Tag: Power

Unravelling Norms

Unravelling Norms

Posted on by jabittan
A worrying lesson for many people of the Trump Presidency was that much of the order and process for politics in the United States is based on norms with little to no actual legal backing or consequence. Norms help set boundaries for decorum, help us learn how to navigate relationships and spaces, and in nearly all US presidential elections of the past, have helped us manage the transition of power from one president to the next.
 
 
Trump demonstrated that norms can be bulldozed by those who are either immune from the consequences of violating norms or by those who simply don’t care about the consequences. We also saw that when norms unravel, people get worried, something Steven Pinker writes about in the context of nuclear weapons in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He writes, “a norm that rests only on mutual recognition of that norm is, of course, vulnerable to a sudden unraveling. One might worry … that nuclear nations outside the club of great powers … might not be party to the common understanding that the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable.”
 
 
Norms are key parts of our institutional systems, even our international institutions as Pinker demonstrates. We rely on norms because writing down how every law should apply in every situation is not possible. There will always be important exceptions to rules and laws no matter how well we write the laws.  Norms guide us and allow us to navigate spaces and situations without having explicit and direct rules and laws for every possible scenario. But norms also become invisible until someone is suddenly violating them.
 
 
Tump was dangerous because he disregarded many political norms. Any news he disliked he dismissed as fake news. Even for the 2016 election, which he won, he never accepted the legitimacy of the electoral system. He refused to concede power after losing an election until enough outrage built following the storming of the Capitol. The outcomes were awful, but somewhat limited due to Trump’s laziness and incompetence.
 
 
As Pinker notes, norms also govern how most countries think about nuclear weapons. But there is no reason someone couldn’t disregard the norms around nuclear weapons the way that Trump disregarded American political norms. Pinker highlights the danger of a rogue actor or terrorist with a nuclear weapon. He writes about the danger of states like North Korea which may not adhere to our norms. If norms are all that bind the prohibition on the use and testing of nuclear weapons, then there is little that would prevent someone as rash as Trump or the North Korean leader from disregarding the norms and making a decision that could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
 
 
Norms are often invisible until they begin to unravel. When they do, it can happen suddenly and be very dangerous, especially when those norms surround major transitions of power or the use of nuclear weapons.
Polemic Comedy vs Satire

Polemic Comedy VS Satire

Posted on by jabittan
I’ve seen a lot of criticism over political correctness and comedy in the last few years. People are unhappy that they cannot make the same kinds of jokes today that worked ten years ago. Jokes about women, jokes about ethnic and racial groups, and jokes about sexual orientation all seem to be largely off limits, and people are bemoaning that comedy is effectively dead. I think that such criticisms are shallow and fail to recognize the important power that good satire can have and how crafty and useful comedy can be without deliberately poking fun of people whose identities have been longtime punchlines.
 
 
Comedy which picks on minority groups, racial and ethnic groups, non-typical gender and sexuality groups, or women are often described as “punching down” – meaning that they take easy shots at groups that are less politically powerful or socially influential. The jokes may be funny and may poke fun at real double standards, behaviors, or factors of a group, but they are also intended to make fun of people and groups with marginalized political and social capital. They give a more powerful group a laugh at the expense of the less powerful group. This can then be dangerous for the individuals in that less powerful group.
 
 
Good satire manages not to pick on just a single group. It doesn’t make fun of the individuals within the joke, but hits broader points among humanity. Steven Pinker describes it by writing, “a moralizer can be mocked, a polemicist can be silenced, but a satirist can get the same point across through stealth. By luring an audience into taking the perspective of an outsider – a fool, a foreigner, a traveler – a satirist can make them appreciate the hypocrisy of their own society and the flaws in human nature that foster it.” Satirists don’t pick on a single individual or group. They don’t create something funny purely at the expense of another. Instead, they invite audiences in to share in the humor of larger social experiences. I think that many of the comedians we have found funny over the years have actually been polemicists and not satirists, and they are now finding that we no longer appreciate their brand of humor.
 
 
As Pinker’s quote notes, a satirists is stealthy in their comedy. They can still be just as funny, but their humor is not directly polemic. It is subtle, questioning, and gets the audience to adopt a new perspective. I think that much of the humor in recent Marvel movies, like in Shang Chi, achieve their comedic effect through satire more than through polemic jokes that we now find so troublesome. Comedy is not dead, but polemic comedy is perhaps no longer viable. Satire, however, continues to be a strong and influential comedic force.
What Do We Want to Want?

