The Aspen Ideas Festival begins with a few of the invited guests standing up to propose a "Idea" which they think would move the country forward. Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, was one of the guest invited to speak this year. His idea was to attack the deficit, and not pass on debt to our kids. It all sounded noble and well--Who likes the idea of passing on debt to children? But what really struck me was how ill-equipped I was to evaluate anything he was saying.
This happens all the time, to me. Someone will be opining about Israel, cap and trade, or health care, and I'll understand the arguments, but really be in no position to argue. I can smell blatant dishonesty, but the subtleties are harder for me. When I first got this gig, people would ask me to speak on a broader range of topics, and to be more aggressive in my objections. I understand the impulse. The Atl blog-roster isn't lacking for conservatives, and there's always a hunger for someone who make the Fox News pundits look stupid.
But I distrusted the whole game. Intuitively, I wonder about the honesty and proficiency of writers who opine on everything from Iran to education to drug policy to health care to cap and trade to race. Perhaps these people simply have more brains than me, but the catch-all nature of punditry, the need to speak on every policy topic as though one were an expert, is exactly what I hope to avoid.
Again, I'm a liberal in large measure because, in my time, liberals have been about the business of expanding the national consensus, of including of voices, of attempting to reconcile past wrongs. I don't think all of those attempts have been successful. But given the choice between that and an ideology that condones Willie Horton, condones Bob Jones, condones discrimination against gays, for me as a black man, there simply isn't much of a choice.
This holds for other issues outside of race--faced with a group that asks its bureaucrats to censor science, that asks its presidential candidates to deny evolution, that employs phraseologists when faced with the challenges of the environment, I know which one I'll pick. But even as I say that, I can see the limits of my own thinking--maybe if I had more than an informed layman's knowledge of the health care debate, I'd think universal health care was a terrible idea. My politics are as much based on trust as they are on actual knowledge--I simply trust liberals more.
I've been reading Drew Faust's This Republic Of Suffering, a kind of cultural history that looks into how the Civil War altered our impressions of death. Faust's book is great, and has the added advantage of doing an excellent job of including the perspectives of African-Americans. Early in the book, Faust talks about how atrocities perpetrated against black soldiers altered their perspective on killing. It occurred to me the other day that no one was ever brought up on war crimes for this fact. Faust also talks about how black soldiers, after the war, were integral to the effort to reinter the bodies of Union soldiers. It occurred to me that there is no memorial or tangible recognition of this fact. I thought back to David Blight's argument that the first Memorial Day was actually held by freed slaves, shortly after the War, and that very few people are familiar with that argument.
The fact is that, until I went on this intellectual journey, I
didn't know any of this. Now, I like to think of myself as
intellectually curious guy, and yet even in my chosen specialty, there
are gaping holes of knowledge. But when you are black, you have a deep
sense that of having been wronged. It hangs over your community, it
infests the family lore, it's there when you cut on "Leave It To
Beaver" and are forced to consider what your lot would have been in
that time.
White people don't really have that sense, mostly
because it's not foisted upon them. To the extent they understand how
much white supremacy has shaped this country, it's learned,
intellectual, and empathetic. I don't know that one is better than the
other. Whites may, in the main, be blissfully unaware. But blacks don't
really know the details of our pain. We simply seethe, and we know it
goes beyond water-hoses and "Lift Every Voice." There is something
deeper at work, something that we don't really know enough to name.
But, again, we feel it.
There is a part of me that believes that
all American citizens should be forced to study the Civil War. There is
another part of me that would inveigh against white ignorance of white
supremacy, that would moralize about how power affords amnesia, and
skewed understanding of this country. But I am chastened by Paul Ryan.
He may well be lying through his teeth, but the very idea that I can't
evaluate his claims stills the moralizing tongue.
