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.

"Hey, did you know there's only one word for 'watashi', 'ore', 'boku', 'atashi' and 'watakushi' in English?"

"Masaka! English must be dead easy!"

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.

And later on:

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.

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.

Friedman's a terrific writer. It's worth reading his entire spiel.

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,

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...

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."

Someone who does not share my interpretation of (obvious) "reality," Lippmann continues,

...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.

Out of the opposition, therefore, we make villains and conspiracies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

---

From Jeffrey Friedman's "Popper, Weber and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance", Critical Review 17 (2005) nos. 1-2. (www.criticalreview.com/)

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.

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.

On the sheer fucking hopelessness of the Abstentionist v. Participationist Debate

Quico says:

Dear Katy,

Thanks for your last post. I've been trying to think of a way to join the fray here, but it's been hard to think of a constructive way of doing so. As everyone realizes by now, the whole debate between "abstentionists" and "participationists" within the anti-Chávez camp is unbelievably stale, barren, an argumentative dead-end. In fact, even those words don't really do justice to the deep reservoir of politico-existential despair that wells up in me as I even think about the subject.

Yet, wish as you might, it just won't go away.

Where are we, really?

Well, from an economist's point of view, it's not hard to characterize the rut we're in: essentially, it's a Coordination Failure. Whether you're an abstentionist or a participationist, I think most of us can agree than either strategy only makes sense if everyone joins in. Tendentially, I'm a participationist, but I fully realize that having everyone abstain is better than having half of us participate and the other half abstain. Similarly, I imagine most abstentionists think it would be better to have everyone participate than to have half of us abstain. But we have no mechanism to settle the debate in favor of one position or the other, and so we seem inexorably headed towards the indescribably boneheaded Nash Equilibrium.

Why is this happening? The textbook answer is that we don't have coordination mechanisms sturdy enough to enforce convergence on one of the two positions. That's both right and not at all helpful. Why don't we have those mechanisms? And why doesn't debate lead us toward convergence? Come to think of it, why is the intra-oppo debate so vicious, so self-defeating? How exactly did we get into this mess? Those are the better questions...and it's here that the analysis gets really, really depressing.

First, we have to own up: there is something very, very wrong with the way the opposition deals with itself, how it talks internally and seeks to work problems out. That situation may have come about in the context of Chávez, but I think it's a cop-out to blame it on Chávez...even in the midsts of battle with the most ruthless of enemies, some wounds are self-inflicted. And the opposition's sheer inability to coordinate - or, to put it differently, to hold a conversation with itself that leads to coordination - is a self-inflicted wound.

I remember, some time in 2002, hearing Roberto Giusti argue explicitly that Chávez was so dangerous that journalists "could not afford" to be impartial towards his government. "I cannot be impartial between democracy and dictatorship," Giusti said. Lots of oppo journos were taking a similar line back then, and we all stood up and cheered for them. It all sounded ever so brave, so gallant, remember? We were so caught up in the drama of the moment, we didn't stop to think through how radical a position that was, and how dangerous its implications. We should have.

Why? Because decisions are only as good as the information that's available to those who make them. To the extent that that information is complete, impartial and accurate, it will give rise to decisions that produce the consequences intended. To the degree that it isn't, it will give rise to decisions that don't.

Now, what was Roberto Giusti really saying back in 2002? He was saying that the information the media publish should no longer be judged by the normal standards of journalistic ethics. Questions of newsworthiness, impartiality, confirmability and public interest would be set aside, and information would be judged by its usefulness in helping achieve an overarching, transcendent political goal: overthrowing the budding dictatorship. Henceforth, when a reporter arrived at a newsroom with a story, the first thing his editor would ask him would be not whether it was true, or whether it was new, or whether it had been confirmed, but rather whether it would help get rid of Chávez.

