The Normal Distribution and the Act Like a Man Box

 

I've been thinking about "manhood" and what it means--or what we think it means--to be a man. I am not a psychologist or a sociologist or any other kind of -ologist qualified to say anything with authority. I’m just a guy, thinking out loud. I'm a guy who has been a man for his whole life, and a father of two men for nearly 23 years. But that's all I am, so...caveat lector.

What I keep thinking about is: what is normal? Statistically (I’m not a statistician), normal is not a single thing; normal is a distribution around a mean. We’ve all seen the “bell curve.” To be formal about it, according to this statistics website:

“The normal distribution is a continuous probability distribution that is symmetrical around its mean, most of the observations cluster around the central peak, and the probabilities for values further away from the mean taper off equally in both directions.”

A “continuous probability distribution” feels very quantum-physics-y to me in its suggestion that reality is less concrete and fixed that we perceive it to be—more wave than point, more probability than certainty. (I’m not a physicist—these are all just the ramblings of a dilettante reader.)

Todd Rose tells some amusing anecdotes, in The End of Average, about times when we have sought an actual individual to represent the “average” of a set of qualities representing manhood or womanhood. In both cases, the search came up empty. There was no single person who represented the mean of all manly or womanly qualities; the pure middle was an empty set.

Qualities exist across a continuum, and they bunch and gather around the mean. Imagine a normal distribution of masculine traits and behaviors, with what we call the very feminine at the left-hand tail and what we think of as the hyper-macho at the right hand-tail. I’m making this up. Most of us would bunch and gather around the mean as aggregates of behavior, but if you isolated particular behaviors, or attitudes, or affects, our individual scores might be all over the place. That’s what makes us individuals.

That’s what makes us individuals, but we socialize ourselves and each other pretty hard, as men, not to be all over the place, but rather to fit snugly inside what Rosalind Wiseman calls “the Act Like a Man” box. There is one acceptable way to be a boy or a man—deviate from it at your peril.

We’ve been raised with some pretty hardcore, binary thoughts about gender and sexuality. “Normal” men are one thing, feel one thing, behave one way, are attracted in one way to one opposite sex. Anything that deviates from that “normal” is, by definition, deviant. But the reality is that “normal” is a cluster of things hovering around a mean, not a singularity where all things meet. If there is such a thing as mean masculinity, it exists only because most cases of Actual Men hover around that point, at locations to one side or another of that mid-point it in equal measure. In other words, not all men are X; some men are a little X+ (meaning to the left of X, not better than X) and some are a little X- (meaning to the right of X, not lesser than X); some are a LOT X+ and X-.

But what have we men done? We have looked at that distribution and we have invalidated almost everyone to the left as being dangerously “faggy” or “gay.” Maybe only the tail; maybe almost all the way up to just short of the mean. Depends on the generation. But even in our relatively enlightened times, too many of us live in terror of anything to the left of the mean, and hope that we, personally, are never tagged as being in that group. But the extreme right? The extreme right is considered totally safe and viable: the hyper-macho, the toxic, the brutal—those are all considered reasonably permissible ways of being a man. So, we don’t just accept the cluster around the mean—we say “real men” exist at the mean and all the way out to the furthest extreme of only the right-hand tail, while anything even slightly to the left of the mean is dangerous and to be shunned.

Remember—the mean, the average, the “normal” would not exist unless there were equal numbers of cases on BOTH sides of it. That’s how distribution works. Which means there are a hell of a lot of us to the left of the mean (in aggregate and also in a variety of individual traits). But we’ve decided to make invisible and untouchable any expression of masculinity in the left-of-X range. Those traits do not exist and must not exist in the Act Like a Man box. 

Which is ludicrous, right? Because if the values to the left of the mean disappeared, the mean would shift hard towards the right. By definition. But we like to pretend that nothing to the left of the mean is part of who we are, and we reinforce that idea constantly.

Would gay men, measured alone, fall into the same rough distribution, or would their mean skew a little to the left? I don’t know.

Would straight men pulled out into a separate group skew a little to the right? I don’t know.

What I do know—or sense, because, again, I have no expertise in any of this—is that masculine traits and behaviors among men as a whole follow something like a normal distribution regardless of sexual preference, and that all of this—all of it—should be considered a normal and ordinary range of expression of masculinity.

I wrote a year ago about how we might be better served by thinking of gender qualities along a linear continuum—a slider switch rather than an on/off toggle. But if you insisted on marking intervals along the masculinity slider for measurement purposes, I think you’d find that, in aggregate at least, most of us would probably register at around 5 on a 1-10 scale. Regression to the mean.

Why does that matter? It matters because people in the majority like to pretend that minorities do not exist—or, at the very least, that their existence as minorities makes them less-than-worthy or less-than-real or less-than important. But remember: in a distribution, even the extremes help to define the mean. And remember: so very, very much of life on earth falls into these distributions. For any set of values clumped around a mean, there are always tails at either end. They are not weirdos or deviants or wrong. They simply represent the tails—they are people with certain traits expressed less often than others within a particular population. But they are expressed. They are part of the data set. They are part of us. They help define us. They belong.

And I’ll repeat this thought as well: the mean is simply an aggregate of traits and behaviors. Go searching for the individual person who is a perfect representation of the average of all traits--Mister Perfectly Average Man, and you’ll come up with an empty set. There is no perfectly-averagely-masculine man. If masculinity were made up of 100 separate traits, none of us would register at-the-mean 100 times. We’d be a little to the left here, a little to the right there, a little further out in some areas, a little closer in for others. As individuals, we are all over the map—and yet, so many of us are terrified of allowing ourselves to vary.

There are as many ways to be a man as there are men. There is no box. There is no fucking box. We need to just stop. We need to let some air in and let each other breathe.

Education is an Old World and a New World, Both

I know it’s liable to drive tribalists crazy, but the truth is that education is both conservative and liberal, both traditionalist and progressive.

Education is conservative and traditionalist at its core, and to pretend otherwise is silly. The point of teaching content—any content—and not simply skills—is to connect our children to their cultural history and allow them to continue the story that our forebears started and that we have been a part of. 

Education allows each of us to be smarter than any of us; it allows us to access the history of thought, of experimentation, of discovery. The ability to access a wide and deep world of other brains is the superpower that has made humans what we are. 

But education is also progressive. Maybe not in every time and in every place, but certainly here in our country. Our Founders read history to find out how other people in other places had solved problems similar to the ones they were facing, and they used what they learned to forge a new path for themselves. 

We have students read novels about problems and conflicts and sadness and pain—not to bum them out and make them feel the world is terrible, but to help them develop empathy beyond what they can see and hear, and to build within them a desire to help others and improve the world. Yes—improve the world. Because the desire to make the world anew is our birthright as Americans (and sometimes our tragic flaw). 

A med school professor who made a speech to my freshman class, the first day of college, spoke of the early European explorers and the importance of finding a point on the horizon past which you know nothing, and sailing straight for it. That—he said—is what education is all about. That—he said—is what this country is all about.  

And yes, those explorers did terrible things when they reached what they thought was a new world, because they brought their traditions with them, which included all their limitations and ignorance and bigotry. And that part needs to be taught, too. The blessings and the curses. 

