​A 2018 Pew research poll showed 73% of Republicans feel colleges are moving in the wrong direction, and 79% say professors bringing their political views into the classroom are a major reason for this[1].   This is nothing new; the political right has long disdained college education as being too liberal.  In the 1950’s Joseph McCarthy targeted liberal faculty members for supposed ties to communism[2], and The California Board of Regents began threatening to fire professors who didn’t sign loyalty oaths.[3]
 
It is true that today colleges are overwhelmingly liberal.  A 2016 study showed Democrats were represented in college faculty 11:1 over Republicans.[4]  A study in 2010 concluded that greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors was accounted for by career-path selection.[5]  However, while the right believes universities are indoctrinating students, a 2008 study, showed there was no evidence faculty ideology was associated with changed is student ideological orientation.[6]
 
But do conservatives value university education at all?  As long as it aligns with their worldview, yes.  Literature and the arts are acceptable as long as they privilege the Western Canon.  “Multiculturalism” – perspectives from non-European or non-white sources – has been derided for decades.  Art movements that do not express traditional realism are discounted.  History that strays into questioning narratives of western and US exceptionalism is deemed subversive.  The notion that traditionally dominant and powerful groups or ideas ought to be critically examined and not assumed as correct are to be avoided.  Sociology must not examine social hierarchies and systems that perpetuate inequality.  Entire fields of study such as ethnic or gender studies are dismissed as “activist” and illegitimate.  Economics, long a bastion of conservative thought, must assume that capitalism is the superior model and inquiries into its flaws or the exploration of alternative systems are inappropriate. 
 
Since its inception in the second half of the 20th century, one of the conservative movement’s founding causes has been to critique the leftward slant of the university.  Books like Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind have been popularizing, catalyzing forces in this line of thought.  Leo Strauss, a far right “founding father” of American conservatism, in his 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, argued that the rise of Nazism was due in no large part to the failures of a professoriate, caught up in liberal thought and attitudes, to teach the classics and thus provide disillusioned young German men a social vision that would inspire faith in social institutions so that they might have avoided the nihilism of Nazi rhetoric.
 
However, while Strauss explicitly rejected much of Nazi ideology, he was obviously sympathetic to many of its grievances about modern, progressive Germany.  He too, wanted to Make Germany Great Again, just not through war and racial cleansing so much as the privileging of traditional social hierarchies.
 
It is in conservative DNA to oppose what it views as the excesses of progress.  In its own telling, this doesn’t mean inquiry and reason per say, but rather the “right kind of” inquiry and reason.  As Buckley famously spoke of standing before history and yelling stop, shades of conservative thought range from complete rejection of modernity (a populist Retvrn to blood and soil, homogenous nationalism, with the salt-of-the earth farmer making everything by hand), to selective rejection of modernity with its “big government” social engineering programs and emphasis on the marginalized and oppressed.  Echoes of this instinct take us back at least as far as the French Revolution and its violent and messy guillotining of the monarchy.  (Modern far right figures such as Curtis Yarvin explicitly call for a return to Monarchy, albeit in a modern form with corporate boards and CEOs overseeing society through technocratic investments instead of an actual king, queen and their lords).  The French went too far, and wrought the unintended consequences of progressivism – a dismantling of traditional hierarchies that were central to the proper functioning of society. 
 
Post WWII, with the rise of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites around the globe, conservatism had a large and obvious foe in totalitarianism.  But while gulags, secret police and central planning were ripe targets for opposition, the underlying premise of communism - a Marxist critique of capitalism’s exploitative and oppressive nature - was more complex and nuanced, and likely a more difficult case to argue against.  Yet while Marxist or not (more often not), what was going on in universities was a project of deconstructing the very systems of power that communism had originally been designed to address.  By lashing the obvious critiques of 20th century communist totalitarianism to the critical analysis of traditional hierarchies and social structures going on in universities, conservatives were able to build a popular case against progressivism in all its forms. 
 
In the 21st century, with the ascendance of the far right in the US, it is not uncommon to hear the terms progressivism and even liberalism used interchangeably with communist or Marxist, despite multiple decades having passed since the fall of the Soviet Union.  However, even as old references are made to the realities of any communist state, only a dwindling percentage of the population will have any clear association with, the modern far right has been able to whip up new and generally fanciful fears and anxieties in the public. Cosmopolitan crime, border invasions, gay menaces and dark Democratic plots to take away American guns have become fruitful substitutions.
 
Yet beneath each of these political and social phantasms lies the same core impulse, that of weakening traditional hegemony.  The supremacy of the patriarchal, Christian, heterosexual and white ethnicity is under threat.  In this, conservatism is correct.  For more than two centuries, since at least the enlightenment, a vision of human rights has generally been ascendant.  From the overthrow of monarchism, to the abolition of slavery, to female suffrage, up through the civil rights era and gay liberation, traditional hierarchies have been under assault, and in the popular imagination, with generally favorable results.  The idea that an individual should have the right to an equal footing not determined by birth or body makes moral sense in a way that is hard to argue against when presented clearly and free from distractions and mendacious associations.
 
While tireless organizing and individual and community action have been instrumental in the success of this progress, academia has played a crucial role not only in providing the research, data and theory giving empirical support to moral consideration.  However, in a more abstracted yet maybe just as important way, the notion of academic inquiry itself has given us a posture in which we are able to objectively understand and communicate what it is we value in society.  Through countless hours of painstaking observation and analysis, universities have been the place where hundreds of thousands of humans have performed the work of holding up a mirror to society, allowing us to see more clearly not only what we do, but why we do it.  By rigorous examination, our systems of social organization are deconstructed, reconstructed and deconstructed again and again. 
 
And yet this process is the antithesis of the central conservative impulse to maintain tradition because it elevates authority to that which can be proven, not merely that which has existed.  In other words, there is no idea that is beyond critique, nothing is sacred but knowledge and truth.  This process is not linear, clean or obvious.  It requires patient debate and humility.  It requires an openness to having old ideas overturned.  It requires the courage to face the possibility that the truths we uncover may be ugly or uncomfortable, or require new moral obligations.  It is nothing so simple as opening a book and having the answers laid out in black and white.  It is fundamentally liberal and progressive, and while often conservative in practice, it is its opposite in spirit.


[1] The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education, Pew, 8/19/2019

[2] "Sarah Lawrence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Era". Sarah Lawrence College Archives

[3] Radin, Max. (1950). Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955)

[4] Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology, 2019, Econ Journal Watch

[5] "Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post

[6] Yancey, George. "Recalibrating Academic Bias." Academic Questions 25, no. 2 (2012): 267–78.

                                        
            I zipped up my backpack and slung it over the back of my chair.  On the desk in front of me was a manila folder with the words, "DO NOT OPEN" emblazoned on the front.  When the TAs finished passing them out, our professor stepped slowly to the podium.  He appeared to be at least eighty.
 
"Welcome, and congratulations.  Each of you has passed basic calculus.  Not an easy feat!  Basic Arithmetic, then Algebra and Geometry.  Finally, Trigonometry and Calculus.  From the Lebombo Bone to Peano's axioms.  From to Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's Ilm al-jabr, to Fibonacci's cubes.  Plimpton 322 to Euclid's three dimensions.  Archimedes' parabolas and Newton's infinitesimals... you've learned it, you've used it, you've proved it.   And then we told you a little something about parabolic disorder.  Now, I know..."
 
A woman with dark hair and cat shaped backpack in the front row raised her hand, "Excuse me, sir?"  The professor cleared his throat.  I could not determine if this was due to nervousness or irritation.
 
"Uh, yes, young lady?"
 
"It's just that, uh, you said parabolic disorder.  I'm not sure what you mean."
 
