America Needs More A**holes Like Me (3 March 2013)

      I shall assert, with all due modesty, that America, perhaps the world, needs more assholes like me.

     I will now clarify that assertion.

     First, I cast no aspersions upon the anus, neither that of humans nor more generally. The anus in itself is an innocent orifice, of great importance in evolutionary history and to be appreciated by all of us organisms organized around a digestive tube.

     Second, America and the planet do not need assholes not like me, for example and especially macho assholes. Nor does the world need more assholes like me in my curmudgeon aspect (with curmudgeons as aged or, to be generous, vintage assholes). As Boomers move into the twilight years, America will undoubtedly have more than enough curmudgeons — at least until younger people realize how much their elders have messed them over with resource depletion, debt, environmental degradation, and transferring money from them to us, and we get a crash in the curmudgeon population when we're recycled as Soylent Grey.™

     No, what we need more of is me as an inner-directed person strong on integrity, and willing to be obnoxious in the process. We need more people like me in my mode of (arguably) a narcissistic, insensitive asshole.

     Actually, I care a lot about what people think of me; but at 5'2" tall (157.48 cm), the initial reaction I'm going to get from most Americans is what I experience as a mild, casual contempt: disregard. They won't actively dislike me — probably — before I open my mouth, but they will kind of ignore me. (I have, after all, needed to call out "Hey, I exist!" on more than one occasion.)

     After I open my mouth, then people can dislike me on more solid grounds.

     Anyway, I overcompensate a lot and tend to be inner-directed, which is a very complimentary way of talking about someone who does what he (usually he) thinks is right without caring a whole lot what other people think or will react.

     Let's start with a harmless example from a simulation game, a variation on "The Prisoners' Dilemma."

     In the variation I played, the prisoners got to talk to each other, and the simulation situation was this: Pairs of prisoners have been arrested; the charges were not revealed to us and would not be revealed — I asked; if both prisoners remained silent, there was a chance we'd both be freed, eventually; but there was a better chance that we'd go to jail for a year. If one simulated prisoner ratted out the other, saying the other was guilty … of something — the accused prisoner would go to jail for at least X years (with X significantly greater than 1), and the betraying prisoner would go free. If each ratted out the other, we'd both go to jail for Y years.

     I didn't pay much attention to those "X" and "Y" details because I, of course, remained true to my fellow prisoner.

     My fellow prisoner — a professor in the Business School if I recall correctly — ratted me out consistently. He betrayed me even after I pointed out to him the Kafkaesque situation we were in — not even told the charges! —and how all we had to depend on was loyalty and integrity.

     Every time, I remained loyal, and he betrayed me.

     Now, if I had my brain in higher gear, on the third or fourth repetition I'd have interrupted the script by telling the game-runners that my fellow prisoner couldn't talk to them because he'd died mysteriously overnight from blood loss and trauma when someone pushed a shiv several times into his ratfink guts.

     Actually, I think that a lot of simulation games and psychology experiments should have their scripts disrupted. E.g., if you know the great Stanley Milgram "shock" experiments on obedience to authority — someone should have snuck a shill into the pool of test subjects, and have the shill blithely deliver all the electric shocks to the supposed victim in the next room, finally saying to the "Experimenter," something like, "Why, why, I've killed him; and you're the only witness …."

     But that's going off on a tangent, though an instructive one for my point.

     At least in a game, a simulation like "The Prisoner's Dilemma," I'm going to stick to my integrity and not allow the actions or probable actions and reactions of another player to determine my behavior.

     It's a control thing.

     I'm not a cynical asshole — although I was introduced to my adviser at Cornell as "a cynical little bastard from Chicago" — I'm not lower-case cynical but try to be something of an upper-case Cynic, with some of the Stoic and the "Job-ic" (as in the Biblical Book of Job) thrown in.
     "What do I have control over?" such people asked; and the answer is "my behavior": even when told, possibly correctly, "Agree with God and be at peace," Job insists "till I die I will not put away my integrity […]. / I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go […]" (22.21, 27.5-6).

