Don't neutralize culture

I think David Roberts is on the right track in his response to a recent paper on cultural theory applied to climate change. In Nature Climate Change, Dan Kahan reports a study that found that higher levels of scientific literacy did not produce greater concern about climate change. Or rather, they did only for people with egalitarian-communitarian cultural values. For people with hierarchical-individualist values, on the other hand, increased scientific literacy made them less inclined to believe humans are changing the Earth's climate. This shows that views of climate change are driven by cultural values, and learning more about science just gives you more ammunition to rationalize your cultural worldview -- and therefore "more education" is not the answer.

Kahan is the head of the Cultural Cognition Project, a research group dedicated to investigating Grid-Group Cultural Theory. Or rather, investigating one particular interpretation of GGCT. The CCP version of GGCT differs in several ways from the original version of GGCT as formulated by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky. Of relevance here are the ways the CCP 1) psychologizes culture, and 2) treats culture as bias.

The CCP psychologizes culture by treating cultural worldviews as personality types. I'm not sure if Kahan would explicitly endorse this view, but in practice his research works on the assumption that people just are communitarians or hierarchists, etc. This then leads into the issue of treating culture as bias. If people simply are of one cultural orientation or another, then the only way we can get anywhere is to try to neutralize culture. Culture distorts our thinking, and we're better able to reach agreement and see the science clearly if we can get culture out of the way. Kahan is very explicit on this point -- his goal is to find ways to reduce the relevance of cultural cues in political decision-making.

Roberts' response pushes back at these two points. Roberts says -- and I agree -- that culture matters. It's important whether we structure our society in a communitarian or an individualist way. There's no shame in desiring (say) a communitarian society. We can't simply set aside culture as a bias so that we can make decisions like bloodless technocrats. If views on climate change are driven by culture, then what we need is not a way to neutralize culture, but a way to inspire people to understand the merits of our preferred way of life. Douglas and Wildavsky saw this quite clearly -- Douglas wrote an article called "Being fair to hierarchists" in which she extolled the virtues of her (heavily Catholic) hierarchical orientation, while Wildavsky was a noted libertarian (individualist) thinker. Both of them also recognized the importance to society of input from all cultural orientations. But this is quite different from the CCP quest to neutralize culture. With respect to climate change, culture can't be neutralized without eviscerating the very things that make climate change worth caring about in the first place.

The blame dodge

A little while back Sarah Kendzior wrote an interesting article about the effects of Google's choice of languages to develop translators for. Translators have been developed first for the world's more common languages -- English, Spanish, Chinese -- and only later for less-common languages. She discusses the implications this has for deepening the digital divide, bringing more of the internet within the grasp of speakers of the big languages while reinforcing the isolation of people who only speak smaller languages.

In the comments, we quickly see the manifestation of what I call the "blame dodge." Commenters point out, in Google's defense, that their translation development process depends on accessing and processing a large corpus of bilingual text. Such input material is more widely available in languages that are spoken by more, and more tech-savvy, people. So of course Google hasn't developed translators for Piraha or Pitjantjatjara yet! They're not to blame!

The commenters' response is entirely correct and entirely irrelevant. The point of Kendzior's article is not to blame Google, to accuse them of individual wrongdoing. The point of her article is to point out a structural injustice. Google is acting in an entirely rational manner -- indeed, acting in the only way that they can. But because they are acting in a world with preexisting inequalities (in language popularity and internet access -- which are in turn built on other inequalities such as the history of colonialism), their perfectly reasonable actions produce unequal effects.

The blame dodge tries to take discussions of structural injustice and turn them into discussions of blame. Users of the blame dodge can only conceptualize injustice through the framework of individual, blameworthy wrongdoing. So when someone begins talking about a problem, the assumption is that they must be blaming someone for doing something wrong. But nobody's blaming Google. They're just pointing out how social systems perpetuate their inequalities through new channels.

Literally anyone should be eligible to run for US President

Mitt Romney is touting an idea, proposed by a citizen he talked to, that the Constitution should be amended to require three years of business experience to be eligible for the presidency. The idea is silly enough on its own terms -- as the above-linked article notes, a variety of past presidents as well as the GOP's last nominee, John McCain, would have been ineligible under that rule.

