Us and Them: The Blog

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.

The Singer, not the Song

More evidence of the decline of the popular notion that people do things because of their membership in groups. This one is especially striking because it does not target the notion that people behave in particular ways due to skin color or nationality -- a notion we could call the ``naive'' version of the zombie theory of identity.

Instead, this description of the ``bunch of guys'' theory of terrorist recruitment strikes at the more intellectually respectable -- though equally false -- idea that people kill and die because of their beliefs. Call this the sophisticated version of the zombie theory: The model is, I hear a sermon, or read a book, and, as a consequence, change what I believe. Then because of my new beliefs, I go forth and wreak mayhem.

As Marc Sageman describes his research in this New Yorker piece by Raffi Khatchadourian, he found that terrorists were usually motivated not by their ideas, but by their immediate social circle.

Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism”—since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals—or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.

In other words, they don't believe and then join. They join, and then believe.

By the way, this is the second time in the past few months that Sageman's work has been cited in a New Yorker piece about terrorism. (The other was George Packer's ``Knowing the Enemy'' of Dec 18, 2006.)

About the zombie theory of identity - let a hundred flowers bloom . . .

My response to the edge.com annual question was a hopeful obituary for what I call ``zombie theory of identity'' -- the notion that people do things because they are members of categories like ``Muslim,'' or ``female,'' or ``Chinese.''

It has been interesting to see how and why other sites took this up. The ZToI got mentioned, for instance, on this blog about culture, economics, film, food and growl, among other topics. Also on this site for Canadian technology news, and this philosophical blog.

And these ``musings of a Chicagoan.''

But my favorite (and a surprise, and an illustration of how the Web links scattered people into communities), was the ref from this blog about all things zombie.

A broken shovel and the dog's water dish . . .

That's what makes for a manly car. If your ride isn't easy to imagine with those things in it, then it may be a ``chick car,'' according to Forbes.com .

Cars are important objects to their owners, and important objects are easily incorporated into the unconscious calculator that tells us, scores of times in a day, that ``this sort of person uses X.'' Remains to be seen whether people will consciously use this distinction to express themselves and their identity choices: Will metrosexual men choose chick cars? Will they buy chick cars to show their spouses they don't suffer from testosterone poisoning? Will smart, strong women avoid these cars to show they don't buy into stereotypes? Or drive them anyway, to show ditto?

The language of identity is spoken with any object at hand. Marketers seem to love this when they can control it -- that's branding (as in Apple's ``Think Different'' ads). They hate the phenomenon when they can't steer it. `` “Chick car” is a derogatory term, and, apparently, men shy away from these vehicles,'' says Forbes. ``When half the market shies away from your product, it is trouble.''

People's feelings about identity are much more complicated than branders like. I be if this automotive distinction takes off, ``the kind of person who drives a chick car'' will not include all women, and it will include some men.

Word Up, You Ivy Playas

Get a load of the lingo used on this invitation to a party at the Yale Club. Res ipse loquitur. Or maybe I should say, dang, that's wack.

This phenomenon is ancient: The privileged and powerful find their images of cool in the culture of those whom their parents and bosses despise. Stylish young nobles in medieval Europe cut up their clothes to look like soldiers and thugs. They wore multicolored coats to look like musicians (remember the pied piper?). And here's a party for bankers and lawyers and yachtsmen, where the dress code is ``preppy fabulous'' (``so wear your best blazer'') -- trying to snatch a little gangsta aura. ``Word up, you Ivy playas.''

You cannot make this stuff up.

First Loops: Underground Hoopers

As the philosopher Ian Hacking has observed, people “are aware of what they are called, adapt accordingly,and so change, leading to revisions in facts and then knowledge about them.”

This is what he calls a ``looping effect.'' It begins, of course, when people are successfully persuaded that they belong to some category they hadn't thought existed.

I'm keeping an eye out for these attempts, serious, whimsical or in-between, to create new human kinds.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the underground hooping community.

The British ``Rebranding'' Brouhaha

Hyphenated ethnicity is a badge of honor in America (remember that successful push to rebrand black people as ``African-Americans''?). But the idea is not going over well in the United Kingdom.

Home Office Minister Hazel Blears proposed to recategorize ethnic and religious human kinds by adding a U.S.-style suffix to official labels -- so that, for example, Pakistanis would become ``Pakistani British.'' The concept's many critics seem to feel that it would create a lower-caste form of British identity. That's exactly the opposite of the U.S. p.o.v., which is that a human-kind label without that extra word ``American'' at the end is a sort of pariah status. Over here, the hyphen indicates inclusion. An ``Italian'' is a furriner from Old Europe; an Italian-American is one of Us.

For instance, when former Governor Jim McGreevey of New Jersey announced that he was a ``gay American,'' his language was carefully chosen to play to our love of the hyphen. As David Kocieniewski reported in the Aug. 15, 2004 New York Times, the term came from the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay-rights lobbying outfit, ``and was a poll-tested phrase used to reframe the debate about gay causes from one about sexual liberation to one about civil rights.''

For Americans, the hyphen means inclusion. For the Brits, apparently, it means the opposite. That's an illustration of Erving Goffman's observation about identity: Its meaning depends on context. The nose piercing that is stigmatized at the office may be the height of cool at the rave. So too the hyphenation of ethnic labels can be treasured in one English-speaking nation and derided in another. Not a problem, unless you believe that identity is fixed, inherent and essential -- therefore that hyphenation must be A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. It's both. It's neither. It depends where you are. That's what I conclude from the curious fact that we are two peoples separated by a common hyphen.

