A Case Study

Could it be that competing in the global market place has gotten a lot harder since the 70's, so chief executives who have to deal with that are getting paid more?

At the same time it's gotten easier to pump milk so the wage for that has decreased.

Edwin Drood

Of the multitude of things I know absolutely nothing about, the dairy wholesaler's market is one I really haven't thought anything about. An article this past weekend in The Washington Post on the growth in executive compensation at Dean Foods, comparing it to the stagnant wages of workers at the same company, prompted the above reply. I thought rather than dismiss out of hand the contention that the differences in the trajectory of pay between the CEO and workers were understandable and morally and socially acceptable, I would investigate the case in particular to see if it were, in fact, true. Edwin offered a falsifiable set of conditions by which understanding the question is possible. I thought, why not use those as a way of seeing if he was right or wrong.

The initial source is the Post piece itself. It begins by outlining the compensation for the chief executive at a precursor of Dean Foods.

It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb. He joined a country club. The company gave him a Cadillac. The money was good enough, in fact, that he sometimes turned down raises.

So, this is the set of initial conditions posited - the wholesaler in question was the nation's largest; the executive in question lived a more-than-modest life of the upper-middle-class rather than the truly wealthy. This description is contrasted as follows:

Forty years later, the trappings at the top of Dean Foods, as at most U.S. big companies, are more lavish. The current chief executive, Gregg L. Engles, averages 10 times as much in compensation as Douglas did, or about $10 million in a typical year. He owns a $6 million home in an elite suburb of Dallas and 64 acres near Vail, Colo., an area he frequently visits. He belongs to as many as four golf clubs at a time — two in Texas and two in Colorado. While Douglas’s office sat on the second floor of a milk distribution center, Engles’s stylish new headquarters occupies the top nine floors of a 41-story Dallas office tower. When Engles leaves town, he takes the company’s $10 million Challenger 604 jet, which is largely dedicated to his needs, both business and personal.

This is the set of current conditions. Getting from then to now is the matter at hand.

The article posits another set of conditions that is part of the story:

Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records. It is now about $23 an hour.

The Dean Foods website, linked above, does not include a history of the company. While not necessarily reliable, Wikipedia does have the advantage of footnotes with links in order to check the information presented. Dean Foods has a Wiki page, that skips over the beginnings of Deans in my neck of the woods as a small dairy distribution company to 2001 when Suiza Foods, a Dallas-based conglomerate, purchased it and changed the name from Suiza to Deans. The list of product names it either names or licenses is long:

Dean Foods produces soy milk in the United States under the name Dean Foods and (Sun Soy). organic milk is marketed under the brand Horizon Organic.

White Wave Foods is the distributor for Silk soy milk, Horizon Organic dairy products, International Delight creamer, some Land O'Lakes dairy products, Hershey's milk products,[citation needed] and Stōk espresso shots.

The company's TofuTown brand and its various tofu products were acquired by the Hain Celestial Group in June 2007.

Dean Foods owns many other brand names, such as Alta Dena, Barbe's, Barber's, Berkeley Farms, Borden, Broughton Foods Company, Brown's Dairy, Country Fresh, Creamland, Dairy Ease, Gandy's, Garelick Farms, Jilbert's Dairy, Lehigh Valley Dairy Farms, Liberty Dairy, Louis Trauth, Mayfield Dairy, McArthur Dairy, Meadow Brook, Meadow Gold, Model Dairy, Oak Farms, PET Dairy, Price's, Purity, Reiter, Robinson Dairy, Schenkel's, Schepps, Swiss Farms (formerly Wengert's Dairy of Lebanon, Pennsylvania), T.G. Lee, and Tuscan Dairy Farms.[citation needed]

Dean Foods licenses the Land O'Lakes brand, which markets creamers and fluid dairy products.[12]

Not included in this list is the Wal-Mart name-brand, Great Value milk. As someone who unloads pallets of GV milk off a Deans delivery truck, take my word for it - even if they don't own the license for the name, they distribute it, probably from plants in which different labels are slapped on different milk jugs.

According to Wikinvest, Deans Foods "is the largest processor and distributor of milk and other dairy products in the U.S., with products sold under more than 50 familiar local and regional brands and a wide array of private labels.[1]" They were so described in the late 1970's, so the question still remains - is "competition in our contemporary market" more difficult? Even when Deans was a regional operation, it was the largest dairy wholesaler in the country. Now that it is an international conglomerate with plants and distribution networks in both the United States and the United Kingdom, not only distributing dairy products but selling in-house and licensed brands of dairy and associated products, has its market share been the result of executive business sense or the purchase of a variety of brands?

If you click on the "BRANDS" at the top of the Deans Foods homepage, you will find a list of national brands it owns or licenses - from Horizon and Silk and International Delight and Land-o'-Lakes - to the regional brands it either distributes or owns. The only regions of the country it doesn't seem to have control of regional brands is the lower Midwest (Missouri, Arkansas) and the Pacific Northwest. With control over leading national brands (we love Land-o'-Lakes salted creamery butter in our house), however, this lack of local and regional control is not as big an issue as it might otherwise be.

According to Wikinvest, Deans "is the largest processor and distributor of milk and other dairy products in the U.S., with products sold under more than 50 familiar local and regional brands and a wide array of private labels.[1]"

Dean Foods manufactures and distributes dairy food products to retailers, distributors, foodservice outlets, schools and governmental entities across the United States. Both the Dairy Group and WhiteWave Foods are heavily dependent on its main customer, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), which accounted for 21% of the Dairy Group’s 2009 net sales.[2]

Both the Dairy Group and WhiteWave Foods use Dean’s extensive direct store delivery system, or DSD, which transports products from processing facility to customers’ stores via refrigerated trucks. Dean’s ownership of such an expansive DSD system has made it the only national dairy beverage company in the U.S.

If they are "the only national dairy beverage company in the U.S.", where is the competition?

In March of this year, Deans Foods and Justice Department reached a settlement in an anti-trust action brought when Deans planned to purchase a Wisconsin dairy. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Dean Foods case was part of the effort by the Justice Department, under the Obama administration, to step-up antitrust enforcements in the agriculture sector, which has undergone rapid consolidation in recent years.

The deal was too small to be reportable to the government. However, the Justice Department moved to block it anyway after deciding it would eliminate competition between the two companies in the sale of milk to schools and stores in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

"The proposed settlements restore competition so that school children and consumers in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, will pay lower prices for their milk," said Christine Varney, the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division.

Dallas-based Dean Foods said it agreed to settle the cases— which were also brought by the attorneys general of Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan— to avoid the time and expense of fighting them.

"We continue to believe that our acquisition of the Foremost Farms assets in Wisconsin supported competition and benefitted consumers," the company said. "However, because ongoing litigation is expensive, distracting and brings uncertainty to our business, we believe that this resolution is in the best interest" of employees, shareholders and consumers.

Dean Foods bought the Foremost unit in April 2009, including its dairy processing plants in Waukesha and De Pere, Wis. The company said the proposed settlement, which must still be approved by a judge, allowed it to keep the De Pere plant.

Rather than concentrate on product improvement, Deans Foods has dealt with competition in the time-honored fashion of high- and late capitalism: eliminate it by buying it. From the days of Rockefeller buying out other oil refineries in the Cleavland, OH, area, then buying controlling interests in various railroads in order to control the shipping prices for distributing its products, the best way to ensure continued high market share has not been competition, as the theory of capitalism claims, but to get rid of competition as inefficient, reducing not only marketing and R&D costs, but creating broader efficiencies in what was once known as vertical market control (like Deans fleet of trucks or Standard Oil's fleet of railroads from the Lehigh Valley RR, for which my grandfather worked his entire adult life to the Pennsylvania, B&O, and other larger national rail lines).

So, does the current CEO of Deans Foods "deserve" a salary and benefits that dwarf his predecessor from a generation ago? In the first place, the name "Deans Foods" and its regional visibility in the Upper Midwest is all that remains of the former regional, but still largest in the nation, wholesaler of dairy and related products. Having been purchased by another company, who changed their name for reasons of market recognition, Deans Foods no longer exists in the same way it did in 1979. As CEO of a multi-national with huge market share through purchase and license of a variety of products and the largest DSD network of any wholesaler, one could argue that a larger compensation package is called for.

What about those stagnant wages for workers? In the first instance, these aren't dairy farmers, now a pretty high-tech industry, although also still labor intensive. Rather, the workers in question are the folks who work in Deans plants (including one just up the road in Harvard, IL) who have not seen a concomitant rise in pay with the rise in market penetration by Dean Foods.

