Eric The Blue

Another letter

There she goes again!  I wish she didn't have the power to annoy me, but she does.  I perform an exorcism by composing a letter.  If it is never published, that is fine:  the therapeutic effect is more than adequate compensation.

"I'm not surprised to learn, by way of Katherine Kersten and one of her college Republican friends (column, October 25), that there is a geology instructor at the University of Minnesota guilty of 'side comments bashing President Bush.'  For the president's approval rating among scientists is likely even lower than it is among the general public.

"In its report 'Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,' signed by more than 500 American scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates and 127 members of the National Academy of Science, the Union of Concerned Scientists charges that the Bush administration has in systematic and unprecedented fashion suppressed scientific work, on subjects ranging from climate change to forest management to reproductive health to endangered species to Iraq's aluminum tubes, when the conclusions of the work are deemed unfriendly to the administration's political agenda.  The report is available here.

"Or maybe the geologist has been to the Grand Canyon and detected 'faith-based' science in the park service bookstore, where one can now purchase Grand Canyon: A Different View--the "different view" being that the canyon was formed, not millions of years ago by the movement of the Colorado River, but within the past few thousand years by events described in the Book of Genesis.

"If people who care for science have a dim view of President Bush and his many zany supporters, I presume even Kersten thinks they should be allowed to say so!"

Design

In the school science lesson that I remember best, students used cash register tapes to construct a to-scale timeline of the earth's history.  I can no longer remember the details of how many years were represented by what unit of length on the tape, but, considering that our planet was formed around 4.6 billion years ago, and choosing on a football Sunday to represent this history on a 100-yard scale, you can maybe see why I was impressed.

100 yards=4.6 billion years
10 yards=460 million years
1 yard=46 million years
1 foot=15+ million years
1 inch=1,250,000 years
0.1 inch=125,000 years
0.01 inch=12,500 years

The extinction of the dinosaurs occurred less than two yards from the goal line representing present time.  Recorded human history fits easily in the last hundredth of an inch.

I thought of this lesson recently while reading the opening chapters of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, wherein various strategems are employed to impress upon the reader the unfathomable size of our solar system, which is itself a lonely outpost in one of the universe's uncountable galaxies.  Our place in both time and space can make one feel insignificant.

Minimal science literacy, it seems to me, removes human beings from the center of the frame, where the devout insist upon placing us.  The idea of "intelligent design" is thus turned on its head.  Where is the sense of architectural design in all this time and empty space?  If there was a God, and he cared mainly for us, there would be no need for the vast auditorium with a tiny stage for our human drama built at one end only after the passage of billions of years.  Given God's supposed purpose, the design is absurdly out-sized in every dimension.

Put it another way.  The notion of "intelligent design" takes too narrow a view.  It alleges signs of design in one obscure corner of the universe but takes no account of unfathomable stretches of cold blank nothingness.  For no logical reason, the evidence in the case is restricted to what humans can see with the naked eye on their own small planet--and the witnesses are not allowed to testify about that planet's long history, either.

There are lots of places in the universe from which it is difficult to detect design.  But, of course, in those places intelligent beings do not compose essays arguing that, from where they sit, the existence of a benevolent design appears doubtful. 

Isn't it remarkable that we should live here on earth, where God has taken care to calibrate everything in such a way as to support our survival, instead of on some cold or boiling planet with a poisonous atmosphere, where nothing could live for ten seconds!

Letter to the editor

Minnesota is home to the Center of the American Experiment, a think tank that describes itself as "a nonpartisan, tax-exempt, public policy and educational institution that brings conservative and free market ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing Minnesota and the nation." Its current president, Mitch Pearlstein, regularly contributes editorial columns to local newspapers, and I rarely miss an opportunity to respond with a letter to the editor.  Over the years two or maybe three have been published, the most recent last March, when I wrote, in response to this:

"So many reasons for Mitch Pearlstein to be pleased with himself!  He disapproves of Ann Coulter!  He has a biracial daughter!  He knows the meanings of hard words like 'alliteratively' and 'larboard'!  On a subsequent descent from Olympus perhaps Pearlstein will explain how he decides where to draw his lines of disapproval.

"He's 'not too thrilled' with Coulter, but she's gotten rich selling her schtick to dolts who mark their ballots as he marks his.  He boasts of never having invited Coulter to address his think tank, but he's invited others who fawn on her.

"Lacking the powers of discrimination possessed by these demigods, I find it convenient to revile them all uniformly."

