The Rag Blog

I know it’s Wednesday. We’ll try to get it on schedule for next time. rdj

In the discussion about self-interest you are bogged down by an unproductive methodology. You are looking at self-interest on too atomic a level in trying to find the prime motivations of self-interest at its base. But Mother Theresa’s and Mother Bloor’s transcendance of their core biological self-interest is not THAT uncommon. We are all to act as though imbued with the highest Kantian ethical principles. But that is not an argument to be addressed to the w.p.

Of course if a w.p. challenges us to justify the higher morality, we are up the creek.

Mike Eisenstadt

No one said anyone ever abandons self-interest. Nor has anyone said we should all become altruistic. My contention was simply that self-interest, as opposed to group interest, is a poor principle around which to organize collective action. Sweet Jesus.

I guess I would disagree, though, with your contention that “At the end of the day, basically everything we do is founded in selfishness — no matter that it may be prettily dressed up as moral or ethical.” There’s a trivial sense in which this contention is true. Even if one does something entirely altruistic, like jumping on a live grenade, sacrificing one’s life to save one’s comrades in a platoon for instance, anyone can comment that this is simply self-interested behavior. It reveals a high preference for outcomes that further the goals of the platoon, and is thus self-interested.

The trouble with this is that it’s tautological. One can attribute absolutely ANY act to self-interest on this perspective. The trouble with tautologies, of course, is that they’re vacuous. Because it explains all behaviors, it doesn’t explain any. Consequently, this perspective is entirely unhelpful.

David Pratt-Hamiton should not read the rest of this. Here’s a citation.

Gavan Duffy

You say that some of us don’t know that we’re dealing in nonsense. You cite the below as an example of something that we’d attribute to self-interest, when it is not:

“There’s a trivial sense in which this contention is true. Even if one does something entirely altruistic, like jumping on a live grenade, sacrificing one’s life to save one’s comrades in a platoon for instance, anyone can comment that this is simply self-interested behavior.”

Are you older than me? (I am 59.) On reading your post, I recalled the grenade example, from my childhood in the 50s!

And then I said to myself, “when did that really happen?” I’m not sure that it ever did.

If it did:

1. The soldier threw himself upon a grenade because if he did not not, he, too would have died. He was a hero, which is better than being simply dead. If we’re all going to die unless someone makes a sacrifice, the person with the most concern for his memory, as it’s called, will throw himself upon the grenade.

2. The sacrificing soldier was saving a general or someone more useful to the war effort. Same argument as above.

3. The sacrificing soldier was saving a bunch of cowardly, pot-smoking, women-abusing scoundrels who were a disgrace to the uniform. Now that would be altruism! Jesus did that, the myth says, sacrificed himself for a bunch of rabble, namely us.

Without commenting on the motives of Jesus, I would say that the soldier may have been tired of life, or some such.

I’d also say that he hurt the war effort by destroying admirable human material to save shoddy human material. That’s not to be admired!

In any case, if that soldier existed and is to be taken as a model for us, we should look towards the skies — that’s where Jesus is, no? — or the Muslim world for leadership.

Dick J. Reavis

I said a bit ago that things happen and then there are the stories we make up to explain what happens. No better example of this than in our individual stories about the fate of the new left.

I must say I really appreciated Dick’s description of the fate of what he calls the Leninists — certainly much more than some of the more “theoretical” postings of recent days. It is that kind of reflection coming from Dick and many others on this list that keeps me reading.

Naturally, my “story” of that time — and what has happened since — is a bit different. I left Austin in 1970, after I was purged in the great Erwin purge that wiped out John Silber and Norman what’s his name, the President of UT. My sin was protesting ROTC and getting arrested for it. Couldn’t have me polluting the student body as a teaching assistant any longer. But, truth be told, I was ready to leave. I had become disillusioned with academia and was convinced that there was a “real world” out there that was different.

I didn’t give up on politics — or organization — however. I went on to Houston and Space City News, then off on a Venceremos Brigade expedition to cut sugar cane (got me on a FBI list for four years, an early precursor of what we can expect from the Patriot Act). Then there was the organized antiwar movement that built up to and followed the May Day protests in Washington. I moved to Atlanta, became an editor of the Great Speckled Bird, helped organize the New American Movement (NAM), which later merged with DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), was a founding editor of the national weekly In These Times (in Chicago) and later, after I moved to the DC area, worked with Citizen Action, the multi-state organization that was created by what Dick would call the old “right wing” of the new left.

These were all organized initiatives that worked to mobilize people around the values and vision that motivated us all in the ’60s and ’70s. So to say that organization disappeared with the fall of sds in 1969 isn’t quite accurate. In fact, the organizational legacy of the new left continues to exist all across the country in a multitude of forms. To be sure, it isn’t spouting the rhetoric of armed revolution, but it is working in hundreds of thousands of ways to change the fabric of the world in ways most of us could support. And it continues to have a very real and positive impact.

We may have been naïve to think back then that a mass movement would somehow magically emerge out of our efforts that would somehow fundamentally transform the structure and organization of our society. That clearly didn’t happen. Nor could it, in truth, because we didn’t have any idea of what kind of society we really wanted.

And when we thought we did, I fear it was not the kind of society most of us would want to have today. To me, that was the problem with those that chose the “Leninist” model Dick was talking about — those who went into PLP, RCP, CWP, SWP, etc. I have worked with many who took that path over the years. My little town of Mt. Rainier, a nice, traditionally working class community on the edge of Washington, seems to have attracted representatives from all of them. They are great people. Many continue to do good work. But the Leninist model never offered a vision of a society that could be sold to the people who live and work around them. And that’s why most of them gave up the “struggle” years ago.

But the movement that began in the ’60s continues. I have spent the last two days at a conference of several hundred people working in state legislatures around the county. Mostly elected leaders, they included many veterans of the new left. Men and women, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay and straight, from almost every state, who continue to fight to change things. They are part of a very real movement that carries on the kind of battles that motivated the Rag.

We underestimated the nature of the problem in the ’60s. There’s nothing new in that. It seems to be the lot of most revolutions. But the battle is not over when it comes to creating a better, more humane and more just society. I spent part of this afternoon, for example, listening to a panel of people outline how we will turn around the battle over the right for people to marry those they love regardless of sexual orientation. They acknowledged the defeats we have suffered, but they are also learning from them and are figuring out — precisely and strategically — how we can win people to our side by defining the issue in terms that people can understand and by applying our organizational resources effectively.

Last night, another panel talked about how the right wing has changed the nature of the debate in our nation over the last 20 years, deliberately and systematically by out organizing us and by doing a better job of telling their story of reality. We can bemoan that, but that leads nowhere. The challenge is to regain the initiative.

Another panel applied those lessons to question of how we organize people around global issues — the role of the US in the world and things like the war against Iraq. Building on real data and a serious examination of how people process information, it pointed to strategies we need to begin to use when it comes to explaining our positions to people who don’t necessarily agree with us — but could — the “persuadables” in other words.

I know from my personal experience that this kind of discussion is going on across the country in hundreds of thousands of communities, involving tens of thousands of people, working in a multitude of organizational contexts. That’s the legacy of the ’60s.

Doyle Niemann

At the risk of reviving what has been an over-extended discussion of “self-interest,” I have been pondering this question during my daily drive back and forth to work and have concluded that we have missed the real issue. It isn’t whether people are motivated by some kind of “self-interest” or not, but how they go about defining what their “interests” are. How they decide what is important to them.

This is a question amenable to scientific analysis. I certainly claim no unique expertise, but I have spent more than enough professional time in the world of mass communications to know that we know a lot about how other people think and how they organize information.

Market researchers, pollsters, brain researchers and others have spent a lot of time examining these questions. I’m not talking about the kind of research and polling in which you ask people what they think so you can parrot it back to them. Rather, it is the process of getting below the surface to see what is really going on in people’s minds. The folks who do high end market research are way ahead when it comes to this. They do in-depth interviews, continuing polling, long-term focus groups, brain wave and other physical reaction analysis, semantical analysis and a host of other techniques – as well as the analysis of decades of practical, measurable experience – to dig deep. They focus not on what people say they think about things, but how they respond and how they act.

They have found, for example, that people do not treat information the same. There is simply too much of it to process. Rather, each of us has developed a set of conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret and process data. We process and sort it and put it into pre-defined categories we have created (or inherited) so that we can understand it. We organize it in definable and relatively predictable ways.

To borrow some terminology from Landmark Education, I like to think of these frameworks as “stories.” For example, by now, most of us have a “story” about each other and how we all fit together. In the recent debate on this list, for example, we see a posting by Dick and we immediately try to fit it into the “story” we have made up about Dick, who he is (and was) and what he thinks. When it’s from Gavin, we fit it the “story” we have for him. When someone new says something, we place them in relationship to the “story” we have created for the entire discussion – or our “story” about the Rag and the left and the years gone by.

This is way too simplistic, but the point I want to get at is that the framework – the “story” – controls how we interpret what is said and done. We fit facts and information into it. If there is a conflict between the story and the facts, all-too-often the facts are discarded.

Translating this into the political arena, the right is far ahead of us when it comes to understanding this and using it to their advantage. They have spent decades crafting a series of messages – using issues, organizations, actions, strategies, personalities, campaigns and much more – to redefine the way much of the American populace thinks about a whole host of issues.

We, on the left, have been way behind the curve. We’ve tried to fight the battle with facts in a world where facts, alone, don’t count for much. Or we have promoted conceptual frameworks – stories – that haven’t had much popular appeal. Rather than figuring out how to get out point of view across in the conceptual terms that the people we were trying to organize actually use, we have, far too often anyway, insisted that they abandon those conceptual frameworks and adopt ours. It didn’t work. Surprise.

It’s not this bad, of course. But there is no question that to win the critical battles we confront for peace, justice, environmental sanaity, civil liberties and more, we have to get smarter. We have to learn to make our case to people in ways that move them to act with us.

Here’s a good example, borrowed from one of the workshops I attended this weekend. The right has been using gay marriage as a wedge issue. It cost John Kerry Ohio and guaranteed that George Bush would have four more years to screw up the world.

Eleven states passed bad ballot measures this year, including Texas. While we have won victories for equality, they have been few and close. So it is important for us to find ways to change the way people process this issue.

The Human Rights Campaign is in the middle of an intensive effort to figure out what messages work with people when it comes to gay marriage. To do that, they have spent a lot of time using the latest tools in conceptual research. While not complete, the messages they are crafting offer real hope when it comes to redefining the issue and winning rather than losing battles.

A few message suggestions based on their preliminary work:

* Love and commitment deserve protection. Many gay and lesbian couples stay together for years, sticking by each other through good times and bad. They are committed to each other and deserve protection.

* It’s not for me to judge. I may not believe in gay marriage, but that doesn’t mean it should be illegal. It’s not for me to judge other people.

* It’s not the government’s business. If two people want to get married, it’s not the government’s business to tell them they can’t – just like it’s not the government’s business to tell us what to read or think or do in the privacy of our homes.

* This is just another stop towards a more just society. We have made real progress towards ending discrimination and reducing prejudice. Good people support ending discrimination against gays and lesbians because that is the right thing to do if we want to have a just and fair society.

None of these is the magical bullet that will turn everything around, but they do appeal to concepts that reside deeply inside the conceptual frameworks that Americans use to interpret events and activities. As part of a comprehensive strategy that combines protest, legal action, lobbying, and mass communications, they offer hope when it comes to turning the tide of popular opinion.

There are other examples, but, once again, a short message has turned into a long one. Please excuse me for carrying on.

Doyle Niemann

Re: Gavan’s remark: “This is probably because I have no earthly idea what he means by “the scientific method. There’s way too much serendipity in science to speak of any scientific method.”

The scientific method is a method of evidence-based argument, not a method of discovery. Scientists indeed discover things by a serendipitous ad-hoc mixture of work, luck, insight, imagination (even dreams!), and fortunately-correct biases. But these processes produce wrong or useless answers almost all of the time — the trick is how to eliminate the chaff to find the very occasional new truth.

The critical feature is agreement that science consists of systematic observation and explanation. Since observation is central, assertions must include reports of the data on which they are based, including enough description of how the data was acquired to make it feasible for others to look for alternative explanations (and preferably to be able to acquire similar data). You can get your ideas from dreams, but not your data.

The authority structure of science is anarchic, with scientists deciding for themselves who and what to believe. The occasional data fakers, professors who tyrannize their graduate students, or national academies that install an orthodoxy pretty quickly get outrun by events. The result is an accumulation of theories (i.e., systematic explanations) that are better established than anything else in human experience (although still incomplete — perhaps with big holes in some areas).

I see this as quite relevant to political work. It is in our interest to urge people to critically assess the information they are given and to consider alternative explanations. That is, to think for themselves. We should enlist the prestige of science in this subversive task. The long association of socialism and science is no accident.

Note that American right-wingers have correctly identified this danger, and are mounting a broad attack on science. Of course, they have their knives out for artists as well, so we are in good company.

Hunter Ellinger

David Sonenschein asks: “With respect to your discussions about science and method, do y’all have any opinions of Paul Feyerabend’s anarchistic approach (would it be called “chaos theory” these days?)?

I do.

Paul Feyerabend’s critique of Imre Lakatos is on target. Since research programs can be falsified only in long hindsight, defenders of the program under attack can always ask us to wait a little longer. Lakatos thus offers no rational standard for selection among alternative research programs (and thus fails to save falsificationism from Kuhn’s critique).

Feyerabend celebrated this and advanced the view that, since falsificationism has failed, there are no such rational standards. This is unacceptable to lots of people because it implies that science is an irrational pursuit and that the theories and research programs that dominate do so as a consequence of the force of its adherents. Notice also that it denies any scope for reason.

In my view, Feyerabend’s compelling critique of Lakatos in no way implies the absence of any rational standard. Neither Feyerabend nor Lakatos adequately consider the pragmatic criterion of theory choice advanced by Pierre Duhem, W.V.O. Quine, and Hilary Putnam, among others. Invoking Quine’s expression, we accept (always provisionally) those theories as true that maximize the global coherence of our knowledge.