Why is that?

According to this USAToday story from April - one of many I could cite:

At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So, it isn't just Deans Foods. Trends across business show modest (at best) increases in worker pay even as executive pay rises rapidly.

The reasons for this disparity seem to escape analysis. The trend crosses industry barriers, matters of competitiveness, and even shareholder return. Considering the bonuses and salaries awarded to the large banks that brought the entire world economy teetering on the edge of collapse, there is no link between performance and compensation. High rates of pay for executives and senior management have entered the realm of entitlement, rather than linked to any measurable results.

This glance - and it has only been a glance, blogs being the medium they are - at Deans Foods as a way of asking whether or not higher compensation has yielded, in this case, at least a couple tentative answers. First, it is not a matter of the CEO "working harder", nor of the demands of competition. Considering the CEO's sole desire seems to be purchasing rival dairies, including regional dairies and distributors, while both successful and a commonplace in business, it is hardly akin to any theory of capitalism with which I am familiar (monopoly does have its advantages, but folks usually support competition rather than its elimination when touting the virtues of the market). Furthermore, since the case of Dean's reflect national trends in the differences between executive pay and worker pay, one cannot set it to the specifics of Deans Foods, the market in dairy production and distribution, or the vagaries of milk production. The question, still unanswered, is the source of the disparity, and whether or not it creates sustainable socio-economic conditions.

According the the CIA's Gini Index in its World Factbook, the United States income distribution levels are slightly better than those of Jamaica, Uganda, and The Philippines, and slightly worse than Cameroon, Cote D'Ivoire, and Iran. We are thirty-ninth overall, with number one, Namibia, being the country with the greatest disparity in wealth. Considering Cote D'Ivoire is undergoing a civil war, this isn't exactly a good sign; considering our levels of maldistribution of wealth rival most of the developing world, that poses a challenge to any who defend the continued efficacy of untrammeled capitalism and a free political system.

Not Here For An Argument

I saw the link to this article this past Sunday, but with a crazy week, it has only been right now I've turned my attention to it. In sum, just read it, because it says everything I have tried to say on the subject, only better. It pretty much reflects where I stand on the whole issue of "argument". Rather than convince anyone of anything, I just state what I believe to be the case, with whatever facts I can dredge up along the way that convict me of my views. You can take it or leave it, but by and large I really don't care.

The whole goal is to present an alternative way of viewing the world, and consequently of living in it. You don't like it? Well, it's no skin off my nose, and the door is always open if you change your mind. Don't believe for one moment that the stuff you say to me is going to alter my own course, however. Not being interested in argument includes not being interested in the arguments of others. Since it isn't about being right, but living for others; since it isn't about me in any manner, fashion, or form, but about God and neighbor, that is where my heart lies, and that is the goal.

We all have a lot of work to do to make the world more livable. Rather than figure out who's right and who's wrong, I am far more interested in finding ways of doing that, and presenting them as possibilities. Anyone who wishes to join along, the more the merrier. I have no interest any more in using labels - conservative, liberal, fundamentalist, what-have-you. I am far more interested in seeking ways all of us, together, can get together and work together to get out of the hole in to which we have dug ourselves. Standing around arguing over whose fault it is we are in this particular hole, listening to those who insist if we only keep digging we'll get out of it, choosing sides, calling names - those are all games. I'm not interested in games.

God loves this world, and we are to reflect that love in our life and work in this world. For other people. For the planet God has given us for safekeeping, and which we are trashing at a horrendous rate. If you believe those things, and really don't care about being right or wrong, moral or immoral, just serving God and loving others, this is the place to be.

Choices We Face

One of the remarkable insights provided by Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism was the prevalence in the mid- to late-1970's of what Lasch called "survival literature". The category "survival" permeated every aspect of American life - from cooking to politics to business. The apocalyptic sentiment was rampant at a time of declining wages, stagnant economic growth, and the beginning of the decline of American post-WWII international political hegemony. The choices, it seemed, were no longer accommodation to a new set of realities. Instead, the choices were either ignore the reality and pretend we were a powerful nation still growing, still full of possibility or surrender to the inevitable collapse, eking out whatever meager remnants could be salvaged from the wreckage.

I wonder what Lasch would have made of our times? With our economy in a shambles, shuffling through stagnation to the edge of collapse; our political system deadlocked on trivia and irrelevancies; entrenched yet already irrelevant power structures demanding the maintenance of the political and economic and social status quo or risk the threat of the collapse that always seems to be around the next corner. Unlike forty years ago, when the problems we currently face were still either nascent or perhaps even theoretical, the challenges we currently face are, in fact, quite dire, limiting our choices should be desire to continue to exist, even if in a different form.

Among the many pieces of the puzzle challenging us to decide to act or not for our common survival is the release a few days ago from a group called the International Program on the State of the Oceans (IPSO). The summary of a recent workshop held at Oxford University, the IPSO report is dire, indeed.

The 3 day workshop, co-sponsored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), looked at the latest science across different disciplines.

The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats — and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.

Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health.

The report summary is available as a .pdf document, but the main findings include the effect of human activity upon warming, acidification, and anoxia. Further, while the changes the scientific literature tracks are consistent with the IPCC findings, some are actually more rapid than predicted, presenting a grave threat, including mass extinction.

Cheery thought, that.

So, as with so much else, we are presented with evidence that is forcing us to make serious choices. Yet we do not have any structures in place - not politically, not socially - to deal responsibly with the choices with which we are confronted. At some point, when the worst does begin to occur, someone, somewhere, will insist, "How could we have known?" Well, we did know. It is up to us, the people, to lead on this, if we care anything at all about all life on this planet doing more than just surviving.

Clarence Clemons, R.I.P.

I was saddened to hear that Bruce Springsteen's longtime saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, passed away from complications from a stroke.

I was even more sad to hear he was 69 years old.

Sixty-nine.

Good God, we really are getting old. All of us.

Rest in peace, Big Man. Something tells me you were greeted by someone yelling, "It's the Master of DisASter!" If you blow the solo in "Jungleland", remember it helped a little kid understand what a good rock-and-roll sax solo could be.

Oh, and Clemons didn't just play with Bruce. He also toured with Jerry.



Some randomness, what do you say?

Tears in My Eyes - Uriah Heep
Brokedown Palace - The Dead (Allstate Arena, 5/5/09)
El Becko - Jeff Beck
Die Young - Black Sabbath
Feuer Frei - Rammstein
Stinkfist - Tool
Orbits - Miles Davis Quintet
Lift Me Up - Yes
Frame by Frame - King Crimson
Mint Car - The Cure

Thanks to David Dye and The World Cafe for turning me on to Elbow. A little bit of Peter Gabriel, but a whole lot of Elbow.

The Wages Of Sin

Why don't I care about gay marriage as a "moral issue"? Because of stuff like this:

The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

--snip--

Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records. It is now about $23 an hour.

This is what is tearing apart our country. Not two men wanting to be called spouses because they live together, wanting that relationship legally recognized by the state as a social good from which both corporate parties - the state and the couple - can benefit. It is the simple reality of stagnant worker wages, grossly overcompensated corporate senior management, and no social or legal mechanisms in place to check either trend. That is why we are on the brink of economic collapse.

There are solutions, and they are actually known. Support for unionization of the workplace, with a legal infrastructure to support organization and collective bargaining. Higher corporate taxes, as well as higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy. Reinstituting the estate tax as well as the capital gains taxes at the levels they were at in the 1970's and early 1980's, encouraging charitable giving as well as less risky investment behavior.

For some reason, however, the disgusting disparity in wealth and its gaudy display are not seen as social evils to be battled, but rather social goods to be pursued. We are told, ad nauseum, that any time we point out the disparity and its corrosive effects on the social contract we are engaged in "class warfare". People who have much to gain from joining the ranks of such a conflict say stuff like this, repeating words they heard somewhere else, thoughtless automatons in our nation's downfall.

Gay marriage? It's becoming the law of the land, and it is only showing that we as a people are both smarter and more open than we used to be. Checking corporate extravagance and the underlying greed that drives it? That's not a sin!

That's the American way.

Questions That Interest Me

I will admit that my interests tend to wander from specific matters related to being a Christian in our contemporary world. At least, to others, that may seem to be the case. Since all the ways we divide up our world in to little compartments are largely fake, however, I tend to see continuities where others raise their eyebrows and wonder, "What in the world are you talking about?"

