Easily Distracted

The historian Randall Packard gave an interesting talk at Swarthmore last week about the history of malaria eradication. Like many historians, he ends up with a skeptical view of contemporary projects and plans. As he sees it, current attempts to eradicate malaria at the present time are making some of the same strategic mistakes that a post-1945 global campaign to eradicate malaria made. Packard wasn’t arguing that there should be no major global effort against malaria, but instead contended that what we should be aiming towards is a zero mortality campaign focused on pregnant women, infants and children.

I liked the talk and agreed with the argument. I got a bit fixated on one point, far more fixated than Packard does: the contrast between the local context of bed net usage and the technocratic, distant language used about bed net usage in top-level malaria control discourse like the Global Malaria Action Plan. That plan notes very briefly that there are challenges with “end-user compliance”, but not to worry: there’s a place in the plan for coordinated use of communication and behavior change methodologies.

Some of the arguments going back and forth between Jeffrey Sachs and Dambisa Moyo about bed nets are screwed up, partly because Moyo takes a lot of the current critique of development aid from Easterly, Calderisi and other authors and takes away a lot of the complexity and texture of that work. Moyo is convinced that the problem with giving bed nets away is that you put African bed net producers out of business, which really misses the point. I also think the “give bed nets away or sell them” argument isn’t a meaningful or helpful argument about bed net usage in Africa or elsewhere, it’s an argument about an orthodoxy in economics.

Sachs, on the other hand, is pretty much stuck in the same place that the GMAP is when it comes to figuring out why people don’t use bed nets: his perspective is too removed, too far from the actual situations of people who are or are not using bed nets. He knows they should do it, and if they aren’t doing what they should do, then just do some education or something.

Language like “end user compliance” wards off the lived reality of human life like a garlic wards off a vampire. Big plans and sweeping frameworks subcontract out the problem of the local and particular to some yet-to-be-named partner organization who will be charged with dealing with end user compliance in a sensitive, community-engaged, bottom-up, gender-attentive, ethnographically nuanced manner. That way, when the news filters up that end user compliance doesn’t meet expectations, you can just imagine that you haven’t met the right partner organizations yet or that the methodology for securing compliance needs some tweaking. You didn’t get enough medical anthropologists. The medical anthropologists weren’t properly integrated into the plan. Something like that.

The big plan never has to trouble itself with understanding the scene of everyday life or meeting the end users as human beings living in particular places. The big plan doesn’t have to bring what a smart medical anthropologist might tell it about why people use or don’t use bed nets into the language or thinking of the big plan. That’s the subcontractor’s problem. But it’s on these questions that big plans of all kinds stand or fall, and they can only be thought and engaged properly in their own terms, not in bloodlessly technocratic language.

You have to be able think at the top level, in the big plan, about local ideas about illness and local ideas about sleep, local arrangements of household space, local furnishings, local material conditions. And understand that these things vary.

The top planners have to understand that in historic terms, it’s perfectly sensible to mistrust development organizations in many parts of the world. Sometimes they have had actively bad ideas that caused damage to local communities and sometimes even when they have had good ideas, they only pursued them for a short while until they got bored or distracted or there was a new fad or a change in political administrations or the money dried up. Then the people who really bought into the good idea were left holding the sack.

The top planners have to get away from data that shows that bed net usage has a huge impact on malaria transmission to understand that sleeping under a bed net can be uncomfortable and annoying. That many adults who’ve had malaria tend to treat the disease the way we treat the flu: annoying, frustrating, a bit scary, but tolerable. It’s not hard to wash your hands and use hand sanitizer regularly, and those cut transmission of the flu. But for a lot of people, the minor hassle of regular hand sanitizing isn’t quite worth whatever percentage fewer times you’d have a cold or flu.

