It seems to me there is still a rather large difference between the Kissinger/Kirkpatrick model and the sort that some liberals embrace. With the former, you would favor propping up this or that regime for reasons of both economic and political principle - namely to defend against foreseen anti-imperialism or communism.
Support for vicious, undemocratic brutality was justified by the greater threat of where these leftist movements were imagined to lead. Yet there was always a good deal of sympathy for the plutocratic regimes. Not only were they acting as proxies for western interests that stood to lose substantial investments, but their very existence was in large part a natural extension of the capitalist narrative: that in markets there are winners and losers, and pity he who ends up on the losing side.
Yet with modern liberal realism, concerned as it is inherently in the progressive concept of social justice, it seems you have less an apology for the propping of regimes’ right to exist, and more a pragmatic, short-term avoidance of instability so as to increase not only future democracy and economic prosperity but social equality. When undemocratic Afghanistan is given aid to go after the Taliban or Al Queda, no apologies are made for the paradigm – within the logic of liberalism it is certainly illegitimate.
What’s more, it is hard to compare the brutality of the Taliban & Al Queda with the Sandinistas or most other communist revolutionaries (although you could draw reasonable comparisons between the Taliban and Latin American Death Squads). Going further, Hamid Karzai – or even Gen. Musharaff are hardly Samoza or Pinochet.
The director of the Congressional Budget Office recently wrote a blog post about the fundamental disconnect between the American people's desire for government services - specifically entitlements - and their desire for low taxes.
I think the equations on this issue are pretty simple.
First, you have entitlement spending as a moral issue. Do people deserve these basic service guarantees?
Second, you have the efficacy of government spending. Is the government the most efficient delivery system for these services?
Third, is our economic system inherently fair? Did the winners and losers deserve their fate?
Fourth, what role does taxation play in growth? Do higher tax rates inhibit investment?
Fifth, do people really deserve their wealth? Is it justified to progressively tax higher earners?
For decades the right has railed against taxation with assumptions on all five counts: People don't deserve these guarantees; the government is wasteful and inefficient; our economic system is a meritocracy; Supply-side principles say high tax rates slow the economy; progressive taxation is immoral because it unfairly redistributes legitimately earned income.
Yet all of these assumptions hinge on a simple question: how fair is our economy - do all people have equal access to the means of success? If they do, then they should be responsible for their own fate. Neither the government nor the people have any responsibility to them. Therefore, guaranteed access to services is not necessary and they can be provided more efficiently and better by private markets. Whether or not supply-side theory is correct is really irrelevant - taxation is in principle unfair and inefficient anyway. One's income is one's own and should not be subject to redistribution.
Yet during these same decades more and more data has been collected that disproves the assumption that our economy is fair, and provides equal opportunity for all - something liberals have always known intuitively. Research in many fields has unraveled the complexities of human behavior and uncovered overwhelming evidence with only one conclusion: one's success in life is solely determined by the genes they were born with and the environment that activated them throughout their life.
Starting in the womb, human development progresses according to its environmental stimulus. This includes everything from what social scientists call "human capital" (an individual's cognitive development according to levels of lead exposure, parental linguistic feedback, peer group interaction), to what social scientists call "social capital" (an individual's exposure to the cultural information and procedures necessary for success). Any theory is only as good as its predictions. And this theory of human development and social interaction has been confirmed repeatedly.
A simple thought experiment gives you an idea of what to expect: take two embryos and place one in the belly of a happy white mother from a wealthy, educated, functional family in Connecticut. Place the other in a 17 year old black girl in Detroit who is 4 grade levels behind with anger issues, her father incarcerated, her mother addicted to methamphetamines , her home with high levels of lead and pests, etc. - you get the idea.
The obvious predicted outcomes for each child are intuitively quite different. One child would seem to have quite an advantage over the other. But what researchers have done is isolated specific factors that can be applied to each situation with powerfully predictive results. Zooming out to the macro level - looking at populations in the tens of thousands, this application of data analysis gives us a clear understanding of what it takes to be successful.