     Capital "C" Cynics say, "Virtue is its own reward" 'cause virtue is not likely to get any other reward — as Job learns, certainly not inevitably get rewarded; but all we have is our integrity and should hold onto it up to, if not including, being told off by God, personally, face-to-face (Job 31, 37 f.).

     So, okay, I'm a wannabe capital "C" Cynical little bastard from Chicago who can be damnably self-righteous.

     And we need more people like me; not a lot more, but more.

     When people sneer at my recycling, they can say, correctly, that I may feel good about recycling but it doesn't do much for the environment.

     And I can say back, "Screw you! I'm following Kant's 'Categorical Imperative' and acting so the principle of my action — here, preserving the environment, responsible citizenship — can be a law for all people. And if nobody else goes along, that's too bad for the environment and for the younger among that 'nobody else,' but screw them, too."

     In other modes and moods, I care a lot about influencing others and about consequences, but in inner-directed, Cynical asshole mode, I don't.

     I write letters to the editor that I know few people will read — and I can look up hard numbers on how few people have read my blogs. I continue to write, but in part in the manner of the Hebrew Prophets or satirists. I.e., I write such things mostly because I have to vent the words and partly because of an archaic belief that if the Word "goes forth" (as a mashal) it will do some work in the world. Similarly, as a teacher I strongly encouraged my students to read my comments and revise their papers, but I suspected from the beginning and was damn sure after a few years that many, perhaps most, of my comments were ignored. I continued to write comments: critique is part of teaching, teaching was my job, "teacher" was in large part who I was and remains a significant part of who I am.

     Push varieties of such "inner-direction" too far, and one gets to sociopath, but the mode is useful for avoiding "group think," at least when "group think" is more like "group feel."
     Feelings are important; empathy is central to responsible morality. Still, sentimentality is not — emphatically not — compassion, and sentimentality can get in the way of ethics; too much squishy feeling for others can stop you from doing the right thing.

     Obviously with squeamishness if, for example, we're hiking together and you get bit by a rattlesnake and I'm too sensitive to cut into the wound and way to fastidious to try to suck out the poison. Not so obviously, consider a scenario where you're an emergency-room nurse in the midst of a major and wide-spread disaster. If that's your assignment, you had better be willing to perform triage on incoming wounded. And as an effective and ethical triage nurse you have to be willing to condemn a probably mortally wounded cute little girl to certain death, if limited resources could be directed to probably saving a severely-wounded, ugly, adult male.

     Indeed, there's a story about emergency food-aid workers in a village who acquiesced to the demands of the village's armed men that they and their starving wives and girlfriends should be given the very limited amount of food available rather than giving it to the young children and infants. "We'll make more babies," the adults said. The doctrine of "Save the Children" and "Women and Children First" might have the aid worker fight to the death against the armed men. The insensitive asshole view might defend the workers from a charge of mere cowardice by noting that the best of a bad situation might be acting to save the village, not individuals, and allowing as legitimate here the adults' argument that, indeed, the younger the children the more quickly they can be replaced, and the weaker the young victims the more likely they would be to die even if fed.

     (For a quick aside I'll supply an infallible law of ethics: Thou shalt strive with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might to minimize the instances in the world where the dilemmas are brutal and triage becomes an ethical imperative.)

     Quite unobviously but more relevantly for most of us, we need more cold-blooded, cold-eyed assholes like me as citizens and politicians: as decision-makers who ask to see the numbers before getting carried away by pathetic images and stories about victims of Disease of the Month or the Disaster of the Week.

     Breast cancer and prostate cancer are horrible diseases and have afflicted family and friends of mine, prostate cancer killing a favorite uncle, and a close friend; but breast and prostate cancer are primarily diseases of the old, and we should refrain from unnecessarily scaring young people about such cancers and putting more resources into combatting obesity, diabetes, and asthma, plus putting more money into foreign aid to combat malaria and enteric diseases, and finally stamp out polio. (And if you seriously want to decrease "excess mortality," a few bucks more invested in anti-smoking campaigns would be money well spent.)