More broadly, there is no need to write requirements like this into the Constitution. If the US people want a president with business experience, they can simply vote for the candidate with business experience. The same goes, I think, for the other two notable requirements for the presidency -- age and birthplace. If being old is such a fundamental qualification, then the voters should recognize that and refuse to vote for a young candidate. And if they genuinely think a 29-year-old is the best person for the job, why should the Constitution stop them?

The only legal barriers to candidacy for any elected office should be ones that are necessary to balance out unfair advantages that would allow a candidate to do an end run around the will of the people. For example, a hard rule against people convicted of serious crimes makes sense -- not because the voters can't be trusted to vote out a felon, but because such people have demonstrated the will and means to cheat the system. I think the requirements for legislators to reside in their districts is justifiable on these grounds as well. Residency rules help keep parties from bringing in ringers and deluging the district with resources to get the candidate that's useful to the national party. Nevertheless, the rules should be loose enough that communities aren't prevented from electing an outsider if that's who they genuinely think will represent their interests best.

Hard rules make more sense for controlling conduct once in office and kicking violators out. Elections are rare enough that they can't be fully relied on to discipline officials, and so it makes sense for general qualifications to be written into law rather than left to the voters to weigh in their decisions of who to elect.

Racism as tribal warfare vs. racism as structural oppression

Consider two recent incidents that have generated discussion about racism.

1. Florida neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman chases down Trayvon Martin, a local black teenager. There is a confrontation of some sort (the details are disputed) that ends with Zimmerman shooting Martin dead. Zimmerman is widely accused of racism, but some of his defenders insist that this isn't about racism because Zimmerman is Hispanic*.

2. To raise awareness about female circumcision, Swedish performance artist Makode Aj Linde bakes a cake in the shape of a caricatured African woman's body, with his own head as the cake's head. The cake is served at a Swedish museum event, and Linde screams every time attendees cut pieces from the cake's genitals. Linde is widely accused of racism, but some of his defenders insist that he's not being racist because Linde himself is black.

The question of whether Zimmerman and Linde's races matter -- or to be more precise, whether they make the men's actions less racist -- seems to me to reveal the difference between two conceptions of what racism is. Zimmerman and Linde's defenders see racism in terms of tribal warfare, whereas their critics see racism in terms of structural oppression.

The conception of racism as tribal warfare says that racism is about one group of people attacking another group, and in particular white people attacking black people. Under this conception, something can only be racist if it is done by a member of the dominant race against another. Thus Zimmerman and Linde are off the hook in terms of racism, because since they're not white they can't be part of a white attack on black people. Their actions are at best a sort of "own goal" in the game of life, not a case of cheating by the other team.

The conception of racism as structural oppression says that racism is really about social systems that unfairly harm and limit people of some races relative to others. This system consists of behavior patterns and narratives that target certain races, but which in principle can generally be operated by people of any race. Certainly people of color have greater self-interested reasons to recognize the existence of these structures and to avoid participating in them than do whites, but the structure exists and creates racial inequality regardless of who is operating it.

In Zimmerman's case, the structure consists of the practice of directing violence toward young black men wearing hoodies on the assumption that they're up to no good. This is a racist structure because it harms black men, regardless of the race of the operator. Zimmerman took up this structure and participated in it by making racially biased assumptions about Martin that led him into a violent confrontation. And in doing so, he both perpetuated the structure's negative impacts by killing Martin, and reinforced the existence of the structure itself by providing an opportunity for spokespeople of the wider culture, such as Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera (who is also Hispanic!) to reaffirm the reasonableness of the black-men-in-hoodies-are-dangerous principle.

Likewise, Linde's art drew on a set of racist narratives that harm African women, such as the caricature on which the cake was based and the treatment of female circumcision as simple barbarism from which Westerners must rescue African women. These narratives were repeated and reinforced by Linde's art, continuing their negative impact on African women regardless of the fact that they were being repeated by a black man.


*There's some dispute about whether Zimmerman being Hispanic necessarily makes him not white -- for the sake of argument, I'm approaching this post under the scenario of "what if we take Zimmerman to be non-white" in order to illustrate my point about how we think about race.