What Do We Want To Want?

Posted on by jabittan
Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Sapiens by asking his readers to consider the following, “the only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. … the real question facing us is not what do we want to become?, but what do we want to want?“
 
 
For all of human existence, up to this point, human lives have been defined by scarcity and physical limitations. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived were only able to do a limited amount with the objects available to them in their environment. But modern humans may be on the cusp of effectively becoming gods. We are at a point where we can build both real and imagined (virtual) worlds where we are no longer limited in meaningful ways by resources. We are harnessing huge amounts of energy, figuring out how to do so in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way, and we may be able to soon engineer human beings to be whatever we want them to be. Harari describes our current path as guiding us to become “self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.”
 
 
And so Harari’s initial question becomes ever more important. What do we want to want? Suppose that we can geo-engineer the planet to always have the weather conditions and hospitable planetary needs for human survival. Suppose we can get a surplus of cheap energy from renewable sources without damaging the planet. Suppose we can conquer biology and even death. What will it mean to be human? What will we want, and what should we want when the only limits are the limits of the extremes of space?
 
 
Harari continues, “is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” This is a question that I cannot answer on my own in a single blog post. I can hardly decide what I want to want in my own personal life. I certainly cannot think about what other people should want in their own lives. It is easy to say we should all want happiness, peace, and flourishing for all humans on the planet, but that is so broad that it means nothing. A scientist engineering the human mind could say that is what they work toward while creating something that makes humans something other than human. An engineer moving mountains could believe they are doing it for all the reasons I laid out, but who is to say that moving mountains is really what we want or should want? Humans are on the cusp of merging with machine, controlling our biology, and becoming gods, but we don’t even have a way to think about whether we should want to be doing these things. We certainly can’t accurately judge whether the outcomes will be in the best interest of humans. It is also possible that none of this will matter if the future of humanity is to become something other than humans. However, it is dangerous for humans to amass essentially unlimited power and to not know what to want to do with it.
Muscle Power - Joe Abittan - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens

Muscle Power

Posted on by jabittan
I have zero sense of agricultural timelines. I really couldn’t tell you when the peak growing season for crops is, couldn’t tell you roughly when the best harvest time is (besides “fall”), and couldn’t tell you what grows best at what different times of the year. Besides being annoyed by less daylight and colder weather, the winter is little more than a season where we have a few extra holidays, travel during inclement weather, and drink warm beverages. For me, winter is not a threat to my livelihood while plants and many animals go dormant.
 
 
The reason why I don’t know anything about agricultural seasons and timelines is because the energy and power that I use has been separated from seasonal cycles. My home in Reno, NV is powered primarily by natural gas internal combustion engines that generate electricity. We have a couple of solar panel electricity generating fields in the area to supply some energy, and soon I’ll have solar panels on my house as well. There are also a couple of small power plants along the Truckee River which our local water company claims generate enough energy to power about 4,000 homes per year. These energy sources are relatively continuous and free from the fluctuations of the sun and seasons.
 
 
Most of human history, however, did not have the luxury of energy systems separated from the Earth’s seasons.  Regarding pre-industrial energy, Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, writes, “since human and animal bodies were the only energy conversion device available, muscle power was the key to almost all human activities.” Muscles needed to be built by living bodies. Whether those living bodies were consuming other animal bodies for energy or consuming plants for energy, they were ultimately relying on solar power and agricultural cycles. This meant that the summer and fall, when plant energy was most available, was the time when muscle power was the most abundant.
 
 
During the winter, and when crops and plants were not growing, there was not as much muscle power available. Humans would have noticed the differences between when plants were and were not growing, when crops were most productive, when crops were the best to harvest, and when they had surpluses of food or faced food scarcity. When muscle power was the dominant form of productive energy, seasons and agricultural cycles were dramatically more important. Divorcing our energy dependence from muscle power has allowed humans to completely forget about the importance of agricultural and solar cycles.
Voting, Homelessness, and Gentrification

