Monday, January 23, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
She Tebow-ed her Way Into My Heart
This is the most popular religion on the planet with a rich history of art, images, symbols, ceremonies. How do you communicate that you are a Christian in an image? Add this to the mix.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Letters From Rick Deckard
I recently received an invitation to enroll in a Business School class. The following introduction is taken directly from the e-mail which I hope was sent to a mass list of students and my name was just form-fed into the bullshit-o-tron 9000.
I'd normally say that this is a laughable attempt to pass the Turing Test, but then it dawned on me that only a human mind could possibly create this much bullshit in the course of three sentences. And following in the footsteps of Aristotle, I'd like to quantify, classify, and organize this bullshit.
Bullshit Level 0
SUSTAINABILITY and QUALITY Courses for SPRING 2012
When you CAPITALIZE the words you want people to READ, it gets under THEIR SKIN because they feel MANIPULATED and it's like YOU ARE SHOUTING.
Bullshit Level 1
This professor would not like to invite me to the course. This professor, by virtue of this very e-mail, has extended me such an invitation. The passive voice is to be avoided, remember? But to form-fill in my name and then start the soft-sell like this is supposed to make me feel less threatened. He is a professor and he would like to do something for me!
Bullshit Level 2
"sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough"
There's no words there! What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything!
Let's have a little talk about sustainability. Sustainability is a very important and laudable goal for any business or society to have. It means that you can 'sustain' the way you do things for a long time (hopefully indefinitely). So a lot of agriculture right now is unsustainable because it uses more groundwater than is being recharged into the aquifer. Agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels which is not a sustainable practice- we are using up more coal, oil, and natural gas than our planet is generating. So a push for 'sustainable' agriculture would mean growing crops that use less water, take up less space, increase the amount of yield you get per amount of energy you expend, etc.
So you can think of all sorts of ways to make different businesses sustainable. You could develop better technology that does a manufacturing process in a way that uses less energy. You can change the packaging on a product so it is more biodegradable.
And now, a bit about strategy. Strategy (in contrast to 'tactics') is knowing what to do to win a game. Tactics are the specific actions you take to execute your strategy. If the game is Settlers of Catan, it may be a winning strategy to buy development cards and build up the Largest Army and have a few victory points. A good tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to place your first settlements near the required resources. A bad tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to convert four of one resource into the resource that you need.
Strategies exist in the business world too, of course. Some companies have expensive advertising campaigns to improve your image of their brand. Pepsi and Coke don't really try to convince you that their product tastes better, they try to convince you that their product is cooler, trendier, that all of your friends drink it, that you become irresistibly attractive when you drink it. Other companies just blatantly say they are superior (this truck has won awards; watch it go up this corkscrew tower of flaming death in the desert). That's more a change of tactics than a change of strategy.
Some companies sell a product at a discounted rate so they can sell you a different one later and jack the price up. Keurig coffee makers work like this: you buy the machine for less than it costs the company to make it, then you pay through the nose for the special Keurig-style coffee canisters to use it. Same thing with Gillette razors: you pay $2 for your handle for your Mach III and $15 for a refill cartridge.
So 'sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough' should mean that there are reliable, indefinitely repeatable ways to develop business plans that are better than all of the plans we've ever had before. But it doesn't.
Bullshit Level 3
"This course takes a leadership perspective for sustained organizational success"
A perspective is a way of viewing a certain subject.
From one angle, this is a picture of a lion. But by changing your perspective and flipping the picture upside down, you see a mouse instead. So what does it mean to take a leadership perspective? Nothing, really. They just wanted to work the word 'leadership' in there somehow. But this is a business school, the point of which is to make good middle management people. This class will be looking at a few topics from the perspective of future middle managers, future leaders. It will not look at the scientific repercussions of these sustainable practices or the political policies needed to enact them. It will not look at the engineering principles needed to analyze a sustainable system. It will adopt a leadership perspective.
"Sustained organizational success" is also just word padding. They wanted to say 'sustainability' again but must have feared that saying it outright would tip off the spam filter. Isn't all success in business supposed to be sustained? Do we consider CEO's successful if their organization doesn't make money?
Bullshit Level 4
"[This course] focuses on the deployment of breakthrough strategy that supports both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on the strategy of deploying breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on the strategy of supporting breakthroughs that deploy both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying breakthroughs that sustain both the organization’s strategy and its mission."
"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying strategic breakthroughs that sustain the organization’s mission."
"[This course] focuses on the journey of deploying strategic breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on missing breakthroughs that support both the organization’s strategy and its journey to sustainability."
One of the above sentences was actually from the e-mail. Can you guess which? I've written the answer upside-down on the next page so you can't cheat.
Bullshit Level 5
"The strategic intent is to satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders while preparing the organization for a sustainable future."
Remember from the previous 'sentence' that the course focuses on deploying strategy (or what I'd call, 'tactics'). What is the nature of this strategy? It is to:
1. Support the organization's mission. If you are a shoe store, your mission is to sell shoes. So a good strategy for a shoe store will include selling shoes.