Every public health campaign that starts from the premise that there’s a simple and rational preventive behavior change that people of course should adopt is setting itself up for failure, because it’s not thinking clearly about how most human beings in general inhabit the landscape of habit and convenience and risk-calculation, let alone local cultural framings of those same things. Public health campaigns sort of start by taking educated professional white Americans and their particular cluster of common attitudes and cultural postures as the norm and everything else as uncompliant end usage or uneducated deviance. Among other things, if you want to convince people to better safeguard their own health and the health of other people around them, you’d better back up a bit and find out whether they care much about their own health and the health of other people around them. That’s not a universal, and not caring doesn’t make someone a monster or a sociopath. If I lived in a world that was full of political disorder, economic failure, endemic violence, if planning for the future was a sick joke, I might find it faintly ridiculous when some well-meaning person kept telling me how important it was to sleep under a bed net.

If you’re planning for action, well, this is what action really is all about. Anybody can make a comprehensive ten-point plan that neatly subdivides the messiness of lived experience into dry subheadings while keeping an antiseptic distance from that messiness.

I just have to say it. President Obama?

It kind of says something about the world in general (as well as the past Administration) at this moment if default statesmanship carried out within ordinary interstate institutions seems like a major contribution to peace.

Yeah, I get it, it’s for being Not-George-Bush.

The Nobel Peace Prize kind of seems to me to need a conceptual overhaul. Make it something more like the Nobel Prize for Contributions to Democratic Civil Society or some such.

Update: Memorable quote from State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley: “We think that this gives us a sense of momentum when the United States has accolades tossed its way rather than shoes.”

There was a sort of mini-meme earlier this month circulating around left and liberal blogs, a response in a thread at digg.com satirizing conservative hostility to government by calling attention to all the high-quality services provided by government that we depend upon in an average day.

It’s an old sentiment, and a perfectly sensible reply to the notion that the state taints everything by its very nature. It’s not likely to convince people who have an impossibly sanctified conception of the market and its capacity to enhance human life, or an equally determined vision of the state as purely and inevitably demonic (save, perhaps, its military or police capacities). But liberals not unreasonably hope to remind most people of the lasting benefits that have followed the early 20th Century expansion of the idea and reach of public services and government responsibilities.

On the other hand, there’s a danger to defending the state as an institution by listing its productive integration into everyday life. For one, it’s important for educated elites in the U.S. and Western Europe to seriously consider the degree to which that state, the state that provides services and protections, is an institution to which those elites have privileged access. It is in some sense “their” institution: they provide its upper leadership and fill out most of the middle management in areas that process or generate expert knowledge and intervention. They feel more comfortable interpreting the state’s activities and interacting with its operations. If they feel at risk from the actions of the government, they’re often more comfortable negotiating or actively blocking those actions. (If nothing else, you’re going to be a more successful NIMBY if you’ve got some money and some education on your side.) When you feel more comfortable with government, it’s hard to understand why anyone else wouldn’t feel the same way.

I’ve pointed out before in the context of U.S. politics why some constituencies flatly reject portrayals of government as a potential savior despite the fact that they’re beneficiaries of many governmental programs and actions. The manipulative cynicism of many conservative pundits aside, a more grass-roots rejection of government often stems from a feeling that the state is simply not capable of systematic improvement to the circumstances that some communities find themselves in. It’s not that it’s incompetent to do so, more that those communities feel a fatalism about the drift of history, a sense that if life is growing steadily worse in its moral, economic and social character, there is no policy, no expert opinion, no government agency, capable of addressing that situation.

There’s another aspect to this populist skepticism about government that I think is much more widely shared and not really ideologically conservative by its nature. This New York Times piece today about a public struggle over the fate of some deer and a moose in Vermont is a pretty good example. On one hand, you’ve got experts trying to manage animal populations so as to minimize the threat of chronic wasting disease on behalf of the public interest. On the other hand, you’ve got a guy with a pet moose that he loves.

The experts are trying to do their best to look out for the people of Vermont and their environment. The policy on chronic wasting disease has the same intent as all the other things that the state of Vermont does to protect its public lands and the health and welfare of the state and its people, all the invisible things that the digg.com poster was trying to remind us that we depend upon and expect.

But each of us knows and lives our existence at a more intimate scale, where the abstraction of the public interest seems impoverished and cold compared to the vivid individuality of real people and real circumstances. Pete the moose’s owner is wondering why it can’t be “arranged where nobody wins and nobody loses”, why you can’t have a general policy about moose and deer and elk together in a hunting farm that also makes an explicit exception for Pete or for some deer or for the circumstances of one man’s facility. Vermont’s a small state, after all, and the elk-hunting farm in question is one of only two in the state. Shouldn’t that make it possible to make law and policy which is flexible and circumstantial rather than dispassionate and detached?

