Karate and Life: 20 Precepts

Much of what I write - perhaps nearly all of what I write - touches on issues of power, conflict, and peace. Across areas of human endeavor I am endlessly fascinated with how power is created and exercised, how conflict is kindled and resolved, and what paths we should take in seeking to create peace. These ideas weave in and out of my writing, both here on the blog and elsewhere.

Regular readers know that a part of my personal exploration into these issues revolves around learning and practicing traditional Asian martial arts. In this I am both a student and a teacher; I love sharing what I know with others, and I have so much more to learn myself.

Those who spend time in the traditional martial arts world soon encounter one of its central tenets: that karate, or judo, or kung fu, are not merely for fighting in a ring or practicing in a gym. The benefits of the martial arts extend throughout the student's life, and indeed should be actively sought and considered far beyond the simple practice of physical techniques. This is probably why one of my most-read blog posts of all time is titled, The Benefits of Studying the Martial Arts.

Most of what I write isn't new - far deeper thinkers have been developing these ideas for centuries. What I try to do is simply bring them to audiences that might otherwise not be familiar with the practice of Do - "way", in Japanese. Karate-do, Judo, Aiki-do - all have this common root, a call to a broader understanding and self-improvement in service to others.

One of the best synopses of this is Gichin Funakoshi's list of 20 Precepts. Funakoshi, an Okinawan master who brought karate to Japan in the early part of the 20th century, is often credited as "the father of modern karate". He wrote his Precepts as a way to pass his notion of Do along to his students, to remind them that they were engaged in a calling far higher than learning how to defend themselves in a fight.

Starting with this entry I am planning to write a series of blog posts, one for each of the 20 Precepts, with musings and thoughts on how these apply to the world around us outside the dojo (literally, "Place of the Way"). I hope these will be of interest to practitioners and non-practioners alike.

The first Precept is this:

Karate-do begins and ends with respect.

In traditional martial arts, this is summed up in the bow, or rei. Students and instructors alike "bow in" and "bow out" when they enter and leave the training space, and bow to each other at the beginning and end of each exercise. Bowing is a physical means by which we remind ourselves of the culture of respect.

Some people are uncomfortable in traditional dojos because of this formality. Where else in our lives do we have such physical, visceral symbols of respect? In some traditional churches (though fewer all the time), people bow or reverence the altar or the crucifix, but in my experience this practice isn't universal even in churches that do practice it.

The underlying principle, however, is sound - and sorely needed. When we begin and end interactions with a sign of mutual respect, it is much more difficult in between to mistreat each other. If our first thought when starting a new conversation or walking into a meeting is, "I respect the people here as fellow colleagues", our whole demeanor changes. And if things go sideways in that meeting, ending with a similar posture of respect reminds us that we're on the same team, that we're there to solve problems together, that we share much in common.

In our culture today, in 21st century America, we have almost no such signs of respect. And where we do have them, we reserve them almost exclusively for our friends, our family, for those who are inside our boundaries of comfort. "If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?"

The Christian call to love one another as God loves us can be hard, especially today. That verse is followed by an admonition: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return". Even if we cannot imagine ourselves going so far, can we at least take the first step of respecting our enemies?

Funakoshi put this Precept first, I suspect, because he understood that without mutual respect (even mutual love), people will use their power to hurt each other. Karate is a form of power, but we exercise power every day in our conversations and interactions with others. When we start and end with a posture of respect, in between we will work to make sure that we don't use our power to harm, but to help. When I respect others, I want to help them. That is a Way worth following.

Two Visions of Economics

In watching the first Presidential Debate earlier this week, I was intrigued by the first half hour or so. The discussion, rather heated at times, focused on issues of economics: how we (government and/or society as a whole) can make the economy better, with more jobs, better wages, and rising prosperity for everyone.

What struck me about the candidates' exchange on this subject was not their policy differences. Truth be told, neither one offered much to actually answer the question, "How would you as President create more jobs?", and some time was spent actively evading questions like "How would you bring jobs back that have gone overseas?" If you were looking for solid policy proposals, it was not your night.

But what the candidates did say was quite revealing. While short on policy details, each candidate did make clear their views on how economics works. The contrast was remarkably stark.

In her opening answer to the first question, Clinton talked about cooperation and sharing - investing in workers, sharing profits, working together. The how wasn't there, but the basic idea was clear: economic progress comes from cooperation. Wealth is created by working together.

Trump's answer to the same question was all about competition. He talked about losing, about winning, about fighting. He framed the economy as us (the United States) against them (Mexico, China). He talked about jobs being stolen. In his view, the economy is a zero-sum game: either we win or they win. Whatever they gain, we lose. Jobs are a fixed commodity.

The thing about this contrast is that it isn't just a matter of differing philosophies or differing ideologies. Economics may be derided as "the dismal science", but a social science it is. Questions like, "what generates more wealth - cooperation or zero-sum competition?" are not philosophical quandaries, they are empirical puzzles with real-world answers.

In this case, in the broadest terms, the answer is clear. Zero-sum competition makes everybody poorer, both through lost opportunities ("opportunity costs", to economists) and through wasted and inefficient efforts. Cooperation, by contrast, generates wealth.

This is obvious from even a cursory glance at the history of human development. At every stage, wealth has increased where people have come together to cooperate in greater and greater numbers. If all we had was zero-sum competition, we'd still be living in small tribes throwing sticks at each other.

This is not to say that healthy competition doesn't have a role to play. But the vast majority of the interactions that drive our economy are cooperative ones. When we sell someone a good or a service, both sides come away better off - the provider gets money, the consumer gets something they need. That basic cooperation - the exchange of values - is the fundamental basis of the free-market system.

Economists disagree on many things, but this isn't one of them. There isn't a single economist anywhere who thinks that an economy based on the competition of all against all is a good idea. Indeed, the very notion of economic growth belies the possibility of zero-sum economics. How can we create new jobs and new wealth if all we're doing is passing the same jobs and the same wealth around?