Never stop asking. Never stop learning. Never be satisfied that you know everything you need to know. Never assume the land you stand on is the promised land, or that you are its savior. The real promise is the fire that drives you forward. But don’t go forward empty-handed…or empty-headed. Learn the past. Learn from the past. And build on it. Conserve…and progress. 

Why I Am Not Surprised

When I was in seventh grade, my Social Studies teacher decided to hold a mock trial as part of the curriculum. I don’t remember what the academic purpose of the whole thing was, whether the trial was based on some actual, historical event. All of that is lost to me. What I do remember is that I was the prosecuting attorney (a position I was very proud of, as my father was a law school professor), and that the whole trial was a shambles.

Why was it a shambles? Because were in seventh grade, and seventh graders—especially seventh grade boys—don’t care about much that the adult world finds important. To make a mock trial work, people have to take their roles semi-seriously. The witnesses have to read their depositions and learn their story. They have to be able (and willing) to work with their lawyer to create a direct examination that runs through the evidence. They have to be able (and willing) to improvise coherently when cross-examined by the other lawyer. That’s the only way the storytelling works. And, of course, the jury has to take its job semi-seriously and care about rendering a fair verdict.

You can already see where this is going. I took my job seriously, and few others did. I managed to hold my witnesses together reasonably well, and it was easy (and fun) to cross-examine the opposing witnesses, who couldn’t keep their stories straight and didn’t much care if they were caught in a “lie.” I made my case; the other side barely tried. It was open-and-shut.

And then the jury returned a verdict against me. Unanimously. I couldn’t believe it. So I went up to the kid who had served as jury foreman and asked him what had happened. “I had all the evidence on my side!” I cried. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re a nerd, so fuck you.”

In today’s case of “The United States vs. Political Seriousness,” I offer this anecdote as Exhibit A.

Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because people thought she was corrupt, or because of her emails, or because of her pantsuits. She lost because she was a wonk, a nerd, someone who took the job way too seriously. Donald Trump was the class clown. He offered no coherent policies, no real rebuttals to Clinton’s positions. He offered a raspberry and a fart joke. He said, “fuck you, nerd.” And enough people laughed along with him to let him win.

That’s my theory of the case, and you can see it playing out all over again. Joe Biden’s approval rating is slipping, and yet he’s delivering on everything he said he’d do. In a rocky, stumbling, chaotic way, sure—but that’s democracy for you. We don’t run our country the way the Chinese Communist Party runs theirs. He said he’d get vaccines out; he got vaccines out. He said he’d withdraw from Afghanistan; he withdrew from Afghanistan. He promised an infrastructure bill; he passed it with bipartisan support. He promised a spending plan; he’s on the verge of passing it. And no one seems to care.

Pundits are blaming the administration and the Democratic party for poor messaging, and I’m sure that’s a part of the problem. But I think the larger problem is that we’re a bunch of seventh-grade boys, and we find competent administration of government boring and stupid. Bomb-throwers and rioters and propagandists are cool. Outrageous liars are interesting—and when they get away with outlandish, incomprehensible lies, we think they’re too cool for school. If someone tells us that those people are doing damage to our culture or our politics, we say, “fuck you, nerd.” Seventh-grade boys don’t think about what will happen tomorrow if they burn down the school today, as long as they get to laugh at all the nerds trying to carry books and lab equipment outside to safety.

There’s nothing nerdier or wonkier than thinking about causation and correlation, assessing the future effects of possible actions today. Cool kids don’t assess; they act without thinking, and they let the chips fall where they may. Acting without accountability is cool; rigging things so that everyone else is left holding the bag, while they walk away scot-free, is the ultimate act of cool. We celebrate the bomb-throwers, not the people who have to clean up the mess afterwards. We sneer at the people stupid enough to care enough to clean up the mess.

We’ve worked hard, as a culture, to erase distinctions between childhood and adulthood, and this, perhaps, is one of the results. We do not put away childish thing and we do not look up to people who behave like adults. Pete Buttigieg will likely not be a viable presidential candidate—not because he’s gay, amazingly enough, but because he takes his job too seriously. If Joe Rogan chose to run for something, though…I don’t know if he’d win anything, but he’d certainly be a contender. If you’re on TV and you’re a loudmouth who loves to score cheap rhetorical points against “guests,” you have a shot. If you’re on TV in any capacity, even if you’re a shady doctor selling crap supplements to the gullible, you have a shot. In fact, the more obvious it is that your supplements are crap, the higher esteem you’ll be held in. We will admire you for fooling the sheep (who are always “them,” never “us”), just as many of us admired Trump.

We don’t care if our problems are solved. We don’t care if our roads have holes. We don’t care if the poor go hungry. All we want to do is point at the grownups and the nerds, like Nelson on “The Simpsons,” and laugh.

Reaching for the Heights

The trailer for the movie, In the Heights, was released this week. Many people have been viewing it, sharing it, tweeting about it, and generally going bananas over it, miserable that they’ll have to wait until summer to see the movie. I remember having the same feeling when the soundtrack to Hamilton came out. In both cases, it didn’t take more than a single song to get people’s hearts racing. There is something in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music that conveys the pure, exuberant joy of living in this country and belonging deeply to it. It’s not that he writes boppy dance tunes that make us mindlessly happy; it’s that he writes straight from—and to—our American hearts.

Because of where he grew up and when he grew up, and who is family was, and where he went to school, his music draws from Hip Hop and Rock and Broadway and Salsa and god-knows-what-other sources. He can do this, not because he is a scholar, but because he grew up the nexus of American musical and cultural streams. He took in everything, and he transformed it into something we had both never heard before and, at the same time, knew to be ours.

What other immigrant artists does he remind me of? George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, who did exactly the same thing in their own time, pulling in Jazz and Blues and Gospel and Classical and Folk and Music Hall and Klezmer, and creating music that had never existed before, but said “America” to much of the country during their lifetimes and ever after.

The purpose of the “melting pot” was not to boil everything down into an unappealing, gray mush, but to create a sizzling, spicy, amazing mélange—a thing both new and old—made up of many cultures and flavors and sounds, but all fitting together into something strong, compelling, powerful, and new—composed of its raw materials but transcending any of its component parts. That was, and is, our country at its best. When we meet everyone, and listen to everyone, and share each other’s stories, and taste each other’s foods, we end up creating new things that draw from the best of everyone and become something that belongs to all of us, and could only have been created by us. We create new things, and we become new things.

Do we have issues of cultural appropriation to deal with? Yes, we do. But there is a difference between stealing someone’s voice to use as your own, for your own benefit, and raising your voice alongside someone else’s and learning their songs. Cultural diffusion is not the same thing as cultural appropriation, and to blur the two and insist that It Must Stop is not only wrongheaded; it’s impossible. There is no such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is such a thing as racial purity. We are mutts, all of us, and however we define ourselves, that thing is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of bumping up against, learning from, and borrowing from other people. I could argue all day that mutts are hardier and more valuable than purebreds, but in the end, it’s a ridiculous argument to have to make; among humans, there are no purebreds. The entire idea is nonsense.

