Quico says: I suppose readers must think I’ve finally cracked: posting 40 year old public opinion research and papal encyclicals and such. Actually, there’s a bit of method to the madness…these random (seeming) posts are related, at least in my mind, and build together into what (I think) is a coherent argument. (OK, well, maybe not the Japanese one, that one was just random.) But, trust me, the other ones actually hang together. They’re going somewhere. I’m just not “there” yet.
Anyway, you can add this one to the mix:
The Threat to American Democracy
Wednesday 05 October 2005
Remarks delivered by Al Gore to a conference organized by "We Media" in New York.
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse ... I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe?"
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.
Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?
On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"
The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in US history."
But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.
In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.
Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.
The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."
Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."
Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others - but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press.
Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.
Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.
And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.
Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day - 90 minutes more than the world average.
When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.
The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes.
Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.
But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow - and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."
But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines ... And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.
It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.
And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.
Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere," or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades.
In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.
The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:
* 1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all.
* 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them.
* 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.
What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.
The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.
And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self-government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under-girded and strengthened the rule of law.
But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design - depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.
Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.
Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.
Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.
Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.
The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.
Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.
So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.
It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.
The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.
It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."
As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the US - including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.
And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.
The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.
The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.
For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.
Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."
The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")
In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore.
Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.
And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.
One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.
This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.
And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.
One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.
That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.
Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.
And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.
MoveOn.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the MoveOn ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So MoveOn complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.
The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.
The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.
Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent ... was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy ... but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique ... under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."
Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of America's gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.
I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi-way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.
We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.
The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.
I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.
I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today.
First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video.
Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.
It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.
The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.
We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.
October 29, 2007
Venezuela's right-wing dictatorship
Katy says: I have been to Venezuela three times in the last year, and each trip brings a new insight into what is going on there, insights that are hard to get from reading Globovisión or form the daily feeds of Unión Radio, El Universal and Descifrado. Recently, I began wondering whether Venezuela is indeed a right-wing dictatorship.The thought occurred to me when I was window-shopping the Duty Free stores at the not-quite refurbished Maiquetía airport and I came across a display of Swarovski figurines. You know the ones - made of crystal, ridiculously expensive, tacky yet attractive.
Anyway, we had thought about getting a few for our house, and I figured that it would be great to buy them in Venezuela. The price for the figurines was listed at $100 each, or Bs. 215,000 at the official exchange rate of 2,150 Bs/$. Yet out in the street, you could sell your dollars for at least 5,000 Bs/$. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that by selling $43 at the street rate, I could get the Bs. 215,000 that I needed to buy the $100-worth figurine that I wanted.
The $57 difference between what I would pay for the figure and what it actually cost is a subsidy I, a member of the "corrupt oligarchic elite," would get from this supposedly left-wing government. Mind you, it's not a subsidy to send my kids to school. It is a subsidy to decorate my house with expensive crystal figurines.
The effects of Mision Cadivi are everywhere in Venezuela. People are buying Italian kitchens by the hordes. The streets are chock-full of large, brand-new vehicles. And with a tank of gas costing less than $1, there is no need to control the size of your vehicle - the bigger the better!
The stories you hear are incredible. Whisky imports have reached all-time highs, and this year we are headed for a milestone - $40 billion in imports, a much larger figure than our current level of international reserves. People are traveling abroad like never before - in the airport, I ran into a few escuálida friends who were going to Israel for the third time this year!
It's not just rich Venezuelans who are benefiting from all this - rich people from neighboring countries are in on it as well. Travel agencies in Colombia, Panama, Peru and Ecuador routinely schedule their passengers to Europe to fly via Caracas. Through associations with Venezuelan travel agencies, their customers can take advantage of this massive arbitrage opportunity and travel for less, while both travel agencies benefit get their cut. Colombians wanting to buy cheaper cars, microwaves, computers, washing-machines and other goods are making the trip from Cúcuta to San Cristóbal's shops by the hordes.
We have a name for governments that subsidize the rich more than the poor: right-wing governments. Because if you put all of Chávez's rhetoric aside, that is what this amounts to, a massive subsidy of the middle- and upper-classes. In a country where $150 in cash traded in the black market buys you a months-worth of groceries for a family of three, the more you consume the more subsidies you receive. Never mind the scarcity - I saw some of that, but I also saw lots of imported olive oil and Spanish olives for sale. And ultimately, scarcity is caused by private importers' inability to purchase staples like milk at international prices and sell them at the controlled rate. Sooner or later, the government steps in - as it always does - and buys the milk overseas and sells it cheaply. The subsidy works its way to your pocket one way or another, you just have to be patient.
I also saw a lot of indications of Venezuela lurking toward a dictatorship. There is more fear in the streets, and fewer ways of channeling it. The government's pressure can be felt everywhere, and the massive subsidies it hands out undoubtedly act as a distracting measure. Who has time to conspire, plan for the future or organize grass-roots efforts to oust Chávez when there are all these arbitrage opportunities to be had?
My friend Roger told me the Internet was pulled from all computers in his government office, armed security has begun inspecting their briefcases and their pen drives every day when they leave work, and he received a memo indicating that, from now on, all employees had to come to work on Fridays wearing pro-government red T-shirts. Oh, what would Scott Adams do with this stuff.
Turn on the TV and you're unlikely to catch any opposition voices. Pro-Chávez lawmakers routinely make the rounds at Globovisión and Televen, while Venevisión has simply dropped all its opinion shows. José Vicente Rangel even has his own show in Televen again, where opposition figures almost never make an appearance. In VTV, not even chavista-light legislators from Podemos make the cut.
Businessmen are scared to even discuss with the government the cons of what they are doing. I met people who want to sell their apartments but are afraid of putting them in the market for fear of being marked as "rich" and kidnapped. Bullet-proofing your car has become the latest trend in yuppie excess.
As for the economy, people are doing really well, rich and poor alike. The industries doing the best are shopping malls selling imported stuff and anything related to the government. Non-oil exports, investment in technology and research and development are practically nonexistent.
As for the poor, well, you still see the same ranchos, you still see beggars in the street, the government has cracked-down on street-vendors, and traffic has gotten worse. While they are probably better off in absolute terms, it's hard to dispel the notion that they are not benefiting as much as some of my richer friends. Their paltry Misiones checks don't compare with the hefty subsidies the rich get, but that's life under a right-wing dictatorship. Good luck complaining.
PS.- I'm not the only one thinking Chávez leans to the right - check out Bruni's terrific post about this issue. A must-read!
Encyclical on the Nature of Human Liberty, 1888
Pope Leo XIII said:The end, or object, both of the rational will and of its liberty is that good only which is in conformity with reason. Since, however, both these faculties are imperfect, it is possible, as is often seen, that the reason should propose something which is not really good, but which has the appearance of good, and that the will should choose accordingly. For, as the possibility of error, and actual error, are defects of the mind and attest its imperfection, so the pursuit of what has a false appearance of good, though a proof of our freedom, just as a disease is a proof of our vitality, implies defect in human liberty. The will also, simply because of its dependence on the reason, no sooner desires anything contrary thereto than it abuses its freedom of choice and corrupts its very essence. Thus it is that the infinitely perfect God, although supremely free, because of the supremacy of His intellect and of His essential goodness, nevertheless cannot choose evil; neither can the angels and saints, who enjoy the beatific vision. St. Augustine and others urged most admirably against the Pelagians that, if the possibility of deflection from good belonged to the essence or perfection of liberty, then God, Jesus Christ, and the angels and saints, who have not this power, would have no liberty at all, or would have less liberty than man has in his state of pilgrimage and imperfection. This subject is often discussed by the Angelic Doctor in his demonstration that the possibility of sinning is not freedom, but slavery. It will suffice to quote his subtle commentary on the words of our Lord: "Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin."3 "Everything," he says, "is that which belongs to it a naturally. When, therefore, it acts through a power outside itself, it does not act of itself, but through another, that is, as a slave. But man is by nature rational. When, therefore, he acts according to reason, he acts of himself and according to his free will; and this is liberty. Whereas, when he sins, he acts in opposition to reason, is moved by another, and is the victim of foreign misapprehensions. Therefore, `Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin.' "4 Even the heathen philosophers clearly recognized this truth, especially they who held that the wise man alone is free; and by the term "wise man" was meant, as is well known, the man trained to live in accordance with his nature, that is, in justice and virtue.
Therefore, the nature of human liberty, however it be considered, whether in individuals or in society, whether in those who command or in those who obey, supposes from this most the necessity of obedience to some supreme and eternal law, which is no other than the authority of God, commanding good and forbidding evil. And, so far, the authority of God over men far from diminishing, or even destroying their liberty, protects and perfects it, for the real perfection of all creatures is found in the prosecution and attainment of their respective ends; but the supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God.
October 27, 2007
Ten Blinding Insights of the Japanese Newbie...
