Samir Chopra's Blog, page 132

The ‘American’ Overseas

A few days ago, from my vantage point at the University of Luxembourg, during a week of visiting a research group on Individual and Collective Reasoning, I posted the following status update on Facebook:

As an American in Europe, I am getting shit for (on this trip): Budweiser (as always), the lack of a really good football/soccer team (as usual) Lance Armstrong (a new one), and the fact that fifty million Americans think universal healthcare is a bad idea and worth repealing.

This sort of meta-lament–to borrow from my friend John Sutton, who described my status update as a ‘Budweiser-lament lament’–is exceedingly common. In putting up that status, I was doing no more than indulging in some rather clichéd commentary, in an all-too familiar trope: the hapless American overseas, made the subject of a barrage of questions by Europeans–or residents of other parts of the world–bewildered by aspects of the American life that seem mysterious to many Americans too. (I should hasten to add, despite my facetious language above, that my interlocutors were unfailingly polite and curious, even while being skeptical at times. I was, after all, among friendly and like-minded folks that included former and future academic collaborators.)

So there, in that Heavily Taxed Land Across The Pond, the American finds the usual lenses reversed, becomes the subject of curious investigation, and finds himself caught trying to make sense of the inexplicable. I have had it happen to me before; the conversations follow and reveal familiar patterns and contours. There is, for instance, the insistence that American beer is bad, a judgment that doesn’t seem fair in light of the many brilliant brewers that dot the American landscape and that year after year, turn in one virtuoso performance after another. More seriously, the queries about national healthcare, too, are familiar and have not lost any of their pungency over the years.  (I do not mind the judgments about the US soccer team, which despite much improvement over the years, still has much work to do to be truly excellent, and neither did I mind throwing my tuppence into the Lance Armstrong-deflation bowl.)

In these conversations my status as American immigrant rather than ‘native’ does not matter, of course.  What is instead more pressing is the question of being visibly immersed in a particular way of life, of being, for the moment, its most immediate representative, one available as translator and communicator alike.  I occupy a vantage point from which to report on American life and I am queried accordingly. Indeed, I suspect I would have featured in such conversations even if my ‘nationality’ were not as formalized as it is today with a passport; what would have mattered would have been my residence, my lived experiences, and my ability to fulfill the role of reporter. The academic world being what it is, the migrant and the expat are exceedingly common figures and are expected to do, as they always do elsewhere, double duties of all kinds. In these encounters, as in many others, the migrant is reminded yet again, of his forced ability to inhabit and move between several worlds.

Indoctrination and Recovery from Addiction

Today at lunch, a conversation about the difficulties of quitting smoking cigarettes and of persuading smokers to quit, about possible strategies for inducing smokers to leave their habit behind, and so on led quite naturally to a discussion about the nature of addiction and so-called ‘addictive personalities’ (and subsequently, a discussion of why some strategies for recovering from addiction work and some do not.) This discussion reminded me that recovery and rehabilitation from addiction can be thought of as a kind of indoctrination into new modes of behavior. In that regard, the following description of indoctrination, taken from Erik Erikson‘s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, from the chapter ‘First Mass and Dead Ends’ describing Luther’s initiation into monkhood, is of much interest:

Indoctrination is charged with the task of separating the individual from the world long enough so that his former values become thoroughly disengaged from his intentions and aspirations; the process must create in him new convictions deep enough to replace much of what he has learned in childhood and practiced in his youth. Obviously, then, the training must be a kind of shock treatment, for it is expected to replace in a short time what has grown over many formative years; therefore, indoctrination must be incisive in its deprivations, and exact in its generous supply of encouragement. It must separate the individual from the world he knows and aggravate his introspective and self-critical powers to the point of identity-diffusion, but short of psychotic dissociation. At the same time it must endeavor to send the individual back into the world with his new convictions so strongly anchored in his unconscious that he almost hallucinates them as being the will of a godhead or the course of all history: something, that is, which was not imposed on him, but was in him all along, waiting to be freed.

Note: I have quoted previously from Erikson on this blog and will do so once more. And on a related note, Freud himself was an addict who recovered: from a habit of conspicuous cocaine consumption, one that he transcended by (among other things) a rigorous work schedule.