But as we retreat from each other in fear and suspicion, we try to draw new/old lines around “our people” to define them in opposition to “those people,” and insist that everyone inside the magic circle is our family, our tribe. Retrograde nationalists, who didn’t used to be able to speak honestly in the public sphere, now feel safe in proclaiming that long before the United States was a constitutional republic, it was a LAND meant for a certain group of PEOPLE—and those people were of English and German or Dutch descent, full stop. Others may come, at the pleasure of the original settlers, but the land does not really belong to them. People say this, openly, in 2019. Even people not of the original “settler stock” say this. In no founding documents anywhere—at the federal level or the state level, or even in colonial charters, to the best of my knowledge—is peoplehood or citizenship or belonging defined by or limited to country of immediate origin. But they say these things, openly, in 2019. Irish and Italian and Greek and Russian and Polish and Korean and Chinese and Mexican and Dominican and Indonesian and Indian and African Americans (and on, and on, and on), beware: you are guests in this land, even if your family has been here for 100+ years.

Is it any wonder that members of minority groups respond to this kind of talk by drawing magic circles around their people and playing what the political right calls “identity politics?” The right loves to rail about identity politics destroying the fabric of America by focusing on small-group distinctions instead of large-group definitions, but they forget that this is reaction, not action. If African Americans take to the streets, chanting “Black Lives Matter,” instead of “All Lives Matter,” it’s because they’ve been told, relentlessly and violently and for generations, that they cannot consider themselves part of the “all.” All the marching, all the protests, all the activism, just to learn that large swaths of White America will never accept you as equal, regular, "normal" parts of the country. And when African Americans finally take White America at its word, we start posting nastily on Twitter about how THEY are refusing to act like part of US, and THAT is what is destroying our nation. What chutzpah…to use an expression from yet another minority group that’s being warned, after generations of relative peace and stability, that they don’t really belong here, and had better behave themselves. 

Take note of what these ethno-nationalists are saying: it does not matter what you believe, how you act, how you vote, or what creeds or principles you adhere to. If you belong to the wrong GROUP, you are not really an American...and you never will be. Alexander Hamilton's story is not and cannot be Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and to claim spiritual ownership of it is an affront to them. Barack Obama's presidency is an asterisk to them--a blip--and the current president's efforts to undo every accomplishment of that administration has nothing to do with political policy--it's about ethnic cleansing. Whether he says that or believes it, large numbers of his followers do, and it is explicitly why they follow him. That is what so-called conservatism has turned into. There are things they want to conserve, all right--we just need to be very mindful of what those things are.

And if we put up with it? Shame on us. If we participate in it in our own way, responding to other people's tribal retreats by circling our own wagons in smaller and smaller magic circles of "us," then shame on us even more.

Because...where will it lead? Will we have to change the Great Seal on our dollar bills?  Give up those the old, Latin phrases that no one bothers to teach anymore? Novus ordo seclorum? A new order of the ages? No. Sorry. The new world is just the old world, transplanted. We've chosen to resurrect all the old, comfortable hatreds. E pluribus unun? Out of many, one? No. Sorry. We've chosen to remain many. E Pluribus Pluribus. Get off my lawn.

And how will we redesign the Great Seal itself?  The fierce eagle, with thirteen arrows grasped—together—in a single talon, fighting a common fight, doesn’t feel right anymore. Neither does the giant pyramid, drawing Americans from all corners of the globe into a single point, with the all-seeing eye up top. Maybe instead of the pyramid, we can have a wall. A single, giant, slab—no dimension, no shading, no shape. Just a slab. And on the other side of the seal, perhaps, a giant middle finger extended—from everyone, to everyone, with the inspiring, Latin phrase: futue te ipsi.

No thank you. Not for me.

Listen, I like being a New Yorker. I like being a Jew. I like being all the distinct, different things that I am. But I also love being part of the crazy tapestry or bubbling melting pot or [insert your own metaphor here] that is America. This is my country. And I should be able to sing about it AND about my family, or my block. I am large; I contain multitudes. Yeah--I claim him as mine, too. 

Even in the middle of the fractious 1960s and 1970s, I grew up singing songs like this in school:

This is my country! Land of my birth!
This is my country! Grandest on earth!
I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,
For this is my country to have and to hold.

Isn't there room in this vast, open country, to sing songs like that AND songs from our own communities? Can't we all contain multitudes?

In the Heights, I hang my flag up on display
We came to work and to live and we got a lot in common
It reminds me that I came from miles away

In the Heights
I’ve got today!

And today’s all we got, so we cannot stop

Today is all we’ve got...but we’ve got it together. Let’s not throw that away.

One Thing Leads to Another

I was flipping through a poetry book over the weekend and landed by chance on “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” If you read any poetry in high school or college, you probably encountered this piece by Lord Byron. I don’t remember studying or discussing the contents of the poem at all, but I do remember talking about its anapestic rhythm (ba-ba-BA, ba-ba-BA), which can feel like the galloping of horses:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Re-reading that poem made me think about another poem that made martial use of rhythm--Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

Poetry pedants will know that Tennyson gets a galloping effect by using the opposite rhythm of Bryon’s poem. He uses a dactyl (BA-ba-ba, BA-ba-ba) instead of an anapest. But that’s not why I thought about the Tennyson poem. I actually thought about a piece of music first, the title of which I thought was “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” but which turned out to be the “Light Cavalry Overture.” If you don’t know the piece, you can listen to it here. At about 2:10, you’ll know why the Byron poem made me think of it, because it uses the same anapestic rhythm to make one think of horses galloping.

So: one poem I re-encounter after many years makes me think of a piece of music lodged in my memory, which leads me (by mistaken identity) to another poem I remember from long ago. And so goes our thinking, bouncing like a pinball (if you’re old enough for that simile to be meaningful) from memory to memory. We don’t think linearly and rationally; we think in webs of association. One thing leads to another.

And here we go again: I write the words, “one thing leads to another,” and immediately I think of the song of the same title by The Fixx, which came out when I was in college and was played incessantly at the bar where we used to celebrate and dance after performances of our comedy sketch troupe. And if I choose to linger and daydream, I can let that chain of associations roll out from one thing to another, all day.

What we think about depends on what we know—and who we are, as human beings, depends on what we think about. The self-story that each of us tells is built up of a million discrete events in memory, and how those memories connect to each other. Who I am is not simply the things I’ve done or the things that have been done to me—it also includes the things I’ve read, and heard, and seen, and touched, and how all of those things connect with each other and with my life experiences. I am who I am, in part, because of how those poems and pieces of music connect with each other in my mind, and why one thing suggests the other. All of those things are the pieces of furniture of my mind, and that’s why the room I live in, in my mind, is uniquely mine.

Think about what this means for us as educators. We are introducing students to information about literature, and science, and history, and mathematics, and art—not simply so that they can regurgitate that information on tests, but because we are helping them furnish the rooms of their minds. We are giving them a place to live, intellectually. We are giving them things to think about for the rest of their lives—bits of memory that can float to the surface and attach themselves to new experiences and new information. And how they process those new experiences will depend, to some degree, on the associations and connections that are made between the new and the old. That means the furniture we bequeath to them--the things of the mind that we bring to our students and our own children--matter greatly. 

The first time I drove across the country, I thought about Walt Whitman and the words that open his “Song of the Open Road.”

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, 

Healthy, free, the world before me, 

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, 

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, 

Strong and content I travel the open road. 