The most common reaction to all of this from the right is to dismiss it, with an appeal to free will. They will point to one or another example of a man who has "risen to the top" despite all all odds. Coming from truly wretched circumstances, he has faced down adversity and by sheer pluck and determination achieved success. If he could do it, goes the argument, then anyone could. They just have to "choose" it.
This narrative is appealing. America is full of stories such as these. Its very founding was in a sense an expression of this sensibility - the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity - writ large. And it seems reasonable: we have set up a society that encourages the freedom to achieve greatness through individual effort. It would seem that all one has to do is work hard, make the right choices and success is easily within reach.
But this story is deceptively simple. It overlooks some basic realities of human development. For starters, "the exception does not prove the rule". These individual examples indeed seem heroic. But this is precisely because we all understand intuitively that these men were outliers. The fact that we see them as exceptional is based on the reality that most in their circumstance do not fare the same. Statistical demographic data bears this out. The children of poor Detroit do not succeed at the same rate as the children of wealthy Connecticut. What must it be then about the poor children of Detroit that makes them "choose" to be unsuccessful? And what then allows the children of wealthy Connecticut NOT to choose to be unsuccessful.
Well, we know why. In fact, we know exactly why. And it has nothing to do with "choice". If a child born to poor Detroit had access to sufficient human and social capital, the likelihood of his success would be virtually guaranteed. He would make the right "choice" every time. And if the child of wealthy Connecticut only had access to low levels of human and social capital, his likelihood for success would be rather dismal.
This can all be backed up by data. Countless devoted people all over the country are working tirelessly on finding ways to close this gap. How it will be done is a difficult proposition. There are no easy answers. But one thing is clear: all people do not have equal access to the means of success; all people do not have access to the means of freedom to self-actualize. Accordingly, it is then our job as compassionate and rational, civilized citizens to do whatever it takes to achieve this. It is our constitutional obligation.
The only way to guarantee equal access to human and social capital is through government services. Charity or private industry might fill in the gaps here and there. But if we are to truly offer equal access to every citizen, government is the only entity with the means to do so. This of course requires funding, and thus taxation. As we have already established, success is dependent on genetic and social circumstance. Earned income is dependent on success. Therefore, earned income is dependent on genetic and social circumstance. It is perfectly moral then to enact a system of progressive taxation. In fact, it would be immoral not to do so.
Brooks' latest takes on the Ft. Hood massacre. I liked my comment and decided to submit it as a formal letter to the editor. (It worked before).
"Brooks sets up a false dichotomy when he describes Hasan as being either driven by psychological and emotional disturbances, or having selected from cultural and religious narratives. One is certainly at the mercy of one's mental state. But isn't one just as compelled by their cultural state as well? That is, aren't we all forced to choose from a limited palette of memories and social experiences?
Surely we are only able to "choose" one or another narrative to the degree that we possess the mental and experiential awareness to do so. This is why entire nations follow similar religions. This is why we raise our children the best we can.
Hasan chose his narrative, to the extent that he selected ideas that appealed to his experience and impulses. But this "choice" was no more his own than a neurological disorder or underdeveloped cerebral cortex would have been."
So, as a requirement to get my credential to teach Secondary Science, I'm taking an online methods course from the UCLA extension. So far its been really fascinating. This week's reading has been on the subject of standardized testing.
Another difficulty stemming from the profusion of curricular aims that customized standards-based tests try to assess is that the tests themselves can’t possibly include a sufficient number of items to shed light on a students’ status regarding the curricular aims that do make the cut in a given year. More often than not, there’s only one item, or perhaps two, to assess students’ achievement of a specific curricular aim. Teachers really can’t get an accurate fix on a student’s mastery of a curricular aim based on only one or two items. Typically, the developers of customized standards-based accountability tests report students’ performances at more general levels of aggregation: amalgamations of students’ performance with respect to collections of a variety of curricular aims, some of them very different. This is what you see when accountability results are reported at the “strand” level or at the “content standard” level. But this kind of reporting obfuscates which curricular aims students have mastered.
Excerpted from “Transformative Assessment,” by W. James Popham, Copyright 2008, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA.
I'm not sure if I did this right, so someone correct me if I'm wrong. But what I did was create a hypothetical sample class of 10 students, (A-J). I showed the results of 10 concepts covered in class, and their respective true performance on each. They ranged from one student (A) getting 90% correct, to another (J) only getting 50%.
