I went to the new Whole Foods at the Ink Block development (so-named because it sits where the Boston Herald used to publish) in the South End yesterday. I want to clarify that when the press release says it offers “a large beer, wine and spirits selection”, they are not at all kidding about the “spirits” piece. I was not expecting that. I expected that they’d have only wine, but no: they have enough bottles to stock a full home bar with top-shelf liquor. In particular, they have a lot of local stuff, including from Bully Boy and Berkshire Mountain Distillers. I checked one of their prices against what I’d get at my favorite local liquor store, and it was identical. Not sure if that’s true in general, but it’s a hopeful sign.
Author: stevereads
I realize that I never wrote a review of Diane Ravitch’s excellent Reign of Error, which I finished last April. Herewith, just a few notes. It’s an important book, it deserves to be widely read, and I should contribute what I can to its momentum.
- The ‘public’ in ‘public school’ is not for nothing. Public schools are to be democratically controlled. A privatized school, without democratic accountability, is not a public school, no matter whether it’s labeled that way.
- Privatizing public schools invites the sort of corruption you’d expect when management is removed from public view.
- Privatized schools will do what private businesses do, namely maximize profits. There are only a couple ways to raise profits: cut costs, or raise revenues. Very often privatized public schools take the first approach. One obvious way to cut the costs of public schools is to keep out the harder-to-educate students — the students with learning disabilities, the students from broken homes, the students with developmental problems. Private schools often succeed by catering to the easiest students, leaving public schools with the problem students. This, of course, only accelerates the flow out of public schools. [1]
- I don’t think Ravitch explicitly says this, but the realization of item 3. — it’s clear to anyone who thinks about how privatization would work — then invites public regulation. You might decree, for instance, that attendance at any of the privatized public schools should be open to everyone regardless of talent and so forth. When there’s money on the line, though, you can foresee the next step in the dance: the privatizers will cut costs in the places where they’re not regulated. Maybe, for instance (Ravitch gives lots of examples here) they’ll expel students who are “misbehaving.” And maybe some of those students really are misbehaving. But maybe a lot of them are just the less-easily-educated students who are costing the corporation too much.
This is a dance we’ve seen before with private health insurance. Since there’s money on the line, insurers have every incentive to only insure healthy people, and find a way to get the sick people out. And since we have public systems (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the VA) that are required to take all eligible patients, there’s an obvious risk that the public system will come to absorb only the hardest cases.
It’s entirely obvious that the solution in both cases is just for the government to run both systems — health insurance and schools — directly, rather than contracting it out and then imposing a set of regulations that grows ever more labyrinthine as the arms race between regulator and regulated advances. Obviously the government’s running any service introduces its own problems. So then there’s the empirical question whether the government runs these services better or worse than private industry does. In the context of health insurance, the answer is “Medicare”: when regulations allow it to work, it works more efficiently than private insurance.
In the context of privatized public schools, Ravitch presents a lot of evidence that, when public schools are allowed to compete on a level playing field with private schools, they do just as well as the private schools. This is not the least bit surprising. Private schools tend to draw wealthy parents, so the inputs are typically better-performing students; it’s then no surprise that the outputs are also better-performing. The question is how well private schools do compared to public schools, given identical inputs. In cities like Boston, that comparison isn’t allowed to happen, because of segregation. But were it allowed to happen, there’s every reason to believe that public schools would perform just as well as private ones. (Books in my queue on this topic: How Not to be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent and The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.)
(By the way: perhaps the conservatives in the room will latch onto the fact that regulators don’t allow Medicare to work properly as evidence that we should take this out of the hands of government, which is so often captured by private interests. The logic, then, is “private interests capture regulators, so the solution is to hand the problem over to private interests.” Right, then.)
- Among the reasons that private-school advocates advance for why private schools should be expected to outperform public ones is that private schools are free from the sort of onerous regulations that bind public schools — particularly contracts with teachers’ unions. Ravitch gives a lot of evidence that this is just elaborate window dressing over the decades-long movement to weaken labor unions, rather than any particular concern with the nimbleness of private education.
- Ravitch writes somewhere (on the web) that we don’t have a schools problem in this country; we have a poverty problem. I can’t find the piece right now (Googling for [ravitch poverty problem] returns plenty of interesting pieces, just not the one I was thinking of), but her claim is that middle-class American students in “poorly performing” schools do just as well as middle-class students in any other nation.