Pride

Over the years I have written about the part-ideological, part-emotional, part-tribal experience of defining some human kind as a distinct people with its own history, culture and political interests.

I've observed these threads in ethnic movements, in feminism, in thinking about the rights of the disabled, in movements built on sexual identity. And I've written about activists interested in doing the same for dwarves, deaf people, the intersexed, and people with attention deficit disorder.

What interests me in these movements is what they prove about how the mind works: They show that human beings don't inherit their tribal identities. Instead, we create them, using whatever basis is convincing, and then struggle to persuade others (and ourselves) about our beliefs. Identity is an endless conversation. This is as true of an identity like ``Puerto Rican'' as it is of the identity promoted by the Little People of America.

I don't write out of a desire to debunk (the LPA is a great group). If an identity movement flourishes, it must be doing something good for those who take it up, and people who say ADD is valuable way of being (``a hunter in a farmer's world'') are not any less legitimate just because they got inspiration from deaf activists, who got inspiration from gay activists, who got inspiration from the American movement for racial equality.

Nor am I trying to say that all these movements are crudely alike, or raise the same issues. Race, gender, sexual orientation and disability are different bases for classing people, and the moral questions they pose are distinct.

A case in point: The new movement for ``Autistic Pride.''

As with the other disability rights movements (including ADD), the claim for ``acceptance, not cure'' here demands responses from the ``normal'' that aren't at stake when the dividing lines are racial, ethnic, religious or sexual.

Put simply, disabled people need help to get through a world made for the non-disabled. If they are to be accepted, not cured, then they have a right to that help. And that means they have a right to demand more time, effort and patience of you than the next person walking down the street. At some point, that demand begins to be an encroachment on your rights.

A couple of years ago, the lawyer and activist Harriet McBryde Johnson wrote this article about her debate with the philosopher Peter Singer, whom she despises for suggesting that severely disabled people like her might not wish to go on living.

In the course of the essay, she described her all-important assistant (``Carmen lifts me into my chair and straps a rolled towel under my ribs for comfort and stability. She tugs at my clothes to remove wrinkles that could cause pressure sores.'') And I found myself wondering about Carmen. Johnson's day took up two lives. When did Carmen get to do what she wanted, instead of being another person's legs, hands and fingers?

I think this consideration may be part of the tension in the arguments beginning about ``autistic pride.'' There are families that want a cure, not acceptance, and part of the reason is the price they have paid in time, pain and isolation because autistic people do not fit into the world created by non-autistics.

Perhaps they have a point. I'm not sure, but there must be some criterion by which we say, ``your pride cannot come at the cost of another person's humiliation.''

And yet. Human-kind emotions are such that this don't-hurt-me argument could be made against any effort to achieve human rights for anyone. Human kinds have a powerful link to our moral emotions. We all have a strong feeling that certain things are not right for us to do or be around, because of the sort of people we are. And this feeling is often unethical and cruel in its effects.

There were whites in the South in the 1950's who said they would be pained to share a lunch counter with black people; men who said a wife treated as an equal would leave them emasculated; social conservatives who say equal treatment for gay couples gives them pain.

So, a countervailing principle: Your avoidance of human-kind pain (``that's not what people like me should live with'') cannot come at the cost of another's greater pain.

I'm not sure how these two principles fit together. In other words, I'm unsure how much respect has to be accorded to new human kinds, on the one hand, and to deeply felt emotions based on the moral aspect of human kinds, on the other. But I think the disability rights movements will make this debate more frequent and more anguished in the future.

Quick Take: Short People

A new study finds short men are more likely to commit suicide than tall ones. Is this because of the well-documented favoritism people show toward tall men -- ie, that short men are, in effect, a lower-status kind of person? Or is it that shortness is a marker of some other trait that makes offing one's self more likely?

Beats me. There is so much human-kind news in the world, the blog is going to have to convey some of it without trying to figure it out first. Hence this short format for the smaller items.

They Walk Among Us

``Race realists'' like to claim that our beliefs about people are based on biological facts. The best evidence that they are wrong was noted by Jared Diamond a decade ago: There are many biological facts that we ignore when we classify people, and those make just as much sense as the ones like skin color or eye shape, that are the basis of our notion of race.

A case in point I often like to cite: Left-handed people. They're as biologically real a group as you could hope to find, as they have a clear, unconcealable, consequential, immutable difference from other human beings. As genes contribute to handedness, lefties almost certainly have more genes in common with each other than Jews with other Jews, or gay people with other gay people. Yet there are no charts showing that our sinistral brethren are a separate human kind; no Lefty Pride marches or set-asides in Legislatures for representatives of the Other Handed People.

Why not? Because something, apart from logic and fact-collecting, tells you that this biological difference isn't the basis for a ``real'' human kind. That something, I think, is the distinct set of rules we have for deciding what's a real tribe and what is not.

What brings this to mind is this rather eccentric but interesting article. Pravda reports that the ranks of the left-handed are increasing. And that, because lefties are smarter and more creative than the rest of us, this will be good for civilization. Perhaps it's time to start designing the flag . . .