The reports about government action which are told and circulate as horror stories are often this kind of tale, where government officials intervene crudely in the name of a policy or procedure into subtle circumstances and produce individual injustice or suffering while claiming to protect a higher or more generalized principle. Sometimes that has something to do with the petty authoritarianism of official culture, the same kind of license that a TSA screener who makes your life miserable is abusing.

Often, however, this is just about an incompatibility between public and individual scales of life. If you start cutting separate deals with everyone who pleads that their circumstances are special, that a legitimate attempt to safeguard the public shouldn’t apply to them, you’ll end up with a public policy that applies to no one. Let’s suppose that the regulations proposed in Vermont are a good way to contain the potential spread of chronic wasting disease. (I’m well aware that you could question them in purely expert terms, but for argument’s sake, let’s put that aside.) So Doug Nelson and Pete the moose get an exemption. Presumably the other elk-hunting farm in Vermont should be offered that too, if it’s asked for. What if someone else rescues some deer and moose under circumstances similar to Nelson and ends up feeling equally attached to them emotionally? The whole point of making an exemption is to recognize the quality and depth of Nelson’s individual feelings and experience with Pete: how could you refuse a similar circumstance in the future merely because it happens after a policy gets made?

What if, what if, what if. These are the counterfactuals that policy-makers tell about exceptions and circumstances, as a kind of totemic ward against their power. If we had to consider circumstances, they say, we’d never get anything done. Or we’d open ourselves up to a kind of corruption and abuse because you would necessarily have to devolve authority to the most local levels of a bureaucracy and trust those individuals to navigate intimate circumstances of real life with discretion and sensitivity. That worries many people as much as inflexible or blanket policies. It’s unnerving, that idea that you can’t really say what an institution or government is going to do until the actual circumstances of action present themselves. It amounts to a blank-check invitation to small-town Bonapartism.

This is the well-worn terrain on which 19th Century liberalism and the modern nation-state were born and it has ever since been the proving ground for that ideal and that institution. I don’t see a way off the map, but it’s well to be mindful of Pete the moose every time we’re tempted to recite the catechism of government’s benefits.

A while back, I suggested that it was time for everyone to cool it a bit on linking to the craziest, least thought-through, most over-the-top writing coming from the margins of cultural conservatism. My point was that during the previous presidential administration, those figures were important to criticize because they had substantial intellectual or political access to actual policy-makers, but that after November 2008, the best thing to do was to try and shove them off into the margins where they belonged.

If they continued to be the targets of regular links-for-deserved-abuse, I felt, there was the danger that those margins would continue to drive the national conversation about policy and politics. The way I saw it, it’s the same issue that you have when you’ve got a bunch of participants in an online forum who are having perfectly interesting disagreements and conversations and then suddenly an invective-spewing lunatic troll drops into the discussion. The result is something most online writers and readers have seen happen many times: everyone will drop their previous conversations and preferentially reply to the troll, with ever-increasing hostility. There’s a lot of reasons why this happens. It’s easier to mock and abuse than to carry on a subtle discussion, but also folks who’ve treasured a sense of a respectful ongoing conversation between unlike individuals are also honestly hurt and confused by the persistent presence of someone who is determined to destroy that community, who programmatically stays outside of a consensus culture but aggressively hounds its every move.

A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their craziness. Can I just ask: how’s that working out for you all? There’s pretty wide mainstream consensus that the parents who didn’t want their precious children to hear the President’s radical, socialist message about working hard and staying in school are pretty much batshit crazy if they’re serious about believing the President was going to suck out the precious bodily fluids of the nation’s children and pretty much nihilistic saboteurs if they’re just trying to sandbag the current political leadership wherever and whenever they can by getting the batshit crazy folks worked up.

