The Captured Perspective

I feel like the slacker in the group for not posting my introduction in a timely fashion. I have grandiose plans to actually post in a semi-regular fashion–hopefully I can hold myself to it.

For my day job, I do interactive advertising (Think: Ads on Yahoo) for a large retail brokerage firm. While I am fascinated by the machinations of the interactive media space, I welcome the opportunity this blog presents to get back to my sociological roots. I plan to write about work-family conflict, gender roles, and social interaction. If I can squeeze in a business bent, I may. I am thinking more Modern Love, less Durkheim.

Glad to have been invited and looking forward to on-going discussion.

“MUMBAI, India– The full scope of the horror and desperation of the terrorist attack on Mumbai began to come into focus on Saturday after Indian commandos finally took control of the last nest of resistance.

Government officials said Saturday afternoon that the death toll had risen to 162 and was likely to rise again. They also said 283 people had been wounded.

Most of the dead were apparently Indian citizens, but at least 18 foreigners were killed and 22 had been injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra State. At least five Americans were believed to have died in the attacks.”

-New York Times, 29 November 2008

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On Thursday night, my family continued our annual tradition to catch a nightly Thanksgiving movie together. This year, we went to watch Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s most recent film that chronicles the story of a young boy who, with all of India on the edge of their seats, is getting ready to answer the last question on India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The film mixes this focal scene with a multitude of vignettes on how he came to know the answers to the questions raised. In the process, Boyle builds in the story of a troubled relationship with the main character’s brother and the tale of unrealized love.  It is an entertaining and touching film, and I highly recommend it.

Despite this, throughout the film, I couldn’t help but feel a bit odd that the Mumbai terrorist attacks were currently taking place in the exact same locale.  The situation raised to me some marked tensions between the film and reality of the Mumbai attacks. It is not that one situation is happy and the other in sad, or that one is realistic and the other is not.  In fact, I think Slumdog Millionaire paints a relatively realistic picture of the tragedies of slum living and the limited ways out.  For example, despite some stories in the film that find happy endings, there were still clear marks of sadness throughout that do not take the same route. Conversely, I am also not suggesting that there won’t be stories of human redemption in the midst of the Mumbai attacks.  I have no doubt that the next few weeks of news will chronicle a multitude of stories of heroism amidst the rubble.

I think the primary difference between the two events is how they are experienced in the midst of the narrative, and how that shapes the ‘audience’s’ understanding and response. (more…)

Anything that is truly worthwhile is both powerful and dangerous at the same time. Anything that is truly beautiful and lovely can also turn twisted and ugly. But we can’t hide from all of that. That’s what is real.”

-Chris Thile

Chris Thile is one of those guys who can make you love something you would not normally approach. He writes lyrics that make your soul pester you to sign up for a local poetry class. He plays the mandolin in ways that make you wish you grew up in a part of the country where bluegrass was required school curriculum. In my view, Thile is one of the best ‘popular’ musicians out there today for both his sheer performance talent as well as his innovativeness in musical approach.  Both of these features are embodied in the Punch Brother’s debut bluegrass/ improv jazz/ classical album “Punch.”

Last Wednesday at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis, Chris and the Punch Brothers walked on stage in preparation for their classical blue grass set.  Chris walks with a swagger that screams confidence, but with a corresponding self-awareness to (try to) play the modest card. While each individual Punch Brother is an exceptionally talented musican in their own right, the center of the show is clearly Thile’s composed music and corresponding stage performance. That focus is well deserved.

Thile’s compositions on “Punch” are an interesting mixture of melodies that oscillate between clash and harmony.  The center piece of the album, a four-movement piece called “The Blind Leaving the Blind” is both ugly and beautiful, disjointed and harmonius… and it finds a way to embody Thile’s above quote with its mix of ‘lovely’ and ‘twisted.’  Russell Platt in the New Yorker writes, “Thile’s “The Blind Leaving the Blind,”… mixes the core sounds of bluegrass with jazz improvisations, Bach-style toccatas, Baroque “lamento” bass lines, whole-tone harmonies, and a couple of Straussian melodic swoons. The lyrics (about a disintegrating marriage) could have been written by Joni Mitchell, if Mitchell were an earnest young man who grew up in a devoutly Christian family and liked to play the Bach solo violin sonatas on his mandolin in his spare time.”  That sounds about right.

Thematically, the album revolves around Thile’s divorce and the way it has shaken his converative Christian unbringing and corresponding faith foundation.  While Thile was not referring specifically to the disintegration of his marriage with the leading quote, his wrestling with this type of situation is clearly evident in this work. Take for example the second movement of the “Blind Leaving the Blind.”