"Oh, my apologies."  He looked over to a short, fat man with a thick head of hair sitting in the corner with a clipboard.
 
The man stood up and walked hurriedly to the front, hunched in deference to the professor.  "Yes, she is right," he intoned, " We didn't get into parabolic disorder.  I thought we were going to wait on that until the presentation."
 
Now I could tell the professor was clearly irritated.  He looked back at the half-full classroom, our eager eyes so full of anticipation.  He forced a smile.  "Right.  I'm used to getting groups who've already got a sense of where I'm about to go.  But OK."
 
He stepped back from the podium and began to pace.  "As I said, 40,000 years ago with Lebombo we have the first evidence that humans began to mark their counts.  Peano described the basic axioms for arithmetic, which billions of school children have been taught all over the world.  It's what most of us use at the grocery store or when baking cookies.  Some of us have need for more demanding calculations, and we have Ilm al-jabr to thank for that.  Building houses, planes and writing software code all relies on what it originally laid out.   When they first found Plimpton 322, they saw where Euclid was coming from and Newton knew where the apples fell.
 
He stopped pacing and looked out at us with intensity.  "But see, what was just mentioned here with regard to parabolics."  He pointed in the general direction of the woman in the front row.  "Well, that was it.  We had reached what appears to be the limits of mathematics."
 
"You might say we followed the fifth postulate as far as it would go."  The professor smiled and let out a small chuckle.  He adjusted his glasses, obviously proud of his little witticism.
 
The students rustled in their seats, uncomfortable as to where this was all heading.
 
"The best mathematicians pushed and pushed.  We lost many good men.  Gauss was the first to fall.  He famously went mad, and they found his body in the Oker.  Lobachevsky and Bolyai ended up in a duel and shot each other fatally.  Families were torn apart after seeing their young going to college and destroying their careers.  So, something had to be done.
 
"A group of mathematicians, calling themselves the International Convention of Concerned Mathematicians (ICCM), came together to address the problem.  They met in secret, in Geneva so as not to worry the public.
 
From somewhere behind me another student asked in confusion, "But why?"
 
"Right, well.  Sure, just let everyone know that that was it - the end of mathematical discovery forever.  Do you realize what that would have meant, how demoralizing it would have been for humanity?  All this war and famine and sickness and the constant, just awful dreariness of existence?  Math was something we could believe in.  Sure, there is God but who believes in him anymore?
 
A muscular young man in my row snorted.  I had been standing near Rick before class began and he was on his phone talking to someone about corn futures in Iowa.  "Whatcheer isn't more than a half an hour.  Tell him he could be in Oskaloosa before Chicago even opens.  Dad's position is good.  Tell them I'll be back in a few weeks but to not doing anything before I get there."
 
He raised his hand and responded, "Uh, I think I know quite a few people in Iowa who would fit the bill."  The class tittered.
 
"OK, sure," the professor continued.  "But Math is such a part of everything we do."  Most people don't do much more than simple addition and subtraction on the first of the month.  But they know we mathematicians have it all under control.  We make the things work that make their lives comfortable.  Their cars, their TVs, their internet, their satellites and airplane systems.  We make things WORK.
 
"Could you imagine humanity suddenly being faced with the reality that this is it, that we aren't going any further?  I don't know.  I just think it would be a shock we wouldn't recover from.
 
Well, at any rate that was the conclusion of the ICCM.  Each of you has a folder in front of you.  Go ahead and open it."
 
The room was silent for a moment as the class seemed to be calculating what was about to happen, processing the words of the professor.
 
I peeled back the adhesive, reached in and pulled out a small packet of legal paper.  On it, just as was written on the outside of the manila folder, were the words DO NOT OPEN.  One student protested that we should heed them.
 
"No, go on ahead.  That's just there as a reminder of how serious this information is."
 
Multiple gasps erupted in the room. 
 
I lifted the first page and read words I'll never forget:
 
The math is not real.
 
I looked around and the entire class was staring towards the old professor in disbelief, rows of brows furrowed.
 
"I know.  It's a lot to take in all at once.  This is why I always thought we should finish the final unit on parabolics with at least a preview of what would come next.  Might be a bit less shocking."
 
The lady with the cat backpack snorted and said exasperatedly, "You can't be serious with this?" She looked around at the rest of us with an awkward smile and asked the class, "This is a joke, right?  He's joking."
 
She was met with a prevaricating silence.  She turned back to the professor.  "Right?"
 
"I'm afraid not, miss.  The greatest minds tried and failed.  We have basic integers, coefficients, polynomials, graphs and such.  But that's I'm afraid all we're ever going to have."
 
The Iowan leaned back deeply, using his broad biceps to push the edge of his desk back with the heel of his palms.  "There's no way this is real.  I know mathematicians, they do all kinds of crazy stuff.  Our course catalogue is filled with higher math.  Calculus II and III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations.  What are they all doing!!?"
 
The professor stood silently; lips pursed in a slightly wry smile.  He looked like a man for whom things were going exactly as he expected they would.
 
"Um, sir, what about the movies?"  I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman with a simple hair style that fell down over a faded white t-shirt.  "Or on TV.  All those chalkboards with lots of equations all over the place.  I mean, I know it's just fiction.  Or, but on the news, I've seen stories on science where labs have some pretty advanced looking math on the whiteboard.  I usually can't understand it.  What's all of that then?"  The Iowan nodded along.  They looked to the professor, who was now looking down and had resumed his pacing.
 
Without looking up, he continued to pace, allowing a silence to drag over the class. 
 
"It's all made up.  Turn to the third page in your packets."  The class obliged.
 
On page three was a list in three bullets:
 
Rules for Higher-Mathematicians

1. The math does not exist.
2. Tell no one.
3. Use only Provideo.

 
"When you stepped into class today, you were stepping in to a very special, very exclusive group.  You were selected through your proficiency, and we are grateful for your dedication.  But the sad truth is that you have reached the end of the road.  There is no math to learn beyond what you already know.  As future mathematicians, you will be the inheritors of a sacred duty: to keep the story of math alive in the public imagination.  This has not been easy, as you can probably imagine.  But aside from the unavoidable slip-up here and there, I think we have done a pretty good job so far."
 
The professor looked up and his tone became more serious.
 
"One of the first tasks of the ICCM was to develop a system of structures that would be our guideposts in this new reality.  Protocols were developed, networks activated that ensured only the proper channels of communication were used.  Briefings were devised to inform heads of state and captains of industry.  Special departments were tasked to develop materials that would be given to media sources such as journalists and film producers.  They had to have the appearance of complexity.  A sort of arbitrary language was developed.  You know, like Klingon."
 
The class appeared oblivious to this reference.  "From Star Trek?  Their whole language - they made a whole language up.  It was internally consistent, and they used it in the series and films.  I think some fans even learned it.  Imagine that!"
 
The class remained silent.  The professor waved his hand, "OK, before your time.  Whatever.  The point is that they made it up, but it seemed real.  So, the ICCM went to great lengths to do the same thing but for math.  It was sent out globally to every college and university.  Students just like you were given the same packet you know have on your desks.  Turn the page."
 
On the next page, a hyperlink and an email address: my first and last name@provideo.
 
I was about to ask the professor a question myself but before I could get the words out, he went on, providing the answer soon thereafter.
 
"These are the two most important things you will need for the rest of your career.  That link is your access portal to the ICCM's database.  This will be your personal email throughout your career in mathematics."
 
From somewhere behind me the sound of a cup spilling and a student calling out "oh shit."
 