I remain
deeply critical of the would-be-polymaths. I didn't even read George
Will's take on Ricci, because I simply don't expect Will to be sincere
or intellectually honest. But I wonder about how much we can know. It
will make you crazy to understand, in any detail, the history of black
people in this country. It will make you even crazier to consider how
much of that history will almost certainly be forgotten. It will make
you crazier, still, to consider that it isn't just being forgotten
because of intense efforts to bleach history, but because of the limits
of humanity, itself.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I think most Americans find the amount of debt our nation has accrued, not only our national debt, but personal debt and trade deficits disquieting. My problem with conservatives and Republicans is how they have
First of all, no one likes to pay taxes. I don't, but I don't like to pay rent either. The idea that there is some magical slash and burn to our national expenditures is belied by the fact that uptil this Presidency that has been faced with the worst economic conditions since the great depression, the policies of so called conservative administrations with their upper class decades long national tax holiday (and what is the tea bag protest about? have we raised taxes recently?) strikes me as the worst sort of ostrich like approach to our debts, whatever economic theory might say. Our bills will go away if we don't pay them; sure.
Secondly, one man's pork is another's Star Wars Program. One person's investment in education is another's untraceable billions for rebuilding Iraq. One woman's investment in the health of our populace is another's national security obsession over the lives of far fewer Americans. While we are loathe--price is no consideration--for a single American to be endangered by some crazy foreigner, we have no qualms at financial indifference to our fellow citizenry suffering in the tens if not hundreds of thousands for lack of health care.
Then insofar as personal debt is concerned, while one can certainly argue that Americans are a wasteful, spoiled lot, tax, trade, wage and health care policies, not to mention an artificially pumped up housing boom during the Bush years economic debacle have shifted the wealth to a small percentage from the rest of us. Educated, experienced, and skilled Americans work at jobs that simply do not cover the expenses of modern life; how much more so those who do not have those advantages. Americans are by and large hard enough working, but are losing money year in and year out, and one job loss in a stressed job market, one health care emergency--well...
I do not know if liberals, given the depth of the ditch we're in, given that even for liberals corporate interests have a disproportionate influence on policies, have the vision and perserverance to address the issues of our time. But I do know that the no tax no regulation mantra is a failure of abject proportions.
sorry; (eno of par. 1) is how conservatives and Repulicans have addressed the issue of debt in their policies and propaganda.
"But I distrusted the whole game. Intuitively, I wonder about the honesty and proficiency of writers who opine on everything from Iran to education to drug policy to health care to cap and trade to race."
This is why I'm still reading your blog, after dropping/adding/dropping countless others. And this is why I felt compelled register and comment after so long: to thank you for taking this approach to blogging. There are enough blogs that lay claim to expertise on everything, I'm glad that your are willing to write what you know, acknowledge what you might not, and speak to what you're still learning. It makes your blog that much more interesting, worthwhile, and credible.
It really struck me during the debates on whether or not to go into Iraq that I really had no way of knowing/evaluating what the right answer should be. What did I know about the country, or diplomacy, or war? The arguements on the left were initially convincing but as I listened more sounded just like the arguements made against US intervention in WW2. We have been told time and again that we need to be "informed"citizens and have opinions, and not just gut feelings, on all kinds of matters that are often well beyond our experience/education. And with the internet we have even more topics to have more opinions about but often with even less context. It would be interesting to see what would become of a blog like this if we all stuck a little closer to what we know in some depth, offered more specifics and fewer generalizations, and were clearer about times when we are just speculating. My guess is that the conversation would only get richer.
TNC,
I'm a little older than you. Not much, but I raise this point only because I somehow think I have journeyed across some of the same trails you now tread. I too once listened to supposed experts and elders of "position" and deferred to them on all matters not within my intellectual or emotional command (ie., football and movie trivia). Somewhere in my young upbringing I became conscious of my own inferiority - and thus for me, I suspect, this reticence to engage my perceived betters. Betters not in my own sense of self or social awareness but a submission to the tools of the intellectual parry. The field was theirs.
