously! — issues in the sciences, including military science and tactics, history, theology, and the arts. And it means some training in the sort of deep analysis where you can figure out why political arguments so often go in circles.

            One reasons for a "failure to communicate": Different people often use the same key words with different meanings. E.g., if a human being is essentially a soul to be saved and "ensoulment" occurs at conception, then abortion may be worse than murder. If you're not big on theories of souls and/or if you think theological issues shouldn't enter American politics — then you'll have a different view on abortion (and we haven't even gotten to historical questions on control of women's bodies!). For another example, what do we mean by "patriot"? In 1969 or so, I told an FBI agent, "Mr. N_____ is a very patriotic young man" since Mr. N_____ started out in Marine ROTC, studied US warfare in Vietnam and decided it was wrong, dropped his plans for a military career, and joined the Peace Movement, actively opposing the war. Now that is a patriot, like John Kerry, only a bit earlier. The FBI agent may have had different ideas on patriotism and, indeed, might have thought my idea of a patriot his idea of a traitor.

            The sort of rough-and-ready analysis I just did requires training, and pulling it off in the real world requires practice — a lot of practice — in controlling one's temper and getting opponents to control theirs.

            Meg Heubeck is doing important and difficult work; she deserves a wide variety of support.

Quick Comment on "The Right to Bear Arms"

Arms don't have to be guns. For a long time most cops even in very tough parts of London and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland got by with clubs, and the American weapon of home defense for most of my life was a baseball bat in the bedroom. (When my richer friends were talking about home security systems, I said, truthfully, that I'd upgraded mine by trading in my old wooden bat for a Little-League size aluminum bat.) 

We'll get sensible gun control laws in the USA when there's (1) open-carry in the US Congress; (2) someone yells "Gun!" and (3) a fair number of representatives are taken out by "friendly fire"; the survivors just might pass some decent legislation. 

The racial, ethnic, and class issues behind our laws on "bearing arms" become a whole lot clearer when you consider the laws on guns vs. knives.