On this issue, Trump is not merely misguided on policy, he's fundamentally wrong. He's like an astronomer trying to model the solar system with the earth at its center. The world just doesn't work that way.

This is one dimension of the presidential campaign that has both policy and moral dimensions. Policy driven by zero-sum economics will make everybody poorer. Insisting that the world is a dog-eat-dog place will make us morally poorer as well. Small wonder the world's markets regard a Trump presidency as a disaster of the first order.

Beyond Fear: A Very Different View of American Presidential Politics

I was quite surprised to discover that the post I wrote last week, "Why I'm Not Afraid of President Trump", has rapidly become the most widely-read piece I've written a long time. In just two days it shot to the top 5 most-read posts on my blog, probably because a number of my FB friends shared it with their networks. Apparently I struck a chord.

I want to continue some of those thoughts from last week because of a confluence of two things. First, a desire to continue the "fear" theme in the post about a possible Trump Presidency. A lot of the subsequent FB chatter about the piece focused on the probable costs of Trump being President, and the various bad things that will happen. Some of these went to significant levels of detail in their predictions, in areas from foreign policy to judicial nominations.

Reading through these discussions made me realize that I hadn't expressed my intended point very well. A part of my argument, it is true, is that a Trump Presidency in reality will likely not be as bad as his worst critics think, much as the Bush and Obama Presidencies were not what their enemies foretold. We never did get Chuck Norris' "Thousand Years of Darkness" by re-electing Obama, and Dick Cheney didn't throw all of his political enemies into concentration camps.

What I meant to say - but didn't articulate very well - is that my decision not to be afraid of the future is not predicated on my ability to predict it. Yes, I have certain hunches about what will or will not happen. Some of those hunches are informed by actual expertise in the study of politics. But as my friend Steve Saideman pointed out recently, even experts get stuff wrong. I recognize that my ability to predict isn't very good. None of us predict the future well, and we tend to project a mishmash of our hopes and anxieties. Confirmation bias is everywhere.

What I should have said but didn't is, I choose not to be afraid not because I know what's going to happen but simply because I choose not to be afraid. I am humble about my ability to predict the future, and completely clear about my ability to affect it (near zero). I don't know what will happen in or after November. Given that situation, fear to me is a choice - I don't have to be afraid, so I choose not to.

There are some things I would like to see happen and some I would like to see not happen, but in the present there is nothing I can do about either. The strength of my preferences doesn't affect the outcome either - whether I mildly dislike The Donald or hate him passionately doesn't make any difference. My choice not to fear is likewise not an indicator of how I feel about Trump or his policies. I find the man and his politics despicable. But I don't have to let his awfulness ruin my day.

This is a position based not at all in politics, but in basic philosophy and self-awareness. The world cannot make me afraid; fear is my response to the world around me. I'm sure there are other circumstances in which I would have much greater difficulty controlling the temptation to fear. Today, for me, is not one of those. I can't speak for anybody else, but that's where I am.

The second event that sparked this particular blog post was a brief blurb I heard on the radio from Trump himself, who told a campaign rally "We're going to go after Hillary." In itself, this was not all that remarkable - had Cruz, or Kasich, or Jeb! been nominated, I imagine any of them would have said the same thing, quite possibly using exactly those words. The issue here isn't Trump, it's our politics in general.

We've been talking for decades about the increasingly personal level of attacks by candidates (and the rest of us) against their opponents. Historians have pointed out that there are ample cases from the 19th century of what we would regard as far more vicious attacks on opponents' character. So one candidate simply saying "we're going to go after" another isn't news.

And that's what strikes me - from a Very Different View - as troubling. Politics has become - perhaps has long been - combat. It's a contest of winners and losers. This is true not only on the surface, in terms of the mechanics of elections, but deep in our DNA. When Karl Rove talked a dozen years ago about a goal of creating a "permanent Republican majority," Democrats were distressed only because they were on the other side - not because the very notion itself, of one side "permanently" defeating the other, violates some very basic principles. We're so steeped in our own broken politics that we can't even see it anymore.

We see this in common political discourse, especially on the internet. How often do we run across a headline in which Person X "destroys" Opposing View Y with a few well-chosen words? This is, of course, verbal nonsense - no rhetoric on my part can destroy anything least of all an idea or a candidate. Yet we casually bandy about this idea of "destruction" every day.

The point here is that, despite our gut feeling otherwise, politics doesn't have to be this way. Communities can, and do, run themselves in far less confrontational and far more inclusive ways. The best examples are local, possibly because it's easier to treat other members of the community like real people when you're in close proximity to them and can interact with them in more authentic ways. Demonization of your opponents requires a certain distance. But distance does not create demonization, it only allows it.

Diversity plays a role here as well, but not in a deterministic way. At this point there's pretty much universal agreement that identities are socially constructed - you're not born being part of any particular kind of group so much as you're raised into a shared set of assumptions. Boundaries can be shifted and changed over time, usually by adopting different practices, patterns, behaviors, and norms.

Without quite realizing it, we have evolved our politics around a single norm: win for "our side" at all costs. This assumes a host of things, including the notion that "winning" is the best thing and that it makes any sense at all, and that we have "sides". This is not the only way to deal with differences of opinion, but we have come to think that it is. This, it seems to me, has become our biggest blindness.

We don't do this as much on an interpersonal level. I don't assault everyone I meet who disagrees with me, either verbally or physically. I know a few people who do, but in general we regard this as boorish behavior. But somehow, we reward and celebrate it in our politics.

So what's the alternative? Any different sort of politics has to start with fundamentals. Our current political habits are built on a set of mutually-reinforcing habits, beliefs, and unexamined norms. To borrow from the trite-but-true, if we want things to be different we have to think differently.

So what needs to change? Let me propose a few basic tenets:

1) All people are people - complex creatures with a dizzying array of characteristics, identities, and life experiences. People are not "Democrats" or "Republicans" - these categories don't define individuals.

2) All people deserve respect as people. This doesn't mean we have to agree on everything, be alike in all ways, or like everything about each other. Respect presumes certain assumptions of both attitude and behavior - we understand in general what it means to "treat someone with respect", and it certainly includes not harming others.