Happy Birthday Blog!

My blog turns one today. My first post went up on 13 November 2011 and some three hundred and twenty posts have gone up since then. I started to blog because quite simply, all too often, I’d catch myself saying, ‘Really? I don’t think so!’ or ‘Really? How interesting!’ in response to something I’d read or seen or experienced, and wanted a place to write down my responses. I also wanted to reminisce a bit when I felt like it. What I was looking for, it seems, was a letter-to-the-editor plus notebook and scrapbook space. That’s how it started, and that’s how its gone  I have not attempted to write long essays–though I hope to down the line–and neither have I tried to do any academic writing here. (I have at times, commented on my teaching experiences and discussed some writings of mine.) This remains, resolutely, a bit of an informal grab bag.

A year on, and I’m still here, which is a good sign. I enjoy writing here, even if, as might be expected, it can be a struggle at times. I’ve blogged with some frequency, on the theory that I would stop blogging if I didn’t blog regularly. I’ve not, however, blogged while on vacation so my two trips out of New York have resulted in two extended gaps in posting; I’ve not minded that, not in the least; the breaks have been invigorating. (I’ve thought about blogging while on the road but have not enjoyed it so I don’t think I will try it again.) There is still no discernible focus here, which has been, on occasion, pointed out to me as cause for concern and sometimes, conversely, as a strong point. I have sometimes been foolishly intemperate; sometimes confused; sometimes vague; sometimes too quick; par for the course for writing online in a forum like this, I think.

My readership remains modest and suitably ego-deflating. I get a small number of hits every day because of search engines; some folks come here via the links I post on Facebook or Twitter; and there are too, a few folks that read this blog via RSS feeds or email subscriptions. Occasionally, someone has been kind enough to share my posts elsewhere and that has always helped to bring in more readers. I remain very grateful for such gestures of interest. Given the amount of great writing available on the ‘Net, I’m still amazed that anyone reads anything here. I’ve often not been able to respond to comments from readers, because I’ve become caught up with other things and only had time to come back and write my next post. I’ve worked on getting better at this but I’m not sure I can always keep up. Then, there were those readers that were offended by my writing and said so; a couple of readers left in a huff because of disagreements with me in the comments space.

I intend to keep blogging in similar fashion–in terms of frequency and content–for a little while, though for personal reasons I expect my posting frequency to drop off next year. Next year, other writing projects, long on hold, will take up more of my time, but I will continue to post here as and when possible. I also hope to convert some of the pieces here into longer form essays; the posts here will serve as embryonic forms of more extended reflections on the themes touched on in there.

So, really, there you have it. I’ve written a bit here, and I’ll continue to write some more. Thanks for reading. Comments welcome.

Strategic Voting and Election Season Polls

I am linking to a paper of mine (‘Knowledge-Theoretic Properties of Strategic Voting’, co-authored with Eric Pacuit and Rohit Parikh) of possible relevance in the context of the just-decided elections and the importance of election season polling. Here is the abstract. (I am traveling and so unable to write a longer comment at this time).

Results in social choice theory such as the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorems constrain the existence of rational collective decision making procedures in groups of agents. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that no voting procedure is strategy-proof. That is, there will always be situations in which it is in a voter’s interest to misrepresent its true preferences i.e., vote strategically. We present some properties of strategic voting and then examine – via a bimodal logic utilizing epistemic and strategizing modalities – the knowledge-theoretic properties of voting situations and note that unless the voter knows that it should vote strategically, and how, i.e., knows what the other voters’ preferences are and which alternate preference P′ it should use, the voter will not strategize. Our results suggest that opinion polls in election situations effectively serve as the first n–1 stages in an n stage election.

This is a technical paper and so unlikely to be readable to plenty of folks so I will try to provide a quick summary and discussion next week. The last sentence of the abstract though, should give you some indication of what its implications are and why they should be of interest to voters, politicians and pollsters alike.

