Saturday, October 22, 2005

Kass on Courtship: Part 1 of n on Part 1 of 3

I've got a big stack of papers to grade today. So I can't finish what I want to write about Kass's "The End of Courtship" part 1. (Exams from my epistemology class. Many of the students wrote for 2.5 hours straight on an exam that was intended to take one hour. I'm totally psyched to see what they've got to say. Dang, I love this job... I mean I REALLY LOVE THIS JOB.)

But let me just note one thing for now so that I'm not sitting around stewing about this all day:

Kass's argument turns in large part on empirical questions, and Kass guesses at the answers to those questions instead of looking for data. Guessing--hypothesis formation--is good under certain conditions and bad under others. Kass's guess and his guessing are bad. First, there's little doubt in my mind that hard data about the attitudes and mental states of 21st-century young people concerning marriage already exists. Second, Kass, on account of his age and station, is probably not well-placed to make a good guess about the empirical points in question. Because of his age he probably has little contact with the world he speculates about, and because of his station he probably has contact with a radically unrepresentative segment of he population--college students. And, since he's at the University of Chicago, particularly rich college students at that.

Kass simply presupposes the answers to central empirical questions and moves on from there. But he gives us no real reason to believe that the average American 18-25-year-old experiences no pressure to marry, nor that the average female of that age group is "sad, lonely, and confused."

Kass may be right, but I'm closer to the age group in question and I have experience with a more representative slice of the population, and I don't find his conjecture plausible in the least.

The way to settle this is to look at the sociological data, however, not to engage in a duel of speculation.

One further point here: the important question at issue isn't whether the average female of the relevant age is "sad, lonely, and confused," but, rather, whether she is more sad, lonely and confused than she would be if she had married the first man she slept with and had a baby at the age of 19--or whatever scenario it is that Kass is imagining to be preferable.

OF COURSE many people at that age are unhappy about many aspects of their lives. The important question, however, is whether their lives are likely to be better or worse in the long run under the old, more repressive system or under the newer, more permissive one.

One strong and obvious prima facie reason for preferring the newer social arrangement is that it still allows people who want to marry and reproduce at a young age to do so--it just doesn't demand that everyone do it. The fact that so many people choose NOT to do so is some evidence in support of the conclusion that this is the preferable course of action. Kass will reply that women don't really have that option anymore because sex is easily available to men. That's probably not right, but I want to spend more space on that point than I can here.

I said before that Kass is right about a few things, though they're deeply buried in his essay. The culture has some role in influencing how people--including the young--live their lives, and currently it is less likely to pressure people into early marriage and reproduction than it used to be. Corporations find it profitable to market certain "life styles" (ugh, what a term...); they encourage the non-young to buy enormous houses and enormous SUVs and have a baby for which they can then purchase expensive accoutrements, they encourage the young to buy expensive clothes and to spend extravagantly on an allegedly cool, more-or-less out-of-control "life style." There are reasons to think hard about the ways of living that the culture in general promotes, there are reasons to worry about the role of corporations in shaping the message of the culture, and there are reasons for thinking that the ways of living that are currently being promoted are not the best ways of living for everyone. (And there are reasons for thinking that there is a wide variety of different ways one might live a good human life.) So there are reasons for addressing the issues that Kass addresses, even though Kass's particular position on those issues is probably more than a bit daft.

But those epistemology exams ain't gonna grade themselves, folks, so I'm outta here.

18 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Kass' article is much better if you imagine him yelling it at some kids on his lawn while he sits on his porch.

9:12 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Let me know how the epistemology thang comes out, dude. So far we can't believe Bush, National Review or I reckon Looie Freeh.

Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and Richard Clarke are OK, tho. I'm detecting a pattern here...

Social science is good, I guess, unless it's whatever Kass is on about, or Sex in the City. (Weird that Kass references Allan Bloom, that notorious homo, tho. Must be a Straussian thing, which is even weirder than sex.)

1:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bush statement:

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

NR: Pass, too many easy targets, like when Cliff May asserted that 'everyone' in Washington knew Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.

Freeh: This is what Lannie Davis had to say:

KURTZ: The Clinton people were furious at the way "60 Minutes" handled the segment. And here to talk back is former Clinton White House attorney Lanny Davis.

Welcome.

Let's deal with the substance first. Louis Freeh says that when Clinton met with Crown Prince Abdullah in 1998, he didn't press for FBI access to suspects in the Khobar Towers bombing, and he hit up the prince for a contribution to his presidential library.