And yet here we are: the crazies and the saboteurs are driving the national conversation as reported in the MSM and masticated by the Sunday-morning TV pundits. It’s the world’s biggest trollage ever. It doesn’t matter how crazy the responses are: they’re treated earnestly as a political problem while also generating earnest replies and assurances as well as mockery and contempt. In an alternate reality, the grown-ups would collectively shrug off a speech by any President about working hard and staying in school as a wholly conventional pro forma gesture and we’d get back to talking about the actually difficult issues involved in health care reform, none of which involve death panels or similar rot. We wouldn’t debate with “birthers” in mainstream media any more than we have debates with people who think the earth is flat or that the Hale-Bopp comet is coming to cleanse the planet and we should kill ourselves now to get to the next level. That’s not to say that there wouldn’t be such people in any alternative discursive reality, but there’s a difference between having fringes and representing fringes as included within and constituting an argumentative space that will help to shape collective action.

I don’t expect much to come of John Holbo’s careful breakdown of the non-philosophy underlying Megan McArdle’s blanket antagonism to all health care proposals, but there’s one point buried in there that’s worth pulling out for its general usefulness.

Namely, that loosely libertarian (e.g., McArdle/Brooksian surface-level libertarianism used mostly to defend fixed programmatic commitments) fears of the unintended consequences of action by the state are empirically and philosophically messed up. They’re not really based on a comprehensive history of the consequences of state action, and they’re not really based on any kind of consistent view of structure-agency interaction. They seem to me to take really very specific kinds of analyses of how 20th Century states engaged in projects, especially high modernist projects, which had many undesirable and perverse effects, and generalize them to a universal law of history. Jane Jacobs and James Scott, to cite two examples of those specific analyses, are talking about concrete episodes and perhaps modestly generalizing them to certain movements, ideologies or specific bureaucratic formations.

I think you can insist on the importance of unintended consequences as a part of a generalized theory of the relationship between structure and agency. I think you can also look at discrete intellectual movements or episodes where important actors believed that they could eliminate or master unintended consequences. Certainly that’s what a lot of rationalist high modernism implied, that good planning inputs based on proper ideological premises could reliably produce exactly the intended systematic changes.

The thing of it is, as John points out, is that if you’re going to argue that unintended consequences follow on any major change or disruption to an existing system, then there are two additional points which have to be made. First, there’s not much of a difference in this sense between the state and other major institutional actors which have some degree of agency over a system or structured practice. If three or four large pharmaceutical firms decide to change the way that they interact with the existing health care system, all sorts of unintended or unanticipated changes may follow. I can’t see any reason why someone like Megan McArdle would be intensely anxious about government and yet be relatively sanguine about industry, civic organizations, and so on, if the issue is that it is impossible to account for or anticipate unintended consequences.

Unless at the end of the day, this is about a near-religious belief that institutions of the market somehow always produce a good unintended consequence. That’s a bit hard to work out if you’re that radical and simplistic a manichean, since either the market is the first condition of human history and therefore produced non-market institutions (whoops! not a good unintended result from that perspective!) or the polity is the first condition and therefore produced the market (whoops! the polity produced a good unintended consequence!). Of course, it’s not a good description of the contemporary American health care system, either, which has been produced by complex interactions between market, state and non-state institutions.

Second, if you’re really interested in the unintended consequences of structure-agency loops on complex systems, you have to allow that many of them may be positive, neutral or be spandrels of some kind or another, as well as being negative or destructive. If you believe that all or even the strong majority of unintended consequences are negative, then you don’t really believe in contingent or unintended outcomes at all. You believe in a kind of declensionist, entropic worldview that holds that everything will in time inevitably go wrong. You’re basically Eeyore. Which is ok, but it is hard to make an Eeyore-style defense of anything, whether it’s the current health care system or anything else. You’re sure it’s all going to go wrong, and in fact, must be sure that the current system is less good than something in the past. If you think the current system is acceptable or worth defending, then you must be sure that unintended consequences sometimes lead to good results, because nobody set out to build exactly the health care system that Americans presently have.

Like John, I’m all for accepting that the gap between intent and practice will inevitably be quite wide, and that in that gap, all sorts of devils can find room to dance. It’s just that those kinds of gaps also have thermals upon which angels fly. The mere existence of such gaps is not a reason to simply squat dully upon the status quo, or unchain the magic market mechanism to come along and sweep us to the promised land, nor is it reason to simply avoid discussion of what we ideally would like to see happen on the grounds that whatever we would like, unintended consequences will ensure that we never get it.

