diversity is not easy, but it IS something to celebrate

Alicia and I went to Border's the other day and I picked up a book called "We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism," by John Derbyshire. His contention is that we have gotten away from the traditional pessimistic view of human nature that is foundational to our political institutions. The chapter entitled, "Diversity: nothing to celebrate" caught my eye. He points out the study published by Robert Putnam a couple of years ago showing that people in diverse neighborhoods have less social connections, less "social capital." They watch TV more and go out less. The notion that there could be a downside to diversity goes against the grain of our warm and fuzzy "diversity is our strength" cult. The zeitgeist right now, what we are supposed to believe, is that diversity is an unalloyed boon to society, the most wonderful thing that has ever happened. By it's mere presence, we seem to be told, we are magically edified and uplifted. Derbyshire ridicules this notion, and in a limited sense I believe he is correct. Our diversity cult is somewhat of a sham. It is what Americans are supposed to believe in, but as we choose our schools and homes we show that we don't actually believe in it.

Only in this limited sense, however, is Derbyshire anywhere near the mark. He laments that our society has come to value diversity, and looks back with fondness on a time when America was 90% white, saying that the task of assimilating everyone was so much easier then. To Derbyshire, our ongoing school and residential segregation merely demonstrates the futility of the "diversity cult." It is human nature, he believes, that leads us to shun diversity. Our society has encountered a host of problems because liberals have attempted to fight human nature and set up utopian social programs that are ultimately counterproductive. Now the future of the country is threatened because of all the nonwhite immigration that has occurred since 1965. Derbyshire sees a possible future in which the United States breaks apart politically along ethnic and racial lines because we were foolish enough to embrace diversity. To bolster his case that diversity causes problems, he points to a host of incidents over the past couple of years, all across the world, in which political or social unrest and violence occurred along ethnic lines.

Where to begin? I literally did some internet searching on this book to make sure it wasn't meant to be satirical. Alas, it appears the author was trying to be serious. The unstated implications of Derbyshire's views range from the repugnant to the bizarre. He basically says, "diversity sucks," and refuses to offer any solutions or alternatives. Presumably he would desire all nonwhite immigration to stop immediately. We can also assume that he would wish us to stop fighting human nature as he sees it - any program meant to encourage integration in the workplace, education, or residential areas should be stopped immediately. Americans should no longer feel pressure to "like" diversity, because it goes against human nature. We should be encouraged to stick with our own kind. (In fairness, I don't know if these are the author's views, but as he refuses to offer any alternatives, I am stating what I believe to be the implications of what he did say).

I do think there is an element to human nature that encourages in-group out-group, us vs. the "other" sort of prejudice. However, the problems in the United States are due to a whole host of factors beyond and including that tendency. So even if were we to accept Derbyshire's extremely dubious assertion that the main problem with diversity in the U.S. is that we're going against human nature, it still leads us to absurdity. Hmmm...what other sorts of things does human nature lead us to do? Lie, murder, cheat, steal, make war on one another...Yes, I think we ought not fight those things. My brain hurts from trying to argue against this guy.

As I said above, Derbyshire points to racial and ethnic conflict all over the world to show the folly of different groups of people trying to get along in one nation. But think of his solution! If we all just retreat to our corners, if all nations become ethnically "pure" are we truly likely to have less conflict? There is no doubt that diversity is difficult, but a world in which people are exposed to less diversity while their prejudice against the "other" grows is terrible to contemplate. Since I was just reading about WW2, I think of Japan, a homogeneous nation that emerged from hundreds of years of isolation not with benign indifference to other groups, but a virulently racialized belief in their superiority over all other groups. Isolation and lack of diversity leads to greater ignorance and prejudice and the potential to treat members of another group as less than human.

That's why Christians all over the world are doing such important reconciliation work, in Rwanda, in South Africa, and here in the United States. We are the glue holding societies together. So maybe we do watch more TV than we would if we lived in a homogeneous area. But because of the bridges we are building and the ties we make across racial lines, even though it's hard, we may be preventing the next riot, the next war, the next genocide. As Christians, we believe in the depravity of humanity, but Derbyshire's conservatism and pessimism is of a brand we can definitely do without.

