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.

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 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.

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.

It Walks! It Talks! The Link.

The Horgan-Berreby colloquy is now up on bloggingheads.

The Extremes of Teams

Bill Bishop in his excellent new ``Big Sort'' blog explains the argument that ``like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded,'' as he puts it. ``Group polarization'' experiments, he proposes, help explain the tone of people at McCain-Palin rallies lately.

The only problem with this idea is that Democrats -- though they're just as prone to hang around like-minded people as are Republicans -- haven't been prone to jeering, insults and threats that have emerged in Republican campaign stops. There are extremes of feeling on both sides, but cries of ``traitor!'' and ``liar'' and ``kill him'' don't boil out of Obama-Biden gatherings. I think that's evidence that certain kinds of like-mindedness are different from others.

Specifically, I think the imagery of death, disease, untrustworthiness and immorality makes a difference. That rhetoric is a license for emotions that other kinds of rhetoric would discourage. It's not like-mindedness about anything that leads to extreme behavior. It's like-mindedness about the other side's malicious, depraved or unsanitary nature.

Some leaders offer those images to their followers; others refuse. We shouldn't think all shared opinions have the same effect, regardless of their content. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, like-mindedness in the defense of decency is no vice.

It Walks! It Talks!

To mark this week's publication of Us and Them: The Science of Identity in a new edition by the University of Chicago Press, I just finished a long conversational interview with John Horgan that is going up tomorrow (Saturday, October 18th) on the bloggingheads website. John and I talk about the Us-Them aspects of the 2008 election, how much people understand why they do stuff, and our society's principles of human rights, democracy and individual autonomy. Are these genuine advances in human thought? Or the secular equivalent of Byzantine Christianity or eighth-century Islam -- widespread only because they're the creed of societies that have the strongest military for the moment? (That's the philosopher John Gray's p.o.v., from which Horgan and I demur, for different reasons.)

Check, as they say, it out.

Us and Them and the Big Sort

The Gazette-Mail of Charleston, West Virginia considers the role of tribalism in the election.

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.