This passage comes from The Cheating Culture, and it’s well worth a good read in these times:

We have been living in the age of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the age of family values and zero tolerance. Religious figures and intellectuals and newspaper columnists have talked endlessly in recent years about moral issues large and small: teen pregnancy, school uniforms, violent video games, graffiti, pedophilia, welfare dependency, crime, drug use, and so forth. God, who previously didn’t play much of a role in American politics, has come to be as omnipresent in election campaigns as corporate donors seeking favors.

Yet America’s watchdogs of virtue have been largely silent about the new epidemic of cheating. To be sure, rampant cheating by students has begun to receive attention in the past several years. And the recent corporate scandals induced a media feeding frenzy. There have also been big stories about cheating by athletes, or tax evasion, or plagiarism by journalists. Still, there’s been very little effort to connect all these dots and see them for what they represent: a profound moral crisis that reflects deep economic and social problems in American society.

Concerns about cheating do not jibe easily with the way that Americans have talked about values and personal responsibility since the early 1980s. That conversation has been orchestrated by conservatives and the religious right, while liberals — often uncomfortable talking about values — have largely kept their mouths shut. America’s moral ills were defined in the ’80s and ’90s in terms that reflected traditional conservative worries, with a focus on things like crime, drugs, premarital sex, and divorce. Other concerns — little problems like greed, envy, materialism, and inequality — have been excluded from the values debate.

The first time I read this passage, I felt it to be a stunning indictment of conservative politics over the course of my lifetime. When, as a young man growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I heard about homelessness and its associated hardships from one group of people and the laziness of the poor from another group of people, I knew there was a serious disconnect. Later on, when I worked in the world of software support, it was pretty easy to tell that our office was made up of folks from a variety of backgrounds, and that wild disparities of ability existed between us. My time at Ga. State, however, has been more enlightening, I feel, than any of my previous experiences.

For example, I’ve learned to limit when I say, “the truth lies somewhere between the extremes.” Sometimes loud people and loud groups are simply wrong, no matter how loud and obnoxious they get.

In the case of those who are not so well-off, this is one of those times where it’s appropriate to stop relying on quick rationalizations to justify ineffective silver bullet solutions. (This logic should really be used for the many issues I’ve painfully seen become trivialized this election season, especially terrorism.) Stop and think for a moment how we got where we are at today. Over my lifetime, Reagan’s quip that government is the problem has been preached to me so many times, yet I still don’t buy it — it’s too simple an argument. No matter how forceful the argument is made, or how loud and obnoxious the anti-regulation zealots get, I’m not going to buy it. For me to make the case that the government needs to get off my back requires that I first feel that the government actually is on my back.

I pay my taxes like a good citizen should. They pave me some roads. If they’re smart, they lay down some public transit, too. They provide me with an education. If they’re smart, they’ll fund education to its fullest extent. They support basic research. If they’re smart, they’ll release the results to the public domain and let the private market take over when it becomes more profitable to innovate. They provide police and fire protection. If they’re smart, they’ll pay these folks enough to live in the same region, too. I could go on about the many things my taxes pay for that too many people take for granted these days.

This is precisely where some of our major problems lie. In waxing morality on wedge issues, we forget about some of the things that are so important to our civic lives. Concerns about greed, envy, materialism, and massive inequality get shouted down as socialist concerns. After less than thirty years, it’s becoming easier to see where our society goes when the shouters misdirect the public to ignore them. These are not socialist concerns — my only encounters with socialist knick knacks have revealed to me that socialists are crazy blockheads with an obsession toward utopia, revolution, workers unions, and awful musk-scented oils — not to mention, there is an awful lot of misdirected contempt among them directed toward free enterprise. The more prevalent shouters, meanwhile, have misled much of the public to believe that liberals are socialists.

The shouters, however, believe that free enterprise and religious fundamentalism are the saviors of civilization. There is no concern for civic life, honesty in business, justice, or education. The conservative model is not sustainable. It relies on continuing tax breaks when they are not needed. It relies on a more closed system of government when we need a more open system. It relies on irrational fears such as the fear that social and environmental responsibility lead to economic doom. It relies on greed and materialism as virtues when a more tempered and rational self interest (as defined in my Economics textbooks) would serve as a more sustainable and business-friendly model.

In reading The Cheating Culture, keeping up with the News through a variety of sources, reading magazines, actively applying what I’ve learned in my classes to these situations, and reading a variety of other books, what I’ve come to realize is that we as a society too often focus on the wrong things. This passage gives us a glimpse into what has truly gone wrong and where conservatives have led us astray.