LANNY DAVIS, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ATTORNEY: Well, not only is that false and President Clinton has said so, but everybody at the meeting, who attended the meeting, not including Louis Freeh, says it's false.

Link

YMMV.

As for Kevin and Matt, I don't what they've written that's unbelievable or something they should've known was not true.

As for Clarke, I don't know what he's been tagged with lately, aside from not making sure that the folks who were flown back to the KSA right after 9/11
were questioned thoroughly by the FBI, which is what happened, AFAIK.

8:06 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I gotta agree with the DA here tvd...

It's not like I just started disbelieving Bush 'cause I don't like his politics.

Seriously: you don't think it's INEXPLICABLE that so many people have come to regard him as a liar, do you? I mean, is it just political prejudice?

I mean, you DO realize he's a big fat liar, right?

And The National Review....egad, I've given those guys more than their fair share of chances to make sense. But I don't think they're all that much loonier than the folks at The Nation...in case that makes ya feel any better...

9:42 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Incidentally, that first comment by Colin has been making me spontaneously burst out laughing about every hour since I saw it.

2:16 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Well, I guess I'll take your epistemology exam, WS. Since I'm not taking your course for credit, feel free to leave it ungraded.
:-)

If one side ignores inconvenient facts and arguments (and both sides do), how can one survey the landscape while looking only in one direction?

Further, can't a flawed argument contain more truth than a cherry-picked one?

And further, if I see a point emphasized in the Nation or whatever, won't I be able to recognize it when I run across it in the 37th paragraph of a NYT story continued on page A92?

I'm not much of a Javert-type, but I've run across stuff that damns Joe Wilson as a lying liar, using only his own words against him. Have you seen much of it in the press you read? I haven't. (I read the press you read, too. And for the record, I don't go near Newsmax or World Net Daily.)

I imagine there's both truth and self-serving falsity in Clarke's and Freeh's tell-alls. Only by sorting through them and being on the lookout for independent confirmation in other sources can we suss out what really happened.

Read everything, believe nothing is what I've come up with. Simply doing the latter isn't sufficient.

I'll stipulate for the sake of discussion that NR, got caught off base with the above. Still, I'll contend that their batting average is higher than the NYT's, the nation's newspaper of record. Jayson Blair never worked for them.

As for what's going on in Iraq, hell, I dunno. Who to believe? My guess, after letting a zillion things soak in, is that things are trending better, not worse. Slooooooooowly.

3:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's an example of GWB uttering a 'misrepresentation of the facts':

"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons....They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.* And we'll find more weapons as time goes on, But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." --WP, "Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons. President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof, " May 31, 2003

WP=Washington Post.

Oh, tvd, can you tell us what metrics you're using to base your guess that Iraq is getting better slowly?

5:34 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

If you're not aware of the prevailing arguments I'd drag in, then your reading list is too one-dimensional, proving my above point.

If you are aware of those arguments, then you're simply being disingenuous.

9:10 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Seriously: you don't think it's INEXPLICABLE that so many people have come to regard him as a liar, do you? I mean, is it just political prejudice?

I wrote something on the method of modern discourse over at my new digs that you may find of some interest, WS. In short, we are all lawyers now.

It may explain some of my own admittedly antiquated discursive quirkiness hereabouts. I am often invited to make an affirmative case but (I detect) only for the purpose of tearing it down. Come in, said the spider. Thanks anyway, said the fly.


And so as to not dodge this indictment, WS, (I only dodge the annoying, not the nettlesome), it's been my position that running this or any country involves a certain amount of dodginess. There are a number of things Bush can't say, like Saddam was removed partly because he was an active supporter of anti-Israeli terrorism, and if Israeli ever retaliated, we might have seen Armegeddon.

But Israel is extremely unpopular worldwide; one destroys his own case by even acknowledging its existence.

WMDs (as well as Saddam himself), are a special case: Blair and Powell wanted them as the nexus, and Bush foolishly assented. That Saddam had WMDs in the past and soon would have them again at the dropping of the sanctions was enough for Bush, and it was enough for me. I also believe it was enough for the US Congress, despite their tepid backtracking now.

I do try to read between the lines, but try hard not to read between the facts.

I do not think Dubya lies and commits troops to war for Halliburton. As I believe of any of the major party candidates for president in our lifetimes, winning or losing, I think their end is in what's best for the country.