We typically make adjustments at the periphery of our knowledge to accommodate recalcitrant observations. Unless and until excessive disorder accumulates at the periphery, we avoid reformulation of knowledge as we move from the periphery toward the core. We wouldn’t want to reformulate our conception of physical law, for instance, in order to bring order to our knowledge of economics.

Feyerabend’s theory isn’t chaos theory, by the way.

Also, for evidence of sexism’s influenced the academy before the feminist successes of our generation, see the correspondence between Lakatos and Feyerabend, reproduced in Before and Against Method (U of Chicago Press).

Gavan Duffy

OF COURSE there are independent observers, with apologies to my PoMo pals.

Maybe a better term would be “disinterested,” but that doesn’t really capture the idea. Interested enough to squander an opinion but not interested enough to have a dog in the fight.

I am reminded of being interviewed by a Texan reporter about a farm worker strike (because I had just returned from the Rio Grande Valley and the Texan could not send a reporter to the Valley because the travel budget was earmarked for the College World Series–Hook ’em!).

She asked “How many workers are on strike?”

“Well, the union says about 3,000, and the growers say nobody is on strike.”

“You mean one of them is lying?!!?”

LONG PAUSE

“No. They’re both lying.”

And it was downhill from there in terms of getting the situation reported…

Steve Russell

There’s more to come … rdj

— Mariann talks about “getting it back.” We won’t. She’s right. …

I am not so interested in what has failed to work. I face that everyday and become mired in it if I watch the news. I am interested in experiences people have had that worked – that fostered dialogue and change …. What are your thoughts? Alice —

Alice – as usual – asks the key questions about the once-and-future sds/Ragstaff members. Here is my contribution to add to Mariann’s and Dennis’ earlier postings.

First – what happened 30 to 35 years ago? We had an impassioned and educated movement started. Then it disappeared. I remember various discussions with Doyle, with Greg and Carol, with Howard and Barbara, with David, and with others wherein we declared that we were in the struggle for the long-term. Yet most of us settled our strike and went back to work. Few of us who refused to settle tried to maintain a presence in any kind of organizational framework; we went off on our private missions.

And there are plenty of reasons: Cointelpro was effective (you’re not paranoid, if someone is actually trying to get you); the ideological and political struggles in sds looked more like bull shit than teen spirit; we did not have the best support system imaginable, as Bill Meacham implies in his Memoir; and, frankly, we were kids – privileged, middle-class kids at that.

Most of us drifted into some variant of normal middle-class life: job, mate, kids, and related joys, frustrations, responsibilities, extravagances. I’m not apologizing, and I don’t expect anyone else to do so. The opportunity that we missed, however, was to try to maintain and build some kind of organization. No kidding. It could have been a Tuesday night sewing circle or a debating club, but we screwed up when we let each other drift away.

And I dislike giving PLP credit, but that was exactly what they were telling us in 1968-1969. They told us (those of us who would still talk with them) to pair off, get jobs, burrow into the community, but keep the study group – if not the party membership – going. Of course, it’s as easy as shooting an armadillo in a culvert to point out that they failed to take their own advice, but nonetheless their line was correct – at least the part about keeping contact in a political context.

We split up, and here we are – hopefully, getting back together – but, only after letting the Genie back out of the bottle. And he is a Mad Genie – in both senses of the word. Well – better late than totally senile.

So much for preface – the last part of Alice’s posting above asks about the current national mood regarding the war in Iraq. How did we get here? Blogs have been important; but I suggest that there is a strong – but relatively quiet – residue of knowledge and opinion from the Vietnam era. Maybe as many as 60% of our population feel that that war was somewhere between a mistake and an imperialist adventure. Due to reticence imposed by concerns related to job security, by residual paranoia, and by a desire to avoid the turbulence that we once embraced, we – by and large – left the baddies and the crazies in the field all by themselves.

I don’t know how it is/was where you are/were, but out here in the Pacific NW it didn’t take long for us to get back into this fight. Nor did it take long to win the fight. OR and WA are blue (and green) states in the best sense of the expression. (What do you say about that, Mariann? David told me that you were out here for some fairly long period of time.) Somebody wrote to The Oregonian yesterday that the count in Letters-to-the-Editor for the last so many months was 103 against Bush and his war vs. 3 for …. Is that an important statistic? I think so.

Let me tell you how I think we got there, because it speaks to the earlier portions of Alice’s posting. Maybe it’s the water, but out here we think that we can practice democratic principles, such as discussion of political theory and policies, and screw you if you can’t take a joke. We’re all doing the job, mate, kids, etc. thing; we almost all like life and the world; generally speaking, we like people. Is that different from where you live? If it is, maybe some of us should be migrating to certain chosen locations to maximize our strength – gerrymander by migration rather than by changing boundaries.

If not – if your area is similar to my description of this area – then it’s simple. Live life per the kinds of principles that we all know and respect; know and respect as many of your neighbors as you can; say your piece with well-researched data and modest tone when the opportunity arises; write and submit your piece occasionally to the local newspaper or …. (One thing additional related to the first two lines of Alice’s piece – most kids are easy to involve, even if you dislike their music and their attitude. Does take patience – no doubt about that. [Best thing about us males getting older is diminishment of testosterone levels. Helps with the patience thing.])

After that, the only missing piece is organization. We screwed up last time. Are we ready to rectify the situation? sds anyone?

Paul Spencer

I have read some pretty thoughtful posts on this line about the New Left and what became of it–and of what that might mean today–and I hope to read more of them. I need leadership today!

It occured to me that I could contribute to the discussion by telling what happened to PL types. I know the fate of most of those who were in Leninists circles at UT. In general, I think we became Leninists because we saw that there was more to be done than ending the war in Vietnam — and that the Movement wasn’t going to end that war, either. We saw graduation coming and we saw the need for years of protest, resistance, struggle–call it what you will. We threw ourselves into the Leninist parties, looking for a structure and a tradition that the New Left didn’t have, something that would sustain and guide us for the rest of our lives. Marxism convinced us that only a revolt by the working class, spurred by economic motives, would give anything decent a chance. Though the parties defined the w.c. too narrowly, I do not know of any ex-Leninist in the UT crowd who has repudiated that idea, except for a half-dozen former Spartacists who became neocons. Most of us still believe that.

The test of the idea was to go into factories and try to organize the w.c. The plan was to restore the Left unionism of the late 30s and the 40s. It didn’t work. The w.c. didn’t listen. We were disillusioned.

In PL — I won’t speak of the other groups, because I know less — the response was to blame the failure on ourselves. The workers didn’t rebel, the internal discussions decided, because “you didn’t sell enough copies of Challenge.” We blamed the failure of our movement on each other. It was a I’m-more-moral-than-you game.

By the mid-seventies, people who had gone the Leninist route were peeling out of the parties, though usually, we went from one party to another. In all of them, I believe, were found an arrogant power structure. We began to dislike that structure that one had once sought. It had its advantages–efficiency–but it had its drawbacks.

By the start of the 80s, I’d say, none of wanted to go back to SDS formlessness and none of us wanted to stay in the Leninist orb. I know of only one person who stayed in PLP, one who stayed in the SWP, and one who is still with the Sparts. This is out a universe at UT of maybe 100.

Old enmities lived on among us and between us and those whom we once called the “right wing” of SDS, i.e., most of the early Rag crew. But more than anything, I think, we felt defeated. In wanting to transform the nation, we had bit off more than we could chew.

I don’t think that many of us started taking smaller bites. Very few of the ex-Leninists became Democrats or signed-on to the “act locally, think globally” point of view. We instead began lives of daily by minor resistance, and we continue like that: separated, alone, skeptical of everything.

There’s an Argentine movie, “Common Ground,” in which a character says something like, “Marxism is only a private moral attitude, suitable for deployment in the kitchen.” Any Marxist would protest the idea of “moral,” in theory, but the line is pretty accurate.

The fall of the Soviets disturbed a lot of us, but convinced very few of us that socialism is a bad idea. Most of us still believe in something that we’d call “socialism,” though the definition of that word would not be the same as it was, for anybody. Were we together again, I don’t thnk we’d agree about what “socialism” would mean.

I speak of the ex-Leninists, not for them.

I can’t draw many lessons from all of this, except one: we were born at the wrong place, in the wrong time. As a professor I have come to know various students who are retracing the footsteps of all of us New Leftists, “right-wing” and Leninist. My heart goes out to them, but I have not been able to provide good advice. In any case, like most student radicals, they don’t seek any advice. They are young and are going to change the world!

Dick J. Reavis

I’d rather not be so stand-offish. After all, my blood flows in your veins, in a manner of speaking.

In Texas (Longhorn Machine Works, Economy Furniture, Farah), labor laws take forever to get enforced. If you break the strike, you will have a good job with benefits exceeding those of the person whose job you took for four or five years and maybe permanently (because a lot of union members get starved out).

If I can’t appeal to you on the basis of your class interests, then all I’ve got is the short-sight argument that the union will eventually win–something that is not at all clear as a matter of fact now, with Repugs appointing the NLRB, the hearing examiners, and the judges.

Steve Russell

But by not being specific enough, I think you limit our options for thinking, but…

If you’re talking about a strike today at one of the plants that you mention, it seems to me that you could win by convincing a scab that other jobs exist and that he could survive in the interval–if the union would insure him a job when it won/wins the strike. You could tell him that it’s in his long-term interest that the union win.

If the union could not guarantee a future job, I´d say that you’d have to talk to the union. The problem is that unions are unions in some sense against the unemployed. They can only win the loyalty of the unemployed if, through other initiatives, they are representing the unemployed.

An analogy is this…during the Black Panther era, a lot of police departments tried to hire a lot of informers. They did find too many. But hundreds of people refused the role because though they were not Panthers, they sympathized with what the Panthers were trying to do and with their general social vision.

As far as I know, the AFL-CIO has always lobbied for the interests of the unemployed. But as far as I know, ever since the McCarthy period, the AFL-CIO has not agitated for the interests of the unemployed — or for else. Unions must have aims beyond that of higher wages and benefits and better rules for their members, or they lose. They have to represent the short- and long-term interests of the whole of the working population, not just the membership.

Dick J. Reavis

Re: self-interest vs. reason and other higher order motivations.

I think I know where Brother Reavis is coming from – the proletariat – loosely and globally speaking. Check out his description of San Pablo Macquiltianguis “high in the pine forests of Oaxaca’s Juarez range” where “(n)early half of the town’s children died before the age of 5, usually of infectious diseases, malnutrition, or dehydration, and . . . people lived in dread of droughts, which inevitably came.” (In “Conversation with Moctezuma”, Wm. Morrow & Co, 1990, pp. 235-8) Dick spent some time in this obscure and remote village where the first language is Zapotec. He wrote a lot about such places during the several years of his career he spent as a journalist on the back streets of Mexico. His subjects were very often blocked from higher order motivations by the continuous intervention of material self-interest in its most intense form – physical survival.

On the other hand, some of us have had the luxury of contemplating the relative quality and political correctness of various philosophical motivational frameworks while ensconced in ivy-covered buildings. But, Gavin, as you said, “It pays the bills around here”. That sounds pretty self-interested.

Good to see a little testosterone still flowing out there, but I don’t think this is an either/or situation. Inevitably, most people are going to be primarily motivated by self-interest, religious fundamentalists notwithstanding. It’s hardwired in us all to a large degree. By fortune and talent, others will marginally transcend such considerations. We must just hope that those with the prerogative to transcend, us among them, will provide good leadership to those who are trapped in the mundane and perspective to those who are not.

David Hamilton

If an unemployed black man in Oakland refuses to snitch on the Panthers for cash, hasn’t he just referred to some value beyond his immediate self-interest?

There is a degree of abstraction you can adopt in referring to “self-interest” that makes the concept useless for discussing tactics, kind of like the law & economics nerds who take such a broad view of “costs” and “benefits” that they can make their paradigm fit everything but at the same time it fits nothing. I mean, Gandhi would say he was pursuing his self-interest when he starved himself and went to jail. My own colorful arrest record, of which you are probably aware, was nothing so noble: I was darn well aware that I was getting hurt but was willing to put up with it for the cause, not because I thought it was somehow in my interest to suffer.

So, if you mean “self-interest” in the sense of an individual who is engaged in building the kind of society he or she wants to live in, then we do not disagee about anything significant. I take it you do not turn your considerable talents to writing romance novels because you do not consider producing romance novels to be the highest and best use of your talents? In making that judgment, you are without a doubt referring to some value you are ranking above “standard of living.”

I doubt that you and I are better people than the ones we want to bring along. I think everybody wants to believe that there are times when it’s right and necessary to sacrifice self-interest to some greater good. Indeed, the chicken hawks running US foreign policy had for a while convinced most Americans of exactly that. We call them “chicken hawks,” of course, because the sacrifice they demand always comes from other people.

Steve Russell

I expect that, if my survival were constantly at stake, I’d be self-interested in all matters, just like the people of San Pablo Macquiltianguis.

My point was that self-interest is a poor principle around which to organize collective political action. This is especially true for peoples so utterly oppressed that their survival is constantly at stake. How do you engage in collective action when finding something to eat is far more imperative?

Finally, David, where you write “some of us have had the luxury of contemplating the relative quality and political correctness of various philosophical motivational frameworks while ensconced in ivy-covered buildings,” you engage in ad hominem attack. You should address my argument, not my job.

I’d expect something like this from Bill O’Reilly, not from you. You disappoint me.

Gavan Duffy

I think we’re defining self-interest too narrowly here — as meaning something that will necessarily exclude or conflict with the interests of others. That is how self-interest gets expressed in a young child, but as we mature we take on more sophisticated approaches. We begin to understand that continually trying to maximize our self-interest is frequently counter-productive. (Mom sends us to our room, or we’re shunned by our friends, or we wind up in jail.) And so we turn to strategies for optimizing rather than maximizing our self-interest.

This usually takes the form of mutually beneficial actions, e.g., sharing rather than stealing. But sharing doesn’t mean abandoning our self-interest. To the contrary, it’s likely to give us a better net benefit than the alternative. Over time this strategy is extended beyond our families and close friends to larger and larger groups. This is a positive thing. It works for us personally, and it works for society at large.

