Us and Them: The Blog

The Enduring Power of Caste . . .

. . . has got Google in a lot of trouble in Japan.

By making old maps available online for comparison with today's satellite images, Google Earth makes it easier to tell who lives in villages once restricted to Japan's traditional caste of outcasts, the burakumin (roughly the equivalent of India's untouchables). As in India, caste prejudice in Japan is officially consigned to the past, but, again as in India, many people make an effort to avoid contact with the modern descendants of the stigmatized caste.

What's remarkable about this story is that Japan's officials, and apparently some burakumin too, are angry at Google. The problem is not the perpetuation of medieval prejudice in the 21st century -- the problem is this damn Internet company reminding us that we live this way.

Isn't Google Earth just doing what it's supposed to do, making more information available to more people? Surely Japan's embarrassment about its prejudices ought to be Japan's problem, not Google's.

Almost as surprising as being in the football preview . . .

I have been seen in many sections of the NY Times, from Science to Business to Local to Education etc etc. But I never thought I'd be in the Styles section. Here I am, though, in Pam Belluck's smart piece about Susan Boyle.

Why ``racial profiling'' does not work

Profiling -- using people's apparent membership in an ethnic or cultural group as the basis for subjecting them to a search -- has its defenders, even among mind scientists. Their reasoning is that common stereotypes (of, say, young black men in cities, or of bearded Muslims in airports) are based on what Steven Pinker once called good statistics.

The argument goes like this: Yes, most members of all social groups are innocent -- but if, in group X, 2 percent of people are criminals while in group Y only 1 percent are, then it is a sound tactic to concentrate on X-ers when deciding who to search.

I think this is mistaken because I see no rational reason to assume our cultural categories can solve a non-cultural problem. The important category in law-enforcement is ``dangerous criminals,'' and people should be searched because they show signs that predict their likely membership in that group. As most people in all ethnic and religious groups are law-abiding, then membership in any group is a very poor predictor of criminality. We aren't using them because they fit the problem; we're using them because they're easy to spot and think about -- like the proverbial guy looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is best. Meanwhile, better tools exist, in the form of non-ethnic, non-religious categories -- among them, gender, age, and demeanor.

Two days ago, William H. Press published this mathematical analysis of the question, which comes to the same conclusion: As he puts it, the only effective method for finding bad guys is to spend a lot of time looking ``not under the lamppost.'' Racial profiling, he found, is no more likely than random searches to find the criminals.

Post-Rational Economic Man

Our social institutions are premised on the theory that individuals are rational, about themselves and their choices, if not about the larger world. As evidence mounts that this is not true, what happens to those institutions -- to courts, elections, markets, medical care?

I think a lot will happen. Many of us have no problem accepting the news that we don't really know what we're doing as we make our choices in life. The trouble will come when this account of the mind collides with presumptions that organize our world -- presumptions, for example, that voters, stock traders and shoppers know how and why they make their decisions.

So when John Brockman's annual question at Edge.org turned out to be ``What Will Change Everything?'' I nominated the new models of the mind emerging from behavioral economics, social cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines.

Depression 2.0

This piece, about how a new Great Depression now would differ from the last one, seems to me to miss a key point. In place of last time's bread lines and hoboes visibly criss-crossing the landscape, Drake Bennett forecasts a lot of unemployed people staying home, watching television. Suffering will take place in isolation, hidden from the public sphere, because we're all habituated to filling our empty hours with 21st century media.

Here's the problem: How will we pay our cable bills, if we're all out of work? Accustomed as we our to information access, we forget easily that it costs money. Money, if we crash, will be very scarce. And vital as Google feels to us all, fast-search never will compel people to spend in the same urgent way that food does.

So I think access to information -- 700 TV channels, yes, but, more importantly, the Internet -- will be the most important casualty of a new Depression. Economic collapse in our time instantly creates a great digital divide. In Depression 21st century style, some Americans would continue to take part in the Google-YouTube-Twitter world we know now.The rest of our people would become be digital Joads, no longer participating in modern life. The effects of that division would reach far and last long.

One more reason to hope we dodge the bullet.

The British, French and Imperial Roman Obama-equivalents ...

... are the subject of my piece, posted yesterday, in Slate. Check, as they say, it out.

I started on this subject with last week's blog post, which argued that the example of minority or ``foreign'' national leaders should remind us not to talk about identity as if it were fixed and unchanging. The new piece speculates a bit about what such leaders have in common.

Transition Atmosphere

Watching President-Elect Obama, at his first press conference, I noticed him repeatedly striking a note of thorough, cautious deliberateness. For instance, at one point, he said, ``obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we've got to think it through.'' And, a little later: ``I'm proud of the choice of chief of staff, because we thought it through. And I think it's very important, in all these key positions, both in the economic team and the national security team, to -- to get it right and not to be so rushed that you end up making mistakes.'' Imagining his team combing through the files of the Bush Administration, I found myself recalling Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. There's a scene there (when I dug up my old paperback, I found it on page 64) in which the reckless, violent cowboys of an Earth colony suddenly find themselves talking to an emissary from a more civilized planet:

``He looked about at the purple colonel, the flowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. `You have not thought things through,' he said. By his standards, it was a brutal insult.''