2. Support the organization's journey to sustainability. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan.
3. Satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders. If you are a shoe store, your customers might want shoes that light up when you walk, allow you to fly like Hermes, and cost a nickel. The government of the USA might want you to pay taxes, but it also might want you to not treat Malaysian kids like slaves. The people who own stock in your company might want good dividends and for you to cut costs by treating Malaysian kids like slaves. Try to develop a strategy that does all or some of this.
4. Prepare the organization for a sustainable future. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan. This is pretty much the same as point 2. That is, they are saying the same thing only using different words.
Bullshit Summary
Word Counts
Breakthrough: 3
Organization: 7
Strategy: 6
Sustainability: 4
So the next time some jackass on the Internet, say Andrew Hanson, tells you that college is great and not a complete waste of time and money, just look him in the eye and say "it's shit like this, Andy! It is SHIT like THIS."
From: REDACTED@bus.wisc.edu
Subject: SUSTAINABILITY and QUALITY Courses for SPRING 2012
Hello David,
Professor REDACTED would like to invite you to the course he is teaching this Spring on sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough. This course takes a leadership perspective for sustained organizational success, and focuses on the deployment of breakthrough strategy that supports both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability. The strategic intent is to satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders while preparing the organization for a sustainable future. Students will have the opportunity to select a study topic or organizational issue of their own choosing and apply the relevant course material to that topic. Topics may involve organizational projects, applications to industry sectors, governments or NGOs, strategic organizational challenges, theses, dissertations, product and service strategy, or any issue involving strategic breakthrough that is important to the student.
I'd normally say that this is a laughable attempt to pass the Turing Test, but then it dawned on me that only a human mind could possibly create this much bullshit in the course of three sentences. And following in the footsteps of Aristotle, I'd like to quantify, classify, and organize this bullshit.
Bullshit Level 0
SUSTAINABILITY and QUALITY Courses for SPRING 2012
When you CAPITALIZE the words you want people to READ, it gets under THEIR SKIN because they feel MANIPULATED and it's like YOU ARE SHOUTING.
Bullshit Level 1
This professor would not like to invite me to the course. This professor, by virtue of this very e-mail, has extended me such an invitation. The passive voice is to be avoided, remember? But to form-fill in my name and then start the soft-sell like this is supposed to make me feel less threatened. He is a professor and he would like to do something for me!
Bullshit Level 2
"sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough"
There's no words there! What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything!
Let's have a little talk about sustainability. Sustainability is a very important and laudable goal for any business or society to have. It means that you can 'sustain' the way you do things for a long time (hopefully indefinitely). So a lot of agriculture right now is unsustainable because it uses more groundwater than is being recharged into the aquifer. Agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels which is not a sustainable practice- we are using up more coal, oil, and natural gas than our planet is generating. So a push for 'sustainable' agriculture would mean growing crops that use less water, take up less space, increase the amount of yield you get per amount of energy you expend, etc.
So you can think of all sorts of ways to make different businesses sustainable. You could develop better technology that does a manufacturing process in a way that uses less energy. You can change the packaging on a product so it is more biodegradable.
And now, a bit about strategy. Strategy (in contrast to 'tactics') is knowing what to do to win a game. Tactics are the specific actions you take to execute your strategy. If the game is Settlers of Catan, it may be a winning strategy to buy development cards and build up the Largest Army and have a few victory points. A good tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to place your first settlements near the required resources. A bad tactic you could use to accomplish that strategy is to convert four of one resource into the resource that you need.
Strategies exist in the business world too, of course. Some companies have expensive advertising campaigns to improve your image of their brand. Pepsi and Coke don't really try to convince you that their product tastes better, they try to convince you that their product is cooler, trendier, that all of your friends drink it, that you become irresistibly attractive when you drink it. Other companies just blatantly say they are superior (this truck has won awards; watch it go up this corkscrew tower of flaming death in the desert). That's more a change of tactics than a change of strategy.
Some companies sell a product at a discounted rate so they can sell you a different one later and jack the price up. Keurig coffee makers work like this: you buy the machine for less than it costs the company to make it, then you pay through the nose for the special Keurig-style coffee canisters to use it. Same thing with Gillette razors: you pay $2 for your handle for your Mach III and $15 for a refill cartridge.
So 'sustainable approaches to strategic breakthrough' should mean that there are reliable, indefinitely repeatable ways to develop business plans that are better than all of the plans we've ever had before. But it doesn't.
Bullshit Level 3
"This course takes a leadership perspective for sustained organizational success"
A perspective is a way of viewing a certain subject.
