Why You Should Vote in the Upcoming Election (even if you're a dummy), part 1

A Brown University professor named Jason Brennan has recently come out with an argument opposed to the popular catechism that everyone has a kind of moral duty to vote. Brennan’s position, on the contrary, is that some people have a moral duty not to vote. Although I doubt it will have much of an effect, I want to put forward my own two cents on this issue. For one thing, I think that idea is just wrong, and for another, I think that it could eventually have pernicious consequences. (Since Brennan’s paper on this subject is not published yet, I am not going to quote directly from it, but instead draw on a conversation that he had about the idea with Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads TV (if you go to the Bloggingheads video, it has a link to a draft of the paper.))

Brennan’s argument goes something like this. As citizens, we have a moral duty to do what is best for our country, if not in the positive sense of doing good (ie., picking up trash on the highway, working at a soup kitchen), then at least in the negative sense of not doing harm. In the case of voting, however, many of us often do harm to the common good, because we don’t understand the issues very well, and we don’t reason very well. Because of that we favor bad policies and vote for politicians who enact those bad policies (unsurprisingly, Brennan says his idea was sparked by Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.) Therefore, those of us who lack knowledge and or proper reasoning skills have a moral obligation not to vote.

In the discussion with Wilkinson, Brennan uses two analogies to help illustrate the point. First analogy: let’s say a group of six people decide to go out for dinner. One person in the group (me, let’s say) is from out of town. While I may have a right to put forward my choice, it wouldn’t be a very good idea for me to do so. I should rather defer to the other five people, who live in that city and know the restaurant scene. By refusing to exercise my right, everyone (including me) ends up better off. Second analogy: we don’t think that everyone has the right to be a surgeon, or an airline pilot. Only the people with the requisite skills should be doing the sorts of things that surgeons and airline pilots do. Why then do we assume that everyone should be picking the President (this is a pretty old argument, BTW. It goes back at least as far as Plato’s Apology.)

I think that Brennan has a number of problems here but the most important is that he uses the wrong model to understand what elections are and what they do. Elections are not simply the accumulated decisions of a set number of individuals (call them citizens), all striving to make the most rational choice. That model of voting has actually been in trouble for a long time, long before Caplan decided to write his book. One of its biggest problems is that it can’t explain why it makes rational sense for any individual to vote at all, since a single vote has almost no chance of making a difference to the end result. Elections are better understood as choices that a people make collectively. They serve as a feedback loop. As long as the situation is (more or less) okay, the status quo obtains. When things get too bad, the population bands together to throw the bums out.

The thing is, if this system is going to work for the benefit of all its members, and not just some of them, it needs input from all sectors of society. A basic assumption of democracy is that the best people to decide about whether or not a change is needed, seen from the perspective of a certain geographic area, or economic class, or any other social group, are members of that class itself. Poor farmers in Appalachia may not know what the Supreme Court does or who sits on it, and they may not know who their congressman is. They may make fundamental mistakes in economic reasoning. But what they do know, very well, is what daily life is like as a poor farmer in Appalachia. They are the only ones, in fact, who have that information. If the system is going to function in a proper—hell, let’s use a real word—in a just manner, then it needs to get that information from them. Remember too, that the only way the system ever pays attention to their information is when they vote. Policy papers from well-meaning social workers don’t cut it, because ignoring such claims has no real-world consequences for politicians.

Certainly, this feedback is imperfect, for the kinds of reasons that Brennan and Caplan and others point out. Voters are ill-informed, prejudiced, and cannot give convincing reasons for why they do what they do. And they do sometimes make bad decisions, as a group. American voters may be on the brink of making one of the most disastrous decisions in the history of the republic, IMO (though recent polling is reassuring on that score). But to paraphrase E.B. White, the leap of faith required for democracy (and it is very much a leap of faith, although I think in the end a justified one) is to believe that more than half the people are right more than half the time. While an individual may persist in choosing against his or her own interests, groups over time tend not to (see James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds). Moreover, the cure implied by Brennan’s argument is even worse than the disease it purports to treat, since it would have a group of self-selected “good voters” deciding what is best both for themselves and for everyone else. This never ends up well, for reasons I will explain in my next post.