The Iowan, still in a state of shock, "I don't believe it.  This makes no sense.  You said it before - cars, planes, satellites.  The Hubble, the Mars rover.  Carl friggin' Sagan! You're telling me none of that is real?!!"  He stared back at the professor, as if expecting him to reveal at last that this was all some silly first-day-of-the-semester charade.
 
The professor was deadly serious.  "Well, it's complicated."  He then explained that while yes, we did have advanced electronics, the notion that these were based on any higher math than simple calculus was a myth.  Sagan had actually been a high-ranking member of the ICCM.  That wistful, almost sad quality about him was less about the wonder of the universe than the sadness in seeing its mysteries ever-unreachable, locked away behind an impenetrable wall of ignorance.  We were able to land on the moon, to sample the rocks on Mars, but these were simple feats of basic math it turned out.  More fantastic theories such as the distance to stars, the gravity of galaxies and cosmic inflation - all little more than hunches, with little math behind them.  In reality we had no idea what was really beyond our solar system. 
 
And what about atoms and particles, someone asked, dejectedly.  We knew some basic chemistry, but we didn't really know much about the interactions of electrons, much less quantum dynamics, one of the better "fields of study" conjured up by the ICCM. 
 
The cat backpack lady seemed almost ready to cry as the professor spoke, each of his words like the teeth of a chainsaw to her soul.  "What... do we all do, then?"
 
The professor leaned on the podium and took out a small green piece of cloth, with which he then used to clean his glasses. 
 
"You work.  If you want to continue.  You may decide of course to turn around and walk right out that door."  The professor pointed limply.  "You just need to sign the next page, agreeing to the rules.  But for those of you who want to remain, and continue on in a career of mathematics, you will become an employee of the ICCM.  Each quarter you will receive a new packet of materials.  We call it the Provideo.  It is designed by the art department of the ICCM.  Unlike Klingon there is no real logic to it.  It's just a bunch of squiggles and dashes.  Meaningless really.  But you need to memorize it.  It is the most important thing you will do.  You will meet together in your departments at your assigned university or private lab.  There your days will be spent in review, going over each new piece of Provideo until you know it like the back of your hand.  You will put it up on the whiteboards in your workspace, print it out and tape it to checklists, you know, all the kind of busywork stuff the public would expect.  Should you take an interview with a PR team or news anchor or whatever you'll be well equipped to make it all seem quite serious and above board."
 
The student behind me had finished wiping up their spilled drink, had now gathered their things and was heading down the aisle towards the podium.  He looked flustered, and handed his packet to the professor, who looked it over.  "I signed it.  I'm not sure what to think right now.  But... this is a lot.  Thank you."  The door slowly closed on its pneumatic hinge after he left the room.
 
"It's not for everyone.  I know.  It is sad.  I won't lie.  But I hope you'll understand the position of the ICCM.  It's really best for everyone."
 
---
I sat on a park bench outside.  The late morning sun was still working to evaporate the morning's dew.  Passing students laughed and continued on to whatever interesting new studies lay ahead.  Still wearing my backpack, I gripped its straps in my thumbs and pulled it close.  It was heavy with textbooks from the Spanish, Women's Studies and Criminal Justice classes I planned on attending later today.  But no math.
 
There would not be any more math.  I suddenly took note of the geometry in the buildings around me.  A bird swooped by overhead and I thought of how one might calculate its flight path.  How many cubic liters of water in the fountain?  How much plastic feeder line was predicted to be needed in the landscaper's gas-powered trimmer?  All basic math.
 
I looked into the sky, the white whisps of clouds smeared across the nitrogen blue.  Beyond which there were stars.  Or were there?  What was it the professor had said about the solar system and galaxies?  I think we still know they are there, some things, somewhere out there.  But I suppose we'll never know.  I suddenly realized the word for what I was feeling: small.  Everything usually seemed to have a grandeur to it - a bigness.  There was a sort of infinity that transcended reality and we were always searching to discover more of it.  But this was all shattered.  Or not even that.  It wasn't explosive it was implosive.  As if in an instant an eternal outward energy had reversed course and was now turning in on itself.  What was shining, giving off light, was now absorbing it into a deadened kind of gloom.
 
And yet the sun still shone above.  I stood up and began to walk.  My next class, Freud's Old Maid: Sexual Repression in Victorian New York, didn't start until 12:30pm.  I had time to grab lunch.  I was suddenly really hungry all.  I thought about my friend, Barry, and felt a strong urge to call and tell about what had just happened.  I quickly remembered the rules, and the paper I had signed.  I couldn't tell Barry, or anyone else.  I was now part of a worldwide secret society, in possession of a secret knowledge that only a handful of humans would ever know.  That felt kind of good.

The Matching Law states, in essence, that an organism will do what has been most reinforcing to them in the past.  That is, generally either what feels good when they do it - either because they have received something from the world (cake, kisses, money), - or because they have removed some discomfort (cold air, delaying a task, uncomfortable social setting).
 
The matching law is at once an incredibly powerful insight into human behavior and a deceptively simple notion.  Because while choosing to eat cake over a rotten fish is easy to understand, much of our reinforcement in life is far more complex and nuanced.  Take for instance, a person who commits suicide.  The matching law states that their history indicates that in the behavior of jumping off a cliff they anticipated more reinforcement than in doing anything else.
This would be a case of negative reinforcement, in which an attempt was made to feel better by relieving or removing some discomfort.   But what was so discomforting about being alive?  If there was no physical discomfort being endured, the pain was psychic, some kind of emotional torment.  And when we try to look at their life and biology, we might find a genetic mechanism by which the chemicals needed for joy, optimism, etc. were not being sufficiently processed.  But we might also find a history of trauma, of anti-social relationships, etc.  All of these become so numerous and tangled that the matching law almost seems irrelevant.
 
But it isn’t!  Our behavior must follow its declaration: we move towards comfort and away from discomfort.  An analysis of behavior attempts to identify the cycles of reinforcement (punishment too, but we’ll keep things simple here), as they play out across 4 parameters: one’s present motivational state (how much they want or do not want something, in this case relief from psychic pain) + the environmental stimuli (the world, the cliff, thoughts), + the behavior (jumping off a cliff) + the consequence (relief of suffering).  Our analysis takes what is sometimes called a “molar” view of behavior.  That is, an organism’s every behavior never exists in isolation, but is a dynamic, ongoing interaction between our physical body & mind, our environment, and what happened after all prior behaviors.
 
Some behaviors have died out (gone extinct), or have been replaced by other behaviors.  E.g. I used to try and feel good by getting negative attention from peers by acting goofy, but I grew older and found that I felt better when I learned to behave in ways that were more honest, thoughtful and productive when in social settings.  When I did that, I discovered new avenues of joy and comfort – new “reinforcers”.  (I think girls started to take me seriously – and sex is just about as reinforcing as anything, aside from maybe heroin).
 
Three classic critiques of behaviorism are as follows: 1. it is mechanistic and dehumanizing, 2. it is reductionist, and 3. it is inadequate for explaining complex human behavior.
 
All 3 are quite true in a way; behaviorism looks at the behavior, not the “whole human”, it looks for dependent variables in a systematic way that requires empirical humility, and it does not seek to explain what it cannot measure.
 
However, this is also its great strength.  Because for millennia humans have relied on myth, superstition, and intuition to determine why people do what they do.  Or, in more modern times, to develop elaborate (however often untested) theories about it.  To this day it is popular to talk about “free will”, “personal responsibility”, “common sense”, or “the problem of consciousness”.  Yet these are each mostly incoherent terms. 
 
“Free will” would seem to require acting without influence of neither one’s phenotypic makeup or one’s past learning history of the world.  This is a notion as mystical and fanciful as a unicorn, in that according to the laws of nature and determinism, no such thing is possible (I’ll avoid the notions of quantum indeterminacy here, but suffice it to say that the answer is in the name: appealing to indeterminacy to explain why someone does something is a contradiction in terms; one might as well wear a banana on their head as a hat because the position of the electrons in their brain’s sodium can’t be measured by speed and position simultaneously).
 