I think Washington may have that atmosphere for a few months . . .

The Great Blind Spot

He is an implausible candidate to lead his nation. He has a foreign-sounding name, a father who wasn't a Christian, and a cool writer's temperament. Before his political rise, in fact, he was a best-selling author.

Barack Obama? Nope, I'm thinking of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1816 he was a 12-year-old Jewish boy in an anti-Semitic nation; in 1876, after a glittering political career, he was made Earl of Beaconfield by his friend and admirer, Queen Victoria.

Yet this week the New York Times informed us, in this clunker, that no western European nation could elect a minority person, a conspicuous outsider, as its leader. There can't yet be a British, French or German Obama.

Hello? Disraeli may be the closest parallel to Obama, but other European nations have elevated leaders who were neither privileged nor typical.

One French Obama was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born, like our President-Elect, on a far-off island far from the national heartland, and he spoke French the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, with a distinct accent.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger and Disraeli share few other traits besides electoral success as an ``outsider.'' My point isn't that such political events are good, bad or indifferent for a nation -- I'm simply noting that (a) they are not that rare and (b) my journalist colleagues and other professional explainers act as if they are.

All over the world, people have followed leaders who don't look or sound ``like us,'' from Alberto Fujimori in Peru to Sonia Gandhi in India. Non-democracies have done this too. Alexander the Great wasn't Greek. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus was African. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian.

So why do we journalists stupidly tell each other that ethnic, cultural and class boundaries cannot be broken in politics? I think some of the answer points to a real problem with the way we all talk about identity.

Nations, ethnic groups, religious communities and the like are not things. Unlike trees and staplers and rainclouds, an entity made of people is an ongoing activity. It's created by thoughts, conversations and deeds. That means, literally, that the United States today is not exactly the same as it was yesterday.

Of course, much activity stays constant over time, which is why we have nations, ethnicities and social classes in the first place. A country is a great many people thinking, saying and doing the same things every day. But we all exaggerate the stability. We treat yesterday's activities as if they were a fixed object that will still be there tomorrow. So we imagine an unchangeability that is not really there.

Then we try to answer questions like ``Is America racist or not?'' Or ``Is Jane prejudiced or not?'' and go round and round in circles. The truth is that sometimes America is racist and sometimes it is not; sometimes Jane acts prejudiced and sometimes she doesn't.

To get precise about what that means -- to predict which times are which, for example -- we need to stop describing identity and its attendant thoughts and feelings as if they were objects. Historians describe change over time; they can map change over decades and centuries. We need a similar perspective for weeks and days and hours.

This is way, way easier to say than it is to do. The mind, I think, really is strongly biased to see identity as immutable and stable. But until we describe identity as processes that change over time, I think, we're stuck in a rut.

You-Heard-It-Here-First Department

A theme I kept returning to in Us and Them was the power of direct, personal experience on a mind that is always classifying and reclassifying people into groups. As I mentioned in the book, the Muslim-Christian division counts for a lot in Lebanon, but it was not difficult for experimenters there to create conditions in a summer camp that made its teen-age residents care much more about the boundary between Blue Ghosts and Red Devils. They were two gangs they had created on the spot, both of which were a mix of Christians and Muslims.

The depressing aspect of this idea is that people can decide that a Star Trek identity is the center of their lives. But the positive aspect is that people can easily drop longstanding ideas about ``others.''

Flash forward to last week, and this report about simple exercises that reduce people's scores on measures of prejudice. Four hours of conversation and parlor games with total strangers -- played with people of other races or ethnicities -- is all it takes, Benedict Carey writes (and the whole piece is very much worth reading):

``Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship `that is as close as any relationship the person has,' said Art Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who developed the program with his wife, Elaine N. Aron.''

Spankers and Shackers

The basis of nations, races, social classes, religions, and all other ``human kinds'' is the obvious truth that personal traits cluster. Knowing one fact about a person tells you that other statements are likely to be true about them. The thing you know, or think you know, can be skin color, a symbol worn on a lapel, an accent, a rhythm coming out of headphones. It can be any perceivable bit of information. People can and have made everything into signals of identity.

As the philosopher Ian Hacking pointed out some years ago, modern life has added a technical source for such signals. In addition to the stuff we notice automatically (because of the way our minds work), we moderns also use identity signals that have been noticed for us. These are traits, or connections between traits, that have been found, vetted and digested by specialists -- researchers in bureaucracies and academia. They're just as exciting to the mind as the stuff we notice about appearances, language and other human-kind perceptions we get ``for free.''

Case in point today: Perhaps in some future election we'll cast aside red-state and blue-state here in the U.S., in favor of this distinction between spankers and shackers.