From one angle, this is a picture of a lion. But by changing your perspective and flipping the picture upside down, you see a mouse instead. So what does it mean to take a leadership perspective? Nothing, really. They just wanted to work the word 'leadership' in there somehow. But this is a business school, the point of which is to make good middle management people. This class will be looking at a few topics from the perspective of future middle managers, future leaders. It will not look at the scientific repercussions of these sustainable practices or the political policies needed to enact them. It will not look at the engineering principles needed to analyze a sustainable system. It will adopt a leadership perspective.
"Sustained organizational success" is also just word padding. They wanted to say 'sustainability' again but must have feared that saying it outright would tip off the spam filter. Isn't all success in business supposed to be sustained? Do we consider CEO's successful if their organization doesn't make money?
Bullshit Level 4
"[This course] focuses on the deployment of breakthrough strategy that supports both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on the strategy of deploying breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on the strategy of supporting breakthroughs that deploy both the organization’s mission and its journey to sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying breakthroughs that sustain both the organization’s strategy and its mission."
"[This course] focuses on supporting and deploying strategic breakthroughs that sustain the organization’s mission."
"[This course] focuses on the journey of deploying strategic breakthroughs that support both the organization’s mission and its sustainability."
"[This course] focuses on missing breakthroughs that support both the organization’s strategy and its journey to sustainability."
One of the above sentences was actually from the e-mail. Can you guess which? I've written the answer upside-down on the next page so you can't cheat.
Bullshit Level 5
"The strategic intent is to satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders while preparing the organization for a sustainable future."
Remember from the previous 'sentence' that the course focuses on deploying strategy (or what I'd call, 'tactics'). What is the nature of this strategy? It is to:
1. Support the organization's mission. If you are a shoe store, your mission is to sell shoes. So a good strategy for a shoe store will include selling shoes.
2. Support the organization's journey to sustainability. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan.
3. Satisfy multiple objectives of a diverse set of organizational stakeholders. If you are a shoe store, your customers might want shoes that light up when you walk, allow you to fly like Hermes, and cost a nickel. The government of the USA might want you to pay taxes, but it also might want you to not treat Malaysian kids like slaves. The people who own stock in your company might want good dividends and for you to cut costs by treating Malaysian kids like slaves. Try to develop a strategy that does all or some of this.
4. Prepare the organization for a sustainable future. If you are a shoe store, people might not wear shoes forever, so have a backup plan. This is pretty much the same as point 2. That is, they are saying the same thing only using different words.
Bullshit Summary
Word Counts
Breakthrough: 3
Organization: 7
Strategy: 6
Sustainability: 4
So the next time some jackass on the Internet, say Andrew Hanson, tells you that college is great and not a complete waste of time and money, just look him in the eye and say "it's shit like this, Andy! It is SHIT like THIS."
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
I Hope I Die Before I Get Old
Two ruminations on age:
1. "I miss being the age when I thought I would have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now."
2. I drove to the store today and on my way back home, 'Sultans of Swing' came on the radio. I was almost home, so I was forced- FORCED as if by invisible chains!- to listen to the last third of it just sitting in my car in my parking spot with the volume cranked up to 25. I hope I never get so old that I don't compulsively do that.
1. "I miss being the age when I thought I would have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now."
2. I drove to the store today and on my way back home, 'Sultans of Swing' came on the radio. I was almost home, so I was forced- FORCED as if by invisible chains!- to listen to the last third of it just sitting in my car in my parking spot with the volume cranked up to 25. I hope I never get so old that I don't compulsively do that.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Reaction: What Else is New?
One Mr. Andrew Hanson has asked me to respond to this article written by David Brooks of the New York Times on the subject of kids these days and their morality. A summary quote:
1. Soft prejudice of low expectations alert!
2. I'd contend that this poor moral reasoning is pervasive not just in 18- to 23-year-olds, but throughout American society, including some of our more famous war-mongering NYTimes Columnists. Is that petty of me? Maybe.
The editorial goes on to explain that young people lack the moral vocabulary necessary to articulate why something is right or wrong, so instead they make moral choices based on feelings, intuitions, and convictions. Morality is not decided by religious tenets (as I hold), nor is it decided on by a community through social mores and customs (as Brooks mentions later), nor is it reasoned out from categorical imperatives ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."), nor is it made on the basis of what will cause the greatest good for the greatest number (Andrew), nothing. It's just, like, what I feel in my heart is right, you know? And what's right for me might not be right for you.
Brooks says that at the heart of this thinking lies a deep belief in individualism. I'd say that it's less a matter of individualism, and more a matter of not offending anyone under any circumstances lest we be offended in turn. We are all pretty, pretty snowflakes with unique dreams, ambitions, hopes, and views on what's right and what's wrong, and anyone who rains on that parade can hurt our self-esteem.
A few cases in point on this phenomenon (and yes they'll mostly be religious because I find public reporting of religion fascinating and my moral thinking is inextricably tied to religious thinking):
1. Religious Ecumenism after Sept 11.
Pretty self-explanatory, this view has been around a long time (when were the Unitarians around- 1850? Earlier? Isn't Ba'hai basically a synthesis of this but from much earlier?) Anyway, rather than making absolute objective religious or moral claims, ecumenism is an attempt to sanitize these claims and make them subjective.
