I think the best starting place for understanding pluralism is humility as a virtue. Not a humility that despairs of improving our knowledge about ourselves and the world, but one that acknowledges our deep fallibility and finitude. For example, no one has ever had the chance to think through all the consequences of his or her beliefs, and we do not even possess the requisite background knowledge to carry it out. Pluralism then easily arises from recognizing how we are “rational satisficers,” to use Herbert Simon’s term, i.e. people who are constrained in achieving their aims due to imperfect information and limited resources for deliberating on our choices. In the context of finite time and incomplete knowledge, it is often impossible to demonstrate that one decision method is absolutely better than another: we cannot find the universal standard by which to compare the methods, and we cannot achieve absolute precision in marking off the domain of each method’s superiority.

Think, for example, of the problem of finding the most efficient route for a traveling salesman to cover all his destinations. There is no practical and optimal search algorithm for finding this best pathway. The alternatives, i.e. heuristic procedures, typically possess both strengths and weaknesses that make them better suited to some contexts and not to others. But knowing which context is which is itself a difficult problem, and in many cases researchers or engineers have to compare the results of multiple methods empirically on a standardized data set without an absolute standard.

Problems in philosophy are often at least this difficult. In fact, many philosophical debates center on the logically prior problem of defining what “the best option” or “optimal” means. In this case, the humility appropriate to pluralism would concede that there is no guaranteed way of knowing which understanding of “best” is “best” in advance. Instead, this evaluation must be carried out iteratively, comparatively, and contextually. Being a pluralist means always being willing to deliberate over the alternatives and to recognize that alternatives that are unacceptable now may, upon further investigation, turn out better than they first appeared. A pluralist draws a further consequence from this fact, which is that one should commit to supporting multiple alternatives, even if one believes some of them are wrong at any given time.

However, pluralism does not require one to treat all alternatives as equal or to say that no comparative judgment is possible. Rather, pluralism insists on the long-term positive value of alternative approaches to a problem, based on a recognition of the fallibility and incompleteness of one’s own position. Pluralism therefore does not simply equate with “inclusion.” Any alternative does not merit inclusion (or institutional support in some form) simply because it surpasses some basic threshold. Rather, the alternatives merit a level of support because they may turn out better than our own point of view. On a higher level, a pluralist would recognize how his or her own perspective consistently gains from having to engage with alternatives, and that no single perspective may ever prove adequate to whatever issue is at hand.

In this regard, most researchers in academia would recognize themselves as pluralists in certain respects. But a thorough-going pluralism brings this stance of humility to all levels of inquiry and action. For example, take a problem like determining the just distribution of resources for health care. One level of pluralism would be to value the contributions of philosophers proposing different analyses within a single moral tradition such as utilitarianism. This is a narrow pluralism compared with also valuing the contributions of other philosophical traditions, such as virtue ethics or a Rawlsian approach. “Valuing” can mean supporting or at least not strongly opposing philosophers working in the other tradition, and it can also mean actively trying to learn from them and incorporate the best of their work into your own tradition. A thorough-going pluralism applies to methods as well as competing solutions within a method. One could say something similar for analytic, continental, and non-Western traditions in philosophy.

In this light, it turns out that thorough-going pluralism is far from vacuous; in fact, it is quite difficult. One must commit to the idea that everything one holds dear could be radically wrong. Recognizing this skepticism does not negate our cherished beliefs, but it does place them in some degree of uncertainty between absolute truth and falsity, or absolute superiority and inferiority. Such a conception of pluralism is not limited to academia and research, but is possible to extend to life more generally. In a democracy, it can mean recognizing that each person is responsible for their own pursuit of happiness (or other good), and that we should be humble in our own pursuit by recognizing that what we believe is good may turn out to be wrong, and that other people, whom we initially conceive of as our opponents, may become our best teachers.

In this understanding, inclusion is something that pluralism broadly encourages, but inclusion itself is not conceptual heart of pluralism, which lies in a recognition of our own deep fallibilty. Just because everyone in a conversation may agree that pluralism is a good thing does not mean we have nothing to argue about. The issue at hand is precisely to what extent our aims as a group are served in the long run by supporting alternative positions, methods, attitudes, and so forth. This is not a problem we can adjudicate in a priori fashion — but that doesn’t mean it’s not substantive! Rather, our discussion hinges on the nature of our collective aim, what believe are the relevant costs of including conflicting points of view in the group, and the potential benefits. It may be, for example, that we would like to be more inclusive but that the group is fragile and more tension would likely cause it to fall apart. In this situation, we must realize that practical constraints have prevented us from being as thorough-going in our pluralism as we would ideally prefer. This neither contradicts our ideal nor erases the fact that we have achieved some level of pluralism, even if it falls short of our standards.