3) Insofar as is possible, politics should be the search for mutual solutions - that is, finding ways of establishing rules and distributing resources that are as close to consensus as can be reached, and that benefit everyone or nearly everyone. A corollary to this is that no one perspective and no one ideology has all of the "right" answers.

If we take the term "politics" out, this is how a great many of us lead our everyday lives. We tend to interact with individuals as individuals, and when we do lump people into undifferentiated categories we usually regard that as a bad thing. We tend to try to treat each other with respect, and when that doesn't happen we regard it as universally inappropriate. And outside of a few structured fields of endeavor, most people most of the time prefer to seek mutual solutions instead of trying to "beat" the other person. Workplaces built around that kind of competition tend to be very bad, both for the people who work there and for the work itself.

I realize that all of these assertions are from my own point of view, and that some will argue with me that "people aren't really like that". This is a debate as old as philosophy itself, and is difficult to gather data on. I'm likely not to convince people with a pessimistic view of human nature. But I have seen enough instances of this in my life to know that it's possible.

What does any of this have to do with one politician's unremarkable comment about "going after" his opponent? That comment shows just how far our politics has gotten away from the tenets I suggest above. We do not search for mutual solutions. We don't respect others. And we tend to reduce complex individuals (either public candidates or simply strangers whom we do not know except that they are on "the other side") to simplistic categories, and then condemn them en masse as such.

Despite being a lifelong student of politics, I dislike most of what we call "politics" for this very reason. We have discarded (to borrow Lincoln's phrase) the better angels of our nature and marinated ourselves in our own worst instincts. We are all poorer for it.

In this regard, the anger and frustration so often written about in this election cycle are entirely understandable. Every two or four years, we are told a Grand Lie: that if only our side wins, if only this or that candidate gets elected, if only the other side is defeated, all will be well. Things will be wonderful. Our nation will be Great Again.

This is nonsense. Our problems will not be resolved if Democrats win all the contests, if Republicans win all the contests, or if the result is some of each. We will be no closer to better mutual solutions; but we will in the meantime be a lot more anxious, and lot more distrustful of and compassionate towards our neighbors, and many of us will be frustrated and angry because "we" "lost".

This is a radically different way of looking at politics, and as such I expect it either won't make sense to many or will strike many as hopelessly naive. I can only point out that our current system of elections and parties seems to be making things worse, not better - and by "things" here I mean not only the overall outcomes of our society but us as individuals. We are, as persons and as a people, worse off because we do this to ourselves every few years.

Radicalism in politics is nothing new, but much of what passes itself off as "radical" is really quite tame. Genuinely radical is telling people to stop judging their neighbors and to attend to their own failings instead (Matthew 7:3). It is telling people to love their enemies (Luke 6:27, Matthew 5:44). It is suggesting that we lay down our lives for each other, not for our own good (John 15:13). Somehow, this kind of radical gets left out when folks suggest that their Christianity informs their politics.

Do I have a solution? Of course not. I pointed out above that I have zero ability to affect the outcomes of our nation. And propounding a solution would be beside the point anyway - saying, "I have the answer" would make me no different from the hordes of huckster politicians and pundits who sell us their wares, trying to make us believe that if only their ideas are adopted, everything will be great. I can't create a good solution; only we can.

This, then, is the conversation I long for: a conversation between people, as people, who can take each other seriously in our own wants, desires, experiences, hopes, and dreams. A conversation aimed at one goal: the discovery of things we agree on, the solutions that help all of us. A conversation in which there are no winners and losers, only participants and citizens. There is no room for that conversation in our current politics. Perhaps we can build one elsewhere.

Politics, Theology, and the Destructive Power of Outcomes

To start - if you haven't read the following article from this past Sunday's NYT, I strongly recommend you go do so now:

Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me

The article is beautifully and poignantly written. It makes clear problems in both American culture and the "prosperity gospel" in particular that I could never articulate so well.

I want to use this piece as a starting-off point for a distinction I make all the time, one that explains a lot of frustration I have with the current state of both political and social relations in America. I frequently make the argument that there seem to be two sorts of people: process people and outcome people. I am a process person. What follows is what I mean by that, and why I think it matters.

This distinction, like all such distinctions, is really a matter of degree. Process people do care about outcomes, and a great many outcome people also care about processes. But in general, when I talk about process vs. outcomes what I mean is this:

• Outcome people are focused primarily on goals. How we get there is less important than that the right outcome is achieved. The most important battle for outcome folks is therefore not how we do things, but what it is we are trying to do. Success is understood when we reach the proper outcome, or fail to do so.

• Process people are concerned primarily with how things happen. That can lead some folks to be extremely doctrinaire about rules and procedures, but in general this view stems from the belief that how we do things not only influences the outcome we get this time, but casts a long shadow into the future. We therefore need to be careful about how we treat each other in the midst of doing things today to try to achieve our goals, whatever they may be. To borrow a popular phrase, success for process people is a journey, not a destination.

Donald Trump is an outcome person. He knows what he wants, and doesn't care what process he has to follow to get it - he's a "get it done" kind of guy.

Ted Cruz is an outcome person when he talks about "carpet bombing" parts of Syria in order to get rid of the Daesh/Islamic State movement. It doesn't matter how many lives are lost, just so that the final outcome is the removal of the threat.

Most members of Congress, in both chambers and in both parties, are outcome people most of the time. The latest incidence of this comes from individual Senators (including Mitch McConnell) indicating that they will oppose any nominee for the Supreme Court put forward by President Obama. The only outcome that matters is that the next Supreme Court justice be nominated by someone else, presumably on the hopes that someone from a different political party will be inhabiting the White House at that point.

There has been lots of speculation about the "angry electorate" in this year, and you don't have to go far to find polling data indicating that most Americans don't think much of their government. Why is a harder thing to put our hands on, and I won't engage in speculation on that point. I only have an N of 1 - me - and so I can only explain why I find the current political situation so horribly dysfunctional. It's precisely because all politics is now about outcome, not process.