The new Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead is so far very persuasive and interesting. It’s the second book I’ve read this year on the decline of Western values/civilization (the first being The Cheating Culture). Both books so far have a very similar problem. It’s not that I don’t buy into their arguments: I do. While they make great arguments, both of the authors don’t seem to do a very good job at backing up their arguments with relevant facts. I wouldn’t fault them too much for this problem, though. They both have a similar challenge: to make a very broad statement about the state of our culture. That’s difficult to do from an objective standpoint primarily because the viewpoint presented is very subjective.

In any case, all that out of the way, while the Democratic convention is starting I think it’s worth mentioning the main point of Dark Age Ahead. I’ve read articles several times over the past year (if not more than a year) about the inability of liberals to get a consistent and compelling message out to the public — hence, the neo-conservative dis(r)evolution we’ve seen take place over the course of my lifetime. Jane Jacobs, in making her case that we’re heading to a time where we’ve forgotten what we forgot as a society and civilization, claims:

In the five chapters that follow, I single out five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm, and discuss what seem to me ominous signs of their decay. They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness. These five jeopardized pillars are

• community and family (the two are so tightly connected they cannot be considered separately)
• higher education
• the effective practice of science and science-based technology (again, so tightly connected they cannot be considered separately)
• taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
• self-policing by the learned professions.

It may seem surprising that I do not single out such failings as racism, profligate environmental destruction, crime, voters’ distrust of politicians and thus low turnouts for elections, and the enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class. Why not those five, rather than the five I have selected to concentrate upon? Surely the second five indicate serious cultural dysfunction. Perhaps my judgment is wrong, but I think these second five are symptoms of breakdown in the five I have chosen to discuss. Furthermore, many North Americans are already aware of them as dangerous flaws and are trying to focus on intelligent corrections.

The five pillars: a starting point. Imagine if the Democrats could bring Jacobs’ five pillars to light over the course of the convention. There’s no advocacy for specific policies, but instead a direction for where public policy should be headed. Imagine if the Democrats could get that vision thing down pat in a way that would energize the non-voting public in addition to the base. Could the five pillars be a start?

On Community and Family: Families are too often torn apart by divorce and are left without adequate social networks, especially for the children. Republicans are not addressing the problem: they merely use scapegoats. (Insert broader vision here. Keep in mind, I’m no crafty political messenger)

On Higher Education: Our education system is failing us. Republicans have put too much emphasis on credentialing, and not enough on education. Our education system should not only teach our children how to take tests, but also how to think critically. We need to invest more in higher education to invest more in our futures.

On Taxes: It’s time for a real, meaningful overhaul of government bureaucracy. Republicans have a goal of slash and burn. We have a goal to make the government meaningful and relevant to the lives of the citizens. The government is not the enemy because we the people are the government.

And so on. Yeah, it’s a very rough draft and it’s poorly worded for a mass audience — very poorly worded. But to me, it’s still compelling. In my own head, at least, I’d like to think Jane Jacobs is on to something, and it would be worth it for the Democrats to take that message and run with it.

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. Of course planners, including the highwaymen with fabulous sums of money and enormous powers at their disposal, are at a loss to make automobiles and cities compatible with one another. They do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow—with or without automobiles.

The simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities, and a growing number of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problem of cities. Cities have much more intricate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You can’t.

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Just read it over and over. Then when you’ve finished reading this passage so many times, read it again. Then think about GRTA board member Richard Tucker, who was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as saying, “I don’t think we can plan our transportation infrastructure around social engineering.” He believes that GRTA’s only function should be to alleviate traffic. He believes that traffic is the only problem that needs to be solved, then everything else will be okay.

Well, it won’t. Not to mention, GRTA is engaging in “social engineering” no matter what it does.

Several weeks ago, the new board met to rewrite its mission statement. Maria Saporta, writing for the AJC, reported how some of the subtle changes so strongly affect how GRTA will work through the Perdue regime. They will hold themselves not accountable to taxpayers, but to roadbuilding interests such as Mike Kenn’s deviously named “Georgians for Better Transportation.” Changes in the GRTA mission statement included changing “transportation choices” to “mobility,” “MARTA” to “local transit authorities.” Additions include advocating for “cost-effective projects” and solutions that can be “quickly implemented.”

To a simpleton (and that’s what GBT wants you to be), these things sound all fair and good. They’re not. They’re the same sorts of simple solutions that bad planners use to make up for their poor planning habits. If traffic can be alleviated, then we’ve done our job.

These “solutions” include choosing the lowest cost option to alleviate traffic along the I-75 corridor in Cobb County, turning GA 316 into a “high tech corridor,” building the Northern Arc (thank goodness that was nixed), destroying a Marietta neighborhood so that commuters can pass through Marietta with greater ease, denying the City of Roswell the right they have to choose their own destiny simply because Alpharetta St. is a state road… should I keep going?

Someone could probably make a whole list of bad projects whose sole myopic vision is to alleviate traffic. That would include all the interstates and many of the arteries.

