Morality — Drawing the Line (and Erasing Part of It)

November 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Morality is based on the group.  Whether an act is right or wrong depends on which side of the group boundary people are on.  That’s one of the points I’ve been trying to make in class recently.  The general topic is religion, specifically Durkheim’s notion that god, belief, ritual, and other components of religion, including morality, are all about group solidarity.  

Case in point – bullying.  It’s been in the news periodically for a long while now, with stories of schoolkids who commit suicide after enduring continual bullying from their peers, both in person and now online.  And for every suicide, there are many, many more victims who never make the headlines but who suffer similar bullying. The statistics that get thrown around are questionable, but regardless of the actual scope of the problem, bullying is nasty stuff, and we’d like to have our children doing less of it.* 

Many states are passing anti-bullying laws.  That’s what we do here in America. If we don’t like something, rather than frame it as a problem and seek a solution, we take a moralistic view, especially if we are conservatives with a preference for “moral clarity.”  We declare it bad or even “evil,” we criminalize it, and we punish people who do it.

But if morality depends on group boundaries – Us and Them – what do we do when the bullies are Us, and the victims are Them?  If we’re Michigan Republicans, we give Our bullies an indulgence.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled state senate passed an anti-bullying bill that manages to protect school bullies instead of those they victimize. It accomplishes this impressive feat by allowing students, teachers, and other school employees to claim that “a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” justifies their harassment. [The Time article is here].

Translation: your Christian beliefs give you a free pass to bully kids you think are gay. 

See, the trouble with just a plain bullying law is that it might punish one of Us for bullying one of Them. And it’s pretty clear that Us is conservative Christians, and Them is gay kids.

Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, [has] referred to anti-bullying measures as “a Trojan horse for the homosexual agenda.

The legislators in Michigan, some of them, have been trying to pass an anti-bullying bill for nearly ten years. The proposed bill was called “Matt’s Safe School Law,” named for a bullying victim who committed suicide in 2002. The Republicans consistently weakened the bill’s provisions and then attached the “religious beliefs” exemption, so even Democrats voted against it. 

In that ten year period, at least ten Michigan bullying victims have committed suicide.


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* Not all of us, of course.  Somewhere in my files I have a WSJ piece from a decade ago by Joseph Epstein, who was downright nostalgic about bullying as he recalled his Chicago childhood.  “If one couldn’t oneself enjoy the bullying of the larger over the smaller, there was still the simple delight of ganging up, the many against the one.”

Costly Thy Habitus . . .

November 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

From Liquidated, by Karen Ho

 Massive corporate restructurings are not caused so much by abstract financial models as by the local, cultural habitus of investment bankers, the mission-driven narratives of shareholder value and the institutional culture of Wall Street.

Yes, you read that correctly: habitus, narratives, and culture trump finance. 

Here’s more from the Financial Times review by Gillian Tett (she’s the FT reporter with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology who called the crash two years before it happened).

It has become painfully clear that bankers placed far too much faith on their quasi-scientific models. It has also been evident that a grasp of cultural dynamics is critical in understanding how modern finance works – or doesn’t.

Ho’s central argument borrows heavily from the work of Pierre Bourdieu . . . [and] the concept of the “habitus” – the idea that a society develops a cognitive map to order its world, a map that is usually based on its physical experience, albeit in ways the participants are only dimly aware of.

In the case of Wall Street, Ho argues that the “habitus” is shaped by bankers’ educational experience and employment history. Modern financiers live in a world where jobs are insecure, and where bankers are paid by trading things or cutting deals. They tend to project their experience on to the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid”, or tradeable, including jobs and people.

Surveys and Confirmation Bias

November 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When he taught research methods as a grad student, Michael Schwartz gave his students this assignment: “Create a survey to show . . .” and he would tell them the conclusion he wanted the survey to support.  The next week, he’d give them the same assignment but with the desired conclusion the opposite of the first one.