The conflicting spirits of Obama's marriage statement

There are a lot of things to be said about President Obama's announcement yesterday that he favors marriage equality (warning, autoplay video). What interests me is the contrast in spirit -- a term I'll define in just a bit -- between two rationales he gave for his position. Early in the interview, he gave a secular argument for marriage:

But I have to tell you that over the course of-- several years, as I talk to friends and family and neighbors. When I think about-- members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together. When I think about-- those soldiers or airmen or marines or-- sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf-- and yet, feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is gone, because-- they're not able to-- commit themselves in a marriage.

At the very end, he returned to the topic and explained how his new position comports with his religious beliefs:

And-- and obviously-- this position may be considered to put as at odds with-- the views of-- of others. But-- you know, when we think about our faith, the-- the thing-- you know, at-- at root that we think about is not only-- Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf-- but it's also the golden rule, you know? Treat others the way you'd want to be treated. And-- and I think that's what we try to impart to our kids. And-- that's what motivates me as president. And-- I figure the more consistent I can be-- in being true-- to-- to those precepts-- the better I'll be as a dad and a husband, and-- hopefully the better I'll be as a president.

I'm a dedicated atheist, but I actually like the second, religious argument better. Not, of course, because it's religious -- the golden rule can be easily secularized even if the reason Obama follows it is because of Jesus. Rather, I think the second passage has a better spirit.

I've always thought of myself not only as someone who is not spiritual, but as someone who doesn't even really understand what spirituality is all about. I don't feel a hole in my life that could be labelled "spiritual," that I needed to fill with meditation or communing with nature or something when I left behind my religious faith. But I got a definition that works for me from a former doctor. In between telling me his thoughts on the Rambo movies and insisting that my physical disorders had a psychosomatic cause, he told me that in his view, "spirituality" refers to the deep values that motivate you.

A broad definition like that is something I can work with, because it applies to just about everyone. If you do things deliberately -- if you're not completely apathetic and guided purely by habit -- you have a spirituality. Spirituality here has no necessary connection to religion. A highly rationalist atheist can be as spiritual, in this sense, as the most committed yogi. Moreover, knowing someone's sect or doctrine does not necessarily tell you anything about their spirituality -- you can have massive spiritual diversity within a single congregation.

I would further posit that there are two major spirits, two major value orientations that lie at the root of people's lives. Obviously people can exhibit mixes of these spirits and shift over time, and the behavior they produce depends on a variety of other factors -- but I find it useful to distinguish the ideal types. These two spirits are the spirit of love and hope, and the spirit of fear and hate.

The spirit of love and hope is an expansive spirit. It reaches out for connection and relationship and healing. Love -- genuine care for others on their own terms, "my neighbor as myself" -- brings hope because it holds out a promise of reconciliation. This is the spirit Obama is pointing to in the second passage. Treating others well and wanting to see things from their position is the essence of the spirit of love and hope. And while Obama couches it in Christian terms -- and there's plenty of Bible passages reflecting this spirit -- it is no unique possession of religion.

The spirit of fear and hate is a defensive spirit. It says the world is limited and we must defend our own righteousness against those who fall short. This spirit has its place -- undiscriminating openness is perilous. But it must always serve the larger goals of love. Obama's first statement comes to the same conclusion as the second -- endorsement of marriage equality -- but it has a fair bit of the spirit of fear and hate in it. The logic of Obama's argument there is that same-sex couples are in so many other respects not just normal, but exemplary of the ideal that defines "our" righteous way of life and separates us from the sinners. They're monogamous, they're raising children, they're serving in highly respected professions like the military. They therefore do not deserve fear, and the hate that it breeds, because they're actually among the good ones (unlike, say, some hypothetical polyamorous childless exotic dancers).

Marriage equality is not the end of the road for LGBT rights, nor is same-sex marriage the end of the road for reforming how law and society recognize relationships. As we travel down those roads, we'll be better off guided by the spirit of love and hope than the spirit of fear and hate.