What’s particularly odd about the school teacher/inner city savior narrative is that writers never imagine the story from a different perspective: what about the principle who deals with dozens of fractious teachers who go from passionate to incompetent? What about the superintendent who must deal with multiple schools and policy problems? Or the individual child who goes through up to 8 teachers a day and a different set of classes each year? Or maybe the parents who fight on the PTA to get other parents involved and improving the school? It would be fascinating to see a high school the way the members of a gang do, to dramatize the ways they manipulate teachers and other schools. It’s obvious: there are so many people involved in each school and so many different roles that people play, and over the decades since Stand and Deliver came out, you might think we would have accumulated a somewhat developed variety of perspectives on the problems of education. Now, maybe those movies are out there, but it’s not my experience that they get mainstream recognition even if they do exist.

The basic problem this narrative monoculture creates is a collective inability to think about more than one aspect of the school at a time. We see the teacher’s frustrations, and often the kids’ frustrations through the teacher’s lens, brought to vivid life. But unless we see how the principle, the parents, even the gangsters, have their own valid frustrations, any interventions we might imagine will be like pulling on one end of a tangled knot and just making it the knot tighten even further.

A good example is a simple conclusion anyone might draw from Dangerous Minds is that if only we taught subject material that was relevant to the kids’ lives, they might actually engage in class. Michelle Pfeifer in the film begins to teach Bob Dylan lyrics about drugs and struggling against death instead of reading some warmed-over book about friendship. With a bit of prodding, the students connect with the ideas of the lyrics to their struggles as poor, urban underrepresented minorities. While the concept is nice, it really just won’t do to think that we could solve our educational difficulties by a) letting teachers choose their own curriculum b) assigning material about death and drugs c) having all students read Bob Dylan or any other number of possibilities. The problems of the superintendent would tell us that somewhat bland standards are necessary because not all teachers are able to do a good job with making a given material accessible and relevant. Moreover, the film’s optimistic belief that the students would ultimately all appreciate such an effort at connecting with their lives is seriously misguided.

What’s perhaps most interesting here is how comprehensive understanding depends on our powers of imagination. In order to avoid picking out one group or solution as the devil or godsend, we need ways to imagine their interdependence. The narrative trope of “single teacher (plus sidekick) saves the meaning of education for poor disadvantaged children” is a reasonable start, but wholly incomplete on its own. Are there other examples of movies or books that flesh out this picture? Even news/magazine articles? How could we tell a powerful story that would expand our powers of imagination about the problems of the education system?

I want to reply briefly to the question Mr. Warren asks about why universities aren’t run as many corporations are: “Consider the average workplace and how bosses are responsible for staff performance. Why aren’t most professors held accountable in some clear fashion for how much a student may, or may not, learn during a semester, or over four years?”

I believe in this question. It’s one of the most important we can ask about college educations, especially as tuition prices skyrocket. I agree strongly that many colleges and professors are not doing a good enough job of educating students. What we have to do, though, is be very careful about keeping in mind why we want accountability, because the obvious answer — so that students learn the content of the required number of courses — is one of the least important, and in fact it is positively detrimental to the more important reasons to get a college degree. As a means to an end, accountability is a dangerous tool, in part because it can bring the deadening hand of red tape down on a process that should exemplify democratic independence and participation.

First, we should question why the average workplace is a good standard for accountability. Forgive me for my skepticism, but I have very rarely heard anyone describe the average workplace as an exemplar of high efficiency, intelligence, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, or moral worth. I think almost everyone experiences the management practices of corporations and organizations as at least as detrimental as helpful to the institution’s goals. The reason has to do with the underlying goal of enforcing accountability through bureaucracy: to remove any dependence on unpredictable, outside-the-box achievements. Bureaucracies achieve accountability through routinization and standardization. This is fine if the overall goal is producing something many times with nearly identical outcomes, like a car in a factory, but it’s not so good if the aim is to develop independent, creative, entrepreneurial human beings.

Now, many people no doubt believe that the purpose of a college education is to get a job, any job, that pays well enough to be middle class. They don’t care if the job is creative or a dead-end. While I respect the basic desire for a comfortable life, I think it’s in fact essential to the continued stability of our democracy that we aim to do better. To say why, it’s important to look not at the average work place, but the ones held in highest esteem who regularly succeed at creative, ground-breaking projects. What about these organizations leads to good outcomes even when they are creating inherently non-standard, non-routine products?