I have aged. And experienced. With that comes not confidence, command or assertiveness, but for me a realization that we are all moored to certain beliefs that become our identity, our truths. These moorings are no more complex than a simple anchor and a chain but they allow us to view and assess the world from a safe harbor. Temporal but safe. I have since come to realize that the platforms from which others expound knowledge and wisdom are based upon simple moorings no more complex than maxims posing as internal truths.
Public policy arguments, much like economics, religion and all things of supposed complexity are human inventions. While the complexity of the human soul may be beyond our comprehensive limits our inventions are based upon relatively simple ideas. Understand the core maxim from which logical arguments are moored the conclusion is easily understood – a reconfirmation of the internal truth of the proponent’s belief system, and hence, self identity.
With this in mind, I now engage firmly with the knowledge and wisdom that I do not have all of the answers nor purely objective command of quantitative facts at my command, but I assure you, neither do they.
I think that is why I read your blog. It inspires. It does not seek to reconfirm but set out to journey and explore and question. It is not a rehash of memes derived from a rehash of memes. It is…courageous.
I teach political science at a CUNY school, and don't hide from my students my disdain for pundits. Don't let anyone---including me---do your thinking for you, I exhort them. Think for yourselves!
That said, I do think a well-trained mind can make sense of a range of issues, including those far outside of one's ken. The key to such sense-making is not in concluding or opining on these unfamiliar issues, however, but in using your analytical abilities, your experiences, your curiosity and skepticism and empathy and yes, even anger, to ask questions of those who do lay claim to answers. Then you can crunch through this information to figure out what does make sense, and how confident you are of this (tentative) sense.
My beef with most pundits is less that they range widely across the globe of ideas, but that they are insufficiently skeptical of their own abilities to lay claim to the substantive knowledge on which their conclusions rests. Because that's the other side of commentary: Analytical skills have to be anchored by knowledge, including the knowledge that one does not know everything. When's the last time you heard someone on the news say 'I don't know'---and have that admission actually affect what they say next?
That's the long version. The short version may be: Don't trust the imperial-polymaths, who stick their flags where they ill belong, but don't be afraid to be a seeker-polymath, don't be afraid to ask anything, of anyone or anything.
You've nailed a huge problem that so many people are completely unaware of.
99% of all opinion content on the internet is based on faulty and/or biased information.
There seems to be very few places (this is one of them) where you do get analysis which is thorough even if it is (by necessity) somewhat filtered through the lens of a personal belief system shaped by the experience of a life.
But this kind of place is the rarity and the people that decide elections will never end up here and many will never even entertain ideas that conflict with their firmly held beliefs that never get challenged. In fact, the real problem for the majority of people is that they don't understand the value of challenging one's beliefs. Examining your beliefs is often uncomfortable and requires mental effort that many people don't have to spare.
I am very pessimistic about the great majority of people ever learning enough to make informed decisions about things like public policy.
Still, I strongly applaud your own acknowledgments of ignorance to judge arguments in some areas -- if everyone acted this way, we could spend more time gathering facts as inputs to our judgments instead of spouting on and on the way that 99% of commentary does without doing the homework of knowing what the actual facts are.
'There is a part of me that believes that all American citizens should be forced to study the Civil War. There is another part of me that would inveigh against white ignorance of white supremacy, that would moralize about how power affords amnesia, and skewed understanding of this country. But I am chastened by Paul Ryan. He may well be lying through his teeth, but the very idea that I can't evaluate his claims stills the moralizing tongue.'
I had to read this a couple of times to understand your conclusion---and I still don't understand it.
The post overall is a cry against ignorance, and especially against ignorant moralizing. So why not force (or, perhaps, strongly encourage) Americans to study the Civil War, Reconstruction, and everything else about our messy history as a way to slice into that ignorance? Why not promote an education which doesn't lend itself to a puffed-up moralizing, but which, perhaps, both chastens and deepens our understandings of ourselves as Americans?