Against Political Speeches, For Political Speech

I’m not sure why I dislike political speeches. By ‘political speeches’ I do not mean ‘political speech’: I am in favor of the latter, the more the better, with some caveats having to do with–among others–Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, and Sarah Palin. Rather, by ‘political speeches,’ I mean, quite precisely, speeches given by a politician–a party animal, to be exactingly precise–at some political forum: a post-election rally (for victory or concession), a party convention, a campaign rally; these remain resolutely inaccessible to me, a movie show that I can’t sit through. (This definition, should, I hope, make clear that certain species of political speeches in public fora remain impervious to my criticism.)

Along with this dislike goes indifference to political speech hagiography, the admiring dissection of speeches, which elevates them to the level of rhetorical masterpieces. Consider, for instance, Robert Lehrman on Obama’s victory speech on the night of 6th November, comparing it to the 2008 post-election victory speech:

[T]he 2012 model showed all the strengths that Obama and his speechwriters consistently exhibit, producing the best drafts of any president. He used concrete details and repetition (“You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organizer who’s working his way through college … You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door…”); antithesis and echoes of John F. Kennedy (“America’s never been about what can be done for us; it’s about what can be done by us together”) and stories that have the ring of truth (“And I saw it just the other day in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter…”). You also see flashes of wit (“one dog’s probably enough”), and the skillful use of pause, emphasis and variety of tone that makes public speaking teachers like me use him as a model for students. [link in original]

That last sentence reminds me that perhaps the best thing about a ‘good political speech’ these days is that it might serve as a model for those trying to become better public speakers: high-school or college students aspiring to debate club membership, teachers themselves, budding actors, Toastmasters clubs, interviewees, and so on. But I don’t think they shouldn’t copy or emulate everything they see and hear.

Most prominently, because, like almost anyone disillusioned by political speeches in electoral democracies, I see them as heralds of betrayal and disappointment to follow. They are all too often infected by too many promises, too much insincere wheedling. The political speech, now, in this landscape of relentless electioneering, has come to stand for misleading obfuscation, one that serves to obscure the truly political behind a veil of elegant wordsmithing.  This is not necessarily because the speaker–the party political animal, remember–is extraordinarily mendacious, rather it is because he or she is made to appear as a figurehead that misrepresents the forces that are all too often arrayed against those subjected to the speech.

The speech then, comes to serve as beguiling distraction, and not just rallying cry.

A Nation in Identity Crisis?

Just for kicks, I thought it might be interesting, on the day after the 2012 election, to think of the US as a nation undergoing an adolescent identity crisis. I do this in response to some post-election commentary that seems to suggest the demographic shift in the US has engendered one, forcing political parties across the land to respond before their next loss in a national election.

What do we know about identity crises? Well, here are some thoughts from Erik Erikson, who coined the phrase. They sound  especially interesting when the ‘youth’ in question is a nation, and in this case, one with a very particular opinion of itself and its history:

I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be. This sounds dangerously like common sense; like all health, however, it is a matter of course only to those who possess it, and appears as a most complex achievement to those who have tasted its absence. Only in ill health does one realize the intricacy of the body; and only in a crisis, individual or historical, does it become obvious what a sensitive combination of interrelated factors the human personality is a combination of capacities created in the distant past and of opportunities divined in the present; a combination of totally unconscious preconditions developed in individual growth and of social conditions created and recreated in the precarious interplay of generations. In some young people, in some classes, at some periods in history, this crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes, and periods, the crisis will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of “second birth,” apt to be aggravated either by widespread neuroticisms or by pervasive ideological unrest. Some young individuals will succumb to this crisis in all manner of neurotic, psychotic, or delinquent behavior; others will resolve it through participation in ideological movements passionately concerned with religion or politics, nature or art. Still others, although suffering and deviating dangerously through what appears to be a prolonged adolescence, eventually come to contribute an original bit to an emerging style of life: the very danger which they have sensed has forced them to mobilize capacities to see and say, to dream and plan, to design and construct, in new ways.

For what it’s worth, I do not think this election, or even the one before it, have triggered anything like an identity crisis. This is not because the US cannot be termed ‘adolescent’; rather, it is because these elections do not seem have induced as fundamental a rupture as indicated above.

Note: Excerpt from Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1962