Quico says: I suppose most people think learning a new language is about as much fun as dental surgery, but I've always liked it. I learned English when I was a kid, French in High School and taught myself Italian and a smattering of Dutch after that. This year, though, I decided to seriously kick it up a notch...or, well, 9 or 10 notches. Back in January, I started teaching myself Japanese.
No, really...
This "hobby" has taken up more and more of my time and, as y'all have doubtlessly noticed, it's kind of displaced my other hobby lately. (Though, in all honesty, blogging long ago went from "hobby" to "pathological obsession" for me, so I think of the Japanese thing as detox, to a certain extent.)
Granted, I haven't even tried to learn the crazy squiggles that pass for writing in Japan, I've just concentrated on speaking and understanding. And when I say I "taught myself" mostly I mean I let the fantastic folks at JapanesePod101 teach me. (It really is a terrific website...Piitaa-san arigato!)
Still, it's been some undertaking. I struggle to think of the right metaphor for it. Lets try a couple...
Learning a language as radically heterogeneous as Japanese is a bit like putting your brain in a bread maker...it kneads it and bends it, stretches it and bakes it in ways you never imagined possible.
Or, it's like deciding to put together a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, an undertaking so transparently ludicrous you can't really believe you'll succeed even if you know, theoretically, that if you just keep putting together a few pieces each day it's a mathematical certainty that you'll eventually get there.
Some day. Some very, very distant day.
Over the last year, my journey's been punctuated by little epiphanies about what Japanese is and what language is and how it is and how it isn't and about what I can do and what I can't do. Thing is, my perceptions about these things keep changing. Looking back, the first few insights seem pathetically primitive now, but still, at the time they felt momentous.
So here, for I'm-not-really-sure-whose-benefit, is my take on the Ten Blinding Insights of the Japanese Newbie...
Insight #1: It's not Chinese!
(Well, I told you they start out real basic!)
This one's actually more subtle than it seems. Japanese and Chinese look the same, because the Japanese stole their aforementioned crazy squiggles from China a millennium and spare change ago. On a map, the two countries look like they're kind of near to each other, so the tendency is to figure that the languages must be related somehow, like Spanish and Italian, or at least like Spanish and English.
But it turns out that Chinese and Japanese are totally unrelated, as different from each other as each of them is from English. In fact, Japanese is a language isolate: it's related to nothing (unless you count Okinawan.)
It took me about 20 minutes of Japanese language study to reach this first insight. It dovetails directly into the next one, namely...
#2: Hey, I can actually pronounce this stuff!
Unlike Chinese, but like European languages, Japanese is not tonal. Tone does not carry meaning, so Japanese has none of the sing-song quality of Chinese or Vietnamese.
Better yet, Japanese phonetics are remarkably similar to Spanish phonetics. Aside from the vexed questions of Ls and Rs (which they don't differentiate) their sounds aren't really that different from ours. So you're hardly ever stomped by a sound you can't quite hear, and if they can say it, you can say it. That's pretty positive stuff, and it gets even better, because when you start studying you very soon realize that...
#3: This language is ridiculously simple!
If you've seen The Last Samurai, you already know this. Japanese grammar is weirdly, disarmingly simple. There's no singular and plural, no masculine and feminine, no future tense. Verbs don't conjugate. (It's all "I am, you am, he am, we am...") There are no articles. (No articles!) And no true pronouns either. Actually, most of the things that make European languages hard are utter non-issues when you're learning Japanese.
This is an epiphany that takes maybe a couple of weeks to reach. And it's great! At this stage, the task ahead seems positively easy.
The only problem is that if you keep working on it for more than two weeks or so, the very next insight is:
#4: This language is ridiculously complicated!
I was worried about verb conjugation? Ha! These little slant eyed bastards have much, much nastier tricks up their sleeves!
See, this whole mismatched-gramatical-categories thing turns out to be a two way street. Sure, they don't have some of the categories we have, but by the same token we don't have some of the categories they have. And they're weird!
Where to start? Japanese has something called copulas, which are sentence ending wordlets that indicate...well, it's not exactly clear what they indicate, but they have something to do with levels of politeness (on which a whole lot more later).
Then there's the word-ending particle, bane of all novice students. Instead of word order, Japanese relies on quirky little one-syllable suffixes to convey a word's grammatical role. If it's an object, you stick a -wo at the end, if it's a subject, you use -ga, and if it ends in -wa then it's the topic.
(Oh, did I mention? They have something called "Grammatical Topic", which corresponds to...nothing at all in European languages. More on particles later...)
Long story short, the elation you get from insight #3 dissipates pretty damn fast. You soon realize that you've not only volunteered to put together a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces exist in 7-dimensional-space.
It's at around this stage that you start to develop a sense of community with every Japanese person who's ever had to learn a European Language. You start picturing them as they hit their own level 3 insight ("it's sooooo easy, Takahashi...no copulas, no grammatical topic, they don't even have suffix markers...total piece of cake!") And it's around this time, as you start to imagine what this picture looks like from the other side, that insights 3 and 4 meld together into a new, higher level insight...
#5: Everything that's hard in European languages is easy in Japanese, but everything that's easy in European languages is hard in Japanese!
This, I think, is the insight that just keeps on giving. Every single day I find fresh evidence to support it.
Maybe two months into the learning process, you start to develop an awareness that, in Japanese, the problems are never going to come from "the usual suspects." The stuff that's going to give you no end of grief is always going to be the stuff that seems most innocuous.
Take the pronoun "I". What could be simpler? What could be more basic? How, pray tell, do you say "I" in Japanese?
If you look it up in the dictionary, it'll lie to you and tell you that "I" is "watashi".
That's a half truth at best, and can be plain wrong in certain circumstances. "I" can be "boku" if you're a guy talking to other guys, "ore" if you're boasting, "atashi" if you're a teenage girl, "watakushi" if you're trying to be extra polite and two or three others that slip my mind just now. It's a plain old nightmare.
Turns out, the only honest answer to the question "how do you say 'I' in Japanese?" is "it depends". Who are you? Who are you talking to? Are you a man or a woman? Young or old? Happy or pissed off?
In Japanese, even the most rudimentary sentences are relational: they vary depending on the social situation, on the relative status of the participants, their genders, age, etc. So there are always a half-dozen ways you can translate even the simplest English sentence into Japanese. Trouble starts right from the word "I".
Of course, you totally picture how this would play into Japanese people's own Insight #3s.
Anyway, the list of impossibly simple things that make your life difficult in Japanese is long. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Literally!
To be precise, there's no one way to say if, and or but. A word like "and" will change depending on the context. "I went to bed and turned off the light" takes a different "and" than "I like pears and bananas." "But" can take at least four different forms (demo, kedo, keredo, ga). And you could fill a book with the different ways of glossing "if".
In fact, at times it seems like the entire Japanese language is a perverse experiment in trying to dream up new ways to make incredibly simple linguistic constructs excruciatingly complicated. Don't even get me started on counting. Any language where the word for "six" changes depending on whether you're talking about six apples, six people, six buildings, six years or six elephants was clearly invented by the clinically perverse purely for the pleasure of watching foreigners get it wrong. It's just plain pointless.
(Though, to carp on the symmetry of it all once more, it's a quirk that strikes Japanese people as neither more nor less pointless than this bizarre fetish Europeans have with that mysterious linguistic entity of negligible utility known as the "article.")
At some point, you try to say something like:
So you whimper off, depressed, cursing every Tenno who ever lived as you become deeply, intimately convinced that you will never ever figure this language out.
This is a discouraging stage. You sit there, struggling to memorize unfamiliar words that all look alike. It's slooooow going. Then, at some point (this happened around three months into it for me) you hit the pits. The absolute low point of demoralization and just sheer discouragement. It's the dreaded, dreaded insight #6...
#6 It's just sooooo different...
"Well, duh" right? I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? You don't need to spend three months studying Japanese to know that it's totally different from any European language. Everybody knows that...
Well, yes and no.
Before you study Japanese, you certainly know that Japanese is totally different, but you can't feel it. The sheer weight of the difference, the pervasiveness of it can't really sink in until you've made a serious effort to learn a bit and found yourself foiled at every turn by the most embarrassingly minor (seeming) details.
Of course, it's a hopeless feeling to try to explain. If you haven't been through it, any explanation will be insufficient, if you have been through it, every explanation is superfluous. Meaning is built out of words in ways that are just totally alien to western ears. Nothing ever seems to fit together in the way you might expect. It doesn't matter how many times people try to explain unidirectional verbs (like "ageru", "kureru" and "morau") to you, some deep, primitive part of your lizard brain just refuses to accept that a word can function that way. Whaddayamean I can morau something from you but you can't morau something from me? It's infuriating! Hell, it's more than infuriating, it's an outrage against common sense!
I guess most people quit when they get to this stage, and the urge is perfectly understandable. But my ego bruises easily, and I couldn't accept defeat after just a few months. So I took a couple off weeks off to clear my mind. And it was during that break that I had my most platitudinous seeming (and, therefore, also deepest) insight yet...