There are millions like Pearlstein, but there is something about his I-am-sir-Oracle manner that really rubs me the wrong way.  It is as if he's emulating Richard Perle:  the overfed smugness, the heavy fragrance of self-satisfaction, the intellectual pretension--he's angling to be despised, so why disappoint him?  I'll admit that, along with his sidekick Katherine Kersten, Pearlstein is my bete noire.  Here is his most recent contribution to the local paper's editorial page, and my likely unpublished response:

"Last time I read a Commentary by Mitch Pearlstein, he was mincingly criticizing Ann Coulter for having called John Edwards a "faggot."  Now, in his latest effort, Pearlstein whines that Republicans (who rule at the White House, the Supreme Court, and, until recently, in both Houses of Congress) cannot make their voices heard over the bullying liberals on college campuses.

"Someone should explain to Mitch that if Republicans would cooperate with these 'boarish' [sic] attempts to muzzle them, he would not feel obliged to apologize, however backhandedly, for the outrageous and stupid things they keep saying."

Predictably, the Powerline punks--add them to my list of despised things--hold Mitch in the highest esteem.  I guess the "intellectual supremacy" of conservatives does not extend to knowledge of the boar-boor distinction. 

Perusing Dr. Johnson

Writing about Mark Harris (September 30), and how his Henry Wiggen novels bear the imprint of their creator's intimacy with Johnson-Boswell lore, has exerted an effect on my coffee-break reading.  Yesterday it was the selection from Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare reprinted in my tattered Norton Anthology of English Literature, wherein I read:

Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.

Could anything be more wrong, at least with respect to some large and justly famous subset of his dramatic oeuvre?--say, the works treated by Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth).  If King Lear represents, even remotely, anything like a faithful mirror of life, then God help us all!  As Lionel Trilling has remarked, the imagery--133 references to 64 members of the animal kingdom--seems calculated, no less than the brutalizing double plot, to impress upon the audience a vision of humanity descended into bestiality.  As for the characters, one pities the auditor who can think they are drawn from life.  They are, rather, highly stylized representations of moral extremities: the characters are all either unbelievably wicked (Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald) or better than anyone you will ever meet in life (Kent, Cordelia, Edgar). 

And King Lear, it seems to me, is only the play that lends itself most easily to refuting Dr. Johnson's point about the poet of nature.  The world of Shakespeare's tragedies, its savagery and nihilism, is I trust remote from the world known to almost all of us, and, notwithstanding his difficult start in life, remote too from the experience of Dr. Johnson.  Since I am not subject to withering, polysyllabic rebuttal in an 18th-century London public house, I shall make bold to ask:  What plays was he thinking about?

With regard to Milton, however, English majors everywhere must concur with Dr. Johnson's assessment.  Concluding his discussion of Paradise Lost, he writes:

The want of human interest is always felt.  Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again.  None ever wished it longer than it is.  Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.  We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation. . . .

It is as if the brocaded, heavily subordinated style is for accepted wisdom.  Eventually it is time for the plain truth, and for that, even Dr. Johnson has a plain style.

Dworkin on school desegregation and the Supreme Court

The racial composition of the student body at Cityview, where my BBBS friend attends the seventh grade, is a result of housing patterns in Minneapolis.  Hardly any white kids are enrolled because, in the north-side neighborhood where the school is located, hardly any white people live.  Other cities have adopted plans, now struck down by the Supreme Court, to avoid precisely this outcome.

For example, in Louisville, where 34% of the student poplulation is black, school districts were grouped into various "clusters," the boundaries of which were drawn in a way to encompass different neighborhoods.  Parents were then invited to apply for admission to any elementary school within the cluster that included their own district.  In evaluating these applications, officials took race into account to the extent necessary to ensure that no school's student body would have less than 15%, or more than 50%, African-American children.

In the background of such a scheme lurks the epoch-making decision in Brown, the case from 1954 in which the Court held, by unanimous vote, that separate facilities and accommodations were, in their very nature, unequal, and that the Constitution therefore required that they be integrated.  Dworkin's analysis of the decision banning integration efforts like the one adopted in Louisville really begins with the observation that, to the children suffering the harm caused by racially isolated schools, it makes no difference whether the segregation is of the de jure or de facto variety.  The Court had held, in 1954, that separate cannot be equal.  That is still theoretically true, but the Court has now held that, when students within the same district are in fact separated by race into different school buildings, thereby limiting opportunity, remedies are not permitted. 