Through socialization, personal experience, critical thinking, the influence of groups, adopted belief systems, etc., many of us continue to refine this optimization strategy. I may move from being simply law abiding to a more abstract respect for justice for all (which could include a refusal to obey unjust laws). It begins to look like I’m adopting some unselfish attitudes. Again, this is positive. But, again, this is not at the expense of my self-interest. It’s just another step forward in the optimizing thing. It also expresses my learning that feelings, and not only “things,” are valuable to me. I adopt a value system based on my more sophisticated understanding of mutually beneficial behaviors. When I conform to that value system, I feel good. If I make some unusual sacrifices that are consistent with that value system, I may feel very good indeed. And if I violate my values, I feel bad. It is not in my self-interest to violate my values.

People tend to call an act “selfish” if it opposes their own value system, and “unselfish” if it accords with their value system. At the end of the day, basically everything we do is founded in selfishness — no matter that it may be prettily dressed up as moral or ethical. But, hey, this can be okay. Let’s try to keep ramping up those mutually beneficial acts.

And, meanwhile, if we’re willing to recognize our essential selfishness, maybe that recognition will take some of the edge off that dangerous self-righteousness.

Dennis Fitzgerald

Dennis and Dick seem determined to deny any virtue in their social (as distinct from individual) interests. But it seems to me that calling everything people want just an extension of self-interest dodges the question of how to deal with this issue rather than explaining it.

In each individual, and in each society, there is an interplay (a dialectic, if you will) between selfish and social impulses. At this time, the social impulses need support — we should not let concern about self-righteousness keep us from acknowledging and celebrating altruism when it emerges from the muckpile of fear and greed.

Part of the weakness of contemporary American-liberal rhetoric is that it is so busy arguing that being good is in everyone’s self-interest that it reinforces the selfishness that it is trying to cure. To many, gated communities will seem safer and cheaper than remaking society so that everyone succeeds. This may even be true for most Americans (that’s the neocon analysis).

While there are several important enlightened-self-interest arguments to be made (e.g., global warming), they will have much more political impact when they are made by people like bankers (who have a broad but selfish view since they own part of everything), not by weirdo commie/hippie intellectuals, even if that’s who did the research that uncovered the problem.

Of course, even in America there is still plenty to do in organizing and supporting the working-class interests that Marx accurately identified as the primary opportunity for egalitarian political action. But Marx was not himself from that class (nor were my union-organizer parents, nor is ragstaffer/union-organizer Glenn Scott, or historical social-impulse heroes such as Shaw and Ruskin). Even the effective organizers who come out of the working class have broadened their vision well beyond narrow class interests.

These people have an impact because they convey the altruistic “hunger and thirst after justice” (Ruskin) that shows the people they interact with that such a broader vision exists. Or, as Gavan puts it, that they have higher impulses. That these impulses can lead to the more rewarding and authentic life Alice mentions is true (although they also can lead to a firing squad), but that does not keep them from being higher. We should wave this flag, not apologize for it.

Hunter Ellinger

One sentence from Ellinger’s post is especially of interest to me:

“Part of the weakness of contemporary American-liberal rhetoric is that it is so busy arguing that being good is in everyone’s self-interest that it reinforces the selfishness that it is trying to cure.”

Perhaps it is only a matter of a careless word choice, but I would say that I hope that I am not trying to “cure” the “selfishness” of other people, because that would put me in the position of wellness, or of a doctor.

Other people are not stupid and probably have good reasons for not regarding me as their superior; I take it that everyone on this list would agree to that!

The gated communities point is a sharp one, I agree. But I’d say that Ellinger, as have others on the list, regards self-interest in the terms that the System has taught us, i.e., immediate self-interest, I’ve got mine Jack, to hell with you. I think that the System defines self-interest in pretty short-sighted way, as benefits those who run in.

I do not live in a gated community and wouldn’t want to. The idea that extremes of wealth should create societies in which some people need guards and bodyguards is repellent to me, not because I am moral, but because I don’t like to feel distanced from people. I would argue with people who live in gated communities than we have accepted a society which imprisons them, too.

Circumstances could exist in which I would live in a gated community, and in a sense, we all do: the United States is gated today. We don’t feel that we’ve chosen to live here, but what about immigrants who come here? (I am thinking of a student of mine whose mother won’t let her return to Trinidad for fear of crime. Am I regard her mother as immoral or as a mother who worries about her child’s safety?) Is their morality to be questioned? The point is that gated communities are not long-term solutions to the problems of human coexistence.

Two considerations underlie everything I say on this issue:

1. I have for years watched activist movements and participated in them. At some point and in some campaigns, I began to feel humiliated. I would today not, for example, sign a petition asking Bill O’Reilly to do anything. That seems like begging, to me. Bill O’Reilly is clearly not a friend of my interests. The only thing in my interest is that he be discredited or removed, somehow brought low.

If I ask Bill O’Reilly to do something decent, I am only showing my weakness. I’d rather spend my time developing the strength to remove him. When we have enough strength, we don’t have to ask for anything.

2. Perhaps those of you who never defended the Soviets do not have this problem, but it seems to me that the great horror of the Soviet Union was that crimes were committed in the name of the people, so much so that the very idea of socialism is now discredited.

Let each person speak for himself/herself, I say! If we can sell some sort of future socialism on personal or self-interest grounds, it won’t become tyrannical like the Soviets did.

Everybody who plays games has no choice but to accept their rules. The rules are that you look out for yourself and your own team and when your team wins, that’s hard luck for the losers. If you lose, it is bad form to complain that the referees were unfair, or that the other team had superior advantages, and one sure doesn’t ask the other team to share its advantages. We are not going to get any social justice by expecting our enemies to adopt “reason” or “truth” or altruistic motives.

We are going to have to outplay them on the field of politics.

Dick J. Reavis

To be continued … rdj

Like Gavin, long ago, I shouldn’t have time for this. But, sucker that I am…..

Things happen. Then there are the stories we make up about what happens. Some of those stories more accurately describe what happened than others, although we can never precisely and absolutely know which. For those stories we trust the most — usually because they predict future events — we call them science.

Arguably, that’s the nature of our “reality,” which is limited by our perception.

The practical question is which of the made-up stories to choose. And choose them we do, through one mechanism or another — personal choice, socialization, brainwashing, indoctrination, etc., etc.

I vote to choose those stories that most reflect the “reality” I see.

That’s easy for many things. That’s where much of what is “science” comes in. But if you follow the debate on evolution/intelligent design/creationism, you can clearly see that others “choose” differently.

When it comes to people, politics, society, the choices get harder. Although it has an important role, “self-interest” doesn’t do it for me. It is, after all, the fundamental concept behind capitalism and other “territorial-based” ways of thinking. It can be and is used to justify every abomination imaginable.

“Reason” is a little better. It at least posits that there is some “higher” framework that should guide our actions. Like advancing the better good, doing what makes the most sense for the most people, etc.

While not my personal choice necessarily, religion and faith are another options. In that world view, God (or something like God) requires us to act in certain ways. In the best examples, to promote peace, harmony, justice and doing unto others as we would want them to do unto us.

I can’t say that one is better than another. But I do know and have seen the power that the stories or explanations we choose have.

As important as the mass protests and personal bravery of the civil rights era were to winning the gains of the last few decades (such as they were), we should never discount the power of the vision that was articulated by Dr. King and many others. It has changed things. When the leading advocate of the right in the Maryland House of Delegates co-introduces a bill to name BWI airport after Thurgood Marshall and the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is an African American, who is also the current Lt. Gov., you have to admit there has been a change in the collective consciousness. Yes, the reality of much of the black community remains bleak, but the terms of the debate have changed and the lives of many individuals are better for it.

I guess I am speaking for the power of the idea — the power of a vision of a better world. Far beyond self-interest, I believe that is what motivates people. That is what moves them to put their lives and futures on the line and to challenge power. It is no accident that the words of the Declaration of Independence (or similar expressions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or the right to freedom of belief, thought and action) have shown up time and again in revolutionary documents.

I do believe the challenge we face is to create our own “story” or “stories” of reality — as accurate and predictive as we can, but also as uplifting, inspiring and motivating as we can make them.

And now I really am late to work.

Best all

Doyle Niemann

As per the below….It seems to me that “false consciousness” occurs when the working class, or any subordinate class, adopts the world view of the bourgeoisie. Marx mentioned that as a problem. He did not define “false consciousness” as a confusion between individual and class interests–and I have not been convinced that he thought such a thing possible.

In the broadest terms, what Marx said about ideology was that small groups had put forward their interests as representing those of all humanity, the biggest possible political group, or of the nation. It seems to me that, given this history, we should be skeptical of anybody’s claim to represent group interests, including class interests. We can, however, trust people who claim only to represent themselves; we can trust them to look out for Number One First.

I therefore think that the most honest policy is for me, for example, to claim to represent myself, leaving to Jesus or somesuch the interests of all humanity. If you, for example, think about your interests, and they run close to mine, we can form a class of two, which, in time, may become a class of four, etc. Pretty soon we might be speaking in the interests of the petty bourgeoisie or some other class–but to be honest, we have to say, “I’m doing this for myself.”

What gets dropped out is the figure who claims to sacrifice himself/herself for the greater good, i.e., Jesus and his imitators.

What gets saved is the wisdom of the 60s, which was that social liberation is inseparable from personal liberation.

Dick J. Reavis

I’m having a deliciously lovely time reading all that’s been written in the past few days. Gavan, you have a more interesting stream-of-consciousness writing style than I had suspected you were capable of. I’ve pondered, giggled, belly-laughed, and enjoyed. I think Paul deserves the lunch Lori offered.

Brother Bill: your posting reminded me of two other ringing phrases to throw into the mix: winners write the official report of a conflict (which is how Julius Caesar could get away with dissing the Druids) and “history is a distillation of rumor” (Thomas Carlyle said that).

A lot of the rhetoric sounds muchly like what y’all were going on and on about 35 years ago, but it’s still interesting. As we said then: What goes around comes around. My assumption is that it has a lot to do with lessons needing to be learned; my faith is that sooner or later it’ll happen.

Kate Braun

My point about promoting human flourishing did not concern political action. It was proposed (by Wittgenstein, not me) as the best underlying norm to motivate scientific inquiry.

Anyway, I fail to see how a class can have a consciousness or adopt a world view. This seems quite anthropomorphic to me.

It is certainly true that some people can only act on the basis of self-interest. Kohlberg called them stage 2 moral reasoners. At stages 3 and 4, people act on the basis of social role expectations. At even higher stages, they act on the basis of principles.

So, I read you as saying that you are an exemplar of arrested moral development. With self-interest as your guide, you can easily justify all kinds of heinous behavior. You free yourself to manipulate others, or even kill them, so long as doing so serves your self-interest.

I hope someday you develop a principled social consciousness.

Gavan Duffy

At the first meeting of a multi-stakeholder group I was involved in a few years ago, the facilitator put rolls of toilet paper on the table in front of everybody’s chairs. She said that as part of our process, we were all encouraged to speak freely and to disagree with one another. But, Rule #1 was to treat each other respectfully. If we thought somebody was getting out of line, we were supposed to toss our roll towards the offending party (but… not “at” them).

It was a pretty fun idea and it really did work well. Nobody wanted to be shamed by having a big stack of tp in front of themselves at the end of the meeting. Even the redneck logger seemed a bit embarrassed after his reference to effin’ greenies earned him almost every roll at the table. (Oh, yeah, and to avoid the negative impacts of self-interest, we weren’t allowed to keep any of the rolls tossed our way.)

So, sorry, Duffer, but this is coming your way. Lighten up a little bit, boy.

Dennis Fitzgerald

In the post … you say “I’m starting to realize that you’ve been conflating self-interest with group interest.”

Could it not be that you’ve been separating self-interest from group interest?

(I notice that I usually address my arguments to you in the conditional, whereas you speak to me in the declarative. I say “I think” or “it could be”; you declare what’s what–in a manner appropriate to your academic status? Is not some hierarchy in forms of discourse evident here?)

My feeling is simply this. The System has for years taught us self-deprecation. We must sacrifice our desires before God, Morality, Nation, the Economy, Marriage, the Family, etc. The people who speak for all of those capital letters usually turn out to be tyrants.

To turn that game around and put capital letters on Class, Humanity, History–or Morality, the Nation, etc.–may in some ways improve life for the rest of us, but if really successful, leads to another Soviet state.

I don’t think we should don’t deny self or self-interest at the start of our fight or our negotiations with life. I think we ought to stand up for our own “selfish” interests, along with everything else. The selfish interests of the bourgeoise may cause great harm to the rest of us, but the selfish interests of us commoners–I count you as one!–might be really healthy for the species!

Dick J. Reavis

Yes, I agree. I haven’t conflated self-interest and group interest, whereas you have.

Saying “I think” and “it could be” is a way of speaking conditionally. You yourself say “Could it not be” in the sentence that precedes your declarative parenthetical sentence beginning “I notice that I usually address….” “I think” implicates that “I could be wrong.” So I’m not addressing you any differently than you address me and any hierarchy you find in my discourse just isn’t there.

Of course, you consistently refer to me formally as “Mr. Duffy,” which indicates that you want to establish some sort of hierarchy. But, in any event, you seem to do this in an effort to portray yourself in some sort subaltern position in which you feel most comfortable. That doesn’t bother me so much, but please don’t attribute to me any intention to place you in that position. It’s your pomo delusion, not mine.

My perspective does indeed differ. I think that The System encourages us to conceive ourselves as individuals who pursue goals in a self-interested manner. To the extent that we buy into this “false consciousness” (writers more recent than Engels call it “the colonization of the lifeworld”), we fail to see our group interest and our group solidarity is undermined.

I would agree that we should stand up for our group interests, but these are hardly selfish.

Gavan Duffy

So it the glass on self-interest/group interest is half-full, not half-empty,–or is it the other way around?

I do not address Mr. Duffy as “Mr.” because I want to imply any gradation of superiority: to accept anybody as my superior in such discussions would go counter to my self-respect. It’s just that if I knew Duffy, I don’t remember him. We haven’t, as the Brits would say, been properly introduced, to my memory, at least. In any case, I don’t think I’ve seen a post addressed to ‘Gavan,’ and Fitgerald’s “Duffer” seems to be a name of affection. Such affection I will not feign, though I would not say that I will forever regard Duffy as a stranger.