2. Michele Bachmann's Church Says the Pope is the Anti-Christ
This was a fascinating story to me a few months ago when it popped up, not only because Michele Bachmann was a member of the same 'strict Lutheran synod with controversial views of Catholicism' that I am, but because it was an excellent lens through which popular views of religion could be viewed. The reason why the story was so sensational was that of course Michele Bachmann can't have these views- that would be offensive to Catholic voters! Is she really comfortable with offending the 120 million Catholics of this country!?!
But lost from most of the discussion was a recognition of what the Protestant Reformation was actually about. Is grace infused into us, or is it imputed? Are we declared not-guilty before God on the basis of our own righteousness which God graciously helps us to attain, or on the basis of Christ's righteousness which is credited to us through faith? Those are two really, really, really different beliefs, and strong conviction in either one of them flies in the face of this moral individualism that David Brooks is talking about.
3. Columnist Ann Coulter Shocks Cable TV Show, Declaring 'Jews Need to Be Perfected by Becoming Christians'
I have absolutely no idea what Ann Coulter meant when she says that Christianity is like Judaism plus Federal Express. But that's not really my point. My point is that Donny Deutsch is absolutely flabbergasted that anyone besides the head of Iran could believe that their religion is true, and that as a corollary in a perfect world all people would practice that true religion.
Yes, kids, that's part of my thesis: America today in a lot of ways is kind of like Donny Deutsch. Stop the presses.
Anyway, those are just three things that popped into my head immediately. I could waste even more time finding others including bad arguments against gay marriage and abortion, but I won't because I think you get the point, and I think David Brooks would agree with me that those examples I cite are the sorts of things he's talking about.
I'll instead let fly a few armchair ruminations as to why I think this moral individualism among Americans has increased of late.
Armchair Rumination #1: Self-Esteem is King
Back in the day (by which I mean the 1950's having never lived through them) children could be expected to be raised in a harsh environment of criticism, violence, and cruelty. And just as the harsh environment of Arrakis gave rise to the powerful and strong Fremen, these children grew up to be moral giants. Teachers, parents, and peers didn't care about your feelings. They just cared if you were right. So if you said something morally stupid like 'It's ok for humans to have sex with animals because they probably have fun having sex with us, so no harm no foul' you would immediately be punched in the face, verbally harassed, etc., etc.
But then people got all hot and bothered about Self-Esteem. Maybe it was Abraham Maslow and his pyramid of needs, or that one psychologist with the pigeons and the bells, or maybe it was Raffi, I don't know. Some psychologist/children's musical artist from the 50's and 60's. And all of a sudden, no one can tell anyone else to shape up or ship out because that hurts their self-esteem. And that's why kids these days are water-soft.
Armchair Rumination #2: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
David Brooks writes that once upon a time people did some moral thinking by grounding it in religion: this action is good if God says it is good, this action is bad if God says that it is bad. Therefore, it would logically follow that if society becomes less religious and more secular, we would lose this important source of moral decision-making.
But it's not just the case that fewer and fewer young people in America are going to church. Moral decision making skills are being hurt because even those young adults that do go to church aren't being taught very well there. The go-to book on this is probably Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers which says that kids these days are very weak on many points of doctrine and instead have religious beliefs that are a mashed-up jumble, but mostly have these parts in common (stolen shamelessly from Wikipedia):
1. There is a God or a higher intelligence, but he's mostly watching over you and me like Santa Claus.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. (Remember what I said about ecumenism?)
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. (Remember what I said about self-esteem?)
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. That is, God is kind of like a giant vending machine that you only need to go to when you're hungry for some M&M's (or a job, or a girlfriend, or healing from cancer).
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
This is called moralistic therapeutic deism. Please note that anyone denying the existence of moralistic therapeutic deism may be a moralistic therapeutic deist themselves!
But wait. Surely the Moralistic part of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism catchphrase means that kids these days are all over the subject of morality, right?
Weeeeelllllllll...not really. Just because you believe that people should be moral or will be rewarded for being moral doesn't mean that you have a good basis for determining what is moral and what is not. And when you jettison the heavier parts of Christianity like doctrine and creeds, you're not left with much of anything with which you can make those decisions. Let's see this effect in action:
If all of the theological tools were in our toolkit, we could critique this statement by saying that it contradicts a few very important doctrines: the inspiration of Scripture, Original Sin (or Total Depravity), regeneration, the sixth commandment. But if you don't know what those are (and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists probably don't, or don't think much of them) then you're just left with saying that that might work for you but it doesn't work for me.
And stuff.
Armchair Rumination #3: Changing Media Landscape
If the main driver of moral individualism is that you don't want to offend anyone, moral individualism may increase if the costs of offending people increase or the risks of offending people increase.