The source of modern resentment

(A blog entry that has no relevance at all to pigs, lipstick, hockey moms, bailouts, suspended campaigns, mortgages, Presidential debates, or the Chicago Cubs)

The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present’s resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendours that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even the shadow or mist or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it’s just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us.

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Fear

(trans. by Margaret Jull Costa)

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace died last Friday by suicide. In the late nineties, after Infinite Jest came out, a friend of mine was living with a producer at a bare-bones cable access talk show in Southern California. Once she showed me an interview with Wallace that her boyfriend had taped. Wallace was nervous, sweating, a little paranoid, worrying on-camera that people would actually see the interview, fretting that he would come off wrong, and so forth. If you’ve had conversations with extremely self-conscious, hyper-intelligent, depressed people you would recognize the style – arguing with oneself while second- and third-guessing the meanings and intentions of the interlocutor. Defensive, and very, very uncomfortable, but at the same time self-aggrandizing and annoyed. Clearly the man was not having a good day. He was pretty famous at this point among those of us who were searching for a generational spokesperson other than Douglas Coupland. My friend and I laughed and felt a little sorry for him. It was pathetic, but endearing. He was so talented. After seeing the tape, I also thought he was lucky, because the crippling self-doubt on display in the interview hadn’t prevented him from doing it. This was about ten years ago. In more recent footage of Wallace (on youtube) he’s soft-spoken, but not visibly terrified. Maybe he perfected a sort of persona for the purpose of appearing in public – and he taught creative writing so his students probably trained him to hold his cards a little closer to his chest. (Some students react to a nervous professor like sharks when there’s blood in the water. I can’t imagine he didn’t notice it right away.) Also legal pharmaceuticals for calming performance nerves are a lot easier to get today. In short, he probably gave that one inconsequential public-access interview on a particularly bad day. He probably had them every now and then, until he had a really bad day last Friday.

Today, a lot of publications published online eulogies. They focused on the brilliance of his work and his impact on literature, but refrained from speculating on the cause of death. When I look at news on the Internet I almost always read the comments, and sometimes, if it’s a piece on a topic I already know a lot about, the comments are all I read. The New York Times forums are my favorites. There are a few trolls here and there, but readers generally don’t overreact, and the editors step in if things turn ugly. The Times comments section after Michiko Kakutani’s discussion of Wallace's work shows a particular style of group grieving – people who knew him personally or through his work shared memories, and a few weighed in on depression and suicide (a sin or a sickness? Discuss.) Some posts cited mentions of depression in Wallace’s writing - for example, the bit about the urge to jump overboard in his Harper’s essay on cruise lines, or his essay on depressed people. Sarah Palin was mentioned several times. I’m not a genius, but I am a person who values thoughtfulness, and I have to agree with the readers who drew parallels between what she symbolizes and how people like us (here, I’m not talking about Wallace – I’m talking about snooty Eastern urban types – folks who read the New York Times arts section online) feel when she mocks “big fat resumes” and her supporters consider book-learnin’ a political liability. In the reader’s forum, one reader speculated on Wallace’s thoughts about “this country's response to Sarah Palin, the blatant reaffirmation of the strident anti-intellectualism that put us on the downward slope with our foreign relations, our economy and our future as a place where it can even be possible to be a reflective human being and be appreciated as such.” Another reader replied, “shame on you for the Palin jokes. Think of how his family feels.”