Ironically, I think some of the best exemplars are universities and the sort of open-ended R&D centers (like the old Xerox PARC) that were notorious problems for managers because there was no good way to run them in a routine way. We can argue about what the best cases are, but it’s worth asking why (at least historically) the employees at these organizations did such great work despite having considerable creative autonomy. One answer is that accountability doesn’t need to come from outside; in fact, the best scenario is holding oneself accountable for some task because one genuinely believes in its importance. That importance may be for the sake of others, or it may be simply for the challenge and pleasure of succeeding at a difficult goal. (It may be both.)

But the significance of our best work occurring outside bureaucratic standards goes beyond the workplace. The consequences are in fact quite broad: learning to think creatively and having the necessary agency to hold oneself accountable are important for public life in general, and especially for continuing the entrepreneurial, self-starter tradition of American politics.

As a result, it’s critical that we be very leery of imposing the deadening hand of bureaucracy on college education. Even if college were only for the sake of getting a good job, the requirements for a good job these days are not simply having mastered certain course material or technical skills. Indeed, the very best jobs require much more than subject-based knowledge: teamwork, critical analysis, quick learning, and flexibility are paramount. It’s difficult to imagine how colleges would inculcate these abilities in students if they were held accountable to regimes of testing, quotas, or other hurdles. In sum, while it’s true that we need to hold colleges more accountable for their results, it should be clear that importing the standards of the average corporate workplace would be a mistake, and indeed the very ideal of higher education is consonant with the sort of accountability, i.e. self-accountability, which cannot be produced en masse like cars in a factory.

“Principles of any sort have been eradicated from political discourse.  If one has any sort of principles, they must be taken not as active, definite guides in the formulation of policy, but disembodied Platonic notions separate of any concrete political reality. In the mind of the modern politician, success does not consist of the fulfillment of carefully defended principles, but rather the balancing of those principles with the nebulous standard of practical success.”

He identifies one of the chief captains of unprincipled politicians as Barack Obama: “Obama, a man so obviously without convictions beyond advocacy of the politically expedient, and so lacking in vision beyond the marketing of himself as a brand, that his elevation to the status of international icon is more a sad commentary on the state of culture than an intellectual noteworthy trend.”

I think Saad has an important point that he’s gotten confused with a misunderstanding about the way politics works. Saad seems to believe that the problem with American democracy right now is that politicians aren’t toeing the line of some overarching principle. In fact, he thinks, if they stopped compromising themselves so much, they might exit the swamp of hypocrisy and start the country moving again. The difficulty with this perspective is that the reason we’re stuck is not so much the absence of strong principles as the absence of the ability to integrate competing principles.

In other words, the chief problem with Saad’s point of view is that if he got his wish and politicians started to adhere inflexibly to various principles, the whole country would grind to a halt. (In fact, it already has, more or less.) It’s too simple to hope that everyone actually believes the same things deep down in their hearts, and if we just articulate it the right way, or just go find the right evidence, we can all arrive at the same basic principles for our lives and country. There has never been this sort of unity, and the divisions run as deep as one can go. [For example, look to Fish's article on how to interpret the constitution, or see Karl Mannheim's work on conservative thought in Germany.] That means that Saad’s hope that the principle of “inalienable individual rights” can cure our internal divisions as a nation is unworkable in practice. The rights guaranteed in the constitution cross-cut our political divisions, and nothing about respecting the idea of inalienable rights demands that I should support the right to bear machine guns in inner cities. Nor does supporting rights demand that I interpret the constitution in terms of its intended consequences or as a book of inviolable rules (c.f. Fish). Whatever will help us, it must be something that brings us together despite our differences instead of serves as one more way for us to articulate what we disagree over.

As Mannheim points out, in fact, the key principle of a functioning democracy is not any progressive or conservative creed, nor any pro or anti capitalist stance, but the basic principle of taking seriously what other people value and trying to integrate what is good for them into your own values. This perhaps is the only principle worth being rigid about in a democracy, but it certainly does not run purely counter to political expediency. At this point, I have to defend Obama against Saad’s cynical attack. To blame Obama for having to make serious compromises to his preferred agenda in order to maintain any semblance of the integrative ideal in democracy is at best a serious mistake and at worst deceptive. Obama is rightly uninterested in vilifying anyone, including bankers, doctors, or Republicans. He sincerely believes that people are at heart good and he always gives them the chance to do the right thing first before he starts to work against them. That, if anything can be, is a profound principle of compassion and understanding in a world of cynicism and anger. To say that Obama took on the health care debate because his only interest is political expediency is inexplicable. Obama has tried harder than anyone else has in years to bring rational discourse back to domestic and foreign policy-making. He has bent over backwards to include Republicans on policy discussions, spending large amounts of time and resources talking with Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and others about their desires for reform, as well as respecting the dissents of many conservative Democrats. Political expediency in this case would be to force the issue, to throw aside effort at meaningful debate, and to simply coerce the Democratic party into line with threats.