Let's take a simple situation: you think that it's wrong for people to wear Nike shoes because Nike hires slave kids in China to make them. Therefore, you see a person wearing these shoes and you tell them face-to-face that they support child slavery. They get pretty offended at you, but you don't care because it's just one guy.
Then you end up writing in to the paper and they publish your editorial about child slavery. You've now offended like 100 people who wear Nikes and will never buy the paper ever again.
Then you end up publishing an article on PolicyMic and end up offending 10,000 people who wear Nike shoes, all of whom leave PolicyMic in disgust.
If every schmo with a cause does this, Media outlets then end up having to adopt one of two strategies as their available market grows:
1. Don't say anything important that could offend anyone, lest it reduce viewership.
2. Do make really aggressive moral claims, but have it drive all of your offended readers away so that you're just preaching to the choir. Hopefully you'll have enough people left to be profitable, and those people will never leave because they think other media outlets are wishy-washy.
I call these the CNN and FoxNews strategies.
Both strategies tend to dull our moral reasoning. In the first case, it's because you're by definition not allowed to say anything offensive (and hence of moral interest). In the second case, it's because everyone already agrees with you: why supply reasons?
Three unfalsifiable ruminations? MY JOB HERE IS DONE.
(Update: added a link to Andrew Hanson's discussion of the same topic. How we arrive at similar conclusions using diametrically opposed reasoning is one of the hallmarks of our friendship.)
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
1. Soft prejudice of low expectations alert!
2. I'd contend that this poor moral reasoning is pervasive not just in 18- to 23-year-olds, but throughout American society, including some of our more famous war-mongering NYTimes Columnists. Is that petty of me? Maybe.
The editorial goes on to explain that young people lack the moral vocabulary necessary to articulate why something is right or wrong, so instead they make moral choices based on feelings, intuitions, and convictions. Morality is not decided by religious tenets (as I hold), nor is it decided on by a community through social mores and customs (as Brooks mentions later), nor is it reasoned out from categorical imperatives ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."), nor is it made on the basis of what will cause the greatest good for the greatest number (Andrew), nothing. It's just, like, what I feel in my heart is right, you know? And what's right for me might not be right for you.
Brooks says that at the heart of this thinking lies a deep belief in individualism. I'd say that it's less a matter of individualism, and more a matter of not offending anyone under any circumstances lest we be offended in turn. We are all pretty, pretty snowflakes with unique dreams, ambitions, hopes, and views on what's right and what's wrong, and anyone who rains on that parade can hurt our self-esteem.
A few cases in point on this phenomenon (and yes they'll mostly be religious because I find public reporting of religion fascinating and my moral thinking is inextricably tied to religious thinking):
1. Religious Ecumenism after Sept 11.
Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood spoke of the terrorist attacks as a baptism not by water, but by ash, the results of which forced people around the world to become aware of their common humanity. No matter how people refer to God, he said, whether it be Allah, Yahweh, or any number of names, it is the same God, uniting all people.
Pretty self-explanatory, this view has been around a long time (when were the Unitarians around- 1850? Earlier? Isn't Ba'hai basically a synthesis of this but from much earlier?) Anyway, rather than making absolute objective religious or moral claims, ecumenism is an attempt to sanitize these claims and make them subjective.
2. Michele Bachmann's Church Says the Pope is the Anti-Christ
This was a fascinating story to me a few months ago when it popped up, not only because Michele Bachmann was a member of the same 'strict Lutheran synod with controversial views of Catholicism' that I am, but because it was an excellent lens through which popular views of religion could be viewed. The reason why the story was so sensational was that of course Michele Bachmann can't have these views- that would be offensive to Catholic voters! Is she really comfortable with offending the 120 million Catholics of this country!?!
But lost from most of the discussion was a recognition of what the Protestant Reformation was actually about. Is grace infused into us, or is it imputed? Are we declared not-guilty before God on the basis of our own righteousness which God graciously helps us to attain, or on the basis of Christ's righteousness which is credited to us through faith? Those are two really, really, really different beliefs, and strong conviction in either one of them flies in the face of this moral individualism that David Brooks is talking about.
3. Columnist Ann Coulter Shocks Cable TV Show, Declaring 'Jews Need to Be Perfected by Becoming Christians'
DEUTSCH: Tell me what — why this would be a better world? Let's give you — I'm going to give you — say this is your show.
COULTER: Well, OK, take the Republican National Convention. People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America, they —
DEUTSCH: Christian — so we should be Christian? It would be better if we were all Christian?
COULTER: Yes.
DEUTSCH: We should all be Christian?
COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny?
DEUTSCH: So I should not be a Jew, I should be a Christian, and this would be a better place?
COULTER: Well, you could be a practicing Jew, but you're not.
DEUTSCH: I actually am. That's not true. I really am. But — so we would be better if we were — if people — if there were no Jews, no Buddhists —
COULTER: Whenever I'm harangued by —
DEUTSCH: — in this country? You can't believe that.