Hypocrisy in Washington has become so ubiquitous that we no longer even notice it. We expect that elected leaders will say one thing when they are in power, and then say the opposite when the other party is in charge. Why do they do this? Because all are "fighting" (I use the term with reservation, because it's a bad analogy) for the outcome they want and don't care what they have to do or say to get it.

This goes beyond lamenting the days when "compromise" was not a dirty word in politics (though I do miss the apparent ability of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill to not only get along, but actually get things done). I think that the failing is not just political, but moral and spiritual as well.

When we become fixated on outcome, it changes our whole orientation. We come to rationalize our actions and our judgments about the world in light of what we want. We engage in wishful thinking to selectively edit the facts around us to fit with what we hope to achieve. Worse still, we begin to demonize and dehumanize people who have different ideas. We move quickly from seeing such people as competitors to seeing them as the problem. Not for nothing do Roger Fisher and Bill Ury devote nearly 1/4 of their bestselling book Getting to Yes to talking people out of this particular corner.

Once we've demonized those who disagree, fear sets in. We become afraid that we might not get the outcome we now so desperately want. We channel that fear into anger and then hatred towards those who we think are standing in our way. They are "destroying America". They are evil. They must be stopped, whatever the cost.

We see all of this on display especially in Presidential election years, since fear, anger, and hatred are effective tools of political mobilization. Whether they are more or less effective tools we no longer know, because they are all we see. They are the very atmosphere we breathe. Just as the fish cannot tell that it is wet, knowing no other condition, we are rapidly losing the ability to see just how afraid and angry we are.

Although the symptoms of this disease are political, the root cause is moral and theological. The author of the article cited at the beginning carefully traces the extent to which an outcome-based theology (one focused on the accumulation of wealth and the assignment of credit or blame) distorts both the gospel of Christianity as well as individuals' behavior. Here we can bring another noted Christian writer to bear - C.S. Lewis:

"(God) wants men to be concerned with what they do; our (the Devil's) business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them". (The Screwtape Letters)

It is very difficult to hold onto basic Christian theology for long and to simultaneously believe that the worldly outcomes over which we are so highly concerned - who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, what foreign policy we should adopt, what our economic strategy should be, who gets elected President - matter all that very much. It is nearly impossible, in my view, to do so and justify behavior that we would otherwise acknowledge as sinful in the name of achieving this or that thing in the short run. As Keynes famously noted, in the long run we're all dead.

This is not to say that we don't have preferences about things, or that we don't continue to develop our ideas to make them better and to produce better outcomes. In fact, we spend far too little time talking or listening to each other about what better means in that context. So this is not an argument that all Christians should withdraw from the world, or that we shouldn't care at all about outcomes.

It is to suggest, however, that a theological point of view (one which might be shared by adherents of other faiths) demands a different perspective. Nearly all of our moral understandings - the theologies and philosophies developed and refined over millennia - have to do with how we treat each other as human beings. This is ultimately a process issue. Our moral obligations are to our own actions, our own behavior, how we treat others.

This explains why (paradoxically, given what I study) I am so repulsed by modern politics. It is almost impossible to find anyone, of any political stripe, who is not so obsessed with this or that outcome that they are not ready on a moment's notice to discard basic notions of human decency and the obvious realization that, when this round of "fighting" is over we will still have to live with each other. The reactions to Antonin Scalia's death this past weekend - the almost immediate argument at the nomination of a successor - were simply the latest tragic example.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. I know what it isn't. Our problems will not be solved when we elect the right President, or when the right party is in power, or when the right policy is passed. All of the "solutions" on offer are illusions, snake oil designed to sell the salesman. There is no end of the rainbow where all of the "right people" have won and everything will be "great again".

The only path I see to change for the better is for people - not parties, not institutions, but individual people - to let go a little of their cherished outcomes and to pay a little more attention to process. By which I mean, to begin to consider each other as people, as humans worthy of respect and decency, and to act accordingly. When people adopt this perspective, even imperfectly (for all of us are imperfect), behavior changes. Insults cease, shouting diminishes, snark and distain are replaced with thoughtfulness and listening quiet.

Do I know how to bring this about? Of course not. All I can do is control how I treat people every day. The outcome that is our politics, or our society, or our community is beyond my fixing. But that is precisely the point. Lewis was right - all I can do is concern myself with what I do, and leave the rest to God.

"Blood on our Hands": Moral Responsibility and Modern Life

It has become characteristic of a certain kind of political protest to demand that some institution - the US government, a university, your local town, a company - take extraordinary steps to disconnect, divest, or otherwise disassociate itself from a political situation or conflict. Institutions that fail to take such steps are, in the eyes of the protestors, "morally responsible" for whatever atrocities or horrific crimes are being committed elsewhere. And since the crimes in question often involve a lot of bloodshed, this tends to lead to some pretty hyperbolic protest language.

A student at Ohio University treated her university, and the world, to an especially silly version of such a protest this week. You can read a full news account of the incident here. The original video has unfortunately been taken down, but you can watch the debate it set off on the OU campus here.

It is worth noting that the student body president did recant and apologize for her silliness and appears to have recognized the error of her ways. But I would guess that this is an argument that will linger for a while on the OU campus.

While dramatic (turning the Ice Bucket Challenge into a bucket of blood will certainly draw attention), the argument that this student made is a familiar one. It's worth noting her statements, captured in transcript from the video:

In the video, posted on Vimeo, Marzec states, "I'm sending a message of student concern of the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. I'm urging you, and OU, to divest and cut all ties with academic and other Israeli businesses and institutions," she said during in video. "This bucket of blood symbolizes the thousands of displaced and murdered Palestinians atrocities which OU is directly complacent in your cultural and economic support of the Israeli state."

Now, I assume that she meant "complicit" rather than "complacent", but you get the drift. Because OU's investment portfolio and international activities include ties to Israel in some fashion, the university itself has "blood on its hands" for all of those innocent Palestinian deaths.