(click on image for larger view)
But as the reading pointed out, there is simply not enough time to test for every concept, and so they sample. Even if they try and target important, representative skills, you're still stuck with the problem of getting a poor reflection of what was taught in the classroom, much less that student's particular knowledge.
In my sketch, student B happened to miss one of the sampled concepts, and so scored a 50%, even though he was 80% mastery over all. And student J, only 50% over all, happened to get the sampled concepts correct, and so was scored 100%.
The author goes on to argue that what standardized tests end up showing is a student's SES (socioeconomic status) and inherited aptitudes. Which would explain high levels of correlation between test scores and demographics. To me this is basically what NCLB has highlighted, by making such a huge deal out of test scores with the public: that there are wide gaps in academic achievement across demographics.
Unfortunately, the take away for many here is simply that teachers are doing a terrible job. All you have to do is look at test scores as a measure of teacher performance and it looks like you have some really bad teaching going on. But of course the reality is that there are numerous other factors involved, and that while bad teaching is bad teaching, it is apples and oranges. I liken it to measuring the performance of two race car drivers, one in a Ferrari, and one in a Yugo. This would seem a terrible way to describe students (as cars), but what we are really comparing is the craftsmanship and materials used to create the individual. A student can be made into a Ferrari or a Yugo over the course of his life. But once he gets to the teacher, most of the raw materials are in place, and there is only so much the average teacher can do to get him up to speed.
As a post-hippie child of Santa Cruz, CA I ended up doing LSD at the age of 9. I had scored it from an older brother and shared it with friends. I had a blast. I remember riding in the car with my mother days later and suggesting to her an insight I had developed while “frying”: maybe reality existed only “to the front of us… while what was behind us – what we could not see – was not really there.” I remember her responding to me that she had had the same thought once while on LSD herself. I had not told her about my illicit activities, but worried she was on to me. Had she only known!
A friend at the time saved a hit and later dropped it one morning before school. I heard later they sent him home after he began barking like a dog on the floor of his 5th grade classroom. As a teen he committed suicide.
Recently I reflected that during that period of time in my life my two closest friends were without fathers. One, a native American Indian (yet one more suicide statistic), lived alone with his mother in a small apartment. She was a house cleaner, and one of her ears had been burned off – I fuzzily recall it being a domestic case, but I’m unclear. The other had a father who was either dead or in prison. My father, on the other hand was our family’s sole provider, a high school teacher who cared deeply for us, but often seemed preoccupied – either physically or emotionally.
I dropped a few more times, but never close to the more than 100 my brother did. He ended up having a bad trip that induced in him an anxiety condition that he still medicates for today. Fortunately, it’s now in prescription form, with less side effects than the booze he spent his twenties downing.
I often attribute much of my lifelong battle with depression to a fracturing of my psyche received from LSD and marijuana. Of course, chronic neck pain has always been the primary causal factor. But when the shades of consciousness begin to unravel, and that dark lubrication begins to bubble, one curses anything that might have ever amplified the chaos.
And yet such bittersweet music it is. The human condition is one of fragility, defined by its penchant for wreckage.
"But [whether or not we have free will] is PURELY IRRELEVANT because the knowledge that we lack free will does not displace that introspective awareness that we have of it. If the realization of a fact has no impact on what or how we think or do or say, then who cares?"
I completely disagree with this sentiment. I think it does have a profound on what we should think do or say. Sure, we are still determined, but we are the agents of the larger social organism and although we must do as it has created us to do, the fact that we are humans is integral to its vision - our vision - for what we ought to do. We are using this insight to extrapolate our localized behavior with our loved ones - how we wish to treat and be treated by them - to our larger community of fellow humans.
I came to my current position on free will (that we have none) from purely political and social considerations. How was it, I asked myself, that such inequality exists, especially in America as we have such a relatively robust infrastructure for personal success? As a liberal, I was troubled by conservativism's main argument for maintaining the status quo: that success is there for those who choose it. But many people don't choose it, and I began to see patterns.