COULTER: — you know, liberals on diversity —
DEUTSCH: Here you go again.
COULTER: No, it's true. I give all of these speeches at megachurches across America, and the one thing that's really striking about it is how utterly, completely diverse they are, and completely unself-consciously. You walk past a mixed-race couple in New York, and it's like they have a chip on their shoulder. They're just waiting for somebody to say something, as if anybody would. And —
DEUTSCH: I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that at all. Maybe you have the chip looking at them. I see a lot of interracial couples, and I don't see any more or less chips there either way. That's erroneous.
COULTER: No. In fact, there was an entire "Seinfeld" episode about Elaine and her boyfriend dating because they wanted to be a mixed-race couple, so you're lying.
DEUTSCH: Oh, because of some "Seinfeld" episode? OK.
COULTER: But yeah, I think that's reflective of what's going on in the culture, but it is completely striking that at these huge megachurches — the idea that, you know, the more Christian you are, the less tolerant you would be is preposterous.
DEUTSCH: That isn't what I said, but you said I should not — we should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians, then, or —
COULTER: Yeah.
DEUTSCH: Really?
COULTER: Well, it's a lot easier. It's kind of a fast track.
DEUTSCH: Really?
COULTER: Yeah. You have to obey.
DEUTSCH: You can't possibly believe that.
COULTER: Yes.
DEUTSCH: You can't possibly — you're too educated, you can't — you're like my friend in —
COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion, but you have to obey.
DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean —
COULTER: We have the fast-track program.
DEUTSCH: Why don't I put you with the head of Iran? I mean, come on. You can't believe that.
COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.
DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" —
COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.
DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?
COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.
DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?
COULTER: Yes. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we're all sinners —
DEUTSCH: In my old days, I would have argued — when you say something absurd like that, there's no —
COULTER: What's absurd?
DEUTSCH: Jews are going to be perfected. I'm going to go off and try to perfect myself —
COULTER: Well, that's what the New Testament says.
DEUTSCH: Ann Coulter, author of "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans," and if Ann Coulter had any brains, she would not say Jews need to be perfected. I'm offended by that personally.
I have absolutely no idea what Ann Coulter meant when she says that Christianity is like Judaism plus Federal Express. But that's not really my point. My point is that Donny Deutsch is absolutely flabbergasted that anyone besides the head of Iran could believe that their religion is true, and that as a corollary in a perfect world all people would practice that true religion.
Yes, kids, that's part of my thesis: America today in a lot of ways is kind of like Donny Deutsch. Stop the presses.
Anyway, those are just three things that popped into my head immediately. I could waste even more time finding others including bad arguments against gay marriage and abortion, but I won't because I think you get the point, and I think David Brooks would agree with me that those examples I cite are the sorts of things he's talking about.
I'll instead let fly a few armchair ruminations as to why I think this moral individualism among Americans has increased of late.
Armchair Rumination #1: Self-Esteem is King
Back in the day (by which I mean the 1950's having never lived through them) children could be expected to be raised in a harsh environment of criticism, violence, and cruelty. And just as the harsh environment of Arrakis gave rise to the powerful and strong Fremen, these children grew up to be moral giants. Teachers, parents, and peers didn't care about your feelings. They just cared if you were right. So if you said something morally stupid like 'It's ok for humans to have sex with animals because they probably have fun having sex with us, so no harm no foul' you would immediately be punched in the face, verbally harassed, etc., etc.
But then people got all hot and bothered about Self-Esteem. Maybe it was Abraham Maslow and his pyramid of needs, or that one psychologist with the pigeons and the bells, or maybe it was Raffi, I don't know. Some psychologist/children's musical artist from the 50's and 60's. And all of a sudden, no one can tell anyone else to shape up or ship out because that hurts their self-esteem. And that's why kids these days are water-soft.
Armchair Rumination #2: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
David Brooks writes that once upon a time people did some moral thinking by grounding it in religion: this action is good if God says it is good, this action is bad if God says that it is bad. Therefore, it would logically follow that if society becomes less religious and more secular, we would lose this important source of moral decision-making.
But it's not just the case that fewer and fewer young people in America are going to church. Moral decision making skills are being hurt because even those young adults that do go to church aren't being taught very well there. The go-to book on this is probably Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers which says that kids these days are very weak on many points of doctrine and instead have religious beliefs that are a mashed-up jumble, but mostly have these parts in common (stolen shamelessly from Wikipedia):
1. There is a God or a higher intelligence, but he's mostly watching over you and me like Santa Claus.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. (Remember what I said about ecumenism?)
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. (Remember what I said about self-esteem?)
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. That is, God is kind of like a giant vending machine that you only need to go to when you're hungry for some M&M's (or a job, or a girlfriend, or healing from cancer).
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
This is called moralistic therapeutic deism. Please note that anyone denying the existence of moralistic therapeutic deism may be a moralistic therapeutic deist themselves!
