Character and Conviction — Scooter Libby

June 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stanley Milgram’s experiments on “obedience to authority” and Philip Zimbardo’s prison simulation are two of the most famous studies in all social science. If there’s anything that we should have learned from them it’s this:
In new and unusual situations,

1. We are not very good at predicting what we ourselves or anyone else will do
2. Individual factors like character and personality are far less important than situational pressures.

Today, the New York Times reprinted excerpts of letters asking for leniency in the Scooter Libby case. The article should have carried the title “Fooled by Character.”

The judge had sentenced Libby to 2½ years in prison for lying to the FBI and to a federal grand jury. Libby frequently claimed not to be able to remember a lot of important things about the disclosure of the identity of a CIA agent. In the criminal trial, the jury concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was lying about these losses of memory.

Libby was trying to protect the Bush administration generally and perhaps specific members of it (Rove? Cheney?) in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Bush team leaked Plame’s identity in order to discredit her husband, who had undercut some of the administrations claims about Saddam’s WMDs.

None of Libby’s supporters (mostly Bush administration biggies) argued that Libby had been wrongfully convicted and that he hadn’t committed the crimes he was convicted of. But clearly, they found it difficult to believe. A man of such good character could never commit such crimes, could he? Here’s James Woolsey, former head of the CIA:

His conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice is completely inconsistent with my knowledge, and highest evaluation, of this man's character and integrity.

And Richard Perle (something of a slimeball himself):

Having known Scooter Libby for many years, I am unable to reconcile the man I know with the crime for which he has been convicted.

Obviously, Woolsey and Perle have not learned the lessons of Milgram-Zimbardo.

More sophisticated is Henry Kissinger:

I would never have associated the actions for which he was convicted with his character. . . . Having served in the White House under pressure, I have seen how difficult it sometimes is to recall precisely a particular sequence of events. This does not justify the action, but it may help you consider mitigating circumstances.

Kissinger at least recognizes situational pressure. But he sees that pressure as affecting only the ability to remember, not the willingness to lie to authorities in order to protect a bankrupt policy and the claims that it was based on. Still, Kissinger, like the others, is blinded by character.

It all reminds me of official reaction when the abuses of Abu Ghraib were exposed and could not be covered up. A military spokesman said, “It's just not something we would do.”

The Daily Show* caught this paradox perfectly when it had Rob Corrdry explain, “We shouldn’t be judged on our actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn't mean it’s something we would do.”

Committing the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice was not something that Scooter Libby would do. It was just something he did do.

* Personal note: I will be in the audience at today’s taping of The Daily Show.

Who Supports Terrorism?

June 4, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Not long ago, I blogged about the reaction to a Pew Research Center poll of American Muslims. Generally, the media ignored the story entirely. What coverage there was mostly emphasized that American Muslims, in their attitudes and values, were very similar to the rest of Americans.

The far right, however, was apoplectic, accusing the mainstream media of deliberately downplaying one frightening finding: Only 69% of younger Muslims (age 18-29) refused to say that violence was “never justified.” That means, as Rush Limbaugh put it, “Almost a third of young American Muslims who support in one way or another homicide bombings.”

Do you personally feel that this kind of violence [suicide bombing and other violence against civilians] is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?

Here are the results:

Often	2%
Sometimes	13%
Rarely	11%
Never	69%
Don't Know or N/A	5%

(Note that in order to boost the percent to almost a third, Limbaugh classified the “Don’t Know or No Answer” responses as supporting terrorism.)

In my posting, I wondered what percentage of US Christians might feel that such violence in defense of Christianity might be justified. I still don’t have any data on Christians, but I did find a survey that found a group even more supportive of terrorism than were the US Muslims. The survey question was nearly identical, except that it left out the part about defending Islam

Some people think that bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified while others think that this kind of violence is never justified. Do you think that such attacks are . . . .justified?

Here are the results:

Often	5%
Sometimes	19%
Rarely	27%
Never	46%
Don't Know or N/A	3%

Who were these bloodthirsty terrorism-justifying extremists? Americans. A representative cross-section of the US population. By comparison with the hotheaded Muslim youth, the average American was more likely to to say that bombing civilians was “often” or “sometimes” justified, and far less likely to say that it was never justified.

Here's a chart showing the comparison (my apologies for the tiny scale. Size matters, but I can't figure out how to make charts larger):

Purity and Danger on the Campaign Trail

June 3, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Mary Douglas, in some of her later writing after Purity and Danger, noted that some cultures are more rigid about the categories they use to think about things in their world; other cultures accepted a degree of fuzziness and ambiguity.