The dissent written by Justice Breyer--all the opinions filed in the case may be examined here--marshaled evidence from social science research indicating that racially isolated schools foster, among blacks and whites alike, race consciousness and antagonism.  Moreover, black students perform better in schools that are neither nearly all-black nor nearly all-white.  To Dworkin's dismay, the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, acknowledged the possible harm caused by racially isolated schools only along the way to dismissing it completely as relevant to the case.  What is important in the majority opinion is not what happens to children in school and life but, rather, the vocabulary and apparatus previously deployed by the Court in similar cases, which he now applies to the case at hand in a mechanical fashion guaranteed to arrive at the desired conclusion.

Roberts wrote, for instance, that government has a "compelling interest" that might justify "race-conscious plans" only in certain extreme situations--as a remedy, say, for past discrimination that was enforced at law and is a cause of persisting racial imbalances.  But neither Seattle, which had never officially segregated students, nor Louisville, which had been found to have cured its discriminatory past, met this test.  So the school districts of these cities could not claim a compelling interest in taking account of race in school admissions practices on this ground--or, inevitably, on any other, either.

Dworkin I think scores a takedown on this point of contention, and I shall leave off my summary of his argument to allow him to speak for himself:

It is puzzling, however, why it should make a difference to the constitutional permissibility of the plans whether the conceded racial imbalances they address were the consequence of official segregation or equally effective patterns of private discrimination.  The harm of ghetto education both to students and to the community as a whole is equally grave in both cases, and those who benefit from integration plans are no more entitled to that benefit in one case than the other.

He proceeds to observe that Breyer had, in his dissent, noted that the majority's distinction between districts that had or hadn't in the past been ordered to desegregate was often manifestly trivial, "a matter of historical accident."  Dworkin adds:

Seattle had been sued and might well have been ordered to integrate if it had not secured a settlement by promising to adopt an integration plan itself.  It seems preposterous that a plan that would have been constitutional if adopted a day after a court declaration should be unconstitutional because it was adopted to forestall that declaration.

The legal framework--"strict scrutiny," "compelling interest," "narrow tailoring"--relied upon by Roberts had been developed, principally by Justice O'Connor, who retired in 2006 and was replaced by Alito, to "smoke out" racial classifications that amount to mere spoils systems.  When citizens are classified by race, the purpose in O'Connor's view may or may not be benign, and her jurisprudence undertook to discover, case by case, on which side of the line the particular racial classification under consideration fell.  Thus in 1989 she found unconsitutional the policy of Richmond, Virginia, to reserve 30% of city construction contracts for black firms but held, in 2003, that the race-conscious admissions policies of the law school at the University of Michigan were legitimate and permissible. 

The Court's majority, argues Dworkin, has put O'Connor's vocabulary at the service of a very different view.  Roberts and the conservative phalanx blind themselves to crucial distinctions in order to hold, absolutely, that despite the country's sorry racial history and current sociological "facts on the ground," taking account of an American's race is in itself always undesirable and may be allowed only in cases that so far have not, and it must now be imagined could not, come before it.  Formerly it was permissible to take account of race in order to separate us.  It is now impermissible to take account of race in order to bring us together, and one therefore wonders whether being apart isn't actually what is sought--albeit, for public relations purposes, sotto voce.

School

My employer, a local unit of government in the Twin Cities area, is a "partner" of the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization and, consequently, encourages employees to volunteer in what BBBS calls its "school-based mentoring program."  So I volunteered and, every Tuesday during the school year, spend about an hour with my "little," who is this year a seventh grader at Cityview School in north Minneapolis.

I don't know what he has gotten out of our time together--possibly confirmation of the fact that in basketball height can make up for deficiencies in quickness and energy--but the experience has been eye-opening for me.  According to the principal, virtually all the kids attending Cityview are poor, and I see now, at the Minneapolis school website, that over 90% qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.  Since I am not blind, I can report that virtually all are racial minorities, too. The website reports that two-thirds of the students at Cityview are African-American, and the balance is mainly Asian.  One kid in 25 is white.

My "little" does not talk very much about the academic part of school, and questions along this line are guaranteed conversation-stoppers.  A couple of times, we have played Yahtzee, and I've marked his struggles to add up his score at the end of the game.  I'm sure his troubles are representative.  I've never been in a classroom when a teacher was conducting class, but other "bigs" have, and they report that keeping order is a full-time job.  Instruction, therefore, is sketchy--or worse. 

I live less than ten miles from Cityview but my neighborhood, in south Minneapolis, might seem to my "little" like a foreign country.  The school that my stepdaughter will attend next fall for kindergarten (Burroughs) is, in the categories compared at the website, nearly a mirror-image of Cityview: two-thirds are white (as opposed to two-thirds black and 4% white), slightly less than a quarter qualify for free or reduced-price lunches (as opposed to slightly more than 90%), and three-quarters perform at or above grade level on standardized tests in math and reading (as opposed to one-third). 