Because there is so much to know. Someone could just as well come to me an insist I understand how the government spends its money. Someone else might argue for health-care. Someone else might argue for a history of immigration. I've picked my area of expertise and interest, and I think it's tremendously important. But I'm chastened by my awareness of other things which I sense are just as important, and yet I remain ignorant of them.
"Because there is so much to know."
I feel the intensity of this statement and sentiment embedded in your post especially when looking back at our past. Those single moments that lead to this very moment are infinite in their detail and importance. I am also somewhat obsessed with that past and it makes me question decisions I make as a teacher. Honestly some topics I dwell on because of my quest to understand the brutality of the past and the complexity of brutality and humanity. But my students need to know so much.
What is important? What can be done that makes the work that I do with them worthwhile? Am I giving them enough context? Is my approach of talking from the present to understand the past the right one? Should I spend less time on some of these topics? Should I spend more on this other topic? This plagues me...But I always say to myself life is long...I just have to impart the quest in my students to know what I haven't taught them, to have them seek it, find it and keep looking. I am still looking and will probably spend my life looking and learning...
Thank you for bringing this up. As I think about it, this seems to separate out into two slightly different questions: first, that we can't all know everything, or even most things; and that there are some things, like politics, that aren't really about facts, but rather deciding what you'd like the future to look like and trying to predict how to get there.
The first part seems pretty clear. There are statistics about how fast the sum total of human knowledge is doubling, and it's certainly happening very quickly at this point. People have argued that back in Da Vinci's time, you could develop pretty advanced knowledge on almost everything and become a "Renaissance Man," but there's just so much knowledge now that it's impossible. Rather, you could perhaps get to be a jack of all trades, master of none.
I'd like to think that I'm a jack of many (certainly not all) trades, master of one. One of the sayings in grad school was that by the time you defend your PhD, you know more about your thesis topic than anyone else in the world. Then again, even though I have a PhD in modeling the spectropolarimetric signatures of clumps in supernova ejecta, I still come up against the limits of my own knowledge in other parts of supernova studies. If everyone with a PhD related to supernovae knows more about their topic than I do, it's just not possible to know everything. Hopefully, the people who really do understand can create summaries for the rest of us, but eventually it comes down to division of labor and deciding whose labor you trust.
Trying to predict the future is much harder. To reform health care, reduce the deficit, etc., requires knowing how things are now, but it also requires a vision of what the fixed system would look like, and some model of how things work to get from here to there. How many people have health care now? How many don't get preventative care so they end up costing more? If we give people more access to prevention, will they use it? Will they use more than they need? Will it end up actually reducing total costs? By how much?
The recent analysis of the effect of Medicare drug coverage says yes to pretty much all of those. People used more prevention. That ended up saving money. But some people did end up using more than they strictly needed, so it didn't save as much money as it could have. But then again, more people switched to generics, saving money that way, which wasn't even included in the original model.
I think when it comes to public policy, there are certainly facts to be researched and debated. We also need to look closely at what outcomes we're looking for. But in between is a much murkier area of trying to understand how people and systems work. Some of those mechanisms are becoming better understood, or rather, we're starting to get better empirical data about how they work. But a lot of the time, people use a model because they want it to be true, not because there are clear results that shows it does.
At one point, I was modeling something a lot simpler than health care -- how extrasolar planets might be consumed in the convection zones of their host star. I was worried that our answers would be wrong because of some of the assumptions we were making. My adviser said that one of the great things about simulations was that, as long as you state your assumptions and then apply them correctly, you're never wrong. Your answers just might not be applicable to the real universe.
In politics we a) rarely if ever state our assumptions, b) the rules that govern the behavior of a system are far less well known, but usually presented as givens. If another scientist didn't state their assumptions and used a non-standard model, it would be pretty hard to argue with them, too, except to say that I thought their assumptions were wrong.
Unfortunately, in politics the consequences of getting it wrong are far greater than an irrelevant paper in a journal that no one will read.