There is a practical silliness to this, of course: OU could do as this student asked tomorrow, divest itself of every investment connected to Israeli companies, cut all ties of cooperation with Israeli universities, and not a single thing would change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, if every last university in the US did this, it still wouldn't change a thing. This seems like the opposite of the Peter Parker Principle - if great power brings great responsibility, shouldn't no power absolve one from responsibility?

But the real reason for such protests isn't the practical impact of the actions demanded (though protesters often delude themselves into thinking that they will in some fashion change the world). What these folks are primarily after is the self-righteous rush of feeling that, whatever evil happens in the world, their hands are clean.

This is, of course, an absurdity in the modern world, especially if your standard for "bloody hands" is "any financial connection to the perpetrators". Do you pay taxes to the US government? Do you participate in the international economy? The reality of modern trade and global production is that nearly any economic activity is likely tied, in some fashion, to some questionable behavior that you probably wouldn't like to be associated with.

It is the merging of these impossibly high moral standards with the obvious (if unintended) hypocrisy of those who promote them that makes the whole thing fall apart. What starts as impassioned moral protest degenerates quickly into cheap theater, screaming, and useless diatribe that accomplishes nothing.

If you are truly concerned about the great moral issues of the day, whether they are in Missouri or Israel, the appropriate response is much harder. Rather than trying (fruitlessly) to disassociate ourselves and our institutions from whatever side of a conflict we don't like, what we need to do is engage with the issues and the people involved. Talk to all sides and hear their stories. Listen to their humanity, their dreams, their aspirations. Understand their weaknesses and failings - and how little you may be able to change them.

You cannot end an intractable conflict by dumping blood on your head. But you may be able, in a small way, to heal some of the damage that conflict causes, even if it's far away from the bombing and the killing. And in the process, you will discover something far more valuable than angry self-righteousness. If you're lucky, you may just discover the peace that comes with connecting with another human being.

Threats and Violence: The Demons Are Never Far From the Surface

Focus has turned to the hardest question in the Boston marathon bombing case: why? We have a living suspect (very likely guilty by the existing evidence) as well as a wealth of information from social media, witnesses, friends, and family on both him and his brother. Yet despite all of this information, understanding why two people would do something so obviously heinous and evil is never an easy thing. We may never have a fully satisfactory answer.

But while we find acts of wanton violence incomprehensible, there is more violent thought in our midst than we would care to admit. This is not news; in the 1960s and early 1970s Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted experiments that showed us just how easy it is to move people across the line to otherwise unacceptable behavior.

A recent story from higher education has brought this to mind again. Earlier this week Dartmouth College cancelled classes after a public protest on campus sparked a nasty, even vicious backlash of rape and death threats in online fora. I'm sure additional details will emerge; you can read the initial news story in the Chronicle here.

What interests me isn't the initial protest, which was poorly targeted (a presentation to prospective students?) and probably counter productive. What I find more interesting is the response, apparently from other Dartmouth students who took to anonymous online discussion forums and expressed a desire to either kill or rape the protesters. One quoted example:

"Wish I had a shotgun. Would have blown those [expletive] hippies away,"

Clearly there's a logic in anonymous online environments that is different from the real social world. It's almost certain that, if you gave that particular author a shotgun and put him in that room during the protest, he probably would not have pulled the trigger and shot anybody. I say probably, because in the heat of a passionate moment people are known to do things they later regret. And I suspect that most of the other authors of similar comments are unlikely to actually commit murder or rape in their real lives, either now or in the future.

That said, I don't find it very satisfying to write this off as simply "harmless online chatter blowing off steam". As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences - our actions flow from the ideas in our heads. I blogged just last week about the hard questions surrounding violence and the relationship between our ideas (or our emotions) and our willingness to justify one kind of violence or another. Sooner or later, philosophies of violence become actions of violence - often when and where we least expect it.

In this sense, Dartmouth College's reaction (cancel classes) is probably a good one. The online threats are serious, not just because they make the targets of the comments feel unsafe, but because they ought to make everyone feel unsafe. There are, apparently, people within the Dartmouth student population willing to entertain the notion that private, person-to-person violence should be used against people you disagree with. This is not just wrong, it's barbaric to a degree that stopping classes for a day to discuss it seems a measured response.

I doubt that the interrupted day will change very much by itself. What the exchange at Dartmouth has done is remind us that the demons of violence are never far from the surface of our collective thoughts. Take any population - even one as wealthy, privileged, and safe as Dartmouth's is - and you will find them skulking in corners waiting for a chance to peek above the surface. If we really want to make headway in banishing the barbarism within ourselves, it can't be done only in response to crises - it must be an ongoing, everyday conversation.

In the course of living our lives we form, test, and entertain ideas about conflict and force and violence nearly every day. Most of the time we don't pay attention to the paths our thoughts travel - and that is the demons' opportunity to sneak in and take up residence. Let's hope that folks at Dartmouth - and everywhere - will start paying more attention to their own thoughts and attitudes, before the demons become actions.

Boston & Texas: Why Meaning Matters More Than Numbers

On Monday, two bombs went off in a crowd of spectators near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious sporting events. Three people were killed and over 180 injured, some seriously. The event was quickly labelled an act of terrorism.

On Tuesday, a large explosion leveled a fertilizer plant in near Waco, Texas. With reports still coming in, the blast injured about 160 people, killed up to 15, and leveled dozens of buildings and homes including 60-80 houses and a 50-unit apartment building. News reports as of this writing seem to indicate an accident as the likeliest cause - though we will know more in the coming days.

The responses to both events, terrorism and (apparent) accident, tell us a lot about how we view danger, violence, and threats in the modern world.

Economists (prominently including the authors of Freakonomics) love to point out that we over-estimate some dangers and threats and under-estimate others. When we hear a couple of stories about sharks attacking swimmers, we overestimate the likelihood that we ourselves might be attacked - and so stay away from the ocean. We forget about the far greater likelihood of being killed in a car accident, or by any of a number of other less visible things that kill many thousands every year.