Because of that association, I had a very particular feeling about driving across the country, and a feeling about the country I was driving across. I was connected to the history of my nation, and the history of exploration, and the American-to-the-point-of-cliché idea of self-re-invention. I was connected—enmeshed in my country in a variety of ways that were important and meaningful. My life was mine, but not mine alone. I was part of something vast, and part of something deep. Without those associations, I was just some guy, driving West across some rocks, hoping I could get to my hotel before the sun slanted into my eyes.

Was I attuned enough to other associations that would have made me think differently about the land I was driving across, and who had lived there before the "history of my nation?" I was not. I had learned things in school; I was not ignorant. But those other associations were not (yet) part of who I was and how I saw--and responded to--the world around me.

When my children encounter a beautiful sunset, I would like them to be able to connect it not only to memories of past sunsets, but also, perhaps, to a Van Gogh painting they’ve seen, and to happy memories of going to museums with their parents. When they hear an old, sad song as adults, I want them to be able to be able to think about what that song meant to them at a time of youthful heartbreak, and how that heartbreak has cooled in the ensuing years to a wistful memory, and how past loves and losses have taught them to be better people. The more things we put into their brains, the more things they can think about and connect to their present experiences. That isn’t elitism or snobbery; it’s just what makes life rich and full.

A world bereft of association is a thin and sad world. X = x = x = x. Everything is just itself. A world of limited association is just as impoverished. This is why arguments about the literary canon do matter. Are the "dead white males" still important to our culture? Obviously I think so, since I just made reference to some of them. But are they the only singers of songs and painters of pictures whose thoughts and ideas should be rattling around in our minds? Hardly.

The power of association is not always a happy and positive thing, but it’s always an important thing. When I encounter horror or injustice today, it connects and resonates with what I already know—about world history, about American history, about what we have solved, and about we have failed to fix. If every story in the news is simply itself—isolated and disconnected from any context or precedent—then it’s easy to avoid accountability. “Oh,” we can say, when someone shoots up a synagogue full of children and old people. “It’s just some guy who has a mental illness.” But it’s not just “some guy,” and it’s not simply mental illness. The actions are connected to a centuries-long history of Antisemitism and conspiracy-mongering, and are also connected to a decades-long history of anger, among some, at American Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights and other progressive movements. If we don’t know these things, and think about these things, then every day of horror can be dismissed as a simple and solitary event, and we cannot grow and make progress.

Everything we teach our children is a simile. Nothing is just itself; it’s powerful and worth learning because of its associations. How is it like this other thing? How is it not like this other thing? What caused and led to it? What did it, in turn, cause and lead to? What does it make you think about?

My love is like a red, red, rose…why? Because it is beautiful? Yes, perhaps. But also, perhaps, because it is delicate, and can easily be injured. Because it requires tending and care in order to thrive. Because, no matter how carefully I tend it, the fact is that the rose, and my love, are living things, and will wither and die someday. There is nothing I can to do stop that, and it makes things matter all the more.

So yes, I will love thee still, my dear, “till a’ the seas gang dry…and the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” But that day is coming, for thee and for me. And knowing it should make every moment with my love—and every moment along the open road we’re traveling—precious. Which brings me back to my old friend, Walt Whitman, for whom I always have a chair waiting in the room of my mind. He sings out to me across the years, and to all my fellow countrymen and women...if anyone has ears to hear.

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? 

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

All Trees; No Forest

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, our total annual expenditures on public education (Kindergarten through Grade 12) are projected to be $654 billion this year, or just shy of $13,000 per pupil. That sounds like a lot of money, but spread across a not-quite-ten-month school year, it averages out to about $342 per student, per week, or about $68 per day, all expenses included. Not a bad deal, actually, for educating our children.

But are we educating our children while we're schooling them? I wonder, sometimes. What are we getting for our money and time? I'm not even counting what they learn in college, for those who go to college. Just think about the inputs and outputs in our K-12 system:

• Our children spend 13 years studying reading and writing, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't distinguish a fact from an opinion, assess an argument for logical validity, or figure out when to use their, they're, or there.

• Our children spend 13 years studying mathematics, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't figure out Annual Percentage Rates on loans, can't figure out whether a sale price is actually a good deal, may not realize that 1/3 is greater than 1/4, and in general can't protect themselves from getting ripped off.

• Our children spend 13 years studying social studies and history, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't identify other countries on a map, can't place key events of world or even American history in chronological order, do not understand the basic functioning of our government, and are increasingly in danger of selling our democratic birthright to the next authoritarian strongman who promises easy answers to their problems and satisfying punishment of their enemies, both foreign and domestic.

• Our children spend 13 years studying science, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates have no real understanding of the scientific method as a system of learning and discovery, rely on faith or mythology instead of empirical evidence to teach them how the world works, and think that a scientific "theory" is no more reliable than a guess.

In each of those disciplines, students learn facts, figures, definitions, and processes day in and day out, year in and year out. Some of them, they remember; some of them, they forget. But how can so many people who have graduated from our schools have so little conceptual understanding of the core concepts that lie at the heart of those disciplines? If they don't "get" those basic, critical ideas, then what was the point of all those days and years, all those tests and papers and project? What was the point of any of it?

Feudal America

This month’s Atlantic Magazine has a depressing little article about how the idea of America—the set of beliefs that animated people like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau—appears to be disappearing with each passing generation, leaving only a dry husk of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia in its place. According to the article, on a scale of 1-10, less than a third of Americans born since 1980 assign a 10 to the value of living in a democracy (as opposed to 3/4 of those born before WWII). A quarter of Millennials say it’s not important to choose leaders in free elections, and a little less than a third think civil rights are needed to protect civil liberties. The article doesn’t talk about what or who those people think will protect their liberties, absent a code of civil rights. Perhaps they think Mark Zuckerberg will have their back. I don’t know.

There was a time—just yesterday, really—when the average person’s safety depended on his allegiance to a local lord of some kind. The lord was part of the ruling class—the strong and wealthy and well-connected. They weren’t regular people, and regular people could not ascend or aspire to their level. In some places, rulers were considered gods; in others, they simply received their right to rule from God. Either way, they owned the wealth of the country, and they owned the land of the country, and those things were carefully managed and preserved and handed down from generation to generation. A local warlord or strongman was given a garrison and some parcel of land by the ruler, and his job was to hold it against invaders and other evil-doers. The regular people who happened to live on those lands were under the protection of that lord, and paid for that protection with…whatever was asked of them (just as the lord owed his life to his ruler). Perhaps the lord wanted a percentage of your crops. Perhaps the lord wanted you to serve as a soldier in his little army. Perhaps the lord wanted your daughter. All fair game. He didn’t just write the laws; he was the law. If you didn’t like the way he ran things, or the level of protection you and your family were afforded, or the price you had to pay to stay within his realm…too bad. In some lands and times, he actually, outright owned you. In others, he simply had such overwhelming power over you that he might as well have owned you.

That is the way things were, with minor variations, for most of us, for most of history. The strong and the wealthy ruled, and the rest of us served their interests, their needs, and their appetites. The rulers took care of the poor to whatever extent they felt it was affordable and manageable. After all, they needed farmers and soldiers. There was work to be done…and they, the lords, were the ultimate owners of that work, regardless of who did it for them. The rich assumed that the fact of their wealth was an indication of their moral and spiritual worth, and the poor were taught that their poverty was a sign that there was something wrong with them, something that their lords suffered with patience and magnanimity, as God himself did.