Personal responsibility can either refer to social rules or one’s determination of their own actions.  Since the latter is an incoherent notion (see paragraph above), the former is entirely compatible with a behavioral, determinist account: rules are essentially a learning history of relations between stimuli that don’t require direct experience.  That is, I avoid a rock flying towards me because I have experienced being hit in the head by objects and thus have been reinforced by (learned to) avoid them when they come at me.  But if I work in a rock crushing yard, I follow the rule of wearing a hard hat because even though I have not had one drop on me yet, I have learned (the rule) that it is possible and that my hat will protect me from discomfort (planning for negative reinforcement).  Our lives are filled by rules that are continually providing reinforcement as they guide us towards comfort and away from discomfort.
 
Common sense is simply my repertoire with certain stimuli.  I have experienced a set of events in the world, learned rules about them, and follow them according to how strongly I have thus far been reinforced.  A man who doesn’t wear a jacket in the snow lacks common sense” simply because – as the matching law states – he has not developed strong enough relations between the contingent event of being cold outside or the non-contingent event of putting on a jacket before leaving.  There can be all manner of reasons for this – often simply due to chemical mechanisms such as those that result in ADHD, in which attention to irrelevant stimuli were more reinforcing; think of the absent-minded professor who is daydreaming equations and forgets to put on his pants.  A lack of “common sense”, or “sense that has been directed elsewhere?
 
The problem of consciousness, it seems we often forget, first requires a definition.  What do we mean by “consciousness”?  Is it simply being alive and experiencing the world?  Bacteria do that.  Is it thinking about and planning for events?  Many animals do that, and many animals “reason” or learn from their local species’ culture – this is simply a learning history of stimuli relations; If I lick this stick and put it in this big hole and pull it out it will be lined with delicious (reinforcing) ants.  Is consciousness communication?  Skinner provided a very sophisticated taxonomy of verbal behaviors that a community develops by reinforcing vocal and gestural responses to stimuli, such as requesting, labeling, receptive identification and imitation.  While we can in no way claim to understand or be capable of explaining every magnificent manifestation of what we commonly call “consciousness”, much less the particular cellular mechanisms or networks of synapses in the brain that conspire to produce them, our understanding of the principles of behavior and learning – not in the least the matching law – has far more explanatory power than that with which we derive without it.
 
The simple idea that what any of us do, at any time of day, can be largely explained by this simple law: that we do what has brought us most comfort or relived most discomfort in the past, has a profound possibility of opening us up to treating each other with the kind of recognition, honor, sympathy, and respect that only the most holy and sainted among us might be imagined to display.  Your mean boss.  The bad driver on the road.  Your annoying stepmother, the playground bully, the thief, the murderer, the rapist, the pedophile – the very worst people in the world all have learning histories that tell a story of the interaction between their genes and their environment.
 
But so too the successful entrepreneur, or Nobel prize winner, or star athlete, or president, wise man, genius or anyone else who seems to display great aptitudes or attributes.  Man is a messy mixture of hormones, brain cells and various organs, sloshing around from meal to meal, relation to relation.  His world is a mess of privileges and disadvantages, social structures and lucky breaks. 
 
Yet the one thing he is not is an actor outside of these things.  And that one simple truth, born out in countless scientific studies – if not simple observation – reminds us that we are all only human (homo sapiens), nothing more.  We are no different than all the kingdoms of life from which we share a common ancestor.  We evolved on the same planet, from the same molecules, atoms, amino acids and fundamental forces of the universe.  Subject to electromagnetic radiation, the strong and weak forces, gravity and the laws that they each must obey.  So, to must we obey them. 
 
So, do we have choice?  What is our purpose if we are nothing but highly advanced automatons, trapped in an endless war with entropy?  To the former the answer is yes, and no.  We make choices, but the matching law determines what they will be.  We feel as though we are making them because society has always described our lives as such, and our intuition that we are acting without any cause outside our own “will” arises from our severely limited cognitive and observational capacity.  We can only ever hope to process a handful of the almost limitless physical processes and environmental interactions that have made us who we are and are presently operating on us.
 
As for our purpose, this is not for us to decide alone.  For as products of our environment, we cannot but act in ways in which we have learned.  As a species, we have applied our evolved physical and cognitive capabilities to develop incredible things: families, social structures, beliefs, religions, reasons, science, governments, countries, AI algorithms that we are at the cusp of being unable to comprehend.  The vast majority of what we do is obscure to us – we just do it.  We find enjoyment, make friends, find lovers, raise children, go to work – all of this not only creates meaning but is meaning.  That is, it brings us comfort and avoids discomfort, even if we often don’t really understand why.
 
Society has great power to make us act and think in ways in which its complex systems have designed.  Many rules we follow lead us to truth, while others towards falsity.  But the matching law is there to remind us that while we may not know why specifically, we know why generally. And while it is only a starting point to understand and analysis ourselves and those around us, it is a point at which we fail to recognize at our peril.

In Leo Strauss’ 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, he argues Nazism arose from a nihilism he defines as ultimately in opposition to modern civilization.  This was provoked by progressive educators who, instead of taking seriously the worries about the immorality and debasement of tradition that progressivism wrought, and reminding their pupils of the strengths of the past, merely chided them for insufficient appreciation of modernity.  But this was counter-productive.  It only reinforced their anxiety over loss of moral rootedness and the spiritual comfort found in transcending the individual for the glory of the state.  Instead of turning to the modern, “open society”, they saw only two paths – either the “closed society” of communism, or nihilistic destruction and war against civilization.
 
For the Open Society meant a state of disintegration, a denial of human nature (covered over by sly fictions), and moral respectability only to the extent society remained closed.  Closed Society on the other hand meant a flag to whom one might pledge an oath, the constant awareness of sacrifice and self-denial, known facts about human nature, and connection to the sublime.  Yet since the only path to the latter form of society they could see ended in communism (which they despised) they felt their only option was destruction.
 
Strauss finds much to fault these young Nazis.  He views them as naïve and errant in their thinking, failing to see beyond their current provincial predicament.  Writing in 1941, he had yet to witness just how devastating their plan would come to be.  With historical hindsight, he delivers one of maybe the most absurdly wrong statements written in the 20th century.  Of Hitler, “He will soon be forgotten.”  A better scholar than I might know better what provoked this grave miscalculation.  A Jew born in 1899, who lived in Germany until 1932, he no doubt grasped their virulent antisemitism (although one wonders why he mentions it only in passing “Their anti-Jewish policy does seem to be taken seriously by the Nazis.”), and may have had good reason to avoid grappling with its enormity.
 
But a better explanation might instead be that Strauss himself has strong reactionary sympathies.  He spends a good deal of the lecture laying out just how right the Nazis were about the moral depravity of progressivism.  While it is not mentioned, one hardly need to imagine what Strauss has in mind when he cites approvingly the Nazi critiques of modern civilization.  He argues that civilization is defined by science and reason, and dismisses non-western cultures:
“The term civilization designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian. A tribal community may possess a culture, i.e. produce, and enjoy, hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, dances, fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.”
Strauss seems to be in agreement that progressivism is decadent and immoral, with its “planetary societies” devoted only to production and consumption, and above all else, an almost narcissistic devotion to individual rights and personal satisfactions.  While not mentioned in the lecture, Weimar Germany was known for its liberalism.  While maybe not quite tolerant, it at least seemed to look the other way at expanding views of traditional hierarchies of race, gender and class.  This fact could not have been lost on Strauss.
 