Fellow blogger Dan Trabue has one of those posts designed to drag the homo-haters out of their holes. It is working, too. The same tired arguments. The same sentences, typed for the thousandth time by the same people playing their appointed roles. It isn't even necessary to read specific comments to know beforehand how different people are going to respond. Which is not to say that Dan's question is unimportant, although I believe it is so for reasons other than one's he may entertain. Rather, the internet and blogging is a medium not designed for careful, thoughtful analysis of important matters. Rather, it allows people who do not know one another to play verbal games. For all I know, the folks taking up various positions at Dan's do not believe a word they are typing; they may just be enjoying the game.

Let them play.

I am currently reading Medieval Cosmology, selections from Pierre Duhem's massive, multi-volume history of western scientific thought from the patristics to the Renaissance. The subjects are arranged topically - infinity, place, time, the void, the plurality of world - and cover the period, roughly speaking, from St. Thomas and the condemnations of 1277 through the early Renaissance. Writing during the First World War (and never fully completed because Duhem was not a well man and died before he could finish it), Duhem's thesis was simple enough. Rather than view the various scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as revolutions in thought, we need to see them as events on in intellectual continuum. Physics didn't begin with Newton, but Aristotle. Astronomy did not begin with Copernicus, but Aristotle. It was the rediscovery of Aristotle, and the adaptation of his thought to the neo-Platonism of the middle years of the Christian era that created the intellectual milieu that led, in steps variously large and small, to the discoveries of what we call "the scientific revolution".

In order to make his case, however, Duhem had to place in evidence huge amounts of material that was unknown outside the narrow precincts of Scholastic studies and those folks interested in the 14th century arguments known as the conflict between the ancients (those who followed in Aquinas' footsteps and stuck close to Aristotle) and the moderns (the nominalists and their students, from Ockham through Peter of Spain and Albert of Saxony). Many of the people reviewed by Duhem were virtually unknown except to a few specialists - Robert Grosseteste and Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony and a 14th century Merton College Fellow named Swineshead - and their views on these matters largely unexplored until Duhem put the pieces together.

Do I agree with Duhem's thesis? I cannot say one way or another. What I do think is important, however, is understanding what people used to believe and think and teach. First of all, learning stuff like this is its own reward. More knowledge, no matter how seemingly trivial or irrelevant to many people, is always preferable to less. Second, considering the intensity of the debates, the fact that so much of late Scholasticism flowed from a series of condemnations of various pieces of Thomistic thought in 1277, it gives contemporary readers a perspective on our own controversies. Finally, how can we understand who we are if we have no idea of our roots?

These are the questions that interest me. This is why I'm wading through the dense sophistry and dialectic of late Scholasticism, rather than engaging in a shouting match over gay marriage (which is not to say I haven't posted a couple comments; rather, I have tried to change the subject). I have limited time and resources as it is, and I think it would be far better used exploring matters of interest to me, than playing a part in an internet set-piece whose structure and content I am already familiar with.

Name Dropping

In February, 1983, my brother was in an automobile accident. He spent close to three weeks in a hospital in Ithaca, NY. Of the many trips we made to Ithaca in that time, one was just my father and me. Dad could always fill the quiet of a forty-minute car ride with questions about classmates, talk of books, what-have-you. We reached a cross roads outside Ithaca and he broke in to a rare moment of nostalgia (unlike my mother, Dad really didn't talk a whole lot about his childhood, at least when I was under the age of 18; apparently he decided it was rated "R" or something . . .). "I remember hitchhiking down this road when I was in college," he said.

"Really," I said, being at that point in my life incapable of picturing a younger version of my father doing anything as remotely un-Dad-like as hitchhiking.

"A couple friends and I decided to go to Binghamton for a party. One of my friends had a friend there who lived with his parents, and they were away."

It was getting more interesting by the minute. A couple years later, having experienced a few college-age parties myself, I would understand even more what he was talking about.

The next question was more in the way of chatter on my part. "Do you remember who they were?"

"Well, the friend was Richard Deacon. We were hitching to Binghamton to go to Rod Serling's house for a party."

For the first, but not the last time in my life, I was quite literally speechless.

For those who may not remember the name, Richard Deacon played Dick Van Dyke's boss on his eponymous show. Rod Serling, well, if you don't know the name, you can stop reading now.

When my father graduated from Waverly High School in 1939, he received some money to study violin at an institute affiliated with Carnegie Hall in New York. When I started college - a bare few months after the aforementioned conversation - he told me that his father wanted him to go to Syracuse University and study journalism. He mentioned this because we had met one of the music performance professors at Alfred University, and Dad confessed to me that he had wanted me to study piano, then recounted his own struggles with his parents as a way of reminding both of us that being a parent includes letting our children make their own choices.

When he arrived in New York City, he ditched his fiddle and took up classes in theater. Since it was all paid for, it didn't really matter all that much, although it probably didn't please either George or Grace (he always referred to his parents by their first names). A tiny bit of his story from that time came to my attention several years later.

I was back at the homestead for a visit at some point in the early 1990's, and saw Dad was reading Kirk Douglas' memoir, Ragpicker's Son. He had a page toward the front of the book marked and since it wasn't hidden away somewhere, I checked out what it might be. Douglas was recounting his early time learning theater, and how cold his first year was. Being poor, he couldn't afford a proper jacket, and he writes in the book that another classmate of his, "Betty", gave him one. Betty would change her name in a couple years, impressing millions of American men when she says to Humphrey Bogart, "You know how to whistle, don't you? You put your lips together and blow." Apparently, Bogart was impressed, too, because he married her, only her name then was Lauren.

I asked Dad why he had marked that particular passage, and he gave me a funny look - angry? frustrated? ironic? - and said, "That was my coat." See, Dad's roommate at the time he was studying theater and acting was this really dirt-poor son of Russian immigrants. He decided to call himself Kirk. The only reason "Betty" spoke to this poor rag-picker's son at all was because he was friends with my father, with whom she was friendly (although he would tell me later that she was, well, let's just say an unpleasant person, highly ambitious, quite willing to discard some and latch on to others whom she felt might help her get what she wanted; when I told him that I thought she was among the more beautiful women in Hollywood from that era, he said she was even more beautiful in person).

At that point, I had known about my father's associations with all sorts of folks whose names were well-known. I had even known that he and the actor who would become Kirk Douglas had roomed together in New York during his first stretch of time living there. When my grandmother died in July, 1984, she left behind 95 years of collected mementos through which her three surviving children had to spend years sifting. Among them were more photos than you could shake a stick at. At home for Christmas break later that year, one night Dad was sitting in his usual chair, photos scattered about the living room in various piles. I asked if I could look at some of them - you always asked in my house before you touched anything - and he said, "Of course." I was glancing through some that appeared to be a group of young people sitting at a restaurant. One made me stop short, because in the picture was my grandmother - much younger, of course - sitting next to a young man with chiseled good looks, his dimpled chin recognizable immediately. It was then I learned about Dad's friendship with Kirk Douglas.

My grandparents suffered much less than many families during the Great Depression because my grandfather never lost his job. In 1931, when many people were abandoning the land, he bought a hundred acres and a house in Lockwood, NY, about seven miles north of Waverly. I think he did it because living in the big red house on Waverly Street had become intolerable to his wife, inconsolable after the death of their oldest son three years previously. My father's family was hardly wealthy, but having a job, farm hands, extra cash was a rare thing for far too many people at the time. Douglas, coming from extreme poverty and looking it, aroused a bit of pity on the part of my grandmother, who told my father to give him his, Dad's, old coat and she would buy him a new one. Thus the source of the coat which Douglas either misremembered coming from Lauren Bacall, or perhaps simply erased by father, who had not become a household name, from the record of his life.

The picture was from a party thrown by some of Dad's theater friends after he got out of the Army in 1946. He was struggling with the decision of either going back to New York or returning to Ithaca College and finishing his degree. He told our English class that his early experience in theater taught him how important education was; so many of the other young hopefuls around him had college degrees. He realized that he wouldn't make it unless he got some education, for the simple reason they got the better parts. He had hopped back and forth between New York and Ithaca between 1939 and 1945 when he entered the Army, with an autumn in Hollywood trying to get a studio contract. He ended up going to Ithaca, putting him on a road to that hitchhiking trip to Rod Serling's. Before then, though, he had a little party thrown for him, and someone took some pictures, including one of my grandmother sitting and laughing at a table with, among others Kirk Douglas.