Mr. Duffer–is that any better?–says: To the extent that we buy into this “false consciousness” (writers more recent than Engels call it “the colonization of the lifeworld”), we fail to see our group interest and our group solidarity is undermined.

I don’t know to what “writers” or concepts he refers, so all I can say: What ‘we,’ Lone Ranger?

Dick J. Reavis

I suppose there’s nothing “wrong” with pursuing the ethics of egoism, “self-interest,” if you in fact recognize no higher interest than your own.

But in that pursuit, you lose the chance of bringing anybody with you who is not identical in a lot of categories we have always tried to organize across.

I am thinking that a scab can make a great self-interest argument, and the only sensible reply would be to call the scab short-sighted.

It’s OK to have interests and necessary to be out front about what they are. But if that’s all you have, I don’t trust you to govern yourself in a manner that does not impinge on my interests. Let alone trust you to govern others.

Steve Russell

This material was originally posted on 31 July, but continuing discussion (most recent response from Steve Russell) prompted me to update the posting date to 6 August. rdj

I thought you might be interested in this email, which I just sent to 5,000 voters in the 47th District. Someone already responded to remind me that I forgot to mention I also introduced legislation that would have given the Juvenile Court more authority over truant children where the parents are not able to exercise control. It did not pass because of squabbles within the Prince George’s delegation, but (hopefully) I will be able to reintroduce it next year.

Doyle Niemann

Keeping Kids in School – Fighting Truancy

Last year, 6,500 students were absent from school for more than 25 days without excuse.

These were days not spent learning. As a Prince George’s County prosecutor, I also know there is a good chance many were also involved with daytime crime, drugs and underage sexual activity.

Holding parents accountable

Parents are legally required to see that their children attend school until the age of 16. The first step, then, is to hold parents accountable. Easily said; not so easily done.

It takes a high degree of cooperation between the school system, the Department of Juvenile Services, the State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Juvenile Court, and for a long time that cooperation hasn’t been there.

But that is changing. Over the last year, I have played a critical role in bringing all these groups together to focus on truancy.

A step-by-step approach

Working together, we have identified a four-part process:

(1) Schools, drawing on regional school resources, identify truant students and do their best to address any problems affecting attendance.

(2) Habitually truant students are referred to an interagency group that includes school representatives, juvenile justice officials, social workers and prosecutors for further screening.

(3) Parents are then summoned to appear before a Juvenile Court Judge, where they are informed about the law and its penalties (up to 10 days in jail and hefty fines). They are asked to sign an agreement that they will make sure their child goes to school. A social worker is present in case there are problems where outside help can make a difference.

(4) If attendance continues to be poor, truancy charges are filed against the parent.

Progress this year

This year, we summoned parents of truant students from Northwestern, Bladensburg and Laurel High Schools to come to court – with good results. Attendance improved.

Formal charges have been filed against more than 15 parents.

Looking ahead to the new school year, we plan to expand this endeavor to middle and elementary schools and to act quicker and more aggressively.

Mobilizing the community

We are also working to mobilize the larger community. Borrowing from successful efforts in Bowie and Laurel, we will be asking local businesses to not serve school-age children during school hours and to report truant students to local police.

Municipal and county police departments are being asked to pick truant students up and take them back to the school. Adults who encourage and assist truant students can also be charged with a criminal citation for aiding and encouraging truancy. This includes businesses that serve underage students.

School reforms

Getting the child back in school is the first step. But then, we need to confront why the child is truant and to help him or her make up for lost time.

In many cases, all that is required is more parent attention. That is what our legal initiative is aimed to encourage.

In other cases, however, more serious educational and family problems must be confronted. That is where we expect the school system and our social service agencies to step forward with remedial services and other forms of help.

An opportunity for adult interaction

In addition to school programs to help students catch up, community involvement and support are critical. Our schools can’t change attitudes and long-term habits alone. That’s where mentoring and other programs that involve our children and give them a chance to interact with adult role models are critical.

I wish I could say exactly what can and must be done in these areas, but specific steps must still be worked out in partnership with everyone involved.

I can promise that I will be involved and will do whatever I can to move the process of reclaiming our children forward.

Doyle Niemann

Doyle, your approach to truancy gave me the cold shivers, as I was a chronic truant and the burden of enforcement would have fallen on my elderly grandparents. The only thing that will slow down truancy is to make school a positive experience, which it never was to me until I arrived at the University of Texas.

If I understand the history of truancy laws, there were two purposes. To allow the cops to pick up kids who were hanging around when school was in session and to sanction parents who were obstructing public education by insisting on putting the kids to work (part of a package of child labor laws).

I tend to agree about the hanging around part. The place where I chose to hide was the public library.

Child labor does not appear to me to be a major social problem right now outside of farm workers. I hope I’m right about that.

But it seems to me that the major crusade against truancy would have to happen in schools. Until it does, I’m on the side of the truants. I quit for good in the ninth grade and my only regret was I didn’t quit sooner. The only thing I learned in school that was useful was typing, and that only took a couple of weeks.

Steve Russell

Truancy?

Brother Doyle, our very own Ragamuffin legislator and prosecutor,

I accidently spent more than 20 years in the Austin ISD as a special education teacher and counselor working with delinquent adolescents. In those capacities, I saw a lot of truancy offenders and worked on a continuous basis with school truant officers, parents, courts, et al. I also had a willful daughter who took a lengthy, unilateral and unscheduled sabbatical during high school. Besides, I personally spent many lovely days learning about such esoteric concepts as jazz in Mr. Murray’s record shop that would have otherwise been squandered being brainwashed at Highland Park High School.

My problem with your approach to this is that your initiative seems to place its ultimate emphasis on the stick, not the carrot. It’s also a one-size-fits-all approach. You may have been a prosecutor too long. Who were the 15 adults who had truancy charges filed against them? I would be willing to bet a sizeable sum that they were poor, single, unemployed, uneducated, unhealthy, possibly addicted or mentally ill and very largely dysfunctional for even their own care to begin with. Often the kids have far stronger personalities than these parents. Another large group of truants, often off the radar, are the teenage daughters of undocumented workers from underdeveloped countries where girls from poor and traditional families are sent to school for only a few years, if at all. Regardless of these parental shortcomings, the judge usually sees no improvement in the child’s situation by throwing his or her offending parent in jail. If they did, the state might have to assume full responsibility for the kid and they usually don’t have sufficient facilities. So, the criminal penalties are usually a toothless threat. What’s the point of fining somebody $200 a day when they don’t have money for rent or food or medical care or crack? And, as I am sure you are aware, the police on the beat are inherently less willing to devote their donut-eating time to messing around with adolescents skipping school who are especially hard to convict of anything, given the nature of juvenile courts.

I also wonder what are the long-term stats on truancy. I might be wrong, but I would hypothesize that as a social problem, truancy has a very long, consistent and persistent history, and the long-term trends are downward. Public education continues, as it has for decades, to partially educate, or at least supervise, an ever broader quotient of the general population. Most of those dropping out of its coverage are the rich going to private schools, who don’t want their kids fraternizing or being in a system burdened with special needs kids.

Problems with truancy are more effectively approached by helping failing parents meet their basic needs and by making schools more valuable and exciting places to be. Are the schools in Prince George’s County centers of adult education or community recreation programs when not in use by regular students?

Which leads to the question of why you latched on to truancy as a political priority. Is it really spiraling out of hand there? Might I also use this opportunity to suggest that while you are prioritizing, you devote some energy to countering the immeasurable social damage and impetus to crime that are the conspicuous results of the “war on drugs.”

In struggle from the easy chair,

David Hamilton

There are exceptions to every situation, Steve, and your situation may describe one. On the other hand, in our system, where a majority of students are poor and minority, few are hanging out at the library. Instead, what we have is a dropout culture of dead-ends that feeds on itself.

At some sociological level, it is all a symptom, perhaps, of the bankruptcy of modern society and the continuing reality of class structure, but that is a meaningless exercise in academic rationalization when it comes to figuring out what to do with a school system and 135,000 individual students, each of whom deserve as good an education as possible.

There is plenty of evidence that truancy breeds lack of opportunity, as well as continuing poverty and lack of opportunity. The truants, of course, don’t see it that way, but that is the reality at the end of the day for the vast majority. It is not good for them and it is not good for everyone around them who become the victims of wayward acts.

Yes, schools need to do a better of job of figuring out how to motivate and reach students who are being lost. We have 3,000 permanent ninth graders, for example. They are just putting in time till they drop out. But it is not that school leaders here (and in most places) are unaware of the problem. One of the positive things (and there aren’t many) about things like No Child Left Behind is that for the very first time, the reality of this is finally being measured. For decades, it was simply swept under the rug. Out of sight; out of mind.

It is all easy to talk about and incredibly hard to do. How do you motivate students whose entire life experience leaves them unresponsive? There are plenty of isolated examples of success, but when they are analyzed in any systematic way, it usually comes down to the quality of the people involved and their ability to motivate and inspire. Charisma is not a skill easily taught, however.

Holding parents “accountable” is not a magic solution. It won’t even work in many cases. But our experience so far shows that it does make a difference in a lot – maybe even the majority – of cases. That’s because it takes on the “culture” of truancy – the acceptance of it among students and parents. More than that, the rationalization of it.

In the end, no matter how we may want to romanticize it, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds have little sense of the world and their role in it. These are the ages when habits are formed and when decisions are made – by young people caught up in incredible changes – that determine their future in very real and practical ways.

I still believe it is better for them to be in school – even in a less than perfect environment – than hanging out on the street.

Doyle Niemann

— There is plenty of evidence that truancy breeds lack of opportunity, as well as continuing poverty and lack of opportunity. The truants, of course, don’t see it that way, but that is the reality at the end of the day for the vast majority. It is not good for them and it is not good for everyone around them who become the victims of wayward acts. —

Evidence? The research I’ve seen sets up schooling as a proxy for education. It’s as valid as the proxy. I was one of five high school dropouts in my top tier law school class. I run into dropout professors often enough that I no longer feel special.

— It is all easy to talk about and incredibly hard to do. How do you motivate students whose entire life experience leaves them unresponsive? There are plenty of isolated examples of success, but when they are analyzed in any systematic way, it usually comes down to the quality of the people involved and their ability to motivate and inspire. Charisma is not a skill easily taught, however. —

Indeed it does turn on the quality of people. And the numbers will tell you that education students (I was one, you know) are bottom feeders. Starting salaries for schoolteachers will tell you why.

One really bad consequence of opening the professions to women in the 70s was that women started going into the professions. I jest, sorta. In the old days you had really bright women becoming school teachers for lack of opportunity. Now they are doctors and lawyers and engineers and various kinds of researchers. Most of my grad students are women. That is good, but schoolteachers still get “women’s wages.” And we get what we pay for.

— Holding parents “accountable” is not magic solution. It won’t even work in many cases. But our experience so far shows that it does make a difference in a lot – maybe even the majority of cases. That’s because it takes on the “culture” of truancy – the acceptance of it among students and parents. More than that, the rationalization of it. —

I still say truancy is as rational as the public schools are irrational. My daughter the high school dropout computer nerd makes very good dough.

— In the end, no matter how we may want to romanticize it, 13, 14, 15-year olds have little sense of the world and their role in it. These are the ages when habits are formed and when decisions are made – by young people caught up in incredible changes – that determine their future in very real and practical ways. —

On the contrary, kids of that age have highly developed bullshit detectors. As anybody with your New Left history knows, the first step to knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want.

— I still believe it is better for them to be in school – even in less than perfect environment – than hanging out on the street. —

Doyle, my friend, I would absolutely agree with you if those were the choices.

Also, have you considered that the burden of enforcement, should there be enforcement, falls on single mothers who are told with the other side of the government’s mouth that they have to work rather than parent to get public assistance? And the grandparents like mine and the uncles and aunties who have tried to be the village it takes to raise a child?

May I make a very primitive suggestion? Primitive as in New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps. Put them to work doing fairly hard labor with booklearning on the side for those so inclined.

The problem is not “out of school.” The problem is crappy schools and lack of options. I created my own options. I guided my kids by not handing them bullshit. “If you want to drop out, that’s fine, but I want you to have a plan.”

Paul went back and got a diploma so he could get in the Marine Corps (!!!). Mary never did go back.

But I know lots of folks besides myself who are living proof of the irrelevance of schooling to education. Schools babysit. They keep kids off the streets. That is a good, but it’s far from a good that justifies punitive measures to maintain the monopoly on babysitting.

Steve Russell

There will be a little more. rdj

In re: the Science & Objectivity debate — has it never occurred to you that the whole of Marx could be reduced to the statement (not his) that, “The self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity?”

And if that’s fair — when did Marx ever speak in behalf of either “reason” or altruism? — why should you say that I “sound” like a YAFer? (Actually, I sound like a Texan, that being my accent.)

I suppose I could cite you various writings on Waco, but the principal one is “The Ashes of Waco,” Simon & Schuster 1995, Syracuse U. Press, circa 1998.

Dick J. Reavis

The main problem I see with the evolution versus inteligent design debate is that it’s all based on an “either-or” premise, when what’s really going on is an “and” situation. Evolution happens. Kammerer’s study of the midwife toad clearly shows the adaptability of a species to environment and mutations in various species can become part of that species’ DNA. But the question then arises, “Why evolution”? My answer is that it’s part of some plan created on a level we humans don’t grasp yet. I think that we’re experiencing the presence of the divine and the effects of evolution simultaneously. I also think that experiencing the divine is not confined to the limits of organized religion.