     Kids' getting murdered at school is horrific, but rare. Concern and sensible precautions are appropriate, but we need more assholes (like me) to stress that schools are very safe places for kids and should be made less, not more, like prisons. If SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about school shootings — and this is an imperative regardless of the numbers — it should be SOMETHING involving minor Second Amendment sacrifices by adults, not placing more restrictions on kids. A Sarah-Connor style pump-action shotgun (and a heavy door) should be all even the most nervous grownups need for home defense, and really serious shooters really ought to stick to bolt-action rifles for the personal touch appropriate for civilian weapons.

     Beyond that, as with terrorists on airplanes, we need more non-macho but also non-neutered, nasty folk to say that groups of grownups should have the adrenals and gonads to rush a shooter and bring him down, even if that means some of us will die.

     We're all supposed to do the right thing, and kids shouldn't have to take classes in an armed camp because American adults have timidity issues.

     (For another solid rule to follow no matter what others are doing: Don't allow kids to die unless it's really, really, clearly the least bad alternative.)

     I've grown impatient — feeling kind of disgusted — with an American culture where feelings get in the way of moral judgment, starting with the emotion of fear. Americans are afraid of crime and afraid for their kids and occasionally terrified by rare horrors from obscure diseases to shark attacks. And fearful people do bad things, as is clear from America's overcrowded, budget-busting prisons to dangerous arguments for encouraging fire-fights in schools to more dangerous campaigns against vaccinations.

     Come on people, feel less, think more. Follow the crowd only if they're going some place sensible. Hold fast to your integrity.


     A lot of people you know may think you're acting like an asshole, but odds are you'll be a useful asshole.

"Oh, Right; I'm the Mommy now": Mini-Epiphanies (24 March 2013)

         I'm not writing here about those "Eureka!" moments, grand epiphanies or satoris. I've never had grand anything, but I have had the little epiphanies: "ah-hah" moments or "Oh, yeah" moments — or "Oh, shit!" moments on something not just immediate and personal.

         A colleague of mine — call her Katarina for future reference — described hers at a shopping mall one day watching some unattended kids misbehaving. "Harrumph!" she thought, or maybe something stronger. "One of the mothers should do something about that." And then it hit her, "Oh, right; I'm the mommy now" — and she strode over and, figuratively, kicked some tween and teen ass.

         That's an important moment: when we realize we're "the mommy now" or, in unisex formulation, "the adult in the room," or at least the closest responsible person in the mall.

         My experience was somewhat different; it was having confirmed how difficult it could be for me to to be accepted as an adult, and as an authority.

         I started teaching with one course in Rhetoric 101 (College Comp/"Freshman English") at the University of Illinois at Urbana. I was twenty-three- or twenty-four-years old and 5'2" tall (say 157 cm.) and still had my hair, a fair amount of it and still dark. Since I got my course the Friday before classes started, I was definitely "low man in seniority" and ended up teaching in the Armory in a classroom that lacked not only air-conditioning but also ventilation. I arrived early and wore my three-piece weddings, funerals, and interviews suit. I got talking with a nice young woman waiting with me outside the classroom. Eventually:

         "Well," I finally said; "I guess we'd better go in."

         "Nah," she said; "we've got time."

         "I have a lot to write on the blackboard," I said.

         At which point she stepped back, looked me over, kind of pointed, and said with mild amused/bemused disbelief, "You're the teacher?!"

         "Why the hell else would I be in a three-piece suit in this heat?!" I responded. And I walked in.
         That student and I got along, and the class went fine, all things considered. For one thing, they were very tolerant of my ignorance and inexperience, and, well, just good people. Last day of class I took them out for a kind of class party at a local dive. You have one guess who alone of the group got stopped at the bar and had to show two pieces of ID and still got hassled to buy a beer.