As for means, you've come to the conclusion that the Bushies affront the truth more than what is an acceptable norm. I accept and respect that; but based on my reading of this extremely complicated world, I just don't happen to agree.

As for moral judgments about such things, I'm agnostic. For example, I thought it was perfectly acceptable or at least understandable for Clinton to lie about the Lewinsky affair. His misjudgment was in trying to brazen it out instead of refusing to contest the Jones lawsuit and letting her win by default. He easily could have said he was too busy running the country for such nonsense, and the public, me included, would have endorsed that.

So too, if FDR skirted The Neutrality Act of 1937 to arm the Allies against the obviously growing Nazi menace, I'm cool with that, too. Those damn Republicans had their heads up their asses.

(If I press my luck with Iran-Contra, I know I'll lose you, so forget I'm mentioning it, even parenthetically...)

10:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

tvd: could you explain how the sanctions would've been dropped while the US remained on the Security Council and had a veto to keep this from happening?

As for means, you've come to the conclusion that the Bushies affront the truth more than what is an acceptable norm

And you find that the statement I quoted from GWB an affront to the truth less than what is an acceptable norm.

As Mr. Spock on TOS used to say, "Interesting".

1:18 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, Tom, I agree about some very big issues with you, and I really should emphasize those more. I'm in a rush right now, and, as is our way here in the blogosphere, I'll just emphasize the negative.

First, I don't think that Clinton could have toughed it out by caving into the Jones lawsuit. Well, I don't think he should have anyway. There are some charges one must dispute (if they are false) no matter what. I'd never give in to a false charge like that, and no one should be asked to do so. Anyway, the right-wing wolves would have never let him recover from that. They wanted to shred him for things he hadn't even come close to doing (murder, drug-running)...if he'd CONFESSED to anything that would have been the end of him.

Second, you're right: even though I'm willing to admit that no one can survive in the modern presidency by telling the T, the whole T, and nothing but the T, that doesn't mean you get to do anything you want.

Watergate. Iran-Contra. Election 2000. Iraq. A pattern emerges here. Serious lies and abuses of power that cut to the very core of our democracy. It takes the breath out of me that reasonable people like yourself are not outraged. I do admire you for your suggested admission re: Iran-Contra, though.

11:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let's not forget Nixon's back door offer to S Vietnam which led to them backing out of the peace talks and needlessly prolonging the war. And - just incidently - won the election for him. If the GOP was a person, it'd be a three time loser several times over.

2:41 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

The Jones team's theory of the case (a mechanism which has only been endorsed recently here in California) was that even if chicks who don't put out aren't retaliated against (Jones wasn't but she was a state employee), if chicks who put out get promoted (Gennifer Flowers), there is a de facto environment of sexual harassment.

Clinton was vulnerable because he got a state job for the unqualified Flowers (altho she could "suck a golf ball through a garden hose.") The Lewinsky thing became relevant because of his habit of diddling the help.

Clinton was screwed either way; he'd dodged the Flowers thing once, but in fighting Jones it came back to bite him.

We're talking tactics here, but sometimes silence is the best defense. As it turned out, Jones' case was legally defective, and a judge may have dismissed it even without a Clinton defense.

4:35 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

The Nixon calumny looks interesting, although Anthony Summers' sourcing is a bit sketchy.

It does seem indisputable that LBJ called a halt to the bombing to help HHH in the election, tho.

8:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Are you saying that calling a halt to the bombing was a crime?

5:39 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And regarding Nixon, I had a different book in mind: Berman's No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam.

This contains a quote from Richard Holbrooke: "What the Nixon people did," the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then attached to the advance US guard to the Paris talks, tells Vanity Fair, "was perhaps even a violation of the law.

"They massively, directly and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation, probably one of the most important negotiations in American dipslomatic history."

6:05 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I find the Nixon thing interesting, but not ready to move it to my "accepted fact" box. I like to see how an assertion survives a fisking.

That's my method of epistemology. The sourcing is thin.

Holbrooke would have no first-hand knowledge of the facts, although I did enjoy his high moral dudgeon. he's good at that. But please don't take that to mean I think Nixon is innocent.

Did LBJ wag the dog in reverse? Seems so. Is that improper? I thought Clinton wagged the dog with Serbia, but since they needed a good bombing anyway, it didn't upset me. I was glad to see Clinton get off the pot.

If you feel LBJ's bombing halt was something that needed doing, and it appears you do, I suppose your moral judgment is somewhat similar.

5:13 PM  
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6:57 PM  

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