A year and a half ago, I criticized (here) a much publicized study by Dan Klein and Zeljka Buturovic:  “This survey, I said, “wasn’t designed to discover what people think. It was designed to prove a political point,” and that point was that liberal ideology blinds people to economic facts. 

I was reminded of Mike’s assignment when I read Klein’s recent article at The Atlantic.  In a bit of academic fairness that’s probably all too rare, Klein went on to create a survey designed to see if conservative ideology has a similar effect.

Klein hoped that his conservative and libertarian allies would not so readily agree with politically friendly economic ideas that were nevertheless unsound. But conservatives in the new survey were “equally stupid” as the liberals in the earlier survey.

Klein also expected some nasty nyah-nyahing from his liberal critics.  But no, “The reaction to the new paper was quieter than I expected.”   In fact, one of those liberal critics, Matt Yglesias, offered an observation that Klein used as his takeaway from the two surveys: “there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.” 

Yes, but confirmation bias is not just something that affects people who respond to surveys.  As Mike’s assignment makes clear, we also need to be wary of confirmation bias on the part of those who create the surveys. There is the further problem I mentioned in my earlier post:  a one-shot survey is inherently ambiguous. We can’t be sure just what the respondents really hear when they are asked the question. 

My own takeaway, besides admiration for Klein’s honesty, is that when you design your research as a statement (proving some point), you don’t learn nearly as much as when you design it as a genuine question.

Defining Deviance — Up and Down

November 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Most of the increase in economic inequality over the past two or three decades comes from the enormous growth in money going to the very rich.  David Brooks attributes that growth in part to a change in culture.*

You see a shift in social norms. Up until 1970 or so, a chief executive would have been embarrassed to take home more than $20 million. But now there is no shame, and top compensation zooms upward.

It’s what Daniel Patrick Moynihan nearly two decades ago (1993) called “defining deviancy down.”  Things which had once been a matter of shame have become acceptable. Norms change.

But they don’t change all by themselves – as though they were part of some “low-pressure system” or “cold air mass” moving into the region.  And the change is not always towards looser standards.  Moral entrepreneurs campaign to define deviancy up, and sometimes they succeed.  If we were back in the pre-feminist, “Mad Men” world of the 1950s, Herman Cain wouldn’t be having his current problems.**  But women – those pesky feminists – in just a few decades, have changed the dominant public judgment about men using a position of power to get laid.  Once accepted, maybe even admired and envied, it’s now something a guy doesn’t want other people, even his friends, to know about. 

“Mad Men” shows us some other examples of deviance defined up.  Look in on an ad agency today and you won’t see anyone smoking. A few souls may go out to the street for a cigarette break, but we see their smoking not as pleasure but as addiction, something to be pitied. Nor will you see anyone coming back drunk from a three-martini lunch or pouring himself a tumbler of Canadian Club in his office. Score one for the anti-tobacco and anti-drunkenness forces.

Besides moral entrepreneurship, norms can change as a matter of invidious social comparison – when those lower down the social scale take cues from those above them.  Fashions in clothes or names filter down through the class structure. So do ideas of unacceptable behavior. In the 18th century, new canons of manners started with the court, then the aspiring gentry, and eventually even commoners were embarrassed by the audible belch or fart. In the 21st century,  it’s not that we suddenly realized that drinking at work or smoking is harmful. Rather, as my British friend once said, “it isn’t done” – meaning that it isn’t done by people of our social position. In fact, moral entrepreneurs might be more successful if instead of trying to convince people that something is wrong, they tried to convince them it is low class.

As Oscar Wilde said,

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. (HT: Mark Kleiman)

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*  Brooks is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. But his liberal counterpart on the Times op-ed page, Paul Krugman, years ago offered a similar explanation for the skyrocketing pay of those at the top.

** For those who might not remember: in 2011, when I originally posted this, Herman Cain, a business executive, was a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, and some of his female former employees had accused him of sexual harassment.