This Is Not News

Roughly a week into listening to the new REM album, Accelerate, I realized I’m having fun being an REM fan, and that hasn’t been true in a while. I’ve been walking around with my iPod, singing along with many of the tracks and probably scaring passersby. I’ve been recording TV appearances and reading reviews, and feeling downright giddy about the upcoming tour. And I don’t want to be guilty of projection, but I think part of my fun is feeling like the band is having fun. I remember watching the documentary about the Vote for Change concerts back in 2004, where REM was playing with Bruce Springsteen right around the time that Around the Sun came out. There’s a bit backstage where Michael Stipe is looking at some of the packaging for the special edition version of the CD, and he gives a copy of the album to Springsteen. But there’s a bit where he shows the album to Peter Buck, and Buck seems pretty much disinterested, and almost glum. Given what I’ve read about the band’s attitude at that time, disinterested and glum don’t seem so off the mark. This time around, Buck’s bantering with Stephen Colbert and summing up the lessons of 2004 as “Make a better record” on the Today show.

It’s a nice feeling, is what I’m saying. But if Stipe is giving interviews in 2011 talking about how the band has finally addressed its communications problems, you’re probably gonna be seeing a story on the evening news about a lunatic philosophy professor running through the streets mumbling incoherently. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

OK, starting tomorrow you’re probably gonna be stuck with a few days of REM blogging. But before I do, let me make a comment about one particular criticism in the Democratic presidential primary. The Clinton campaign apparently criticized Obama for calling himself a “law professor” when he was not a tenured faculty member and his title was Senior Lecturer. Now, I should probably call my lawyer brother to get his 2 cents on this, but I think it’s officially the second most ridiculous thing I’ve heard after the whole kindergarten essay thing.

I’m an adjunct. I am the epitome of the part time faculty. I have no responsibilities beyond the courses I teach - I don’t go to faculty meetings, I don’t work with grad students, I teach. My ID lists my title as “Adjunct Professor.” When I was a grad student teaching my own classes, my students called me Professor Thomer. Some still do, others call me Dr. Thomer. When people ask me what I do, I will sometimes call myself a part-time philosophy professor. Now, I would never put Professor of Philosophy on my resume, because in a formal setting, with the capital letters and all, that’s a rank I have absolutely no claim to. But in casual conversation? Who pays attention to academic rank? And who is still awake at the end of that conversation?

So I’m on my way to class today to give an exam, and I’m reviewing in my head the instructions I have to give about people putting away their iPods and turning off their cell phones. And I think to myself, “I certainly don’t have to tell them to turn off their pagers. Wow, technology sure has changed since I graduated from college a decade ago.”

So, of course, I go to say “Turn off your cell phones” and out comes “turn off your pagers,” and everyone gets to laugh at the out-of-touch guy. Sheesh.

Just goes to show you how funny the human brain is. In a space of ten minutes the same mind that said there was no need to say something, said that exact thing. Sometimes I think my neurons need to do a better job of talking to one another.

Bill Clinton apparently takes issue with a Barack Obama ad in which he says “I don’t want to spend the next year, or the next four years, re-fighting the same fights we had in the 1990s.” Clinton responded, “what fights should we not have made?”

Well, I think it would have been nice if we could have done without the year-long scandal and impeachment trial that resulted from Bill not being able to keep his hormones in check. But that’s just me.

I’m not denying that there were policy-based fights. And I’m not denying that the Republican approach to government often involves picking fights. But Bill Clinton’s personality, biography, and choices made many of those fights personal. And it would be nice to move on from those personality-driven fights, even if that only means we get to start new ones.

As my noodling about deliberation intersects with my near-obsessive following of Democratic presidential delegate selection results, it is probably worth examining the undercurrent of controversy about the use of caucuses in some states to select delegates. The argument for caucuses is that they encourage interaction between voters, encourages people to stand behind their choices, and allows for some chance of voters persuading each other to change their minds. All of these are similar to the advantages proposed by deliberation. Many supporters of Hillary Clinton’s campaign have pointed out a potential downside - there is a limited time window and a long time commitment required than in a straightforward election. This drives down participation because some people are unwilling or unable to participate. As much as I have enjoyed Barack Obama’s advantage in garnering support from caucus states, I can definitely see the point here and would certainly support any state that wanted to move from a caucus to a primary. So do various deliberation schemes suffer from the same problem? Well, if you’re doing a deliberative panel to work on a specific issue, you’re going to need to build some support for lost wages, child care concerns, and similar considerations. If you wanted to do a larger-scale deliberation project, you’re probably going to need to space it out over a period of days. I think participation is worth the costs, but it’s worth looking at the practical examples in order to appreciate just how large that cost is.

OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks?

A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because they have very busy very important jobs, because the perspective given by those very busy very important jobs needs to be represented. We’re not looking for an “unbiased” or “neutral” panel – we’re looking for a panel whose collection of biases resembles the collection of biases in the nation. But that means mandating participation and closing a lot of loopholes. Is one of the rights in a democracy the ability to avoid participating in a democracy? My gut instinct says no – that if you want to enjoy the fruits of certain rights and political structures, you need to pay into the cost of having them. And if a deliberative democracy is going to work, you need people to understand what deliberation is and how a group of citizens can set a policy. If understanding comes through doing, then people need to do it. We make people go to grade school and high school not just for their own benefit but because the costs to society are too large if they don’t.

