Can We Talk? – Redux

February 19, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is talking a concession?

This exchange turned up in my Twitter feed this morning,

In case the screenshot is not legible, Robert Wright is responding to a paragraph from a WSJ story “U.S. Says It Would Meet for Nuclear Talks With Iran, Other Powers”  (here behind the WSJ paywall)

The plan was denounced by a key congressional Republican. “It is concerning the Biden administration is already making concessions in an apparent attempt to re-enter the flawed Iran deal,” said Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Wright disagrees:

The “plan” being denounced by this “key” Republican is literally just to sit down and talk to Iranian officials. He's opposed to talking, which he considers a “concession”.

But McCaul is not the only one who considers talking a concession. We all do, at least when the talkee is someone we strongly disagree with. But should we? The tweet took me back to this post from 2006, when this blog was a mere toddler not even three months old. It was called “Can We Talk?” It seems as relevant today as it did then.

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The news today is that North Korea has agreed to sit down in talks about their nuclear bomb. North Korea leader Kim Jong-il (son of former leader Kim Il Sung) had previously demanded that the US talk with North Korea one-to-one, but US leader George Bush (son of former leader George Bush) had refused. Lil' Bush refused direct talks and insisted that four other countries had to be there.  Lil' Kim eventually caved, probably because China was threatening to cut off its oil.  

North Korea isn’t the only country we won’t talk to directly. Syria, Iran, maybe others. As with North Korea, if we’re going to communicate with them at all, we need other countries as intermediaries to relay the messages.

When I was a kid, I would sometimes have a dispute with one of my brothers, and we’d get so angry, we’d refuse to talk to each other. At the dinner table, I’d say something like, “Tell Skip that if  he doesn’t give back my racer, I’m not going tell him where I hid his airplane.” My mother would dutifully turn to her right and repeat the message, as though my brother hadn’t been right there to hear it. Then she’d do the same with his answer. You see similar scenes in sitcoms and movies. Maybe it happened in your family too.

In real life, at least in my house, it never lasted long. Everyone would see how stupid it was, how impossible to sustain, and usually we’d wind up dissolving in laughter at how ridiculous we were.

I imagine our ambassador turning to the Chinese representative and saying, “You tell North Korea that we aren’t going to give it any food unless they stop making bombs.” China turns to North Korea, just as my mother turned to my brother, and repeats the same message. North Korea says to China, “Yeah, well you tell the US . . . .” and so on. That’s pretty much what these countries have been doing anyway, though without actually sitting down in the same room.

When people insist on this “I’m not talking to him” charade, we call it childish and silly. When nations do it, we call it foreign policy.

(Full disclosure: I think I may be borrowing — i.e., stealing— this observation from something I heard Philip Slater say many years ago.)

We Didn’t Talk About Healing and Unity in the 60s. Why now?

January 22, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

Now that the inauguration has finally settled the question of who is president, the calls for “unity” and “healing” will probably taper off. But for a while, you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing those words. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, after the debacle also known as the Steelers-Browns playoff game, Mike Tomlin had said that the Steelers needed a time for healing.

In past times of national division, healing and unity were not part of the political discourse, They have become popular only recently, sort of like Liam and Olivia. In the 1960s, nobody named their kid Liam or Olivia. The 1960s was also, you may recall, a period of political conflict and division over civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Riots in the cities, assassinations of political leaders, killings and terrorism by White supremacists who were sometimes also cops and sheriffs. And yet, there wasn’t a lot of talk about healing and unity.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Unity actually declines in the sixties. Healing is just beginning its rise, and I suspect that much of the healing talk in those books was about personal rather than political healing. The crossover into politics does begin in the sixties, but the rise was nothing like what happened a quarter-century later.

Google nGrams, the source of the above graphs, counts words in books, so it lags behind the actual change in fashions. For something more up-to-the-minute I tried the Nexis-Uni tally of words in news publications. The graphs I could get quickly are not as nuanced, not as granular (speaking of fashionable words), but they show the same trends. The concern with healing a divided nation doesn’t set in until very late in the 20th century,

Why were we not talking about unity in the 1960s? My guess is that the difference between then and now is that although the nation was divided, it was not polarized. Certainly, the two major parties were not as polarized. The news media were also more concentrated, less divided. The most trusted man in America was a TV news anchor, something unimaginable today.

As for healing, its popularity is part of the more general diffusion of the language of psychotherapy into all areas of life, including politics. The therapy-based issues, as in “he has commitment issues,” has replaced the more secular problems. Decades ago, if I said, “Houston, we have an issue,” I would get a smile of recognition. Now, most people would think it was an accurate quote. We also talk about what someone “needs” to do rather than what they “should” do — the therapy language of personal needs replacing the morality language of right and wrong.* It’s a tribute to what might be called the triumph of the therapeutic that in a time when an actual disease has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and infected millions, our talk of healing is all about politics.

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* I’ve said this before in somewhat greater detail in earlier posts (here
 Mad Men — Language Ahead of Its Time) and here (Needs — One More Time).

Dissing Hunter-Gatherers

January 20, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was listening to the podcast “Think Like an Economist” this morning, the episode called “Economic Growth — Improving Our Lives.” About two minutes in, I nearly choked on my coffee when I heard Betsey Stevenson say this.  