- Confusing our poverty problem with a schools problem has led the Gates Foundations of the world to advocate privatization as the balm that cures all ills. This may be what they earnestly believe, but it also plays into the ideology and self-interest of the American business community.
Reign of Error is a really excellent work. It deserves to be read and widely discussed.
[1] – Here’s where it’s important to cite Albert Hirschman’s legendary Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. The ability to take your kids out of the public school and send them to a private school (“exit”) amplifies the decline in “voice”; that is, the parents who are most involved in the public school, and care the most about the kids’ education, would be among the first to take their kids to a better school when the public school decays. When the most interested parents leave, the school that remains is even more impoverished and is quicker to decay, thereby hastening faster exit.
Oh, such a clever book. Such a clever, clever book. It’s what would happen if The Complete Upmanship were written by a Ph.D. sociologist. It is hilarious in a very dry, British way literally right up to the final footnote on the final page.
The Rise of the Meritocracy is written from a future-retrospective perspective after Britain has turned fully meritocratic. Now everyone’s place in society is based purely on their merit, not on any other irrelevant details of their personality. To get there, we first had to neuter the power of entrenched wealth; this was achieved through punitive (100%?) estate taxation. Of course this led the wealthy to give their money away while still alive, so more taxation had to be added there.
Then we had to eliminate preference on the basis of seniority. At first this would seem to be anti-meritocratic, but the idea is that, if we want to measure merit, we should measure merit directly rather than measure seniority as its proxy. Hence workers were rigorously tested throughout their lives; whenever they deserved to rise through the ranks, they did so, perhaps leapfrogging those senior to them in the process.
There’s an assumption lurking under all of this, which Young makes explicit only toward the end: economic output is considered the overriding goal of the society. That’s why it makes sense (this comes early on) to get rid of general schools that keep the talented and the less-talented together, and to instead separate out the wheat from the chaff; to do otherwise would be to harm the nation’s overall productivity. In the interests of productivity, then, the bright students must be pulled away from the dull students as early as possible. Hence, essentially, eugenics develop, to identify the talented as soon as possible; again, to do otherwise would be to waste those talents during their formative years. Naturally, of course, any meritocratic system of testing would ensure that if your talents only mature later in life, you should be just as able as the early bloomers to advance to the talented track.
One predictable outcome of all of this is that the children of the talented are overwhelmingly — not 100%, but overwhelmingly — talented. We thus seem to have reinvented the hereditary aristocracy, only this time under the ostensibly benign guidance of talent rather than nobility. By the time Young tells his fictional future story, the population has largely grown to internalize the wisdom of the existing social order, just as (Young says somewhere) those born during the era of the hereditary nobility never questioned the wisdom of granting power in proportion to landownership. Of course, there are those among the lowest classes who scream from the fringes, but they’re disorganized. And since, by this point, all the most talented people have been siphoned off into a meritocratic upper class, the lower classes are represented by only the least talented. So the system is nicely self-reinforcing.
Tremendous, disturbingly hilarious read. Highly recommended.
John Dewey says that the term ‘public’ isn’t vacuous: if I buy a used car from you, that’s a transaction between two private actors that doesn’t radiate (arguably) beyond the two of us. What counts as ‘public’ are exactly those transactions whose effects spill beyond those involved in them. The state is called into being to regulate actions which are public in this sense. This defines government not by its origins or its particular means of accomplishing what it accomplishes, but rather by a set of effects that it wants to regulate. This is Dewey’s philosophy throughout The Public and Its Problems: look always at effects as a way of clarifying things. (Does this make him a pragmatist? A consequentialist? Anyway, consistent with what Dewey himself might say, the label doesn’t matter so long as we all know what we’re talking about in any specific case.)
But then it gets confusing, first because, obviously, you can make the case that most any transaction has consequences that spill beyond the immediate actors. (Let’s do like the economists do and call these ‘externalities.’ There are both negative and positive externalities, depending upon whether we like the consequences.) I buy a pack of cigarettes from the corner store, then go and smoke one of them on the street corner; should the cashier at the bodega be required to pay for his role in my covering passersby with secondhand smoke?