The basic claim of the piece is not that the Nazis were nihilist reactionaries, but that they were the wrong kind of reactionaries.  He suggests at the end that the British, being of a different temperament than the French who gave in to their progressive passions, and the Germans, who clung to a fanciful pre-modern ideal, were able to weather this predicament of modern civilization and its discontentedness.  He ends with the line, “it is the English, and not the Germans, who deserve to be, and to remain, an imperial nation.”  In evoking imperialism as something to be deserved, Strauss reminds us just where his real allegiances lie. 

Charli xcx’ BRAT is currently sitting at the top of the 2024 chart on Rate Your Music
 
What is the rubric for rating music?  Structure, tone, lyricism, innovation, pleasure...
 
I often think about the classic division between Beatles versus Rolling Stones fans.  The former is clearly more complex, inventive, technical and dynamic.  However, the latter possesses a sort of raw pathos.  It’s too reductive, but there is an element of intellect versus soul.  The Beatles created gorgeous aural worlds.  The Rolling Stones tapped into something deeper and darker in the soul.  Both of these bands came out of an explosion on popular music as a worldwide commercial phenomenon.  Both had access to amazing studio production, the former leaning into this much further, yet still relied on their own core band member's songwriting - what each brought to their instrument and how it folded into the others' sound.
 
Commercial music had already long-established songwriting factory production - Fordism in art.  Tin Pan Alley being maybe the most famous and successful since the late 19th century.  Songwriters would create and sell their product to artists to use.  Skilled session musicians were then hired to provide backgrounds.  This was the ultimate commodification of music, and many genres basically existed because of it.
 
"Indie" music of the day would have been early country, bluegrass, folk and blues.  This was an opposite set-up, with single musicians or small groups forming together to play everything from porch stoops to bars, to parties, to small and medium venues.  In its purest sense, it was the opposite of Tin Pan commodification.  This "roots" music allowed for the purest expression of what we might call the soul of an individual or local community and tradition; the “ars gratia artis” (famously printed beneath the Lion of the MGM logo) – “Art for art’s sake”.
 
This tension between commerce and soul has always been a tension in all art.  Literature, theater, film and music have all, to greater or lesser extent, had to deal with the realities of the economic and social structures of their day.  From the simple bar songs inscribed on stone tablets in ancient Greece, to the patronage systems of medieval Europe.
 
Does knowing the production-providence of a work factor in to its appreciation?  Can one not simply listen to a song and be swept away by it, no thought to who made it, where it came from, or how it was made? I’m reminded of the dilemma one faces when a beloved artist is discovered to be an awful person, having done awful things.  Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Louis C. K.  Can we listen to the music, laugh at the stand-up routine, or watch a film made by a rapist?  What if Hitler made slammin’ beats?
 
OK, let’s reel it back in a bit.  Corporate music isn’t raping anyone (mostly).  But what do we do when a track list flits from a group of unassuming musicians creating their own sound on a shoestring versus a mega-corporation selecting and creating every element of a piece of art based on maximum commercial viability.  The top of the billboard charts is consistently dominated by music that has been crafted by enormous teams of people, costing upwards of a million dollars for a hit track.  From A&R department sales presentations with PowerPoint charts, focus groups, bids on beat packages, vocal coaches, multiple producers, mixers, engineers, songwriters, session musicians, classically trained orchestration, famous guest artists, then a shiny, well-quaffed cover artist with stylists and personnel including managers, lawyers, road crew and tour bus drivers.
 
Charli xcx is clearly a product of the latter.  What do we make of this?  On a purely non-intellectual, almost acontextual level, BRAT is danceable, innovative, sprinkled with hooks, interesting chord structures and progressions, technically adept and dynamic instrumentation.  But can our rubric dismiss the context from which the music was created?
 
What is the purpose of a rubric?  What is the point of rating music?  There need not be any Platonic ideal here.  One might choose from among a vast array of artistic elements in their score.  One might weight elements differently.   One might leave out completely – if only out of human cognitive limitations – entire categories of appreciation.  The artistic canon is nothing if not a story of time, something that by definition cannot be scored until many years or even decades have passed.  “Cultural impact” is commonly only judged at a much later date – often after the original creator is long since buried in the ground.  And by its very nature, the trajectory of culture is almost impossible to predict.  Who could say what future listeners might find interesting in a work 100 years from now (assuming, that is, world wars won’t have burnt the physical record to a crisp).  The carved stone tablet of a simple Greek citizen’s bar song was created more than two thousand years ago. 
 
So, subjectivity established, this reviewer argues from a point of personal privilege, for a rubric that includes as much context as possible, with weights given according to that which objectively exists in the work, the work’s subjective expression in the listener, as well as what values ought to be venerated in its creation.  In one sense, to include artistic values in a rubric might seem superfluous, in that it feels removed from the actual experience of the work – the ineffable effect sound has on a human is something no one really understands.  Various animals have been studied and while some species seem to respond to certain elements – pitch, rhythm, etc. – none respond to as wide a variety of musical elements as humans. 
 
The brain is the most complex known object in the universe; the sheer number of interconnecting neurons responsible for these responses is only beginning to be understood.  Synesthetic waves wash over us as we process sound leaving speaker boxes, vibrating across gas molecules, striking the bones of our ears and disappearing into the ocean of our subconscious and conscious experience.  An article in 2012 describes the phenomena of a comatose patient literally being awakened by an Adele song.
After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn’t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila began singing along.
 
 
 
Then something remarkable happened: Charlotte smiled. Within two days, she could speak and get out of bed. Why does music seem to help "awaken" some people from their comas? (Meghan Holohan, NBC News, June 2012).
 
Is there room in our rubric for a song’s ability to wake someone from a coma?
 
The human brain (along with other complex species, to various degrees) contains structures both old and new, evolutionarily speaking.  Two systems – the limbic and the cortical – are responsible for very different processing tasks, yet are inseparable.  The limbic system is responsible for our basic drives – fear, joy, anger, sadness, while the cortical system makes sense of the world – forming the vast set of connections that give rise to memory, language and abstract thought.  But our advanced ideas about the world are bound to our basic drives.  Memories contain fear and joy.  Arriving at logical consistency often requires both the joy of the new and a transcendence of the fear of losing the old.  The faulty logic we see in social phenomenon such as conspiracism is as much driven by an aversion to scary realities as it is clumsy epistemological scaffolding.
 
Art lives within these spaces.  At one’s most depressed, lonely and hopeless moments, the experience of a song or a film can transport one to a completely different place with stimulated thoughts and feelings that can serve to pull us into new realities of conscious and unconscious experience.
 
This is almost religious.  Historically, religious practice commonly involves a transcendence of cognition and emotion, with the goal of finding one’s way closer to God.  From the whirling dervishes, to Pentecostal glossolalia, to Jewish shuckling.  Note that this practice almost always involves a physical action that seems to in a way distract the participant, allowing them to transcend the physical and reach a new level of experiential consciousness.  Other practices rely on different techniques, but the goal is largely the same.  Native American ingestion of peyote or entrance into sweat lodges alter the body’s chemistry or physiological response directly.  Buddhist meditation, with almost brute force, asks the participant to sit immobile and organize their thoughts in such a way that the cortical and the limbic systems might be stripped bare and reduced from conscious experience.  A Hollandaise of the mind.
 
What is the point of religion?  It seems almost fundamental to the human experience.  It seems to be there at our oldest record of human activity.  As such, its function is clearly an enormously powerful element of what we – the most sophisticated beings in the known universe – do with our lives.  As incredible as our bodies are, we can only have begun to respond to the universe. 
 