We can go more deeply into Obama’s approach to politics if needed, but the general point is that he indeed follows a profound principle with great dignity and consistency: to take your opponents seriously, to integrate their best ideas into your own, and to try to forge a greater union. To simply advocate strong principles without an understanding of how deliberative democracy depends on the integration of opposing viewpoints is to advocate the gradual destruction of the public sphere. Which, indeed, is what’s happening. So while Saad is quite right that we do need politicians to more rigorously follow a political principle, he is wrong that “compromise” is antithetical to a principled approach to politics, and he is wrong that “inalienable individual rights” is directly helpful as a “principle” for fixing our problems. Indeed, it is our whole society’s increasing take-it-or-leave-it attitude to what we imagine as our inalienable rights that has created the fickle rage that passes for public debate these days.

I want to dwell on the idea behind this quote, which is that violence can achieve permanent change in the nation’s best interest. The tendency to express anger and frustration in violence is powerful but deeply misguided, and I think it’s worth trying to explain why.

This issue is important for a number of reasons, but personally I often find myself deeply angry when I read the news and hear what many people think is a good answer to their and our problems (including Pawlenty). So I don’t mean sorting through Pawlenty’s comment to be just a project of negative criticism. Instead, I hope it to be a piece of a positive project: being able to turn violent anger into a productive, helpful response that indeed does match our highest standards for good action.

In the context of a democracy, one of the main reasons we believe that anger is the best way is because conversation seems to have failed. From Pawlenty’s point of view (granting its sincerity for our purposes here), violent destruction is a way of saying “I’ve had enough” in a fashion that the antagonist (Woods/big government) can’t avoid and can’t ignore. Now, since the whole point of democracy is to not resort to violence in the face of disagreement, we have to believe very strongly that what we desire is so important, so crucial to our well-being, that its absence or lack is sufficient to justify the temporary nullification of the political system we live within. In other words, whatever we want, we think it justifies us acting like we live by the sword instead of by democracy.

It seems to me that the only kind of desire that could justify abnegating democracy would be the desire for democracy itself. What I mean is that democracy constitutes one of the highest goods we have ever achieved as a human race, and to be able to live in a society without tyranny or slavery, for example, is really one of the very best things we can have. Higher vs lower tax rates, the possession of guns, the right to abortion, these are all important goods for some people, but they don’t equal in importance the ability to engage freely in political speech and action in order to determine your own government. So to kill or harm someone because of the desire for a right (no matter how justified) is to say that that right matters more than democracy itself, which is almost self-contradictory. [There are a bunch of loose threads here we could follow up on, but let's keep plowing ahead.]

As a result, the only way smashing in the windows of big government makes sense is if Pawlenty believed “big” government somehow threatened democratic government. On the face of it, there is no direct reason why a big government is not democratic, nor that being big would clearly lead to an undemocratic government down the line. (Indeed, countries such as Sweden or Norway indicate this cannot be true in any simplistic fashion.) Now, we could either go down the path of wondering if Pawlenty does somehow believe that big government is threatening democracy (a la the Tea Party), or we could consider why it’s mistaken for anyone to think that violence for a lesser cause than democracy itself is worthwhile.

Now, since the overarching intention of living in a democracy is to not have to use violence on a regular occasion to achieve the basic necessities for life and happiness, we would have to assume that any act of violence would be a one-off event. Somehow, the people Pawlenty opposes would have to be permanently or at least reliably altered by suffering his destructive act in such a way that they continued to act according to peaceful, public discourse but now in the particular way that Pawlenty wanted. This sort of assumption makes sense for a five year old who lashes out at his parents, knowing that (if they’re loving), they wont respond in kind back to him. Instead, they’ll try to understand the source of his anger and correct it, along with punishing him with a time-out. However, outside this situation, it does not generally hold true that anyone we hurt with our actions will be so loving as to understand our reasons, try to address them, forgive us our errors, and then move on as before. Rather, much more common would be for the person we harm to suddenly view us as a threat within an otherwise peaceful world and to use any means possible to restore what they beforehand saw as an acceptable situation. The consequence of our harmful act, therefore, is to beget further actions that would normally be beyond the pale of democratic civil society.

The basic conclusion must be that in a democratic context, violence does not lead back to civil society but with certain things fixed. Violence leads ultimately away from democracy, period. It’s a mistake to think that any one person or even a whole group of people can act destructively toward others and expect that the other people will understand, fix their ways, and return to normal.