That dynamic is baked deep into our bones, as humans. Something in us yearns for the strongman, for the big daddy, for the god who rewards and punishes. Don’t let two hundred years of self-government fool you. Two hundred years is nothing.

If you look across human history, the idea of broadly applicable civil rights is not the norm—not by a long shot. Rule of law is not the norm. Representative democracy is not the norm. Even a merchant/entrepreneurial class standing between the peasantry and the aristocracy is not the norm. If we assume that these things just happen, and will always be there for us, then we’re fools. The founders of our country and their more progressive descendants fought hard to bring these things into existence, and without constant pressure, the old way of doing things can easily return. We saw it creep up during the Gilded Age, only to get pushed back by a couple of Presidents Roosevelt. And again, today, it’s returning.

The strong and the wealthy want to rule; they expect to rule; they are surprised and annoyed whenever constraints are put on them; and they fight, constantly, to remove those restraints and run free. They feel it is their right (or perhaps their burden), as exceptional people.

This, then, is American politics at its core: a fight between those who want to constrain wealth and power enough to allow every citizen the freedom and means to pursue happiness, and those who feel the wealthy and powerful are entitled to whatever they can take. Some people call this “class warfare,” like it’s a bad thing. But it’s not a bad thing; it’s the only thing. We value the freedom to do as we please, but we also value equity and fairness. Two great ideas that fit together like oil and water. American politics is not a stable, comfy thing; it's a state of eternal dynamic tension. It was built that way. It's on purpose.

If we value personal freedom but also societal equity, we have to find ways to balance them. And “ways” means laws. Those with wealth and power are always well positioned to acquire more of both; those with neither are eternally at a disadvantage. Where we can’t do for ourselves, the force of law has to do for us. That’s what laws are for. We were not promised happiness, but we were promised the ability to pursue happiness, and the laws of the land exist, to some extent, to allow each citizen a reasonable shot at that pursuit. The fair and equitable pursuit of happiness, regardless of birth circumstances, has never existed without structures put in place and held in place for just that purpose. Without those laws, all you can do is ask pretty please for the wealthy and powerful to help you out. And they will, gladly….for a price. The historical norm, into which we could easily slide if we’re not careful, is some form of feudalism, where a tiny fraction of the population own everything…and everybody.

With this historical lens, Donald Trump is not really a Republican or a Democrat; he’s a feudal lord dressed in a bad suit, constantly confused about why all the little people are getting in his way. His every action, from the way he decorates his homes and addresses his adoring crowds to the way he takes what he wants, when he wants it, speaks to this self-image. He does not exist to serve us; we exist to serve him. The only reason for our existence is to exalt him. The country is his for the taking—his and his family’s. He has lived this way, unapologetically, for over 70 years. How he managed to bamboozle anyone into believing he cared about the “common man” as anything but the raw ingredients for his next meal is beyond belief.

What would an American feudalism look like? It would start with some simple beliefs that already rattle around our culture—things like basic health care not being not a right; the government not owing you anything; taxation being theft; the government needing to be small enough to drown in the bathtub; the desire to be left alone, to do what we will, or what we can; unfettered individualism. 

Those sound very American, very cowboy-like, very freeing. And they can be freeing and desirable…as long as you have cash. You're only free if you can afford to be free.

You can already see a creeping sort of feudalism in the way we think about health care. If you're wealthy, health care is a commodity you can buy. For everyone else, it has become a gift (a "benefit") to be bestowed upon you by your employer, because it's simply too expensive for most of us to afford on our own. And you’d better behave yourself if you want to hold onto that benefit. Or you can go with the rest of the bungled and the botched to the emergency room, and throw yourself on their mercy. Of course, if taxation is theft, and everyone has to pay their way, you may not have that merciful option open to you for very long. But…too bad for you. That’s life. You are owed nothing; you are promised nothing; you should have worked harder.

Roads? Schools? Protection from fire? Protection from thieves? The rich and the powerful are happy to pay for those things…for themselves. But what happens if we really buy into the idea that taxation is theft--that those who have owe nothing to their neighbors? Those who have will retreat to their gated compounds, where the roads are well tended. They will provision their estates wonderfully. And they will protect what they have ruthlessly. After all, there are so few of the blessed inside, and so many of the cursed outside. There is no social contract; there is only you, and you, and you.

Of course, a wide range of services will always be needed within these compounds. Someone will have to sweep the streets. Someone will need to teach the children. And so on. One assumes there will be some level of charitable giving, as well. The wealthy aren't monsters. If giving isn't mandated by law, it will be compelled by religion or ethics or whatever. 

So...the gates will open, and the serving class will be allowed in, one by one—pledging their allegiance and their service to the lord, and accepting his protection in return. Of course we’ll pledge our allegiance. What other choice will we have? If we destroy the idea of a government we choose and fund, whose functions and functionaries are beholden to voters, what will we have, but a ruling class that gets to make all the decisions by itself, for itself? And for us, too, when it occurs to them (some argue we're already there). Your lord might be an actual person, or it might be a corporation, but either way, the lord will hold power and the lord will grant privileges. “Rights” will be what you earn through your loyalty and hard work.

When we look around the world today, we see a lot of representative democracies, and we think, “Well, that’s just how good, sane people do things, here in the 21^st century.” But this century is just a dot on a very long timeline, and our nation’s whole history is just a tiny stretch of time between dots. Electing leaders and holding them accountable to our needs and desires is nothing like the norm, historically. Assuming our leaders should be held accountable to the same set of laws as all other citizens is equally unusual. If we think it’s a valuable thing, we’d better start valuing it.

We should not assume that what we have is safe, stable, or normal. It needs constant protection. If we care about it, we have to make sure we actually understand how it works, so that we can protect it. We have to teach it to our children and make sure they treasure it, as well. We have to be zealots about it. As unfashionable and un-ironic and un-detached as it may sound, we have to be patriots.

We Are Unhinged

We have become unhinged.

I don’t mean “crazy,” though perhaps we are crazy. We certainly think other people are crazy. Them. The other side. And it’s the other-side-ness I’m talking about when I say we are unhinged. Un-hinged.

We’ve always taken sides in political arguments, right from Day One, but the two sides used to be joined in the middle. There was a thing that held us together and connected us, that touched both sides but belonged to neither—a thing that formed a core or center around which the rest of us could freely swing, this way and that way. It allowed the two sides to function together to perform tasks that neither side, alone, could accomplish. A simple bolt can make two flaps of metal into a hinge. And something made separate people and conflicting ideas into a nation.

Was it the Constitution? The Declaration? The First Amendment? The flag? Was it a sense of shared history, or shared destiny? It wasn’t a shared ethnic identity, no matter what the screamers like Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan want to believe. It wasn’t just white-ness, or WASP-ness, or even male-ness. We overcame substantial parts of those biases, and allowed outsiders to take part and feel ownership (albeit grudgingly). We may not have been ready to welcome this minority group or that one, but weirdly, maybe even perversely, they insisted on welcoming us. They demanded ownership in the country. They wanted the words to belong to them, as much as they belonged to us. They wanted to believe in the words, even when we didn’t seem to.

