A Serious Question

Our ship has crossed the pond, and we are moored in St. Malo, in northern France.

While we browse the walled city (despite the cold and rain), I’d like you to consider a question that I find increasingly pressing—and confounding: what must a citizen know?

In other words, what are the absolute essentials, the basic information and skills, needed in order to be a citizen (as opposed to a resident) of a democratic nation-state? There are obviously lots of things it would be nice if people knew, but I’m looking for the irreducible minimum here. If you could wave a magic wand and require an essential curriculum of your own devising, what would that curriculum contain, and why?

This is not an idle question; I really, really want to know what you think.

I’m leaving now. Talk amongst yourselves.

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Just the Facts

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to harp a lot on the inadequacies of the media and the importance of accurate and complete information. My (frequently unarticulated) assumption is that if people agree about the facts of a matter, they are more likely to agree upon what those facts mean. So facts matter. A lot.

Case in point: yesterday, I shared my frustration about Fox News and its incessant drumbeat about a ‘Benghazi scandal’ the details of which the network neglects to specify. One of the commenters purported to fill in the blanks by asserting that the administration had refused to deploy troops that were within range and might have saved lives.

That would indeed be scandalous, if true. But as most other media outlets have reported, every military official in a position to know has emphatically denied the allegation. (Former Secretary of Defense Gates characterized the belief that the nearest troops could have gotten to Benghazi in time to defend the embassy as based upon “a cartoonish understanding” of military operations.) Unless every military expert from Gates on down is part of a conspiracy to protect the administration, the facts do not support the single concrete accusation being made.

I’ve been mulling over the role fact-finding plays in our political debates, because I’ve been reading a book that has been getting a lot of attention lately, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt’s scholarship is focused upon moral psychology, and the book is an excellent and very accessible exploration of evolutionary morality and the operation of culture on innate human tendencies.

One of the innate tendencies Haidt identifies is a belief in proportionality; that is, a belief that reward should be based upon contribution. Most of us have an innate “fairness” monitor that tells us that the member of the tribe who works hard should be entitled to a greater share of communal goods produced than the slacker.

I think both conservatives and liberals agree with this moral premise. Their dispute is with application—that is, with the facts. For example, if you believe that people are poor because they are lazy and conniving—that is, slackers, you will resent their dependence on public assistance. If you discover that the great majority of poor people work 40 or more hours a week at jobs that simply do not pay enough to allow them to get by, and that those who are “gaming the system” are a very small percentage, you are less likely to feel that you’ve been taken advantage of and more likely to support policies aimed at making the working poor self-sufficient.

There are lots of other examples, but the basic point is: facts matter. Conservatives and liberals (terms that have lost much clarity in any event) share many more moral premises than the pundits and pontificators assume.

What we increasingly do not share is accurate and complete information–and a uniformly credible media.

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Worse Than I Thought….

We’ve been onboard our ship for eight days, and it has been delightful; the sole complaint I have is that our only option for television news is Fox. (This may have something to do with the average age of the passengers, which looks to be somewhere around the mid-eighties, just barely older than the average age of Fox’s audience.)

At home, I almost never watch Fox. I see Jon Stewart’s clips and I read about some of the more outrageous and/or embarrassingly wrong reports that periodically become a topic of broader discussion, but this has been the first time I’ve been exposed to extended “real time” broadcasts.

It’s even worse than I thought.

Earlier today, during a discussion about the (genuine, troubling) IRS scandal, one blond “newscaster” turned to another and said the problem stemmed from the fact that President Obama has total power—“there are no mechanisms to keep him from doing whatever he wants. There has never been such a powerful chief executive.”

I am not making this up.

Blond bimbo evidently never heard of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the Senate filibuster, Mitch McConnell, the Party of No….

Yesterday, there was a roundtable of some sort about Benghazi. I listened for a good ten minutes in an effort to figure out precisely what the participants believed the “scandal” was. What, exactly, do they think is being covered up? What misdeeds are suspected? What is it that they are insisting is “worse than Watergate?” Not a clue. But one of the hosts signed off the segment by saying “You’ll only hear about Benghazi on Fox, because all the other media are covering for the Obama Administration.”

Really?

Perhaps “all the other media” are hamstrung by that old-fashioned journalism practice called verification—the quaint notion that reporting requires demonstrable facts and that in the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, responsible news organizations don’t manufacture and air stories, no matter how ideologically satisfying such stories might be.

A research project a year or so ago found that people who got most of their news from Fox knew less than people who didn’t follow the news at all.

I believe it.

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Interesting Factoid

Evidently, President Eisenhower changed the original language in his famous last speech. Out of reluctance to annoy members of Congress, he allowed the draft of his speech to be changed from its original target: “the military-industrial-congressional complex.”

Too bad he changed it, but then, we haven’t paid any attention to the warnings that survived the edit, so maybe it didn’t matter.

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Meritocracy and Mobility

A great benefit of vacations is time to read. I loaded up the Kindle app on my IPad, and I’ve been going through the digital version of what used to be a pile of books on my nightstand.

Yesterday, I finished Chris Hayes “Twilight of the Elites,” and unlike so many of the entirely predictable books reliably pumped out by pundits of the left and right, I found this to be a thoughtful, nuanced examination of the political and social failures that account for our sour American mood. Hayes connects the angst of the Tea Party to that of the Occupy Movement, and sees both as part of a more widespread distrust of our common institutions.

I should probably note that this emphasis on institutional failure was also at the center of my 2010 book, Distrust, American Style. Hayes focuses on many of the same scandals  that I included in that book; however, my purpose was to show the effects of institutional distrust on social capital—to explore institutional failure as a cause of increased distrust of our neighbors, especially those who may not look or talk or worship as we do.

Hayes’ purpose is to explore what those institutional failures tell us about the failure of America’s approach to meritocracy.

There are so many worthwhile and illuminating passages in the book that picking any one out seems arbitrary, but here’s an example. Hayes notes that any meritocratic system—any system that purports to reward excellent performance rather than social or economic status—depends upon the existence of genuine social mobility. That genius child of poor parents must have a real shot at getting the scholarship, or the job, or the loan to start his business—in other words, a meritocratic society must have mechanisms that facilitate the discovery and advancement of the people who possess merit.

As Hayes points out, however,

            This ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call the Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible….Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up.

America used to be the land of social mobility; today, of the Western democratic nations only England has less social mobility than we do.

As Hayes says elsewhere, “A deep recognition of the slow death of the meritocratic dream underlies the decline in trust in public institutions and the crisis of authority in which we are now mired.”

Even if you aren’t on vacation, even if you are skeptical of his premises–you should read this book.

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