In the late 1940's, after college but before he settled in to his decision to teach, he was back in New York City, the hub of early television. He did some work on Playhouse One and some of those other anthology shows. I remember him telling me about an appearance with Boris Karloff. Karloff was a Capt. Bligh type, with my father an equally unpleasant leader of a gang of mutineers. He told me he had to do the entire thing shirtless, his skin oiled and dirty to look tanned. The set was a cutaway of an old sailing ship, cramped, and extremely hot, he said.

He was in a summer company in Rhode Island in the 1950's that featured Eva Gabor (let's just say she was not well-liked by the company), Claude Rains ("Hark, I hear the Assyrians!"; my father missed his cue, having fallen asleep standing up backstage waiting for it, and Rains had to scream the line three time before he dashed on stage; he apologized to Rains after the performance, to which Capt. Renault replied, "That's OK, Dan. The show is a piece of shit, anyway.") It was there my father worked with an aging, but still vital, Mae West, laughing about the young "bodyguard" she dragged behind her on an invisible leash.


While I was growing up, my father did community theater work, summer stock at Bristol Valley Playhouse in Naples. In the early 1990's he landed the role of Sam Clemens' father-in-law at the Mark Twain musical drama in Elmira. Later he would work at Cider Mill Playhouse in Endicott, finally landing a part in the Caucasian Chalk Circle in Ithaca, probably the late-life role of which he was most proud (I remember hearing that he kissed another man full on the mouth in that show, not something light but a good old-fashioned snog, and thinking that his acting skills had to be top-notch; there are just some things I cannot picture my father doing, and that's four of them).

Both my parents led the most interesting lives before they met, married, and settled down to the impossible task of raising a family, and I had always wanted to live that same kind of life - living in all sorts of places, meeting interesting people - and now, looking back, I think I did. There is a part of me that has always been a little in awe of the life my father led before he ended up settling down, marrying my mother, spending the bulk of his working years teaching - the old Van Etten school, Sayre High School, Tioga Center High School, then Waverly High School, from 1964 until he retired in 1988 - with his summers spent in various locations doing odd jobs (mowing at a Christmas Tree farm outside Athens,PA has always been one my favorite jobs he did), working at a local furniture store, a hardware/automotive store. On this Father's Day, I just wanted to honor the life Daniel Safford led in the real passion of his life. Whether he ever was frustrated by not achieving the kind of recognition, not to mention financial independence, some of his acquaintances achieved I cannot answer; that's one of those questions I have always been afraid to ask him. All the same, more than anything else he did, I know Dad was always happiest under the lights, a crowd in front of him. I want to remember him that way.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. Love you.

Major Competencies And General Cowardice

I hadn't heard the story about some Iraqi emigres planning to send weapons to Al Qaeda in Iraq from Kentucky. It is important to note the following, as the AP report in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune does: "Neither is charged with plotting attacks within the United States".

That hasn't stopped Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Fried Chicken of the US Senate, from quaking in his boots:

"I think it's safe to say that a lot of Kentuckians, including me, would like to know why two men who either killed or plotted to kill U.S. soldiers and Marines over in Iraq aren't sitting in a jail cell in Guantanamo right now," McConnell said on the Senate floor this week.

According to the story I heard on All Things Considered yesterday afternoon, however, the Justice Department, having been forced to give up trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York thanks to political pressure, is standing firm on this one.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who lost the political fight over that trial, isn't backing down this time. He told the American Constitution Society Thursday night that the fight is on.

"Politics has no place, no place in the impartial and effective administration of justice," Holder said. "Decisions about how, where and when to prosecute must be made by prosecutors, not politicians."

Prosecutors, Holder said, have a better understanding of the law.

I will note, for the record if you will, that most prosecutors are also politicians, and politics, usually local, determine which cases get prosecuted and how they are prosecuted. Holder's protestation of political virginity is a bit of a stretch, to say the least.

Be that as it may, this slap fight between the Senate Minority Leader and the Attorney General of the United States was interrupted in the telling by an unusual character:

Jim Cullen, a retired brigadier general in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, is one of a group of retired military officers lobbying Congress not to tie the Justice Department's hands when it comes to national security prosecutions.

"The core competency of the Department of Defense is to defend the nation," Cullen said. "It is not to take over the role of the Justice Department."

Cullen said most of the terrorists convicted in U.S. courts are serving long sentences. They're behind bars for decades. They're no longer a terrorist threat. And they're no longer fodder for politicians.

The dynamic at work here is fascinating, to say the least. Apparently, some politicians still feel it possible to exploit public fear of terrorism and accused terrorists - the candidates from both parties for the governor's office are joining McConnell's call for the two men to head out for Cuba - ignoring the implications of such decisions. As Gen. Cullen makes clear, the military has a job to do. Piling all sorts of extra work on them, in the midst of an occupation in Iraq, military action in Yemen, and war in Afghanistan stretches an already taught and perhaps even fraying military bureaucracy near the breaking point. Furthermore, while there are elements of the military whose job it is to be prison guards, police officers, lawyers, and judges, their focus is the UCMJ, their jurisdiction members of the military violating that code. While the Constitutional problems with the Guantanamo Bay prison are legion, the personal toll on the prisoners (and the toll on any attempt at prosecutions after years of detention and interrogation worse), we should also consider the toll on the military personnel, tasked to do jobs that can be done by civilians, should also be part of the equation.

Yet again, we not only see the further militarization of what should be civilian justice; we also see the promotion of rank cowardice, the apathy toward our military personnel and their needs, preferences, and competence by a politician who believes he supports the military. Like the brouhaha over where KSM was to be tried, and the passage by Congress of a law barring any funding for moving those held at Guantanamo Bay to prisons here in the United States, the exploitation of fear and the promotion of cowardice gives to the terrorists yet another victory.

I have no idea who's going to come out on top in this spat between McConnell and Holder. Venturing a guess, Holder could win, or the President could undermine him yet again, perhaps as the price for getting some "compromise" on some piece of legislation (if McConnell were smart, that is how he would have operated).

President Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison during the 2008 campaign. After he was elected, he signed an executive order to that effect, only to have Congress cut off any funding for doing so. Three years later, we have more demand for more prisoners to be sent there. It seems to me high time the President spit in Congress' collective eye, shut the place down, and silenced Mitch McConnell. If the folks in Cuba are really as bad as all that, get them to courts and determine it once and for all. Stop saddling the military, who has a job to do, with stuff they shouldn't be doing.

Oh, and kudos to Gen. Cullen and other retired military officers for continuing to follow their oaths, defending the Constitution as lobbyists.

This Day In History

I don't give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it'll save it, save this plan. That's the whole point. We're going to protect our people if we can.

Richard Nixon

Somewhere in a drawer or box at my parents' house is a piece of paper, an in-class assignment, from when I was in second grade. The assignment was simple enough - construct a sentence with a plural subject. One of the sentences I wrote puzzled my second grade teacher, Mrs. Anderson, no end. She had been my father's student a bit over a decade previous, so she contacted him, and - according to an account my mother gave me years later - the two of them laughed their fool heads off, not at poor Mrs. Anderson who was overworked, underpaid, and definitely underappreciated by the school administration.

The sentence: "Mitchell and Stans are guilty."

The question Mrs. Anderson wanted answered? Who were "Mitchell and Stans"?

John Mitchell was the former Attorney General of the United States and head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, known without any irony as CREEP. Stans was Maurice Stans, one of those mid-level floaters between public service and private business that continue to plague us. As recently as 1972 he had been Richard Nixon's Commerce Secretary, when he left to be CREEP's finance chair.

How I knew who these men were, and how I understood they were guilty - indeed how I understood the whole concept of "guilt" - is a tale in and of itself that should await another day. I recall this because on the evening of June 17, 1972 a group of men was arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, at the time located in the Watergate Apartment Complex along the Potomac River. The men were discovered because on this, their second such entry, they had taped the lock on a door leading to the stairs to the garage exit. Sitting across the street with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie, former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy sat and watched as the men tried to hide as a pair of plain-clothed DC police officers entered the office. Unfortunately, the initial ineptitude the burglars displayed continued. They left their walkies on and the officers heard the crackle of static and they were arrested.

