My poor husband. This weekend, we went to a farmer’s market because it was a beautiful day, and I didn’t have to work, and the farmer’s market is fun, and, long story short, a person from whom I was buying earrings said to me and Jim, “Some people think government is the problem, and some people think government is the solution.” Jim, being a sensible person, just stepped back a bit. I don’t really remember what I said after that (I was in a white-hot rage), but I know I said a lot.
I have spent my career working for big (and public) institutions, and got all my degrees at a big (and public) institution. And I spent far too much of my life irritated (and sometimes outraged) by various decisions that those institutions made—decisions that were, to me, not just wrong but obviously wrong.
There are, loosely, three categories of wrongness. There were decisions that were irritating and time consuming (such as providing physical documentation of every article I claimed to have published, having students sign for getting a small gift card, having to provide travel receipts). There were decisions that obviously ignored considerations central to the teaching of writing, for instance, or ethical practices regarding staffing. There were others that seemed to strike at the very notion of college education as a public good. All of those decisions were, to me, outrageously short-sighted. I was right. I was also short-sighted.
I’m really sorry about all that time I spent bloviating about how obviously dumb my administration was; it turns out that my administration was not necessarily being dumb. It turns out I was often the short-sighted one. I was right that about some decisions being unethical, and I was right about the harm some decisions did for the teaching of writing, but I was wrong to think that my Dean was the problem. Because I saw every entity above me as “administration,” I falsely identified the source of the problem, and therefore I never identified a workable solution.
And this is another post about the neighborhood mailing list, and how it exemplifies what’s wrong with American political deliberation. (Although, to be fair, I could use departmental faculty meetings to make the same point, with me as the person arguing very badly. I’ve also done my share of this on the neighborhood mailing list and various other places. I’ve loved me some pleasurable outrage about how obviously wrong the government, my university administration, the city is).
Anytime there is a change in our neighborhood, we look at the proposed policy from our perspective, and we think how it will affect us. That’s a valid datapoint. But that’s all it is–one datapoint. I earlier wrote about how the Big Bike narrative assumed that cyclists in our neighborhood are outsiders, when in fact a lot of the people cycling in our neighborhood (including some of the cyclists who are jerks) are neighbors. They are us.
And, let’s be clear, we are in a neighborhood with streets paid for by all citizens of Austin. The notion that these are “our” streets is no more rational than the belief that the trash can loaned to you by the city of Austin is your trash can.
In the case of Big Bike, the assumption is that there is a policy that is obviously right to all sensible people of goodwill, and it happens to be the one I hold. Thus, anyone who advocates a different policy is stupid, corrupt, duped, selfish, shortsighted. I’m saying that, for years, I thought that way about my universities’ policies that didn’t agree with what policies I thought we should have.
At every university, there have been irritating, complicated, and time-consuming, and, to me, obviously dumb, requirements about submitting documentation for travel, absences of students, rewarding students for participating in a study, hiring student workers, keeping track of purchases, exposing personal data about sources of income. It turns out that, in many cases, the policies I thought were obviously stupid were a response (perhaps not the best response, but often good enough) to a real problem I didn’t know existed. Because, at every university, those irritating, complicated, and time-consuming requirements were put in place because someone was an asshole. Someone filed false documentation, failed to note a conflict of interest, embezzled, falsely accused a student (or a student was a jerk and refused to admit to absences), exploited student workers, or filed a lawsuit.
I’m not saying that university is always right, but I have been wrong as to who was wrong. I have been at three universities with unethically low salaries for staff (University of Texas at Austin is one of them). I care about staff; that is part of my viewpoint. I’m not looking out for me; I’m looking out for others. And the salary structure at three of my universities was (and is) obviously ethically and rationally indefensible. I was (and am) right about all that.
I was, however, wrong to think that these unethical salary structures for staff were the consequence of my University administration being short-sighted in its policies about staff salaries. In two cases (I’m still unclear about UT-Austin), the salaries of staff were legislative decisions, and not the university.
I was right that the decision was wrong, but I was wrong as to who was wrong.
There is a different kind of decision in which I thought I was completely right, and the university was being stupid and short-sighted, and I was wrong.
When, for complicated reasons, I ended up on Faculty Council, I learned that most of what I thought about how the university ran was wrong, in all sorts of ways. Here’s one example: I had long thought it was obviously wrong to have the day before Thanksgiving a class day. A lot of students had to miss that class in order to get flights, and others risked their lives driving on a day with terrible traffic and accidents.