This new conception of the media's role meant that journalists would abdicate their responsibility to "hold up a mirror to society," to produce a space where society is able to see itself, warts and all, and to recognize its own reality as fully as possible. Henceforth, the media would serve as a trick mirror - reflecting only those parts of reality that it judged would further an ulterior end. That the image such a mirror produces is deeply distorted is tautological: in this context, the distortion is the point. And do notice that this isn't some wild conspiracy theory: this is the understanding of their own role that many of the nation's leading journalists proudly and publicly embraced.

That key figures in the oppo media openly endorsed this way of communicating should've given us pause. That they thought of their ethical obligations as a kind of "luxury", an added extra to be discarded when it proved inconvenient, should've put us on guard. How would we react, for instance, if a doctor took that kind of attitude towards his code of professional ethics?

But we're Venezuelans, so the passion of the political moment overcame us. And it's perfectly understandable. After all, Giusti and Colomina and the rest of them more or less announced, "from now on, we're only going to tell you what you want to hear." Who's going to object to that?

We should've realized all along that decisions made on the basis of a distorted understanding of reality can't be expected to produce the outcomes intended by those making them. We shouldn't be surpsied that the rise of openly partisan journalism set the stage for a series of catastrophic oppo own goals.

Back in 2002, we didn't stop to think through the risks, the potential costs involved in volunteering to be lied to. We didn't stop to realize that with every story puffed up out of all proportion because it made the government look bad, our understanding of our own country would diverge just a little bit from reality. We didn't think through the fact that, with every story buried or ignored because it made the government look good, the distance between the world as it is and the world as we think it is would grow.

Those who warned about this process were dismissed as cryptochavistas or, at the very least, as spoil-sports for busting our vibe at a time when all we wanted to do was sing "y decimos síííííí a la esperanzaaaaaaa..." So, it's true, we were systematically deceived...but it's also true that we practically begged to be systematically deceived.

In the systematically distorted mirror the Giusticialista media put in front of us, everything was the way we wished it to be. We wished to live in a country where everyone hated Chávez's guts, the media showed us a country where everyone hated Chávez's guts. We wished to believe everything the government did would backfire due to incompetence and venality, the media showed us a country where everything the government did backfired due to incompetence or venality.

That our decision-making came to be dominated by wishful thinking shouldn't surprise us. As the Globovisión mindset colonized the opposition consciousness ever more completely, decisions come to be made on the basis of means-ends relationships that found no correspondence in reality (having generals camp out in Plaza Altamira will destabilize the regime! refusing to vote in assembly elections will delegitimize the government!)

All along, the oppo journo-punditocracy believed that the key to getting rid of the regime was to establish, beyond any possible doubt, that the public overwhelmingly rejected Chávez. For a while, from 2001 to early 2004, that wasn't so hard to establish: it was true.

But then reality threw the punditocracy a curve ball it was entirely unprepared for: it changed. In the second quarter of 2004, when the misiones started to make themselves felt and Chávez's popularity started to pick up, the punditocracy found itself up a political creek without an ethical paddle.

Their reaction when faced with these changed circumstances shouldn't surprise us: people like Giusti had been perfectly frank about it for years. This guerra was most definitely avisada. They lied. In the way that journalists and editors lie: not so much by telling outright untruths, but by puffing up those elements of truth that suit their objectives and playing down or ignoring those that don't.

So the polls that showed Chávez gaining in 2004 weren't reported, or were reported in a box on page 29, while any hint that the Si campaign was doing well was an automatic six columns above the fold on page one. The startling impact that the misiones had on barrio life became more familiar to readers of The Guardian or The New York Times than to readers of El Nacional or Notitarde. The ongoing passion that many poor people felt for Chávez was systematically downplayed. And little by little, day in and day out, we as opposition supporters were deprived of the informational tools we needed to understand what the hell was happening in our own society, in our own country.

This whole juggernaut of distortions came to an explosive head in the wee hours of the morning of August 16th, 2004, when the Recall Referendum results were announced. Now, I want to be clear here: what follows is not an argument about whether there was or wasn't fraud in 2004, a question that I remain agnostic on. What follows is a reflection about how and why the vast majority of opposition supporters became totally convinced, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that there had been massive fraud and the election had been stolen long before any evidence to back this up was available.

