Elite Problems

 

 

By Gary Berg-Cross

Immigration and defense “experts” are abroad in the land.  At least a look through the keyhole version of this seems to be what one see’s as part of media coverage of the early debates on immigration reform and the senate hearing to confirm a new secretary of defense.  To paraphrase one person’s summary of the latter hearing, the only thing more embarrassing than Hagel’s answers were the senator’s questions and posturing. We expect some meritorious discussion of topics, but instead we got what Chris Hayes (of MSNBC UP fame) described this way:

“Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel was an omnidirectionally embarrassing debacle for everyone involved.

First there were the Senate Republicans who seethed with such theatrical contempt for Hagel and his ideas you would have thought the president had nominated Noam Chomsky for the post (who, incidentally wouldn’t be my first choice to head the Pentagon but who I’d take over Donald Rumsfeld in a heartbeat). Republican senator after Republican senator threw questions at Hagel that even by the debased standards of a nominating hearing were the cheapest kind of demagoguery and bullying….

If you were a visitor from another country and just listened to Hagel’s Republican interlocutors you would have had to ask, where did this moral monster Chuck Hagel come from, where had this seditious dissident been hiding for the last decade? And the answer, of course is: mostly in the Republican Senate Caucus!

 

We expect and deserve more as part of our democratic republic by the elite folks we send to Congress, but of course we have grown used to being disappointed by them. 

 

In his new book, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, the above mentioned Chris Hayes takes on a host of issues around our being mis-served by meritorious elites. He has plenty of evidence to work with just in the recently completed decade (2000–2010 -aka “a decade of failure”). He doesn’t seem far off in arguing that every major societal institution has failed in some way. Early on big businesses collapsed with Enron and Worldcom, and expert auditors and analysts failed to catch it.  The Supreme Court was more partisan than serenely supreme in deciding Bush v. Gore. Just a bit later in the decade the Bush administration and our intelligence apparatus failed to protect us from the 9/11 attack. Who can forgive our corporate media who let us down as the administration lied and mis-represented info to edge us into 2 wars.

Norman commented more broadly on the media and its weak reporting on who is accountable for what on MSNC:

ORNSTEIN (7/25/12): Figuring out who to hold accountable is fuzzy now and it’s the biggest one we have, given the way the parties are operating. They not only gridlock and do great damage, as you say, and it really is damage to the country, the fabric of the economy, but they leave voters with little opportunity to figure out who genuinely to blame. And frankly, the press corps is an unindicted co-conspirator to that.

In those unaccountable wars the military failed to get us a “win” and when we think of post-war nation rebuilding, well it was a catastrophe. We had years of the RC church engaged in and covering up of sex abuse. Same for the football program at Penn State.

The Bush administration had an inept management approach to the natural disaster called Katrina. We could add, as Chris does, a view of elite athletes on steroids.  We might cap it off with the failure of oversight for the housing bubble and then the financial collapse of unregulated bank practices that crashed our economy. Throw in a decline in government practice and the elite interdependence, such as Big media failing to effectively warn society of housing bubbles and leveraged default swaps.  It is a compelling picture of failure.

 

Hayes book elucidates his hypotheses of why it all went so wrong. Part of it concerns specialization and Sociologist Robert Michels’ idea of the iron law of oligarchy, published in his 1911Political Parties. Michels noted (as had Plato and Aristotle before him) that even political parties and groups ideologically committed to equality and democracy (yes even in the freethinking community), became more or less oligarchic in their operation like more unabashed elitist and aristocratic parties of the right. Michels’ grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to actually bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy with its rule by a few, true elites is inevitable because any institution has to “organize itself” for effective against the opposition. This self-directed organization in turn requires delegation of responsibility to someone in charge of specific things and thus with specific talents (or resources). Institutions and thus society finds itself in a dependent relation. Over time we are forced to trust and depend on a small cadre with delegated authority. Thus natural forces lead to an “us and them” – leaders and following, trusting masses of non-leaders. Of course immigrants are main targets of such thinking.  Michels speaks of it a great ‘gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.’ The type of thing we hear in both the immigration and defense confirmation debate and it abounds in fundamentalist religions where the Mosaic elite speak with God and the congregation sups on tableted words of wisdom from on high.

Of course there are institutions who recognize the need for democratic practices and open voices and I am happy to note that we in the humanist community are among those that do. One has to go no further that the Humanist Manifesto II, yes written by old fashion elite thinkers,  to see many declared democratic principles and warnings concerning elite power:

The beginnings of police states, even in democratic societies, widespread government espionage, and other abuses of power by military, political, and industrial elites, and the continuance of unyielding racism, all present a different and difficult social outlook.