The second reason why this definition of ‘public’ gets confusing is specific to Dewey’s book. When my dentist puts surgical implements in my mouth, that’s purely private; but society has an interest, Dewey says, in regulating dental licensure generally. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t really pursue this distinction between the act and the general environment in which the act takes place, but it seems rather important. It’s also interesting that he doesn’t pursue the direction that some libertarian economists would take, namely that (in the age of Yelp especially, let’s say) the fear of a bad reputation is a sufficient replacement for licensure. But in any case: if one private transaction isn’t public, then what makes many such transactions, considered in the aggregate, public? You and I can both think of obvious explanations here, so there’s no real need to pursue them. And perhaps it’s for the best: maybe Dewey didn’t exist in a time of fatuous libertarians, so he didn’t feel obliged to justify himself to them. It was a better time for everyone.
We live, and Dewey lived, in an era when industrialization had upended much of what we thought about the public and about community. The doctrine of individualism, which did much to break the bonds of society, was born at the same time as steam-power, and in Dewey’s telling this is not coincidental: inventors had unlocked great potential in man through the use of labor-saving machinery, yet mercantilism and royalty conspired to prevent its full use. Individualism was meant to break free from this, and save man from stifling collectives. But ironically, says Dewey, the doctrine arose just as man’s individual identity was being submerged within giant institutions run by industrialists. Individualism, in this telling, is the thin transition layer between eras of repression.
After industrialization, people moved off to live in cities, thereby destroying the close personal connections that they might have had with their neighbors. In that earlier era we might have had a ‘community’; now we don’t. The small-scale community has been replaced with a large-scale mob. A large number of people, each watching the same television program, does not a community make. People like Walter Lippmann would then say, well, to hell with the community; you can’t organize a functioning government out of an ignorant mass. Lippmann would say, let’s have rule by the technocratic élite. Dewey pushes in the opposite direction: reconstruct community out of that mob. And the way to do that, in the modern era, is by means of the same mass communication that so lamely connects us.
The community of physical scientists, which has flourished during the era of industrialization, is one model for the great community that Dewey envisions. He says that we’ve mastered the physical sciences but done little with the human sciences, and that mastering the human sciences is a necessary step on the road to building the great community. I hear in here an optimistic story of how, say, business cycles can be controlled. I can’t draw you a complete picture of how we got from there to here, but I would hazard a guess that economists as a group are less optimistic than Dewey was, nearly a century ago, about the prospects of economic control.
When it really mattered — during the first and second world wars — we certainly did manage to control the economy plenty well. That’s a story about which I’ve read little. I know its broad outlines, and some of its details; in Bowling Alone, I think it was, the author notes that eighty percent of American males were involved in the war effort during World War II. It might even be more specific or greater than that: it might be 80% of all Americans (including, say, women working in explosives factories at home), or it might be that 80% of all males served in uniform. But in any case, a significant fraction of Americans’ labor was redirected into total war. This must have meant that a significant fraction of labor which had been involved in producing food for domestic consumption was now solely producing it for soldiers on the front lines. Likewise at every scale of economic production, from shoes up to civilian aircraft. Since the economy had now converted most of its slack resources (human and otherwise) into military production, there was a great risk of inflation. The government responded to this by limiting wages, imposing rationing, etc. So when we need to harness collective energies, we can. The rest of the time, we choose not to. (This would be of a piece with Piketty‘s depressing observation that inequality has only really decreased when war has taken the asset-owning class’s assets and blown them up. It’s also of a piece with all of Bowling Alone.)
The challenge, then, is to construct a community without the impetus of war. When people feel peace within their communities and their society, they will feel peace in their own minds. The life of an individual human is inseparable from the life of his or her community; sickness in the one will lead to sickness in the other. I take from Dewey a very optimistic view of how to return peace to humans, and to human civilization.
At some level, the central thesis of this book is unobjectionable: the public can’t possibly be expected to pay attention to, and consider in a thoughtful way, every issue of public import. Society is complicated, and none of us can be an expert on everything that’s important. We can’t all know about the science behind global warming, the proper response to the ISIS threat, how we should handle income inequality (sidebar: can we talk about asset inequality instead? It’s likely to be a more durable problem), and so on. So, Lippmann says, let’s just give up on the unattainable ideal of mass democracy. It made sense in ancient Athens, and it may make sense in small towns; but in a large, complex, industrial democracy, we’re pining for an ideal that made sense to Jefferson but stopped making sense a few decades later.