However, let us briefly occupy the position of the people so wronged by violence in order to turn this critical argument into a positive understanding. Because in fact, no matter how distasteful it may be to recognize, responding in anger to someone who hurt us is as much as a mistake as the hurtful person’s actions were in the first place. No one should expect that violence will lead ultimately to the resumption of peaceful society without difficult acts of forgiveness and contrition, and that includes victims of violence as well as its perpetrators. To turn the circle around and become a perpetrator of violence ourselves is to put aside the very good we valued in the first place in favor of a quick path to hell.

That means that each of us, ultimately, is responsible for assuming the attitude and position of the parent with respect to those who harm us. To feel anger is to possess the opportunity to build understanding and compassion with someone who is afraid and suffering from the lack of something very important to them. In this way, anger is the door to understanding what they cannot articulate in the realm of public discourse, and to solve what they feel they cannot with peaceful means. Violence does not serve as a wakeup call to those we hate except to stimulate them into further violence. Our own anger, however, can serve as a wakeup call for us to reach deeper and summon our belief in what really matters: being able to live with love and kindness in peace.

———————

It’s not clear to me that anybody gains by getting involved with politics these days. It’s so easy to be demonized for a minor mistake or for no reason at all. When the searchlight of angry internet rage finds you, no thick skin or the stone wall can block its burning gaze. I take it seriously that there is a great deal of anger in the world and that anyone who ventures to criticize it is no longer in control. In a sense, the point of this blog is to try and explain why I’m scared enough of the consequences of all the anger I see to let it go unchecked.

I am not simply worried or moderately exercised by the rampant hypocrisy and name-calling that passes for informed criticism today. I am concerned about a structural problem with democratic states that leaves them open to transformation into tyrannies or worse, totalitarian regimes. In particular, I am worried about the anti-democratic tendencies I see in America today. These are deep, serious concerns that can lead to strong political accusations and which therefore demand a counterbalancing sense of responsibility and carefulness. I unfortunately do not have the time or ability to do these problems full justice, and yet I do not feel content to hold my peace in the hopes that someone else will take up the challenge as I see it. This blog, then, is not a book, nor a scholarly work, nor even a well-researched journalistic report. It is the best that I can do as a well-educated, concerned citizen whose primary labor is spent on other pursuits out of necessity. I hope that in some sense the very limits of my project make it appropriate to this format of a blog, where the opinions and resources of others can be brought together as comments and postings in a public, online space.

I am well aware, however, that no fancy words or flowery rhetoric can hide the essential fact that there are thousands of other blogs making similar kinds of arguments using the same evidence, and that I would find many of them to be ridiculous, abhorrent, or at best misguided. In fact, the very problem I am attempting to address here is that we as a nation can no longer tell well-reasoned, sincere political argument from hyperbolic propoganda. I do not believe that the difference can be fully captured in the form or presentation of our arguments. Logic alone will not suffice. We must look to principles and actions as well.

For that reason, then, the way I hope to distinguish this blog from those to which it is opposed, or to anyone who acts out of thoughtless anger via any medium, is by making myself accountable under a set of general principles to anyone who reads these entries. What I will not promise is that at any time I am correct, acting in concordance with these principles, or in fact helping the cause I have set out to support. This might sound very strange, but it shouldn’t. What I am trying to show is that there is no total ideology, claim to perfection, or ultimate authority present here. I am a finite, limited being. I believe that living by the principles I set for myself is always a struggle and an impermanent achievement. I do not believe that someday Truth will descend on the earth and our struggle for the good will be over.

The point of the principles below is to join together the efforts of anyone interested in order to balance our weaknesses and support our strengths. We do this by our commitment to a community pursuing a higher set of goals. I hold myself accountable to these principles and I hope you will hold me to them as well. I should say that they are no more perfect than anything else, and that I expect to revise them and find that not everyone agrees. Nonetheless, only by acting and reflecting upon these principles do I expect to distinguish this blog from any other. Only by the actions, judgments, and thoughts of an open community can we distinguish sense from nonsense. I do not believe there is any better way. This ideal and its consequences, I hope, will help return meaning to politics and stability to our democracy.

Principles

1. Each person is in essence a good person. No one is beyond the pale although it may prove impossible to reach them.

2. Angry destructiveness, vengeance, ridicule, and similar actions are always counterproductive. They categorically harm more than they help.

3. Always moderate a claim to be proportional to its evidence. Hyperbole or exaggeration are signs of the desire for attention rather than the desire for the good of others.