I sat at a Faculty Council meeting, and listened to someone explain that, because the fall semester is already shorter than spring (which I’d never noticed), and because of various legislated weirdnesses about the UT calendar, taking away that class day would mean that some of the Engineering departments would lose accreditation. Accrediting organizations require a certain number of labs, and removing that class day would mean they wouldn’t have enough labs.
We would, they said, have to refigure the entire calendar to ensure that they could have enough labs, and that any decision about that Wednesday should be delayed till that refiguring could happen. And I listened to faculty stand up and talk about how we should, right now, cancel that Wednesday class because of what it meant for them personally. Of course, were UT to lose its engineering accreditation, all those faculty would suffer far more than they were suffering by having a Wednesday class day. But they didn’t think of that because they assumed that their perspective was the only valid one.
And I realized I was them. I also assumed that the policies of the university should enable my way of teaching. And suddenly I empathized with engineers. I was engaged in epistemological selfishness, only assessing a situation from my perspective. A decision that was obviously wrong from my perspective (such as requiring that the day before Thanksgiving be a class day) was a great decision for a university that wanted to ensure its engineering programs were accredited.
My perspective about the day before Thanksgiving—enable students to leave earlier—was a legitimate one. But the perspective of the Engineering faculty concerned about losing accreditation was also legitimate. In fact, I’d say that, since my university would be seriously hurt by losing Engineering accreditation, and my students would be hurt, that my interests and the concerns of the Engineering faculty were intertwined. That my perspective was legitimate doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered. That the Engineering faculty had a legitimate concern doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered.
The University worked it out.
I’m not saying that all positions are equal, nor that we should never decide our administration has made a bad decision. I have twice been at universities with an ambitious Provost who made every decision on the basis of what would enable them to have great things on their cv because they saw this job as a stepping stone to being Chancellor. Try as I might (and I did try), there was no perspective from which their decisions were the best for the university—they were (are) splashy projects that look great on a resume but aren’t thought through in terms of principles like sustainability, shared governance, financial priorities.
I also sat at a Faculty Council meeting and listened to various faculty from business, math, and economics explain that a report arguing for major changes in various university practices had numbers that literally did not add up. And they didn’t, and those major changes never did save anywhere near the predicted amount. The changes were eventually abandoned.
Three times I have been at universities that had a state legislature actively hostile to my university, that made decisions designed to get the university to fail.
Big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work.
What I’m saying is that just looking at a policy, and assessing it from your perspective as a good or policy doesn’t mean it is a good or bad policy. You have to look at it from the perspective of the various stakeholders, after which you might decide it’s a terrible policy (because it might be). My university should not make every decision on the basis of what is best for me, or even people like me. My university has people with genuinely different needs from me. My university makes bad decisions, but that a decision is not the best one for me is not sufficient proof that it is a bad decision. My university should not be designed for me.
And, similarly, the government should not be designed for me. Or you. Or us.
The notion that, in regard to any question, there is an obviously right answer is epistemological selfishness. The notion that, because you can see flaws in a policy, that policy is obviously dumb and wrong, is just bad reasoning.
Every policy has flaws. You have to decide how to get to work. That’s a policy argument—you are deliberating the policy of getting to work. Is there a perfect route? Nope. Parenting, having a dog, gardening, buying a car—those are all policy deliberations. Is there a perfectly right decision? No. You have to deliberate among various pressing concerns—cost, size, resale value, gas mileage, loan options. Any big institution has to do the same weighing.
Despite the fact that we all get by in a world of vexed and nuanced decisions in our moment to moment decisions, when it comes to what we think of as “political decisions,” a troubling number of us reason the way I did for far too many years—that, when it comes to policy, my perspective is obviously right. Even though my personal life was not a series of perfect decisions, from the day to day (whether to bring an umbrella, wear a heavy coat, take that route to work) through the slightly more important (whether to grant an extension to my students, how to manage my time, agree to that commitment) to the big ones (whether to marry that guy, take that job, get that haircut), somehow I was convinced that I knew the right thing for my university, city, state, or country to do. I had made the wrong decision about a haircut multiple times, but, when it came to politics, my belief was some kind of perfect insight spit from the forehead of God?
My model of political deliberation–despite my long and documented history of being wrong, even when it came to major policy decisions in my personal life, I was magically infallible–is unhappily common.