Some years ago, I got mugged late at night at an urban train station. I was pretty stupid: I had a friend drop me off to a nearly deserted train station on the most deserted side. Two guys started towards me the moment they saw me, and I remember thinking very clearly that they were going to rob me. I should have turned and headed the other way fast, but I was paralyzed. So I walked toward them, they whipped out a knife, poked me in the stomach, and demanded my wallet. I took it out, they took out the money and handed it back. Though I was basically feeling like it was an out-of-body experience, I asked if I could keep a buck for a phone call. They laughed and gave me a dollar.

I got a good look at both of them, but a second after they ran off, I literally could not see either one in my mind, at all. Not their face, not their clothes. I could tell you they were young and they were black and that’s it. I had no image of them at all. I could remember very clearly the knife poking in my stomach, a small dot of blood under its point. I could see my wallet, and the dollar I got back. I could remember the ground, the lights on the ceiling, the fare machine with its specific blemishes. Not them.

So I went out the other side of the station and there was a transit cop there. I told him I’d just been mugged. He took off and called for backup, telling me to stay put. About fifteen minutes later, he came to get me. The police had apprehended two guys and wanted me to ID them. They were the right age and build, they’d been running from the cops through nearby backyards and over fences and so on from what I could hear. I looked at them and looked at them and tried to tell myself that these had to be the guys. But I couldn’t do it, because I wasn’t sure. I told the cop that I couldn’t be sure, I couldn’t remember the faces or the clothes. He looked at me, plainly annoyed: they’d obviously had a time chasing these guys down. “You sure?” he said, “These guys were running from the back of the parking lot on the other station the moment we got over there.” I hesitated. I wanted the guys caught, and I didn’t want to put out the cop for nothing. But I couldn’t do it: I knew I couldn’t swear that I was right, and I wanted to be able to swear. So they let them go.

———–

I’m surprised that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. has had the legs that it’s had as a national news story. I actually think that the conversation about the case in a lot of places has been sophisticated and complex, talking not just about race but about social class and about policing and authority.

Broadly speaking, I come down where quite a few people have, which is to say that of course this was about race: the person who made the call probably wouldn’t have called for two white men doing the same, and probably would have known who a white man on the street was anyway. Or she would have asked someone else in the neighborhood: recently a neighbor who lives several blocks away stopped at our door to ask about something odd she’d seen two doors up, just to make sure that we thought it was ok. (It was ok, we recognized the car and the people she was seeing.) The cop probably would have accepted much more quickly that he was dealing with the actual homeowner and backed off. On the flip side, Gates’ anger at the cop’s presence would have been much more humdrum if he hadn’t felt like a black man who was being harassed in his own home.

But like many other observers, I think this is as much about policing and authority as it is about race. I’m not the only one to have seen a connection between the Gates arrest and the case of Philadelphia police officer Alberto Lopez Senior last week. Though the cases are very different in scope and scale, they underscore the extent to which police power in many instances is arbitrary and the extent to which police unions with tremendous political influence will successfully shield their own employees from oversight.

This remarkable thread at Crooked Timber built around the comments of NYPD police captain Brandon de Pozo on the case triangulates really well on the problem of police authority and police discretion. De Pozo’s argument is that the officer arresting Gates made a mistake, but an understandable one, that police need to have good judgement but that the public also needs to show respect for their authority. I’m ok with that thought only if I think that when a cop shows bad judgment about making an arrest, there will be consequences and there will be public clarity about there having been bad judgment. Maybe minor discipline with the officer in the Gates arrest, but in the case of Lopez in Philadelphia, that should have been the fastest firing on record. He not only attacked and arrested someone without provocation, but tried to tamper with evidence and obstruct justice. Instead, he’s back on the job.