#7: It's no use fighting it
See, when you're on insight #6, you manage to convince yourself that somehow, it's personal. That Japanese is being difficult out of spite, that it's determined to humiliate you, that it goes out of its way to prove to you that you can't learn it. This is, of course, a totally insane idea, but that's how you feel around month four.
But somehow, during my break, the sheer self defeating lunacy of the thought became clear to me. I was fighting the language! But whingeing constantly about how hard it is doesn't somehow make it easier...it only stresses you out. In a flash, I realized that every minute I spent fighting the language was a minute I wasn't spending learning it.
When this insight hits you, you have to stop. It's a time to collect your thoughts, to take the measure of the task ahead of you all over again. Truth is, if you think you can learn Japanese in a year or two, you're setting yourself up to fail. You can't! And getting upset about it won't change that reality.
If you're studying outside Japan, the reality is you need 3 or 4 or 5 years to learn passable Japanese. That's all. It's not its fault that it takes a long time to learn. It's not your fault that it'll take you such a long time to learn it. It's nothing personal. It is what it is.
All you can do is keep putting together bits of the jigsaw, keep hammering away at it and know that some day you'll get there. What's empowering here is the certainty that, so long as you persevere, you really can't fail.
When you change your time perspective like this, you finally give yourself a decent shot at success. The key is to think through where exactly the blockages are and work through them patiently and with a bloody-minded relentlessness.
And for me, at that point, definitely the biggest blockage was all about syntax. Which takes us to...
#8: Even if you understand every single word in a sentence, that doesn't necessarily mean you understand the sentence!
This insight is almost as discouraging as #6. You can sit there, listening to your lessons, and even though you know what every single word in the sentence means, the overall meaning is lost on you.
You might hear "Joe, Andy, Wife, Cousin, Chocolate Cake, New Car, Coffee Shop, Eat, Go," in that order, each with its own little word-end particle. You might even understand each word separately. But you have no idea what it means!
If you miss even one particle, you have no clue if Joe is driving Andy's car, or the cousin's wife is driving Joe to Andy's coffeeshop to eat chocolate cake, or if it's the cake that wants the coffeeshop to drive the new car and eat andy's wife with cousin Joe. Knowing all the words isn't nearly enough until you get a knack for how they hang together. Without it, you're lost.
For the same reason, you can't actually build a sentence, even if you know each of the words you want to put in it. It's infuriating! It's a hump you have to overcome...but at first it's far from clear how to.
The reason is that word order in Japanese is hideously counterintuitive. All you know for sure is that the verb goes at the end. Other than that, it's chaos out there...synctactic anarchy.
The grammar books actually make it worse by telling you that, unlike in English, it doesn't matter which order words go in...which only makes everything even more confusing. But let me give you an example so this all gets a bit less abstract.
In English, if you read a sentence like:
Of course, with a very simple sentence like Joe eats cake, it's not such a problem. But what if you want to say, oh, I dunno something like "Joe is going to the coffee shop in Jim's new car to eat chocolate cake with Andy and his wife's cousin"? Suddenly this arbitrary syntax thing becomes an absolute bloody nightmare. Trying to keep track of all the little suffixes, of who did what to whom, trying to figure out who initiates the action seems nearly impossible. At least, that is, until you hit insight #9...
#9: The subject goes first, the verb goes last, and everything in between is backwards!
Now, any grammarian reading this probably did a spit take just now. "Dear God, that's not right!" And, I admit it, it's not really right. It's a rule of thumb. A heuristic. It has a job that's more important than being right: it makes your life bearable.
The grammar books probably are right in that, in some formal sense, word order in Japanese really is free. But when you're learning, you don't need academic precision, you need a lifeline to rescue you from drowning in the sheer anarchy that is the Japanese sentence's syntax. And this rule of thumb gets you safely to syntactic shore 95% of the time.
Take the nightmare of a sentence above,
No, really...
This "hobby" has taken up more and more of my time and, as y'all have doubtlessly noticed, it's kind of displaced my other hobby lately. (Though, in all honesty, blogging long ago went from "hobby" to "pathological obsession" for me, so I think of the Japanese thing as detox, to a certain extent.)
Granted, I haven't even tried to learn the crazy squiggles that pass for writing in Japan, I've just concentrated on speaking and understanding. And when I say I "taught myself" mostly I mean I let the fantastic folks at JapanesePod101 teach me. (It really is a terrific website...Piitaa-san arigato!)
Still, it's been some undertaking. I struggle to think of the right metaphor for it. Lets try a couple...
Learning a language as radically heterogeneous as Japanese is a bit like putting your brain in a bread maker...it kneads it and bends it, stretches it and bakes it in ways you never imagined possible.
Or, it's like deciding to put together a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, an undertaking so transparently ludicrous you can't really believe you'll succeed even if you know, theoretically, that if you just keep putting together a few pieces each day it's a mathematical certainty that you'll eventually get there.
Some day. Some very, very distant day.
Over the last year, my journey's been punctuated by little epiphanies about what Japanese is and what language is and how it is and how it isn't and about what I can do and what I can't do. Thing is, my perceptions about these things keep changing. Looking back, the first few insights seem pathetically primitive now, but still, at the time they felt momentous.
So here, for I'm-not-really-sure-whose-benefit, is my take on the Ten Blinding Insights of the Japanese Newbie...
Insight #1: It's not Chinese!
(Well, I told you they start out real basic!)
This one's actually more subtle than it seems. Japanese and Chinese look the same, because the Japanese stole their aforementioned crazy squiggles from China a millennium and spare change ago. On a map, the two countries look like they're kind of near to each other, so the tendency is to figure that the languages must be related somehow, like Spanish and Italian, or at least like Spanish and English.
But it turns out that Chinese and Japanese are totally unrelated, as different from each other as each of them is from English. In fact, Japanese is a language isolate: it's related to nothing (unless you count Okinawan.)
It took me about 20 minutes of Japanese language study to reach this first insight. It dovetails directly into the next one, namely...
#2: Hey, I can actually pronounce this stuff!
Unlike Chinese, but like European languages, Japanese is not tonal. Tone does not carry meaning, so Japanese has none of the sing-song quality of Chinese or Vietnamese.
Better yet, Japanese phonetics are remarkably similar to Spanish phonetics. Aside from the vexed questions of Ls and Rs (which they don't differentiate) their sounds aren't really that different from ours. So you're hardly ever stomped by a sound you can't quite hear, and if they can say it, you can say it. That's pretty positive stuff, and it gets even better, because when you start studying you very soon realize that...
#3: This language is ridiculously simple!
If you've seen The Last Samurai, you already know this. Japanese grammar is weirdly, disarmingly simple. There's no singular and plural, no masculine and feminine, no future tense. Verbs don't conjugate. (It's all "I am, you am, he am, we am...") There are no articles. (No articles!) And no true pronouns either. Actually, most of the things that make European languages hard are utter non-issues when you're learning Japanese.
This is an epiphany that takes maybe a couple of weeks to reach. And it's great! At this stage, the task ahead seems positively easy.
The only problem is that if you keep working on it for more than two weeks or so, the very next insight is:
#4: This language is ridiculously complicated!
I was worried about verb conjugation? Ha! These little slant eyed bastards have much, much nastier tricks up their sleeves!
See, this whole mismatched-gramatical-categories thing turns out to be a two way street. Sure, they don't have some of the categories we have, but by the same token we don't have some of the categories they have. And they're weird!
Where to start? Japanese has something called copulas, which are sentence ending wordlets that indicate...well, it's not exactly clear what they indicate, but they have something to do with levels of politeness (on which a whole lot more later).
Then there's the word-ending particle, bane of all novice students. Instead of word order, Japanese relies on quirky little one-syllable suffixes to convey a word's grammatical role. If it's an object, you stick a -wo at the end, if it's a subject, you use -ga, and if it ends in -wa then it's the topic.
(Oh, did I mention? They have something called "Grammatical Topic", which corresponds to...nothing at all in European languages. More on particles later...)
Long story short, the elation you get from insight #3 dissipates pretty damn fast. You soon realize that you've not only volunteered to put together a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces exist in 7-dimensional-space.
It's at around this stage that you start to develop a sense of community with every Japanese person who's ever had to learn a European Language. You start picturing them as they hit their own level 3 insight ("it's sooooo easy, Takahashi...no copulas, no grammatical topic, they don't even have suffix markers...total piece of cake!") And it's around this time, as you start to imagine what this picture looks like from the other side, that insights 3 and 4 meld together into a new, higher level insight...
#5: Everything that's hard in European languages is easy in Japanese, but everything that's easy in European languages is hard in Japanese!
This, I think, is the insight that just keeps on giving. Every single day I find fresh evidence to support it.
Maybe two months into the learning process, you start to develop an awareness that, in Japanese, the problems are never going to come from "the usual suspects." The stuff that's going to give you no end of grief is always going to be the stuff that seems most innocuous.
Take the pronoun "I". What could be simpler? What could be more basic? How, pray tell, do you say "I" in Japanese?