Lippmann not only thinks that mass democracy is an unattainable ideal; he thinks it would be a bad idea even if it were possible for all of us to weigh in on every subject. Perhaps the Internet makes it possible, for instance, to give everyone a vote on every subject. Were Lippmann alive today, he’d tell us that we’d just make a hash of it, and that we should ditch such an idea. Again, we’re all, most of us, most of the time, going to be ignorant on most topics that come before us.
So we delegate to those who know better. We delegate telecommunications policy to the FCC and to the relevant Congressional committees; we delegate health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services; etc.
Considered properly, says Lippmann, there’s actually no such thing as ‘the public’ which is interested in this or that subject. There are many different publics. My public might be concerned with privacy on the Internet in the post-Edward Snowden era; your public might be concerned with gun rights. There is no such thing as ‘the public’.
That seems very wrong to me, inasmuch as all of these things affect all of us. When my child’s school gets shot up by an outcast eighth grader, I’m concerned very much with gun rights; when Google hands your search results over to the FBI without a warrant, I hope you’re concerned about your privacy. Defining a ‘public’ and its particular problems by the issues on which it can knowledgeably weigh in seems rather limited.
The ideal that Lippmann seems to be chasing is a technocratic elite: I delegate the solution to these problems to someone who (it’s stipulated) knows how to solve them better than I do. But mightn’t the technocrats be captured by those they’re regulating, or might they indeed be self-serving? Indeed they might. To solve this problem, Lippmann introduces a (grudging?) role for the public: we get to watch our technocratic betters debate one another, and we get to decide whether one or both of them is self-serving.
Even by the terms of Lippmann’s own argument, this seems wrong-headed. Suppose two parties are debating what should be done about asset inequality. One side proposes a small asset tax. The other side says that there’s not even a problem to solve; it says that asset inequality is what the Madonnas and Bill Gateses of the world deserve. According to Lippmann, we in the public are not supposed to be involved in deciding matters of policy, so let’s make this debate Lippmann-friendly and say that it’s between two politicians who are supposed to go and solve the problem of asset inequality — or not, depending upon which one we choose. Well, what now? Both sides seem quite earnest; I trust that both the Democrats (Piketty’s side, roughly) and the Republicans (Mankiw’s) believe sincerely that their views of the world are correct, and that the other side is making a major, harmful mistake. So neither is self-serving. And by stipulation, the public is too ignorant to decide on matters of policy. Yet we’re supposed to be smart enough to choose between two men arguing vehemently over fundamental values underlying those matters of policy. Does not compute. If we’re too ignorant to do the one, then we’re too ignorant to do the other.
Maybe Lippmann believes that we can educate the public to the point where it can at least choose its delegates. Nope; he nixes that idea quite early on. Education moves too slowly, he says. To properly educate Americans in matters of public import, it doesn’t suffice to just teach people broad principles; you’d need to teach them about ISIS and asset inequality and so forth.
So the only option that Lippmann seems to have left us with is to do a poor job delegating to our betters over matters that we fundamentally don’t understand.
The problem here isn’t just that Lippmann has left us with a poor system; it’s that his whole perspective on democracy is wrong. The point of democratic self-government isn’t to solve particular problems optimally; the point of democratic self-government is democratic self-government. Democracy isn’t the means; it’s the end. And consequently, I think Lippmann also has the wrong picture of the public that he’s facing. He’s picturing the members of a static public, who hold a set of mostly ignorant beliefs on a small set of issues — as opposed to a public which improves itself in order to make itself worthy of its own self-government. Without really saying so, I wonder whether Lippmann is like an economist, solving a static optimization problem: what’s the right way to process a certain fixed set of inputs to achieve a fixed goal?
Consider a narrower problem, namely free speech. There are terrible people out there who use speech to spew hatred. If I were to tell you that the solution to this problem is to limit speech to those who can use it correctly, you would rightly yell me out of the room. You’d do the same if I offered to limit voting to those who scored above a certain minimum level on an intelligence test. That’s because, to repeat, the point of democracy is not to yield better outcomes. Democracy, free speech, and the right to vote would all be desirable ways of structuring a society even if they led to terrible outcomes.