Because, in the end, that was what was striking, wasn't it? We may look back now and retroactively bolster our conviction that there was fraud on the basis of analyses that were published much later, but the reality is that we were just as certain at 5:10 a.m. on August 16th! When it came to fraud allegations, the certainty came first: the evidence we could wait for. So what interests me, more than the underlying question, is the conditions for the production of that certainty, the mechanisms that managed to convince us that something we had no proof of had to be true, that our conception of the world didn't make any sense otherwise.

Looking back, it's hardly surprising that oppo leaders rushed out to cry fraud on the spot: nothing in their conceptual arsenal prepared them for the possibility that they could lose fairly. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of political propaganda - much of it mascarading as journalism, the rest of it self-avowed - had been invested to convince anyone who opposed Chávez that what was happening couldn't happen, not fairly, anyway. So the claim of fraud was a necessity to preserve our whole understanding of our social reality, and that understanding that had been carefully crafted over years by people who had told us explicitly that they considered impartial information a luxury we could not afford.

We've been living with the consequences of these choices ever since. Obviously, we didn't manage to overthrow the bastard: all we did was fatally undermine our own ability to understand the society we live in, to "think straight" about the political moment, and to agree on strategies of resistance that make sense. Five years on, Roberto Giusti's pledge doesn't look so gallant: turns out that what we couldn't afford was systematically distorted communications.

What's sad, though, what's really dismaying is that we don't even recognize the situation we're in, because the people who brought it about - and here I'm thinking much more of Miguel Henrique Otero and Alberto Federico Ravell than of R. Giusti - are still in charge of our communications. They have yet to issue anything like a mea culpa, possibly because, having bought their own propaganda, they're the most dissociated of the lot and genuinely can't grasp the scale of the cognitive havoc their editorial lines have wreaked.

Five years after Giusti's declaration of (the abandonment of his) principles, we've pretty much lost our ability even to talk to each other without biting one another's heads off. After half a decade of systematically distorted communications, we can't even agree on a single version of our contemporary history. We can't produce a shared understanding of the reality around us that can serve as a platform for our political action toward the future. And that, I think, is the real reason we can't coordinate: if we can't agree on what is to be done, it's because we can't agree where we are, or how we got here.

After years of systematically distorted communications, of decisions we were sure would have one effect and had another, of misplaced allegiances and squandered reserves of trust, it's not surprising that a kind of all encompassing nihilism has taken over opposition discourse, a kind of quiescent, polymorphously disgusted but imprecisely directed wrath based on a kind of existential disorientation that expresses itself in an ironclad refusal to believe in anyone or anything again. That is the legacy of Giusti's gallantry.

If it was just that we didn't understand what's been happening in Venezuela, well, that would be bad, but we could work it out. It's actually much worse than that. It's not just that we don't understand what's been happening in Venezuela, it's that we don't understand that we don't understand what's been happening in Venezuela, and when you don't understand that you don't understand something you're well and truly fucked, because you have no clear path towards gaining an understanding of it. You don't see the need for it!

To tell you the truth, Katy, that's the reason why I haven't been writing much about politics, - or, at all, since that Oppo Harikiri post. Together with Escualidus Arrechus's shrewd observation on how screwed our political culture is, that poll knocked me into a state of near catatonic depression about the state of our public sphere. The mountain ahead of us just seems larger and more daunting every day: more and more, chavista insanity seems more than fully mirrored by the craziness on our side. It's kind of too much for me.

The state of the fight

Katy says: Six weeks have passed since the introduction of a proposal to reform the Constitution by Venezuela's President, and now is as good a time as any to size up the debate. The players have positioned themselves for what is sure to be an intense campaign period toward the end of the year, and their recent actions say a lot about what their strategies are.

As usual, the Venezuelan political scene can be divided into three largely heterogeneous groups. On the one hand we have chavismo and its reluctant allies, the radical-light Podemos party. On the other we have the opposition sector which we can divide into two: abstentionists and participants.