So now we come to the conflict within the parameters of Public Education about what constitutes religion and how the policy of separation of church and state factor into the mix and how do children learn, anyway, and how are they being taught? I see it as having a lot to do with fear. Fear that some more powerful entity will cut public school funding and cost principals and teachers their jobs. Fear that a child being kept back a year so he can really learn some basic, necessary tools for life (like reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic) will be permanently damaged and forever friendless by being stuck with some sort of negative label. Fear of job loss on the part of teachers if their classes don’t make the right scores on TASS and the other standardized tests that purport to measure learning. (How does one measure learning anyway? People learn different things in different ways. If I’d been taking an Algebra I class under today’s system, I’d have failed and been labelled “dumb in math” forever after). Fear adds yet another reason to dumb down the curriculum and get all in a knot over the ID v. Evolution debate. Fear should play no part in education. When students fear their teachers, they won’t ask questions, and if they don’t ask, they won’t learn. When teachers fear their principals, they become a force of negativity within the system. When parents bow to the “higher knowledge” of teachers and principals, they opt-out of being an alternative influence on their children and teach their children to accept whatever the established authority pronounces. As far as I’m concerned, if the subject is taught well, scoring well on the wretched test should be a piece of cake. (I had an innovative Algebra I teacher and after getting a D on the first report card went on to earn A’s thereafter).

So now it’s the loudest voice that carries the greatest weight, urging schools to take the appeasement route, purchase factually-incorrect textbooks loaded with misinformation, and allow teachers and principals to be god, rather than partners in the enterprise of learniing. Public schools are still using a “one-size fits all” approach to education and tend to dumb down the curriculum so that no child (or parent) feels discriminated against. Then there is all the resultant hoo-hah, because not only can Johnny not read, write, spell, punctuate, or know enough math to balance his checkbook, but he’s being done out of a college scholarship because all the Asian kids busted their butts in high school and made better grades! Teachers “teach the test” because the scores matter more than the information. It’s sick and loathsome!!!

When I was in public school in the days of yore, there was such a thing as an “excused absence.” Mom wrote a note to the teacher saying her child had the chicken pox or a strep throat or a broken leg or whatever, and there was no penalty. No such thing anymore. Have a cold? Too bad. Better come to class anyway because you’re allowed only five days’ absence per semester or your grade automatically drops. I bet this rule doesn’t apply to high school football players! This rule forces sick kids into the classroom, where they can infect the whole class. This rule turns kids into automotons who will carry over the lesson into the workplace and infect lots more folks with ever-more-resistant flu germs (they mutate/evolve, too). Our children are learning some Really Bad lessons from their public school experiences.

Not everyone can have a Greenbriar or some other alternative education experience. The next-best thing is for parents to get involved with their children’s education. Check the homework. Visit with the teachers and principals. Listen to what your kids have to say about school, teachers, homework, etc. Let the education demi-gods know that you care and that you’re watching. Give your kids books and access to more books. Make Rules And Enforce Them. And don’t automatically take the teacher’s word over your kid’s. There are bad teachers who have tenure/seniority and aren’t going to be fired no matter what. There are stupid teachers who take the easiest route until they’re entitled to retire with a miniscule pension. Parents have to be willing to fight for their kids’ rights to a good education. This path isn’t always the easiest path, but it’s a good path.

I spent the most intense 15 years of my life working with and for Greenbriar School. It’s the most political thing I’ve ever done. I served on every committee except the finance committee; I taught; I was one of the transportation gang; I vetted potential teachers, helped create publicity, was the in-town phone number for years. I saw kids develop a love of learning and the self-disciplinary tools to help them keep on learning for a lifetime. I saw kids develop respect for their teachers, not fear or derision. I saw kids grow into self-assured (not uppity)people who could work comfortably with those who had power over them. They’re out in the world right now, working, earning, making a difference because they see the world differently.

This is, sadly, not the case in public schools nowadays. Students (and their parents) expect to be promoted from grade to grade whether they merit it or not. Because of the directive to teach the test, school becomes all about what I call “regurgitation education,” where he who parrots best gets the best grade. What are these poorly-trained kids going to do if they do get into college and run into someone like Dr. Malof, who taught the American Literature class I took at UT a lifetime or so ago? Dr. Malof would come into class each day and scrawl a word on the chalkboard and that word was the focus of discussion. And he was looking for original thoughts. The rule was to not repeat anything anyone had said in class. Not Dr. Malof, not yourself, not any class member. Not from any discussion in class or from anything written in a paper or on a test. New ideas. New thoughts. Every class meeting and every test. I found it a fun challenge; today’s public school high-schoolers coming into such an environment probably will not. I feel sorry for them.

There is an outcry about the Asian influnce. It seems to take the position that by being successful in the public school reality, Asian students are denying non-Asian students their god-given right to promotion, honors, college scholarships, etc. What a delusion. It’s all about commitment to excellence, insistance on regular study-time, parental involvement, expectations, and leadership.

I’m really glad I don’t have children in the public school system. I’m worn out from meetings and the challenges inherent in making sure my kids grew up to be good people. If time rolled back, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat, however.

And now I’ve nattered on enough. For those of you who have heard me say “don’t get me started on education”, this is what I meant.

Kate Braun

Most, but not all, of the research on complex adaptive systems has focused on ecological systems and, yes, it’s been an orgy of mathematical modelers spawning stuff that’s not real helpful to community organizers. But there are some gradually-emerging and fascinating parallels that do provide insights into the workings of human systems (social, economic, political.) What are the characteristics in those systems that promote adaptability to changing circumstances, resilience, a critical level of stability, creativity, etc.?

The folks associated with Santa Fe Institute are often ground zero for a lot of this thinking, but if you’re looking for clues about its possible political applications — and if you’re a non-technical, generalist schmuck, such as myself — I’d recommend reading “Panarchy,” edited by Lance Gunderson and Buzz Holling. It’s a pretty accessible read and makes some cool points. And I think the emerging hypotheses about what seems to work best are pretty consistent with the values that most of us hold.

Dennis Fitzgerald

No, Marx would not have said that “the self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity.” He might have said “the interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity,” but this is different. Group interest and self-interest are not equivalent.

Whether Marx ever spoke on behalf of reason is irrelevant, as he certainly used reason. I don’t see what altruism has to do with any of this. I’m not arguing for altruism.

OK, you REASON like a YAFfer, then. I was speaking loosely. But, if you are laboring under the illusion that self-interest and group interest are the same thing, I take it back. In that case, you are just confused.

I will look for your book. BTW, do you have access to the transcripts of negotiations between Koresh and the FBI?

Gavan Duffy

Where do you live? I gave my transcripts to the Texas Writers Collection at Texas State University, San Marcos (the former Southwest Texas State.) You can look at them there. I think audio tapes are floating around, maybe available on the net.

Some people hear things in them that the transcribers–and my ears–don’t discern. I think I’m the only journalist who ever read the transcripts, and none that I know of listened to the tapes.

Now, tell me: where does Marx distinguish between self-interest and group interest? It seems to me that even as early as the German Ideology, he says that the driving force of history is that we have to eat to live.

It’s individuals who have to eat. Groups can’t eat for them.

Dick J. Reavis

In a remarkable display of brevity others might emulate, Dick summarizes his position with the quote, “The self-interest of the working class is the best hope of humanity?” Please explain how that constitutes a “throwback to PLP?”

Incidentally, Dick wrote a cool book about Mexican political culture called “Conversations with Moctezuma,” which I recommend.

David Hamilton

Who said anything about a “throwback to PL?” I admit that PL threw me out, but there aren’t enough soldiers in any army to throw me back.

Dick J. Reavis

Geez, don’t y’all remember anything from the old days? Reality is those illusions which stay put!
On a more serious note, I am intrigued by Dennis’s statements:

“In the overall scheme of things, what’s best for us is best for me (or, at least, for the collective me’s, if not necessarily and always me personally) and, by implication, vice versa.”

“… it is a failure of reason not to recognize that the decimation of Africa’s population (to cite just one example) is not in my long-term, flourishing self-interest. And it is a failure of reason not to recognize that an inequitable distribution of power (i.e., the potential for exercising force) is not in my long-term self-interest.”

It would be very pleasant to believe these things. On what basis, Dennis, do you assert them? What’s your reasoning?

Bill Meacham

Here’s one quote from another of Dick’s postings: “I insist that what I want is, ipso facto, what’s best for humanity, and further, that if everybody respected himself or herself in the same way, the world would not be run by Halliburton.” The first clause is PLP tactically, if not philosophically. The rest of the quote is idealistic at best.

Beyond that, Dick’s earlier discussion of “brute force” is exactly where I draw the line. Maybe I am misreading, but it sounded like pre-emptive war to me, and it certainly sounded — again — like PLP tactics. The end does not justify the means. A means is an end in itself, whatever the later results. A means must be engaged only if it is consistent with (our) reasonable principles. Self-defense is the only allowable violence. Otherwise, we have met the enemy, and it is us.
As to the particular quote in your message above, you know that I agree with that. Want to talk about the details?

Paul Spencer

I live in New York, upstate and down.

A few years ago, I found someone who claimed to have tapes, but my messages to him went unanswered. I may not be able to resurrect the old mail, as I think it’s on a long-dead computer.
I don’t know that Marx ever explicitly distinguished self-interest and group interest, but I doubt he was ever sufficiently careless to conflate them.

I recognize (without citation to chapter and verse) that Marx wanted workers to develop class consciousness, or to take as their own the interest of their class. True enough. That he recognized the existence of “false consciousness,” seems to me, indicates that he recognized the distinction between self-interest and group interest. In the intervening century and a half, at any rate, we’ve learned a lot more about identification than was available to Marx. We know, for instance, that people are capable of identifying with multiple groups simultaneously. At one and the same time, one can identify oneself with one’s class, one’s religion, one’s ethnicity, one’s alma mater, one’s favorite baseball team, etc. You yourself have identified yourself as a journalist, a member of the working class, a Texan, etc.

So you have a personal identity that differs from these various group identities and thus a personal interest that differs (at least sometimes, like when they clash) from the interests of these groups. Anyway, because so very few can so completely identify themselves with a group that they cannot distinguish between the group’s interest and their own, I’m unwilling to give up the distinction.

Bill, you forgot these…
Reality is a mescaline deficiency.
Reality is a policy phased out in the Eisenhower administration.

Gavan Duffy

I thought somebody might challenge that. Right on, Bill!

To save everyone else the hassle of scrolling to the bottom of this, I previously wrote “… it is a failure of reason not to recognize that the decimation of Africa’s population (to cite just one example) is not in my long-term, flourishing self-interest. And it is a failure of reason not to recognize that an inequitable distribution of power (i.e., the potential for exercising force) is not in my long-term self-interest.”

Then Bill replied, “It would be very pleasant to believe these things. On what basis, Dennis, do you assert them? What’s your reasoning?” So, okay, what’s the reasoning behind such grandiose expansions of my self-interest? Brace yourselves! BUT, before we start, understand that I and even that selfish Dick guy are far too selfless and enlightened to be moved by any of this.

These are simply arguments you can use with Republican yahoos. As I said, I think the rapid and likely unstoppable expansion of globalization is a critical factor in the expanded reach of my self-interest. The net results of globalization may thus far have served mainly to bolster my privileged economic position, but can I reasonably expect that I and my children and my grandchildren (assuming my two picky daughters eventually find mates) will continue to be immune to the catastrophic difficulties “over there?”

Epidemics such as AIDS are now global issues. The pace of international travel means that massive epidemics in one place constitute a threat in every place. And don’t count on a magic vaccine to save us. Those millions of HIV-positive Africans are generating mutated strains of the virus faster than medical science can run.

Combating such epidemics not only makes good sense from a defensive self-interest standpoint, it can also yield some surprising benefits. For example, I saw a news report recently about the discovery of two long-time African sex workers (Sudanese, I think) who not only did not have AIDS but who, alone among all their co-workers, were shown not to be HIV-positive – despite having had unprotected sex with probably hundreds of infected men. Researchers were very excitedly trying to find out whether there was an antibody or something else in the women’s chemistry that was giving them immunity.

This is potentially the human variation of the benefits we have historically derived from ethno-botanists’ research into the medicinal uses of various plants in far-away places. Bottom line: that’s not just a bunch of poor black people over there, that’s a storehouse of ancient genetic diversity that could benefit all of us in ways we can’t even imagine. Saving them is in my self-interest.

Then there are the issues of poverty, starvation and government corruption. Not my problem? Those conditions create ideal breeding grounds for drug, crime and terrorist syndicates. Anyone can recognize that it would be dangerous if a neighboring state were taken over in some way by organized or disorganized crime, but it ought to be clear even to Republican reasoning that today all the world is, potentially at least, our neighbor.

Is it reasonable to assume that only Muslim Africans might be inclined to terrorism? Can we reasonably assume that none of the rest are ever going to violently object to the fact that the US appears willing to bomb people but not to feed them? Poverty is the ultimate systemic threat facing humanity. Even the former head of the IMF, Michael Camdessus, has been quoted as saying that the widening gaps between rich and poor nations are potentially socially explosive. If the poor are left hopeless, he said, poverty will undermine societies through confrontation, violence and civil disorder. People will not fade away quietly, and in one way or another we will all be sucked into their despair.

Finally, there is the economic aspect. The self-interest case may be a bit weaker here, but it’s legitimate and likely to become more significant in the near future. Even excluding South Africa, U.S. agricultural exports to sub-Saharan Africa reached almost $600 million between 1990 and 1996 – well above the total to all of Central and Eastern Europe. More significantly, Africa is also an important source of strategic minerals and other natural resources, and an important supplier of oil to the U.S. (projected to increase to 25% by 2015). It would be no simple job maintaining access to those resources in the midst of civil chaos and terrorist strikes.

Africa’s real economic potential, however, lies in its human resources – as producers and consumers. With some other countries, notably China, emerging as economic powerhouses, US exports are going to be facing increasingly stiff competition. The US already is grappling with a growing and unsustainable trade deficit. The prospects for larger African markets may look pretty weak today, but growing rather than diminishing prosperity there defintely would be in our future economic self-interest.

Ah… it’s past midnight, I’m running out of steam here, and I haven’t even got to the second part – the inequitable distribution of power thing. It seems logical to me that a broad and equitable distribution of power tends to create a far more stable and resilient system than does a concentration of power. (The bigger they are, the harder they fall.) And it logically would seem to be in my self-interest that the institutions I rely on be stable and resilient. I would also reason that that this is true whether you’re talking about political, economic or military power – or at least I would try to reason that out if I weren’t so tired. How about if we let one of our comrades tackle the reasoning on this one? And if nobody agrees with me, I’m going to take steps to revoke every one of your Wobbly memberships.