4.5 billion years ago, when molecules somehow began to link up in self-replicating packages, forming RNA, then ribosomes, then multicellular organization, then organs, and spreading out over the planet in great kingdoms, what we call “life” was essentially a form of reality peering back at itself.
 
The fundamental forces and laws of the universe, as far as we know present 13.7 billion years ago when everything seemingly popped into existence.  The Bosons of the Higgs field pulled together fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks, giving them mass as they exploded into the unfolding expansion of the universe.  Atoms formed into ever-heavier elements as black holes and galaxies collided and stars imploded under their own gravities, launching them ever further into clouds of gas and dust. Accretions formed new solar systems and planets.   We are the first assemblages that we know in which water, amino acids and other basic building blocks formed into life.
 
And so here we are, with our brains and our communities, our religion and our art, still folding into ever more complex creatures capable of peering out at the rest of the universe.  We want to know.  We want to feel.  (As a behaviorist, I might proffer that we feel we want).
 
This reviewer views religion as a social phenomenon, created as a function both of human desire and fear.  Life is beauty but life is suffering.  I also want to know why.  But while religious practice and belief may have its unique epistemological advantages, as a logical proposition it is tautological and ultimately limiting as an avenue towards greater knowledge.  On this front, it fails at its own proposition: knowing God, precisely because it’s reliance on God as a manifestation of ultimate understanding.  As cognitively limited as humans are, we can at least experience truths about the universe far more profound than those found in texts written by particular humans with an historically quite limited appreciation for the vast number of stimuli available to life forms such as ourselves.
 
But the one thing religion can do really well, is act as a cortical-limbic bridge.  Given that these two systems are literally the stuff of which our living experience is formed, the leveraging of their interconnectedness will always be required if we are to truly grasp the outer reaches of our understanding and interaction with reality.  For this reason, religion has always been at the for front of this avenue of human exploration.  But like every early probe into the unknown, such as fire, boats, microscopes, telescopes and satellites, their function is limited, and earlier versions are inevitably supplanted by new technologies.  As a social construct with the epistemological limitations mentioned previously, it has always been off limits to those who see these deficiencies and find themselves unable to overcome them. 
 
Fortunately, religion is not the only road to cortical-limbic navigation.  As a technology for human awareness, music can be as effective (if not more effective) in this role.  It is no wonder that music itself has usually been an integral part of religious practices designed to transport one into otherwhile inaccessible realms.  A sufficiently expansive rubric for music appreciation would require consideration of its ability to provide this human platform of exploration.  To the degree that cortical-limbic exploration is valued, as such it will be weighted in the rubric.
 
And so, criteria argued for, I return to Charli xcx’’s BRAT.  While aforementioned elements of the music can score highly on their own terms (it’s danceable, innovative, sprinkled with hooks, interesting chord structures and progressions, technically adept and dynamic instrumentation) to the extent that it is a creation of Fordist commodification across a wide array of corporate policy manifestations, a rubric that values expression as a route to further exploration of the cortical-limbic pathway  – what might be called “soul” – would score it quite low in this area.  The social structures, with all their power hierarchies and pressures, reach in to the work like vapid tentacles.  This can be seen throughout.  A better reviewer than I – and one more inspired to break down what is and is not reductive, contrived, affected or derived – would catalogue these elements of BRAT.  A better reviewer than I would offer them as an argument for the very score that I say ought be diminished here. 
 
Alas, I’m less interested in that.  In this review, I merely offer an examination of why one might come to similar conclusions about any mass-produced popular work of art the production of which relies so heavily on the social structures I have described, and thus its inherent  limitations as a truly great art form.

​Listening to a never-Trump podcast is always a gamble.  It’s mostly going after how awful Trump is, and maybe interesting enough insight into center-right concerns.  There seems to have been more self-interrogation earlier on in the MAGA takeover of the GOP, but lately it feels rare. 
 
On a recent episode discussing possible Kamala Harris VP picks, a brief list of policy preferences was presented.  Shapiro, the centrist Democratic Governor of PA, seems a favorite.  His antagonism of teachers’ unions, and support for school vouchers, fracking, and Israel loom large.
 
But taking apart any of those issues unpacks the fundamental racism of conservatism, and not only why it has given us MAGA, but why even the most moderate conservative positions cannot be extricated from racism.
 
None of this is going to be explicit racism.  But if when seeing inequality, pain and the mistreatment of people of color, one turns away and ignores it, or worse - creates fictions to explain it way, or make excuses for why immediate and intensive intervention is not only not require but too dangerous to try, one is preferencing the advancement of white supremacy.
 
Let’s look at these issues in order.  Antipathy for teachers’ unions and support for school vouchers are based on the same premise.  School reform is needed because schools are failing minorities.  Minorities are both poor because they don’t get quality educations because unions are protecting lousy teachers, and since they are poor, they can’t afford to live near good schools.  Vouchers can be used by the poor to go to non-union schools, get quality educations and rise out of poverty.  The “soft bigotry of low expectations” does the old right-wing triple-Lindsy of turning the critique around to say it is the left, actually, who are the racists because they don’t care about black poverty.
 
It’s a rickety story built on multiple failings both of logic and fact.  Poor kids start out without school-ready skills.  Their parents have little education themselves, and work for low pay that breaks families and introduces high levels of stress.  Housing markets force families into neighborhoods where generations of burden nurture the portion of people with anti-social behaviors.  Schools in these neighborhoods do their best, but making up for large scale social failures would require hard-to-imagine levels of academic intervention.  Yet the simplest intervention - in theory if not policy, would be not into schools but into a labor market that seems to require poverty in the first place.  For every poverty wage job, you definitionally get a poor household.  If all labor paid non-poverty wages, poverty would practically cease to exist. 
 
Yet for conservatives, supporting unions and fair wages is a non-starter.  From trickle-down, to growth theory, to (misapplied) ideas about operant conditioning and the reinforcing/punishing contingencies of “bettering oneself” through acquiring new skills and or hard work to achieve success, conservatism tells a story seemingly designed to avoid collectivism and the abstraction of capital from individual production to social production.  Deeper social theory here might productively lead to various strains of democratic monarchism (accumulation of wealth as a social good) and a conception of libertarian free will (pull yourself up by your bootstraps).  This story looks at persistent American racial inequality and is fine with a permanent underclass of low wage workers who historically have been disproportionately minority and there is no reason to think they won’t always be.
 
Fracking support seems a blend of pragmatic political maneuvering and avoidance of carbon regulation and government job creation.  The right has soft spot for blue collar workers who have become dependent on gas extraction. This is likely rooted in deeper racial affinities (fellow whites in the working class) and a story about the labor market providing good jobs without government involvement. 
 
No case needs to be made for how devastating climate change is, particularly for the global south and its largely non-white populations.  Fracking, responsible for a relatively small portion of total CO2 emissions, is a significant contributor nonetheless.  If people need jobs the government can create them in various ways, including incentivizing businesses to invest in these communities.
 
Yet this requires an acknowledgement both of the serious harm caused by climate change, as well as a belief that the government should fund interventions.  Yet a government of this sort would require increased taxes, and thus violate conservative notions about wealth and will such as mentioned above.  It would also require valuing the lives of poor Americans whites vastly more than the brown peoples who will bear the overwhelming brunt of climate death.
 
Regarding Israel, it will not be surprising to find a messy set of assumptions and values.  Israel was founded as a safe place for Jews.  The Greatest Generation fought against fascism for democracy, and Israel was a sort of prize at the end.  Arab neighbors are ungrateful at best and fascist or simply pathological at worst.  Israel must defend itself from the barbarians, even if it has to bend the rules to do so.
 