While these are good reminders about how bad we are at probabilities and math (which is important), these analyses miss the point. They do so with a classic economics mistake - assuming that one death is very much like another, or (in economics-speak) that death is fungible. Dead is dead, after all.

But our collective responses to the Boston and West, TX events show otherwise. Death is not just event, one equivalent to another. Death has meaning, and so how we die has meaning. That meaning changes the very character of how we perceive death and how we shape our responses to it.

Assuming that no link is found to criminal or nefarious activity (and as of this time, none has been suggested), the West, TX explosion is an accidental tragedy. A fire broke out at a factory which unfortunately had large concentrations of explosive substances. Disaster ensued. But the disaster was (in this narrative) not intended, directed, or caused by any person. We may discover in the future that it was the byproduct of negligence or sloppiness or bad maintenance. But nobody meant for those people to be injured or die.

The Boston explosions are an entirely different animal - even though the damage caused was far less (in both deaths and property destruction). These were clearly a work of malevolence. It is no accident that the first fatality victim identified, and probably the best well-known, is an 8 year old boy - the very definition of an innocent. We don't just feel hurt by these explosions; we feel attacked.

And that is the fundamental distinction, the point that economists miss. Whether I die from an accidental fire or a homicide matters. Human malevolence, alone among all the possible causes of death, is the one that bothers us the most. There are many reasons why this might be - because we feel it should be the most preventable, because we feel the wrongness of it, because we are confronted with our own feelings of anger and hatred that can lead down that road. But for whatever reason, death by the deliberate targeted action of another affects us differently than any other kind.

Both of these stories are national news. Boston will go on being national news for a lot longer, as we sift through the questions - who? and why? chief among them - that accidental explosions do not pose. The memory of the victims of Boston will stay with us, as will the images of response - the pairing of New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox logos, for example, or the singing of "Sweet Caroline" at a Yankees game. All of these things move us, even those of us far away from either event, in a way that accidental tragedy does not.

This is not to say that the victims of both events are not deserving of sympathy and support - and both will be given. But these things feel different. And however much we try to be rational in our policies and responses, that feeling matters for what we do. Many stories are tragic, but not all tragedies affect us in the same way. Statistics and death tolls, in the end, are not the final arbiter - narrative and meaning are. And in a way, that is very smart of us - because we often can't control the statistics, but we can work together to build meaning.

Talking About Violence After the Boston Marathon Explosions

Like a lot of people, I spent some time yesterday checking on friends involved with the Boston Marathon and trying to find out what happened. A good friend of ours had actually just finished the race some 20 minutes before and saw one of the explosions - luckily, she was a block away and wasn't hurt. I know many people who have similar stories. And sadly, there are over a hundred whose stories don't end as well, including (as of this writing) three tragic deaths.

There will be many questions in the coming days, starting with Who did this? and going through How? and Why? A few fringe voices have already cited their favorite suspects (Muslims, natch), but for the most part public conversation has been subdued and sensible. We've seen events like this before - the most direct parallel is the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which was a lone domestic bomber. So for the most part, people aren't rushing to conclusions, which is good.

But there is also an opportunity here to ask larger questions, the ones we never really get around to thinking about. In cases like this, the violence is obviously horrible and indefensible - what legitimate argument can be made for killing an innocent 8 year old kid? We know (at least, most of us know) that this kind of indiscriminate targeting of civilians is wrong.

The question we don't want to ask is, what kind of violence is right? When is it acceptable to use lethal force against other human beings? We've done an awful lot of this overseas in the last decade - even conservative estimates for Iraq and Afghanistan put the casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands. Inside the US we allow ourselves to get distracted by other issues: guns, race, class, and others. Where was the debate after the Trayvon Martin shooting about the circumstances under which it's appropriate to use deadly force in self-defense? It was quickly drowned out by cries of racism on the one side and gun rights on the other.

So as a society, a lot of violence is done on our behalf, and we inflict a lot of violence on each other. But we never get around to talking about the basic question: when, if ever, is violence justified?

I have no doubt that, if we did have a national conversation about this, we would discover a strong diversity of opinion. I have blogged before (here and here) about gut-level views about legitimate views of violence that I find wrong, even abhorrent, which are nevertheless held (in an unexamined fashion) by significant numbers of people. So I don't expect any kind of quick, easy national consensus. These are hard questions.

But because they are hard questions, we need to tackle them head-on. Rules and principles about the legitimate use of force are too important to be left to the category of "you can have yours and I can have mine", because if my personal sense of allowable force includes carrying a gun and shooting whenever I feel threatened, that has an immediate and significant impact on the world you live in. We can, and should, strive to do better than an everyone-for-themselves Hobbesian anarchy.

We tend to put instances like the Boston tragedy, or even the Newtown or Aurora shootings, in their own category, divorced from the rest of reality. But in each of these cases somebody made a decision that lethal violence was justified, even required. Sometimes the people who make those decisions are mentally ill, but not always - neither Terry Nichols nor Timothy McVeigh entered an insanity plea after the Oklahoma City bombing. People make these decisions in context with all the other decisions about violence that get made every day. As American philosopher Elbert Hubbard famously wrote, "So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs."

So by all means let us mourn the tragedy of Boston, comfort the victims, and come together with resolve not to let this kind of senseless violence diminish us. But let us also use it to propel us to a greater understanding of what violence is, and isn't, for. It's high time we had a serious conversation about when we should, or shouldn't, be killing our enemies.

You Keep On Using That Word...

Occasionally I find something amusing on Facebook, and rather than respond to it there I post it here. I do this in part so I don't scare off the "friends" I have on FB who are invaluable sources of information about ideologically and tribally extreme positions. Since those people don't read my blog, I feel pretty safe re-posting their stuff here.