Dennis Fitzgerald

There will be more to this series. rdj

Maybe you have no time for all this, as you say in the last line of your post, because you complicate things and it takes a long time to sort them out, attributing ideas to scholars, tracing the geneology of ideas and generally taking an academic approach.

After conceeding much of what I say, you start making a case for reason. “If we give up on reason, on what basis do we set policy?” you ask in a quite rhetorical way.

Maybe you look for reason to uphold you, but I wouldn’t expose myself to that.

Reason, if such exists, was on the side of racial integration, but white folks in the South, who could ostensibly have been reached by reason, never did properly come around. What brought down segregation was not reason but the self-interest of black folks, their willingness to rebel in pursuit of their interests, and among other things, the self-interest of the Soviets and their willingness to propagandize the existence of racism in the U.S. : i.e., brute force and the threat of it, domestic and foreign.

The Vietnam war was not “reasonable.” What ended it was the brute force of the Vietnamese people, with backing from the Soviets, not any reasoning in the imperial country, which is repeating the error in Iraq, because reason is puny.

No “we” on this list sets any social policy, as you suggest. The System’s “reasonable men” do that: is it that you want to qualify as a candidate for their number?

Were I to be able to set social policy, my guide would not be “reason” by itself or “truth” or “science” either. It would be: what´s good for me, what kind of world do I want? (Call that Desire if you want; with that word you can start a whole new geneological-historical exposition.)
Reason is polite and fine, but, as winner or loser, give me self-interest and brute force any day! With those as my guides, the world seems “reasonable.”

Everbody is pursuing his or her own self-interest and those who garner the most brute force for their interests, win.

Dick J. Reavis

Wow. What strikes me most about your case against reason is how you use reason to articulate it. Do you not recognize that you refute your argument in the very act of making it?

Now, I agree that many heinous things have been done historically in the name of reason. This is not the fault of reason, but of the heinous people who evoke reason to rationalize actions motivated by self-interest and enabled by their access to brute force.

You should direct your argument against the use of reason to rationalize self-interest, not against reason itself. The appropriate remedy for the misappropriation of reason is to use reason to expose it. You have done this, and it’s what post-modernist social critics typically do. I have no problem with it, so far as it goes (it doesn’t go far enough, in my view, because it offers no alternative). But to lay the blame on reason seems wholly inappropriate. You want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I take your point about the importance of action to realize racial integration in the South. No amount of reason can convince some people. But, in order to take those actions, a mass political constituency had to be mobilized. Civil rights leaders used reason to do that. Appeals to self-interest wouldn’t do, owing to the compelling self-interest of prospective participants to free-ride on the civil rights movement — to enjoy the benefits of its success without contributing to the costs of attaining that success. If the civil rights leaders relied on the self-interest of their constituents, there would not have been a civil rights movement, much less a successful one.
This problem — the free-rider problem — is the reason your appeal to self-interest is mistaken. When we rely on self-interest, small groups that can easily police their membership to prevent free-riding tend to form, while large groups that cannot police their members do not. This is why producers of goods are organized, while consumers of goods are not. It’s why teachers are organized, while students are not, etc. I expect you already know this anyway. In any event, you should reconsider your appeal to self-interest in light of it.

By the “we” who set social policy, I mean “all of us.” I’m not naive enough to presume that we live in a democracy, but I’m not cynical enough to deny that we can have voice, should we choose to exercise it.

I would want your “what’s good for me” maxim for “what best promotes human flourishing.” Your maxim is the one that has produced all the ills you enumerate. Mine is the norm that should (if it doesn’t) motivate inquiry, social and natural.

See Bacon, Wittgenstein, and (Hilary) Putnam.

I won’t apologize for taking an academic approach, as that pays the bills around here.

Gavan Duffy

Ah, Duffer, you soar with the eagles. What fun that you’re occasionally willing to take time from your busy schedule to swoop down and shred a few of us groundlings.

But, hey, boy-o! Some of us ain’t going down without a struggle (as you’ve already noticed). Being a journalist, and therefore more practiced at brevity than you academic types, I have just four points.

First, you can stop grappling with postmodernism. It’s dead. PoMo performed a useful function in destroying the metanarrative of modernism (and it was never designed to be anything but a deconstructive force, so don’t hassle the pig for its failure to give good milk), but now that PoMo has effectively done its work, it’s finished. We’ve begun moving into construction of the next story. Difficult to say what our next metanarrative might be, but my guess is that it’s likely to be fueled by some of the insights being gleaned from research into complex adaptive systems. Anyway, better to invest your limited time in that construction work than flogging a dead horse. A lot of people haven’t recognized PoMo’s death yet because they’re distracted by all the residual zombies of modernism — the walking dead — some of them in high places.

Practical advice. There’s widespread agreement that you can’t kill a zombie, because it’s already dead, but you can permanently disable it by cutting off the head. (In case Bert Gerding is still watching, that is only a figurative allusion, Bert.)

Second, reality. I won’t quibble too much with your words, because I think you’re pretty much on target. Most consciousness theory these days acknowledges that while “the truth” is probably out there, our view of that is just so much amateur homebrew. It is (and probably always will be) largely inaccessible to us. But, as you suggest, there’s no point in going all grumpy about that. Better to dance with the one what brung ya than to sit there sulkin’ because you can’t get nowheres close to the prom queen.

Third, truth. I kind of hate that word. Mostly because it’s always shacked up with belief, and belief is so riddled with insecurity that it becomes completely obsessed with stomping out the non-believers and contrary-believers. Humility is in order. Better to acknowledge that all this truth stuff is just so many aging hypotheses, many of them still doing useful work, but generally just hanging on until they’re forced into retirement by some younger, more vigorous hypothesis. Even all the supposedly factual data and observations that support our hypotheses… homebrew at the end of the day. But, again, drink up. No margin in going thirsty all night. Just don’t get all huffy about this brew’s being the end-all and be-all.

Fourth, reason. Aw, shit! Now I’m going to be camped out somewheres apparently closer to that Reavis guy than to you, Duffer. But maybe only apparently. I’m not sure you’re actually contradicting each other. We’re talking about an appropriate instrument for managing human systems. Dick says self-interest and force are the prime movers. You counter that that’s exactly our problem. And that we need to let go of the “what’s good for me” maxim in favor of “what best promotes human flourishing” — i.e., the application of reason. But, hold on now, didn’t we already establish that there’s a synergy between those two a few millennia ago? In the overall scheme of things, what’s best for us is best for me (or, at least, for the collective me’s, if not necessarily and always me personally) and, by implication, vice versa. Clumsily applied as it often is, collective human self-interest rules. And it rules by force — consensually in the better circumstances but, in any case, inevitably. Are we collectively flourishing? Qualitative aspects aside, just ask all those extinct species we’ve elbowed out of the way to create more parking space. Will we continue to flourish — and hopefully to flourish in better as well as (or perhaps instead of) bigger ways? That’s where you and Dick ought to be able to find some common ground. Especially in our rapidly globalizing reality (so-called), it is a failure of reason not to recognize that the decimation of Africa’s population (to cite just one example) is not in my long-term, flourishing self-interest. And it is a failure of reason not to recognize that an inequitable distribution of power (i.e., the potential for exercising force) is not in my long-term self-interest. I think there’s no contradiction, at least in the longer term, between self-interest and applied reason. We’ve just gotta disable some of those zombies who can’t figure out how to put the two together in a more effective fashion. (Figuratively, Bert, figuratively!)

Dennis Fitzgerald

How I’ve enjoyed this discussion. None of us are as far apart as we might presume, and the talk is still civil!

I especially enjoyed Fitzgerald’s post: I wish I could write like that! The first mention of Gerding really had me laughing.

On another subject: I don’t know how many people know me or have kept up with me, but in 1995 I wrote the book of record about what happened at Waco with David Koresh and the FBI. I said that the FBI negligently killed innocent people, and that the press bought the government’s story rather than studying the events. I was effectively blacklisted, couldn’t find a job for three years and am still suspect. Some of my liberal friends decided that I’d finally gone around the bend (others may have decided that of late!)

Well, on Nov. 11, 2005, in Hempstead, N.Y., according to the New York Times, Bill Clinton said that he’d changed his mind about Waco. He said:

“I think we made a mistake letting the forces go into Waco instead of waiting them out, and I will always regret that. This is another thing you need to analyze as President: When do you take your experts’ advice and when do you do what you think is right? How do you know when to follow your gut and when do you listen to others? I think the answer is when your gut feels strong, and when it’s an area you know something too. If you’re blind ignorant then you ought to listen to someone else, and if you don’t have a real strong feeling. I had a real strong feeling. I dealt with problems like Waco when I was Governor and we should have waited them out. Janet Reno was new on the job. She got enormous pressure from the FBI to go ahead and go in there. And I am responsible for that, because I told her if that’s what they want to do and she thought it was right. It was a mistake and I am responsible. And that’s not one of those things you get A for effort on.”

I just learned of Clinton’s recantation tonight. It’s been a good night for me!

Dick J. Reavis

My point about saying that I have no time for this: I knew you would respond forcing me to respond, etc. I really can’t get that involved. I am not retired, Dennis.

Here are some BRIEF responses to Dennis.

— First, you can stop grappling with postmodernism. —

Postmodernism has always been at the margins, where it wants to be. But it’s hardly dead. As neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism.

— Difficult to say what our next metanarrative might be, but my guess is that it’s likely to be fueled by some of the insights being gleaned from research into complex adaptive systems. —

Do you mean John Holland and friends? If so, I’m skeptical. Genetic algorithms, neural nets and the like are pretty good at learning. The trouble is this: when you open them up and inspect them, all you see are a bunch of nodes (or units or whatever you want to call them) and some weights governing their interactions. That doesn’t comprise a theory or anything else that can be expressed propositionally. So what good is it?

— Anyway, better to invest your limited time in that construction work than flogging a dead horse. —

I do this in my work. But this is the Raglist.

— Practical advice. There’s widespread agreement that you can’t kill a zombie, because it’s already dead, but you can permanently disable it by cutting off the head. —

Now you’ve become incoherent.

— Second, reality. —

We are all blind pilgrims feeling our way through the world. We are so susceptible to illusion (and delusion) that we must consult one another. What we call “true” is just what coheres with everything else we think is “true.” But we may have it wrong, so we must be prepared to give it up. We are more prepared to give up propositions on the periphery of our knowledge than those nearer to the core. But we are always prepared to give up any proposition, if in doing so we advance the global coherence of our knowledge.

— Third, truth. —

Well, yes, I agree. But I will insist that there’s a truth to the matter, regardless of whether we know what it is. Else, it would make no sense to seek a truth of the matter or to posit truthful claims.

— Fourth, reason. —

No. The individual pursuit of self-interest does not necessarily maximize collective self-interest. At some point, those initially successful in attaining their interests enhance their chances even more by exploiting others.

— Clumsily applied as it often is, collective human self-interest rules. —

Even collectively, people organize into competing groups. If by “self” in “self-interest” you mean “all of humanity present and future,” then there may be no difference between pursuing self-interest and promoting human flourishing. I can’t see how you can posit that equivalence though.

Maybe you are confounded by my use of “promoting human flourishing,” which, by the way, is a phrase of Wittgenstein’s. By this I mean (and I take Wittgenstein to mean) the flourishing of all of humanity, not of particular individuals and groups.

Bentham identified the good as the sum of returns to expected utility for all persons present and future (where utility is total pleasures minus total pains, recognizing that for some pain is pleasurable.) But this doesn’t work, because we maximize that sum by allowing the better-off to exploit the worse-off. We get justice, argues John Rawls, only if we attenuate Bentham’s conception by arranging inequalities such that the prospects of even the worst off in society are still improving. This implies that we lower aggregate returns to expected utility (or collective self-interest) to achieve fairness for the worst-off members of society. Yet this ENHANCES human flourishing because it removes the incentive of the worst off to destroy society altogether. This is the liberal argument at least. Whatever you think of it, it trumps the Benthamite self-interest argument that you and Dick appear to advocate. Dammit, I’m not being brief.

— And it rules by force — consensually in the better circumstances but, in any case, inevitably. —

Being responsible caretakers of the environment promotes human flourishing. Making them extinct to create parking spaces does not.

— Will we continue to flourish — and hopefully to flourish in better as well as (or perhaps instead of) bigger ways? That’s where you and Dick ought to be able to find some common ground. —

You can create these recognitions only through the application of reasoned argumentation. But these aren’t failures of reason. They’re failures of people to use reason.

— I think there’s no contradiction, at least in the longer term, between self-interest and applied reason. —

There’s no contradiction if you redefine the terms so that they’re more or less equivalent. That’s what you seem to be doing here. Yes, it is in every individual’s long-term self-interest to promote human flourishing. But that’s not what Dick meant by self-interest. He meant what’s good for Dick.

Anyway, Dennis, Go tell it to Halliburton.

When I worked for KPFT, I had occasion to interview George Brown, founder of Brown and Root, now a main subsidiary of Halliburton. I asked Brown if he regretted building the tiger cages for use in the Vietnam War. I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “No, whatever the Navy wants us to build, we build it.” Now there’s self-interest.

I apologize for being more didactic than brief.

Gavan Duffy

I feel almost insulted by Mr. Duffy, who says, “it is in every individual’s long-term self-interest to promote human flourishing. But that’s not what Dick meant by self-interest. He meant what’s good for Dick.”

What? My self-interest is not the universal self-interest of humanity? Isn’t it patent that I represent all of humanity? How could any reasonable person doubt that?

I insist that what I want is, ipso facto, what’s best for humanity, and further, that if everybody respected himself or herself in the same way, the world would not be run by Halliburton.

These guys on top blind us by getting us to believe in things like “reason” instead of our own self-interests.