My experience with big institutions—that they make policies that are ridiculous from my perspective, and even burdensome—is how most people experience the government. And that mantra—this big institution is terrible because their decisions don’t make sense from my perspective–is a constant mantra on my neighborhood mailing list. Every decision “they” make is not just dumb, but obviously dumb. And there are no good reasons or legitimate perspectives that might make “their” decision makes sense.
According to many people on my neighborhood mailing list, everything the city does is wrong. It isn’t just flawed, but completely, obviously, and pointlessly dumb.
And, unhappily, my neighborhood mailing list exemplifies how smart, well-intentioned, good people who are deeply committed to thinking about the public good reason.
My neighborhood mailing list is, ostensibly, non-partisan. But it isn’t. A recurrent (perhaps even dominant) topos (as people in rhetoric say) is that “the government” (an out-group) is making an obviously bad decision because “the government” is dominated by “special interests.”
That’s as political and factional as political discourse gets. It’s toxic populism. It’s the false assumption that there is some group (us) made up of “regular people” who see what really needs to happen. If anything happens that “regular people” (us) don’t like, or that hurts us in any way, then this is the government being dumb, oblivious, or corrupt.
Toxic populism dismisses that the policy we hate might help some other group of people by saying those people aren’t “real Americans.” For complicated reasons, I had to listen to some guy repeat what he said he had heard on Rush Limbaugh, about how Native Americans were getting “special” benefits from the government (those “special” benefits were simply honoring agreements). There was something about Native Americans not being “real” Americans that caused steam to come out my ears.
My neighborhood mailing list claims to be non-factional, but it tolerates dog whistle racism and demagoguery about graffiti. It also tolerates the “the government always fucks things up” rhetoric that is, actually, profoundly factional.
As various studies have shown (Ideology in America summarizes a lot of them), the public, on the whole, supports policies that we tend to identify as “liberal,” but votes for anyone who plausibly performs the identity of “conservative.” And “conservative” is associated with being opposed to government intervention—“the government” is associated with Democrats. This association explains why so many people complain about aspects of Obamacare that Republicans enacted (such as the failure to expand medicare).
And irrational.
In all those years when I was whingeing that the huge institution wasn’t enacting policies that were the best from my perspective, I was engaging in profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric. It was political, and it was factional. Rhetoric about how government sucks isn’t just anti-democratic; it’s pro-Republican.
The government screws things up, and we should engage in loud and vehement criticism when it does. But “the government” making a decision that inconveniences us and “the government” screwing up are not necessarily the same thing—the first is not evidence of the second. Good governmental policies inconvenience everyone at least a little.
After Proposition 13 passed in California (which greatly reduced the state budget), I frequently found myself in situations in which—in the same conversation—someone celebrated the passage of Prop 13 and bemoaned that government services had declined. They shot themselves in the foot and then complained they had a limp.
Americans, till Reagan, lived within a world of well-financed government projects—roads, bridges, water services, public schools, non-partisan science research. Since Reagan, the infrastructure has deteriorated. We now have people complaining that taxes are too high and the infrastructure sucks (which is why we should take more money from government).
We need to stop assuming that “the government” is always deliberately, stupidly, and obviously wrong. “The government” is neither the problem nor the solution; voters are.
I don’t remember much about what I said when I lost my temper with the guy at the farmer’s market, but I do remember one thing. I said, “If you think the government is the problem, then why haven’t you moved to Somalia?” (And, yes, I know, that situation in Somalia is more complicated than that, but, by that time, I’d figured out his sources of information, and that those sources said Somalia is hell.)
And then he did start talking about how the government should stick to what it does well and leave other things aside.
That’s the fallback position for people repeating Libertarian positions that are internally inconsistent but sound good as long as you don’t think too hard. I made no headway with him.
But, what I did see is that his position was thoroughly indefensible logically, and it was the position I have taken far too often in far too many situations. He thought the government was stupid because it made some decisions that he didn’t like. He didn’t notice that “the government” paved the roads that got customers to his place, enabled the trade that got him what he needed for his shop, ensured that he didn’t get robbed, enabled him to do something if someone wrote a bad check. He wants a government that gets him everything he wants and nothing he doesn’t.
And so do I. And that’s a bad way to think about government.
That a policy seems wrong to me doesn’t actually mean it’s wrong. I am not (yet) Queen of the Universe with perfect and universal insight. None of us is. People all over the political spectrum need to stop talking as though the government is the problem. It isn’t. We are.