retribution: 1944-1945

I just finished reading Retribution: The battle for Japan, 1944-1945, a great book by Max Hastings. Rather than sticking to the standard western narrative punctuated by the set pieces of the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, Hastings delves into some forgotten (for Americans) aspects of the Pacific war. There are chapters on the nationalists and communists in China, the British campaign in Burma, the thankless jobs of the Australian army, and the Russian attack in Manchuria in August 1945. It makes for a more encompassing, realistic portrait of the last years of the war. Not only that, the author uncovers many fascinating personal stories from the men and women on all sides who fought and experienced the war. We hear from Japanese and Russians, Chinese and Australians, rendering the non-American combatants much less opaque than they often end up in western books.
Of course, one cannot write about the war with Japan without discussing the atomic bombs. Wasn't it unnecessary and immoral? This is more of an embarrassingly simple pop culture kind of question than a serious historical question. As with most serious scholarship, Hastings brings a nuanced, contextual perspective that acknowledges the horror of the act, but eschews the moral hand-wringing one may find in the media. Though the atomic bombs have come to represent a uniquely terrible thing to posterity, those who were fighting the war did not immediately see it that way. In a sense, they were correct. The bombs were dropped after the United States Air Force had firebombed scores of Japanese cities, killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and leaving millions homeless. The atomic weapons merely represented a dramatic increase in killing efficiency, though the full import of that would soon sink in.
We cannot seriously lament the use of the bombs on a moral level without calling into question the whole allied war effort, both against Germany and Japan. The author points out the “technological determinism” that marks great wars: if you have it, use it. This occurs in the context of a momentum, a moral breakdown, that also takes place in a total war. Both sides introduced a host of new weapons and tactics, and anything that could give an advantage or shorten the war was put into service as fast as possible. (The only significant tactic withheld was chemical weapons, because both sides feared enemy reprisals and loss of face would outweigh any temporary gain). The use of atomic bombs occurred in this tradition. In the end, Hastings does a good job of showing the confusion and immorality of war, but ultimately lays the blame where it belongs. If both sides engaged in atrocities and morally repugnant acts, only one side was the unequivocal initiator – only one side was institutionally barbaric. Indeed, as one considers the pacific war, it becomes clear that it was an epic contest between two societies on very different moral planes. The fact that Americans now agonize over their excesses while Japanese engage in a systematic denial of their offenses only illustrates the point further. One little lesson from it all: extreme cultural relativism is bunk.

the promise and sameness of the obama presidency

During the 2008 election there was some discussion about race based voting and the phenomenon of white people voting for Barack Obama because he is black. I went on the record saying that his race was an important and substantive factor that was appropriate to take into consideration. If, however, such a vote was to assuage guilt or "fix" America's race problem once and for all, it was bound to lead to disappointment. Twelve months on, this appears to be exactly what has happened in some quarters.

In tuning in to a variety of conservative media sources, I have heard some people who voted for Barack Obama in hopes of finally moving past race express their frustration that we seem to be as preoccupied with it as ever. Their disillusionment reveals the naivete with which they approached the issue in the first place and calls the meaning of their race influenced vote into question.

To anyone who had truly grappled with the dynamics of race in America it was apparent even before the election that a Barack Obama presidency would be rich with paradox. It would be transformative, and it would change nothing. As unprecedented as his election would be, it would not magically dissolve a racialized society that knows no other way of being.

Would Barack Obama's election be America's vindication, a defining achievement, a towering proof that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice? Or would it be the ultimate incarnation of the "exceptional negro" in a country that still does not understand the full dimensions of privilege and peril associated with skin color? One year later, as the disillusionment of some show, it was always going to be a little bit of both.

the stimulus and the media

As most of you probably know, I have no stomach for the strident criticisms of President Obama coming from the right. Having said that, it really is a shame that he has gotten himself into the dubious business of counting "saved or created" jobs. From the start, economists of all stripes seemed to think this was an extremely problematic thing to measure. It's not that the stimulus program hasn't created and saved some jobs. It surely has. But being able to measure it precisely, especially with the slippery "saved" category, is probably not possible.

As it turns out, the administration's figures have been shredded by a variety of news outlets, and not just conservative ones. Dramatic and ridiculous errors(?) have been uncovered showing hugely inflated job counts on a variety of spending allocations. The president's attempt to quantify the boost the stimulus has brought to the job market is purely political, and it is likely to backfire on him. The widely reported errors are too numerous for the American people to see them as isolated incidents. The administration appears to have engaged in systematically politicized record keeping that has little to do with sound economics or governance.

The context for all of this and the reasons why President Obama would stoop so low is not just a recession and banking crisis and desire for health care reform. The media environment is more severe than ever before. The intensity of opposition, both to Bush and to Obama, has been astonishing. Neither man had to actually do anything for a sizable portion of the country to loath him. The scrutiny and criticism any President now faces right from day one is unprecedented. A large percentage of the country votes on information that may have little to do with a President's performance, things such as, "do I have a job?" or strange impressions generated by partisans from one side or another. Large groups on both sides of the spectrum are completely unfair to any politician not on "their side" and seek to sway those in the middle through distortions, vitriolic attacks, and half-truths. And so we appear to have succumbed to the "permanent campaign." The President cannot focus on governing as much as he used to. He must campaign. The left criticized George W. Bush for this, but now Barack Obama is doing it perhaps even more. Many lament this state of affairs, but if our Presidents are now full-time campaigners, we may ask ourselves who drove them to it.

a little civility won't kill you, will it?

Why can't the police just communicate a little more like civil, normal people?

Yesterday Alicia and I were pulled over on our way to Humboldt Park. They were in an unmarked car by the side of the road. They pulled out behind us as we passed them, followed us for over a mile, and then stopped us at Augusta and Kedzie. They came up to the car and asked for my license and other information. I gave my license to them and while I was looking for my other stuff they said, "okay," handed my license back, and got back in their car. They left so quick I didn't have a chance to ask them anything, such as, "Why did you pull us over???"

