Ingenuity, Technology and Paranoia

We live in a patchwork quilt of new and old.

Here in Indiana, the dim bulbs in our legislature are busy fighting old constitutional wars and introducing measures to protect us against non-existent threats.  Let teachers impose prayer in schools! Make them teach religious beliefs in science classrooms! Protect Indiana from the existential threat posed by “Agenda 21”! (The latter is a reference to a decades-old, utterly toothless pro-environmental UN resolution that the paranoid are convinced will destroy American sovereignty and perhaps, Strangelove-like, sap our “manly juices.” Or something.)

Meanwhile, in precincts less terrified of reality and the future, innovative ideas are making urban life more convenient. We just returned from New York and a visit to the son who lives there, and once again were impressed by how livable the Bloomberg administration is making the Big Apple. Of course, as Bloomberg noted in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, New Yorkers pay high taxes and thus have a right to expect good service for their money.

It isn’t only municipal services that are making New Yorkers’ lives more convenient, of course. Technology and the clever use of ubiquitous cell-phones have given rise to new services that we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. While we were in the city, we made use of one of them, called Uber.

Those of you who are familiar with Manhattan know that taxis are everywhere–at least, when it isn’t raining. Outside Manhattan, however–in parts of Queens and Brooklyn, for example–the familiar yellow cabs are far rarer. People living in those boroughs have access to the subway and to bus service (unlike the situation in Indy), but they don’t have the added option of raising an arm and hailing a cab.

Enter Uber.

Uber is a service that allows you to order a car easily. But it is much more than that. You download an app. Should you need a car, you enter your location and your desired destination; a return message tells you where the nearest Uber cars are,  how long it will take for the closest one to reach you, and how much the ride will cost. If you decide to proceed, you tap in your order, and pre-pay the fare and tip (credit card information having previously been entered). The app gives you a photo of the driver and the license-plate number, so you can identify the vehicle when it arrives, and it maps the car’s progress on the telephone screen. In our case, we watched as the little dot representing the car moved toward us on the screen.

When the trip was over, Uber sent an electronic receipt to my son’s smartphone, confirming the route and charge.

Our driver was Maria. Her car was new and clean, and she was pleasant and willing to explain the virtues of the Uber system from the driver’s perspective. She could work when it was convenient–she just turned on her phone to signal her availability. She no longer worried that she might pick up some mugger or worse–few predators will provide their credit card and identifying information.

The service was more expensive than a taxi, although not excessively. It probably doesn’t make sense in places where hailing a cab is easy. In underserved areas, however, its convenience is well worth its cost.

I don’t know whether Uber will make it–whether this new use of technology to make transportation more convenient will catch on and spread. But I marvel at the ingenuity of whoever created the system. If we look, if we open our eyes, we can find similar inventive efforts all around us. In fact, if we just take a moment to think about it, so much of the taken-for-granted activity in our daily lives would have been incomprehensible to our younger selves. From our smartphones to our laptops to our IPads and Kindles, to thermostats that communicate with us, to cars that stream our music….In earlier days–and not all that much earlier–these were the stuff of science fiction.

We have a choice. We can embrace our newly enabled existence, these gadgets and breakthroughs that ease our days, and we can use our increased productivity and saved time to enrich our minds and souls, to solve problems and help others. Or we can spend that newfound time looking for UN agents in black helicopters, and repudiating Darwin.

Our choice.

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Defining Chutzpah

Chutzpah is a yiddish term that roughly translates as “gall” or “nerve.” Borscht belt comedians have historically illustrated its meaning with the following example: a young man kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

The young man in that story looks almost reasonable in comparison with AIG–or more accurately, in comparison with AIG’s former CEO, Maurice Greenberg. Greenberg may go down in history as the ultimate example of chutzpah. As Politico noted, in an introduction to their report,

Remember when AIG took a $182 billion bailout only to turn around and hand out seven-figure bonuses to the same guys who tanked their company? Grab the pitchforks — it gets better.

Politico was talking about the fact that AIG’s current board was meeting to consider whether the company should join a lawsuit brought by Greeenberg and former shareholders of the insurance giant. The suit centers on an allegation that the terms of the bailout that saved the company were unfairly onerous.

Think about that for a minute.

In fact, let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say your brother-in-law came to you with a problem; thanks to his own greed and all-too-clever business dealings, his company was on the verge of ruin. Assume he begged for your help–a loan to get him out of the dicey situation he had created. You wouldn’t have given him the loan, but you knew that if you allowed him to go under, other family members–most of whom were innocent of any participation in his folly–would lose money they’d invested in his business. Some would lose their life savings. Your nephews would have to drop out of college, your sister-in-law who had cancer would lose her health insurance…The consequences of his stupidity and venality would be horrible.

So you grudgingly agree. You tell him that you’ll lend him the money, but only on condition that he repay it with interest at an above-market rate and subject to other terms you hope will protect you and his company against further profligate behaviors. He eagerly agrees, since he knows no one else would lend him the money and the higher rate is justified by the greater risk involved. Deal.

Immediately after he gets the money, he takes his management team on an extravagant cruise. And then, when the business stabilizes, he sues you, alleging that the terms of your loan were unfair.

See what Politico meant by the pitchforks reference?