Chavismo's strategy so far has been to, by and large, confuse the debate. There are so many proposals included in the Constitutional reform that it makes it hard to classify it as an X-type proposal, which is exactly what the government wants. Instead of people discussing it for what it really is - a proposal about indefinite re-election and a whole lot of things that are either already in place or perfectly do-able without including them in the Constitution - the debate has ranged from issues such as the reduction in the number of working hours to whether we should be allowed to enjoy what we own. XXIst-Century Socialism appears like an all-encompassing term that boils down to one thing: Chávez.

Making the proposal about Chávez himself works to the government's advantage, as it usually does. By engaging in the formalities of a debate with certain sector of society, by threatening to continue changing the proposal and adding, removing or modifying other articles, chavista deputies hope voters will end up deciding their vote on Chavez himself. Whether it will work remains to be seen.

The opposition's participant wing has followed parallel and not entirely contradictory strategies. UNT's approach has been to simplify the proposal to "Chávez is going to ruin the country." Although they do press the issue of Chavez's indefinite re-election, they also highlight some of the other aspects of the proposal reform such as the attack on private property and the diminishing status of town halls and state governments. The message seems to be that this sucks through and through.

Primero Justicia's approach has been slightly different. While they have said they like some of the aspects of the Constitutional Reform and dislike others, they have not dwelled much on the details. Their main focus is on getting the Supreme Tribunal to say that the reform proposal must be voted on as a block instead of in parts, which is what most Venezuelans seem to want.

Primero Justicia obviously knows that voting the proposal in parts is a non-starter, so their goal is to show that it's the government, and Chávez himself, who refuse to allow people to vote for the proposals in a separate fashion. PJ seems to be thinking that, without driving up Chávez's negatives by making him look undemocratic, the message about how the reform is all about Chávez perpetuating himself in power simply won't stick.

The strategies being followed by the opposition's two main parties is not contradictory and should not be interpreted as a sign of disunity. Each party seems to be focusing on their relative strengths - UNT on the radical anti-Chávez group, and PJ on the moderates. Both groups are needed to win the referendum - this election, after all, is different in that we do not run the risk of losing one group of voters by pandering to another. Due to the "referendum" style of the election, all efforts to get people on the "No" boat are win-win.

Yet in the midst of all this rhetorical positioning, it's abstentionists who hold the key. If recent polling data is to be believed, a majority of the country rejects the reforms but only a minority is willing to vote on the issue. That minority is heavily biased toward approving the reform, so right now the government has the upper hand.

Turning out the opposition vote is a major challenge. On the one hand, abstentionists have to be convinced that their vote will have relevance and that we won't simply be run over once again. The government will try and keep abstentionists unmotivated by, for example, tempering down some of the most controversial proposals like the elimination of certain attributes of private property.

The date for the referendum is likely to be December, when people will be awash in cash thanks to hefty Christmas bonuses and other handouts. The challenge we face is a major one, and while I find people overstate the stakes involved, it promises to be one hell of a fight.

El Otro Carrao

Quico says: It's 11 a.m. on a dazzling Paris autumn day and my favorite writer is telling me about his childhood in the Llanos during the Gómez dictatorship.

"I always wanted to learn how to cook. It really fascinated me, cooking. Knitting too...needle work in general. I would tell my mother to teach me, but as you can imagine, in those days, well, it was just out of the question. 'That's women's work,' she would tell me, 'you're supposed to be out on horseback, carrying a gun, getting into machete fights.' Imagine, that's what was expected of boys back then!"

It was with a mix of trepidation and bravado that I'd gone out to meet José Manuel Briceño Guerrero at his daughter's apartment in this immigrant-heavy corner of the 20eme Arrondissement, on a street named - impossible to omit this bit - Rue Lesage. He'd emailed me to say he would be spending a bit of his summer vacation there and, well, it's just a 3 hour train ride from Maastricht, so...