The power of the Civil Rights movement came, in part, from the demand that Thomas Jefferson’s words apply to all Americans, regardless of what Mister Tom himself might have wanted or intended. Throughout our years, groups of people of have read the words, “All men are created equal” and have said, “Make that real for me.” The work is far from finished—but that doesn’t mean it never began. A black man has been our president. A gay woman hosts a hugely popular daytime talk-show. A Latino man and his cast of black, white, Asian, gay, and straight actors has made the entire country fall in love with and sing about “the ten-dollar founding father.” Every generation, some new group of people reaches for the bolt that has held the hinge together, and has said, “I want to be part of that.”

But now…what is the “that?”  What is the bolt around which we cling, today, to form the hinge around which we can swing? We use freedom of speech to broadcast contempt of each other; freedom of religion to excuse bigotry against each other; the right to bear arms to protect us against the existential threat of each other. These things were meant to hold us together. Instead, they keep us apart. We birthed ourselves as a nation by saying that the pursuit of happiness was one of our inalienable rights, and that governments were formed—by us—to protect those rights. And yet, today, when people struggle because laws or behaviors hinder them from the free pursuit enjoyed by their neighbors, we sneer at them, call their pleas for equity and justice “special pleading,” and mouth off about the self-reliance and independence of our forefathers…our forefathers who would have perished a thousand times over if their neighbors had not been there to help them in times of trouble.

Why are the people next to us no longer our neighbors? Why doesn’t their pursuit of happiness deserve our sympathy and support? Is it because we are white and they are black? Is it because we are straight and they are gay? Is it because we are Christians and they are Moslems? Did our forefathers run through a checklist of acceptable beliefs and behaviors before offering a helping hand to someone whose crops had failed, or whose barn had burned down? 

No, of course not. They didn’t have to. The checklist was already assumed—pre-checked before the neighbors ever put down roots. If someone were living next door, it was because he had already passed muster as Acceptable. And anyone outside of that definition….lived elsewhere.

Is that what we want to go back to? And if so...how far do we need to take it, in order to feel safe? Will it be enough for white people to hide themselves away from black people—even more than they already do? But so many white people despise each other these days. Maybe that’s not enough. Would it be enough for Democrats and Republicans to live in separate neighborhoods—even more than they already do? But the moderates and extremists within each party hate each other almost as much as they hate the opposition. Should devout believers of various religions be protected from having to come in contact with or provide commercial services to people whose beliefs or behaviors contradict their own? Should we have special districts where only white, straight, conservative Christians live and operate businesses? And if we build such things, will we need some kind of guarded entry gate to keep the wrong sort from being able to go shopping in their stores?

Must every nut be separated from every bolt? Every screw removed from every hole? Every piece of wood separated and stored with similar pieces of wood, and all metals arranged by type and color? Has the wonderful, awful, maddening, glorious house we have built become so difficult to maintain that we have to tear it to the ground and return all of its parts to the store for safe-keeping?

Non-Negotiables

I was wrong. I thought we were in agreement on the Big Things, and the fights and debates were about details, the how-do-you-get-there stuff. I thought we were on the same page about what America IS and what America is FOR. I was wrong.

I was wrong—and I think that’s why this election has been so difficult for me, and for so many other people. It revealed something I hadn’t seen before. Maybe I was too dumb to see it, or too sheltered and bubbled. I don’t know. But I’m seeing it now.

I thought America was for anyone who believed in and adopted the core beliefs of the country, as put down by the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—with, perhaps, some Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, and Lincoln thrown in for good measure. I was raised to believe that those core beliefs were what made us American.

It’s not surprising that I was raised to believe this. My great-grandparents were immigrants, and were so committed to the project of becoming Americans that, within two generations, any stories or memories they had of the “old world” were forever lost to the family.

I was raised to believe that our core beliefs—and nothing else—were what made us Americans—that being American was (unlike being Greek, or French, or Irish, or Chinese) not about having a unique ethnicity or culture or rituals, not about having a deep history of peoplehood tied to a unique and particular place—that being American was an identity that was open to anyone.

Of course, there were caveats and hold-on-a-minutes laced all throughout that set of childhood beliefs, things I had to encounter and deal with as I got older—like the fact that there was a group who had a “deep history of peoplehood,” here, who our forefathers slaughtered. But even as a cynical teenager, I felt strongly that the failings were things we could fix—things we would fix—things that our core beliefs would simply not allow to continue existing. So, fine: Jefferson may not have thought of black men when he said “all men are created equal.” But having said it, it could never be unsaid, and it would eventually force us to do the right thing. The more we read and spoke and believed the words, the more they would transform us into the New People and the New Nation we wanted to be. The belief in those words made us who we were. They were our catechism; our dogma; our civic religion.

But I was wrong. Or—I wasn’t wrong in believing those things; I was wrong in thinking we all believed those things. I thought even the worst of us believed those things, but also—at the same time—held racist or sexist or xenophobic attitudes that contradicted those beliefs, creating an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. There are probably people about whom that is true. But there are also people who just flat-out disagree with everything I’ve written. They believe that America is for the Caucasian Europeans who first claimed and stole this land from its native population—that the history of the country should place those people front and center (not just in the early chapters, but in every chapter), and that the culture of the country should be deeply centered in and defined by the cultures of the English and northern European peoples who filled Independence Hall, 200+ years ago. Now and forever.

Columnist Pat Buchanan makes his America First (and White America even more-first) feelings very clear. America was, is, and must remain a “Western, Christian country.” People who are neither Western nor Christian can live in the country, of course, and be citizens here, but they can’t really own it like he can. For Buchanan, the American identity has nothing to do with our founding documents or our laws. There’s an American identity that existed before those documents were ever written, and has a deeper, more profound importance. Of course, as someone of Irish descent, Pat’s acceptance as a “Western Christian” would not have been a given, a hundred years ago. But whatever. He’s in, and the Mexicans are out. He’s in, and the Arabs are out. That’s the way it should be. Or—he warns us—we can let in all of those non-western and/or non-Christian folks and utterly lose our country. We can lose the country, no matter what those people believe, or desire, or commit their lives to, because they are the wrong kinds of people.

Ann Coulter, predictably, makes Pat Buchanan sound like Gandhi, talking about “Emma Lazarus' insane idea that all countries of the world should send their losers to us.” Of course she’s a loon, and a professional bomb-thrower, and all that. But when you hear her words and ideas being echoed by the new administration, you have to start paying attention. When your new president decides that only brown-skinned Muslims need watching as “terrorists”—that the government no longer has to spend money to keep an eye on white extremists—well, then you have to deal with the fact that you’re not using the same dictionary as other people. White people can’t be terrorists in their own land. I guess mass murderers in America who happen to be white, extremist Christians are just…protesters? I don’t know.

What I do know is this: I’m not an American because it pleases my neighbors’ sense of Christian charity and makes them feel big-hearted and tolerant. No thank you. My ancestors had to live at the pleasure of kings in one nation after another—never citizens, never under the protection of the law, always disposable when their presence became a problem. Their gravestones are in Yiddish, no matter what country they lived in, because they were kept so isolated—and were driven out so regularly—that it was never an advantage to learn the native language. They were forced to be a nation apart, with no home in the world—and were then held under eternal suspicion because they didn’t truly belong, anywhere they lived. That is not going to happen again.

So Pat, Ann, Donald: this isn’t your country, just because you love Jesus. This isn’t your country, just because you don’t tan well. This isn’t your country, just because your relatives got here before mine. This is your country, God help us, but it’s also mine.