         It could have been worse. My ID were legitimate, and I was an adult.

         Part of my entry into adulthood came at age seventeen or eighteen when I took over as president of a charity group and had to deal with a group of guys who'd embezzled the profits of a dance their high school fraternity had run and took off to Florida for a very long weekend. My previous job with the charity was what would later be called "Media Relations," and I was well aware that we couldn't afford the bad publicity of having the guys arrested. So we covered it up; most centrally, I covered up a really reprehensible theft. However, this was not exactly a loss of innocence for me.

         Much later in life, when I was one of "the older guys" on Miami University's Student Affairs Council, another faculty member and I were talking with one of "the younger guys": an Ayn-Rand Libertarian mostly, but a young person who'd just compromised and cut his first political deal. My colleague kidded the guy with an allusion to loss of virginity, and I started to throw in, "Yeah, I remember—" when my colleague cut me off with, "Rich, I don't know anything about your sex life, and God knows I don't want to know anything about your sex life, but politically, you were never a virgin."

         That's an overstatement, but OK; politically, by seventeen or eighteen, by the time I took over as president of that charity — I was no innocent.

         What the theft taught me, what dealing indirectly with the thieves taught me, was the important insight, "Everybody feels justified."

         That was a kind of "Oh, shit" moment.

         As Steven Pinker notes somewhere in his monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), it's a real problem that murderers and others who commit violent acts typically feel justified; indeed they are in their own minds moral people, doing justice upon their victims.

         Not everybody feels justified; some people feel guilt and remorse. But most of us, most of the time, do feel justified, even when we do bad things, even when, indirectly, we steal from crippled children.

         My second confirmation into adulthood came on 23 November 1963. I typed that correctly: 23 November, the day after President John F. Kennedy was murdered.

         I was saddened, and appalled by the murder of President Kennedy, but it didn't shake my vision in the universe or anything like that. Three American presidents had been assassinated before, President Lincoln quite famously; and I knew of the attempts to kill Franklin Roosevelt — and had been alive during the known attempt to kill President Truman. (I only learned of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang in researching this paragraph.) Anyway, however much some of my fellow citizens believed "It can't happen here," in my universe, such shit happened, and "It" — any "it" that happened elsewhere or in earlier times — could indeed "happen here" in the United States.

         Nah, what shook me up a bit was a petty thing, and personal with me.

         When Kennedy died, I put a black ribbon across the seal of our fraternity at the entrance of the house. I was a house officer and had the permission of the chapter president to do so, and it was the custom if we mourned the death of someone in the chapter. I thought we should make some gesture, and the single black ribbon was decorously restrained (the seal was inside).

         One of my fraternity brothers tore off the ribbon, primarily, it got back to me, to get back at me for a gesture he thought stupid — and in part just to hurt me.

         He later apologized, after other Greek houses on campus lowered their flags to half-staff and such, but he threw in that, yeah, he did what he had done mostly just to hurt me.

         This was my introduction to malice: doing harm to another without profit to oneself.
         I ended up writing my master's essay on malice among some of Shakespeare's major villains, and the idea of malice is pretty central to my dissertation. "Everyone feels justified" — or many of us do, much of the time, even when we shouldn't — and "Some people are just no damn good," or, more exactly, many of us will act maliciously, hurting others while not helping ourselves. Or not helping ourselves except insofar as we feed our pride.

         And just how dangerous that occasional maliciousness can be was taught to me by a former student, after he'd graduated and had gone to law school and — before moving to the really big show of international law — served as a small-town Ohio attorney. A young man himself at the time, the attorney told me that his father had never hit him but that as a child and teenager he had feared his father. He had clients, though, who really lived the dumb-ass slogan "No Fear." When I wrote him and checked my memory of what he had said, he wrote back that some of his clients "had no fears or boundaries … they feared no person or adult figure … (one guy, Robert "Rip-Off" Jones was heard to say (moments before his death by gun), 'I'm not afraid of you or your gun.'" These guys "were largely socialized by the streets" and "having no fear was part of their problem, and definitely a problem for others."