The last couple of days on FB have, to a great extent, been dominated by the "marriage equality" discussion. Far too many of my FB friends have changed their profile pics, so that I can't tell them apart anymore. But what I was really waiting for was for someone on the other side - someone against gay marriage - to take a stand. I finally got my wish today, with this:

One Nation Under God supports Civil Unions this does not prevent anyone from living whatever lifestyle they choose but we believe strongly in the traditional, universally-held belief of a man and woman being required to constitute marriage. God created man and woman for a reason and this is an essential part of His plan of happiness for humankind. Sadly, whenever there is good as we know there tends to be evil. The reason for this particularly against the family is because this is where the potential for the most love and joy exists. Just as in politics those with less than honorable intentions purpose is character assassination so it is where the greatest cause of happiness exist so does Satan's desire exist to take away the ability for humankind to enjoy life. The family his his single greatest threat.

For those who claim because someone doesn't agree with them means they hate them they are nothing more than schoolyard bullies trying to force their own beliefs upon others while hypocritically attacking those who simply follow the traditional and universally-held belief that a man and a woman who have children are what constitutes a family.

This page has been, is and will ever always be for the love of the family. God bless the family!

I certainly support both free speech rights and the right of people to believe whatever theology they choose. But the "argument" here fails to persuade, largely because it rests on a twice-repeated assertion that the "traditional" definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman is "universally-held".

If this were true, would we be having this discussion? I think Inigo Montoya put it best:

Do Political Parties Define Our Lives?

Regular readers of this blog (all three of you) know that I've railed against the tendency for people in general, and Americans in particular, to sort themselves into arbitrary tribes. I long ago included a "Tribalism" label for posts on the subject, and I haven't been shy about using it. Anyone can click that link at the bottom of this post and see what I've written previously on the subject.

But for all of that, even I was taken aback to run across this set of data today:

Republicans' LIfe Ratings Plunge, Democrats' Improve

The data, coming straight from the Gallup organization, is startling. The questions they're asking here are pretty straightforward:

• Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
• Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. Just your best guess, on which step do you think you will stand in the future, say about five years from now?

Basically, they're asking people how happy they are with their lives right now, and how optimistic they are about the future. And the data - in particular, the first graph at the top of the article - demonstrates clearly that the answers vary a lot depending on your political party affiliation, and tend to move very sharply around election time.

If this is true - and given Gallup's track record, I have no reason to doubt their data - this is cause for very grave concern. Are we so given over to our political tribes that our views of our own lives, taken in total, are determined by which party team we associate with?

It cannot be objectively true that Republicans' lives are suddenly worse than Democrats' just because a Democrat won the Presidential race. For most of us, the "best possible life" for us involves our own personal circumstances, where we live, what our job and career prospects are, how much money we have, how healthy our children are, whether we have supportive and meaningful relationships with family and friends, whether our dog is happy and healthy. None of these things, and a thousand more we could add, are changed one iota by the results of an election.

The ability of the President or the Federal government or any other level of government to affect these things is marginal at best, and even that only over time. Yet based on the Gallup data, the lives of millions of Republicans suddenly got worse in November, and the lives of Democrats suddenly got better.

"Ah," you say. "It isn't about how things are now, it's about their views of the future." That seems to be the case, based on the Gallup data, but here again we're deluding ourselves. How well our own lives are doing in five years will be only tangentially affected by government decisions. That isn't to say that government decisions don't matter at all - but for most of us, their immediate impact on our personal circumstances is pretty minimal. My life is much better today than it was three years ago, a result which has nothing whatsoever to do with who was President then or now.

What this points to is, to me, a bit frightening. Far, far too many Americans have apparently drunk the toxic Kool-aid that political parties have been spooning out over the past couple of decades. We make fun of parties during election years for blasting us with "the world is going to end" and "thousand years of darkness" apocalyptic fantasies. But according to Gallup, a lot of us have apparently been listening to this nonsense.

For our own health and sanity, we need to find a way to detox from this sewage. For a people who pride themselves on "rugged individualism" to impute this much power to the state should be anathema. We may prefer some policies to others, but the range of possible political outcomes is pretty narrow. Our mythical "can do" American spirit should be able to work out its own way whatever the outcome of the policy debates. Our success and happiness should be up to us, not dependent on who wins or loses elections every few years. But we have let the political parties - both of them - poison our minds.

So if you find yourself chronically depressed because your guy didn't win the last election - get over it. If you are boldly confident about your future because your guy won, remember that your future success depends on your efforts, not his. And for all of us, let's take responsibility for our own lives and our own happiness - not as Republicans or as Democrats, but as Americans.

Things I Hope Are True

Over the last couple of election cycles, "hope" has become more of an epithet than a virtue. Hilary Clinton, trying to blunt Barack Obama's mighty machine in the 2008 primaries, famously chanted that "hope is not a strategy". Since then, there have been countless knock-offs of the red-and-blue Obama "Hope" poster - some funny and clever, some merely cynical and negative.

But hope is an important part of the human condition. Whatever the level of cynicism, hope draws people in. We need to have hope in something. Maybe it isn't our politicians, or our government, or the other party. But we need to hope that something in the future will look better than it does today.

In that spirit, here are a few things that I hope might be true in light of last night's election results. I don't know if any of these things are true. I'm not even sure if I believe that they are true or not, because the evidence isn't conclusive yet. But there is enough evidence for hope - and that's a start.

1) I hope that we are seeing the limits of money in electoral politics. Much ink was spilled about Citizens United, and I stand with those who think that calling corporations "people" and giving them the same free speech rights as actual citizens is a perversion of both the Constitution and basic Enlightenment notions of personhood and citizenship. But that said - there was a LOT of "outside" money spent in this campaign, at both the national and state levels, and a lot of it lost. Some Senate candidates got tremendous outside support and yet went down in flames. We don't yet know why - maybe Americans' cynicism has inured us from the temptations of negative campaign ads. Maybe campaign ads just don't work at all. But whatever the case, apparently money by itself can't buy elections. And if that's true, that's a very good thing.

2) I hope that we have discovered that strategies based on suppressing votes rather than persuading them, in the end, don't work. My colleague Steve Saideman has written eloquently about what he calls "voterfraudfraud", and penned this today:

My biggest concern: would resentment against voterfraudfraud efforts compensate for successful voter suppression.  It seems that it did.