It’s mine, not just because I was born here, but because I signed on the dotted line and said YES to the things that our best dreamers wrote and dreamed and believed: YES to, “All men are created equal;” YES to, “Consent of the governed;” YES to the first amendment (and the second, and the third…); YES to, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And, while we’re at it: YES to, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist;” YES to, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately;” YES to those “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free;” YES to, “I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest;” YES to, “I celebrate myself and sing myself;” and YES to leaning forward to the, “next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Those are my articles of faith. Those are my non-negotiables. What are yours?

How Much Choice Can You Handle?

So. Betsy DeVos will be our new Secretary of Education. Every educator I know is freaked out about the fact and what it portends for public education in this country. Will she use her power to divert public moneys to private and religious schools? (Definitely.) Will she preside over the complete dismantling of the Department of Education? (Who knows?) Will her actions bake racial and class segregation even more deeply into our educational system? (Probably.)

Freedom of individual choice does not sit comfortably alongside equality. We value both, but they often work against each other. The more we enforce equality of inputs and resources, the more likely we are to constrain individual choice. The more we empower individual freedom, the more likely we are to end up with un-equal outputs. It’s a difficult balancing act.

Democracy is hard because we are maddeningly inconsistent. We talk about the importance of individuality, freedom, and choice, but our advocacy kind of depends on the thing we’re choosing. The Right believes firmly in individual choice when it comes to guns, schools, and health care, but stands firmly against personal choice when it comes to things like family planning. The Left is exactly the opposite.

Individual liberty is obviously an important part of what makes us Americans. But where to put the boundary between the rights of the individual and the needs of society has been a tricky issue. It’s something our founders thought hard about, and it’s something that has troubled thinkers and authors through the ages. John Stuart Mill, writing in 1869, said:

As soon as any part of a person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding). In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

This is why the rights to and limits of individual choice are moving targets. There are personal decisions that, in 1869 or even 1939, would have affected no persons besides yourself--which, today, would absolutely affect other people. We force every driver to wear a seat belt and buy automobile insurance. We didn’t used to. Why are those limits to free action necessary now? Because today we are so pressed up against each other that every stupid action any one of us makes in a car will have consequences that affect other people, either directly (you hitting me) or indirectly (my rates going up because too many people are terrible drivers, or my taxes going up because too many people in too many road accidents have no insurance and have to go to the emergency room).

Individual freedom to make choices about children’s education was severely limited in the middle of the 19^th century, when compulsory public schooling was introduced. At the time, some children went to school; some did not. Some children were educated at home by parents or tutors; some simply went to work. Some girls were taught the same things as boys; some girls weren’t taught how to read. It was very much a family-based decision, based on the values and needs of the family. The government decided that the needs of the industrial revolution and a rapidly diversifying population required some kind of Assimilation Machine that would spit out functional, employable Americans, regardless of what was fed into it. Which is why some families greeted the introduction of compulsory schooling with a snarl and a shotgun. They weren’t fighting to maintain their children’s ignorance; they were fighting for the right to make their own choices. Bad choices, you might say. Choices motivated by fear, racism, and xenophobia, you might say. But still: their choices.

A hundred and fifty years later, astonishingly, the fight goes on. Many parents want to send their children to private schools, religious schools, home schools—whatever kind of school they want-- and they want public moneys to pay for the choices they make, so that educational decisions aren’t just a privilege of wealth. Some of those choices are motivated by a fierce devotion to a good education and the feeling that their current options are limited and sub-standard. And some of those choices may well be motivated by things like fear, racism, and xenophobia.

So: their children; our society. Who gets to make the decisions?

It’s a tricky question, isn’t it?  On the one hand, we know that public schooling in this country has been a great equalizer, a way for children from different backgrounds, nationalities, and cultures to some together and become One People. On the other hand, our current generation values diversity and individuality over conformity, and many people fear the whole idea of assimilating into some “norm,” whether it’s a capitalist, consumerist, media-soaked kind of norm or a secularist, humanist, one-worldist kind of norm.  On the one hand, a public school is a place to inculcate the core ideals and values of a culture. On the other hand, families have their own core ideals and values, and should have the ability to protect their children from ideas they don’t believe in.

Or should they? Where is the line between public and private? The shrinking of our world makes it a very complicated problem. A hundred years ago, you could grow up thinking and believing any wacky thing as your parents might want you to believe, and it would have limited public consequences. Basically, your education would affect just you, and perhaps a small group of your friends and co-workers. Now, with social networking and with people changing jobs and home cities, you and your ideas may touch and affect hundreds, perhaps thousands or millions of other people. To what extent should government care about the effect of weird, bad, diverse schooling on the public at large?

And to what extent should government care about you--little old, individual you? When you are a minor, your parents get to make choices about your life. Should there any limits to that, for your own protection? Should you, as a minor, be protected from your parents’ bad choices? And if so, who gets to say which choices are bad?

When I was teaching in New York City, the department of education created a wide array of magnet middle and high schools, to provide some measure of choice without succumbing to charter schools or handing out vouchers. Every parent got a thick book in the spring, listing every possible school. Parents made their choices, and some computer algorithm figured out who would go where. But some parents chose not to choose. They let their children go to their regularly zoned, neighborhood school. And what happened? The better students went to small, magnet schools, all over the city. The students with more educated parents went there as well. The students with engaged, activist parents went there. The students whose parents paid attention and cared went there. And, by and large, whoever was left over ended up at the zoned school.

And who was left over? The kids whose parents chose not to choose, or didn’t know how to choose, or were too busy, distracted, or un-informed to know that the choice mattered. Choosing not to choose was unmistakably a bad idea; the old, zoned schools became depositories of the least motivated, hardest to educate children, staffed by teachers who lacked the seniority to transfer elsewhere.

Is that all right? In a system where parents get to choose what’s right for their children’s education, is there any role for “nanny-state-ism,” any role for the government—local, state, or federal—to say that certain choices are off the table because they will harm the child—for his own sake and on behalf of the larger society of which he will someday be a part?

From the most brutalist, Libertarian, Ayn Rand position, you’d say No—there is no role for government. If you’re too stupid to make good choices for your children, then they will fail and you will fail, and good riddance to the whole bunch of you. Excellence and strength should be allowed to rise, and weakness should be culled from the herd through its own bad actions. It’s the same position Jerry Seinfeld referenced when joking about motorcycle helmet laws. This is the position that values individual freedom to act over pretty much any other social good, because it sees extreme individualism as the greatest social good. It’s an extreme position, and you can easily imagine more moderate versions of it.

From the most collectivist, social-welfare-oriented position, you’d say Yes—there is a role for government to put forth rules and set legally binding and enforceable limits on behalf of the health and welfare of minors. This is the position that values equity and the health of the community over individual freedom. For the good of all of us, individuals have to be protected from their worst impulses and decisions. This, too, has extreme and more moderate versions.

When we’ve worked well as a society, we’ve found ways to move to the middle and honor both sides of the equation, providing choice but also accountability to standards of what Good looks like. Unfortunately, we’re not in a very moderate or understanding frame of mind, these days. We’ve come to believe that the life of the republic is a zero-sum game; only one side can be right, and each side, thinking it’s allied with God, must fight the forces of evil to the death.

That is a lie, and it is nonsense, and it will eventually destroy us. That much seems obvious to me. I wish it seemed obvious to more people.

