Getting some perspective: (6) On Barack Obama

Gail Collins, columnist and former editor of the New York Times' editorial page, on Obama and his dealings with Republicans over the stimulus package:

I don’t know how many times we need to go over this, but this is actually a real-life version of what Obama promised during the campaign. Didn’t you jump up and cheer when your guy promised that he’d get Republicans and Democrats to work together?

This is a point Ms Collins was making as long ago as July:

He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Her style is quite unlike that of any other newspaper columnist I've read, and she uses it in service of observations that others seem just not to make. And there is a genuine warmth in it towards people she disagrees with, a commodity in short supply in political commentary. As, by the way, is patience among the left-of-centre.

Her appraisal of the election and the day after was also a delight.

Getting some perspective: (5) On bitterness

A friend recently reminded me of Jill Sobule's song Bitter, from the 1997 Happy Town album: it's been uploaded to YouTube in the original version (including lyrics), and as a live performance. It's one of those songs that sticks in the mind because it's smarter than it first appears. And because it's just fun.

Getting some perspective: (4) On the environment

From Earth, the Not-So-Lonely Planet, a NYT article offering a long-overdue correction to out-of-control language on the environment:

The living Earth is tough on scales it is hard to credit. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. Slaked in radiation from nearby supernovae, pummeled by asteroids, it has barely faltered and never stopped. Our civilization may be — is — out of balance with its environment; current human ways of life are frighteningly precarious. But to read the fragility of our way of life onto life itself is foolish.

The point of this article is staringly obvious to me, as a scientist, but I suspect it would be news to many people on the street. I wonder if there's enough cultural space to present this kind of argument. Because, like the author, I think it needs to be made.

In some sense, all misunderstanding is bad. Some misunderstandings are more consequential than others, but as a scientist I am committed to caring about understanding apart from consequence (although, not independent of it). Yet this very day, in an informed discussion of nuclear disarmament, I read a throwaway reference to the arsenals of America and Russia — incomparably larger than those of other nations — as being large enough to destroy the planet. This kind of talk may be time-honoured, and it may have some poetic or mythical grounding, but as a literal statement it is the purest nonsense. Do these people really want me to bore them with a description of what it would take to destroy life on earth, let alone the planet itself, in any meaningful sense?

Public discussion is becoming much better-informed on environmental issues and mechanisms: talk that used to be restricted to scientists and their groupies, in the Seventies and Eighties, has long gone mainstream. So aren't we in a position to call “Time” on the most lurid kind of disaster-talk?

Getting some perspective: (3) On intractable conflict

A couple of related essays on intractable conflict:

The NYT's Ethan Bronner on reporting the conflict in Israel/Palestine, says that

It turns out that both narration and mediation require common ground. But trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus. It feels like I am only fanning the flames, adding to the misunderstandings and mutual antagonism with every word I write because the fervent inner voice of each side is so loud that it drowns everything else out.

openDemocracy, on shrill internet discussion, tries to put online Israel/Palestine discussion in perspective by comparing it with e-wars on chronic fatigue syndrome: a more promising comparison than it may seem. They go on to announce a manifesto:

The democratising possibilities of the internet are in the process of speeding the degeneration of the public sphere into a proliferation of insular nodes, each fighting a war that can never be won. Battles cannot be won on the net nor can they be lost. What remains is a solipsistic politics of ME, ME, ME: my views, my truths, my facts, my pain, my anger. Convincing others and changing the world is forgotten in favour of the perpetuation of one's own perspective.

It would be a mistake to look back at politics before the internet age as a prelapsarian idyll. But new realities create new problems as well as solving old ones. What is needed is a political model that can beging to redress the rise of solipsistic micropolitics; one that emphasises connection, self-critique and cool, considered analysis. What is needed is a different kind of technology that retains the internet's openness to participation but without the tendency to push activists and driven individuals towards self-righteous isolation. What is needed are tools for dialogue rather than tools for the proliferation of disconnected voices...

Getting some perspective: (2) On teasing

From a New York Times article written In Defense [sic] of Teasing:

Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools... And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke... The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a sulking child, children (as early as age 1) mimic nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest. In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.

And, he might have said, the most social.

A very important point about human nature and wholeness is being made here. I was saddened to read the letter in response that the NYT published; a letter that, despite itself, rather proves the point of the article. Extreme and abusive, or merely dysfunctional forms of teasing, are indeed harmful and potentially crippling to their victims. OK. Yes. We get it. (Some of us already know this from experience ... although it would be unwise to enter into a contest on credentials here.) And to ask the victims to have a sense of humour about the wider phenomenon, may be to ask too much.

But that is not the question. The question is what the public policy should be. And I take the point of the article that it is improper, hubristic, and vain to try to bring annihilating force to bear against an entire dimension of human interaction; especially one so embedded in our nature, and so constitutive of positive and healthy development ... so constitutive of mature life.

Those of us who have suffered in this matter may find it hard to hear this argument: it reopens old wounds; and, more subtly, it torments us with a vision of functional relating which (we may feel) is inaccessible to us, and which others have achieved, in a way that excluded us. But this is a hurt that we should address in conversation with our counsellors, our friends, and our priests --- not with support for some utopian project.

The argument is still correct.

Getting some perspective: (1) On identity politics

From The Edge of the Mystery, a NYT essay on presidential transitions:

Then, too, have come the inevitable protests from identity-based interest groups: Latinos and African-Americans in Congress who weren’t satisfied with the number of senior appointments, as well as gay activists lamenting the omission of a gay cabinet nominee. That sound you hear is the last wheezing gasp of boomer-age politics, the cataloging of individuals according to their areas of oppression, the endless process of tallying cultural differences rather than aggregating common objectives. It is a political philosophy that probably made sense 30 years ago but that seems sort of baffling at the dawn of the Obama era, when such interest groups are among the most powerful in the Washington establishment — and when the Man himself is black.