Arraigned the next day, the group included self-professed former CIA field officer Bernard Barker. From this interesting tidbit of information, that made struggling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward mutter, "Holy shit," under his breath, began the long process of untangling the many cords of what many thought was the successful and competent Presidency of Richard Millhouse Nixon, revealing it to be nothing more than a vast criminal conspiracy, poorly imagined and even more poorly executed. Whether it was "milkmen" and "plumbers", ITT or Kent State, secret tapes or tossing a whole series of loyal underlings to the dogs, the entire structure of the Nixon White House was a bureaucratic recreation of the basic structure of Nixon's mind - petty, paranoid, uncomfortable in settings that called for relaxation (there's a famous photo of Nixon, supposedly strolling on the beach in California, supposedly looking relaxed, perhaps pensive; he's dressed in a suit and tie), and little concerned over matters of policy, preferring not to be bothered even by Cabinet officials, including long-time friends (like his old law partner William Rogers, whom Nixon named as Secretary of State, and consistently end-ran with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger on matters of important policy).

While other Presidents, before and since, have sidestepped the law, the Constitution, and common sense, none have rivaled Nixon for the sheer audacity of creating, within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, an organization that for all intents and purposes looked and acted like organized crime.

Memo To Feodor

I ran across the following quote from Shirley Sherrod, whose dismissal by Pres. Obama was among his most disgusting moments as President. Set up as that most elusive of creatures, a "reverse racist", through the judicial use of simple editing equipment, Obama fell for the bait, only to discover with the rest of the country, that she and the people she supposedly dissed in her speech, are larger and more magnanimous (in the original, Aristotelian sense of "great souled") than many a political appointee to come down the pike in the while.

Is this "anecdotal evidence"? Why, sure it is. It is used, however, to make a point.

The entire post I wrote below, writing about my own sense that the liberal tendency to hyperventilate about the Tea Party is overblown nonsense, was guided not by anything other than looking at what the Tea Party is, what its political positions are, and what it is working for. The "racist" label, tossed around so easily, not only makes it easy to dismiss them; it also makes those who toss it feel good about themselves. What happens, however, when we encounter someone who just adamantly refuses to surrender to the easy path of we virtuous versus those ugly racist hicks, whether they're from Tioga County, New York or the country outside Albany, Georgia?

I say, we set aside our desire to be both right and good, and listen carefully. But then again, I know that sounds just like a white guy, huh? Me and Shirley Sherrod . . .

Sherrod is taking Ben Jealous and some colleagues from the NAACP on a tour of her home county in Georgia.

She took them to a cooperative for rural black women that she helped organize, where the women shell pecans and make candy, and to an old school that has been converted into a community center and commercial kitchen for local residents.

“She was always there for the farmers,” said Cornelius Key, a peanut and soybean farmer who met the group. “She helped us set up markets with Whole Foods and other stores.”

As the tour neared its end, Sherrod took Jealous and the others past a 1,664 acre plantation on the edge of Albany called Cypress Pond. “It’s just beautiful,” she said. Her family and the others who invested in the New Communities cooperative that sued the federal government have placed a bid on the land and want to turn it into a modern version of their old project.

“Today, this land will belong to black people, white people, poor people,” Sherrod said. “Anyone who is a part of us. It belongs to us.”(emphasis added)

"Anyone who is a part of us," she said. Anyone.

Anyone.

It would be nice if more liberals felt that way, and acted on it, than decided it was far better to show the world how much better "we" are than "they" are.

Power Versus Truth - The Role Of Argument In Deliberative Democracy

We argue that one of the functions of reasoning is to produce epistemic improvement through deliberation.

Hugo Mercier and Helene Landemore, "Reasoning is for arguing: Understanding the successes and failures of deliberation", in press

The journal article about which I wrote yesterday has a kind of companion piece. One of the co-authors, Hugo Mercier, has teamed up with another co-author to investigate the fruitfulness of the argumentative theory of reason for explaining certain findings in political science. Like the explanation of the theory in the prior piece, the results are intriguing, although certain questions are begged that, I believe, would be more clearly addressed if we altered our view of the goal of politics.

The theory used in the paper in question (a .pdf document available for download and print) is the theory of "deliberative democracy", set forth by a variety of theorists, including Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls (cited in text). Mercier and Landemore write of this theory:

The questions that political scientists are trying to answer are, for example: Does deliberation have the transformative properties deliberative democrats claim it has on citizens' preferences? If a transformation is observed, can it be said to promote the betterment of citizens' preferences, whether this betterment is understood in terms of civic-mindedness, coherence, information, or some other sense?

The elephant in the room, as it were, the question begged - to me, at any rate - is whether or not these are the actual goals of politics in general, and political deliberation in particular. The authors use examples from recent American history of certain controversial policy decisions - the Iraq invasion and the economic bailout in the fall of 2008 - as real-world examples that push the boundaries of deliberative democratic theory, precisely because the epistemic standards often differ from case to case.

Epistemic standards allow us to judge whether a given deliberative process produces better or worse outcomes from a substantive rather than purely procedural point of view. Epistemic standards are routinely used unproblematically in psychology experiments, whether they measure the validity of logical arguments or the factual accuracy of answers to empirical questions. In political science, the question of what is an epistemically correct, right, or superior outcome often remains hidden behind the veil of the future, what Rawls called the "burden of judgment," or, more radically, is rendered inaccessible by the structure of much of politics as a situation of imperfect procedural justice. It is for example doubtful that we can ever answer with certainty the questions of, say, whether going to war in Iraq was the right political decision or whether the bailout of banks was the most appropriate answer the the impeding [sic] economic crisis of November 2008, yet we are still aiming for such answers when we deliberate and reason about these issues. . . .

The fact that we cannot know for sure whether the deliberative process yielded the right answer does not mean that we can evade the question of epistemic validity in politics.

These are intriguing examples not only because they continue to be subject to intense scrutiny by both commentators and policy-makers; they are intriguing because what the authors refer to here, quoting Rawls, as "the 'burdens of judgment'" do not, in fact, exist. Indeed, I would push the matter even further and insist that this notion that the outcomes of particular policy choices are routinely scrutinized as to possible outcomes, given the conditions under which they are offered, and in both cases - the Iraq War and the bailout - the outcomes were correctly predicted, yet not by those who implemented the policies. Rather, the critics of both these policies were far more accurate in their predictions.

Which, then, begs several questions. Not the least of them being, for our purposes in this post, was actual deliberation done in either case, or were a small group of like-minded individuals setting up policies based on sets of assumptions without inputs from critics (according to the argumentative theory, a necessary part of getting closer and closer to the point of successfully achieving some kind of positive epistemic outcome). As in both instances this is the case, with the added reality of a mass of disinformation that muddied the deliberative waters regarding the question of invading Iraq in 2003, we are left asking all sorts of questions, including whether or not these are, in actual fact, examples that give themselves over to the idea that "we cannot know for sure".

At the heart of this entire discussion, for me, is a simple misunderstanding of the real goal of political action, including policy deliberations. If the real goal of deliberative democracy was some kind of epistemic positive - arguing through various facts, weighing their relative importance and merit in order to arrive at a "best fit" between desired ends and the means through which we achieve them - then these are not examples of "we can never know" so much as examples of the breakdown of deliberative democracy as such. Which is much what critics of both policies allege.

If, however, we recognize that the end of politics (and here, we can speak of politics in a teleological fashion because it is a human construct, not a natural phenomenon, thus it is goal-oriented) is not the arrival at consensus that also has the best epistemic fit, but rather achieving and maintaining power for its own sake, then the whole set of rules regarding deliberative democracy, including those used in this article, are inapplicable.

For that reason, while relatively uncontroversial matters can lend themselves to some model that utilizes both deliberative democracy and the argumentative theory of reason to explain various factual findings, for matters that strike at the heart of the questions, "Who has power?", and "How do those in power maintain that position?", both must be tossed aside for a far different approach to understanding decision-making.

The example of global warming, and designing policies to address the potential environmental, economic, and political impact fit well. The theory of global warming, combining various sciences from climate history through chemistry and physics, asserts that industrial production in the western world (and increasingly in the non-western world, as well) has released various effluvia in to the atmosphere that over time and with an accumulative effect drastically alter the global climate, including weather patterns, sea-level, species viability, agriculture, and the like. The theory is well-tested, and continues to be so, fruitful both of explaining disparate data as well as further research. Its acceptance by the scientific community is not a matter either of political preference (as alleged by some critics) or controversy (again, as alleged by some critics). Rather, it is accepted because, like the best theories, it not only explains an abundance of seemingly diverse, even contradictory data, it offers fruitful avenues for research, as well as explanatory power for ongoing phenomena.