Public engagement in the political process requires emerging from a private realm where you have formed your ideas and then somehow voicing them in front of others. Traditionally, the private realm was a man’s household and land, within which he was solely responsible. But for college students today, what would our “household” be? Despite being old enough to fight in a war, students typically aren’t even self-sufficient financially. We own little to no property; we rarely hold positions of serious power; in some sense we do not pass the coming-of-age ritual into middle-class adulthood until we graduate. How can we learn anything of the practice and pitfalls of political responsibility if we have none?

What’s still left to a student in college is typically their “future,” upon which they mortgage the money to pay for their education, and participation in whatever social communities alive on the campus. Of course, some students do find engagement off campus via part-time jobs or volunteering, and others manage to obtain some degree of actual influence on campus through rare positions of student leadership that are taken seriously by the administration. But I’m concerned here with the majority of students who are not pushed toward such opportunities and in fact could not be accomodated en masse if they did all seek engagement.

How, then, can a student’s future be a basis for an autonomy analogous to the independence of a family farm or a small business owner? Perhaps the answer is simple: the future is a basis for autonomy when a student expects his or her career will lead to autonomy eventually. One might say that the common contemporary equivalent to the family farm is the independent consultant, the expert whose skills are portable from one situation to the next. The consultant is autonomous in the world of giant institutions and corporations that are out of date by structural necessity and constantly need the input of more flexible outsiders who can reform bureaucracies without suffering any political backlash. Similarly, the entrepreneur or innovator escapes dependence by taking enormous risks on ideas and products too far out for big companies to even imagine. In this case, then, the majority of students would have to imagine themselves as independent consultants or entrepreneurs, which is not a practical goal for many majors in addition to being an eventual contradiction of terms: consultants survive as long as they are not the majority, because they live off of the problems of many big corporations.

If most graduates are going to end up working for other people, i.e. are going to be dependent toeing some corporation or other institution’s line, how can the idea of the “future” be a source of independence for a student still in college? An alternative would be to ensure that any time not spent at work could support the ability to engage meaningfully in the public pursuits of the student’s choosing. The idea of inspiring students to a life of learning has something of this answer about it, and indeed many people who have found themselves impoverished of other freedoms have sung the praises of the freedom of imagination and the mind. Along this line of thought, then, we would have to ask how college education can support the freedom of mind and the ability to bring reflective judgment to public engagement outside the constraints of work.

But more basically, students would have to obtain the idea that this is what their education was for. And indeed, nothing in college curriculums makes any sort of indication that its value is a freedom of thought and action outside the career, in those precious few hours left between arriving home from work at night and leaving the house again in the morning. What stands against this liberal arts conception of the meaning of education? The narrow-minded specialization of the professors teaching undergrads would be one factor: only rarely do professors imagine that the value of their course is in opening up a student’s mind for the rest of his or her life; instead, they typically view it (at best) as necessary content for becoming another professor of whatever subject. But to dig deeper we’ll need to investigate what students could possibly gain from a college education that would give them an autonomy stronger than mere employability. We would need to see in what way college could give students a freedom to pursue their own meaning in life independent of the concerns of necessity, such as a basic income. To be continued…

The difficulties of remaining a responsible, self-aware person during discipline are manifold. First, one, as self aware, is not convinced of the naturalistic interpretation of skill given by examiners and culture (cf in particular the classic example of regression toward the mean given in statistics courses where students’ scores on midterms are indicators of a constant intelligence factor that determines scores for the finals but only imperfectly). From the perspective of the discipline, it fails to understand why some students fail, because the inner workings of their minds are closed to the non-empathic observer (and also to the closed system of the discipline’s technical discourse). That is, since most examiners are unaware of their discipline as such, they are also not empathic, leading to a naturalizing of ability to learn into the individual. (This is mitigated by awareness of class differences, etc. but as such is mainly an elaboration of the training system as opposed to direct empathy.)

The adult, then, is not bound by a false naturalism and therefore exerts pressure on the training system to accomodate his/her distinctive needs. Usually, if successful, this results in an elaboration of as just discussed. However, as an outsider to the interpretive system of understanding and explaining disciplinary achievement, he/she must maintain a sense of calm and security against the pressure of otherwise peers, as well as accept what will often be a temporary loss of status during the training period, because there is a taboo against identifying oneself as habituating publicly and therefore socially instead of privately therefore “naturalistically.” Also, I know my experience is to consistently confuse awareness with competence, so that I often am shocked how poorly I do at first in a class even though I exceed the norm by the end.