If you look it up in the dictionary, it'll lie to you and tell you that "I" is "watashi".
That's a half truth at best, and can be plain wrong in certain circumstances. "I" can be "boku" if you're a guy talking to other guys, "ore" if you're boasting, "atashi" if you're a teenage girl, "watakushi" if you're trying to be extra polite and two or three others that slip my mind just now. It's a plain old nightmare.
Turns out, the only honest answer to the question "how do you say 'I' in Japanese?" is "it depends". Who are you? Who are you talking to? Are you a man or a woman? Young or old? Happy or pissed off?
In Japanese, even the most rudimentary sentences are relational: they vary depending on the social situation, on the relative status of the participants, their genders, age, etc. So there are always a half-dozen ways you can translate even the simplest English sentence into Japanese. Trouble starts right from the word "I".
Of course, you totally picture how this would play into Japanese people's own Insight #3s.
"Hey, did you know there's only one word for 'watashi', 'ore', 'boku', 'atashi' and 'watakushi' in English?"Come to think of it, if Japanese people have their own insight #3, they must also have their own #4 and #5s, no? It's a thought that solidifies your feeling of camaraderie with every Japanese person who ever struggled to learn a European language. You start to get a sense of the scale of the challenge they face, because you're climbing that same mountain, just from the opposite side. This idea yields an enormous, awed sense of respect for anyone who's ever managed to bridge the gargantuan chasm that separates these two language groups.
"Masaka! English must be dead easy!"
Anyway, the list of impossibly simple things that make your life difficult in Japanese is long. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Literally!
To be precise, there's no one way to say if, and or but. A word like "and" will change depending on the context. "I went to bed and turned off the light" takes a different "and" than "I like pears and bananas." "But" can take at least four different forms (demo, kedo, keredo, ga). And you could fill a book with the different ways of glossing "if".
In fact, at times it seems like the entire Japanese language is a perverse experiment in trying to dream up new ways to make incredibly simple linguistic constructs excruciatingly complicated. Don't even get me started on counting. Any language where the word for "six" changes depending on whether you're talking about six apples, six people, six buildings, six years or six elephants was clearly invented by the clinically perverse purely for the pleasure of watching foreigners get it wrong. It's just plain pointless.
(Though, to carp on the symmetry of it all once more, it's a quirk that strikes Japanese people as neither more nor less pointless than this bizarre fetish Europeans have with that mysterious linguistic entity of negligible utility known as the "article.")
At some point, you try to say something like:
"Hello, I am Francisco. I am 31 years old and I live in Europe but I was born in Venezuela"and you realize that you can't say it, but not because you can't say "hello" or "live" or "born" but because you don't know how to say "I" or "and" or "but" or even "31".
So you whimper off, depressed, cursing every Tenno who ever lived as you become deeply, intimately convinced that you will never ever figure this language out.
This is a discouraging stage. You sit there, struggling to memorize unfamiliar words that all look alike. It's slooooow going. Then, at some point (this happened around three months into it for me) you hit the pits. The absolute low point of demoralization and just sheer discouragement. It's the dreaded, dreaded insight #6...
#6 It's just sooooo different...
"Well, duh" right? I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? You don't need to spend three months studying Japanese to know that it's totally different from any European language. Everybody knows that...
Well, yes and no.
Before you study Japanese, you certainly know that Japanese is totally different, but you can't feel it. The sheer weight of the difference, the pervasiveness of it can't really sink in until you've made a serious effort to learn a bit and found yourself foiled at every turn by the most embarrassingly minor (seeming) details.
Of course, it's a hopeless feeling to try to explain. If you haven't been through it, any explanation will be insufficient, if you have been through it, every explanation is superfluous. Meaning is built out of words in ways that are just totally alien to western ears. Nothing ever seems to fit together in the way you might expect. It doesn't matter how many times people try to explain unidirectional verbs (like "ageru", "kureru" and "morau") to you, some deep, primitive part of your lizard brain just refuses to accept that a word can function that way. Whaddayamean I can morau something from you but you can't morau something from me? It's infuriating! Hell, it's more than infuriating, it's an outrage against common sense!
I guess most people quit when they get to this stage, and the urge is perfectly understandable. But my ego bruises easily, and I couldn't accept defeat after just a few months. So I took a couple off weeks off to clear my mind. And it was during that break that I had my most platitudinous seeming (and, therefore, also deepest) insight yet...
#7: It's no use fighting it
See, when you're on insight #6, you manage to convince yourself that somehow, it's personal. That Japanese is being difficult out of spite, that it's determined to humiliate you, that it goes out of its way to prove to you that you can't learn it. This is, of course, a totally insane idea, but that's how you feel around month four.
But somehow, during my break, the sheer self defeating lunacy of the thought became clear to me. I was fighting the language! But whingeing constantly about how hard it is doesn't somehow make it easier...it only stresses you out. In a flash, I realized that every minute I spent fighting the language was a minute I wasn't spending learning it.
When this insight hits you, you have to stop. It's a time to collect your thoughts, to take the measure of the task ahead of you all over again. Truth is, if you think you can learn Japanese in a year or two, you're setting yourself up to fail. You can't! And getting upset about it won't change that reality.
If you're studying outside Japan, the reality is you need 3 or 4 or 5 years to learn passable Japanese. That's all. It's not its fault that it takes a long time to learn. It's not your fault that it'll take you such a long time to learn it. It's nothing personal. It is what it is.
All you can do is keep putting together bits of the jigsaw, keep hammering away at it and know that some day you'll get there. What's empowering here is the certainty that, so long as you persevere, you really can't fail.
When you change your time perspective like this, you finally give yourself a decent shot at success. The key is to think through where exactly the blockages are and work through them patiently and with a bloody-minded relentlessness.
And for me, at that point, definitely the biggest blockage was all about syntax. Which takes us to...
#8: Even if you understand every single word in a sentence, that doesn't necessarily mean you understand the sentence!
This insight is almost as discouraging as #6. You can sit there, listening to your lessons, and even though you know what every single word in the sentence means, the overall meaning is lost on you.
You might hear "Joe, Andy, Wife, Cousin, Chocolate Cake, New Car, Coffee Shop, Eat, Go," in that order, each with its own little word-end particle. You might even understand each word separately. But you have no idea what it means!
If you miss even one particle, you have no clue if Joe is driving Andy's car, or the cousin's wife is driving Joe to Andy's coffeeshop to eat chocolate cake, or if it's the cake that wants the coffeeshop to drive the new car and eat andy's wife with cousin Joe. Knowing all the words isn't nearly enough until you get a knack for how they hang together. Without it, you're lost.
For the same reason, you can't actually build a sentence, even if you know each of the words you want to put in it. It's infuriating! It's a hump you have to overcome...but at first it's far from clear how to.
The reason is that word order in Japanese is hideously counterintuitive. All you know for sure is that the verb goes at the end. Other than that, it's chaos out there...synctactic anarchy.
The grammar books actually make it worse by telling you that, unlike in English, it doesn't matter which order words go in...which only makes everything even more confusing. But let me give you an example so this all gets a bit less abstract.
In English, if you read a sentence like:
"Joe eats cake"you know that "Joe" is doing the eating and the cake is doing the being eaten simply because of the order the words are in. But in Japanese they have those suffixes, which means that the words can go in any order they like. So,
"cake-wo Joe-ga eat"and
"Joe-ga cake-wo eat"are exactly equivalent, because Joe is marked by "ga" and the word that has the "ga" does the action. Of course, that also means that if you say,
"Joe-wo cake-ga eat"the cake just ate Joe! It doesn't enter into it at all that you said "Joe" before you said "cake". Mess up your word-ending particles, and you hideously mangle the meaning of any sentence.
Of course, with a very simple sentence like Joe eats cake, it's not such a problem. But what if you want to say, oh, I dunno something like "Joe is going to the coffee shop in Jim's new car to eat chocolate cake with Andy and his wife's cousin"? Suddenly this arbitrary syntax thing becomes an absolute bloody nightmare. Trying to keep track of all the little suffixes, of who did what to whom, trying to figure out who initiates the action seems nearly impossible. At least, that is, until you hit insight #9...
#9: The subject goes first, the verb goes last, and everything in between is backwards!
Now, any grammarian reading this probably did a spit take just now. "Dear God, that's not right!" And, I admit it, it's not really right. It's a rule of thumb. A heuristic. It has a job that's more important than being right: it makes your life bearable.
The grammar books probably are right in that, in some formal sense, word order in Japanese really is free. But when you're learning, you don't need academic precision, you need a lifeline to rescue you from drowning in the sheer anarchy that is the Japanese sentence's syntax. And this rule of thumb gets you safely to syntactic shore 95% of the time.
Take the nightmare of a sentence above,
"Joe is going to the coffee shop in Jim's new car to eat chocolate cake together with Andy and his wife's cousin"Where to start? Well, first you find the subject (in this case "Joe") and you put it first. Then you pick out the main verb (in this case, "is going") and stick it at the end. Already you know the sentence is going to look something like:
"Joe-ga ... is going."And how do you fill in that dot-dot-dot? Easy! You work your way backwards, clause by clause, through the English. What do you get?