Voting, Homelessness, and Gentrification

Posted on by jabittan
I live in Reno, Nevada, a city that was hit very hard by the Great Recession and has turned around over the last few years with an explosion of gentrification. The city is in a valley between the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west and more smaller ranges to the East. The city is at a point where the valley has been mostly filled in, meaning that any additional urban sprawl will have to take place in valleys outside the main Reno/Sparks area. Consequently, prices have risen in the valley, driven by a limited supply, limited ability to spread, and an influx of new residents from California and neighboring states. At the same time that the city is gentrifying, new developments and new economic programs built on tech and outdoor tourism are changing the local landscapes. New trendy hotels are being built and large hotel casinos are being turned into condominiums and apartments.
Caught-up in the city’s transformation are the homeless shelters. The main area where homeless shelters have been concentrated downtown is transforming into a trendy place with local breweries and new restaurants. It is close to the still somewhat new baseball stadium and is close to an area where the University of Nevada, Reno is currently expanding student housing. This has put pressure on city leaders to clean-up the area, which means pushing out the homeless who have come to know the area as a place where they can find shelter and a meal.
“The very poor are a tiny minority,” writes Christopher Jencks in The Homeless, “and they hardly ever vote. Citizens who want the poor to live as far away as possible are a large majority, and they vote regularly. That leaves the poorest of the poor with nowhere to go.”
This quote from Jencks accurately sums up the current situation regarding the homeless in my home town. Rumos I have heard are that the Gospel Mission my wife and I volunteer at to serve the homeless will have to move and the building it occupies will likely be demolished for new hotels in the near future. I think this is a good economic move for the city, our ballpark, and the area around the stadium. Reno is a town that has always been in the shadow of Las Vegas as a less glitzy, downscale version of sin city. Many people want to reimagine Reno as something better, cleaner, and more attractive to the outside world than a sad version of Vegas. However, our homeless who rely on the shelter and know they can depend on the area for a place to eat and sleep are going to be pushed further away. A new, much larger, homeless shelter was recently built, but it is several miles down the road in a somewhat hard to access part of town next to the busiest freeway interchange. It was people with resources who vote that decided the homeless needed to go and that they would be pushed to one of the least attractive parts of town. The homeless, without any power themselves, certainly didn’t chose to be even further marginalized and outcast from a city that wants to ignore their existence.
Reactive Racism

Reactive Racism

Posted on by jabittan
An unfortunate reality in the United States is that there is a great deal of racial segregation across our states, cities, and communities. There are not a lot of spaces that manage to mix the different races, different socioeconomic status individuals, and different cultures that exist within our country. Many white people have almost exclusively white friends and social groups. Many wealthy people only engage with and interact with other similarly wealthy people. We don’t have a lot of voluntary institutions where different races come together willingly or where people of different socioeconomic status mix. I admit that this is the reality of my own life, as much as I wish it were not the case.
One consequence of this segregation is a misunderstanding of the power dynamics and direction of racism in our country. When we do not interact with people who are not like us in any deep or meaningful way, we can fail to understand the power dynamics of racism. We can fail to understand the structural and systemic factors of modern racism. In the end, this means that we misunderstand power dynamics, animosity, and the hatred that can flow between people of different races or social classes. I see this in my own life when people I know argue that black racism against whites is just as bad as any white racism against blacks. Black people who hold racist views against white people are sometimes used to excuse racist white people and in some cases they are used to turn the table and suggest that white people now face more discrimination than black people and other minorities.
What this argument seems to miss, however, is the role of power dynamics and the nature of reactionary racism. In 1993 when spending time trying to understand and write about homeless women for his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow noted this phenomenon. In the book he writes, “It is tempting to see white racism and black racism as mirror images of one another, made of the same kind of stuff. But white hatred of blacks appeared to be a purer, self-sustaining emotion that fed on itself. Black hatred of whites appeared to be more reactive, more dependent, feeding not on itself but on white hatred.”
Liebow’s argument is ultimately I think about power. White racism against black people seemed to stem from systemic and structural factors that enabled, and possibly even promoted, the disenfranchisement of black people for the gain of white people. The racism and hatred for white people that blacks held, on the other hand, seemed to be more reactionary. That is not to say that both forms of racism are terrible and can drive people toward atrocities, but it is important to note that Liebow could detect a leading force and a reactionary force. It is important to recognize the idea of reactive racism and the inherent power structures and dynamics it represents so that we don’t fall into the false equivalence argument that racism toward white people is just as bad in this country as white racism toward others.
Ownership of Land