And do they lead to terrible outcomes? The only sensible way to answer that is “Compared to what?” (ObQuote: Churchill on how democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.) Is Lippmann’s technocratic élite, with a largely pliant public that delegates its power every few years and then passively watches for the next few years, any better? That’s an empirical question, but I think it’s fair to say that the historical record has been rather mixed. Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest comes to mind: the Kennedy administration was filled with people like Robert McNamara — a man who had organized the strategic bombing of Germany, had run Ford, and had graduated from Berkeley. These were brilliant men with all the right credentials. Yet the Kennedy men still got us into Vietnam. (Did Walter Lippmann graduate from Harvard? If you’ve read this book, the question answers itself.) On a gut level, I’m willing to call the historical battle between democratic self-government and technocratic management a draw, at best.
So in practice the argument for technocratic management is ambiguous at best. In principle it’s appalling.
The only reason I picked up The Phantom Public is because I’ve heard such wonderful things over the years about John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, which (according to the Wikipedia) is a direct response to Lippmann’s book. I’m expecting much better things from Dewey. I move on to him next.
There’s a real risk that a book like this will be disaster porn — self-aggrandizing disaster porn, no less. As a matter of fact I think that’s the problem that Slate had with Goffman’s book. They believe that her book plays into all the stereotypes about urban black life — dominated as it is, in the American mind, by crack cocaine, gang violence, broken homes, and bombed-out inner cities.
And that is, indeed, the picture that Goffman paints. She lived for years in a run-down Philadelphia neighborhood, the only white girl in the area. At the beginning she just watched and listened and tried to hide while observing. Eventually she worked her way into her neighbors’ good graces and somehow, oddly, seemed to be riding along with everyone as everything happened to them: shootouts, drug deals, police pat-downs. She ran away from the cops alongside her friends. One time she and the neighbors even watched the police strangle one of their friends to death.
Not much that’s uplifting happens to anyone. All three of one woman’s children are either in prison or dead by the end of the book. Her father lives upstairs in her house, keeping his piece of it neat and tidy while she lives on the first floor and allows it to become infested with roaches.
Always, everywhere, the police are watching over Goffman’s friends, waiting for any chance to book them for something and reach their informal monthly quotas. Goffman says police will hound her black friends anywhere they can find them: at her friends’ jobs, when her friends are in the hospital, or even when her friends are attending funerals. This is, I would say, the most controversial part of Goffman’s book, and the aforelinked Slate piece expresses some (mild) doubts that this could even be possible. Do the police even have the resources to run the records of everyone staying at a hospital? Aren’t they focusing on other things? Makes me consider the possibilities that either Goffman just made this stuff up, that she’s hanging around with particularly bad dudes whom the police would bother expending this many resources on, or that reality is really so much worse than I could ever have envisioned.
You have to grant this premise that the police are omnipresent in the lives of inner-city black Philadelphians, or much of the rest of the book just doesn’t make sense. Since black youth expect the police to be on their case everywhere, and expect that they’ll be jailed at the first hint of misbehavior, they are wary of being anywhere where the police can find them. This means they can’t hold down a regular job; they can’t spend time where the police would expect them to be (mother’s house, girlfriend’s house). So they have to sleep on friends’ couches, always ready to duck and dodge.
Again, you need to believe some pretty strong things about police behavior to make this true. The police are so determined to make life miserable for these kids that they have an almost limitless interest in asking neighbors where the kids are staying. They seemingly interrogate everyone so that they can learn about everyone else. Their methods of interrogation turn girlfriends against their boyfriends and children against their parents. The presence of the police, in Goffman’s telling, has done much on its own to destroy the fabric of black community life. No one can trust anyone else. No one can hold down a job without fearing that he’ll be handcuffed and taken away from that job on a moment’s notice, thereby driving many black youth into the underground economy.
It’s a profoundly depressing story with no hopeful upside. Even Goffman’s own return to the white, manicured world of Princeton, New Jersey is fraught; every backfiring engine makes her shriek in anticipation of being shot. Her book reminds me a lot of Gang Leader for a Day, though Goffman inserts herself into the story much more than Venkatesh did. At one point Venkatesh realizes that the Robert Taylor Homes’ residents had all been protecting him without saying so: they’d kept all the really illegal stuff away from him so that he couldn’t incriminate them when, as must inevitably happen, the police asked him what he’d seen. Goffman is so much in the thick of the action that her book is practically begging the police to interrogate her. It’s a very strange book.