The reason I think that even the Gates arrest is a serious case of bad judgment goes back to the story I opened my post with. See, for me, an arrest is a serious, serious thing. The power to make an arrest is the singular place where a free society lives and dies. When a cop gets someone to come out of their own home in order to arrest them for disorderly conduct, with the apparent motive to avenge insults and get even, that’s serious business, even if the cop and the justice system know it’s a nuisance charge that’s going to be dismissed. The New York Times survey of police on the question of disorderly conduct makes it pretty clear that a lot of cops feel pretty free to make an arrest whenever they feel annoyed by a member of the public.

I get it: police work is hard, and in many respects unrewarding. I get also that it’s important and that I rely on it. I respect the men and women who do it well. I don’t think it’s right to yell at police or be an asshole. But saying after the fact that Gates was an asshole is one kind of judgment about the civic conduct of another citizen of this country. Arresting someone, charging them with a crime, depriving them even briefly of their liberty, is another thing altogether.

I couldn’t say yes to identifying those guys that night because I didn’t know for sure that they were the ones, even with a lot of circumstantial evidence that they might be. I couldn’t say yes because to arrest and charge ought to be something that has an almost sacred weight. I couldn’t be a party to it unless I was prepared to swear to its justice and necessity.

That’s what worries me most around this incident and similar incidents: that some people approve of the use of police power as routine, as tactical, to make a point. De Pozo in the Crooked Timber thread suggests that police ought to enforce social norms. He’s clear that he means just through their presence and their persuasive words, but I think maybe other police aren’t so clear. The power to arrest mustn’t be used just to tell an asshole he’s being an asshole, or to dictate the proper attitude. The misuse of the power to arrest ought to be seen as an extraordinary violation, a matter of the utmost gravity.

Some interesting fallout from the light sentence given to Pennsylvania state senator Vincent Fumo for his conviction on corruption charges, a sentence that the judge in the case justified as recognition of Fumo’s many good deeds. (The 55-month sentence is less than the plea deal Fumo was originally offered.)

Said good deeds were documented by a long parade of prominent character witnesses who sent letters to the judge. The letter that sticks in my craw most is from the current Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

Rendell does a bit of damning-with-faint-praise in his letter, which I mostly took to be an effort to build in a firewall between himself and whatever the sentence to Fumo ended up being. The thrust of his letter, however, is that Fumo worked hard on the behalf of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians, including people not in his own district, and that these good works should be considered as mitigating his illegal conduct.

What bugs me about this is that it frames the kind of corruption that Fumo engaged in as a kind of personal misconduct that has no political or social implications in its own right. I’d actually buy that argument if Fumo had been convicted of assault or of breaking into his neighbor’s house to steal something. There can be a big disconnect between good works in the world and individual crime or immorality.

Fumo, however, was systematically making the plight of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians more rather than less dire. Rendell gets it exactly wrong. Fumo was stealing “other people’s money” and redirecting it to his personal use. He was using the protected concept of a non-profit institution to carry out this activity. Fumo, like much of the Pennsylvania legislature, had no meaningful conception of the public interest beyond the reproduction of a self-aggrandizing network of people and resources.

I don’t think this is just Ed Rendell being Ed Rendell. I think this is a blindspot that crops up across the ideological spectrum in American (and arguably global) politics, but that is especially annoying when it comes from liberal Democrats. If someone’s delivered some votes here and there in support of progressive legislation, that means almost nothing if they’re constantly draining off resources that might be used to progressive ends in favor of keeping the wheels greased for a small elite of people centered on the politician himself or herself. Whatever goes out the door with those votes gets smuggled back in through phony non-profits, wink-wink nod-nod kickbacks, under-the-radar earmarks and the like. Lauding someone like Fumo for helping poor people is like praising water for being dry or sunlight for being dark. And yet, Rendell isn’t the only one to look the other way when stories like this break, to downplay the consequences.

If some punk off the streets breaks into a house and rips off some jewelry, maybe I’d be willing to find mitigation in the fact that he also volunteers at the local soup kitchen, is nice to children, has a little dog named Smookums and was abandoned by his father when he was six. Theft from the public by a public official, whatever his character, is of a graver category of offense than one person stealing from another person, and nothing should mitigate its gravity. We’ve been falling all over ourselves for three decades in the United States to get tough on crime, make mandatory sentences more and more extreme, and yet somehow official misconduct never seems to be crime in the same sense. Maybe it’s not: it’s worse.