As I made my way there, I was terribly self-conscious of how little I really knew about the man. A journalist would get fired for turning up to an assignment this unprepared. But what can I say? There just isn't that much about him online. Worse, I've only read a couple of his books, and both of which were written decades ago. (As for the newer ones, I simply have no idea how to get them in Europe.)

The reason I wanted to - no, not "wanted to". The reason I felt I had to meet him was his 1981 magnum opus, The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs.

It's a book that shook me to the core. It split my understanding of my culture into two periods: before and after reading it. I've developed a deeply personal relationship with the book, coming to see it as a kind of road map to my own identity, a Rosetta with the power to decode the Venezuelan psyche. And now, here I am, clutching a glass of orange juice and sitting across from its author as he paints a portrait in words of his impossibly unlikely origins.

"This was all out in Apure," he goes on, "in a really tiny village called Palmarito. My mother was from there. My dad was an Andino, from Trujillo. Gómez had sent him out there as part of his drive to 'pacify the plains.' He was Civil Chief of the village even, and well, he met my mother there so that's where I was born. They wouldn't let me cook, or knit, but it was clear enough all along that I wasn't cut out to be out fighting other boys with machetes or carrying guns on horseback. The one place where I felt comfortable and where they didn't mind me spending time was my father's library. My father was a big reader, you see: he had a lot of books, so I spent my childhood surrounded by them. I loved it, really, and I've always treasured those memories.

"But it's also true that I got pigeonholed as the bookish one from very early on. In a way, I wish I'd learned more practical things. If somebody had to run an errand around the house, I was always excused because, you know, 'José Manuel está estudiando.' So I was never the one they sent out and round up the cows, or to ride to the pharmacy or whatever. 'Studying.' That was my role. I loved it, but at the same time, well, there's so much I never learned how to do."

I chuckle at this. Venezuela's leading classicist rues not being a better cook. A man who has memorized most of The Iliad, deep down, only wishes he'd been taught to crochet.

"It was another world back then, really. I always lived in small places in the llanos, it was only much later I first visited a city. Until I was a teenager, I'd never seen an automobile, or a telephone, even. We just didn't have them out there. But I never felt deprived because for not having those things. On the contrary, I see kids these days tapping away on cel phone keyboards and I always feel a little sad for them. I didn't have any of that, but I never felt that as a deprivation, because I had something else, something they don't have: time.

"Many years later I went back to Palmarito. They'd called saying they wanted to have a little ceremony to honor me as an Illustrious Son of the town. I went out there and the mayor welcomed me, but then apologized profusely, saying he felt terrible that they couldn't name the one street in town after me. He explained that, unfortumately, they'd already named it, and you know after whom? After el Carrao de Palmarito, you know, that folk singer? Picture that, he's also from there, and he'd already had the only street in town named after him! He was there that day, I even met him, and he stepped in to tell the mayor there was no problem, that they could name one side of the street after him and the other side after me!"

It's a good story, and suddenly I feel ridiculous remembering how hard it had been to work up the gumption to contact him. I'm not the easily intellectually-intimidated type, but the idea of meeting Briceño Guerrero had filled me with dread me for years.

I had been expecting...well, I don't know what, exactly. But not this, certainly. Not folksy charm. His books had dripped with erudition, even his emails were liberally sprinkled with latinazos: nothing about his work was straightforward, everything about it was challenging, difficult. So I'd been expecting...well, a difficult man I suppose.

But here he was, bantering and cracking jokes: as easy-going and avuncular as could be. As our conversation hit its stride, as we both overcame that initial period of reticence, I realized that his prodigious talent is no longer news to him, that he long ago stopped trying to impress it on people. However complex his oeuvre may be, however daring and iconoclastic his thought, the man himself struck me as the last thing you might expect: deep down, he is a simple man.

"It was always the ancients that drew me," he says, when I ask him how a boy from Palmarito ended up leading a life like his. "I really loved studying Greek and Latin - and later Hebrew - and I've always loved teaching them. I've been blessed with generation after generation of great students in Mérida. It's really the most rewarding thing I've done, teaching them. So, by now I've been eligible to retire from the Universidad de Los Andes for the last 26 years, but no way, I'm not going to stop. I love this work."