I have very mixed feelings about it. Mostly I just want to be convinced that she didn’t make it all up. Then I want to know what to do about it. In a pinch, “end the monumentally destructive war on drugs” will do as a smart policy intervention, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the problem here. There are so many problems that you don’t know where to begin. Begin with the war on drugs? Begin with the lack of job opportunities for high-school dropouts? Begin with the difficulty that convicted criminals have getting jobs? Begin with the CompStat focus on quantifiable policing? Goffman avoids a good many of these questions, quite deliberately: her job is to describe this particular community from the inside, not look down on it from the outside. But her book begs for all of these other questions to be answered.
First of all, bowling leagues aren’t even the half of this book. It’s a quite impressive collection of data arguing that, at every level of our society, no matter how you slice the data, Americans are doing less in groups. We’re going out to eat less; we’re playing cards with other people less; we’re (yes) spending less time in bowling leagues; we’re spending less time in clubs; and we’re less civically engaged.
The big picture, of course, is that it’s going to be very hard to prove causality, and there are a million different ways to argue against this. Maybe we’re spending less time with other people because we’re so busy with work. Nope; we actually have somewhat more free time. Maybe people are less economically secure, so they’re doing all they can to just hold onto their money for dear life. Nope; turns out that this is true among the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class.
The argument is incredibly hard to make, so Putnam comes at us with a frankly overwhelming quantity of data. Each datum might, on its own, be open to rebuttal, but the overall effect is that it’s very hard to dispute the sheer volume of examples. Something really significant happened, starting in about 1960, whereby we just stopped spending time in groups.
Putnam ends up concluding that the most significant contributors to this atomization are television, and the aging of the “great civic generation” (i.e., the Greatest Generation). World War II may have brought Americans together civically, and the end of the war meant the end of a great unifier. Whatever the model that explains it, Putnam seems reasonably convinced of the cause: the people who had been civically engaged are dying, and they’re not being replaced. And then there’s television, which tends to focus us in our homes rather than in, say, movie theaters. Television (apart from certain types, like PBS) also tends to be connected to less civic engagement, even apart from its isolating aspects.
The final chapter of these sorts of books is supposed to tell you “now what?” but here there’s really not much of a next step. The civic generation is dying, and people are watching more isolating television. The first isn’t going to change, and the second is unlikely to change. My intuition (based on nothing but, well, my gut) is that sociological behaviors will tend to have a rapidly-increasing/rapidly-decreasing flavor: if everyone around you is playing bridge together on Saturday night, that will seem like a perfectly lovely thing for you to do, too, and you’ll join in; but if no one else is doing it, you won’t, either. So when people stop playing bridge, groups will stop playing it in a hurry. (I hear echoes here of Simon’s paper on skew distributions, but that’s just a hunch. Maybe there’s a power law somewhere in here, or maybe not.) The question is how to bootstrap the rapid increase. Well, how did civic engagement increase rapidly for the Greatest Generation? A war intervened. Wars tend to focus groups.
So maybe the only answer to our civic woes is to enrobe the world in another cleansing fire.
This book ought to be a few essays. One is a very good — devastating, depressing — essay about women in technology in the U.S.; it argues rather clearly that the problem is not that women are less good at math and science, but rather that certain *sociological* facts about men in technology make the U.S. tech industry very masculine, thereby identifying the tech industry with certain virtues prized in certain subsets of the tech world, thereby identifying women *out* of that industry, thereby perpetuating itself. That essay is wonderful and terrible.
Interwoven with the women-in-tech section is a section that ties it to colonialism. This section is brilliant. Essentially: the first refuge of scoundrels is to prematurely universalize their own biases. It’s not that women have been systematically locked out of the temple, you see; it’s that *evolution itself* dictates that they be excluded. It’s not that their British overlords thought Indians inferior and treated them as such, while treating the Indian economy as an extractive agricultural one meant to feed the British industrial maw; no, it was of course that Indians are *by their nature* effeminate, weak, and deservedly on the bottom rung of the racial ladder. (The Chinese are brilliant, but evil.)