It’s not a joke. It might be a partisan attempt to hijack sorrow in order to promote a political goal, which is tasteless (and a well-worn political strategy), but it’s also a statement of fact. When that feeling of worthlessness descends, reading today’s political coverage doesn’t help. Is the candidacy of Sarah Palin sufficient cause to do myself in? Of course not. Is her ascendance depressing to people who think there’s more to foreign relations than guns and bluster? Well, yes. When I visited my nephew’s grammar school I was struck by all the “anti-bully” propaganda plastered all over the school. It shows up in my own child’s urban school materials too, but not half as much as it does in the Republican stronghold my nephews live in. Yet the swaggering, hard-nosed bully is what the Palin / McCain ticket glorifies (This is the sort of paradox that Harpers-type writers love to point up, and if I were half as talented as David Foster Wallace, I would have written an entire essay by now on that topic.) The Third Reich rose on a wave of shared resentment over the humiliations of Versailles and the economic traumas of the early thirties. People supported Hitler because he defended them against those who would denigrate German pride. They didn’t necessarily recognize him as a bully – he was their champion. The grievances expressed by supporters of Palin are not fake – they're as real as the hurt felt by middle-class Germans when their savings became worthless and Goebbels told them to blame the infiltration of Jews, communists, and intellectuals. Looking at Palin through that lens, it feels dangerous and outmoded to be a thinking person at this moment. Even if Wallace had no thoughts at all on the current situation as he took steps toward his own death, those of us who are trying to make sense of what causes such a smart and successful person to kill himself can’t help but consider it. On the other hand, maybe we just think too much.

STOP TELLING ME WHAT EVERYBODY'S EATING: A RANT ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING.

There is a limit to what we can, within reason, be expected to endure, and sometimes even the smallest thing can tick me off. At the risk of demonstrating myself to be a short-tempered coot, I demand that the New York Times writers stop talking about what they and their sources are eating.

What do I mean? Good question. My response: Frequently, in 'features' sections of the NYT, like the New York Times Magazine, the stories involve longer interviews with sources who play major roles in stories. As if to demonstrate that these are real people, doing real things, with whom the journalist ACTUALLY interacted, and also so as to fill space (part of what Kevin Barnhurst has called "The New Long Journalism"), we find journalists sharing all kinds of information concerning what their sources are eating, and where

Take the recent article about internet trolls, from The New York Times Magazine, August 3, where we are told:
"We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like."
"We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha."
"Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza."

This is an informative story about internet trolls, and I write not to discredit the journalist (Matthias Schwartz), but to say two things:

a) The fear was, for a long time, that stories in news outlets would get shorter and shorter, as a result of competition with television. The web (though not all other parts of the internet) has given journalism a much more expansive shell for journalism, and stories are, in some cases, free to 'breathe', even to lounge around, have brunch, take a stroll through a leafy neighborhood, get lost in the basement of a bookstore, and eventually find their way home. In elite US journalism, we're seeing (and this is indirectly related to web journalism) long stories.

b) I think the bit where journalists tell us what they're eating, or what their sources are eating is irritating, and will be mocked in future times as a telltale sign of elite journalism of our current period. It's an obvious way to identify one's journalism as made by, and intended for, the upper middle-class (perhaps as 'objectivity' was a hundred years ago). And it's too clever by half.

Before I become Andy Rooney, I'm going to take my leave...

Don't Hate Him Because He's Intelligent

There are all sorts of reasons that I could give as to why I think John Derbyshire has surpassed Gore Vidal and Ron Rosenbaum as the biggest asshole now working in American journalism, but I would suggest that this recent piece of his in the National Review serve as Exhibit A. At the top of the article, he cites a recent essay by William Deresiewicz in which Deresiewicz recounts having had some trouble talking to his plumber. This inability to communicate across class levels becomes, for Derbyshire, an anecdote supporting the idea of a natural elite, based mostly, he seems to think, on intelligence. So you see, when the hoi polloi start moaning about elitism, it's really just a complaint that some folks are smarter than them.

First of all, any time you start talking about "inherited" intelligence you beg all kinds of pretty basic questions: including, what intelligence really is, how we know we have measured it, how we could ever control for various environmental influences with any degree of influence to make any sort of claim about innate abilities, and whether it is the case that intellectual skills are represented by a single trait, or (more likely by far) that some people have mental capabilities that make them good for dealing with some sorts of tasks, and others have capabilities to deal with other sorts of tasks.

But the really rich irony here is that Derbyshire has completely misunderstood (or mis-represented) the essay that he quotes from. William Deresiewicz isn't arguing that he can't talk to the plumber because he, Deresiewicz, is just so damned smart. He's arguing that he can't talk to him because he is not competent to do so. There's no natural hierarchy at play here; there's a failure of the educational system. Which any reasonably intelligent reader might have guessed from the title of the essay: "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."