But wait. Surely the Moralistic part of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism catchphrase means that kids these days are all over the subject of morality, right?
Weeeeelllllllll...not really. Just because you believe that people should be moral or will be rewarded for being moral doesn't mean that you have a good basis for determining what is moral and what is not. And when you jettison the heavier parts of Christianity like doctrine and creeds, you're not left with much of anything with which you can make those decisions. Let's see this effect in action:
I mean, yeah, the Bible talks about how homosexuality is wrong and stuff, but I'm not going to be a bad person and get all in your face about it. The Bible was written by old men 2000 years ago, so not all of it applies today. And gay people are just acting the way they were made and the way they feel, so who am I to tell them differently? They can't change who they are.
If all of the theological tools were in our toolkit, we could critique this statement by saying that it contradicts a few very important doctrines: the inspiration of Scripture, Original Sin (or Total Depravity), regeneration, the sixth commandment. But if you don't know what those are (and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists probably don't, or don't think much of them) then you're just left with saying that that might work for you but it doesn't work for me.
And stuff.
Armchair Rumination #3: Changing Media Landscape
If the main driver of moral individualism is that you don't want to offend anyone, moral individualism may increase if the costs of offending people increase or the risks of offending people increase.
Let's take a simple situation: you think that it's wrong for people to wear Nike shoes because Nike hires slave kids in China to make them. Therefore, you see a person wearing these shoes and you tell them face-to-face that they support child slavery. They get pretty offended at you, but you don't care because it's just one guy.
Then you end up writing in to the paper and they publish your editorial about child slavery. You've now offended like 100 people who wear Nikes and will never buy the paper ever again.
Then you end up publishing an article on PolicyMic and end up offending 10,000 people who wear Nike shoes, all of whom leave PolicyMic in disgust.
If every schmo with a cause does this, Media outlets then end up having to adopt one of two strategies as their available market grows:
1. Don't say anything important that could offend anyone, lest it reduce viewership.
2. Do make really aggressive moral claims, but have it drive all of your offended readers away so that you're just preaching to the choir. Hopefully you'll have enough people left to be profitable, and those people will never leave because they think other media outlets are wishy-washy.
I call these the CNN and FoxNews strategies.
Both strategies tend to dull our moral reasoning. In the first case, it's because you're by definition not allowed to say anything offensive (and hence of moral interest). In the second case, it's because everyone already agrees with you: why supply reasons?
Three unfalsifiable ruminations? MY JOB HERE IS DONE.
(Update: added a link to Andrew Hanson's discussion of the same topic. How we arrive at similar conclusions using diametrically opposed reasoning is one of the hallmarks of our friendship.)
Thursday, February 10, 2011
You have that luxury
Dear David,
I don't know your history, so I can't be sure what has led you to pen this sick, twisted post, clearly written in order to further marginalize those of us who can't grow the thick beautiful facial hair that you apparently take for granted. Your complaints about not finding women fall on deaf ears and hairless upper lips. I constantly see jerks like you prancing around with women they can trust, buying each other beers, watching sports together, and slowly stroking that thick, lustrous mustache you can apparently "produce very easily."
Hey David, I got some news for you. Some of us CAN'T easily produce a beautiful mustache on our beautiful Wisconsin faces in front of our big brain full of expertise in both civil AND environmental engineering. Some of us have mustaches that make us look like rat people. Some of us only had one major and don't really understand Apocalypse Now. Some of us have been waiting for a product like the BeerStache our entire lives, and thank God that Facebook brought it to our attention.
So thanks David C. Miller. Thanks for reminding me what a reject I am for trying to spend the few seconds that I bring my beer bottle up to my lips in the world of a guy who's got it all. The guy who has it all, and apparently think it's still necessary to prove their place in the social hierarchy by kicking the mustacheless guy when he's down.
I hope you're proud of yourself.
--Anonymous
Dear Anonymous, if that really is your name,
How dare you.
How dare you tarnish the reputation of our nation's oppressed mustachio'd class with your rank historical revisionism.
Have you forgotten the place of the mustache in Western Civilization? Have you forgotten who invented shaving? It was the Romans, who believed that shaving marked them as being more civilized than the surrounding hirsute barbarians, who they then went on to pillage, destroy, and attack with their Praetorians and, later, their knights, (or perhaps their horsemen if they failed to research Guilds quickly). People with mustaches were fed to the lions in the Coliseum.
Skip ahead two thousand years to learn of the only history that really matters: the History of America. America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal. And to defend that principle, over 600,000 Americans (most of them with mustaches) gave their lives in the Civil War.
But America again turned her back on those who built her. Between 1860 and 1913, every single American President had a mustache or beard except for Andrew Johnson who was impeached for not having one, and William McKinley, who was assassinated before he could grow his. There have been no mustaches since. There have been two World Wars.