Why do I think it’s dangerous for citizens to not understand the deliberative process through participation? Because if the process isn’t something you participate in, it becomes something external to you – it becomes a “them” that is against normal folks like “us.” Listen to the way most people talk about “the government” and what it does with your money, your time, your life. “The government” is an Other, a disconnected powerful force that exerts power over us but over which we have no control. So whenever “the government” tries to do something, there’s distrust, suspicion, opposition, and resistance. As a result, “the government” becomes a force to be disparaged even by those people who want to exert power through the government. Watch how many Democratic and Republican presidential candidates complain about Washington and the way it works – even though many of them are senators who are part of the existing Washington power structure, and all of them want to be a very significant part of the Washington power structure. Candidates are more than willing to exploit our alienation from what should be a democratic government. Imagine what will happen to a citizen deliberative body. If a large segment of the population refuses to participate, elites will have incentives to rail against the citizen deliberators in order to muster votes and other types of support from the nonparticipants. This will create added pressures on the deliberators and make the whole process even less attractive.

There are also a lot of logistical issues to work out in setting up a citizen deliberative body, and for the moment I’m leaving those questions aside. I figure I ought to at least raise them. What kind of issues will citizen deliberators discuss? What role, if any, would the existing branches of government play? Do we need a professional legislature to go along with the citizen deliberators? Should laws passed by citizen deliberators have a sunset clause so that they can automatically be reviewed by future deliberators? How long would a particular panel of deliberators meet? Who would pay their salaries? How would this affect the families of the deliberators? How long could the deliberators stay away from their jobs?

Lurking behind these logistical questions is the idea that someone is going to have to maintain the program. Someone has to identify the experts, edit the briefing materials, supervise the selection of the panel, moderate the discussions, perform and interpret any surveys or polling. There is still going to be a bureaucracy and a set of experts involved. While they won’t be setting policy, they’ll be exerting a large influence over the folks that do. How do we avoid Dewey’s problem of experts here? Familiarity helps, so part of each deliberative panel’s process should include an explanation of how the panel and materials were selected and what the goals of deliberation are, something along the lines of the introduction potential jurors get before they are interviewed. This way the citizenry will understand how the process is supposed to work, and if they see it being abused, they are more likely to rise to its defense. (This will only work if the system is sufficiently established that a number of the citizens care about its continues integrity, which I admit is an uncertain bet.)

OK, I still need to flesh out some of what I’ve said here, plus I’m kicking some ideas around about the importance of institutional memory and how a deemphasis of expertise would affect that memory. That’ll be the first weekend thought to tackle.

Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work.

It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of gathering information about a problem, predicting how various potential solutions might play out, and then making a decision based on what the evidence suggests is the best possible solution. But a democracy has to make a lot of decisions, so that’s a lot of empirical information to gather, process, and interpret. No elected official can do it – that’s why they have staffs, and sometimes they don’t even have time to read the text of a bill before they vote on it. So the average citizens can’t really be expected to do it either – and I don’t know about you, but I know I don’t have a staff.

Now, if we can’t have out own staffs, maybe we can at least rely on experts. We can read recommendations or endorsements and make decisions from there. But that brings in what Dewey calls the problems of experts. If you spend a lot of time researching issue X and figuring out how to solve it, talking to other people who care a lot about issue X, and putting enormous amounts of your time and energy into minute details and permutations of issue X, all of a sudden you are not thinking like the average, non-issue-X expert does. You can’t quite relate to how he or she sees the world. You can’t understand why Average Joe doesn’t care passionately about marginal tax rates and sugar tariffs.

Or, to put in other terms: every time there’s a comic book movie made, the film-makers make some small change to the comic story. The millions of filmgoers who haven’t picked up a comic book in years happily see the new movie and hopefully they enjoy it. The thousands of people who are familiar with the comic and can share details of its history with you notice the change, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to them. And they can’t understand why there’s not a mass of people with torches and pitchforks at the movie studios, or at least a halfway decent boycott. They’re experts, and their concerns are very different from the average filmgoer. They see the world, and the movie, differently. So their view of what makes, say, a good Spider-Man movie is not necessarily a correct view, even though they’re the experts. As Dewey says, the experts can become their own class, their own community, far removed from the communities that their expertise is supposed to solve. (more…)

Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I was taking) I had to give a lot of renewed thought to Dewey and how I envision education working. I think that in my efforts to structure my classes to give students maximum opportunity to prepare for tests and exams, I wound up encouraging memorization, and I didn’t do enough to encourage students to reflect and connect the material. I think a gut check like this is a good thing - I’ve been doing this for eight years now, and it’s easy to fall into habits. So I’ve been tweaking my class approach, and we’ll see where it takes me.

The next question is whether this election year will totally ruin whatever faith and interest I have in studying democracy, but that’s a rant for another time.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate seven years of Not News than waking up to find that Network Solutions has temporarily suspended the domain registration. And on a day when some pretty important e-mails were expected to come down the pike, no less. I’ll take the blame on this one – I must have split the domain registration off from the hosting service at some point, and then forgotten that the hosting service wouldn’t automatically renew. Whoops. If anyone tried and failed to get to the site, my apologies.

My Year Eight resolution is to finish importing everything into the blog database, and from there maybe I can start writing some reviews again. In the meantime, I’m gonna hunt down some cake.

I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn who has made philosophy a secondary academic and professional focus in no small part because because she doesn’t see the discipline as particularly relevant right now.

“I’m in a livelier, more hands-on world,” Allen says, offering a sharp view of the discipline with which she fell in love as an adolescent.

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them.

“The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow.

“Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?

I do not mean this to be vindictive or defensive, but when a fellow academic is saying you’re not hands-on enough, there’s something of a problem.

Part of the issue is probably the very real diversity problem that Allen cites. Part of it is the fight within the discipline over what counts as being properly philosophical and sufficiently rigorous.

I’ve spent roughly a quarter of my life in philosophy and I’ve done it because I think the discipline has something to tell us about the problems we face in today’s society. And because I think it helps show us some methods that will work to help us solve those problems. Every day I step into a classroom and try to pass along that idea to a group of skeptical students. And some days I realize just how hard of a sell that is.