One of the ways that Ivy League schools deform their students, Deresiewicz argues, is by pampering them both intellectually and emotionally, so that they get an undeserved sense of superiority:

"There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances...Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls 'entitled mediocrity.'"

In other words, John Derbyshire, unafraid to speak the Truth that all us cowed liberals cannot accept--that there are truly superior people in the world, who are just more intellectually gifted than all the rest--isn't even bright enough to figure out the point of the stuff that he quotes. He has taken almost the exact opposite meaning from Deresiewicz's essay than the one the author obviously intended it to have. And then he's broadcast that perverted interpretation to his readers, most of whom probably won't probably bother to read the original. So now, an insightful, provocative commentary on the relationship between education and class in modern America gets turned into some lame defense of elitism, thanks to Derbyshire. What a tool.

This isn't really media commentary, but I had to get it off my chest.

Media and bodies

The issue of visibility is, as Dave notes, important for thinking about new media in general and especially thinking about it historically. Bloggers have helped make visible certain moments or kinds of information (two prominent examples: Presidential sexual follies; racist remarks made by public figures) that may not have become part of the public discussion in an earlier era. In doing so, they have also made visible the ways in which mainstream media had always decided on what was or was not newsworthy, allowing for a more public critique of news institutions as well as politicians.

At the same time (as Fernando points out) we need to realize that media of any kind both open up and foreclose certain opportunities, encourage certain ways of acting and discourage others, bring some kinds of information to the fore and hide other kinds. One of the things that the Internet hides is the physical specificity of the bodies that use it: their visibility. Sherry Turkle has famously celebrated that aspect of Internet communication. By removing physical presence from an interaction, people were allowed to be whoever they wanted to be. If you a middle-aged male accountant from Wichita, you could pretend to be a surfer, or a biker, or a Buddhist monk, or a woman, or a space alien. No-one would be the wiser: a kind of postmodernist play of identity became a very real possibility. But this feature also meant that it was easy to forget that most of the people using the Internet in the 1990s (the VAST, VAST majority) were white, youngish, middle-class American males (which might help explain why, for example, the dominant political ethos was essentially libertarian). When we look at how the Net was organized, the ways it was used, the kind of discourse that built up around it, we need to keep in mind what sorts of bodies were in charge, and maybe also look at how they used something like a notion of visibility (or related terms like “openness”), to both publicly present themselves and to strategically hide certain elements of their lives.

HEADFIRST INTO A DILEMMA: HISTORIOGRAPHY, CONTINUED

In a recent post, I argued that too many histories of the media focus too much on the discourse surrounding the media, and neglect the material qualities of the media themselves. I maintain this position, but in the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how some of the best historical work in media studies has succeeded largely because they de-center the object of analysis. In other words, much as works of history of communication technology that focus almost exclusively on, say, newspaper reports about a certain medium (many inspired by Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New, a truly superior work) fail to deliver much because of their tendency to recapitulate tired ideas about utopian and dystopian expectations (Marvin, and Carey before her, always did better than this), histories that focus almost exclusively on the technology as a thing in and of itself reify the 'set-aside-ness' of the communication technology in question, and this leaves us with some pretty weak historical work, too.

A colleague recently suggested to me that Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought--a history of the U.S. from 1815 to 1848--did a better job with the history of the telegraph than many other books that took a more telegraph-centric look at things. The point: Howe (a bona fide historian) does better talking about the telegraph because he's not talking about the telegraph itself, or even about the discursive domain surrounding the telegraph. It's a superior piece of media history because it's not trying to be the history of a medium, which allows it to be a multivariate and broad exploration of all kinds of things happening in the U.S. as the electrical telegraph was coming into being (keeping in mind that the original 'telegraph' wasn't electrical, or American). So, all those issues in economics, culture, military history, race, gender, class, politics, power, regionalism, and literature get pulled into the analysis.

So, maybe it works like this:
--histories about technologies themselves are often too limited in scope
--histories about the discourse around the technologies have become a kind of one-note reminder of the constructedness of all things (an idea that is important, but not really sufficient in all cases to explore or exhaust a particular area of study)
--histories that go broad and don't focus on a communication technology are the best

To write good histories of the media, maybe we need to stop looking at the media.