I really hoped this section would go somewhere. It didn’t. Indeed, I really hoped this section indicated the thematic direction and scope of the rest of the book: that we would find history, art, coding, misogyny, and colonialism all wrapped together in a devastating package. It wasn’t meant to be.
Chandra also gives us some scattered essays about the act of programming. Those are great — for me, anyway, and for those who have programmed a computer. I don’t think it will be really understandable by those who haven’t programmed, because Chandra doesn’t give enough context for those folks. I don’t know whom this part of the book was aimed at. Those who’ve programmed will nod vigorously at someone who managed to capture their lifestyle in well-chosen prose form, but was Chandra really trying to preach to the choir? Those who’ve not programmed might get some of it, but I have my doubts.
Finally, the plurality of the book is given over to a description of Indian philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. Most of it was, sad to say, lost on me, for the same reasons that I think the programming section will be lost on non-coders: not enough context, and a great many weighty Indian words thrown at the reader without terribly many examples to lodge them in our consciousness.
At the end of the book there’s a halfhearted attempt to tie all of this together, but I don’t think it goes anywhere.
I’d strongly advise reading the first 75 pages or so, then quietly returning it to the library.
This is a fun little essay, eye-opening and mind-changing. The whig interpretation of history is one that we’re all familiar with, even if we’re not aware of it: that all of history led up to this moment; that anything which seems to further the advance toward this moment is perceived as positive, while those who opposed the advance to this moment are perceived as standing in the way of history’s great upward march; and that, indeed, history can be perceived as an advance, with our progressive existence being the pinnacle of historical development.
There are many problems with this approach, but the main one is that it allows us to shirk our responsibility toward understanding events as they happened. If (this is the example Butterfield spends the most time on) we perceive the Protestant Reformation as the inevitable toppling of a Catholic Church that had become corrupt and repressive, then we view Martin Luther as a hero, and we view 16th-century popes as necessarily evil and opposed to progress. We follow along this line far enough and we end up with Max Weber telling us that Protestantism is the necessary substrate that allows modern capitalism to exist.
If, instead, we understand Luther as he was, we need to confront the fact that, had he stepped in a time machine and seen the anarchy that the Reformation begat, he would surely have apologized and begged for mercy; the world he sought was one of greater orthodoxy; he surely believed that Catholicism’s problem was insufficient adherence to true belief. There’s nothing inherent in Protestant practice that makes it less rigid or less dogmatic than the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
A historian’s job, according to Butterfield, is to tease out the ways that historical change happens, and to understand the role of historical contingency: but for this chance event, things could have turned out far differently than they did. And the contingencies rest on the actions of men and women who were trying to make the best of the complex, fluid situations they faced. Understanding why they did what they did in the context of their times, and how they contributed to historical change, is the historian’s job — not to interpret yesterday in the light of today.
Butterfield would seem to stand with Karl Popper (he of The Open Society and Its Enemies fame) in denying the possibility of something called ‘historical law’. One optimistic reason to try to discover these laws is that we can then, presumably, use the past to guide the future. Popper would tell us that there are no such laws. Butterfield would also tell us that there are no such laws, and that the historian’s job isn’t to find them, either. The historian’s job is to develop historical imagination and historical empathy. That job is quite hard enough; anything more is beyond the historian’s competence.
Butterfield wrote his book in 1931, a few years before the final German catastrophe. I can’t help but think that, had he written it 14 years later, he would be more sympathetic to those who see the nightmares of the past and hope desperately to prevent them. He’d probably still think it was a fool’s errand, but there’d maybe be some more gravity to it. The Whig Interpretation of History was mostly focused on, well, the whigs, and the long-since-concluded battle between Protestants and Catholics; I wonder whether this historiographical fracas seemed important, but fundamentally innocent and remote.
Then again, maybe Butterfield 14 years later would have held up the Nazis as examples in support of his thesis: history is not an ever-upward march, and historical contingencies large or small can lead to unpredictable outcomes.
I don’t know what Butterfield would have said. I could probably research what he said; the man died in 1979. In the absence of that, I could put myself into his shoes and write The World War II Rebuttal To The Whig Interpretation of History.
Steve Reads 