But when you are black, you have a deep sense that of having been wronged. It hangs over your community, it infests the family lore, it's there when you cut on "Leave It To Beaver" and are forced to consider what your lot would have been in that time.
White people don't really have that sense, mostly because it's not foisted upon them. To the extent they understand how much white supremacy has shaped this country, it's learned, intellectual, and empathetic.
I think what gets me in this is that line "White people don't really have that sense." I know that the discussion has occurred in comments here before, but I would just like, again, to caution against such a blanket statement about white people. Straight, Christian whites with a western European background: yes, I'll grant you them. If they understand at all, it is empathetic, because they have no experience of discrimination, of prejudice, of oppression. But there are many groups that fall under the rubric of "white people" who are also all too aware, when watching "Leave It to Beaver," where we would have figured in that happy land as well, and which tinges our enjoyment of it.
It is true that the issue of the inescapability of skin color makes the African-American experience more immediate than that of minority groups who can "pass." But, you know, not all such minorities take the opportunity to pass. Some, like, say, Hasidic Jews, would refuse such an opportunity.
I'm not trying to defend white people in general. I'm just asking for caution about saying "white peopleas if we're all the same.
I wouldn't even grant the straight, christian whites with a western European background. I'll grant you that they haven't been wronged, racially, but I know plenty of them who carry around a sense of having been wronged, and are permanently aggrieved. Some of them are white supremacists, whether they know it or not, and feel wronged that they and their family are poorer or more limited than any non-white person- their sense of the right order of the world is that they should naturally have more. Others carry around a sense of being wronged around some other grievance.
My grandmother, in her senility, came back incessantly to the grievance that the kids in public school mocked my her for coming from Catholic school. Some of my white friends feel aggrieved because the glorious revolution was betrayed by the corporate-industrial-military complex, and they feel further aggrieved that I don't join them in the nursing of the wounds. My father carries around a permanent sense of being wronged, pretty much by whatever wrong is handy- that he was drafted, that he wasn't handed an academic job when he didn't look for one, that other people aren't as smart as he is. (That's a big one).
I don't mean to belittle the ways that blacks have been wronged at all. I just want to point out that carrying around a SENSE of having been wronged is not dependent on having been wronged in any large, historical, or hard-to-overcome way. I think it's more of a personality thing than anything else, but it definitely has a cultural element. I'm just saying that cultural element isn't dependent on any objective history.
Point taken, but I was assuming an actual history of oppression and grievance, not simply one ginned up by Bill O'Reilly and the "whites are now an oppressed minority, too" crowd, or one built of perceptions that may not track to reality.
This is a really interesting topic. When I was younger I really admired famous, historical polymaths. People like Aristotle, Pascal, Wittgenstein, and Thomas Jefferson who were accomplished in a variety of fields and subjects. As I've gotten older and have seen many of the commentators / "pundits" who present themselves as knowledgeable in a multitude of fields I'm much more skeptical of the occurrence of multiple expertise in the modern world.
I think part of the issue is that many contemporary subjects (particularly in the cases of domestic and foreign policy related fields) require such a deep understanding of the history and development of the field and the theories that guide research and/or policy making that the likelihood of one person being an *expert* in multiple (particularly unrelated) fields is pretty slim.
Also, I think that our contemporary form of public "intellectual" discourse too often confuses an argument with rational / logical form with an argument that produces a good or right conclusion. I remember reading Aquinas' Summa Theologica and marveling at how he could construct these (really) beautifully formed logical arguments that were nonetheless wrong. I think that the current climate rewards pundits who can present logical (or rational sounding) arguments, even if their conclusions are bad and even if they have little or no real knowledge of the field they're commenting on.
Lastly, (agreeing with gjeffries above) I think that too often we let our own personal belief systems / personal histories shape and determine how we understand issues *without* admitting to ourselves and to others that we are doing this. Particularly when our public discourse rewards rational form over substance and enables / encourages commentators to expound on subjects they have limited knowledge of, we will see a lot of "rational" arguments about issues that are informed, not by the actuality of the issue at hand, but by the beliefs of the proponent.