There was a lot of concern, and very legitimately so, about efforts to make it harder to vote - particularly where those efforts seemed to be aimed obviously (or even openly) at supporters of one side. But in the end, it didn't work. Those efforts lost both in the courts and at the ballot box.

Nate Silver and his ilk knew where yesterday's election was going, but pundits from David Brooks to Joe Scarborough apparently didn't - they all wanted us to believe that it was a "nail-biter", in which any little thing could shift the outcome. Turns out that wasn't true. Were there efforts to suppress votes and lower turnout for Obama? Absolutely. But those efforts came to naught, buried under a blizzard of both legal losses and people willing to stand in line for hours to vote. I hope this serves as a signal to all parties in the future: you can't win by restricting the franchise.

3) I hope that this becomes a real turning point for the Republican party. I say this not out of any trace of schadenfreude, but because the American two-party system works best when it has two well-functioning parties. Right now, one of those parties - the GOP - appears to be coming apart at the seams. It has been at war with itself for years, and barely managed to grit its collective teeth and paper over those differences for this last election. The only unifying force in the party in 2012 was "we don't like Obama". Behind that is a fractious coalition of increasingly intense social conservatives (who are slowly losing the fights they care about most), frustrated fiscal conservatives (dealing with the reality that Nixon was right - we really are all Keynesians now), libertarians (some of who still supported Ron Paul even yesterday), and some leftover neocon hawks and defense-first types (who kept a low profile and hide behind "Support the Troops!") These groups have nothing in common, and in fact contradict each other on many of their most important issues. This isn't a political party, it's a bar fight.

This isn't good for American governance. There are important ideas in all of those factions that need to be heard. But the Republican party of today is a lousy vehicle for giving voice to any of them. Romney himself is almost perfectly symbolic - in trying to be everything to everybody, he was little to anybody. Even David Brooks, the NYT's designated right-hander whose job it is to pull for the GOP, complained about the many faces of Mitt.

One of two things needs to happen. Either we need to get just enough of a shift in American electoral rules to allow for the creation of third parties - which would permit the GOP to split into its organic components and allow those components to grow or shrink on their own - or the party needs a new paradigm, a new center around which some voices can gather. The latter is probably more likely, but it will mean that some - most likely, those on the losing side of demographic and social changes - will get left out in the cold. That's unfortunate, but probably ultimately necessary. Shrinking minorities can't be allowed to hold the rest of the system hostage - in any form of democratic republic, at some point you lose the fight and move on.

I don't know if any of these things is true, or if any of them will come to pass. Unlike Silver and his fellow econometricians, I don't have the data to confidently predict where the future is going. But on this post-election morning, I do find some reasons to hope - and hope is good start to the day.

Avengers: Why Comic Books Aren't Just for Kids

Like most of my geek-minded sisters and brothers, I went to see "The Avengers" this past weekend. It was big and loud and tons of fun, as only a big-budget movie written by Joss Whedon can be. Among fans, it's clear that the folks doing these Marvel movies have gotten it right. It's a Golden Age of Geekdom.

But there is a sense among non-geek/non-comic book fans that those of us who indulge in this stuff are a little Peter Pan-ish - holding on to a last bit of childhood, refusing to quite grow up. This is the air that hangs over a great many geekish things, from comic book movies to game conventions to computer games to sci fi books. For those not of the tribe all of this can seem a little childish, which often feeds a sense of confusion when something like "Avengers" comes along that is wildly popular. I mean, haven't we outgrown all of this yet?

I know plenty of very intelligent adults, of course, who would disagree. Two of my friends have posted excellent articles recently - one that draws lessons from the Avengers story about managing groups, the other that points out all of the excellent illustrations in the movie of Principal-Agent Theory. Clearly there's something more here than explosions, attractive actors, and witty dialogue.

And while I admire my friend Steve's ability to use popular culture to illustrate political science theories, I think his observations about principals and agents actually tap into something deeper. There is a common thread among movies, books, video games, and other stories about "big conflicts" - a fundamental narrative that we tell over and over and over. Sometimes it involves superheroes, sometimes cowboys, sometimes aliens, sometimes soldiers. But the root narrative is always there, because it reflects one of the fundamental questions of the human condition.

What is this fundamental story? To call it "good guys and bad guys" is too simple, although it is that. What separates the good from the bad nearly always includes command structure - the principal-agent problem. The "bad guys" are always led by a single leader, an overlord who has absolute control over his minions. In "The Avengers" this is made obvious from the very beginning, in which the bad guy demonstrates the power to magically turn people to his side - a form of mental domination that erases all free will. This is one of those fundamental hallmarks of the bad guys - they seek (and usually obtain, to some degree) domination over the will of others.

The good guys, on the other hand, don't work this way. Among the Avengers, the group argue with each other. Their personalities clash, they disagree, they get in each other's way, they even fight. They talk back to authority figures (Nick Fury) and distrust them (with good reason). Up and down the chain of command, there are breakdowns and disagreements (think Nick Fury with a rocket-launcher). They're messy and chaotic.

And that's the whole point. The reason we tell stories like this is not that the good guys win out over the bad guys. With precious few exceptions we ALL think we're the good guys, and unless you have a deeply-rooted martyr complex we all want to win out over our enemies.

We tell these stories because we want reassurance that the oldest way of solving the problem of social order - to impose it from above with ruthless power that crushes freedom and individuality with cruelty, oppression and fear - is not the only way. Stories like the Avengers help us work through one of the thorniest problems of human existence: how do individual freedom and social order co-exist? Nearly all of the grand narratives and deep thought systems, from philosophy to theology to literature, grapple with this question.

So to those who think that comic books are just for kids, and adults who read them should just grow up: this really is serious literature. Underneath all the explosions and cool superpowers, these are stories about the fundamental questions of humanity. And if we're lucky, some of the many people who go see this movie will come out thinking a little bit harder about teamwork and order and freedom.

Of course, the snappy dialogue and cool special effects don't hurt. If we're going to think deep thoughts about philosophy, why not have fun at the same time?