Archive for the ‘George W Bush’ Tag
Of Moles and Squeegee Men
Filed under: dual nature | Tags: broken windows, George W Bush, law enforcement, media, Obama
Leave a Comment Now that January 20th has come and gone, the Bush League has departed from DC like unruly guests who cleaned out the liquor cabinet and the wine cellar and generally trashed the place. As we start to pick up the pieces and straighten the furniture, a question persists: should we call the cops or should we just pretend it never happened?
Many of the DC regulars want to make pretend and “just get on with things.” As Glenn Greenwald noted:
There are few viewpoints, if there are any, which trigger more fervent agreement across the political and media establishment than the view that George Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials should not be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, for the various laws they have broken over the last eight years.
The reasoning for this “let bygones be bygones” comes in a variety of flavors. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen argued that the Devil (aka Osama bin Laden) made us forget ourselves and our constitution and begin jailing people without charges and then torturing them:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.
Cohen’s Post colleauge Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, strikes a pragmatic pose
:
I’m coming to the conclusion that what’s most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.
Mr. Greenwald is outraged by this attitude because the Justice Department continues to hound the lawyer-mole who first told a New York Times reporter about Bush’s illegal NSA spying program. It certainly seems unfair to persecute an individual for revealing criminal and unconstitutional behavior at the same time pundits and politicians want to give the “evil doers” a free pass.
The New York Times’ Frank Rich also supports investigation and possible prosecution, to regain our country’s honor:
While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed.
Beyond the whole matter of being a nation of laws and all, Mr. Rich argues we need to address the problems of the past to gain guidance for the future:
But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.
Greenwald and Rich make strong points in favor of actually investigating what happened over the past eight years, and prosecuting those who broke the law. But their points are not the only – or even most – important reasons for investigation and prosecution. To understand what’s at stake here, we need to remember the squeegee men.
Back in March of 1982, The Atlantic magazine featured an article by George Kelling and James Wilson, titled “Broken Windows.” Kelling and Wilson argued that the perception of a social breakdown will lead to the reality of that breakdown:
…at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
Kelling and Wilson wrote about experiments reported on by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to have apparently abandoned vehicles parked on streets in the Bronx, NY and Palo Alto, CA. While the time frames differed, the result was the same: both cars wound up being vandalized and destroyed. Kelling and Wilson wrote:
…vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares.”
This article eventually led to a then-new approach to community policing in which minor offenses were dealt with thoroughly, with the idea that by discouraging disorderly behavior there would be an increase in social order. The most famous – or notorious, depending on your point of view – case of this was in New York City, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained fame for such tactics as cracking down on squeegee men. This approach was eventually credited with a significant decline in the general crime rate in New York City.
It’s common to believe that illegal or anti-social behavior is rooted in individual morality: good people behave in good ways, while bad people behave badly. But that’s not necessarily so. As Kelling and Wilson (and others) have found, individual behavior is often influenced by how that individual sees others behave. If boundaries are pushed and nothing happens to the wrong-doers, then the threshold for anti-social or illegal behavior shifts. If someone vandalizes a car and nothing happens, soon others will follow suit. If one Wall Street firm games the system and nothing happens, you know it’s only a matter of time before others start behaving the same way.
This is really nothing new. Who hasn’t, as a child, tried to do something because “everyone else is doing it”? And who hasn’t had their mother or father reply something to the effect: “If everyone else jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?” While we may tell ourselves that adults act differently, history (and the fashion industry) proves that our behavior frequently reflects that of those around us.
While it might be politically convenient to disregard any possible criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration, “letting bygone be bygones” will send a terrible message to the rest of our citizens – as well as the world. It will be saying “we don’t care” about violations of our constitution, international law, and the fundamental idea of human decency.
Ruth Marcus may wish to disregard the particulars and just ensure “that these mistakes are not repeated.” But by blithely ignoring them, we’re likely to guarantee such behavior will someday return.
Restoring Science – and Democracy
Filed under: emergent | Tags: democracy, George W Bush, Obama, science
Leave a Comment In a New York Times essay “Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy,” Dennis Overbye ponders the significance of President Obama’s inaugural promise to “restore science to its rightful place.”
Overbye believes that “Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.” How do people find that truth?
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.
He notes that these values are also integral to a properly functioning democracy, and observes:
It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.
