Us and Them: The Blog

Depression 2.0

This piece, about how a new Great Depression now would differ from the last one, seems to me to miss a key point. In place of last time's bread lines and hoboes visibly criss-crossing the landscape, Drake Bennett forecasts a lot of unemployed people staying home, watching television. Suffering will take place in isolation, hidden from the public sphere, because we're all habituated to filling our empty hours with 21st century media.

Here's the problem: How will we pay our cable bills, if we're all out of work? Accustomed as we our to information access, we forget easily that it costs money. Money, if we crash, will be very scarce. And vital as Google feels to us all, fast-search never will compel people to spend in the same urgent way that food does.

So I think access to information -- 700 TV channels, yes, but, more importantly, the Internet -- will be the most important casualty of a new Depression. Economic collapse in our time instantly creates a great digital divide. In Depression 21st century style, some Americans would continue to take part in the Google-YouTube-Twitter world we know now.The rest of our people would become be digital Joads, no longer participating in modern life. The effects of that division would reach far and last long.

One more reason to hope we dodge the bullet.

The British, French and Imperial Roman Obama-equivalents ...

... are the subject of my piece, posted yesterday, in Slate. Check, as they say, it out.

I started on this subject with last week's blog post, which argued that the example of minority or ``foreign'' national leaders should remind us not to talk about identity as if it were fixed and unchanging. The new piece speculates a bit about what such leaders have in common.

Transition Atmosphere

Watching President-Elect Obama, at his first press conference, I noticed him repeatedly striking a note of thorough, cautious deliberateness. For instance, at one point, he said, ``obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we've got to think it through.'' And, a little later: ``I'm proud of the choice of chief of staff, because we thought it through. And I think it's very important, in all these key positions, both in the economic team and the national security team, to -- to get it right and not to be so rushed that you end up making mistakes.'' Imagining his team combing through the files of the Bush Administration, I found myself recalling Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. There's a scene there (when I dug up my old paperback, I found it on page 64) in which the reckless, violent cowboys of an Earth colony suddenly find themselves talking to an emissary from a more civilized planet:

``He looked about at the purple colonel, the flowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. `You have not thought things through,' he said. By his standards, it was a brutal insult.''

I think Washington may have that atmosphere for a few months . . .

The Great Blind Spot

He is an implausible candidate to lead his nation. He has a foreign-sounding name, a father who wasn't a Christian, and a cool writer's temperament. Before his political rise, in fact, he was a best-selling author.

Barack Obama? Nope, I'm thinking of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1816 he was a 12-year-old Jewish boy in an anti-Semitic nation; in 1876, after a glittering political career, he was made Earl of Beaconfield by his friend and admirer, Queen Victoria.

Yet this week the New York Times informed us, in this clunker, that no western European nation could elect a minority person, a conspicuous outsider, as its leader. There can't yet be a British, French or German Obama.

Hello? Disraeli may be the closest parallel to Obama, but other European nations have elevated leaders who were neither privileged nor typical.

One French Obama was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born, like our President-Elect, on a far-off island far from the national heartland, and he spoke French the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, with a distinct accent.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger and Disraeli share few other traits besides electoral success as an ``outsider.'' My point isn't that such political events are good, bad or indifferent for a nation -- I'm simply noting that (a) they are not that rare and (b) my journalist colleagues and other professional explainers act as if they are.

All over the world, people have followed leaders who don't look or sound ``like us,'' from Alberto Fujimori in Peru to Sonia Gandhi in India. Non-democracies have done this too. Alexander the Great wasn't Greek. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus was African. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian.

So why do we journalists stupidly tell each other that ethnic, cultural and class boundaries cannot be broken in politics? I think some of the answer points to a real problem with the way we all talk about identity.

Nations, ethnic groups, religious communities and the like are not things. Unlike trees and staplers and rainclouds, an entity made of people is an ongoing activity. It's created by thoughts, conversations and deeds. That means, literally, that the United States today is not exactly the same as it was yesterday.

Of course, much activity stays constant over time, which is why we have nations, ethnicities and social classes in the first place. A country is a great many people thinking, saying and doing the same things every day. But we all exaggerate the stability. We treat yesterday's activities as if they were a fixed object that will still be there tomorrow. So we imagine an unchangeability that is not really there.

