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°2021.11.02.Tue | Education, wealth, racism, and remedies

I’ve been skeptical of student debt forgiveness for the typical reasons: my own sense of frugality (e.g., going to a state school and paying off debt ASAP), concerns about moral hazard (i.e., increasing credential inflation and education costs), and even the ever increasing federal debt (i.e., a ponzi scheme that will one day fall).

That said, I know the world has changed since I was an undergrad. I also appreciate the U.S. has a stark wealth gap along racial lines that needs to be remedied. (And I recognize most conservatives seem to care about national debt only when social programs are being discussed, but lose that concern when considering military spending and industrial subsidies.) This discussion between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louise Seamster in favor of student debt forgiveness gave me much to think about. This includes the policy issue of debt relief and the ethical issue of equity.

If equality is about ensuring equal opportunities, equity recognizes that neutral-seeming policies aren’t enough to counter historic and systemic biases: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (Kendi 2019, 19). I strongly support equality and removing that which perpetuates historic and systemic bias. But I dither on equity. I wish I could find a taxonomy of remedies, like those sketched below, with which to think about the ethics and pragmatics of remedying injustices.

systemic reform
reparation
- Coates’s reparations
equity
- affirmative action: quotas
- affirmative action: “preferences” (non-quotas)
- Kendi’s Department of Anti-racism

I am a strong advocate of systemic reform: ethically necessary and practically achievable though distressingly difficult to achieve. On affirmative action, I am ambivalently moderate: cautiously supportive of the balance struck in Grutter v. Bollinger, though it is usually bureaucratically incoherent—often requiring doublethink—in practice. I am sympathetic to the obligation of reparations to those directly harmed (e.g., the internment of Japanese Americans), but the passing of time limits its utility in longstanding systemic bias. I dislike Kendi’s authoritarianism for many reasons.

I wonder if there is there a comprehensive treatment on this topic that attends to the ethics and pragmatics of these and other options?

References

Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. How to Be an Antiracist. One World.

°2020.03.17.Tue | On the ethical differences between prepping, hoarding, and profiteering

As an anxious pessimist, I’ve joked that preparing for the Corona Virus has been my moment to shine. But I’ve also been thinking about the ethics of preparation and the distinction we might draw between prepping, hoarding, and profiteering.

I’m intrigued by prepping, but don’t identify as a prepper – I live in a city apartment. Nor would I want to spend thousands of dollars on the off chance I could make a go of it post-apocalypse. I find such folks amusing, a bit deranged, and, at times, a little too gleeful; but everyone needs a hobby, and I see no social harm.

And there’s much to say for being prepared for likely events that span a few weeks or months. I have a lot of toilet paper, but I usually do as I buy it in bulk from Amazon. I have a box of surgical masks, that we wear to dremel the dog’s claws. I bought a new box of N95 masks, which I use during allergy season and air travel. I bought some more gloves, which I use for bleaching my hair and doing stuff around the apartment. I stocked up on food, but will be able to eat all of it in a couple months. I got some money out before the market crashed, but my 401ks are in the same dump as everyone else’s. This was ego-centric but not anti-social behavior, done before the panic.

To prep is to skim bountiful capacity for later use. In this way, it distributes and decentralizes essential resources. My twenty pound bag of rice – plus some dried beans and tofu tetra packs – could be handy to me and others in an unforeseen crisis. There’s still the quandary of if and how to share those resources when asked by those less prepared. (See The Twilight Zone’s episode “The Shelter.”) And I wrestled with shorting in the market, but didn’t have time to open a margin account in any case.

To hoard, on the other hand, is to deprive others of resources you don’t need. To buy more than what you need when others are trying to do the same is excessive and anti-social.

Profiteering then, such as that fellow in Tennessee, is benefiting at the expense of others – he’ll never use seventeen-thousand bottles of hand-sanitizer. The anarcho-capitalist might excuse the profiteer because there’s no formal coercion, but I use a social-good test: is this a behavior that adds value to society? The profiteer is not creating more resources or value, he’s only extracting it. If he’s extracting value from purchasers who are desperate, this is exploitative. If he’s extracting value from the wealthy who can afford it, this is an unjust redistribution of resources.

Whereas the profiteer is able to extract far more value than they contribute to society, the prepper, as a type of decentralized storage, adds some.

°2019.08.01.Thu | Why even reasonable people disagree

I’ve been thinking a lot about interpersonal conflict, especially around something I’ve been struggling with this past year.

Interpersonal conflict arises for many reasons, the bulk of which are manifestations of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Cognitive biases and disordered thinking contribute as well.

However, putting aside all of that, it’s possible for even reasonable people to disagree.

Having taught conflict management for a couple of years, I’m well acquainted with “I-statements,” Nonviolent Communication (speaking of observations, feelings, needs, and requests), log-rolling (and other non-zero sum interactions), and separating positions (I need your orange) from interests (I’m hungry, can you help?).

All of these tactics are about identifying and expressing interests, which are informed by values, understanding, and circumstances.

Each of us has values, a priori beliefs, which can be unexamined or even in conflict between themselves. A useful maxim for speech is to ask: is what I want to say kind, true, and necessary? It’s great when these three values are aligned, but sometimes they are not; sometimes I have to suffice with one or two out of three. Sometimes people have different values (e.g., individualism vs collectivism), though there’s often more overlap than we think. Learning to express our values, even when conflicted, is a step toward finding common, or at least not dissimilar, interests.