Dick J. Reavis

— Do you mean John Holland and friends? If so, I’m skeptical. Genetic algorithms, neural nets and the like are pretty good at learning. The trouble is this: when you open them up and inspect them all you see are a bunch of nodes (or units or whatever you want to call them) and some weights governing their interactions. That doesn’t comprise a theory or anything else that can be expressed propositionally. So what good is it? —

A much more fruitful source of emergent-systems theory is the work of Stuart A. Kauffman (collected in “The Origins of Order” and popularized in “At Home in the Universe,”) which uses chaos theory to explain the emergence of qualitative and structural system features that are inaccessible to incremental adaptation. While Kauffman’s primary focus is on biology, his coherent-novelty-out-of-chaos analysis explains a great deal about revolutions, political or cultural. (I applied it to education in this.)

Hunter Ellinger

Chaos theory never got very far in political “science,” although there was a group at Wisconsin-Milwaukee that was very into it.

Systems theory needs revitalization in the social sciences generally. The trouble was that the cold warriors got ahold of it and mistakenly (perhaps on purpose) construed societies as closed systems. So they focused on homeostatic “pattern maintenance” — maintaining current equilibria, or the status quo — instead of change, homeorhesis.

Exceptions are Karl W. Deutch’s “The Nerves of Government.” Also, Walter Dean Burnham on political realignments. Deutsch is long dead, but Burnham is emeritus at UT and lives in Austin. I was a student of both, years ago, and helped recruit Burnham at UT.

I am reminded also of Ilya Prigogine, the Nobelist, I believe, in biochemistry, who when he was alive would enthusiastically regale all who would listen about order-from-chaos and dissipative structures outside the PCL at UT.

Gavan Duffy

I have no idea what any of you are talking about these days, but I find it highly amusing. A free dinner to the person who can explain it to me so that I understand.

Lori J. Hansel

I’m fairly sure that your remark is facetious, but I’ll give you my take anyway.

Gavan says that Reason is a good approach to life, and we should use it more. Dick says that this approach will waste our time; let’s just go for it. Think old-school SDS intellectuals (Hayden, Thiher, Calvert) vs. PLP; praxis-axis vs. action-faction.

Alan says that self-interest is equivalent to navel-contemplation. Dennis wants to avoid a conspiracy-to-murder rap. Hunter is trying to move the discussion toward a dialectical synthesis (i.e., take the best parts of the debate and move forward.) Michael wants to look for political/philosophical/moral progress in technical progress.

Do I get dinner?

I have enjoyed the Ragstaff letters, and this has been the most fun of the whole list. I stand with Gavan, Alan, Dennis, Hunter, and Michael (dialectical synthesis.) I am certainly glad that Gavan has taken the time to be didactic with us.

I’ve been reading Reavis for 30 years, and I am amazed that he would throw back to PLP at this juncture. At any rate I agreed with him about Waco, and I’m glad that he sees vindication now.

Paul Spencer

These bumper stickers were compiled by Jerry Paull, a former Methodist minister in Lakeside, Ohio, who writes: “The following actual bumper stickers are now on cars. I didn’t write any of them. I’m only the messenger. If they make you laugh, good. If they make you cry, good.”

*AT LEAST IN VIETNAM, BUSH HAD AN EXIT STRATEGY

*BLIND FAITH IN BAD LEADERSHIP IS NOT PATRIOTISM

*IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

*IF YOU SUPPORTED BUSH, A YELLOW RIBBON WON’T MAKE UP FOR IT

*POVERTY, HEALTH CARE & HOMELESSNESS ARE MORAL ISSUES

*OF COURSE IT HURTS. YOU’RE GETTING SCREWED BY AN ELEPHANT

*BUSH LIED, AND YOU KNOW IT

*RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM: A THREAT ABROAD, A THREAT AT HOME

*GOD BLESS EVERYONE (No exceptions)

*BUSH SPENT YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY ON HIS WAR

*PROAMERICA, ANTI BUSH

*WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?

*IF YOU SUPPORT BUSH’S WAR, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? SHUT UP AND SHIP OUT

*FEEL SAFER NOW?

*I’D RATHER HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO SCREWED HIS INTERN THAN ONE WHO SCREWED HIS COUNTRY

*JESUS WAS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST – THAT IS, A LIBERAL

*MY VALUES? FREE SPEECH. EQUALITY. LIBERTY. EDUCATION. TOLERANCE

*IS IT 2008 YET?

*DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM — Thomas Jefferson

*DON’T BLAME ME. I VOTED AGAINST BUSH — TWICE!

*ANNOY A CONSERVATIVE; THINK FOR YOURSELF

*VISUALIZE IMPEACHMENT

*HEY BUSH! WHERE’S BIN LADEN?

*CORPORATE MEDIA = MASS MIND CONTROL

*STOP MAD COWBOY DISEASE!

*GEORGE W. BUSH: MAKING TERRORISTS FASTER THAN HE CAN KILL THEM

*KEEP YOUR THEOCRACY OFF MY DEMOCRACY

*DEMOCRATS ARE SEXY. WHOEVER HEARD OF A GOOD PIECE OF ELEPHANT?

*ASPIRING CANADIAN

*CORPORATE MEDIA: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION

*DON’T CONFUSE DYING FOR OIL WITH FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

*STEM CELL RESEARCH IS PRO LIFE

*HATE, GREED, IGNORANCE: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

*HONOR OUR TROOPS – DEMAND THE TRUTH

*REBUILD IRAQ? WHY NOT SPEND 87 BILLION ON AMERICA?

*FACT: BUSH OIL
1999 – $19 BARREL
2006 – $70 BARREL

*THE LAST TIME RELIGION CONTROLLED POLITICS, PEOPLE GOT BURNED AT THE STAKE

*I’LL GIVE UP MY CHOICE WHEN JOHN ROBERTS GETS PREGNANT

*SUPPORT OUR TROOPS – IMPEACH BUSH

This is the inauguration of a new weekly column. Everyone is invited to play. Since we all have to eat, my philosophy has always been that we may as well eat like royalty. It doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming to do so these days, and farmers’ markets have made our cooking lives a joy. So here’s the newest game in town.

Richard Jehn

Star Wars Ribs (Wuxi Paigu)

This is almost fun to prepare as the kitchen aromas are intoxicating. The Chinese name can be translated as “Vinegar Stewed Pork Ribs” if you want. The recipe is changed significantly from the one I read in Saveur. If I were to give it a more traditional English language name, it would be “Asian Braised Ribs,” but I like the “Star Wars” thing for what I hope is an obvious reason.

1-3/4 pounds country pork ribs, excess fat removed
Fresh-ground pepper
3 whole star anise
2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven, season the ribs with pepper, then add them and the anise pods to the hot oil. Brown the ribs on all sides, then add:

2 tablespoons fresh ginger, minced (or 2 teaspoons dried)
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/2 cup mirin (sweet rice wine)

Reduce the wine until almost gone, five minutes, then add:

1/4 cup soya sauce
1-1/4 cups no-salt chicken stock (homemade from leftover barbequed chicken makes it really good)
1 small Spanish onion, diced

Simmer this mixture, uncovered, for half an hour, then add:

1/2 cup red wine vinegar
More pepper to taste

Simmer the ribs for about 1-1/2 hours, covered, skim fat, then add:

1 tablespoon sugar

Simmer 30 minutes (but no more than 1 hour), covered, until very tender, then remove cover and allow liquid to reduce until thickened, about 15 minutes.

Serve with rice and steamed peas, and generously ladle sauce over the ribs and rice. Garnish with diced scallions.

This summer the Denver Justice and Peace Committee finally became convinced to risk sponsoring one of our benefit Maya textile sales. Back to Colorado one more time. And while there, it’s only natural that one would take advantage of the opportunity to commune with a bit of nature, which they have in such splendid profusion. The Denver sale made money for the Committee, but Sally had to catch a plane back to Austin just beforehand to start work on a new TV series. This wilderness backpacking trip would be accomplished alone, so it would be judicious just to go back to the old familiar Conundrum Hot Springs, a popular trail that I have hiked many times before. Besides, it’s hard to beat. The Conundrum Hot Springs may be the ultimate wilderness thermal hot springs. For me, the springs have become a regular pilgrimage site. With eight to 10 visits over the past 33 years, I claim the record for the number of visits by a flatlander. But over those years, the culture and atmosphere around those remote springs has either radically changed or I have or both.

The Conundrum Hot Springs are located in the Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness Area between Aspen and Crested Butte. By far, the easiest access is to hike up Conundrum Creek from the Aspen side. From Aspen, go west on Colorado 82 across the Castle Creek bridge on the western edge of town to the traffic circle, where you take the Castle Creek Road about three miles to the Conundrum Creek Road on the right. You follow that as it turns from pavement to good dirt road to bad dirt road for a distance of about a mile, which brings you to the end of the road and the trailhead. From there, it’s about nine and a half miles uphill on a strenuous trail to the springs, with an elevation gain of about 3,000 feet. The springs sit at about 11,600 feet, in an alpine meadow that in July is a sea of wildflowers. At that elevation, you are just below the tree line and the spruce and the fir have already thinned out and become stunted on exposed ridges. The meadow is laced with little hot streams oozing from the ground. Some of these outflows have been dug out and dammed to create a series of pools. The largest is 15-18 feet in diameter and up to three feet deep with water of more than 100 degrees bubbling up in the middle.

The springs are located in the center of a cirque, at the head of the valley surrounded on three sides by towering peaks, with the drainage of Conundrum Creek stretching off to the north. The surrounding ridgeline seldom drops below 13,000 feet and is crowned by Castle Peak, Conundrum Peak and Pyramid Peak, all above 14,000 feet. Along the ridge to the east of the valley is Electric Pass, once the tallest “pass” in Colorado with a hiking trail through it, a trail now no longer maintained by the Forest Service and therefore gone. It earned its name with lightning strikes on summer afternoons and hence they don’t want you to go that way.

Walking up the Conundrum Creek valley, you cross the creek four times by the time you get to the hot springs. The first two crossings have double log bridges with handrails. No spills, no thrills, but lovely to watch the water rush by from midstream. The third crossing is just a shallow ford where you have to wade the creek. Best to change briefly to the Tevas there to save untreated hiking boots from saturation. The last crossing is only about 25 yards from the main pool of the springs. Until recently it was a single log, worn somewhat flat on top, 18 inches in diameter, 15 feet long and four feet above the very fast, very cold stream. For the acrophobe, this last crossing was cruel. Having busted your butt to get up there, now you had a serious balance test with the springs in sight, languid bathers watching, doubtless prepared to smirk at the slightest hesitation. Testosterone time.

This summer’s trek to the springs was unique in that I went alone for the first time. Once started I was quickly reminded that wilderness hiking alone is fundamentally different from wilderness hiking with other people. There is no back up. You must not slip and sprain an ankle. Your margin for error is very much diminished and every responsibility is yours. A cell phone that worked in remote mountain valleys might partially mitigate the problem, but I don’t have one. Besides, going into the wilderness with a cell phone has an oxymoronic quality. The situation demands caution, alertness and judiciousness and no smoking before the springs.

Considering my advanced age, I decided to buy a high tech, telescoping, titanium walking stick in Aspen before departure, the first time I have ever hiked with such a device. After this experience, it will forever be among my essential hiking equipment. It’s essentially a cane, principally useful for balance. This sometimes very steep and rocky trail made obvious its utility, if not its necessity. By the time I finished the hike, it was clear that I would never do this again without one. But my fancy cane was also a continuous reminder that previously I had been able to do without it and of one potential negative aspect of my future life as an actual elderly person.

Since I had a large pile of Maya textiles that some might consider valuable in the camper, I asked the nice young lady who sold me this walking aid if there were any theft issues with cars at the trailhead. She said that the problem there was not people, even considering my several inflammatory bumper stickers, which she assured me, might instead earn anonymous garlands of wildflowers on my hood. The problem was bears that were increasingly moving into the area and developing the habit of breaking out car windows to get to good-smelling stuff inside. So what do you do with the food you don’t carry? And what do you say to Mister Bear when you meet on the trail carrying your food not enclosed in bear canisters? Especially if you are alone and thus exponentially less able to “look big.” On the previous hike up to the hot springs, Sally had heard what was very likely a bear on the trail going up. I bought a loud whistle to go with the hiking stick.

One result of these ruminations was the desire to make it all the way up to the springs in one day. Near the springs, there are many established campsites and usually a bunch of pretty cool people. The idea was that the same species in large numbers equals security. No camping alone somewhere half way up to break up the hike, a practice I often had followed previously when hiking with inexperienced companions not enamored of the joys of stress walking. This time, the plan was hot springs or bust.

Bears will focus your mind that way. Some have said that without bears, there is no wilderness. Wilderness should humble you and for the essential experience, you need a little competition for the peak of the food chain. There also was the “can I still do it?” factor, a perpetual problem of the aging ego. The judgement is that without the new cane, the answer might have been a resounding no. Going up this time took more than seven hours. No matter how well I paced myself, that was way at the outer limits of my endurance. I tried to walk systematically for 50 minutes and rest 10. It quickly became apparent that 10-minute breaks were not enough time to eat trail food, drink water, get out the poncho because it’s starting to rain, spray on more bug spray to deter the deer flies, doctor nascent blisters, etc., and rest. Then 50 minutes became hard to sustain. Break times lengthened and walking time shortened. During the last half hour stage, I was staggering under my pack, as usual filled with far too much food and clothing, eyes fixed on the trail immediately at my feet, counting steps, becoming slightly delusional with fatigue, but aware that I was getting close.

Arriving with still two hours before dark, there was plenty of time, just no energy. In my exhaustion, cooking and setting up the tent were the only reasonable accomplishments. Making it up the last 200 yards from my campsite to the springs, even without a pack, seemed daunting. After downing a big bowl of hot processed gruel, I passed out in the tent before darkness fell. Of course, still thinking of Mister Bear, all my food and cooking gear were in a bag at the end of a rope, swinging in space from the lower branches of a fir tree growing on the edge of a cliff 100 feet away from my tent.

The day before starting this hike, I had lunch with my old Boulder architect friend, Clifford Bravin, the first time we had met in more than a decade. We had once hiked to the hot springs together in what was the most memorable of all my hikes up there. Back then in the late 80’s, the problem with Clifford was that he always had some very promising romance it was crucial that he attend to up to the moment of departure. In the case of our hike to Conundrum, she lived in the high mountain town of Ashcroft, just over the ridge in the adjacent Castle Creek valley. All we had to do was hang at her little cabin the first night, me alone under the stars outside, him and her inside. Then we would just pop over Electric Pass the next morning, drop down into the neighboring Conundrum Creek valley and already be halfway up the valley to the hot springs. Seemed reasonable at the time.