         It's definitely a problem for others when "No Fear" and no limits are combined in a large human being with desires to lash out suddenly or (and ethically worse) act with a cold-blooded malice.
         It's probably a good thing none of these guys — or their little sisters — were in the group my colleague Katarina confronted at the mall. I'm not sure many guys with no limits would find themselves saying, "Oh, right; I'm the Daddy now" and start setting limits for others.

         That's a depressing thought, and I won't end on it.

         For another thing I've learned, in an "oh, yeah" moment while reading depressing books on human nastiness — another insight that comes through is, "Well, yeah, but most of us most of the time feel justified because we're doing OK." All of us, at one time or another, can do some really bad shit; but, again, most of us, most of the time, don't.

         I'm sure the first class I taught sensed my fear and noted that I looked sixteen — but they cut me some slack. Sometimes, most of us, can be downright kind.

Media Objectivity? Nah. Honesty & Responsibility? Maybe. (2 Dec. 2013)

 "No blood, no news" — Chicago TV station manager, 1970

(and Dean Rusk, disapproving)

                  "The observer is part of the system." — Chem 101, day 1, 1961

            
            I am not feeling very positive right about now toward American journalism, nor, for that matter, a whole lot of fictional movies and "reality" TV shows. More exactly, right about now, I'm pretty disgusted.

            There was a train derailment in the Bronx this morning, and at least four people are confirmed dead (the number may be higher by the time you read this). The fact of a train wreck is indeed news, and there may be important news coming out of the story, but as of 10 AM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, 1 December 2013, there was just the quickly-reported fact of the wreck when CNN went full frontal on what they admitted — indeed, stressed — was "BREAKING NEWS" and pre-empted Fareed Zakaria's GPS program to show an aerial photo and get comments from witnesses and, essentially, invite a substantial audience to gawk at a transportation accident.

            Now that, in a sense, is objectivity: the nasty sense of treating other feeling and thinking creatures (your fellow human beings, fellow citizens) as objects of spectacle and whatever the word is for the analog of spectacle when you're not voyeuristically viewing but listening.

            Serious consideration of how we in America have failed to maintain much of our infrastructure, with passenger railroads a prime example — now that is worth in-depth coverage. But the roadbed in the Bronx may've been newly repaired and the tracks in peachy-keen condition; the accident may've been caused by some variety of human error that falls into the category of "Horrors happen."

            CNN didn't know because they were reporting "BREAKING NEWS" and therefore mostly not news at all. They could have shown the recorded Fareed Zakaria program and gotten to the train wreck later — at least, let's say, a day later — when there'd be actual information to report.

            And I'd be a viewer interested in such information, since I take trains regularly and had just e-mailed to a travel agent (younger readers can look up "travel agent") my tentative itinerary for a trip involving Amtrak's Texas Eagle Los Angeles to Chicago and the Southwest Chief Chicago to LA, plus a number of shorter trips on commuter runs.

            However, if I'm in a train that goes off the tracks, I'd prefer it if the media whores — including amateur media sluts with cell phone cameras — kept their distance until there was some solid news, the reporting whereof might serve the public interest. So my elliptical-trainer gym viewing got me pissed off enough to inspire exercise but didn't give help my staying informed.

            I returned from the gym to read a page-one story in my local newspaper, "Americans lose trust / Poll finds suspicion lurks in dealings with others." Somewhat mischievously, I checked out the editorial section to see if there was a mea culpa there from the Editorial Board of The Ventura County Star or some columnist. Silly me! There was, of course no apology from the Star, and I doubt there will be apologies from more than a couple media outlets — out of hundreds or thousands (depending what you count) — for their contributions to American distrust of most institutions and of one another.