This passage is made up of clips from an excerpt of Robert Reich’s book Locked in the Cabinet. In it, he describes his tour through the L-S Electro-Galvanizing factory in Cleveland. As he takes his tour through the plant, he asks the front-line workers various questions to see if they pass his “Pronoun Test.” Do the workers describe the company as “they” and “them,” or as “we” and “us?”

“Hi! What’s it like to work here?” I ask the first person on the factory floor who’s running a piece of equipment, a huge rolling machine disgorging a continuous four-foot-wide sheet of flat steel. He’s about twenty, with long hair and a beard.

This is not likely to be a moment of brutal candor. The plant manager is standing next to me, the CEO is just behind, and the TV camera is recording the whole scene. We are bathed in an intensely bright spotlight.

“Oh, I like it a lot.” The kid pushes the hair out of his face, which is covered with pimples.

The plant manager and the CEO smile. Then I begin the test. “Tell me a little about this company.” I expect another flunk.

“Oh, we work hard here. We put out a good product.”

Hmm? I thank him and move on to another fellow down the line who’s monitoring a machine that lays a thin layer of gray liquid over the steel. Plant manager, CEO, camera, and spotlight all move with me.

“Hello.” I extend my hand. This fellow is stout, balding, middle-aged. He shakes my hand limply. “So, tell me about this machine,” I ask.

“This is our new zinc-coater. We got it last month.”

Two for two.

Five minutes later, I’m talking with a woman who drives a forklift, carrying steel coils to the delivery dock. I ask her about company-sponsored training.

She delivers this stunner: “We train everyone on a variety of jobs. Our goal is for everyone to know the whole operation.”

…

At L-S Electro-Galvanizing, worker committees do all the hiring, decide on pay scales linked to levels of skill, and set production targets. They rotate jobs, so every worker gradually learns about the entire system. More than ten percent of payroll is spent on training. And jobs are secure. Even during the recession, when its customers were scaling back, the company kept everyone on board.

…

“Fifteen percent return on equity. We’re growing twenty percent a year,” [the CEO] says… “This is the most profitable cold-rolled steel company in the Midwest, maybe in all America.

Jump forward to today.

A recent news story on the current elevation in the terror alert level quoted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “You ask, ‘Is it serious?’ Yes, you bet your life. People don’t do that unless it’s a serious situation.” The headline to the story highlighted the “you bet your life” part of his statement. But when I read the full quote, the use of the word “people” stood out to me, partly due to the passage from Reich’s book.

This is a real nit-pick, I know. But I hear the word “people” used too often and too loosely to strengthen arguments. In my own mind, use of the word “people” just triggers a red flag when I’m engaged in either political or organizational-related discussion. To me, language is important, and it can help me predict an individual’s hidden attitude or motivation. Some examples of how the subtleties of spoken language can be significant can be given with a few things I’ve heard over the past few years. While none of these statements are likely true one hundred percent of the time, they are statements I’ve heard people say that help them make behaviorial and attitudinal predictions:

• People who say “people” in their arguments don’t have much ground to stand on.
• The tenants who are the least likely to pay their rent on time are the same people who always end their conversations with “Have a blessed day.”
• A job applicant who asks about money during the interview is more interested in money and won’t contribute to the organization.

There are others, and I could probably stand to offend just about everybody with more generalizations about what people say and what they mean. The point here really goes back to Donald Rumsfeld’s comment about what people are doing.

Perhaps the real intent of his statement was to say that we shouldn’t question the motives of the folks who decide where the terrorist alert level stands. After all, they take their jobs seriously enough and they’re not going to raise the alert level out of some political motivation. Not to mention, perhaps Rumsfeld uses the word “people” instead of “we” to mean that homeland security is a separate department from defense, so he has no connection with what goes on over there. The consequence is that there is only one way to describe “connecting the dots” — useless.

On the other hand, his use of the word “we” could go more along the lines of where my own prejudice lies. After all, Rumsfeld isn’t the one doing the work. So when something goes wrong under his watch, he’s not really responsible. Those “people” can take the blame.

Not knowing the mind of Donald Rumsfeld, I can’t really vouch for what his motivations really were in using the word “people.” Either way, for anyone who feels that language is important, it’s a troubling sign of where the lines of accountability lie within the administration.

There’s an underlying lesson in leadership, whether that’s corporate or political leadership. As someone in a position of leadership, it’s very important — not to mention, difficult — to not only become a part of the “we,” but also to allow others an opportunity to become a part of the “we.” If “people” and “they” become a normal part of your vocabulary, the leader can falter by allowing this subtlety in language become not only a part of your attitude, but also a defining element of the corporate culture.