Yet, people with the same values can still disagree: they can bring different understanding to bear. You and I can both value friendship and a mutual friend, but I happen to know that she dislikes cilantro, and you do not. For a time, we might disagree about where to take her for dinner. This is a toy example, but what we know affects our understanding of more important concerns. Again, sharing what we understand is an important skill—though personal experience is frustratingly difficult to communicate.

Finally, even if we share the same values and understanding, our interests can diverge because of our different circumstances. It can be as simple as you are at the top of a narrow staircase and need to come down, and I am at the bottom and need to go up. Sometimes, our circumstances (our commitments, jobs, and relationships) put us in conflict. In this example, one of us will have to wait. That said, we too often fail to consider our shared values and to communicate our understandings.

Even if I disagree with a person, I need not feel enmity, which can make things even worse. I can’t blame you for needing to come down the narrow staircase. And it is better for one of us to cede than for both us get caught in an angry stalemate. Since you can come down more quickly, I’d likely invite you to do so if I can do the same next time. Life is rarely as simple as a toy example, and we ought always look for agreeable opportunities.

°2019.02.21.Thu | Are podcasts making me even more solitary?

I just started listening to Hidden Brains’ “Close Enough: The Lure Of Living Through Others.” I was expecting it to be the usual digital-self story I could skip, but I haven’t because of the focus on YouTube: a man who watches how-to videos instead of making stuff, a women who watches other womens’ meticulous bedtime routines to relax, and another woman who imagines being a musician without making the effort to do so.

I watch a lot of YouTube myself: how-to channels on boat building, lock picking, and knife making; explainers such as veritasium, CGP Grey, minutephysics, and Practical and Real Engineering; channels about alternative living and tiny homes. I was a huge fan of the user-generated content on Current TV – and was an early adopter of a DVR to remove the awful adverts – and I see YouTube as a fulfillment of its predecessor’s vision. Of course, not all of my 120+ subscriptions are user-generated: many news, visual arts, music, and documentary channels have mainstream media outlets as well. Still, I watch more YouTube than anything else, including Netflix. As someone who loves to learn, the allure is strong.

Although I don’t feel I’m living vicariously – and don’t feel guilty about watching YouTube, especially in the winter – I do have a different concern, in which podcasts are also implicated: I live a relatively solitary life. This has two obvious reasons: I am a shy introvert, and I’m well beyond the age of making lots of friends. Generally, that is fine, I live simply. I’m wholly content to spend a nice day with my spouse and our dog walking about the city, or sitting at the park and chatting with our dog friends. But I wonder if YouTube and Podcasts undercut one of my significant social drives: interesting conversation.

When I was younger and single, I’d spend my evenings in cafes. I could read, chat with newcomers and old favorites, and then leave when I wanted – a perfect scenario for an introvert. I also belonged to a few groups that welcomed heterodox discussions. I do have good conversations with my spouse, brothers, and students; I am fortunate. Still, I wonder if the quality and quantity of podcasts undercuts my motive to seek out good conversation? To put it in terms of the Hidden Brain episode, do I now live much of my conversational life vicariously?

°2017.08.15.Tue | The paradox and pragmatics of intolerance

In What White Supremacists Don’t Want You to Know, Valerie Aurora highlights Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and argues it is relevant to our response to neo-Nazis of today.

For his part, Popper was writing during the end World War II and was likely thinking about the tepid response to the original Nazis. Although they forced him to flee his home in Vienna, the Nazis are not mentioned in Open Society. Nonetheless, in a very long footnote, Popper consider the various “paradoxes” associated with open societies, including the paradox of tolerance.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. [@Popper1966, fn. 4, p.581]

Aurora applies this to the white-supremacy of today:

a tolerant society should tolerate protest marches in general, but it shouldn’t tolerate a white supremacist march advocating for the oppression and killing of people of color – like the march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 that ended with white supremacists beating and killing people who were opposed to their message of intolerance.

I think I first came across this notion by way of Aurora some time ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I had hoped it would help me resolve my dueling values of being tolerant but also defending tolerance. Unfortunately, when I think about particular cases, I fear its resolution is dependent on who gets to define what is intolerant. I can imagine both sides of a debate making claims of intolerance about the other side. For example, those wanting to suppress Muslim immigration can claim Islam is a religion of intolerance and should not be welcomed/tolerated. Those in support of immigration will claim that this position is intolerant itself.

This then sent me in search of a rubric for judging intolerant defenses of tolerance. For example, how should we judge the punching of a neo-Nazi? My thinking has been aided by Yonatan Zunger’s “Tolerance is not a moral precept”; he characterizes tolerance as a type of peace contract with worthwhile ends, not a moral precept.

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

Even so, Zunger acknowledges that conflicts might be unresolvable.

If everything you have ever learned tells you that this is a real and present danger, and that certain members of the community — members of another religion, perhaps, or people of the wrong sexual orientation — are jeopardizing everyone’s safety, then a fundamental, existential conflict is inevitable. In a situation like this, there can be no peace treaty; only war or separation.

This is a useful framework, but I’m still in search of a rubric.

Perhaps the following questions about the initial act of intolerance and subsequent defense could serve as a start.

The initial intolerance (i.e., some exclusionary/hateful behavior)

Is it born of a deep or long-lasting culture? Germans feel differently about neo-Nazis than Americans, for obvious reasons.
Is it a significant or growing threat? A lone kook is less of a concern than an organized militia.
What is the balance of genuine vs possible harm? Advocating for white culture is less of a concern (even if a “dog whistle”) than calls for genocide and violence.

The intolerant defense of tolerance (i.e., suppression of above)