American politicians have often found success in appealing to the more rigid world view. They call for a hardening of boundaries — geographic, moral, and cognitive. It is the view that divides the world into good and evil. The most famous example in recent history is George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union speech in 2002. Referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bush declared, “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

The “axis powers” of World War II , the basis of Bush’s phrase, were in fact linked by alliance. The countries in Bush’s axis of evil had no such alliance, and two of them, Iraq and Iran, had just fought each other in a devastating nine-year war. Bush was trying to build support for the invasion of Iraq as a response to the terrorist attack of 9/11. So even though the 9/11 terrorists had nothing to do with Saddam’s Iraq, Bush could lump them all together as “evil.” This reduction of the world into two simple categories, good and evil, worked. Nearly half of all Americans believed that Saddam had been behind 9/11, and of course nobody in the Bush administration did anything to disabuse them of that mistaken idea. Bush was able to sell the invasion of Iraq as part of the war on terror (he might just as well have said “war on evil”) — sell it to America, that is.  But while Bush was successful in the US, the rest of the world rejected his logic, his “facts,” his policy, and quite possibly his good-vs.-evil world view.

You would have thought that the experience of Iraq had taught us something. In the movies, when you get rid of the evil ruler, all the Munchkins hail you as a savior, send you back to Kansas, and live forever in happiness and peace. But in the real world, Iraq turned out to be a much more complicated array of political, religious, and ethnic alliances than merely good and evil. Even if Saddam was evil, getting rid of him did not exactly unleash the forces of good, as the daily press reports from Iraq remind us. The world of international politics is more complicated than good and evil, and the country that has benefited most from our wars against evil in Afghanistan and Iraq has been that axis-of-evil linchpin Iran.

Nevertheless, here is Fred Thompson, former senator and now probably a candidate for president: “This is a battle between the forces of civilization and the forces of evil and we've got to choose sides.”

Thompson has not even officially declared his candidacy for President, but in the polls, he’s already ranked third among Republicans. If Mary Douglas is right, we should also see this Purity-and-Danger view underlying the position of Thompson and his supporters on the subject of immigration: Harden the boundaries, wall off the borders, keep out the dangers of impurity.

Stay tuned.

Movin’ on up?

June 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I was in my thirties, it occurred to me that I was not earning nearly as much as my father had when he was my age. He had been, for much of his life, a successful businessman; I was an academic. Even in absolute dollars, his income thirty years earlier (he was about thirty years older than me) may have been higher than mine. Certainly in inflation-adjusted dollars, he had been much better off.

I was an example of “downward mobility,” something I’d almost never heard about, not even in my sociology classes. The phrase “social mobility” almost always carries an assumption that we move in only one direction – up. There’s a silent “upward” in front of the “social mobility.” We expect that children will do better or go farther than their parents did.

This expectation runs into a logical problem. If the pie remains the same size, and some people get a larger slice, others have to get a smaller slice. The only way for everyone’s slice to increase is if the pie is constantly getting larger. Or as President Reagan famously said, a rising tide lifts all boats. The pie metaphor works better, for what has happened in the last few decades is that the pie has gotten larger, but the slices for most of us have grown by a few bites while the slices of the wealthy, already large, have been supersized.

The middle class is slipping farther and farther behind the wealthy (and much farther behind the very wealthy). But beyond that, the last few years have also brought more downward mobility. (At least in this one area, I was way ahead of the curve.) On average, men in their 30s have not been doing as well as their parents at a similar age. The report by Isabel Sawhill and John Morton, mentioned in the previous post in this blog, compared the incomes of thirtysomethings a generation apart. Here are the results.

The men in their thirties in 1994 were earning just barely more than were men of their parents’ generation. But men in their thirties in 2004 were doing worse, and by a considerable amount – $35,000 compared with $40,200 for their fathers.

The good news is that despite this trend, family incomes in both periods were up.

The increase is not as great for today’s thirtysomethings as it was for those even ten years ago, but the trend is still up. What does it all mean – men’s incomes down, family incomes up? The obvious answer is that more women are working. Some women in their thirties have chosen to be in the paid labor force for reasons of career and self-fulfillment. But my guess is that most of these women are working because they have to – because the additional income they bring in is the only thing that allows their family to maintain middle-class status.

In earlier generations, American families had the luxury of being able to live on a single income. Now, a second or even third income in the family has become a necessity.