The commentator won't tell you that he really only has a cursory understanding of the subject, he won't tell you ahead of time what core beliefs inform his view on this issue, and he won't tell you that he is using the form of logic to obscure the substantive holes in his argument. I appreciate that you don't do these things on your blog.
MR Coates
I have noticed that you do not claim to be an expert on everything ,unlike some bloggers. And on one hand I find it refreshing that you are humble enough to admit that you do not know all of the answers to the worlds problems.And I like the fact that you do not seem to spend all of your time on the internet and that it is not your only scource of information.
But on the other hand I also think that you do yourself a disservice by restricting yourself to writing only about "things that you know about".I am sure that you are more knowledgeble than you might think on issues shuch as foriegn affairs ,economics or science.
As we have all seen, too often the "experts" are often wrong.I do place value on expertise and education.But I am willing to bet that you learned more about economics by watching life in West Baltimore as a child , than you learned while in college.
I myself am a high school dropout and i make no claim to expertise or brilliance.But I am always amazed when I read an article by an "expert" who knows less than the average guy in the street about economics.
I am not talking about cliches like "street smarts" . For example, I am betting that you probably understand a lot more about the "informal" or "underground" economy than most experts.I am not talking about drugs or criminal activity.I am talking about the fact that many people in Baltimore or other cities may be working "off the books" as day laborers or working many jobs during the year.This is true about whites as well as blacks .
Many "experts " do not seem to understand how the urban economy works. They think that either peple have a job for life or are unemployed . Being from West Baltimore I am sure that you knew a lot of people that either worked"off the books" or worked a lot of temporary jobs. I am sure that you also " take with a grain of salt" some of the facts and figures that policy experts throw about.
Your occasional posts on economics are far better than ones that i have read fom other bloggers.It is not simply because you grew up in West Baltimore .Or that you are black.It is that you acually spend time outside and that you are able to observe things around you with an open mind.
This is just one example where i think that you would be more of an expert on a subject like economics than some of the so called "experts".And i am sure that you have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things outside of urban economics.As I said this is just one example.
Maybe I'm biased [being from Baltimore} ,but I would like to hear the veiw points on foriegn policy from someone that grew up in West Baltimore , rather than a prestigouse prep school.There are some "experts" and bloggers that write interesting stuff ,but almost seem like they have never walked outside in their life.Nor do some of them seem to be very open minded.
You are obviousely an educated man.But you also seem to have the ability to look around you to see the truth as well. I love books [and i love all the refrences to books on this blog}. But i believe that anectdotal information and openmindeness is sometimes undervalued.
Mr Coates I am guessing that you probably have first hand knowledge of many things outside of racial matters or urban issues.Please use the fact that you may be wrong about an issue to your advantage. I myself would rather read something by an open minded person who admits that they could be wrong, than an article by someone who is closeminded and thinks that they are always right.
I hope that you do not do yourself and your readers a disservice by restricting yourself to only a few subjects. Thank you for all of your hard work on this blog.
This is totally off topic.But I would like to wish MR Coates and all of the commenters here a very safe and happy Fourth of July.
It's tough to become knowledgeable about a subject that you aren't interested in, in my experience, so I don't think you should feel compelled to rigorously educate yourself about (or comment about) everything. Better to expose yourself to different topics, and explore further the ones in which you have some interest. One of the annoying traits of some other prominent bloggers (to me, at least) is their certainty, even about subjects that are far from their experience or expertise. I find your relative sense of humility on this score to be refreshing.
Seconding Pete from Baltimore, enjoy the Fourth.
Posts like this one are why I avidly read this blog.