A kind of mischievous grin flashes through his face. Down to the outlandish personal appearance he's crafted, Briceño Guerrero clearly relishes the anachronistic-misfit-intellectual niche he's carved out for himself. Nobody but nobody in Venezuelan academia keeps working for a quarter of a century past retirement age. This is not normal behavior. Obviously, though, he couldn't care less.

It doesn't take you long to realize what underpins his achievements is simply a prodigious, photographic memory. It's an attribute that has yet to fail him. "Somebody once asked me what book I would take with me to a desert island, and I told him 'none': the books I love I have right here," he says, tapping his forehead.

I found our meeting impossibly entertaining, but slightly awkward as well. The books that made me an instant groupie - his cultural analysis of what he calls "the Latin American failure" - are books he wrote a very long time ago indeed. It soon becomes clear that, for most of the time I've been alive, his attention has been decisively elsewhere: on poetry, on philosophy and on the classics. At times, when I try to steer the conversation towards social topics, I have the odd feeling that his own writing from the 60s and 70s is considerably fresher on my mind than it is on his. I find myself laying out arguments for him that I plainly just picked out of his books.

It's not that he's forgotten them, it's that, these days - as he's the first to admit - his feelings about politics are something like a considered boredom, an annoyance at how superficial our political debates are. He accuses Chávez of "emotional vampirism" - of monopolizing the nation's attention, its emotive energy, to such an extent that he makes it nearly impossible to take a step back and consider the country's problems at a deeper level.

"Not that that's new: I remember, in previous decades, how the debates between Marxists and non-Marxists at ULA, or between Adecos and Copeyanos, were similar in many ways: terribly shallow, and centered on the sense of belonging to a group more than on a genuine give-and-take of ideas."

"At ULA, the faculty, which was always mostly marxist, didn't know what to make of me at all. All they noticed is that I wasn't a marxist and, as far as they could tell, that could only mean I was a reactionary. Personally, I never had any interest in these kinds of debates - which I always found basically sterile. My instinct, faced with confrontation, has always been to withdraw...and it still is."

I tell him one of my blog readers (here's lookin' at you, Escualidus Arrechus) had commented recently that the measure of how screwed up our public debate is is that 80% of what Chávez says the opposition would accept, if an opposition spokesmen had said it, and that most of what the opposition argues chavistas would accept, if it came from their guy. He stops, delighted with the thought, and instructs me: "please, send that reader my congratulations: I've often had that sense myself, and he managed to express it very well, very succinctly."

For all his writing on the Latin American failure, he still seems genuinely mystified about why it is that our public discourse can't seem to get out of the rut, generation after generation after generation. He looks me earnestly, right in the eye, and asks "¿por qué será, chico?"

And then he remembers the famous quote from Guzmán Blanco, when he was asked why he had become a conservative, and replied "we called ourselves conservatives because we saw that the others called themselves liberals. But if they had called themselves conservatives, then we would have called ourselves liberals."

"It's been over 100 years," he notes, "and that's still where we are. You have to be on one side or the other."

Against this backdrop, it's not surprising that Briceño Guerrero chose to turn his talents to other fields. Literature, and especially poetry, is what really gets his juices flowing these days. To read the ancient masters, he taught himself first ancient Greek and Latin, then Hebrew and finally, within the last couple of years, classical Chinese.

He mentions this last morsel all casual like, as though learning classical Chinese from scratch was a perfectly reasonable hobby for a septuagenarian, like canasta. I find it simply staggering. "But, but, but... why?!" I stammer, groping toward a suitably euphemistic way of hinting at the obvious: that he's far too old for that sort of thing.

"Why? The Tang Dynasty poets!" he says, "the verse they wrote, it's tremendously beautiful! It's like no other kind of poetry I've encountered. I was hooked instantly. Actually I spent half of last year in China, learning the classical language. I've only learned about 1,500 characters at this point. It's a slow process: you have to learn a character and forget it and learn it again many times before it finally sticks. But even now I've managed to translate a few poems, and my chinese teachers liked them very much."