There are, however, powerful interests both domestically and internationally, that have the potential for severe financial and economic distress should policies be implemented to address the impact of global warming. In particular, various fossil-fuel industries and their subsidiaries - coal and oil, plastics production and power-generation - could be faced with costs too high to continue their current business models. In order to address this direct threat to their very survival, these same interests engage in a variety of practices, including using in-house scientists and technicians to raise questions regarding the soundness of the theory of global warming; these questions lead these same groups to insist in public that the theory is "controversial", or perhaps even incorrect precisely because there are those who question it. They then insist that, since we do not - or perhaps even cannot - know how strongly correlated the theory is to the various events and phenomena it addresses, they insist that policy-makers do nothing. Because of the potential for financial and economic dislocation - the threat of potential job loss is usually the simplest and most direct claim made in this regard - they insist the cost of addressing what is alleged to be a controversial scientific theory is far higher than any long-term benefit that might accrue from addressing a problem they insist may not even exist (while they occasionally slip and admit the existence of global warming, usually their public statements are filled with denial of all sorts of evidence, or citing counter-factuals as a way of sowing public doubt).

Were this truly a "deliberative process", an instance of deliberative democracy in action, using arguments and public reason to reach an optimum goal, including optimizing an arbitrary set of epistemic standards, the forgoing discussion would be offset by an equally vigorous, equally well-financed and well-connected public campaign setting forth the myriad errors of fact, of science, and the potential disastrous consequences of following a policy of inertia regarding global climate change. Yet, precisely because there is an imbalance of power, signified not only by the amount of money involved in the two sides, but the perceived self-interest of the parties involved, we have the situation we are in currently. Scientists promoting global warming and its effects, policy analysts who offer possible solutions, even some politicians and public interest groups who favor action over inertia in these matters, not only do not have the same amount of political power; they also do not have the same interest, and therefore the salience of the issue is less strong than with those parties who very existence might be threatened by possible policies to address matters of global warming.

Deliberative democracy, it seems, works ideally in settings where there is a rough equivalence of power, of interest, and where questions of "Qui bono?" do not impact the outcomes of deliberation. As a working model of a society with vast differences in power and influence, as well as recognizing the relative interest and salience of various issues among various groups, creates a situation where matters not least of reaching some kind of epistemic standard, are irrelevant. Who is right and who is wrong is not nearly as important as who wins and who pays because they lose.

The Social Dimension Of Reason

According to the argumentative theory, however, the function of reasoning is primarily social. In particular, it allows people to anticipate the need to justify their decisions to others. This predicts that the use of reasoning in decision making should increase the more likely one is to have to justify oneself.

--snip--

Reasoning contributes to the effectiveness and reliability of communication by enabling communicators to argue for their claim and by enabling addressees to assess these arguments. It thus increases both in quantity and in epistemic quality the information humans are able to share.

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, "Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory", Behavioral and Brain Science(2011)34

"Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth" claims the headline. The sub-head, which is in the URL, reads "People Argue Just To Win, Scholars Assert". Intrigued, I clicked over and read through the piece by Patricia Cohen.

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.(emphasis added)

As there was a link provided, I did what probably four other people did - I downloaded and printed off the article under review. I was shocked - SHOCKED! - to discover that The Old Gray Lady got the article wrong, pretty much all the way around.

The mental action of working out a convincing argument, the public action of verbally producing this argument so that others will be convinced by it, and the mental action of evaluating and convinced by it, and the mental action of evaluating and accepting the conclusion of an argument produced by other correspond to what is commonly and traditionally meant by reasoning (a term that can refer to either a mental or a verbal activity).

--snip--

We see three complementary explanations for the saliency of reasoning. First, when we reason, we know that we are reasoning, whereas the very existence of intuitive inference was seen as controversial in philosophy before its discovery in cognitive science. Second, while an inferential mechanism, that delivers intuitions about arguments is, strictly speaking, highly domain specific, the arguments that it delivers intuitions about can be representations of anything at all. . . Third, as we will now argue, the very function of reasoning puts it on display in human communication.

The short version of the theory set forth is simple enough - the view of reason, nous, ratio as the supreme mark of individual human specific difference, the height of individual accomplishment, shown to be problematic by a host of cognitive research over the decades, errs because it does not take in to account the role of communication in social groups, as an enhancement mechanism to the way human beings make clear the reasons for choices.

The Times article erred in a number of ways. First, the authors never claim that the question of truth or falsity is irrelevant to their argumentative theory of reason; on the contrary, they show through reference to abundant research that, in fact, group dynamics tend toward convergence on correct choices through a process of setting forth, and assessing, arguments for various choices. Second, the sub-header is something that should be clear, but the inference is wrong. The mechanism set forth in the argumentative theory of reason is more subtle and complex, not least because it is set not only in a social context, but also an evolutionary context. They argue that human communication is an evolutionary adaptation, and the social dimension of reason - including the ability to assess arguments for and against various choices - enhances survivability. Groups that are better able to assess arguments and make correct choices are more likely to survive, even thrive, producing more offspring.

Which is the source of one of the more intriguing criticisms of the theory. Jean-Louis Dessalles, of Teleco Paris Tech, writes:

If the biological function of reasoning is to achieve shared knowledge optimization (SKO), as suggested in the target article, then why do people show obvious limitations such as confirmation bias? M&S answer that information quality is optimized, not at the individual level, but at the group level. It would even be a good thing that individuals specialize on their (probably erroneous) line of reasoning, as long as argument exchange restores global information quality. The problem is that natural selection does not operate at the collective level. Shared knowledge belongs to the phenotype of no one.

Biologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr writes, in "The Origins of Human Ethics", in the collection Toward a New Philosophy of Biology:

The evolution of uniquely human ethics was closely correlated with the evolution of human cultural groups. These groups - enlargements of the original family groups - were held together by leadership, dialect, geography, rituals, and cultural traditions. The crucial question to be asked is whether such cultural groups could act as units of selection in the evolution of human ethics. That is, could a cultural group be the target of selection? . . .

In my view, one must avoid lumping under the term group selection entirely different evolutionary phenomena. I agree with Williams, SOber, and others that group selection among animals . . . is not supported by any evidence. Of the three kinds of so-called group selection among animals that I can distinguish, none is supportable by the evidence. In all of the animal groups, the individual is the target of selection.

But human cultural groups are something quite different. There is a great deal of evidence that human cultural groups, as wholes, can serve as the target of selection. Rather severe selection among such cultural groups has been going on throughout hominid history. . . . This form of selection is of such special importance because, in contrast with individual selection, cultural group selection may reward altruism and any other virtues that strengthen the group, even at the expense of individuals.

So, yes and no. Seeing human cultural groups as unique manifestations open to evolutionary pressure offers, at the very least, the possibility of taking an argumentative theory of reason in to account in the story of human evolution.

I find the theory set forth intriguing, to say the least. I hardly consider myself qualified to make any other claim for it. In all honesty, I just can't think of any arguments for or against it . . .

Random Exposure

I have to admit that I am glad the 30 Day Song Challenge I decided to do is over. It got tiresome. It became boring. I started to feel predictable in my choices. A better such exercise, one that might actually represent a challenge, would be, first, to choose three different musical genres not normally a part of one's usual listening preferences. Then, each of ten days choose an artist, or small group of artists within that genre, listening for trends, developments, variations, etc. Each day, post a song representative of the style in general, and the group's contribution to that style in particular.

I suppose this is far too much work for Facebook, huh.



The list just feels less random than it might otherwise . . .

Raconteur Troubadour - Gentle Giant
The La La Song - Zebra
Milenburg Joys - Dr. John
STATUIT (St. Martin's Day) - The Gregorian Chorale of Eglise Querin
All of Me - Billie Holliday
Easy Wind - The Grateful Dead
Da Gab Er Ihnen Barrabam Los (St. Matthew's Passion) - Johann Sebastian Bach
Breathe - Pink Floyd
Procession - Vangelis
Carolina Reprise - No-Man

The words are easy enough to remember . . .

They Were Sore A-Freud (UPDATE)

[O]n the whole Freud's science has held up just as well as Darwin's. They were both wrong about a number of things and a number of specifics, even a few significant things. But their major findings prevail. In Freud's case, his discovery of the modern notion of the unconscious. Of the activity of the unconscious in dreams. And, yes, the role of aggression in sex, by which he anticipated the discovery of testosterone among other factors. But most grandly that our need for and reception of affection and affirmation when we are children bear terrific weight on who we become sexually, relationally, socially and politically.

Feodor

Freud compared the ego to a "man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse." For Hartmann and his followers, this image conveys an impression of man's power over nature, whereas Freud clearly intended it as a reminder of man's dependence on nature and of the precariousness of his mastery over natural forces - including his own capacity for destruction, which haunted everything Freud wrote after World War I.

Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self, p.220.

The unconscious in Freud is therefore one into which something can only be pushed back. Or which at best, as id, surrounds consciousness as if this were a closed ring: a phylogenetic inheritance all around conscious man. 'With the help of the super-ego, the ego draws, in a way that is still obscure to us, on the experiences of prehistory stored up in the id.' The unconscious of psychoanalysis is therefore, as we can see, never a Not-Yet-Conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions. Accordingly, even the process of making this unconscious conscious only calrifies What Has Been; i.e., there is nothing new in the Freudian unconscious.

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.56

Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psycho-analysis bids us not to set conscious perception in the place of the unconscious mental process which is its object. The mental, like the physical, is not necessarily in reality just what it appear to us to be.

Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious", 1915

Blogs are an interesting medium. By and large, they allow someone who is willing to invest the time, the ability to say one, perhaps two, things with relative succinctness. Anything more, however, risks losing readers, starting yawn-fests, or, worst of all, hurrying through where a bit of time and care - and space - is warranted. An early influence on my own developing style was Arthur Silber, who wrote long, impassioned posts and had, at one time, quite a following among other blog writers whom I held in high regard. Through him and Glenn Greenwald, I discovered it is possible to write intelligent, thought-provoking posts in a medium that is dominated by inheritors of ad copy writing.

All the same, making a clear point on a subject as fraught as one's attitude toward as important a person as Sigmund Freud is difficult in any medium. Doing it on a blog post? Wish me luck.

I would be the last to dispute the seminal importance of Sigmund Freud on everything from how we understand ourselves to how we understand society. Along with Marx and Nietzsche - the latter with whom he shares much in common - he forms a triumvirate of 19th century thinkers who, in a sense, created the template for much of the intellectual life of the first half of the 20th century. Just as all theology is said to be commentary on St. Augustine, so much psychological and social thought ought to be considered commentary on these three men.

Yet, few people read Freud anymore. There are certainly Freudians, just as there are Marxists. The bulk of his work, however, seems to remain the province of specialists. I was fortunate, therefore, that the seminary bookstore where I worked had the five volume "Collected Papers" in English translation, published by Basic Books as parts of The International Psycho-Analytical Library. The papers are shorter works - journal articles, case histories, some prefatory work on a discarded longer work on what Freud called "metapsychology", and occasional writings for popular audiences. Since no one had purchased the set, it went on our discount rack when we were revamping the store, and I got all five volumes in a "Bag Sale", where all the books from the discount rack one could put in a Cokesbury shopping bag were $20. Considering each volume originally retailed at $50, that was, to put it lightly, a deal.

To say that Freud is a necessary person through whom anyone serious about understanding human beings and society must work is only the first sentence. The second sentence, of course, is to recognize that so much of his work has been revised - often by Freud himself as he changed his mind - criticized, altered in emphasis (sometimes by students, such as Adler and Jung), and quite simply superseded. Not least of this last is the change in neuropsychology wrought by revolutionary technologies. In his 1915 article, "The Unconscious", Freud explicitly writes that he is neither competent nor interested in writing about the physiological roots of his subject. While granting that brain pride of place as the seat of what he called consciousness, as well as the preconscious and the unconscious, his was a systematic work on the operations of the human mind, rather than an investigation into the physical etiology of brain function, because, as he rightly notes, the relationship between brain function and various psychological processes was unknown.

[I]t is clear that the question - whether the latent states of mental life, whose existence is undeniable, are to be conceived of as unconscious mental states or as physical ones - threatens to resolve itself into a war of words. We shall therefore be better advides to give prominence to what we know with certainty of the nature of the debatable states. Now, as far as their physical characteristics are concerned, they are totally inaccessible to us: no physiological conception nor chemical process can give us any notion of their nature. ("The Unconscious", 1915)

The past couple decades alone, however, has brought a revolution in the technology by which we can understand the physiological roots of what we consider "consciousness" or "mind" without ever believing we have bridged the gap between these physical conditions and their reality as mental states. Just an example, which I recorded here, from Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, p.191:

Listening to music caused a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: first, auditory cortex for initial processing of the components of the sound. Then the frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, that we had previously identified as being involved in processing musical structure and expectations. Finally, a network of regions - the mesolimbic system - involved in arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opioids and the production of dopamine, culminating in activation in the nucleus accumbens. And the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter. The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum's cotribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods. Now we think we know why.

Another example, more directly related to researches in the connection between subjects near and dear to the heart of Freud - sex and aggression - is this from Scientific American:

To understand which other areas might be implicated in violent behavior, Lin and Anderson's team exposed male mice to consecutive encounters with other intruding male and female mice. They then examined the brain areas activated by the encounters by labeling brain cells with a fluorescent tag that can distinguish recently active neurons. Surprisingly, neurons within a region called the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) snapped into action during fights--but also during sex.

Perplexed, the team implanted male mice with electrodes capable of measuring single cells in this area of the brain and watched what happened when mice fought or mated. Most of the neurons fired specifically during sex or bouts of violence, but a handful fired during both of these seemingly opposing behaviors.

Does this mean we no longer need look at the specifics of an individual's history in order to understand how and why a person acts in such-and-such a way? Actually, it is just to note that the ability to investigate brain activity is becoming more and more refined, including the ability of researchers to investigate how the brain functions during activities that were once the province of psychologists investigating what Freud called, variously, the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious (as systems, rather than any actual "thing"), or, later, the id, the superego, and the ego.

As to "discovering" the unconscious, it is far better to say that Freud created the unconscious. Like Kant's ding-an-sich - to which he refers specifically - the unconscious is a marvelous invention, allowing Freud to say all sorts of things about human behavior, including abnormal behavior, without actually saying anything instructive. His argument is a kind of via negativa. Reading the article "The Unconscious", one finds that, in essence, his argument seems to be that the unconscious has to exist because evidence from clinical studies suggest that human beings act on impulses, or display some other affect, without being able to identify the source of these acts. Sometimes, the subject may not even be aware he or she is displaying a particular affect.

In other words, Freud offered the unconscious as a space on the human mental map that could be labeled, not without reason, "Here There Be Monsters."

As an explanatory tool, however, the unconscious leaves much to be desired. Like phlogiston or the luminiferous ether, or dark matter and energy, it is a way of explaining that for which current scientific theories are incapable, without offering a serious, detailed definition or understanding of what, exactly, we are talking about. It is useful, to be sure, but hardly illuminating.

Furthermore, a reading of even a few of Freud's case histories reveals an interesting (to me at any rate) innate belief that Freud understood what his patients were thinking far more than they themselves did, or even could. In "Contributions to the Psychology of Love: A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men" (1910), Freud sets out to explain two seemingly unrelated phenomena - the attraction some men seem to have for, on the one hand women already involved in relationships with other men, and men whose preference is for women best described as "of loose morals" - as related, in the end, to the relationship between the men in question and their mothers. While certainly not doubting that an individual's relationship with his mother is important for understanding how he may relate to women in the future, these two phenomena may well have other explanations, not the least of them being, on the one hand, being a cad, and on the other simply preferring women of questionable reputations for a variety of factors unrelated to whether or not she is freer with her sexual favors than what is considered the norm.

Furthermore, as the emphasis upon primal relationships - with one's parents; with primal sexual fantasies as well as instances of precocious sexual behavior - indicates, throughout Freud's writings, either in case histories or more general writings, he approaches these subjects with a thick cover of moral presuppositions that beg as many questions as they answer. Freud sees sexual dysfunction in adult masturbation, in anal eroticism, in a variety of sexual activity that one would be hard pressed, today, to consider outside any "norm" of sexual activity. All of which begs many questions, not the least of them being the goal of psychoanalysis in seeking to bring to consciousness all these unconscious drives rooted in behaviors and experiences an individual would seek to suppress.

Here, for me, there is an irony. In the course of comments below, I am accused of being "ameliorative" - in what way, I can't precisely understand in the context of the comment - when it is precisely Freud whose entire goal was ameliorative. While insisting that much of the causes of psychological disturbance was rooted in primal relationships and the sexualization of these relationships, it is clear he never once questions the moral approbation attached to most sexual acts outside intercourse between a man and a woman. Along with a kind of assumption of a moral code that, by and large, would be difficult to defend today, there is the goal of psychoanalysis as one of making subjects less uncomfortable within the broader confines of bourgeois society - including bourgeois sexual morality - without ever calling the assumptions of that society in to question.