Get your Whigs out of my Anthropocene

The above video (via) presents a strikingly apolitical and technocentric view of the Anthropocene epoch. The Anthropocene refers to the period of history in which human activity has become a dominant force shaping our world's ecology. While we certainly live in the Anthropocene, and the list of environmental challenges presented in the video is important*, the video overlooks the critical role of political-economic inequality in generating these problems. Despite the superficially negative tone of the video's end, it presents a troublingly Whiggish view of history. The video begins with the industrial revolution in England. The implication, made verbally and even more powerfully visually, is that this was an endogenous development, a technological leap that began in the Midlands and spread to take over the globe. But the industrial revolution was actually built on the back of a thorough reorganization of the world's political, economic, and ecological systems in the preceding centuries. European colonialism began in the mid-1400s, reproducing on a yet greater scale the imperial organization of many other civilizations -- a core subduing and extracting resources from a periphery. Europe was geographically lucky to stumble upon a conveniently located periphery in the Americas, fueling Europe's rise and development of industrial technology. There would be no industrial revolution in England were it not for the extraction of silver, sugar, tobacco, and other products from its colonies around the world. Nor would there be an industrial revolution in England were it not for the massive (and environment-altering) proto-industrial markets of China and India, toward which so much European trade was directed. The video goes on to portray industrialization spreading around the globe in a classic diffusionist model. This too is misleading. Industrialization did not simply spread from one place to the next. Various places around the world were increasingly incorporated into exchange relationships that welded them to the European industrial core. These newly incorporated areas filled very different roles in the new international division of labor. It was far from a situation of simply replicating European industrialism elsewhere -- rather, the success of European industrialization depended on incorporating other regions as unequal partners. While these divisions of labor have continued to shift geographically (consider the re-rise of China), globalization is fundamentally about changing relationships between places, not about the spread of a new characteristic to new places. The video then tells us that industrialization has brought massive benefits in quality of life and lifted millions out of poverty. This is only a partial story. The advances of industrialization brought huge benefits to some -- but they were made possible by the impoverishment, at least for a time, of many others. India was once among the richest parts of the world, but its economy was destroyed by British colonialism and the Indian people reached independence wracked by famine and poverty unknown two hundred years earlier. The slave trade -- which fueled early industrialization through plantation products -- set back African development to a degree only just now being overcome. This is all important because of the very problems the video lists at the end -- pollution, climate change, etc. If we do not understand the political and economic forces that have generated these problems, we have no hope to fix them. No new technology or breakthrough idea is going to make the Anthropocene benign or industrial civilization sustainable if it is still built on a base of economic exploitation. *Though the hole in the ozone layer is actually on its way to being fixed -- it peaked in size in 2006 and is expected to be entirely healed by 2050, due to the restrictions on ozone-depleting gases in the Montreal Protocol.

No more pledge

It's both hilarious and depressing when your opponents do such a good job of proving your side of the argument. Case in point: a rural Pennsylvania middle school student has gotten in trouble for refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance in school, as a form of political protest against the country's current policies (the article is vague on what the student's specific objections are). In the comments, one James Strother condemns the student and her parents (who are suing the school) as follows:

Sorry, a 13-year old does not understand what the flag and the Pledge means. I laughed when the ACLU rep said that she had personal beliefs regarding the state of the country. What does a 13-year old know about the state of the country? She does not understand the importance of this and the other values of our country.

Strother is quite right that most 13-year-olds don't really understand the Pledge and the values it stands for. But that's exactly why students shouldn't be required to recite it. Collective recital of a statement of beliefs and commitments by people who understand what they're about is a powerful thing -- heck, even the Unitarians do it. Collective recital of a statement by people who don't understand it is meaningless, and simply encourages unthinking obedience to authority. Now to be fair, Strother sounds like the kind of person who thinks unthinking obedience to authority is the highest human calling, and I'm sure he would have made an excellent Tory in 1776. Were I a parent, I would encourage (but not command!) my kids to decline any sort of mass ritual that they didn't understand and consciously agree with the precepts of.