"Joe-ga, Andy and his wife's cousin together with, chocolate cake to eat in order to, Jim's new car in, the coffee shop to, is going."
Bingo! A perfectly formed Japanese sentence! Study Japanese long enough and sentences like that start to make perfect sense to you.
Insight #9 gets you from knowing a bunch of words that you have no clue how to string together to knowing a bunch of words that you can kind of use.
I'm sure in the years ahead I'll understand all the nuance this little rule of thumb misses. When that happens, I'll discard it. But, for now, I think I'll keep my lifeline thank you very much. I'm not much of a nihongo swimmer quite yet, and I'm pretty sure I'd drown without it.
Of course, just as you're feeling pretty good about making your first few sentences, Japanese finds a new way to baffle you. The most prominent of these has to do with politeness. It's a huge stereotype, of course, the whole obsessive Japanese politeness thing. But what a lot of people don't realize is how finely structured the politeness-level system is, how deeply embedded in the language.
Around month five, I started to become aware that there is always more than one way to say any given thing in Japanese. So I asked my Japanese friends just exactly how many levels of politeness there are in Japanese. Seems like a reasonable question, doesn't it? Right away, though, we came up against one of those little impasses of mutual misunderstanding that serve as surefire signposts to deep cultural chasms. "What do you mean 'how many levels are there'?"
"Well, you know, in Spanish and French there are two. Tu and usted. Tu and vous. In English there used to be two, but 'thee' fell out of usage so now there's just you. I guess in Japanese there are more, but how many, exactly? Three? Four? More?"
This only got me more puzzled looks until I realized I'd have to go back and think this one through from a totally different vantage point. Eventually, just in the last few weeks, an insight crystalized. There isn't a straightforward answer to my question, because...
#10: European politeness is binary, but Japanese politeness lies along a continuum
In European languages, it's fairly straightforward. You're either using the 'Tu' form or you're using the 'Usted' form. The only thing that changes between them is verb conjugation. If you mix the two, you're just not speaking properly.
But Japanese politeness is much more multifaceted. You have the basic -masu verb form (for polite speech) and the dictionary verb form (for casual speech) but the story hardly ends there. Verbs change, but nouns and prefixes and suffixes change as well. As you go from more to less polite, more and more words and bits of word "fall away". What's worse, men speak differently from women.
The hardest thing to convey, though, is that it isn't just that there are different levels of politeness, it's also that there are also different flavors of politeness. The polite language that's appropriate in business is not the same type of polite language that's appropriate when talking to a very old person, or to a priest. The honorific language you use when (or well, realistically, if) you ever meet the Emperor is something else altogether. And the casual language you speak to women is different from the casual language you speak to men, which is different from the casual language you speak to children, which again is different from the casual language you speak if you're a criminal, or a dirty old man, or if you're very angry.
Each register has its own words, its own phrase construction patterns, its own conventions. The possibility to mix and match between them is basically unlimited. So, in a way, Japanese people are constantly, unconsciously, automatically "fine tuning" the level and flavor of politeness they're using to fit the situation they're in, to project the type of persona they want to project, to situate themselves in their social environment.
This, I think, is the reason Japanese people have the feeling that foreigners can never truly learn their language. The language is embedded in the social system to a degree people in the West can hardly conceive of. So it's not that you can't learn the language. You can. It's that you can't truly master the judgment to know exactly where on the politeness spectrum it's appropriate to speak, even if you know all the words. Even if you manage to speak perfectly grammatically, you almost certainly won't ever sound fully natural.
Like old gringos in Venezuela who continue to screw up their masculine and feminine nouns after decades in the country, foreigners in Japan can go for decades without quite grasping that sixth sense Japanese people learn as kids and allows them to know which register they need to use when.
This multiplicity of registers also accounts for one of the weirder things about Japanese. This one I'm still struggling with, but as far as I can figure, there aren't any swear words. Or, well, not as we think of them. They have a taboo register, but not specific taboo words. If you go for the very, very rudest register of them all, everything you say comes out as swearing...or, everything you say has an impact on the listener similar to the impact swearing has in the west. But it isn't any specific word that's making the speech "sweary", it's the whole package that's out of bounds. Only hardened criminals and yakuza types talk like that.
Anyway, that's the way it seems to me at this point. But then, this one hasn't quite crystallized into a proper insight yet, and if you've read this far, you've certainly realized that a big part of the way this game works is that later insights often modify or even overturn earlier ones. That's learning, baby, ask Maria Montessori if you don't believe me! Probably a year from now this write up will look totally idiotic to me.
It's been a trip learning Japanese. But I still have a long, long way to go. I'm working mighty hard to transition from Advanced Beginner to Intermediate level right now. I still make a lot of mistakes, and I have the impression I sound kind of like Tarzan when I talk. I know full well that it'll take another three or four years before I can speak presentably, but then, that is a reality I'm through fighting.
If you're thinking of learning Japanese, or any radically different language, all I can say is: slow and steady wins the race. I'm convinced anyone can learn any language, given a net connection and enough perseverance. The reason people fail is that they set unrealistic goals and get discouraged when results are too slow in coming. I blame deceptive marketing. Anyone who tries to sell you a book by telling you you learning a very different language is "easy" or "quick" is just plain lying.
It's not easy. It's not quick. But it's also not impossible.
Just remember: if you're realistic about your time horizon and grimly determined to study every single day, you can't fail. Or, well, that's what I tell myself every day, anyway.
October 23, 2007
Philip Converse: The nature of belief systems in mass publics
Quico says: It's been hard to find the time or the stomach to blog recently. (Somebody I know might have taken up the slack, but hasn't...) Rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I might as well post some of the more provocative stuff I've been reading. Today, it's a summary of "an oldie but a goodie": Philip Converse's groundbreaking 1964 study of voter cluelessness. Even if you've never heard of it, it's a paper whose influence has permeated our political culture. It launched a sub-field in political science, and lives on with silent strength in the conduct of almost every election campaign of the last 40 years. For a gripping discussion on the implications of Converse's paper, check this out.
Wikisum (summing up Converse) says:
Democratic theory assumes that voters in the "mass public" hold clear ideological values which allow them to make voting decisions based on the positions candidates hold. One of the most prevalent distinctions they are assumed to make is evaluating candidates' positions on the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum. Thus, when the electorate chooses politicians that vary from one end of the spectrum to the other, it is often assumed that the electorate is becoming more conservative or more liberal.
The result of Converse's surveys and analysis cast doubt on many of these assumptions by showing the apparent lack of understanding of ideology or even differentiation between the two political parties on the liberal-conservative continuum. Using open-ended interviews as well as survey data, Converse classifies voters into the following categories based on their understanding of basic ideological differentiation between ideas:
Discussing some of the implications of Coverse's research, Jeffrey Friedman writes:
Wikisum (summing up Converse) says:
A great majority of people neither adhere to a coherent and complete set of beliefs able to sustain a clear ideology nor do they have a clear grasp of what ideology is. This is measured by a lack of coherence in responses to open-ended questions. What's more, the ideology of elites is not mirrored by the mass public.
Converse analyzes open-ended interview questions to measure conceptualization of ideology. He concludes that the liberal-conservative continuum is a high level abstraction not typically used by the man in the street because of response instability and lack of connections made between answers. There is no underlying belief structure for most people, just a bunch of random opinions. Even on highly controversial, well-publicized issues, large portions of the electorate do not have coherent opinions. In fact, many simply answer survey questions randomly.
Though some political sophisticates do structure their opinions in a larger ideological framework, such structure is rare. This level of political sophistication (one's "level of conceptualization") is correlated positively with the respondent's level of education, degree of political involvement, and amount of political information, but crucially also dogmatism and political inflexibility.
The result of Converse's surveys and analysis cast doubt on many of these assumptions by showing the apparent lack of understanding of ideology or even differentiation between the two political parties on the liberal-conservative continuum. Using open-ended interviews as well as survey data, Converse classifies voters into the following categories based on their understanding of basic ideological differentiation between ideas:
- Ideologues: These respondents relied on "a relatively abstract and far reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting political significance over time were evaluated" (p.216).
- Near Ideologues: These respondents mentioned the liberal-conservative dimension peripherally, but did not appear to place much emphasis on it, or used it in a way that led the researchers to question their understanding of the issues.
- Group Interest: This group did not demonstrate an understanding of the ideological spectrum, but made choices based on which groups they saw the parties representing (e.g. Democrats supporting blacks, Republicans supporting big business or the rich). These people tended to not understand issues that did not clearly benefit the groups they referred to.
- Nature of the Times: The members of this group exhibited no understanding of the ideological differences between parties, but made their decisions on the "nature of the times." Thus, they did not like Republicans because of the Depression, or they didn't like the Democrats because of the Korean war.