For pretty much the last million years, people were hunter-gatherers living a hand-to-mouth existence. The main focus of life was finding enough food to eat.

Now Betsey Stevenson and her partner in podcasting and life Justin Wolfers are widely respected economists. But what they say here about hunter gatherers is flat out wrong.

Of course, we can’t be certain how foragers of 100,000 years ago actually lived. But the accounts that we do have of contemporary foraging societies paint a picture far different from the image of grim hunter gatherers toiling unhappily for long hours to avoid starvation. Foragers spend far less time working than do people in agricultural or industrial societies. In fact, they don’t really have the concept of “work” since they do not separate work and the rest of life. And the basis of that life is involvement with other people, often in a manner we would call playful.

Immediately after the statement about foragers, Stevenson and Wolfers tell us what happened next.

Things got a little better when people started farming about 12,000 years ago. People went from spending most of their time finding food to growing food to stay alive. Unfortunately though, starvation was still common. There were innovations, but they rarely led to sustained economic change because political systems were designed to keep any extras in the hands of an elite few.

No, things didn’t get better, they got worse. Wolfers implies as much in the next sentences. Agriculture wiped out the freedom and equality that foragers take for granted. And yes, it did bring starvation. Even when people in agrarian societies weren’t starving, they had a much poorer diet than that of foragers, who ate a wide variety of plants and animals.

Little wonder then that foragers are also happier than people in more “advanced” societies. They are happy, but, as James Suzman (here) says of the Bushmen, they don’t have a word or concept for “happiness.”

Bushmen have words for their current feelings, like joy or sadness. But not this word for this idea of “being happy” long term, like if I do something, then I'll be “happy” with my life long term.

Perhaps Stevenson and Wolfers have this incorrect picture of life before the agricultural revolution because they are economists, and economics is about scarcity. In fact, one definition of economics is that it is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But foragers like the Bushmen live in a world of abundance relative to their wants and needs. Scarcity was something imposed by economic growth.

As the title of the podcast episode implies, economists take it for granted that economic growth improves our lives. But does it? I think we need to ask two other questions first: “Compared to what?” And “How do we measure how ‘good’ our lives are?” Economists are not comparing us to the Bushmen, nor is the economists’ idea of a “good” life one that foragers would have. In other words, the economists’ vigorous cheerleading for economic growth requires that we ignore the evidence from most of the history of our species.*

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* Given that for more than 90% of our history on the planet  we humans were hunter gatherers, you’d think that social scientists would not base their ideas about “human nature” on only the most recent sliver of that history. But they do. See these posts from a decade or so ago — one about virginity, the other about private property.

Like a Virgin — Whatever That Was

Sandbox Sociology — Sharing and Human Nature

Grow Up

January 19, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ever since I watched the events at the Capitol on January 6, I have been trying to pin down just why it all seemed so childish. Childish with serious consequences — people were injured and killed — but childish nevertheless. Trump’s childishness is easy to see. His name calling and trash talking; his casting of everything in absolute terms — things are a “disgrace” or a “disaster” if Obama did them, “fantastic,” if he did them; his sense that he is the victim of unfair treatment; his refusal to do anything that might benefit others but not himself; his petulance (his refusal to attend the inauguration being the latest and most obvious example)

His supporters too often seem childish. I’m not talking about those who are motivated by real issues — rich people who want a huge tax cut, businesses that wish to avoid environmental regulation, people who think that abortion is murder. I’m talking about those whose support for Trump less a matter of issues and more a matter of identity. I’m talking about the insurrections at the Capitol. Maybe what seems child-like is their refusal to separate play and “reality.”

They had a specific real-world purpose – “stop the steal.” Maybe they had managed, with Trump’s help, to convince themselves that this was possible. But by breaking into the halls of Congress? Get real.

But the insurrectionists were not about getting real. They were playing — playing at being 1776 patriots, playing at being soldiers and commandos with their camos, their climbing gear, and their zip-tie handcuffs. It was like playing some combination of paintball and capture the flag.  As in play, there was no real external goal. The goal was to capture the Capitol. Once they had succeeded in breaking into the building, they were like the dog that catches the car he’s been chasing.  Videos show them uncertain of what to do, wandering around like tourists, taking selfies, making videos. Sometimes they remember to chant their slogans (“USA,” “America First,” “Trump”), like fans at a football game. A video shows a group in the Senate chamber using their smartphones to photograph documents lying on desks. But it’s clear the men have no idea what they are photographing or why.

Yes there was real violence. But that too seems to have had the same purpose — getting in.  And a small number may have had actual plans to kidnap members of Congress. But I wonder what they would have done if they had managed to find any. As Fabio Rojas tweeted, “A bunch of cosplaying MAGA nerds won't topple the Federal government.”

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“It’s time to grow up, “ said president-elect Biden. His remarks were occasioned by the refusal of Republicans in Congress to wear masks even when they were confined in close quarters during the insurrection, even when a Congresswoman repeatedly offered them masks, and even though a House rule requires them to wear masks.

As I was listening, I thought: what a change this is — to have an actual grown-up in the White House asking that elected officials, and by implication, the nation, act like grown-ups.