Ownership of Land

Posted on by jabittan
“The most effective way to assert, or reassert, ownership of land was to force people from it,” writes Matthew Desmond in his book Evicted. This line feels like it could be from a book written about the Trail of Tears, about any number of American atrocities toward indigenous populations of the Americas, or about European colonialization. But the line is about modern evictions from rental properties across the Untied States.
I don’t think the idea of connecting modern evictions with our nation’s history of forcing Native Americans from their land was intentional in Desmond’s book, but I think it is an interesting and insightful angle through which we can view evictions and the American housing crisis. People need reasonable and safe places to live. Research has demonstrated how important the places where you live and grow up can be for your life outcomes. Our troubling history of taking land from Native Americans shows that we have always known this and it reinforces the lessons that current research is presenting. Additionally, the abandonment of native populations and the economic challenges that tribes across the country face today show how long lasting dislocation from property and housing can be.
American public housing projects have often not gone well. Providing housing via market mechanisms is generally much preferred to government provided housing, but for those on the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale, this option often become exploitative, exclusionary, unhealthy, and dangerous. Poor people often have to live in slums that can do more to set them back than help them find a way to get ahead. And when they can’t get ahead, they face eviction, with the powerful landowners forcing them from the lousy housing they were at one point able to attain.
The power dynamics of renters and owners is important to acknowledge. Landlords can evict tenants, and low income tenants quickly realize that a landlord can make their life difficult if they speak out about the slum conditions they live in. The people living on the land have to deal with terrible conditions, and risk being forced from the land if they speak up. Just as Native Americans had to accept the terms of the powerful American Government, tenants have to accept the terms of land-owners, no matter how unreasonable they may be.
I recognize that land owners have rights. I also recognize how terrible renters can be and how terrible they may treat the property of the land owner (I currently live in a house that was once a rental and we are still dealing with the costs of careless renters and neglect). However, my efforts to connect Desmond’s writing with the way Native American’s were treated is a deliberate attempt to show that a power imbalance can be more harmful for renters than landlords. I don’t have a great solution, but I think it is important that we recognize the opportunities for exploitation that arise for our nation’s lowest SES members in a market system of providing low-income housing. It is also important that we recognize the great harms that exercising power and forcing people from land can have, as demonstrated through the darkest moments of our nation’s past. We should do all we can to avoid leaving another bitter legacy of power and eviction in our wake.
A Religious Start to Ideas of Drug Prohibition

A Religious Start to Ideas of Drug Prohibition

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Chasing The Scream Johann Hari briefly writes about human practices of using drugs dating back well over 2000 years ago. He uses a story about Greek rituals at the Temple at Eleusis to show how common and widespread drug use was, and how it occupied a central and almost sacred role in human life for ancient Greek civilizations. Hari writes about the downfall of the ritual use and near celebration of drugs which occurred at the temple. A downfall that doesn’t appear to have been brought about by negative consequences of drug use, but a downfall that was a deliberate power grab.

 

“The early Christians wanted there to be one rout to ecstasy, and one rout only – through prayer to their God,”  Hari writes. “The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.”

 

Hari writes that drugs alter states of consciousness and can give people a new sense of wonder, of awe, and of being something more than themselves. These senses, he argues, were what the Christian Church wanted to offer people through their religious experiences. Church and drugs were competing for the same mental faculties and experiences, and the Church wanted to limit outside exposure to sources that gave people a supernatural feeling.

 

I like to think about the world in terms of the systems and structures that shape the possibilities of our lives. Institutions matter, and they can inform what we find to be immoral, just, and common (or uncommon) parts of human nature. Hari’s research suggest that human desires to change their states of consciousness with chemicals are not in fact the immoral and uncommon problematic desires that we have portrayed them. Institutions, such as religions, have shaped the ways we think about and understand drugs and chemical intoxication. There are probably some true elements of public safety and health in our drug prohibition today, but much of our policy stems from and still maintains a system of authority, power, fear, and xenophobia. Drug use can be widespread and accepted, even if it is problematic – just look at alcohol use in the United States and across the globe. It can also be prohibited and marginalized, it just depends on the institutional systems and structures we chose to attach to drug use. We can develop ways to use drugs responsibly and safely, or we can force drug use into illicit and shady corners of society, where a guarantee of safety and protection is a laughable idea.
Limits in What We Do

Do We Need Some Type of Limit?