Surgeons, as a group, adhere to a curious egalitarianism. They believe in practice, not talent. People often assume that you have to have great hands to become a surgeon, but it’s not true. When I interviewed to get into surgery programs, no one made me sew or take a dexterity test or checked to see if my hands were steady. You do not even need all ten fingers to be accepted. To be sure, talent helps. Professors say that every two or three years they’ll see someone truly gifted come through a program—someone who picks up complex manual skills unusually quickly, sees tissue planes before others do, anticipates trouble before it happens. Nonetheless, attending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to keep at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end. As a former residency director put it to me, given a choice between a Ph.D. who had cloned a gene and a sculptor, he’d pick the Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he’d bet on the sculptor’s being more physically talented; but he’d bet on the Ph.D.’s being less “flaky.” And in the end that matters more. Skll, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It’s an odd approach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They start with minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same homegrown ranks.
—Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve”

There’s a certain extent to which there’s not much to say about this. The entire essay, on the issue of practice versus perfection in the medical field, is quite long and rather informative about the issue of hands-on training for residents in the healthcare field.

The striking element of this paragraph was the use and application of the word “egalitarianism.” An egalitarian outlook is one that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, believes in “equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people.” So, if I understand the author correctly, every surgeon begins residency with the same potential, and will survive purely through practice, not talent. If this notion is taken further and applied to other areas, a more universal truth behind the notion of egalitarianism begins to emerge.

For example, there is the old riddle of how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. In the world of music, I’ve always heard an emphasis on the notion of talent, especially in classical music. There are talented pianists, talented rock stars and talented singers. That’s what they say, at least. However, what I’ve personally witnessed tells me a different story. I’ve seen singers who start out virtually tone deaf, then through many hours of practice and hard work, become soloists. In witnessing this dedication to music, whole audiences receive entertainment and (presumably) a sense of inspiration to greater things.

In the world of politics the application of the egalitarianism concept translates to the practice (or the art) of winning elections and re-elections. Just as surgeons may make an imprecise incision or musicians may hit a wrong note, many politicians lose some of their elections before winning higher offices. That’s one way of looking at it. On the other hand, politics is not simply about winning elections. To be an elected administrator or legislator is itself a practice. Clarence Stone’s book Regime Politics, for example, focused on the importance of forming alliances in not only winning elections, but also in running a city and keeping the peace. In a real world example, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to play politics with Ari Fleischer is said to have been a decisive move that facilitated her long-term effectiveness as a senator.

When politics is cast in an egalitarian light rather than a competitive light, ideology and self-interest matter less; the public interest (presumably) matters more. Rather than fight over what our founding fathers intended&emdash;they had ideological disagreements among each other&emdash;we can at least take a look at the compromise they eventually came up with, our Constitution. It is not the practice of winning elections and advancing a particular ideology that would matter nearly as much as advancing the public interest and providing public goods in an efficient manner.

To that end, it may be worth studying what factors account for shifts in the voting preferences of the public. A research study that followed Reagan’s win for a second term as president found that “no liberal-to-conservative shift occurred during the 1980s… Some measures of voting strength during the 1980-86 period show that liberal legislators received slightly higher support than conservative candidates” (”The Myth of the Conservative Shift in American Politics” by Larry Schwab, Western Political Quarterly, Dec. 1988). Is it possible, then, that the general public would respond less to ideology and more to a skilled political practice? If only it were that simple.

As noted in The Economics of Collective Choice (p. 238), while the ideological positions of voters tend to be moderate, legislative politicians tend to listen to the extremes among the ideological spectrum. What research has found is that “participation in the political process is highly self-selective. Consumers, workers, voters, and firms who have the largest net gains from action (or the largest net losses from inaction) will tend to participate.” Ideological groups, as a result, tend to cluster and vote together. The question remains: how does the seasoned politican figure into this formula? Of any application on the notion of career-oriented egalitarianism, the political application may be the most difficult.

There are a few entries here and there where I’ve quoted passages from books, papers, essays, etc., and sometimes made some commentary on them.

In the case of “Motivation, Happiness, Nostalga” I merely quoted from the passage without giving commentary. That was probably a mistake, but the quote was quotable nonetheless.

In “Heschel and Hierarchies” I made some attempt to comment, though I don’t think my commentary was really worth all that much hoo-ha.

Having said all that, there’s a particular point I want to make, and it’s about this blog entry. This blog entry will mark the introduction to a series of blog entries I’ll call Passages. Perhaps I’ll eventually put all the Passages entries off in the sidebar, but whatever happens, just be forewarned that if you see an entry with a title of “Passages, Part Whatever” you might find it worth your while to skip that blog entry and move on. That way, if I find myself working a little harder on my Passages entries, you’ll never notice. If I fully follow through on the idea, then you can be further forewarned that the typical Passages entry will be a bit longer than normal.

Who knows. Maybe there will be some hoo-ha for dessert.