             "If it bleeds, / It leads," as they say in the TV news trade, and, more generally, "Good news is no news." American news media, along with police dramas and "reality" shows like COPS, present to viewers an America in which dangers to life limb lurk around every corner. Every school shooting in White and/or upscale neighborhoods gets major media play; "sex trafficking" is talked about as if it were the 18^th-century slave trade; and the media offer a figurative megaphone for every member of The Responsible Parents Brigade pushing a doctrine of "Stranger Danger" and the risk of letting children boot up the computer and go on line, let alone out the door.

            Plus, of course, we get all warnings against fraud and scams and the significantly named "confidence games."

            There is nothing wrong with any of this in moderation. Shoot-em-up/Blow-em-up movies can be fun; murder, rape, mayhem, theft and major felonies are news; and there are, God knows, some real asshole gonifs out there waiting to rip off the unwary.

            What is missing in the rough arts of popular culture is some balance of the sort audiences once saw in Shakespeare's obscenely bloody King Lear. There's violence in Lear, but also acts of gratuitous kindness and decency to balance somewhat — the proportion is 1:3 — acts of viciousness. What is missing in the news is context combined with a sense of proportion.

            Instead of the opening news-story paragraphs of disturbing or uplifting "human interest" before getting to, say, some school-house horror, we could have a brief explanation of how rare school violence is and how safe US schools generally are. After we've been reminded that even in dangerous neighborhoods — maybe especially in dangerous neighborhoods — school are about the safest places kids can be, then the reporter can hit us with the grisly, reader-grabbing, ad-selling details of Gunfight at Alferd Packer Memorial High.

            Summary time:

            Objectivity in any strong sense of the term is impossible. As I learned in Introductory Chemistry, and you should have learned somewhere in school, "The observer is part of the system." This is a rule even in physics or astronomy. To measure the position and/or vector of a small particle, you have to measure it, which will change the system in ways that can't be predicted exactly; so you get the uncomfortable fact of Uncertainty: get an exact measurement — an ideal measurement — of position, and you can't know the velocity; get an exact measure of vector velocity (I'm mixing terms here), and you can't determine position. In astronomy, you needn't worry about, say, looking at the Crab Nebula and affecting it. However, you, a human and a specific human, are looking at it, and it may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can't be detected with vision or any other sense with which human beings have evolved. It may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can only be learned with senses and/or instruments of which we can't conceive. "The observer is part of the system" even in astronomy if for no other reason than you can't get observations for human-conducted science without involving humans.

            Objectivity in some strong sense is more clearly impossible if you have humans dealing with humans. An anthropologist can't write a paper delivering to us The Village; s/he can only give us the village with an anthropologist wandering around asking weird questions. Or we get the village with an anthropologist viewing it from close enough that s/he will report villagers acting suspiciously, like they thought someone was spying on them — or we get a necessarily vague report from a distant observer.

            Journalists can't give you The Story; they can only give you stories as put together by journalists, who change things just by their presence — think of turning the cameras on at a demonstration — or by asking questions. What's been called New York Times objective style, reporting without the word "I," is always and necessarily at least a small lie. A novelist can give you a story with a "third-person, 'omniscient' Narrator," because the novelist is the creator of the world narrated; reporters can only give you stories with reporters poking around in them: reporters who are actual human beings (most of them) with feelings, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, language, and the other standard human psychological equipment. So some bias is inevitable.

            Objectivity in a literal, moral sense is not desirable; treating journalistic subjects like objects is reprehensible. Objectivity in a literal, "epistemological" sense is impossible: neither reporters nor anyone else can get outside the world and describe it with the accuracy of a god.

            Media folk, though, can try to report honestly, fairly, and compassionately. They can educate their reader about contexts and give some idea of proportion (statistics can be handy here, e.g., in assessments of "Stranger Danger" or risk assessment generally). Studio executives can try to avoid the mildly grotesque voyeurism of "reality" television and shark-week/car-crash news. Studio executives can hire producers who'll use writers who can grab an audience's attention without house invasions or child abductions by pedophile cannibals or "blowing shit up."


            The media can do better than invite us to gawk at car crashes and train wrecks, or play on our fears.