As TNC eloquently reminds us, we all come to discussion with our own background/history. This is mine: I used to be a chemistry professor at a large research university and I loved all aspects of the job: doing research, teaching and mentoring students. Following a nasty tenure battle (where I was denied tenure) I decided to leave academia and science. There is a very long list of reasons why I made this decision but one of them was that I felt my basic mode of operation was incompatible with survival. Every problem I tackled I started with the assumption that I was an idiot. This lead me to initially be cautious and then as I worked more and more on the problem to break new ground (And other prominent scientist agreed; I had support in the broader community, just not enough support.). But this is antithetical to the way science is done, at least in my field. Today you need to shout first and follow-up later; frustratingly, there often isn't any follow-up, and there is no penalty. The whole experience of being an independent scientist has been disheartening and I wish I knew if things have degenerated with time, or if they've always been like this. I go back and forth constantly about whether I made the right decision to leave, after all someone has to 'fight the good fight'; but it was taking a serious toll on my health.
Anyhow, thanks TNC for the thought provoking posts and for giving me a place to vent my spleen.
"But when you are black, you have a deep sense that of having been wronged. It hangs over your community, it infests the family lore..."
This statement is true for black people who are old and have experienced serious racism. But should Sasha and Malia Obama,(who are obviously black) for example, feel this way when they grow up?
This statement tinges of self-fullfilling prophecy. I've always enjoyed your writing TNC, but this vein of thought has always saddened me. Although justified in a lot of cases, how is the black community ever supposed to rise when being black "infests the family lore", I don't know your particular case TNC, but it only will if you choose it to.
Great post overall though. Got me thinking. Everyone-no matter the discipline or field-should have a strong sense of history. Your perspective will forever be lacking without it.
I guess it depends on your definition of "serious racism", but it's hard for me to imagine a black person in America growing to adulthood even today without having many brushes with oppression of a magnitude that 90% of white americans never have to deal with. Even Sasha and Malia.
TNC's parents grew up under American Apartheid. There is not a black american today who does not have living family who can say the same. The only way a deep sense of wrong could not infest their stories is if they did not tell any of those stories.
Racial discrimination is still rampant today in much of the job market, in the criminal justice system, in the hospital emergency room, pretty much everywhere. Even people of basic goodwill still have a tendency to unthinkingly repeat old festering memes and tolerate bigots in a way that makes for a hostile environment.
Black people have been wronged, and still are being wronged, and a worldview that doesn't recognize that is probably unhealthily pollyannish. But with that statement I'm probably beyond my boundaries as a white guy here -- it's clearly for POC to determine exactly how to respond to their world, because I can only empathize, not experience it.
But we are not a post-racial society yet.
If anything I see TNC very much on the "act as if we are" side of that question. He's very gentle and generous with people who say questionable things here that would be deconstructed brutally in anti-racism communities I'm familiar with.
If he's harboring resentments to the point where he can't see people's goodwill behind ignorant mistakes, it's very hard to tell that from what he says on this blog.
I guess it depends on your definition of "serious racism", but it's hard for me to imagine a black person in America growing to adulthood even today without having many brushes with oppression of a magnitude that 90% of white americans never have to deal with. Even Sasha and Malia.
TNC's parents grew up under American Apartheid. There is not a black american today who does not have living family who can say the same. The only way a deep sense of wrong could not infest their stories is if they did not tell any of those stories.
Racial discrimination is still rampant today in much of the job market, in the criminal justice system, in the hospital emergency room, pretty much everywhere. Even people of basic goodwill still have a tendency to unthinkingly repeat old festering memes and tolerate bigots in a way that makes for a hostile environment.
Black people have been wronged, and still are being wronged, and a worldview that doesn't recognize that is probably unhealthily pollyannish. But with that statement I'm probably beyond my boundaries as a white guy here -- it's clearly for POC to determine exactly how to respond to their world, because I can only empathize, not experience it.
But we are not a post-racial society yet.
If anything I see TNC very much on the "act as if we are" side of that question. He's very gentle and generous with people who say questionable things here that would be deconstructed brutally in anti-racism communities I'm familiar with.