As our meeting draws to an end I realize that, if anything, my intellectual infatuation has only grown. As I get ready to part, I feel this instinctive need to ask him for guidance, for counsel, this drive to get him to tell me what is and what is not worth doing with one's life.

"The challenge in Venezuela," he says "has always been the same: to find the space needed to reflect on a deeper level. The petty, little day to day quarrel in the front page of the newspapers always draws all the attention, all the energy. And these days it's worse than ever. The pleitico sucks away all the intellectual oxygen it takes to look deeper. But if you can find a small group of, I don't know, five or six young researchers, people competent enough and smart enough to think independently, with their own heads, and to look past the day-to-day quarrel at the forces that lay beneat the surface and drive the changes in our country...that, Francisco, is worth doing."

Tangled up & blue

Katy says: Dear readers: I apologize for being MIA. I have been swamped with work - my real work, that is - due to a pressing deadline. This should be done by the end of the week.

I also took a week-long vacation with my family. As most of you know, I don't live in Venezuela, and neither do most of my siblings. So my parents and the rest of us decided to meet in a neutral place - Panama. This gave everyone a good chance to spend their Misión Cadivi dollars. I reckon with the subsidies the government gave my relatives, you could feed a family of 12 for a year in Venezuela. Thanks, Misión Cadivi!

Too bad I haven't registered for Misión Cadivi yet. I could do it quite easily, given that I have a bank account back home and a credit card from my Venezuelan bank. All I would have to do is activate the credit card, and it's off to Chilean shopping malls and supermarkets, discounts courtesy of Uncle Hugo. Oh well, I may not be getting any of Chávez's free money, but it makes me a freer blogger.

So come back next Monday, when we'll open up the taguara again. And our apologies for this extended recess.

Sorry, everyone...

Quico says: Travel. Work. Overwhelmed. Same for Katy. Back when we have a sec.

An oppo harakiri in the making

Quico says: A little bird just put Hinterlaces' daily phone tracking poll for September 3rd, 4th and 5th in my inbox. It makes for some incredibly infuriating reading.

When asked whether they generally favor or oppose the Constitutional Reform proposal, 45% say they oppose it and 35% say they are in favor, while 20% are undecided or don't answer. 47% say the proposal threatens democracy, while 40% think it guarantees democracy. Only 26% think changing the constitution is necessary to shorten the workweek, while 54% think it could be done through a law. 64% want to be able to vote article by article, while just 26% think voting on the proposal as a block would be better.

Good news, right?

Wrong. Because, even though 45% of respondents generally oppose the reform, only 27% say they would go out and actually vote against it, while 26% say they wouldn't vote at all. Meanwhile, 31% say they would vote in favor of the proposal.

Which means Chávez could win without having to cheat, even though most people don't want the reform, all because we've psyched ourselves out of our best chance in years to clip the government's wings.

Abstentionism isn't politics, it's a vocación de martir...

Poll chart anyone?

Quico says: Datanalisis' latest poll, carried out between July 28th and August 7th (so, just before the official announcement) asked...

"If there was a referendum next Sunday to change the current constitution, how would you vote?"

In favor - 30%
Against - 40%
Don't know/no answer - 24%
Depends on the specifics - 5%

"...and if President Chávez publicly backed the reform of the current constitution, and one of the changes was the indefinite reelection of the president, how would you vote?"

In favor - 28%
Against - 50%
Don't know/no answer - 20%
Depends - 1%

Which brings us to the inevitable Chart.

So far, I've only gotten three polls, and all three were carried out before the reform's details were announced. If you happen to beg, borrow or steal some fresher ones, you know where to send them.

(Documented results only, please, so include a URL or a PowerPoint. I'm not going to post "my aunt heard that my cousin's uncle's boss said that Gallup has No on 89%" type stuff...)