Posted on by jabittan
I’ve recently watched The Hobbit trilogy, and images of Tolkien’s dwarf kings consumed with greed and gold have stuck with me. For whatever reason, the image of King Thror spinning around in a state of dazed confusion among his treasure, and the image of Thorin becoming corrupted by the same gold bounty have replayed through my mind. Tolkien and the artistic creators of The Hobbit are using the dwarf kings to show the negatives of greed, of lust for power, and the danger in pursuing wealth over people and relationships. They also show what can go wrong in the mind when we have everything.

 

The Hobbit came back to mind as I looked over quotes I highlighted and notes I took in Dreamland by Sam Quinones. My last two posts were about our efforts to avoid pain, suffering, and negativity and about how we try to fill our lives with consumer products that promise to make us happy. Mixed in with those ideas, Quinones adds, “man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.”

 

Thror and Thorin show us what Quinones means. When the kings were at the top, when there were no constraints in their power or wealth, they used other people for their own gain. Their minds turned to selfish impulses, and turned away from doing what was right for the good of their people. When they reached the top, they atrophied, with nothing to work toward but the preservation of their own grandeur.

 

A curious phenomenon that Quinones highlights throughout his book is how opioid addiction cuts across all socioeconomic status levels. The sons and daughters of esteemed judges and doctors just as well as men and women who have grown up in poverty all seem to be victims of opioid addiction. For some reason we expect addiction among the second group, but find it inconceivable that the first group might face the same challenges. In some ways, the quote above from Quinones answers part of why we see addiction among middle class families and among the children of talented professionals.

 

When we have no limits in what we do, when our lives are tailored, curated, but isolated, we begin to lack purpose. Our lives might look full from the outside, but be void on the inside. When we seem to have it all, the value of our lives can decay, and without friction under our feet to push us forward, we can’t move anywhere. Just as our excesses produce terrible externalities, our having it all, or at least thinking we can buy it all, produces a feeling of purposeless that can lead to drug use to blunt the meaninglessness of self-indulgence.

 

My recommendation is to remember Thorin and his grandfather. To remember that our selfish desires can become our own downfalls, and to turn instead toward community building and relationships with others. To strive for our own greatness will leave us on an empty throne, but to work with others for shared goals will help us develop real structures in our lives that last and have real value.

Markets & Civil Society Organization

Posted on by jabittan
I tend to be a bit hard on the idea of free markets. I grew up learning about the invisible hand and in a family that started a business and did well. I (mostly because of my family’s business) appreciated the idea that setting up a market and running a business was a good thing from the standpoint of finding an efficient point at which to price a product or service. Today however, perhaps as a result of my healthcare interests, I see numerous examples of markets falling short of the goal we establish in our minds based on the idea of the invisible hand.

 

Rather than seeing markets find an efficient point where competition drives efficiency and provides everyone with better products at better prices, I see too many externalities from free markets and unfettered competition. We are producing a lot of greenhouse gasses that harm life on the planet. CEOs are getting better (maybe deservedly so) at capturing greater salaries from their companies, driving economic inequality, and straining social stability. Private health insurance markets seem to drive overall healthcare costs up at every turn, and no one seems to be able to understand how health insurance actually works. The free market, and open competition, does not appear to function as clearly and organize as succinctly as my simple understanding from high school would have suggested.

 

What is missing is something that ties markets and capitalism back into civil society. Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, in their book The New Localism, suggest that shifting political power and decision making back to local contexts within cities and metropolitan regions can help correct these problems. They write, “New Localism is a mechanism for converting the self-organizing power of markets and civil society into structured fiscal and financial resources, and ultimately, political power.”

 

National and multinational sized corporations often have a responsibility to maximize profits for shareholders or top executives. Their huge scale means that any local or regional place is less important for them, since there are always markets in other countries and other states. However, when local governments exert more control over such companies, the local contexts begin to matter more. When CEOs and executives from these companies are invited in to help shape policy beginning at the local level, and are held accountable to the local individuals in the places where their markets are strong or where their employees actually live, the business motives that encourage negative externalities are shifted. The dynamic becomes one where civil responsibility is elevated, and ultimately political power is shifted in a way to help organize business in a more responsible manner in relation to the local context.

 

The lesson that Katz and Nowak share is that businesses on their own are encouraged to organize themselves in a way that maximizes profit at the expense of the local communities in which they operate. By giving localities more power and better networked governance structures, big businesses can instead be a cooperative part of the political and social structure, re-organizing themselves within society in a way that helps make Adam Smith’s invisible hand dream a little more plausible. The Invisible hand in this model is not so invisible, but more of a structured handshake creating a commitment to more than just profits.