Okay, theoretically there could have been an old Plymouth stolen and they were looking for it. Theoretically. But I assume it was a much less reasonable reason, especially since Alicia and I have been followed by the police along that stretch of Kedzie before. And the whole time we're being followed, I'm thinking why are they following me? How is this going to end? When they finally did pull us over, I wish they would at least have the courtesy to communicate a little bit.

It seems as though greater civility would pay off for them. Almost all of the good interactions I've had with police have been at CAPS meetings! No wonder people don't show up for those things.

giving

I've spent some time recently reading Mere Christianity. It's the sort of book that is good to come back to every couple of years. It's written with an extraordinary simplicity which only seems to make it more profound. I want to take some text from page 86 on giving:

Charity -giving to the poor- is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

The sentence that was most striking to me was the idea of giving more than we can spare. How many of us do that? The great obstacle is not that we are mean spirited or don't enjoy giving. We just want security, as Lewis mentions later on. But security can be a bottomless pit. Alicia and I could save all our money now with the justification that we want to buy a house. Then what about college for the kids? Then what about retirement? There is always something. We could always be more secure. Alicia and I want to live a simple, giving lifestyle, but we're conscious of the need to do better. More than you can spare. I think we must deliberately choose to be less secure than we would like to be.

how our federal system maintains wealth disparity

The super rich pay a huge percentage of the overall tax burden in this country. On the other hand, over the past three decades, while living standards and income for middle and lower class folks have stagnated, the wealth at the very top has increased dramatically. The result has been the return of the kind of income disparity we associate with the Gilded Age of the 19th century. This is of course an extremely contentious issue between conservatives and liberals. Read a conservative talking about the huge tax burden on the rich and you come away thinking, "man, that's just not fair!" Read a liberal discussing the dramatic increase in wealth among the already rich while the rest of us see little of the benefits and you think, "gee, that's just wrong!" I tend to think the liberal has the stronger argument here. But one of the problems with a theoretically correct argument is that the implementation of it in the real world may be confounded by some other variables. In this case, the variable is our system of state governments. Some states, such as New York, have basically said, "Yeah, we like the liberal argument. Let's tax these people up the wazoo!" The problem is that meanwhile other states are saying, "We want people to move here; let's not tax them at all!" I've not checked into the data on this, but I've certainly heard a lot of anecdotal commentary on people moving their residences or work projects to more tax friendly states. It just makes sense. Anyway, the point is that our system of 50 state governments "competing" with each other probably has the effect of keeping tax rates reduced - even when it would make more economic and moral sense to put a heavier tax burden on the super rich. The solution then must come at the federal level. I do believe that raising the federal tax rate on the rich could have a net positive effect, especially considering our budget problems. Just a thought.

wake up!

Please check out this inspiring challenge from Chris Butler at UrbanFaith. It's one of the better pieces I've read in the aftermath of Derrion Albert's death. We must demand more of ourselves.

the president takes on his enemies...fox news?

Is anyone else disappointed in the Obama administration's silly feud with Fox News? I find it extremely unbecoming. Mr. President, we get it, okay? Fox News is dumb and irritating. But so is MSNBC. For that matter, so is cable news in general. Why in the world is anybody associated with your administration bothering to publicly criticize, or even mention, the rants of a cable news company? It is beneath the dignity of the office for the white house to get involved in a scuffle with cable news. So let it go, please. Of course, one might argue that cable news as a whole is far more concerned with maintaining a profitable business model than in delivering responsible, in depth journalism. That would be right, but that's not what the white house is arguing, and even if it were, it's not their problem to fix. Rather, they are intentionally trying to isolate and discredit a specific news organization. At best, the effort seems petty and childish, at worst it brings to mind the Alien and Sedition Acts! So Mr. President, we can agree that Fox News is silly, but you don't have to get silly with them. Please, be the President.

these crazy banks

The Obama administration is restricting the size of bonus packages to some employees at the major banks that used taxpayer dollars. It is astonishing to me that some people are upset about this. It's not just the loony executives at the banks who lost their moral compasses years ago. It's regular people! Somehow this is another example of Obama being socialistic, I guess. But let's be clear. These banks almost took down the economy of the entire world into depression, we bailed them out, and a year later they want to give ridiculous bonuses. As far as I'm concerned, the U.S. government can do whatever they want with them - we're the reason they still exist! It's absurd to see the Obama administration's feeble and timid attempts at placing limits on the banks being met with criticism.

I read a great column the other day from Bob Herbert in the New York Times. He was discussing the problems with the banks, and especially the notion of being "too big to fail." If a company is indeed "too big to fail" then it seems to me there are two logical courses of action: it should either be broken up into smaller parts so that the failure of any of the pieces would not pose systemic risk to the whole economy, or it should be state owned. We've broken plenty of companies up in the past. One of the problems with that course, though, is that if we break our banks up and other countries don't, we may be at a competitive disadvantage in the worldwide financial system. Is state ownership a real option? Probably not. The American electorate is so scared of socialism that taxpayers may rather lose their bailout money than move in that direction. Most likely, we won't take either decisive course. We will probably end up with a mishmash of inadequate new regulations and another crisis in the future.