It is often argued that such measurements prove that Cityview is a bad school, its staff manifest failures, and that its students should receive vouchers enabling them to attend private schools, where students do better.  But I think the problem at Cityview is that the percentage of kids from disadvantaged, even chaotic, households has attained a certain critical mass--Malcolm Gladwell would say a "tipping point"--with the result that the school is swamped by the social problems endemic in the neighborhood. 

The problem is not Cityview School.  It is the racial and socioeconomic isolation of the population it serves.  A voucher program would, if it was partly successful, help the few kids who took advantage of it and further isolate the ones left behind.  If it was more successful, the problem Cityview has would simply be exported to private schools.

The solution is to address and dissipate the social and racial isolation of the Cityview students.  But now the Supreme Court has ruled, in one of many 5-4 decisions (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy on the one side and Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter on the other), that efforts to do precisely that in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, are unconstitutional, since they "take account of race" in an unacceptable way.  Ronald Dworkin, writing in a recent New York Review, has aggressively criticized the reasoning of the narrow majority, as expressed in the school case by the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts, and I hope in my next post to summarize Dworkin's analysis and the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, which Justice Stevens called "unanswerable."

Drowning in it

My wife and I recently had to deal with the consequences of tree roots having grown into our sewer line--said consequences being, in a predictable double entendre, of a notably shitty variety.  But at least it was our own shit, and real, as opposed to the figurative shit of others that one now breathes in with the cultural air. 

For example, my employer has, against my will, enrolled me in "BAtraining" (the "BA" stands for "business analyst") conducted by a firm specializing in "business consulting."  So I show up for the first class, open a three-ring binder that has been supplied to all participants, and begin reading, on the first page, about the company whose tutelage I am to be on the receiving end of for 21 days over the next few months:

. . .  We believe that people, not technology, develop systems, and that all development must be "user-centric."  We believe that all tasks produce a work product, or system, and that for that work product to be optimal, the work must be segmented and developed incrementally so that each portion is intellectually manageable.  Along the way, each segment is verified to ensure that purpose dictates function, which then determines the form used to produce the final product.  We also believe that an engineering approach to software development is much more reliable than an artistic one.  To that end we advocate essential, logical, and physical analyses of the problem as critical steps in the development process.  To serve these beliefs, we consistently allocate a very large percentage of revenue to our R&D efforts to develop better approaches to "How Systems are Built."  This allows us to be flexible and common sense-like in our approach rather than dogmatic. . . .

And so on.  I remember getting back essays I wrote as a college freshman on which the teacher had written, at irregular intervals in the margins, "What does this mean?"  But even back then I trust I would have been embarrassed to claim authorship of the above stretch of expository emptiness.   The question of what it might mean is probably beside the point, on the ground that the purpose was not to mean anything at all but, rather, to persuade potential clients, like my employer, that a repository of mysteries too deep to be expressed in English is, for a price, available to them and their employees. 

It didn't get better when class started.  I am in for some long, long days, and apparently they will proliferate: my boss has asked me to "share" with colleagues my "learnings" at weekly meetings.  That is the way she talks.  The other day she said at a meeting that we have to be "prepareful" of certain looming obstacles.  My theory is that she has herself attended a lot of these seminars. Come to think of it, she was signed up for BA training, but then it conflicted with some other training courses she's attending!

In the interval between my first and second treatments of "BA training" I received a notice from my old college's alumni office, the purpose of which was to solicit my attendance at some college-sponsored events.  My eye, falling on blurb number two in the list, was assaulted with

Laura Ely, founder of Discover Your Beauty, has assisted thousands of people to consciously communicate the core of who they are through what they wear.  Since 1991 she has been a leading consultant to business executives, religious leaders, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, and on Oct. 9--you!

Grimly curious, I clicked on the link for online registration and read:

What is your "Personal Brand?"  When who you are on the inside aligns with your outer appearance, you'll experience increased self-confidence, communication and energy levels.  You'll find yourself propelled toward greater professional success and personal fulfillment.

I don't know what benefits are conferred nowadays on those who have put in their seat time at a liberal arts college, but one might have hoped that some modest powers of bullshit detection would be cultivated.  Formerly it was a useful power to possess. Now, though, most of the world has been sucked down the hole, and the remnant must be looking like a collection of crackpots walking about with cottonballs in their nostrils.