Images

 

Robert Michels iron law of oligarchy, Political Parties: http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2009/06/newlabour-party-history-23-the-alliance-oligarchy.html

Leave the thinking to us: http://gulfofmexicooilspillblog.com/2011/01/18/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-blog-iron-law-of-oligarchy-and-gratitude/

Financial elites: http://globaleduction.blogspot.com/

Twilight of the Elites: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/07/11/review-christopher-hayes-twilight-elites-america-after-meritocracy

Being “Smart” Doesn’t Mean There Aren’t Blind Spots

by Gary Berg-Cross

Smart vs. dumb seems like a simple dichotomy. No one likes to thought of as dumb, let along being called dumb publically. It’s generally a good thing to be considered intelligent and informed and able to think rationally. Of course we have models or absent minded professors and deep thinkers that are socially clueless and inept at ordinary tasks. But we have a general sense that knowledge is power and that intelligence (along with a dose of skepticism and a good method) can expose the truth and the truth is better than falsehood and critical investigation is a better long-term strategy than uncritical acceptance.

We are stunned to hear uniformed opinions and willful ignorance expressed as facts as in ““keep your government hands off MY Medicare” But Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler has shown that a large % of recipients of government benefits somehow don’t believe they’ve received any benefits.

Wild generalizations like “corporations are people my friend… of course they are…Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.” can also rankle, since there are so many counterarguments to hidden, common sense assumptions. Willard Romney said this in August 2011 while attempting to counter an argument that taxes should be raised on corporations as part of balancing the budget. Romney is smart all right and Harvard trained, so why the blind spot about how his thinking comes across as false, but yet appeals to so many? Seems like a bit of a paradox, which you may have experienced in talking about such things with seemingly intelligent supporters of such policies. But it is wider and gain you may have experienced this when talking to elite professionals on topics that are outside their training.  Little is funnier than having a lawyer or economist ask you not to use too many technical terms or speak in simple sentences on scientific topics. One may be trainied and intelligent and still yearn for simple answers when they may not be so available.

Simple, contemporary political statements like corporations are people ring hollow since we can ask if corporations have to follow the same rules as we humans and be responsible in the same way. This is clearly not what it means nor is the idea that all the benefits wind up in “the people’s” hands. Some of the people’s wealth seems to be missing.

These type of seemingly smart vs. dumb dichotomy abounds in freethinkers’ vs. religious arguments over evolution and the verbal barbs thrown such as :

I love how the atheists on blogs like to act like they're a part of an elite squad who are masters of logic and reason.

It is true that simple logic can expose some silly arguments justifying religion which seems in part defended by an element of willful disbelief. Such styles are part of larger factors than reasonability that produces a spectrum that is not just elite smartness or general dumbness. Some people seem to dislike atheists and freethinkers just because they ask difficult question which challenge others to answer about open ended topics like morality. And most of us like to think we are on the right side of moral issues. I show my bona fides and the case is closed. I don’t have to exhaust my self in a long change of reasoning supported by evidence.The point here is that our supposed intelligence is often blinded by competing cognitive and social factors.

 In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman (subject earlier blogs on knowing) points out how such slow, carefully thinking is often the poor minority of reasoning. Research is such areas helps understand some of the blind spots and disputed implied above. It’s because reasoning is part of a pretty complex system evolved over time and engaged in particular ways by culture and cultural elites (e.g lawyers, economists & clergy).

There are fast associations that we make when a topic comes up and thus questioning suitable religious (or political) authority which has status in culture. Attacking religion seems anti-social and unpatriotic to those who value social cohesiveness. After all won’t such things lead to socialism or communism?

Into this discussion we now throw the idea of cognitive biases and intuitive thinking. It is the humbling realization (as reported recently) that bright people can be especially prone to stupid mistakes. After all the work on human, cognitive bias shows that we are subject to systematic cognitive errors. It is just that different people have different degrees for particular types. If we have good memories we make react to a Pol flip flopping on his/her position. If we associate government with bad things we may accept some statement with little support since it is consistent with our beliefs. But it turns out that a general intelligence doesn’t really protect us from holding and defending stupid positions. Indeed a simple higher intelligence (as measured by S.A.T. scores) can make things worse. This is the understanding of research (by West & friends) that looked at awareness of faulty reasoning or a blind spot. West and his colleagues began by giving 482 undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example so you can judge the problem:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

An intuitive, short cut response is to divide the 48 in half. That gives an answer of twenty-four days. Sorry that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days. After all it doubles every day!!!

The wrong answer seems easy to get to that somewhat intelligence people fall prey to it, but think it right and defend the answer since after all, I am smarter than the average and therefore must be right. A humbling thought is what seems to be an ever increasingly American meritocracy that with Pols like Romney represents more of a de facto oligarchy. It is perhaps a bit of an insight into why there seem so wild thinking, but smugly confident politicians in America. 

For more see Jonah Lehrer's article in the New Yorker and Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things