Second, the unaware “nature” of the discipline prevents explicit discussion of larger meanings, on many levels. One struggles to discuss the relation of one class to another except tangentially, lamost as a digression. One struggles to relate the class to other disciplines with different norms. And it is almost impossible to speak of higher meanings for society, professions, and personal life (eg what is it like to use this in a biostatistics job?) So many burning, important questions go unanswered, poorly answered, merely intimated, or dismissed with prejudice. This displacement of inquiry and emotion requires considerable work on the part of the individual to maintain the sense of calm enjoyment and meaningful directedness mentioned above.

Finally, there is an alienation of the adult from the discipline as he considers its futrue and excellences but is unable to discuss them in an inquiring way. Effectively, this stifles innovation and represses people’s emotions to the discipline’s detriment. The origin of this repression is a conflation of the acquisition of skill with the coming to awareness of adulthood. Traditionally, one becomes self aware at the same time as one is legitimated with power to change the discipline, eg as a student graduates and becomes a faculty member. Thus traditionally the “children” are excluded from adult problems in a way with some degree of legitimacy and practicality from the perspective of the “adults.” However, what happens in addition is the exclusion of all other adults who have the capacity for larger questions of excellence and meaning for society but less than complete habituation into the skills of the discipline. This is essentially the “meritocratic” exclusion of democracy from disciplinary power, or, in other words, the basic political problem for holding disciplines (including non-academic professions) to account for society at large. As long as completing the training is the only legitimate, recognized origin of “adulthood,” we cannot have public discourse.

Returning the the experience of taking on a discipline, then, there needs to be two separate discourses engaged in the process. One is the discourse of acquiring skill and the ability to concretely represent the technical aspects of the discipline. The other is a discourse oriented towards inquiry about the meaning of the technical skills (and even the discourse of acquisition). Here one is not disciplining students normatively, although there remains a sense of degrees of achievement. The difference is that each student must be treated as legitimately organizing meanings together in a way distinctive of his/her experience. What structures this meaning-discourse is the actual limits and nature of the technical skills in the discipline, ie there are indeed recurring connections and problems between subfields or between the discipline and other disciplines, other industries, or society. This stability of structural connections lends inquiry an organization that means each individual is not by necessity radically new or unlocated (ie incommensurable with others). In fact, inquiry into meaning often (implicitly or explicitly) takes the form of historical investigation, doubling as the coming to understand and orient towards the desires and goals of the people (as well as outside forces and events) that have created or worked on the technical structure in the past. In a sense, this is the functionalist evaluation of the fit between reality and social structure (again, Mannheim). The irony of course, is that often such evaluations do not in fact require deep technical knowledge, because the scale of the inquiry is so broad that most details are irrelevant due to the scope of history and future under debate that render those details mere fluctuations in the discipline. But the idea that technical experts might then be at the service of non-technical “adults” is anathema to the traditional model of adulthood.

Similarly, it is also often possible to inquire into the meaning of a discipline-piece without having mastered its local technical language and practice. In fact, understanding the meaning of intention of a technical practice is one of the fastest and most powerful ways to learn it. The absence of meaning-discourse then is a great loss to the discipline, under the caveat that one can properly engage with the levels of sophistication that students (and faculty) traverse during inquiry.

Fundamentally, one is distinguishing between discipline, which coerces students forward, and inquiry, which takes the personally-felt problems of the student as a launching point for authentic understanding. Just as raising a child requires the discipline of the naughty spot for timeouts, one cannot dispense with discipline. Moreover, just as one is always limited by the necessities of life, one must always be more disciplined to “survive” then our interest in inquiry would like to admit. More importantly, though, discipline and inquiry correspond to different kinds of work. From the perspective of discipline, inquiry appears non-technical, and in some sense this is accurate. Depending on the scope of the inquiry, the details may be irrelevant to the picture being reworked, recomposed, taken apart and used as a collage, etc. Indeed, inquiry about the meaning of a discipline does not produce the standard work products of the discipline. However, the communication of a new perspective/collage is of vital importance for the disciplines continuance.

So it is a mistake to think that all scientists (for example) do inquiry as such. They may only sometimes be aware of frustration and “stuckness” that resolves itself one day. In this way, they are merely disciplined. That is, everyone, as a person, is capable of inquiry and carries it out regularly, but we need to distinguish the different modes of awareness with which they do it. The relatively unaware mode I just mentioned is a disciplinary mode, produced from the coercion of habituation from the outside without a complete, authentic awareness of the purposes and goals the work is serving. Inquiry proper, however, is peculiarly human in being general to all subjects and methods, and is not disciplinary per se but exists in a higher mode of awareness. Full fledged inquiry carried out in a disciplinary context attempts to reorient some technical practice and normative values to a different meaning or purpose than they originally served. This reorientation may simply be for the individual using them, who never thought about them that way before, or for a larger community in such a way that the new orientation is implemented into the disciplinary normalization of education.