Then we try to answer questions like ``Is America racist or not?'' Or ``Is Jane prejudiced or not?'' and go round and round in circles. The truth is that sometimes America is racist and sometimes it is not; sometimes Jane acts prejudiced and sometimes she doesn't.

To get precise about what that means -- to predict which times are which, for example -- we need to stop describing identity and its attendant thoughts and feelings as if they were objects. Historians describe change over time; they can map change over decades and centuries. We need a similar perspective for weeks and days and hours.

This is way, way easier to say than it is to do. The mind, I think, really is strongly biased to see identity as immutable and stable. But until we describe identity as processes that change over time, I think, we're stuck in a rut.

You-Heard-It-Here-First Department

A theme I kept returning to in Us and Them was the power of direct, personal experience on a mind that is always classifying and reclassifying people into groups. As I mentioned in the book, the Muslim-Christian division counts for a lot in Lebanon, but it was not difficult for experimenters there to create conditions in a summer camp that made its teen-age residents care much more about the boundary between Blue Ghosts and Red Devils. They were two gangs they had created on the spot, both of which were a mix of Christians and Muslims.

The depressing aspect of this idea is that people can decide that a Star Trek identity is the center of their lives. But the positive aspect is that people can easily drop longstanding ideas about ``others.''

Flash forward to last week, and this report about simple exercises that reduce people's scores on measures of prejudice. Four hours of conversation and parlor games with total strangers -- played with people of other races or ethnicities -- is all it takes, Benedict Carey writes (and the whole piece is very much worth reading):

``Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship `that is as close as any relationship the person has,' said Art Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who developed the program with his wife, Elaine N. Aron.''

Spankers and Shackers

The basis of nations, races, social classes, religions, and all other ``human kinds'' is the obvious truth that personal traits cluster. Knowing one fact about a person tells you that other statements are likely to be true about them. The thing you know, or think you know, can be skin color, a symbol worn on a lapel, an accent, a rhythm coming out of headphones. It can be any perceivable bit of information. People can and have made everything into signals of identity.

As the philosopher Ian Hacking pointed out some years ago, modern life has added a technical source for such signals. In addition to the stuff we notice automatically (because of the way our minds work), we moderns also use identity signals that have been noticed for us. These are traits, or connections between traits, that have been found, vetted and digested by specialists -- researchers in bureaucracies and academia. They're just as exciting to the mind as the stuff we notice about appearances, language and other human-kind perceptions we get ``for free.''

Case in point today: Perhaps in some future election we'll cast aside red-state and blue-state here in the U.S., in favor of this distinction between spankers and shackers.

The Extremes of Teams

Bill Bishop in his excellent new ``Big Sort'' blog explains the argument that ``like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded,'' as he puts it. ``Group polarization'' experiments, he proposes, help explain the tone of people at McCain-Palin rallies lately.

The only problem with this idea is that Democrats -- though they're just as prone to hang around like-minded people as are Republicans -- haven't been prone to jeering, insults and threats that have emerged in Republican campaign stops. There are extremes of feeling on both sides, but cries of ``traitor!'' and ``liar'' and ``kill him'' don't boil out of Obama-Biden gatherings. I think that's evidence that certain kinds of like-mindedness are different from others.

Specifically, I think the imagery of death, disease, untrustworthiness and immorality makes a difference. That rhetoric is a license for emotions that other kinds of rhetoric would discourage. It's not like-mindedness about anything that leads to extreme behavior. It's like-mindedness about the other side's malicious, depraved or unsanitary nature.

Some leaders offer those images to their followers; others refuse. We shouldn't think all shared opinions have the same effect, regardless of their content. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, like-mindedness in the defense of decency is no vice.

It Walks! It Talks!

To mark this week's publication of Us and Them: The Science of Identity in a new edition by the University of Chicago Press, I just finished a long conversational interview with John Horgan that is going up tomorrow (Saturday, October 18th) on the bloggingheads website. John and I talk about the Us-Them aspects of the 2008 election, how much people understand why they do stuff, and our society's principles of human rights, democracy and individual autonomy. Are these genuine advances in human thought? Or the secular equivalent of Byzantine Christianity or eighth-century Islam -- widespread only because they're the creed of societies that have the strongest military for the moment? (That's the philosopher John Gray's p.o.v., from which Horgan and I demur, for different reasons.)

Check, as they say, it out.

Us and Them and the Big Sort

The Gazette-Mail of Charleston, West Virginia considers the role of tribalism in the election.

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.