Where to begin?  Jews have come to be coded white, and among religious conservatives members in good standing of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  A bit of noble savage gilding takes place over the ones who started of good with the Old Testament but kind of lost their way when they failed to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.  This gets dark fast with the more fundamentalist types who have their own wicked fantasies about the final end for Jews.  But even leaving that aside, to see the settlements, the segregation, the vicious campaigns that target journalists and civilians, and to not feel horror, one can only but value the life of Jews and Arabs quite differently.
 
None of this is explicit, conscious, overt racism.  Yet the policy preferences and assumptions require a privileging of white people over people of color.  When you look at the toxic bigotry that has always lived in the corners of conservatism, seeing its bloom grow at varying rates of the decades, and that has now burst its seams to take control of the conservative American party, it is no surprise that what feeds the toxic element is not extrinsic to conservatism but rather intrinsic to its notions of government, capital, and apparently race.

Under a neoliberal framework, the criminogenic and anti-social effects of poverty must be denied and/or re-conceptualized as failures of institutions such as schools, criminal justice, corporate polluters, or government.
 
While corruption at various levels in each of these institutions is clear, they are the mere band-aids of a capitalism that refuses to reckon with poverty.  What’s more, this capitalism has strong levers over each of these institutions via lobbying and other forms of political capture, making even their attempts at triage ineffective at best.
 
But the neat trick neoliberalism does, in vainly trying to reconcile itself with free market conservatism, is allow for basic assumptions about property and employment.
 
Conservatism: poverty is caused by choice

• no need for institutions to begin with.

Neoliberalism: poverty is caused by institutional failures

• If we had good institutions, poverty would be erased.

 
Each assumes that our underlying economic system is either good or good enough, with varying degrees of quality institutions.
 
Yet even in this perfect world, we still have massive wage inequality and poverty.  Good schools, quality policing, racial, religious and gender harmony, strict environmental regulations will still not impede the fact that our economy runs on poverty level wages.  The experience of poverty might be a little better - healthcare, small class sizes with social supports, humane policing, environmental hygiene.  But capital will be so limited for so many that their housing will still be restricted to certain neighborhoods.  Spending will be limited and therefore stress high due to precarity.  Expendability will be high as low specialization/skills means their labor will be easily replaceable.  Political advocacy will be low due to social ostracism intrinsic to the economic devaluation of their work. 
 
All of this raises stress and promotes indignation towards those born to more capital who live as if their worth is greater due to all the privileges life has subtly afforded them. 
 
Wealth provides exponential access to agency.  Paying rent, investing, taking vacations, sending your happy kids to college, having nice things, not worrying about pollution or crime.  And if your wealth comes from your own labor, a great sense of pride reinforces one’s sense of worth, or social praise within one’s skin.  And should you require any additional help in reinforcing pro-social instead of anti-social behaviors, all these added reinforcing stimuli are available as well.
 
If human freedom can be limitedly defined as access to reinforcement, a certain level of relative  capital is by far the determining factor in this phylogenic growth across the lifetime.
 
From William Baum’s Understanding Behaviorism:
 
A group's culture consists of operant behavior shared by the group members, acquired as a result of membership in the group, and transmitted from one group member to another. Evolution of culture occurs in a manner parallel to shaping of operant behavior and biological evolution—by variation coupled with selective transmission. In cultural evolution, the pool of cultural practices possessed by a society, analogous to a gene pool, is the culture pool. The traits that produce culture are behavioral specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers and punishers. The replicators of culture (practices) are the activities of group members passed along by imitation and instruction. They include nonverbal practices like dietary selection and manufacturing, and also verbal practices like stories, sayings, and rules. Practices of social reinforcement and punishment are fundamental replicators of human culture. Group selection and cultural group selection resulted in evolution of cooperative breeding and other cooperative activities
 
This basic process is fundamental to our phenotype and so will exist in every social system.  But a social system that radically reduces wealth inequality so as to maximize access to reinforcers to the most number of people is the most just according to a moral principle of a human right to freedom and dignity.  To the extent that any system devalues this access, it is consequently immoral.

The bump-stock ruling occasioned me a brief social media dialogue with a gun pedant today.
 
This is a weird sort of guy with a weird sort of rhetoric.  I get the fetishization of hobbies.  You have the crafters, the motorheads, the bicyclists, the videogame dorks, the foodies, etc., etc.  They all get really into something and know all its ins and outs.
 
But guns are different because they are lethal - literally designed to kill.  Their ultimate purpose is war, or to stop personal violent crime.  Or to commit crime. 
 
Many books have been written about the messy psychological valley that has grown over the past century between sport and war.  The NRA’s transformation in that time from an enthusiast organization to one emphasizing violent threats not only from crime but from some future totalitarian government.  (In a bizarre twist, their zealousness has molded literally any gun regulations as primo fascia evidence of totalitarianism – for which more and more powerful guns are needed to defend from the state.
 
Fear is loaded right into the clip.  As a string of progressive civil rights triumphs on race, gender equality and sexuality played out over the years, gun culture shifted further and further from hunting and target practice and towards personal protection.  It’s hard not to draw parallel tracts between the legal and social deconstruction of white male, Christian, heterosexual patriarchy and it’s declining assumed superiority, and the rise of a gun culture in which there are more guns than people in the United States
 
The gun is the ultimate fascist signifier.  It is the monopoly on violence allowed to the state by democracy placed in an individual’s hands.  When empathy has failed, when communication has broken down, when you feel your enemy has you and your family in the crosshairs, violence becomes reasonable.  After decades of losing the “culture wars” (aka respect for pluralism and human rights), the gun has become a totem of this New Lost Cause.  In the 1970’s, mostly weirdos with vigilante fantasies subscribed to guns and ammo and studied diagrams of how to booby trap your front porch.  I recently watched Taxi Driver, and the Travis Bickle character couldn’t portray better the peculiar lump of roiling insecurities that is the modern gun fetishist.  Yet his character was a lonely Taxi driver living in the slums of NYC, eating popcorn at pornos and crafting DIY concealed gun contraptions before arguing with ghosts in the mirror. 
 
The modern 2nd amendment warrior is the face of the GOP, gathers by the thousands in megachurches, votes for a speaker of the house who flies the Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office and wears the face of an ex-con grifter conspiracist ex-president on his T-shirt while watching a slew of right-wing news porn peddling lies about violent immigrants, vaccine denialism, election-rigging, and trans-groomers hunting down children.
 
But there is something deep in that psychology.  When an appeal to tradition supplants academic, scientific, and a simple, empathetic listening to other people’s stories about their real lives, your epistemology is severely neutered.  A complicated re-routing system gets built that is designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between reality and your ancient assumptions.  When biblical inerrancy faces the staggering evidence of evolution, or the fact that when you meet gay people they are perfectly normal, the machine must go into overdrive.  When nearly every last scientific expert on the planet describes how climate change works and predicts massive storms, and your city floods.  When they describe how germ theory works and that you should wear a mask and you see the bodies piling up in make-shift morgues outside hospitals, doctors breaking down in tears, and a million of your countrymen dead.  When all crime statistics show the illegal aliens you fear so much actually have dramatically lower rates than US citizens and when you meet them they are normal, hard-working people whose first thought is their family.  When 60 cases of election interference are brought before the courts and all are thrown out.  When cities are not flaming hellholes but generally pleasant places most Americans live in happily.  It goes on and on. 
 
What is it like to live with a constant media and cultural diet of fear and paranoia, but then to have to always be working against the tide of reality to make everything align.  It’s got to be exhausting.
 
And now you’ve got some egg-head leftie who wouldn’t know a Coltrane X950 from a Weenus-Corrector 600.  This is YOUR turf.  You’ve trained for this.  You’ve got him in your sights. Dead to rights.  Let him try and take it.
 