The mountains will quickly relieve one of the hubris that this will be easy or safe. At the time, we were strong, experienced hikers and getting up to Electric Pass, although physically demanding, turned out not to be the big problem. We had waited just a little too long for Cliff to tear himself away from those loving arms back at 9,000 feet, so we arrived from the east side of the pass in the early afternoon with a thunderstorm rapidly building to the west and headed our way. Not a good time to be at Electric Pass. No stopping to admire the view from 12,900 feet.

We hurried along the very faint trail across the barren rock landscape of scree slopes leading down into the valley of Conundrum Creek. Within less than a half-mile we confronted a hard, crusty snow field across what was left of the trail, at best a faint indenture across the rocks. The icy stretch was probably 50 yards wide, no previous hikers had kicked out steps and we had no ice axes or crampons or ropes. It had about a 60-degree slope and extended downward for a couple of hundred yards to a point where it disappeared at what looked from above like the edge of a cliff. We could easily envision sliding out of control all the way down it and beyond into the great unknown, with a high probability of a rough landing. The growing threat of lightning strikes required going down fast, but not that fast. Instead, we left that remnant of a trail and descended straight down through the scree, steep fields of fist-sized rocks where you take one step and the rocks slide with you for another. It’s a controlled slide down on mini-avalanches. This, too, led to something that looked like the edge of a cliff, but unless the whole slope gave way, it was likely to be easier to stop yourself beforehand on scree than on ice. Hopefully, when we got to the edge, we would find a way down. If not, climbing back up through the scree in a thunderstorm was going to be a challenge. Luckily, we did find a way to climb down, with rain falling ever harder and lightning bolts dancing above us on the ridgeline for inspiration, demonstrating how Electric Pass got its name and why they don’t want you to go that way. At our recent lunch, Clifford shook his head and acknowledged that he’d never forget that experience or do it again. My theory is that as you get older, it becomes more reasonable to take chances.

The greatest trip to Conundrum was probably the first, but they’ve all been good. It was about 1973 and I was wandering west to California with rock drummer David Fore his girlfriend, Sherry, and her friend, Jackie, in two cars. We had stopped by Boulder for Steve Fromholtz’s wedding on the way. Somehow, we heard about Conundrum and decided to go. It was like that era in general; if you remember much about it, you probably weren’t there. What I do remember is that at the hot springs in those days, clothes were an option rarely chosen, standard dress when not in the water being hiking boots and bandana. Recreational drugs were also an ever-present option that most people repeatedly exercised, psychedelics in various colors, shapes and forms being de rigueur. Like a tea party with invisible cups, nude groups of relative strangers sitting in the springs kept one hand elevated above the water so as not to moisten the passing joints. Discussions of the relative merits of your Moroccan kif compared to my Oaxacan red hair filled the idle hours. Others spent hours engrossed in close up wildflower photography, oblivious of having run out of film.

If you became excessively languid and needed instant revitalization after hours of strenuous psychic activities while sitting perfectly still in 100-degree water, you changed your paradigms radically by doing very quick push ups in the stream of 40-degree white water that flowed nearby. And when it started pouring rain in the late afternoon, as it has always been prone to do, we all gathered in the old doorless, windowless one room ranger cabin to whip up a big communal feast. My hazy memory assures me it was somehow delicious, a hippie gourmet extravaganza, and that there were more flowers then, too.

In 2006, although there are still a lot of flowers, things have changed. People always say, “This place ain’t like it used to be.” That applies to almost everywhere, even Conundrum, more than nine miles back in the wilderness. When I arrived at the springs on a Tuesday evening, totally blown out, there were only a couple of other campsites occupied, out of about 20. It was the middle of the week, but I remember there being more people up here, especially in July, peak wildflower season and probably the best month for non-problematical weather. Heavy use had caused the Forest Service to designate campsites about 20 years ago. First thing the next morning, the people who had been there when I arrived left too. I finally made it up to the hot springs that Wednesday morning, a beautiful sunny mountain moment. There are now two logs over the final crossing. That last test removed, they had made it too easy. I only used the old one. No one was in the springs. I stayed for an hour before anyone showed up; four 20-somethings whose idea of a transcendent drug experience at the hot springs was to hike up and down in the same day while killing a fifth of whiskey. I suggested that wilderness backpacking was conducive to lighter weight drugs. They eyed me with some apprehension, even in a bathing suit, were distant and totally boring, even to each other. I gave up the springs to them and returned to my camp for a bite of lunch.

While descending to my camp, I came upon a group of a dozen Christian teenagers arriving with a bearded preacher-leader and setting up at the site next to mine. I could have been pissed by their noisy intrusion but for the fact that I had first encountered wilderness on the 1961 North Texas Methodist Youth Trail Hike with a bearded preacher-leader, in this very same mountain range, back when Aspen was funky and we were cool sneaking off to drink underage 3.2 beer. My spiritual life had been much enlivened by the experience, despite the futility of the Jesus rap.

These young Christians’ apparent attempt to get closer to God quickly bore fruit as it began to rain, then hail, then hail harder and bigger with strong winds, booming thunder, lightning strikes close by and plunging temperatures blowing down the slopes. They got their little tents up just in time and sat it out singing hymns from several tents simultaneously, audible between the bolts. Worked for them. The ground became covered with little ice balls. I watched from inside the dilapidated log cabin, cooking more processed gruel and alone. The rain dribbled on until after dark.

Thursday morning, my last in the mountains, was more or less clear again, so it was off to the springs for one more soaking before heading back down. On the walk up to the springs from my campsite, the Christian girls trooped by, headed back to their camp with wet hair. They regarded me as if I were a possible close relative of the abominable snowman. They had apparently gone to the springs in gender-segregated groups in the early a.m. Guys first. The springs were mine alone again.

I floated for a long time just above the place in the middle of the biggest pool where the bubbles rise. There are two rocks under the water there that you can use to maintain your floating body with the least effort in just the precise position above the outflow of the hottest water. Thus suspended, you ponder how far down the lava is and how it is the whole system could be so balanced and stable that the emerging flow is always the same temperature. The warm morning sun beat down and there was no sound other than a background of wind whispering through conifers and water cascading in the distance. A massive horseshoe of glaciated mountain ridge towers 2,000 more feet above, enclosing this perfect bath in a wildflower-strewn meadow among scattered spruce. You are centered in the warm pool centered in the bowl at the head of the valley. For awhile, I drifted away in splendid solitary serenity.

But it was fleeting. Eventually, this reverie was broken by gray clouds and rumbles that reminded me that I still had to walk nine and a half miles that day, albeit downhill. Most hiking accidents happen going downhill. I would be alone and it would very likely rain. Mister Bear could be there and fresh out of berries. Time to get it together, shoulder the pack and responsibility and head for Austin. Just enough time to drive non-stop so as to get there by the time Sally gets off work Friday. As you leave such a place, you always turn to look back on it one more time, wondering if this will be the last time you see it? Maybe I’ll take my grandchildren up there some day, but they haven’t been born yet and may need to hurry up. Maybe I’ll again feel the need to renew the ritual. I just won’t count on some youngsters to bring the party.

David Hamilton

I started a conversation with Charlie by sending him one of Fred’s (of Fred on Everything) columns titled “Jane Fonda’s Wall – Thoughts On The Chatter Of Candy-Asses.” I thought he might appreciate the dark humour. I guessed wrong. Here is the last paragraph of it that triggered some of Charlie’s response.

“If I were designing a memorial to my own taste, I would want an enormous bronze hand rising from the ground, making a rude gesture — no flag, no inscription, just a raised finger. Some might think it vulgar, but soldiers are vulgar. It would perfectly express my feelings about the war, the country, Washington, and the commission that designed Jane Fonda’s wall.”

Richard Jehn

I see the point. I have been to the wall three times and I have been to Arlington National Cemetery and I am always awed by the place. I feel a bond with the names inscribed on the wall. I have found guys I knew, my flight commander is there. I don’t think the way the writer thinks. War is the culprit; the soldiers aren’t vulgar at all, they are usually very young and they are doing what an adult told them to do.

As for Barbarella, she was pretty cute and fell for a line or two and got to have her say. Some hate her, some don’t. For awhile I wouldn’t go and see her films but got over it, freedom of speech I think it is. John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton for many years, he could have gotten out any time he wanted. His father John Sr. was Commander of all Pacific forces. All he had to do was say the thing they wanted him to, but he wouldn’t. John McCain’s grandfather launched his planes in the Battle of the Phillipine Sea knowing they didn’t have gas to get back to the carriers, but they had to save the invasion force in the unprotected ships heading for Luzon.

War is interesting and it is amazingly enough always going on. Today there is a war brewing in Somalia and Ethiopia, and in Nigeria, the Sudan, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Nepal, Georgia, and Bosnia isn’t done, Turkey will have its way with the Kurds. China will eventually do in Taiwan and North Korea is a fun idea, and that leaves out three that the Americans are in. The Canadians are in Cyprus and in Afghanistan. And maybe Mexico will blow up and Nicaragua again if the elections go the way I think they will go.

Charlie Loving

I’m reading “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” The journalist, Chris Hedges, wrote it in 2003 after reporting in the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Iraq, Central and South America, and every other place where war has been for the past 35 years. He says some rather powerful things in it. FWIW, it’s an anti-war book. And the notion that you seem to maintain, that war is a grand and glorious thing, never did, and never will, fly with me.

–the soldiers aren’t vulgar at all–

I think that’s debatable. Especially in Iraq right now, there have been some incredibly vulgar things that have happened. The rape and murder of that girl in Mahmoudiya (and the murder of her entire family to try to hide the fact,) the massacre in Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and the numerous other atrocities. Hedges actually argues that war brings out these vulgarities, and perhaps that’s true. It makes them no more acceptable.

But you’re absolutely right that war is always going on. The mystery is, “Why?”

Richard Jehn

About the vulgar comment, soldiers are a cross section of society and mostly the poorer of that. Rape and murder are quite common on the streets of Seattle and San Antonio and I presume that Canada is not immune.

I think this debate is one that is good. As to the “Why?” Well, I can’t tell you why. I have some ideas, but that is a long book.

A soldier who has been sent to a place, Iraq, and told he will serve for six months and has been there a year and is still not going home can become psychologically demented. I saw it in the returning soldiers from ‘Nam — they were nuts, but no one seemed to pick up on it.

The enemy has no uniform. There is no front line. Anyone from anywhere could be coming to kill you and they really do want to. The Iraqi soldier might not be an Iraqi soldier. He might be a bomb. The lady might be a bomb, too. It is stressful. Why do so many of the guys I see at the VA hospital where I volunteer at times seem crazy? In group sessions they burst into tears and collapse in a heap. They have been mind-fucked, if you will pardon that expression. The best of the real guys have been hurt in ways we can’t conceive, so when they do things like Abu Ghraib, it doesn’t suprise me.

John Charlie, my son, was a Navy medic for four years; he is out now. He was at Gitmo and he went to Haiti, where they set up their small clinic and the line of patients was more than a half mile. The bad guys would beat up the patients to get their meds and so forth. It was horrible. The bad guys were the Haitian police who were supposed to make things safe. One night the Marines (Navy medics are Marines) blew up the police barracks. No one ever knew except them and the patients were safer.

He was on the USS Guadalcanal when they deployed to Liberia. The Marines set up a perimeter around the embassy. The enemy were naked kids spurred on by adults. They were doped up and naked except for their AK-47s. They were 10 and 12 years old. It was totally nuts. He then went back to Guantanamo. He is crazy on one level even today and there is not a damn thing that meds or anything can do. It is like a branding iron has marked part of his brain with this evil that can’t be removed.

My father, who flew B-17s in WWII, was afflicted by the syndrome, too; for years and years he would go into a sort of state of contemplation, which is what we thought, but when I turned 30 he told me one night over a bottle of Jack Black that he was guilty of murder. He had dropped tons of bombs on people he never saw. He was a POW and he also saw that side of the war after the Germans shot his plane out of the sky. He could not resolve the crisis in his mind, no matter how honorable the press, president and all made that war against the Nazi machine.

Charlie Loving

Hedges suggests that it hardly takes an extension of the tour of duty to make these guys crazy. I would tend to agree – it is the constant death and destruction that they must dole out that does it.

After I went to Canada, Mom always said that if I’d gone to Vietnam, they never would have seen me again. She believes I would’ve died. She’s probably right. I don’t think I would raise a weapon against another human, Charlie, no matter the consequences to me. I tried to explain that to the Selective Service Board in Austin, but they were some of the most closed-minded people in existence.

It is likely the same today. Look at what they are doing to the Seattle fellow who has principled reasons for refusing to go on a tour of duty in Iraq. He offered to go to Afghanistan, but they said, “No, you have to go to Iraq.” And now he refuses, because the US is in violation of international law, and they’re going to throw him in the brig for nine years.

I appreciate you relating your father’s story to me. I’m sure you recall that I knew him, even before I met you. He was my student teacher in grade four or five. I told Mariann about it; here is what I wrote to her:

“I met his father before I met Charlie, when I was 10 or 11. We didn’t sort that out for quite awhile after I made Charlie’s acquaintance. Mr. Loving was the student teacher in, I think, my grade 5 class. I had the same teacher for both grades 4 and 5 – Mrs. Sayers, at Highland Park Elementary in the northwest of Austin. It’s by the old Hancock Shopping Centre on Hancock and Balcones. I remember liking Mr. Loving a lot – he was very kind, mild-mannered, and knowledgable. That’s good for kids.”

Richard Jehn

I am totally dismayed by the policy of the EEUU. We love Israel for some reason that escapes me. We would let them do anything they want. Perhaps we should do another exodus and send them all to North Alberta and let them fight the people in Yellow Knife and Fort Nelson. Or maybe the bears?

Our foreign policy is such a failure as to be insane. We screwed the pooch in ‘Nam and now we are doing the same thing in Iraq. Well duh? Declare victory, folks, and run away.

Charlie Loving