President Obama’s promise to “restore science” reflects a belief, shared by many prominent scientists, that the Bush administration frequently devalued or distorted scientific findings, especially when those findings conflicted with its political interests.
In other instances, Bush revealed an antipathy towards scientific values by supporting decidedly non-scientific theories like “intelligent design.” While supporters of “intelligent design” describe it as a valid alternative theory to evolution, they can’t seem to grasp the fact that ID is really a form of what Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science.”
When Feynman introduced the concept in a 1974 speech, he was arguing against bad scientific practices he’d observed in various studies in fields like education and psychology. In explaining what made them “bad,” he compared them to cargo cults:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
So what’s that essential ingredient of good science?
It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated…
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
It’s hard to imagine any politician of any stripe embracing THAT kind of integrity in their daily political doings. In many ways politics is a lot like sales: there are objectives to be achieved – not the least of which is gaining and maintaining power – and politicians are inherently geared towards “closing the sale.”
But if the Obama administration can at least revive a respect for science and its values, that would do more than help us confront problems in areas like medicine, energy and the environment. It could also be a start towards restoring democracy in America. As Overbye noted in his NY Times essay:
If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy.
Stephen Colbert has his own unique take on this matter.
Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be
Filed under: uncertainty | Tags: democracy, George W Bush, Obama, politics, reality
Leave a Comment Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ~Philip K. Dick
The world would probably be a lot better off if people weren’t so smug about their sense of reality. Regardless of nationality, religion or political affiliation, we have a tendency to believe we have a firm grip on The Way Things Are, and a confidence that our actions and beliefs are clearly the best way to deal with life’s issues both large and small.
The fact that many things in life today, including many things other people do, appear nonsensical to us is just a minor detail. We know what’s what, and we tend to feel it would be better for all concerned if everyone saw things the way we do.
We never seem to realize that big chunks of our understanding of reality reflect our own biases and perceptions, not the inherent nature of the world “out there.” The perceptions we embrace with certitude are in fact usually best guesses about what is happening around us. And our certitude in these perceptions leaves us open to manipulation by others who present stories we find conveniently agreeable, even when those stories are lies. That certitude can also blind us to warning signs of coming disaster.
Ron Suskind once related a story about an anonymous aide who spoke about the Bush Administration creating its own reality:
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Many of us with a liberal point of view may tend to view this Bush/Cheney perspective from a lofty perch in the “reality-based community” and conclude that these people are either sinister or crazy. However we need to recognize there’s an element of truth in that aide’s statement. And then we need to decide how to deal with it.
On the most simple level, the aide was right. The Bush administration has created realities – in the Middle East, in New Orleans, on Wall Street and Main Street – that we’re now trying to figure out how to deal with. The key proviso that they either didn’t acknowledge or didn’t recognize was that those created realities often turned out to be quite different from what they themselves expected.
But beyond that is a much bigger question: what is reality today? In his book “Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be,” political scientist Walter Truett Anderson argues that in today’s postmodern world we are inevitably dealing with socially constructed realities. He notes the relevance of this in understanding modern politics:
“…the real fount of political power, the source of all loyalty and all independence, is the reality-creating process by which we decide who we are and what we think is happening.”
Although this book was published in 1990, it appears to define a problem Democrats have had lately in presidential elections: while Republicans provide stories to voters about who we are and what is happening, Democrats all too often respond with position papers and program promises. The egghead label that frequently stuck with Gore and Kerry – and has threatened at times to stick to Obama – is probably rooted in this distinction. (Note that Bill Clinton, who was also an exceptionally intelligent politician, managed to generally avoid the egghead label by – among other things – connecting with voters and “feeling their pain.”)
As we’ve seen over the past eight years, Republican hubris in reality-making has frequently doomed their plans to failure. Anderson notes: “…our deliberate reality-creating, future-making, civilization-building projects always turn out to have unexpected consequences…” This is especially true when you fail to recognize that you’re not operating in a vacuum; that others are creating realities at the same time you are.
Being a member of the “reality-based community” can only be useful when we recognize this truth: in today’s world we are each involved in creating realities, and such realities always exist within a larger context of other people’s realities.
As for the many problems confronting us today and in the upcoming election, Anderson provides a perspective from 18 years ago:
“This is the issue that mass democracies are going to have to come to terms with: whether we can construct our large-scale public realities in forms that enable us to grow and change and engage the difficulties of life in adult ways, or whether we will inevitably gravitate toward simple fables of good guys and bad guys.”