Asking Instead of Knowing

The modern idea of Democracy is rooted in the 18^th century European Enlightenment and its belief in reason, rationality, and empirical evidence. The founders believed that if sound arguments were placed in front of people, people could figure out the right course of action. We would read or hear the opposing arguments, laid out cleanly and clearly. We would debate and discuss them, like civilized people, and then we would decide. The arguments for and against the Constitution, laid out in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, followed this recipe pretty well. Arguments were made, supporting evidence and precedents were cited, respect was given to opposing viewpoints. Up and down the new states, people read, discussed, and argued—passionately, but more-or-less rationally.

And then, almost immediately, the founders threw reason to the wind and started arguing with emotion, hysteria, and outright lies, just like we do today.

Human nature being what it is, we can’t rely on our better angels to win out when it comes to political discourse. We need to be on our guard, all the time, to separate facts from opinions, and reasonable arguments from nonsense. Not just in what we’re reading and seeing, but also in what we, ourselves, are saying. We have to approach everyone—including ourselves—with a healthy dose of skepticism. The survival of the republic depends upon it.

Screaming matches are no way to settle important problems. When we come at every disagreement with emotion, hunger, and bias, we care more about winning than being correct, and that’s a very dangerous thing when you’re dealing with issues of public policy. If I’m wrong about the best way to provide for the poor and the sick—if my ideas are not, in fact, the best and most effective ones, then I should want to lose the argument—because people’s lives are at stake, and their lives are more important than my ego.

We’ve lost sight of that perspective in our public discourse. We simply assume that our ideas are correct because they’re ours—and that being right in the moment is more important than being effective in the long term. We don’t feel the need to double-check or confirm our arguments or those of our allies, because our allegiance is all the proof we require. We don’t feel the need to inquire into the arguments of our foes, because they are already, definitionally, on the wrong side, regardless of what they say or think.

We don’t do this because we’re awful people. We do this because we are taught from an early age to see the world as black vs. white, inside vs. outside, us vs. them. It informs and infects our worldview and our mindset, and it makes it very difficult to deal with diversity or ambiguity.

If your religion sees the world as divided between the forces of light and darkness, where one side must win and the other must be vanquished, if your culture tells you that your group is civilized and other people are barbarians, then it never occurs to you to ask if your group might, perhaps, be wrong. It can’t be. If your thirteen years of primary schooling tell you that in all things there are only right answers and wrong answers, and that the role of Authority is to give you those right answers, and the role of the Follower is to accept them, then it never occurs to you to question Authority—because it is, by definition, correct.

Everything you see and touch becomes a mirror of your mindset. Physical activity limits itself to a series of competitions—because nothing else is worth doing (and people not interested in competing are weak and useless); storytelling focuses on battles between good guys bad guys (and stories where it’s not certain who’s right and who’s wrong are seen as signs of moral decay); art takes as its single purpose the elevation of the Good and the Beautiful (and anything not fitting the culture’s definition of those things is seen as corrupt and disgusting). Everything becomes a zero-sum game where only one side can win or be right, and other side must be destroyed or dismissed. It’s like the old saying: if the only tool you have is a hammer, then the whole world looks like a nail.

Compromise in such a world is a sign of weakness—surrendering some of your light to the power of darkness. Why would you ever do that? Dialogue with people who disagree with you is foolish unless it’s used to persuade, manipulate, or fool your opponent. Why else would you even engage in discussion with them?

What does this kind of dualistic, Manichean way of seeing the world do to democracy? It limits it to a series of votes that drive people into and out of power. Each side remains hermetically sealed and self-contained—never listening to or learning from the other. One side gets a moment in power, and then it is voted out and its policies erased until the next go-round.

The only way to escape this cycle is to allow the thought to enter your brain that you might be wrong—that the other guy might actually have a better way of doing things—that your Authority Figure might be in error, every once in a while—that’s it’s up to you, not them, to decide what’s best—that’s it up to facts, not feelings, to determine what’s true.

An authentically democratic culture requires humility—the acceptance that you might not know everything. An authentically democratic culture requires empathy—the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes and understand the pain, fear, and joy of someone different from you. We have unwittingly allowed ourselves to create a culture that works against humility and empathy—telling us that no one is more important than Glorious Us, and that our needs, our fears, our desires, and our opinions, are all that matter. And little by little, we’ve defined that “us” down, from humanity to race, from race to country, from country to region, from region to family, from family to individual. We live in 300 million Republics of Me—and the president (and sole resident) of every republic is 100% right, 100% of the time.

How do we break down the walls and re-establish some kind of common space for rational argument and discussion? How do we stop bullying each other with shouted opinions and start listening to each other instead? I think the first step is DOUBT. Science and rationality all start with doubt—with the question, “what if I’m wrong?” We don’t ask in order to give up; we ask in order to find out.

We have to start doubting ourselves and our allies, even if only for a moment. We should doubt ourselves to verify and reinforce ourselves. Doubt ourselves so that we can come back from doubt even stronger. Instead of saying “I know it’s true because it feels right,” let’s put in ourselves in a place where we can say, “I know it’s true because I checked.”

I’ve tried to think of a few steps we can share with students, children, and friends—or to use, ourselves, when we’re not sure what stories to trust.  It’s not comprehensive or all-inclusive, by any means. But maybe it gives people a place to start.

Questions to Ask When We Read News on the Web

·        Should I trust the author?

o   What do I know about the author? What else have they written?

§  RED FLAG: If the author’s other work reveals a bias or agenda (always writing about the same topic; always taking the same position), find a second author who supports what this author is saying…even if you’re in agreement with that bias.

·        Should I trust the publisher?

§  RED FLAG: If the website seems to have a bias or agenda, find a second publication that supports the article’s main positions…even if you’re in agreement.

·        Should I trust the argument?

o   Are there links to supporting resources in the article—or in a bibliography at the end?

§  If so, what websites do those links lead to? Are those sites connected to or allied with the site publishing the first article?

·        RED FLAG: If the author is only citing friends or colleagues, search elsewhere for supporting information.

·        RED FLAG: If the article cites experts but doesn’t link to their work, look up the experts and find out who they are and what biases or agendas they might have, and where they have been published.

·        Am I being played?

o   Is the author laying out a rational argument, or am I being manipulated and coerced?

§  RED FLAGS: Be on the lookout for these logical fallacies (and check the link for many more!). Authors who rely on techniques like these are trying to keep you from thinking rationally and clearly about the facts and their meaning.

·        Ad hominem—a personal slur or attack on the opponent, unrelated to the topic.

·        Slippery Slope—assuming the most extreme result and attacking that instead of the more probably result

·        Bandwagon—appealing to a position’s popularity and the power of the group-mind.

·        Straw Man—misrepresenting an opponent’s argument and then attacking that instead of the actual argument.

·        Tu Quoque—avoiding criticism by turning it around on the accuser and saying “You, too.”

·        Who else is talking about it?

o   Is the story bouncing around the “echo chamber,” or is it being written about and discussed across a wide spectrum of sources and opinions?

·        RED FLAG: If everyone is talking about a story, but they’re all using the same source for their information…approach with caution.

·        RED FLAG: If the story is only being told “in-house,” within a partisan echo chamber, be cautious. There may be a good reason no one else is talking about it.