If he's harboring resentments to the point where he can't see people's goodwill behind ignorant mistakes, it's very hard to tell that from what he says on this blog.
A pseudo-buddhist perspective on memory.
Memory is suffering. Our attachment to memory is a survival mechanism, ie, if you remember that you can be wronged in a particular way, you can prepare defenses to make sure it doesn't happen again. Ideally, yes, forgetting everything about war and slavery and racism would be liberating for all of us, except for the fact that the impulse to protect ourselves says no, it's not time to let that go yet. Especially as none of the above phenomena have left our sphere.
No argument for or against TNC here, just that each generation is going to have to make a choice how to remember. For what it's worth, I think TNC is authentically progressive in his approach, for his time. In a hundred years...
More than a little late to the party, but it seemed like some distinctions could potentially be useful. Three words seem important here: knowledge, learning, and opinion.
This post starts off about the limits of knowledge. Knowledge is hard to come by. If you can't nail something down, such that you always know it to be true, it doesn't really seem like knowledge. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get close to knowledge. I suppose some experts know some things, but I suspect that if you ask most true experts they'll respond like Polywogy did above: they'll say they may know a few things, but not really much at all, even in their field of expertise. These true experts would be careful to say that they can offer opinions about many things in their field.
TNC ends by accusing the self-described polymaths, as well he should. That word is straight from the Greek, poly-, meaning many, and -math deriving from manthano, which is the verb "to learn." (Mathematics thus could be translated as something like "the learnable things.") The true polymath, therefore, would only claim to have learned many things, to have studied much about many subjects. Whether he could offer up the fruits of knowledge from these studies would be another question.
What the polymath would most likely be limited to offering would be opinion. Perhaps he would have heard many opinions through the course of his learning. Perhaps many of them are correct opinions. But the polymath likely wouldn't know them. It would take a lot of work to test and torture those opinions to see if they came up to the level of knowledge. That work, almost by definition, is something that the polymath hasn't done.
Opinions, as the famous phrase reminds us, are the possession of all people, from experts, to polymaths, to pundits. Opinions can be more or less trustworthy. They can even be correct, such as when a doctor makes a preliminary diagnosis that turns out to be true. True opinion, though, is not knowledge. The correct diagnosis (from the Greek, dia-, through, and gnosis, knowledge) might more properly be called knowledge, although doctors can tell us that often they're offering opinions in their diagnoses. But opinions are often wrong, or impossible to prove or disprove. They leave us stymied, wishing we even knew where to begin towards moving through them and towards knowledge. Opinions frustrate.
I read in TNC's penultimate graf a refusal to impose his field, and perhaps his knowledge, on others because, as he later explains, "there's so much to know." He arrives at this place because he knows at least one thing, like Socrates in the Apology: he knows nothing. This is the root of wisdom, of course. But it doesn't preclude all knowing, somehow. It seems also that TNC, like Socrates in the Phaedrus, does claim to know about a few things (for S. it's eros). About the rest of the world, though, it's all opinion.
Now, just because opinions frustrate doesn't mean we don't have a duty to opine in some cases, e.g., life or death situations, or voting, or filing our taxes. And perhaps we might even have a duty to have opinions on pressing issues like global warming or the deficit, though they be very tentative and broad: in a democratic society, where we are our own leaders, the public welfare has to be looked after by us. Much of the time, the public welfare requires that we use only the crudest tools we have at hand: opinion. In doing so, we look towards the people who've done the best learning. We should also beware of the people who claim to know things. My economist friends tell me that people who claim to know things about macroeconomics are liars; they claim the field is not a science and cannot be known. But then they claim to have an opinion about what we should be doing about the recession. Through these conflicts of self-proclaimed experts, though, we might get inklings of which opinions are better than others. For the rest of us not devoting our lives to these fields, we do best to sit back and let honest experts come up with the best opinion they can.
That's why the moralizing tongue should be stilled, but perhaps not the citizen's opining one.