- No issue content: This group included the respondents whose evaluation of the political scene had "no shred of policy significance whatever" (p. 217). These people included respondents who identified a party affiliation, but had no idea what the party stood for, as well as people who based their decisions on personal qualities of candidates.
Most people fall into the lower three levels of conceptualization.
Converse also found that the mass public does not seem to share beliefs in any predictable way with elites. He doubts that the voting patterns of the people at the lower end of the scale follow the patterns of the ideologues and near ideologues who have a firm grasp of the issues.
In addition, Converse's interviews with the same respondents over a two-year period often show little correlation with each other. In these cases, only 13 out of 20 managed to locate themselves on the same side of a given controversy in successive interviews. Converse's interpretationis that this change seemed almost exclusively random instead of as a response to changing beliefs.
Discussing some of the implications of Coverse's research, Jeffrey Friedman writes:
Converse found that only about 2.5% of the public (as of 1956) was passably knowledgeable about the meaning of liberalism and conservatism, the “belief systems” that structured, and still structure, most political debate and public-policy making. That would be bad enough; but surely knowing what the dominant belief systems “mean” isn’t sufficient to make well-informed political decisions.And later on:
Consider the most reviled pundit on the other side of the political spectrum from yourself. To liberal ears, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity, while well informed about which policies are advocated by conservatives and liberals, will seem appallingly ignorant of the arguments and evidence for liberal positions. The same goes in reverse for a Frank Rich or a Paul Krugman, whose knowledge of the “basics” of liberalism and conservatism will seem, in the eyes of a conservative, to be matched by grave misunderstandings of the rationales for conservative policies.If Limbaugh, Rich,et al., turn out to exemplify the “cognitive elite,”we are in serious trouble. Converse, I believe, showed just that.
Converse’s political elites are particularly well informed about what it means to be a conservative or a liberal, and their reasoning about politics is structured by this knowledge. But Converse’s findings suggest, I think, that their relatively high levels of ideological knowledge are due to their being conservative or liberal ideologues: closed-minded partisans of one point of view. Should the leadership of public opinion by such people be a source of relief—or a cause for anxiety?
Ideological constraint is a form of determination. Converse equated it with “the success we would have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude, that he holds certain further ideas and attitudes.” There would be nothing worrisome about such determination if people’s political attitudes were being constrained by logic or evidence. But Converse made it abundantly clear that that is not the type of constraint he had in mind.
“Whatever may be learned through the use of strict logic as a type of constraint,” Converse wrote, it seems obvious that few belief systems of any range at all depend for their constraint upon logic.” Ideologies are only “apparently logical wholes,” and the appearance is skin deep.
For Converse "what is important is that the elites familiar with the total shapes of these belief systems have experienced them as logically constrained clusters of ideas.” But this experience does not stem from the ideologue’s astute reasoning or her keen investigation of reality. Her views are, instead, determined by the political belief system she has been taught.
Converse’s ideologues form a cultural elite, not necessarily a “power elite.” The members of the public who are sophisticated about politics (relative to most people) aren’t necessarily those who are in charge of the government. Realistically, however, the cultural elite, through its teaching and journalism, is likely to shape the ideas of the governing elite, who tend to be a highly educated subset of the cultural elite. The power of Converse’s politically sophisticated stratum, then, lies not only in its attenuated trickle-down influence on mass culture, but in its subsumption of, and influence upon, those who directly shape public policy through their positions in the legislature, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy.Friedman's a terrific writer. It's worth reading his entire spiel.
In a democracy, all “branches”of government are nominally subordinate to the people. The power of public opinion is supposed to check even the nomination and confirmation of judges and the appointment of top bureaucrats, since that is done by politicians beholden to the electorate. This nominal barrier to elite rule seems to have stymied the movement to “bring the state back in” to political analysis. During the� 80���s, the “state theory” movement was poised to take political science by storm while it produced penetrating analyses of pre-democratic states, both premodern and newly industrialized, modern democracies seemed to stop “state theory” in its tracks.
How,after all, can state personnel act autonomously if, as in modern democracies, “society,” or public opinion, controls the flow of revenue that pays for the standing armies that, in classic state theory, undergird “strong states”? The key role played by the military (and its supportive tax-collecting bureaucracy) in state theory—putting down popular protest—fades to insignificance in democracies, where public disaffec-
tion is translated into change nonviolently,through the ballot box—and where the ballot box controls the military. Is state autonomy possible, then, once the state is democratic?
Post-Converse public-opinion research can provide a positive answer to this question: The public can’t control what it doesn’t know about. But since that research is usually the province of specialists in American politics, this answer was not apparent to state theorists, who tended to be comparativists. (And the question did not seem to occur to public-opinion researchers, for the reverse reason.) Only recently has the cross-fertilization of public-opinion research and state theory begun, based on the simple premise that a public as ignorant as the one portrayed by Converse is unlikely to be aware of most of the things its government does. Public ignorance maythus sever a democratic state from the demos.
Government officials can let their own ideological agendas shape bureaucratic rule making, judicial decision making, and the crafting of legislation, without fear of electoral reprisal—even if their agendas are unpopular—to the extent that they think that the public is unlikely to find out about it. State autonomy in democracies, then, would have to do not with the efficiency of tax collection or the reliability of armies,
but with a government so big that nobody can keep track of its activities.
This separation between people and policy has limits. The mass media can, by pounding away at a proposed or extant government policy, bring the public’s limited attention to it. Hence Bush’s defeat on Social Security. But these limits have limits: very few issues will receive such sustained media attention that they provoke public outrage and, thus, negative political consequences for unpopular policies.
October 19, 2007
Taking Ignorance Seriously
Jeffrey Friedman says:
The most profound observer of political ignorance, Walter Lippmann, tackled [...] the commonplace accusation that one's political adversaries have evil motives. This is neither a charitable accusation to make nor one that, when the heat of the day's political battles dissipates, stands up to empirical testing. Yet it is an immensely important political phenomenon that unfolds regularly.
Lippmann attributes it to the inherently contestable nature of a complex world - especially one that we tend not to see as particularly hard to fathom. We typically fail to realize that the political world is complex, and thus that our perceptions of it amount to anything but "the facts" speaking for themselves.
Once our political opinions appear to us to be "self-evident" reflections of the facts, it becomes mysterious (to us) why anyone would hold different opinions than we do. As Lippmann ([1922] 1997, 82-83) puts it,
Thus, ignorance of the real possibility of one's own ignorance both enables and is reinforced by ignorance of the possibility of one's political antagonist's ignorance.
Popper (1962: 7-8) has a theory of the source of political demonization that almost exactly duplicates Lippmann's:
From Jeffrey Friedman's "Popper, Weber and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance", Critical Review 17 (2005) nos. 1-2. (www.criticalreview.com/)
The most profound observer of political ignorance, Walter Lippmann, tackled [...] the commonplace accusation that one's political adversaries have evil motives. This is neither a charitable accusation to make nor one that, when the heat of the day's political battles dissipates, stands up to empirical testing. Yet it is an immensely important political phenomenon that unfolds regularly.
Lippmann attributes it to the inherently contestable nature of a complex world - especially one that we tend not to see as particularly hard to fathom. We typically fail to realize that the political world is complex, and thus that our perceptions of it amount to anything but "the facts" speaking for themselves.
Once our political opinions appear to us to be "self-evident" reflections of the facts, it becomes mysterious (to us) why anyone would hold different opinions than we do. As Lippmann ([1922] 1997, 82-83) puts it,
He who denies my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very good foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole...Someone who does not share my interpretation of (obvious) "reality," Lippmann continues,
So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it as "reality."
...is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme. Rarely in politics is a place made for him by the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme.If we allowed that those who disagree with us just see the facts differently, we would have to conclude that either they, or we, must be mistaken about the facts. That would undermine the obviousness of the reality that we find solidly anchored in "self-evident truths". We sidestep the disconcerting possibility that we may be mistaken about these truths by attributing not a mistaken understanding of the facts but bad motives to our political opponents. It is far easier to reassure oneself about the purity of one's own motives than about the infallibility of one's own perceptions, so people persistently tend to see a world that is in fact so complicated that its interpretation generates honest disagreement as, instead, so simple that only evil people could disagree with them - malevolent people who deliberately ignore obvious truths.
Out of the opposition, therefore, we make villains and conspiracies.
Thus, ignorance of the real possibility of one's own ignorance both enables and is reinforced by ignorance of the possibility of one's political antagonist's ignorance.
Popper (1962: 7-8) has a theory of the source of political demonization that almost exactly duplicates Lippmann's:
The conspiracy theory of ignarance is a curious outgrowth from the doctrine of manifest truth.This is one reason that, in politics, people close their minds to other points of view, regardless of the content of those points of view. Anyone can use this mechanism to dismiss challenges to their own beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are.
By the doctrine that truth is manifest I mean the optimistic view that truth, if put before us naked, is always recognizable as truth.