Thus the taking on of a discipline with awareness is the acceptance and commitment to a certain direction of purpose and achievement, with its concomitant sacrifices, limitations, and benefits. To be disciplined with awareness is fundamentally to acquire the skills necessary in a context of inquiry, so that each aspect of the education is intentionally examined and reflected upon in the light of the whole and its larger environment. What is gained from this approach is an increased sense of meaningfulness for the individual’s life and work, as well as a better capacity for the discipline to remain connected with the reality of its own problems and its environment. What is lost is a certain speed and efficiency. It will not be the case that inquiry ever replaces discipline or vice versa some day, but in a day and age where huge infrastructures of disciplines, from professions to natural sciences, are the dominant power structures governing human life, it would be nice if we could make it easier to undertake discipline with more self awareness.

Tribune article on the amount of uninsured patients being sent to nearby hospitals

tribune article on non-profit hospitals sending patient’s to cook county hospital

Sun-Times article quoting an Obama friend defending the ER policy.

What exactly lies beneath the argument between hospital administrators, President Zimmer, outside medical professionals, newspapers, and the University community is difficult to tell because most of the opinions expressed are obscured from public discussion. For example, no one as yet to my knowledge has published interviews with the doctors and students who signed the protest petition. Nonetheless, as a general member of the University community, my initial reaction of doubt and anger to the proposed change in medical care was shared by many others, and I believe my perspective speaks for their concerns. I welcome other voices, especially those who have not spoken publicly and believe this issue merits the understanding and consent of the community at large.

The basic issue from where I stand is the utter absence of a definition of “urgent” versus “non-urgent” care. Obviously a gun-shot wound is highest priority, but what about getting a few stitches for a gash or suffering from possible food poisoning? These lesser issues only require a walk-in visit, not emergency diagnosis or surgery, but will I be sent to the Kenwood clinic if I show up at the UC Hospital needing stitches? A host of touchy issues follow from this question. In fact, I don’t think they are substantive for the discussion, but they do emphasize potency of what “non-urgent” turns out to mean in practice.

In other words, the issue is that spokespeople for the University, including President Zimmer and the authors of the Urban Health Initiative website, have failed to understand that their basic terms don’t have a clear meaning for us. Their rhetorical error resulted in anger and confusion on both sides, at first because people responded too quickly to what the policy might be, and then because the administrators who designed the policy overreacted to what seemed irrational or uninformed criticism. The former mistake was probably exemplified by ACEP President Nick Jouriles, who issued an aggressive press release against the ER policy without checking the facts first, as he admits. The latter mistake can be found in President Zimmer’s public response to student criticism, which was to blame them for not doing more research: “I would hope that as U of C students, you would try to do more to avoid a superficial [understanding].”

Having examined all the available information I could find, I would argue that the UHI failed to explain itself clearly, but that what information is available indicates the policy has merit. The horrible irony is that the UHI has stumbled into the same problem it was trying to address. As a Tribune story describes, “the University of Chicago Hospitals is taking on yet another mission: educate the uninsured on how to get quality medical care without showing up in its expensive emergency room.” The point is that a lot of medical problems that need to be treated that day (such as a pulled muscle) do not necessarily need an emergency room, and moreover a number of people arriving at the ER have chronic medical conditions but no primary care physician that provides them with regular treatment or preventative advice (see the bottom of the UHI FAQ page). The result is that people, out of justifiable ignorance, go for treatment to places that have equipment specialized to other purposes and end up wasting money to no purpose.

The sad fact is that the UHI is not carrying out this educational mission on its website in a detailed, coherent way, i.e. so that someone like me who still doesn’t understand fully what conditions are appropriate to ERs could learn about good choices for care. Moreover, the University has not pursued the point of defining “non-urgent” care in the press, as evidenced by the lack of nuance in the Maroon’s story, the Tribune, and a host of other articles (here). (These newspapers have their own responsibility to investigate further and have not yet fulfilled that obligation.)

In other words, what ended up as a PR disaster and the postponement of a potentially good policy could have gone differently. Fundamentally, the error lies in assuming the worst of one’s critics. As I see it, the people criticizing the ER policy had a good reason to be worried because the policy was very ambiguous, ironically suffering from the very problem it was intended to correct. While the ACEP and others in the community sometimes asssumed the worst of the university, the university administrators needed to respond positively to these criticisms instead of assuming the fault only lay outside their doors. Although no one escapes responsibility here, ultimately it should have been up to the designers of the plan, who understood its reasons and context best, to respond positively to criticism, even when it was hasty and unthinking. That is, after all, what it would mean to be truly a leader in health care.