Meanwhile, there again grew an association between those civilized men without facial hair and those uncivilized barbarians with it. Does Tony Hayward, the CEO of British Petroleum, wear a mustache? Did Frank Zappa? Which of the two is more accepted in Corporate America?
We live in a world where all the expressions of individualism, of uniqueness, of non-conformity, are to be subordinated to the sanitized Will of the Almighty Dollar. And since it is easier for those with mustaches to shave them off than for those without them to grow them, that is the image we all must be made in.
For you to come in against that backdrop and accuse me of looking down my nose at you for not being able to grow a mustache is to ignore the great struggles people with mustaches face even today. For example, the average nominal price of a mustache ride remains at just five cents, even as inflation has eroded its purchasing power to almost nothing. This has occurred even as some grow richer and richer, leading to what economists call The Great Stagnation.
And now you say you want to have a novelty beer bottle mustache. Oh no. Don't, don't, don't tell me about my world. Don't tell me about my world! I mean you just wanna have your fling with like the mustache from the other side of town. Then you're going to put the bottle down, you're going to marry some rich prick who your parents will approve of and just sit around with the other trust fund babies and talk about how you went slumming too, once.
You are a fraud. You want all the sympathy and attention that a mustache can generate, but you don't want to go through the sacrifice it truly takes to deserve it. You can put that bottle down, and off goes that mustache with it. No pain. No blood. If you want a mustache again, it is just a beer away; you needn't wait a few weeks. Frosting never gets caught in your mustache. Your mustache never itches. You are a genetic prince playing at being a pauper, secure in the knowledge that if you ever really get in trouble, you can always retreat to your hairless castle.
But a beer bottle mustache is not a real mustache. Just as cohabitation is a cheap imitation and perversion of marriage, a beer bottle mustache is a cheap imitation and perversion of a real mustache. Your covetousness will not be placated by a piece of plastic. Your envy will not end even if you do end up purchasing a BeerStache. You'll look at something else someone has (a goatee, sideburns, a full beard) and covet that next. Your envy will grow even if your hair follicles will not. And no matter how many times you try and attach the object of your desire to the side of a beer bottle, you'll know in your heart that it isn't real. It's a chasing after the wind.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Cuz Saving Our Planet is the Thing to Do
When people at parties tell you about the Internet and how it's changed the way we work and live, leading to huge gains in productivity and the freedom of information and overthrow of dictators, I want you to think of the above picture. Facebook is a billion-dollar company that makes money by...uhhh...targeted advertising? Maybe? Does anyone really know? I know you can pay facebook and they'll send your friends a happy birthday cake or whatever, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly the targeted advertising. Maybe people who make the apps have to pay a fee to get facebook to post them? I don't know.
But I do know that there are very few places that annoy me as much with their advertising as Facebook. Sure, there's that mother of 2 who lost 50lbs. of belly fat by taking a pill. That's annoying. But this is at a whole other level.
I've never met the woman with the eye-black and sports jersey who wants to buy me drinks. It's possible that she's really nice, likes sports, and honestly, truly, wants me to have a drink for free because she is charitable and wants me to be happy. But I'm also really sure that thetaoofbadass.com is not my kind of place. It's openly manipulative, slightly misogynistic, and just generally juvenile in its view of human interaction. And I know this within 10 seconds of reading the ad that that's exactly what thetaoofbadass is all about.
I don't want to learn a technique to get girls to buy me drinks. I want to meet a woman I like and trust that sometimes buys me drinks, and who I sometimes buy drinks for, but we mostly just buy ourselves drinks when we want them. And if she likes sports and doesn't care who knows, then ok, and if she doesn't like sports, no big deal.
There's a similar advertising failing with the BeerStache. It's not that something you clip onto the side of a beer bottle that looks like a mustache isn't cool. I can produce my own mustache very easily, thankyouverymuch. It's that Facebook is a place for defining your identity: what you look like, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, your causes, concerns, jokes, videos, and games. And defining myself as 'the kind of person who clips a fake mustache on a beer bottle' is just entirely foreign to my (carefully cultivated) Facebook self-image. Again, I've never met the two young ladies with mustaches drinking beer at what appears to be a rocking party. Perhaps they have many virtues. But I'm pretty sure that we would not get very far in a conversation. (This is what a psychologist would call 'projection' of my personal hangups and distastes onto the blank beer-swilling slates of these two women as an explanation of how they must behave)
And as much as I like ROCKER girls, the dyed hair, Johnny-Depp-in-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean eye shadow, look-I'm-not-smiling-in-my-picture-because-I'm-quirky-and-countercultural expession, and complete lack of a front of a shirt are all signals to me that there is no place in my identity for a complementary part like this, like her. Not that there seems to be a place in my identity for a complementary part like anyone, but you get the point.
As for the MBA in Sustainability, I'd consider myself lucky to one day get a job where my immediate supervisor will have an MBA in Sustainability and will constantly talk about 'best practices' and 'lean processes' and the 'triple bottom line' while I roll my eyes and dream of a world without MBAs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)