But how can we ever fall into error if truth is manifest? Ignorance may be the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, to poison our minds by filling them with falsehood, and to blind our eyes so that they cannot see the manifest truth.
The conspiracy theory of ignorance is fairly well known in its Marxian form as the conspiracy of a capitalist press that perverts and suppresses truth and fills the workers' minds with false ideologies...
The theory that truth is manifest - that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it - this theory is the basis of almost every kind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuse to see the manifest truth.
From Jeffrey Friedman's "Popper, Weber and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance", Critical Review 17 (2005) nos. 1-2. (www.criticalreview.com/)
October 12, 2007
Chavismo's Mirror Image
Quico says:
Dear Katy,
Actually, I'm not sure if we really agree, or, to say it more precisely, I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. Your post deals mostly with what we think, but the problem, for my money, is all about how we think.
The question isn't whether one side or the other in this "debate" is failing to learn the right lessons...that much seems plain obvious. What I'm trying to get at is not the "whether" but the "why". Why does the opposition keep learning the wrong lessons? Why do we fail again and again to converge on a single, coherent position? Why does deliberation lead to vitriol, mistrust and successive schisms rather than to convergence and mutual understanding? What is it about this debate that makes it so dysfunctional?
To answer those question, I think we have to think through the preconditions for successful deliberation. Under what circumstances does open debate lead to mutual understanding, to convergence, to coordination? Until we're clear on that, we can't figure out why the debate we've been having fails to measure up.
So what are those pre-conditions? Under what circumstances can reasonable people talk through their differences with a view to reaching a common understanding?
In very broad terms, I think there are basically two:
-A common understanding of the facts of the matter
-A common commitment to talk through our differences rationally
My last post focused on the first of those conditions, but the two are pretty much irreducibly linked. The opposition can't coordinate because it can't come to an agreement on how we got into the mess we're in. But a big part of the reason we build that common understanding that is that our commitment to talk through our differences rationally has been badly eroded.
Too many of the rules of rational deliberation have become collateral damage to the infernal dynamic of hyperpolarization the Chavez era has brought. Basic rules of logic, fundamental axioms like "A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time" have been discarded, supplanted with irrational, politically opportunistic that amount to "A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time unless, in a given situation, it is politically convenient for me to act as though they are."
Probably the most basic axiom of rational deliberation, and probably also the one that has fared the worst in the Chávez era, is the simple understanding that the truth of an argument does not depend on the identity of the person making it.
A statement like "the sun rises from the east," is true whether the Dalai Lama says it or Kim Jong Il says it. Rational debate cannot go forward unless all participants accept something as basic as that. The first prerequisite for fruitful deliberation is the ability of participants to separate arguments from identities, and the willingness to focus on the argument while ignoring (at least provisionally, for the purpose of the debate) the identity of the party who puts it forward.
We're talking about a cornerstone value of the enlightenment project here, a kind of sine qua non requirement of modernity. Arguably, Venezuelans in the public sphere have never been very good at bracketing identities and focusing on arguments - which is just another way of saying that we've never been very good at modernity. But what we've seen over the last 8 years is really a catastrophic collapse in our society-wide commitment to this principle. The farther we depart from it, the deeper the country sinks into...well, why sugar coat it? Into barbarism.
Now, I think I know what you're thinking: "but Chávez started it!" I agree! That's right, Chávez did start it. From the word go, chavismo's Standard Operating Procedure when faced with any and every criticism has always been to ignore the substance of the argument and attack the person (or institution) making it. I've written about that, in outraged tones, a million times on this blog, I've examined it from every possible angle.
But, in this context, that's not the point. The relevant fact is that the opposition's reaction to this tendency has been to mirror chavismo: doing exactly the same, but backwards!
Think back to Roberto Giusti's "principled" statement, in 2002, that he could not be impartial between authoritarianism and democracy, that the circumstances forced him - as a journalist - to take sides. In practice, what this meant was that he would stop considering news stories on the basis of their intrinsic newsworthiness, but instead would judge them according to which side was likely to benefit from their publication. In other words, truth would play a second fiddle to identity. And much of the oppo journalistic elite publicly endorsed that view.
This subordination of argument to identity amounted to a retreat from the enlightenment project as such. And abandoning the axiomatic bases of rational deliberation undermined our ability, later on, to agree on the facts of the matter, to come to a collective understanding about what's going on.
What's upsetting is realizing that we reacted to Chávez's rejection of rational deliberation by, in turn, rejecting rational deliberation. Giusti's position - the position of most of the oppo media for most of the last 8 years - constituted a surrender. We gradually started to become just like them, but backwards. Chávez nos tiene locos...but only because Chávez es loco and, without realizing, we've started to think the way he does.
We've surrendered to Chavez's barbarism. Thinking we were "fighting fire with fire", we started treating rationality as a kind of luxury that we just couldn't afford in the heat of battle. We've become chavismo's mirror image.
Over the last three years, in the era of the Chávez consolidation, the implications of our surrender to this kind of barbarism have corroded our political discourse more and more deeply. As the government achieved its goal of splitting us between abstentionists and participationists, we've found ourselves shorn of the tools we would need to come to agreement through rational deliberation.
Well trained in the arts of dismissing anything "the other side" said as self-evidently wrong, ill-intentioned, even evil (hey, we'd been doing it to chavismo for years!), we started training those habits of mind on one another. So phrases like "oposición oficialista" entered the debate, slurs meant to not to criticize the arguments of the other camp but to disqualify them on the basis of their their identity. In fact, the internal opposition debate has come to resemble nothing so much as the debate we used to have between the government and the opposition, with deeply entrenched positions and a growing sense that the other side is more than just wrong, it's evil.
So it's more than just a failure to learn, Katy. It's that the structural preconditions for collective learning aren't in place. It's that the norms of public discourse within the opposition itself have been chavesized, have devolved into a dysfunctional, primitive form where debate is always about people, never about ideas, and therefore yields enmity and resentment far more often than mutual understanding and convergence.
You know, Briceño Guerrero wrote beautifully about Latin America's always embattled but nonetheless genuine identification with the values of the enlightenment. He didn't think enlightenment values would ever be incorporated widely enough into our way of behaving to organize our public life quite successfully, but neither did he foresee that our identification with those values could wither away completely.
I guess the reason behind my recent bout of acute pessimism, Katy, is this sense that the old man was wrong: the impasse he reported 25 years ago is being broken. We're no longer confronted with discourses in permanent stalemate, we're confronted with the gradual but decisive retreat of European Rationalist values from the public sphere. And that's some serious shit, Katy.
Dear Katy,
Actually, I'm not sure if we really agree, or, to say it more precisely, I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. Your post deals mostly with what we think, but the problem, for my money, is all about how we think.
The question isn't whether one side or the other in this "debate" is failing to learn the right lessons...that much seems plain obvious. What I'm trying to get at is not the "whether" but the "why". Why does the opposition keep learning the wrong lessons? Why do we fail again and again to converge on a single, coherent position? Why does deliberation lead to vitriol, mistrust and successive schisms rather than to convergence and mutual understanding? What is it about this debate that makes it so dysfunctional?
To answer those question, I think we have to think through the preconditions for successful deliberation. Under what circumstances does open debate lead to mutual understanding, to convergence, to coordination? Until we're clear on that, we can't figure out why the debate we've been having fails to measure up.
So what are those pre-conditions? Under what circumstances can reasonable people talk through their differences with a view to reaching a common understanding?
In very broad terms, I think there are basically two:
-A common understanding of the facts of the matter
-A common commitment to talk through our differences rationally
My last post focused on the first of those conditions, but the two are pretty much irreducibly linked. The opposition can't coordinate because it can't come to an agreement on how we got into the mess we're in. But a big part of the reason we build that common understanding that is that our commitment to talk through our differences rationally has been badly eroded.
Too many of the rules of rational deliberation have become collateral damage to the infernal dynamic of hyperpolarization the Chavez era has brought. Basic rules of logic, fundamental axioms like "A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time" have been discarded, supplanted with irrational, politically opportunistic that amount to "A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time unless, in a given situation, it is politically convenient for me to act as though they are."
Probably the most basic axiom of rational deliberation, and probably also the one that has fared the worst in the Chávez era, is the simple understanding that the truth of an argument does not depend on the identity of the person making it.
A statement like "the sun rises from the east," is true whether the Dalai Lama says it or Kim Jong Il says it. Rational debate cannot go forward unless all participants accept something as basic as that. The first prerequisite for fruitful deliberation is the ability of participants to separate arguments from identities, and the willingness to focus on the argument while ignoring (at least provisionally, for the purpose of the debate) the identity of the party who puts it forward.
We're talking about a cornerstone value of the enlightenment project here, a kind of sine qua non requirement of modernity. Arguably, Venezuelans in the public sphere have never been very good at bracketing identities and focusing on arguments - which is just another way of saying that we've never been very good at modernity. But what we've seen over the last 8 years is really a catastrophic collapse in our society-wide commitment to this principle. The farther we depart from it, the deeper the country sinks into...well, why sugar coat it? Into barbarism.