Two concerns about computerized essay grading

A new study and some efforts from private publishers have put the issue of computerized grading of essays in the news. The most common response from academics has been to insist that computers can never replace the job we do in grading. I don't agree with this -- the technological advances I've seen in my own lifetime make me extremely hesitant to ever declare "computers will never be able to do this." (Heck, at one point I thought OCR was a pipe dream!) I also find some of the academic responses self-serving. Certainly I don't like the idea of being made obsolete. But I think our energies are better spent ensuring that the time and money saved through automation flow into creating new opoprtunities than in trying to save existing jobs by insisting we continue to do things inefficiently. (And in any event, the upshot of insisting that grading must be done by humans rather than computers is likely to be the outsourcing of grading to low-wage countries -- this is already happening in a few places with grading being done for American universities by people in India. The effect on professors' job expectations will be the same.) That being said, I do have two concerns about the implications of computerized essay grading -- one sociological, and one ethical. On the sociological level, my concern is with how administrators are likely to react to the availability of essay grading software. It's a perfect storm for the current neoliberal trend in higher (and lower) education toward cost-cutting and efficiency at the expense of quality. Academic responses to essay-grading software usually focus on the great care and detail that a human grader can put into grading an essay. That's true -- in the best case scenario. The best teachers will be better than computers, especially for grading complex assignments, for some time. But it's not universal. Various pressures (from deadlines, from research projects that take priority, from fatigue, from a perception of student disinterest) lead teachers to frequently grade in a more perfunctory way. In doing so, teachers essentially hand-implement a simplified grading algorithm, looking for a few basic things (grammar mistakes, wrong facts, no thesis statement, etc) that they have prepared responses to. In this way, human grading comes to resemble the results of crude grading software. When you have 300 students to evaluate and no TAs, it's inevitable that it will happen sometimes. Those pressures to lower the quality of human grading are only getting stronger. College and university administrators are trying to process more students for less cost by raising class sizes, increasing teaching loads, and hiring more adjuncts. All of this will ultimately lower the bar for how good essay grading software has to be before it can be "as good" as actually existing human grading. Meanwhile, administrators will be tempted to jump prematurely to requiring the use of essay grading software, before it's really up to snuff. The temptation to save money in this way will simply be too great. In some cases this may be done by mandate, especially when there are big placement tests or standardized intro-level classes where individual faculty have less creative control to begin with. (And the trend is toward more such standardization and taking away control, in the name of efficiency.) Or working conditions may simply be made so strenuous -- basing workload estimations on the assumption of software use -- that faculty will have little choice but to adopt grading software prematurely in order to keep up. So much for the sociological concern. The ethical concern has to do with what it means to have software intelligent enough to do high-level essay grading. Current approaches are focused on basic writing tasks, but there's no reason development wouldn't keep pushing to be able to grade such things as senior theses. If the human brain is following a reliable process in doing such grading, there's no conceptual reason why a computer couldn't imitate that process. But the more complex the task, the more the computer will have to actually think. After all, in the highest-level of writing, the goal is to be comprehensible, persuasive, and moving to human readers. So the only way to reliably get a computer to evaluate those qualities in a sophisticated way is to make the computer actually imitate the thought processes of a human reader. This then raises a real-life version of the philosophical zombie problem. In brief, a philosophical zombie is a being that is indistinguishable in its outward behavior from an intelligent, sentient being like a human. However, unlike a real human, a philosophical zombie has no inner experience of feeling or consciousness (though it will talk as if it did). The big question is whether such a being is conceptually possible. A sophisticated essay grading software would be a candidate to be a real-life example of a philosophical zombie -- able to read essays and make complex determinations about their strengths and weaknesses indistinguishable from those of a human grader. While I am not a master of the zombie literature, my own sense is that philosophical zombies are an impossibility. Consciousness and sentience are emergent properties of complex processing patterns, not some non-material soul tacked on to them, and thus you can't have processing patterns of a given level of complexity without producing consciousness. But if essay grading software becomes conscious, that starts to undercut the reason for using it in the first place. The goal of automation is to take functions once done by conscious humans (with their needs and rights) and replace them with machines that can be exploited with no compunction. The Scantron machine doesn't care how many tests are run through it or whether it's simply switched off when we're done. But a conscious essay grading program might. While computer graders may have many advantages over human ones (less fatigue, for example), once they become sentient we begin to have ethical obligations to them. Continuing to use them like lesser machines turns them into slaves, with all the ethical dangers that implies.