Oh, he has arguments.  The senseless urban violence.  (Well, we all know who those people are).  The suicide rates.  (Not my fault if you’re a weak-willed nervous-nelly).  The endless stream of mass shootings.  (Not if everyone was armed).  The dead little kids, limbs blown off at Sandy Hook.  (The sanctity of life is… wait, did you say little kids?)
 
OK, tactical retreat.  Code red.  Does not compute.
 
A guy kills scores from a window over-looking a Las Vegas country concert.
 
The Pedant finds his stride.  See, what these pinko types don’t understand about guns is, well, everything.  They’ve come to my house.  Oh, it’s on.
 
I never finished a Tom Clancy novel, although I’ve enjoyed the silly action movies they spawned.  But I remember opening a copy of one once and was intrigued by the way in which Clancy went into great military detail.  If I remember correctly, there would be a chunk of dialogue between two characters, and then one would start to describe – in minute detail – the various types of tanks, their combat suitability, their equipment, their make and model numbers.
 
Now, I realize the Clancy audience is really into this stuff.  There’s a whole thing with war history buffs and almost cosplay devotion to the genre.  Maps and lists and coffee table panzers.  Miniature models meticulously painted and placed in little dioramas of sand and faux-scrub brush.
 
And these were real weapons of war, used by real soldiers who fought and died and did unspeakable things to one another.
 
Is there not some thread here, some deep sinew in the male psyche that weaves together notions of God, country, family and the implements of war?  When empathy is gone, when communication has broken down, you have your oily lists that only you and your kind really understand.  Really appreciate.  Because this isn’t just a hobby anymore but an identity.  You, Pedant, are naked here in this place of machinery and technical details.  Like the Ur man standing before his cave, the big bear before you behind the flames, your woman and child hiding behind you.  Your loincloth is the pages of True Crime and Handgun Magazine, tied together with tank treads only used on Dewy-Nukem half-tracks from 52’-53’ and the frames of Aviator glasses that remind you of being up in the clouds somewhere drinking beer in a Cessna-Sable B92.  Your club is a large bundle of Rush Limbaugh’s Signature Series cigars.  And the bear is, well, everyone who isn’t just like you.  Everyone who isn’t a real American.  Who isn’t real.

​
​> Is everyone responsible for their own success because opportunities are equal?

• Some people start with more societal capital
  • Intact family, access to knowledge, money, health, etc.
    • These were inherited
      • This traces back through generational privilege
        • Often legal codification
          • Red-lining, segregation
    • Economic systems design leverages societal capital
      • Housing market creates higher-income-segregated communities
        • Safer, cleaner
        • models of leveraging and networking opportunities
          • more models for pro-social behaviors
          • less need for anti-social (escape) behaviors
      • High-income employment opportunities as norm
      • Capital can be invested to receive dividends
• Example: White child raised in 2 parent home, both parents educated, high income professions.  Less stress and more money for reinforcing activities and buffering life events.  High income neighborhood means schools filled with other privileged children, higher attainment.  Pro-social models for leveraging the wealth family already has.  College and high-income jobs easier to attain.  Child marries within class/race and passes privilege on to children.

 

• Some people start with less societal capital
  • Broken family, little knowledge, little money, poor health, etc.
    • These were inherited
      • This traces back through generational marginalization
        • Often legal codification
          • Red-lining, segregation,
          • Skill-based immigration
            • Low capital vs. high capital immigrants
    • Economic systems design deleverages lack of societal capital
      • Housing market created lower-income-segregated communities
        • Unsafe, dirtier, fewer resources
        • Few models for leveraging or networking
          • More models for anti-social (escape) behavior
          • Fewer models for pro-social behavior
      • High-income employment opportunities hard to access
        • Low-income employment opportunities as norm
      • Little capital to invest and receive dividends
• Example: Black child raised in single parent home, mother uneducated, low-wage job.  More stress and little money to buffer life events.  Low-income neighborhood means schools filled with other marginalized children, lower attainment.  Fewer pro-social models for leveraging wealth that family doesn’t have anyway.  More anti-social models for escaping stress and harsher life/environment.  Few models for educational attainment and other students often disruptive and acting out in class, low-wage jobs are the norm and modeled, high-wage/professional jobs more difficult to reach.  Child marries within class/race and passes little privilege on to children.

 

• Each of these statistical variables can be derived from extensive available social research and journalism that defines, categorizes and is able to predict each’s impact on the individual.
  • E.g. the presence of one factor is an independent variable if it can be demonstrated to impact another variable (dependent) in a given group.

 
 
 
> Behaviors are learned from our environment.  Both what is modeled for us and what resources we can access.  You can’t play piano, speak another language, etc. without the opportunity for people to teach you.  You can’t take piano or language lessons if you don’t have the money or of no one is available to teach you.

• A social experiment exists: Group A is high income/SES, and Group B (control) is low-income/SES
  • 100 kids in each group
  • If you select any number of socially independent variables (see above), each will impact the success rate (dependent variable) of the child
  • We know this.

 
> Why do some marginal cases succeed despite socially independent variables for marginalization (dependent) (e.g. poor, broken home, parent education, etc.)

• There is always something in the environment that counters the negative social effects.
  • E.g. the family was broken but extended family support was there; friend circle happened to include pro-social role-models; the individual was born with dispositional traits that allowed better navigation through difficult events (e.g. not quick to anger, ability to focus, physical health, ease with picking up social cues, etc.)
  • Pure luck often plays a big role in any number of ways as a more positive environmental stimuli just happened to be available

> As in any structural analysis, the outlier does not prove the rule.  If you win at the casino, it does not mean that everyone can win at the casino; most people will lose.  The machines are designed such that only a small percentage will pay out.  The small percentage is proof not that everyone will win, but rather the opposite – that most will lose.
 
> Our society has built in economic structures (real estate, professional wages, reliance upon education for future earnings, etc.) that require/ force a certain percentage of people into poor neighborhoods and low wage jobs.

• This can be changed by redesigning our economic and legal policies such as redistributing income/progressive taxation, support for institutions that equalize wages (unions, regulation), etc.

 
> Our culture has built in racial structures (ethnic (white) cultural normalization, media role-models, etc.) that require/force a certain percentage of people into wealthier neighborhoods and high-wage jobs.

• This can be changed through redesigning our cultural responses (dialogue, education, media, journalism, etc.)

 
> Until both economic and cultural systems are changed, hierarchies will continue to be perpetuated. 

• Evidence of this will be that you take any set of 100 kids and compare them to any other set of kids in society, on average their life successes will be roughly the same.
  • By race, family background, wealth, etc.
• Currently, all evidence indicates that this is far from the case, especially with regard to race and class.

 
> Unequal outcomes with equal opportunities is not possible. 

• Humans are statistically all of average ability
• If opportunities are equal, we should see no statistical difference between any randomly selected groups
• As noted above, many socially determining independent variables exist. Many are obvious – if a child’s parents provide more cognitive enrichment (independent variable), then his school readiness (dependent variable) will be greater than if they provide less cognitive enrichment.
• The number of independent variables in an individual’s that impact their success (dependent variable) are huge.
  • However, if identified, these independent variables can be either eliminated or mitigated by the addition of different variables.
  • E.g. A child’s poor home life could either be improved by parents earning a higher wage, or mitigated by the presence of a smaller class at school or a social worker or school counselor.
  • *** Some independent variables are responsible for cascading effects.
    • They produce additional variables that also impact the dependent variable
      • E.g. a low income makes it difficult to purchase cognitive/emotionally enhancing vacation or to weather life events such as transportation or health issues

> Therefore, the existence of unequal outcomes precludes the existence of equal opportunities