Now, I think I know what you're thinking: "but Chávez started it!" I agree! That's right, Chávez did start it. From the word go, chavismo's Standard Operating Procedure when faced with any and every criticism has always been to ignore the substance of the argument and attack the person (or institution) making it. I've written about that, in outraged tones, a million times on this blog, I've examined it from every possible angle.
But, in this context, that's not the point. The relevant fact is that the opposition's reaction to this tendency has been to mirror chavismo: doing exactly the same, but backwards!
Think back to Roberto Giusti's "principled" statement, in 2002, that he could not be impartial between authoritarianism and democracy, that the circumstances forced him - as a journalist - to take sides. In practice, what this meant was that he would stop considering news stories on the basis of their intrinsic newsworthiness, but instead would judge them according to which side was likely to benefit from their publication. In other words, truth would play a second fiddle to identity. And much of the oppo journalistic elite publicly endorsed that view.
This subordination of argument to identity amounted to a retreat from the enlightenment project as such. And abandoning the axiomatic bases of rational deliberation undermined our ability, later on, to agree on the facts of the matter, to come to a collective understanding about what's going on.
What's upsetting is realizing that we reacted to Chávez's rejection of rational deliberation by, in turn, rejecting rational deliberation. Giusti's position - the position of most of the oppo media for most of the last 8 years - constituted a surrender. We gradually started to become just like them, but backwards. Chávez nos tiene locos...but only because Chávez es loco and, without realizing, we've started to think the way he does.
We've surrendered to Chavez's barbarism. Thinking we were "fighting fire with fire", we started treating rationality as a kind of luxury that we just couldn't afford in the heat of battle. We've become chavismo's mirror image.
Over the last three years, in the era of the Chávez consolidation, the implications of our surrender to this kind of barbarism have corroded our political discourse more and more deeply. As the government achieved its goal of splitting us between abstentionists and participationists, we've found ourselves shorn of the tools we would need to come to agreement through rational deliberation.
Well trained in the arts of dismissing anything "the other side" said as self-evidently wrong, ill-intentioned, even evil (hey, we'd been doing it to chavismo for years!), we started training those habits of mind on one another. So phrases like "oposición oficialista" entered the debate, slurs meant to not to criticize the arguments of the other camp but to disqualify them on the basis of their their identity. In fact, the internal opposition debate has come to resemble nothing so much as the debate we used to have between the government and the opposition, with deeply entrenched positions and a growing sense that the other side is more than just wrong, it's evil.
So it's more than just a failure to learn, Katy. It's that the structural preconditions for collective learning aren't in place. It's that the norms of public discourse within the opposition itself have been chavesized, have devolved into a dysfunctional, primitive form where debate is always about people, never about ideas, and therefore yields enmity and resentment far more often than mutual understanding and convergence.
You know, Briceño Guerrero wrote beautifully about Latin America's always embattled but nonetheless genuine identification with the values of the enlightenment. He didn't think enlightenment values would ever be incorporated widely enough into our way of behaving to organize our public life quite successfully, but neither did he foresee that our identification with those values could wither away completely.
I guess the reason behind my recent bout of acute pessimism, Katy, is this sense that the old man was wrong: the impasse he reported 25 years ago is being broken. We're no longer confronted with discourses in permanent stalemate, we're confronted with the gradual but decisive retreat of European Rationalist values from the public sphere. And that's some serious shit, Katy.
October 9, 2007
How to debate when you agree
Katy says:
Dear Quico,
Sorry it's taken me so long to reply to your previous post, but I wanted to take my time before answering what, in essence, is a debate in which both parties agree. Fundamentally, we both agree on how frustrating it is to see our side caught up in a useless debate on whether or not to participate. As for the opposition media, we both agree that it does more harm than good. So what is there to debate?
Lots. Because where you see reason for despair, I see an opportunity to make us stronger, to make our positions more coherent, to test our tolerance.
I've been on the record before as saying that I don't think the elimination of Chavez's term limits is necessarily a bad thing. My approach to the current state of rigor mortis on our base electorate sort of points to that direction - namely, that until the Chávez phenomenon has run its course, we're better off not winning.
Don't get me wrong - obviously any legitimate opportunity to unseat Chavez should be taken and exploited to the max. However, all losses point to something, and in our case losses point to the flaws in our side. Until we learn the lessons from the bitter medicine that chavismo has supplied us with, we're better off in the opposition. The country isn't, but we are.
Take, for instance, April 13th, 2002. On that day, the opposition movement should have learned a few things. One of them is that Chavez has the honest, yet a bit fanatical, support of a large minority of the population. Another is that we should never rely on the military to solve our problems. And finally, we should have learned that unseating governments by unconstitutional means is the kiss of death which takes away legitimacy from all attempts to make our country a better, freer place to live. Can we honestly say we have learned these lessons? Some of us have, others of us have not.
In August of 2004 we learned another lesson. That day we should have learned that unity in the opposition is not a panacea, that the way the media paints a picture is not always the way the country is. We should have learned that the international community is not going to come and save us, and that we should never, ever trust Chavez's electoral authorities. Finally, we should have learned that there is a non-significant mass of people who chavismo has enfranchised, people who had never come out to vote but decided to do so for the first time because they honestly believe in the process.
I think we were certainly the victims of electoral shenanigans that day. I also think that it didn't make a difference in the final outcome, and that international observers knew about this and basically ok'ed a flawed referendum by assuming that this was a case of a broken clock actually getting the time right. Can we honestly say we have learned these lessons?
In December of 2005 we declined to participate in Congressional elections. That day we should have learned that you can't prove fraud if you don't force the other side to cheat. We should have also learned that massive abstention may backfire on us, and that perhaps the only side we end up punishing with our actions is our own. Have we learned all this?
I think that abstaining that day may have been a mistake, but it was the only politically viable option at the time given how the CNE was caught lying about the secrecy of the vote. I also think that people have a hard time believing this was the only reason parties decided to not participate.
In 2006, the lesson should have been that no matter how enthusiastic the crowds or how feverishly you campaign, you can't defeat an electoral behemoth like Chavez with a disorganized, improvised campaign. We don't need to think back much to remember that, during last year's World Cup, with the elections five months away, the opposition still didn't know who their candidate was going to be. We should have also learned that opinion polls, more often than not, get things right. Did we learn all this?
My point in writing this laundry list of mistakes made and things unrealized is not only to convey the idea that, until we learn these lessons, we won't get rid of Chavez. What I'm believing more and more these days is that until these lessons are learned, we don't deserve to get rid of Chavez.
I'm convinced that Chavez and chavismo have changed Venezuelan politics, yet Chavez seems to be the only politician who has understood this. The poor in Venezuela have long been neglected, a fact few people dispute these days. And Chavez has brought about a sense of empowerment in people previously disenfranchised. Whether this empowerment is real or not is beside the point - what matters is that they feel empowered.
I'm convinced that this thing that has been engendered will make people realize, sooner rather than later, that chavismo goes against the very surge of citizen power that it thinks it has brought about. I'm also convinced that, until chavismo runs out of financial weapons to feed its populist project, we're better off getting ready for the true battle.
It would have been unthinkable for a project like Chavez's to gain power in the middle of the 1970s. But during that time, the seeds of what we have now began to grow. Chavez and his minions were in hibernation, waiting for their time, and it came in the 1989-1992 period. Perhaps now is our time to hibernate as well, metaphorically speaking.
One of the lessons we still have not learned - and here I include you, Quico, first and foremost - is to appreciate our diversity. Yes, it is frustrating that we still have abstentionists in our camp. But until we learn to embrace that debate, until we learn to see that it's not, in your words, "fucking hopeless", we will never be electable. After all, how can we convince the country that we are the only way to reconciliation if we can't even tolerate the people in our side who think differently? Only when we learn to deal with the Marta Colomina's and Roberto Giusti's of our side, to the point of them being able to tolerate us, will we be ready to take the lead.
Quite frankly, as much as abstentionists may annoy me from time to time, I understand their point and I see where they are coming from. Abstention is a phenomenon, it is an integral part of the psyche of our electoral base in the same way that the Tupamaros are an integral part of the psyche of chavismo's base. But Chávez doesn't attack the Tupamaros, he sort of tolerates them, tries to rein them in. That is how you deal with the radicals on your side whose support you need.
(And for all my abstentionist friends out there - don't take it personally, but you *are* radical; we love you, but let's call a spade a spade)
I have said this before and I really believe it - I will outlive this. If chavismo defeats us ten, twenty or thirty more times, fine, it had to happen. Had Germany gotten rid of Hitler in 1938, the world would be a very different place, but perhaps Germany wouldn't be the civilized, modern country it is now, built on the rubble of its own people's madness. History has its pace, and we should learn to read it and not force it. In the meantime, the only productive thing we can do is participate as much as we can and develop our grassroots network. We've been given the wonderful gift of defeat - let's use it to wisen up.
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