When broken down by demographics, certain groups have very predictable life experiences. By adjusting variables, you can easily put life outcomes on a scatter plot and they will be highly determined.
At one end of the scale, we might have a white male born into wealth, with highly educated parents who love him and nurture him, push him academically and basically give him an optimal upbringing. On the other, we might have a black male who's father is in prison, his mother on drugs, whose school is filled with others from similar backgrounds, and he falls farther and farther behind in school.
It is obvious which child stands the better chance of success in life. Yet for all practical purposes, when the first child starts his own business and lives a life of rich luxury, we say it was his own choice - that he earned it. And when the second child drops out of school, begins selling drugs, and commits murder, we say it was his own choice - that he deserved it.
We have enormously complex social policies set up based on exactly that premise - that both of these men had a choice in their lives. Sure, occasionally individuals will perform outside the norm for our crude parameters. But the exception doesn't prove the rule, it simply calls for a more nuanced and detailed look at what those particular cases involved.
If people did indeed have free choice, we would be unable to come up with predictors for social outcomes. Education, family, neighborhood, income, etc. would have no relationship with outcomes. Every individual would be just as capable of breaking the rule, thus disproving it.
So if we are to truly take a determined view of human social behavior, we must be prepared to radically revision how we structure our society.
I think one of the most powerful insights kids might have into causality and consciousness, and the most productive use of the idea of NFW (no free will) might be through conflict analysis. Kids face incredible levels of conflict on a daily basis. Imagine having to sit next to someone everyday who might, for no apparent reason, wack you on the head or stomp on your foot! This is at all grade levels.
There will always be kids who, for whatever reason, come to school with all sort of destructive baggage. As a teacher, a large part of your job is creating and maintaining a safe, positive environment for learning. This is not only egalitarian, but positively impacts learning for the whole class.
Yet teacher training and expectations routinely neglect this crucial aspect of teaching. In schools with few low SES (socioeconomic) kids, this tends to be less of an issue. Higher SES students come from homes with lower rates of absent fathers, incarceration, drug abuse, poverty, education, etc. Students thus bring less baggage with them into the classroom. But in areas with high rates of low SES students, classrooms are completely different. This is then compounded as a culture of low-performance, stress, hostility, etc. pulls kids farther and farther behind as they age.
The way teachers deal with this disparity generally falls under the umbrella term "classroom management". There are many styles and techniques used, and each teacher will have a style that works best for them. But most of the emphasis is placed on control and behavioral maintenance. A much smaller proportion of time is devoted to explicit teaching of emotional cognition and social skills. Occasionally a curriculum will be adopted, but often without specific training. With high-stakes testing, the schools with the lowest scores will be under the most pressure to spend MORE time on core math and language skills and LESS on emotional/social curriculum. These schools are also going to be less likely to have the funds for any extra programs in this department.
Now, I'm not familiar with efficacy studies of any of these types of curriculum or materials. The variables going into why kids behave the way they do are vastly complex. But we know how to target at-risk students, we just have to find out the best way of going about it. Also, the role of families in the equation can not be stressed enough. Certain types of parenting support has been shown to increase academic performance, especially starting at an early age - as young as 1.5 years.
But now we're getting into large-scale policy questions of investment, ultimately reaching back to the public's worldview regarding human behavior and what people are capable of, which then gets us to FW vs. NFW as a point of origin for this stuff. Do these poor parents have the capacity to prepare their children better on their own, or does society need to reach out and help them learn how to do what is best for their children?
No one really argues that kids have FW, as it is something supposed to have developed by the "age of reason", although I'm not sure how they determine what that age is and how it is any different than other previous ages. Yet by declaring FW in their parents, they are basically saying that these parents are "choosing" to set their kids up for a life of poverty. I'm still not sure how we can allow kids to suffer for their parent's failures. But at the very least the kids ought to be given proper curriculum to try and make up the social/emotional skills they have often been denied.
To me all of this is applied naturalism. I'm more concerned that students have the emotional cognition needed to process external stimuli appropriately. In this sense, NFW memeing may indeed turn out to be an effective conceptual construct for them to use. I'm interested in hearing and seeing more from people who have experience in developing and using naturalist principles with their students and what outcomes they have observed.