I don’t blame AIG’s current board for going through the motions of deciding whether to join this jaw-dropping lawsuit. They have an obligation to their shareholders to actively consider even bizarre claims, and they decided–quite prudently–against it. But the audacity of the Greenberg lawsuit–the staggering sense of entitlement it displays–is absolutely overwhelming.

It easily displaces other examples of chutzpah. In fact, it may be the most apt definition of the word yet encountered.

It makes me want to ask that famous question: have you no shame, sir?

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Thus Spake the Profits

We do seem to live in the Age of Hypocrisy.

A Facebook friend posted a comment about Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain headquartered in Oklahoma. Like Chik-fil-A, the chain makes much of its Christian values, closing on Sundays and, most recently, suing the Obama Administration over the mandate to include contraceptive coverage as part of the health insurance offered to employees.

“Next time you hear someone defend Hobby Lobby’s extremist stance on birth control and health insurance law, try this little thought exercise. Go to a Hobby Lobby and make a small inventory of every item they sell that’s made in China. Yes, the same China that has MANDATORY FORCED ABORTIONS. Then ask a salesperson why Hobby Lobby’s commitment to Christianity extends to how their employees live their lives but not to where they get their inventory from.”

Seems like a reasonable question to me.

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Membership Has its Privileges

Yesterday’s blog included a “you aren’t one of us” moment, and it got me thinking about the nature of membership and exclusion.

We all value membership–in a club, a society, a community, a polis. Political thinkers suggest that one of the stabilizing elements of a liberal democratic society is the widespread phenomenon of “cross-cutting” memberships; that is, the fact that we are all members of multiple, different communities. In my case, I’m a member of the Jewish community, the academic community, the downtown community, the legal community, etc. etc. At any given times, some of those ties are stronger or weaker, but the net effect is to embed me into a number of different (i.e. “cross-cutting”) groups. If that were not the case–if each of us belonged only to a single group–the liklihood of competition for power and comparative advantage between groups would cause constant conflict.

The bottom line to this theory is that the more groups in which we claim membership, the wider our perspective and the more inclusive our definition of “we.”

The problem is, in order to define membership, we have to be able to distinguish between those who belong and those who don’t. And therein lies an apparently inescapable problem.

If you think about it, human progress–or at least American progress–has been defined by extending social membership to people who were previously identified as “other.” The Irish, Catholics, Jews…and more recently and incompletely, Asians, Latinos and GLBT folks. Even women.

When people are “other,” when they are not members, not one of “us,” it becomes easy–and acceptable–to generalize about them and to demonize them. The Irish are all drunks, Catholics do the Pope’s bidding, Jews are shifty businesspeople, women are too emotional…Membership definitely has its privileges, and the most significant of those is acceptance into the group and the right to be judged on ones own merits, as an individual.

This all leads to a conundrum. With membership we also have exclusion and its negative consequences. Without membership, however, we lose cohesion. With no “we,” society becomes atomized, a collection of self-serving “I’s.” Exclusively nationalistic “we’s” can lead to fascism (defined as the identification of the individual with the state) or authoritarianism.

The trick is to find the proper balance–enough community within enough communities to give us comfort and generate mutual support, enough individualism to facilitate the exploration of our human distinctiveness. The Greeks called it “The Golden Mean.”

We have a way to go.

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I Think We Need Truth in Labeling

My best friend called me yesterday, fuming about a solicitation call she’d just received.

The woman caller identified herself as a volunteer for the Republican Party. She began by thanking my friend for her past, generous support of the GOP–and indeed, my friend was an active Republican voter and donor for many years. Her husband served two terms in the General Assembly as a Republican State Senator. However, like so many of my friends and family, she no longer supports the party, and when the woman at the other end of the phone asked whether she would consider a contribution, she said so.

“I’m a Democrat now,” she informed the volunteer. The volunteer (predictably) asked if she would share why she had left the GOP; my friend responded that she strongly disagreed with the party’s positions on social issues, especially abortion and homosexuality. It is not government’s job to decide whether you procreate, or who you love; the party used to understand that “limited” government meant limited to matters that are properly the province of the state.

There was a pause. The woman on the phone then asked “Don’t you think we should consider the will of god?  Shouldn’t the government have a role in ensuring that we live by what’s written in the bible?” to which my friend responded “Whose bible? Whose god?” Another pause, then the question: “are you a Christian?”  When my friend said she was not, the woman evidently had an “ah ha” moment, because she ended the conversation by saying “Oh, that explains it.” According to my friend, she might just as well have said, “Now I understand–you are not one of us.”

The conversation made it quite clear that, to this volunteer (and presumably others like her), the Republican party is no longer a political enterprise. It’s a religious movement, a party by and for Christians. Not just any Christian, either–it’s the party for what they call “bible-believing” Christians, the party of Rick Santorum and Mike Pence. If there are still those in the party who take a more traditional approach, who understand the purpose of politics to be participation in secular governance and political outreach to be the building of a bigger, more inclusive tent, they presumably hadn’t communicated that to this particular foot soldier.

The conversation simply confirmed the reality of today’s Republican party–a party consisting of what has been described as “a shrinking base of aging, ethnically monolithic, and geographically isolated voters.” Christian voters. Perhaps we could achieve more clarity in our political discourse if the GOP stopped trying to be coy, and just renamed itself the Christian Party. In its current iteration, it certainly isn’t the Republican Party that my friend and I used to support. That party disappeared a long time ago.

The volunteer on the other end of line simply confirmed its transformation.

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