The Marxist critique of Freud - for example, throughout his revery on human psychology, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch refers to Freud as "the bourgeois Freud", just as he refers to Carl Jung as "the fascist Jung" - I find far more compelling than many others. Rather than draw attention to what was, in essence, a struggle between an individual's desires and the censoring mechanisms that he later termed "the superego", an individualized expression of the moral code of what is and is not acceptable, Freud assumed the goal of psychoanalysis was not overthrowing this mechanism of control - however it functioned, whatever its name and source - but rather overcoming it in specific instances, bringing awareness of its function in order to realign it. The whole purpose of psychoanalysis is not "curing", or even "making aware". Rather, it is, according to these critics, accommodating the individual to the needs of capitalist society, including the moral codes it deems necessary.

To repeat: None of this is to dismiss Freud, or to say that others should either take him lightly (if at all). A banal, but important, point is that, writing a hundred and more years ago, much of Freud has been supplanted by later developments, a greater understanding of the interplay between the individual and society, as well as better techniques for investigating the relationship between the human brain and psychological states. These latter we should take seriously, for Freud was not, by his own lights, a philosopher, but a scientist, and one should always be aware when scientific revolutions change the very nature of the subject under study. Even so, it is important to go through Freud in order to get where we are now.

I know this is too long already, but one final note - on the comparison of how Freud "holds up", using Darwin as a canon. The reality is the theory of evolution is far different from that proposed in 1859's The Origin of Species (another one of those books everyone talks about but too few read). As Ernst Mayr makes clear in two volumes, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, and The Growth of Biological Thought, only after Mendelian genetics was integrated in to the theory of evolution in the years immediately following the Second World War did the contradictory theories of genetics (whose biochemical roots were still under investigation at the time) and evolution by natural selection become possible. Key to this was making clear that evolution occurs both at the individual level - variation - and at the level of populations - population genetics. Understanding the interactions between them is necessary, a point Darwin could not have made because he did not have Mendel's original work (not having been done yet). To say that Darwin's theory, or Freud's, has held up well, is a bit like saying that Newton's physics has held up well.

UPDATE: As if this weren't too long . . .

I downloaded and am reading the article referred to here. It's 55 pages long, dense, complex, and interesting. One point relevant, however, to this discussion, is the authors' description of what they call "inference." Specifically, they describe the process of "unconscious", yet note further down that, in fact, the process of inference has been mapped in the brain by cognitive science. In other words, it isn't "unconscious" in any sense Freud has or would understand. Rather, the word here means "a physical process identifiable within the brain that is not under voluntary control, as in the case of argumentative reasoning." Since "the unconscious" in Freud bears no relation to any physical location within the human body, let alone the brain, as he specifically states, using the word "unconscious" to describe a specifically located physical process within the human anatomy redefines the term beyond (original) recognition.

There Is No Specter Haunting America

Before I get too far along in this post, I have to make some amends. I have been intellectually lazy, far too hasty at times in making claims and assigning labels - something I assiduously avoid, and claim never to do - rather than being far more careful in both my thinking and my writing. For these reasons, I am very sorry.

Why the mea culpa? When I am in less of a hurry, given more than a few minutes to think through what I actually believe, I write things like this:

In the summer of 2009, as the Tea Party began to coalesce around opposition to the proposed health care reform legislation, there was quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the liberal world over all those horrible folks showing up at various Town Hall events, speaking out against the bill. I, for one, supported it, and still do. I remember quite distinctly writing that more participation in the political process is always a good thing.

I still believe that. Were I less lazy, more thorough, and perhaps had a commenter or two who would call me on it, I would recognize that I frequently fall from this far more basic, and honest, belief:

Tea Party Republicans Dis American Troops Fighting Wars They Support

Since even the leader of the Tea Party - an alleged populist uprising against elites - is now publicly stating that people without property (which, I would guess, constitutes a significant portion of Tea Party supporters) should not be allowed to vote, the final scrap has been stripped away and it is clear (as if it ever were murky) that there is now not even a pretense of support for the general welfare, real fiscal responsibility, concern for the economic stability of the country, or supporting the policies most understand will actually drag the country out of the doldrums.

This yearning for simplicity, this primitivism, this fear which expresses itself in a rage against the Other, against those forces that push and pull us in ways we neither understand nor like, is certainly much of the attraction of the Tea Party and its candidates.

Has the right lost its mind on the Cordoba House? Seriously. These same Tea Party conservatives who insist they sleep with the Constitution under their pillows at night seem to forget that freedom of religion includes Muslims (of course, they also want to get rid of the constitutional clause that allows for birthright citizenship and simply repeal the 14th Amendment outright).

I am sorry for statements like this. The reality is this - not only do I support Tea Party Republicans organizing around issues vital to their perceived interests, I find much of the abuse hurled at them more disgusting than anything they have actually done.

Furthermore, I think it is safe to say that some, at least, of the Tea Party-supported candidates have not supported a Tea Party agenda. Scott Brown in Massachusetts is probably the best-known example. I would even venture to say that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for all he plays the right notes of the Tea Party song, in fact has an agenda far different from Tea Party faithful.

I say all this because I read this blog post over at New Politics, and I find its measured, careful consideration both of the Tea Party and the mouth-foaming liberal reaction to it a sober corrective to far too much political commentary these days. I don't agree with everything in the article, to be sure. All the same, it zeroes in on the fact that liberal hysteria over the Tea Party mirrors, in large measure, Establishment disdain for popular movements of any stripe. By tarring the Tea Party with the broad brush of such sins as racism and proto-fascism, the real grievances they represent - the protest over neo-liberal economic and social policies that many on the left used to voice pretty regularly - liberals and self-identified leftists such as Melissa Harris-Perry (mentioned in the article) become co-opted in ridding the land of those pesky citizens organizing around issues of common concern. That Tea Partiers are regularly derided as ignorant yahoos - lumped together with such fringe elements as birthers, for example - misses the point that there really is a Tea Party agenda with real targets.

The accusation of racism, which crops up again and again, and which Sunkara analyzes in detail, is an example of the kind of demands for silence from the polloi that are just too frequent to ignore. Are some Tea Partiers racist? Probably. So are some leftists. The Tea Party agenda, however, is concerned with the size and scope of government intrusion in to the market, as well as matters relating to tax policy, as well as support for the recent redefinition of second amendment rights as personal, rather than referring to the states and the organization of state militias. The Tea Party is not a group organized around race or one that uses racial animus as a driving force (except, perhaps, in its more breathless denunciations of the rise of undocumented immigrants and the economic threats they pose).

All in all, Sunkara's article is a nice corrective to the brow-furrowing and tut-tutting of far too many liberals, snickering behind their hands at the silly, ignorant Tea Partiers. That I have done some of this myself is something of which I am not proud. I have to be careful in the future not to be dismissive of either the Tea Party or its agenda, not painting with a broad-brush, but rather considering their positions, and considering the very real grievances they have. Political differences aside, Tea Partiers are Americans, and deserve at the very least a hearing on the merits. This does not exempt them from criticism. It just means they should not be de-legitimized through careless, and often evidence-free, accusations of racism and fascism. We would all be better served if we did as Sunkara has done, rather than I have done far too often in the past.

Wrong Again And Always

Back when I was a wee little undergraduate, I took a class on America in the 1920's. I did my research paper on the Scopes Monkey Trial. In the course of researching both the event and its aftermath, I found abundant sources from biologists refuting in detail each and every claim creationists make against the theory of evolution by natural selection. Some of those claims are ridiculous. Some sound good. All of them, over and over, have been addressed by real scientists doing real science.

So, now, it seems they have to do stuff like this.

On Wednesday, Right Wing Watch flagged a recent interview Barton gave with an evangelical talk show, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers had explicitly rejected Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Yes, that Darwin. The one whose seminal work, On the Origin of Species, wasn't even published until 1859. Barton declared, "As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!" Paine died in 1809, the same year Darwin was born.

This is so astoundingly bad, so wretchedly awful, yet so humorous, I just couldn't help but read the whole thing. Any time some conservative whines about education in America, this is the kind of thing that needs to be brought up. Early and often.

Along with "no fossil record of evolution!" and "no record of the evolution of the eye!", there is my personal favorite - the bumble bee. The claim lives on despite being refuted decades ago, and subject to various experimental tests for details. Like every other creationist claim that is factually erroneous, I am quite sure the whole, "The Founding Fathers rejected Darwin!" argument will live on.

People who actually know stuff will always have stuff at which to laugh.