I’m back in the moment where I belong
Turns out four years was four years too long
Its over and I’m over it
She sang me a song that I wrote for her
Then she said I like the tune but not the words
Its over and I’m over it
You collected the moments I threw away
Said to yourselves he’s gonna want them back
The day it’s over
And he’s over it”

I am not convinced Thile is over this divorce, and to be fair, I do not think anyone really ‘recovers’ from divorce if recovery implies being the same as one was before. He has said in interviews that his divorce is both the “best and worst thing” to ever happen to him, and I think “Punch” demonstrates that the music has thus far gotten the better end of the stick.  While not as singable as some of his earlier work with Nickel Creek, in “Punch” Chris finds a way to capture a multi-facted and complex reality in both lyrics and tune.  And if that is the reality we inherit, to quote Chris again, “we can’t hide from all of that (for) that’s what is real.”  By that, and nearly any other measure, “Punch” is a real album, and the ‘Brothers know how to put on a phenomenally good show.

Here are the Punch Brothers playing pieces of the second movement.

There is a wide array of terms that attempt to get at what I want to call “flourishing.” These include concepts of flow, fullness, being fully alive, self-actualization, and many others. It seems to me that all of these conversations are attempting to answer the more foundational question: what does it mean and look like for human beings to flourish? As I posted before, this question is on my mind more than any other.

Over Turkish coffee and hookah in Hyde Park the other night, two friends and I came up with a vision of what it might look like for us to flourish in community together. While the discussion was mostly geared toward our travel plans, I think the framework we established might be more widely relevant. It’s essentially a five-point vision:

1) Exposure
We want to be continually exposed to other peoples’ realities. This could mean sleeping with the homeless, understanding a place’s politics, dining with the marginalized, and being seriously embedded in real relationships with people whose lives have the ability to fracture our perspective.

2) Intellectual growth
We must be exercising and stretching our intellect, forcing ourselves to think in greater nuance about more things. I want to be able to see the world sociologically, anthropologically, poetically, musically, economically, politically, and scientifically.

3) Celebration
This may sound cheesy, but we have good reason to celebrate all of the good things we have been given and entrusted with. From dancing all night to being engaged in the beauty of music and artistic expression, we need to continually counter the gray and sleepy humdrum of modernity with an engaged and hearty spirit of playfulness and foolishness.

4) Creating
My boss once told me that leaders need to ask themselves two questions: 1) What am I creating? and 2) Do people believe me? While this is bent toward entrepreneurial leadership, it speaks strongly to my desire to not only critique, but create. However informal or subtle, we need to hone our ability to translate ideas into reality, as Peter has with this blog.

5) Discipleship
Regardless of one’s faith or moral tradition, we are becoming a certain sort of person as. How are we surrounding ourselves with sources and creating habits that enable us to move toward ideality. My personal ideal is the person of Christ, but yours could be King, Nietzsche, Gandhi, or Dylan. The question remains, how are we becoming the disciples of our heroes?

I realize that this is an unscientific, somewhat vague, and idealistic vision of human flourishing. What are your thoughts on this? Is flourishing an entirely personal venture or, as the field of positive psychology asserts, can we come up with frameworks for understanding fullness? In your experience, where does this framework miss the mark?

I’ve made up my mind.   This evening, I hereby submit to you, the reader, a glimpse into Andrew’s brain.  A window, if you will, to peer through and check out what I’ve been dwelling on for a while now. 

Tonight’s topic: children, their makers, and possible ego centrism.

Why do people choose to have children?  (Please note that I am not planning on having kids anytime soon and that this post is merely a glimpse into my rambling mind.  If you find yourself getting unnaturally happy or ragingly mad while you read, please reply to this post.  This “window” into my brain is often smudgy, and you may need my help in cleaning it off.)

Children are great.  I’ve always had tons of fun whenever there has been a chance to goof around with them, and I’ve even considered a career in pediatric physical therapy.  Also, kids of my own are something I’ve always wanted as a part of my adult life.  In analyzing my motivation lately, however, I can’t seem to come up with a good reason to have them.  I can’t even figure out why anyone should ever have them.  Now, this is already beginning to sound pretty harsh and hateful toward anyone who might want, or for that matter, already have children.

Don’t get me wrong; children are wonderful.  What I’m trying to get at here are the moral forces that drive us to want to have children.  And maybe this is all tied back into religion, genes, Darwin, and all that.  I’m not sure.  So, why do people feel that they should have kids?  It kind of makes sense to me that way back when people had to perform very strenuous manual labor in order to obtain the resources they needed to live, it probably wasn’t that bad of an idea to have a whole bunch of offspring; you know, so you could survive.  Really, though, that isn’t the case in much of the world anymore.

Genetically, it makes sense for us to reproduce; to push more of ourselves into the population, thus giving our species a better chance of survival (the ultimate goal?).  I spent a bunch of my undergraduate days debating this sort of stuff with my biology classes; talking about natural selection, that Darwin guy, how ontology doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny, even how religion all fits into this (or not), etc..  But, since our planet is nearly brimming over with people, this doesn’t seem like a logical reason to have children either.  

I guess there are other reasons too.  Maybe rearing a child you created, helps you experience a part of life that you would not otherwise get to experience; one that would help you grow and possibly become a better person.  But, is making myself a supposed “better person” worth creating a life?

I suppose, one day I’m going to feel that I want to settle down and start making a family with my wife, and that’s not so atypical.  But, the crazy thing that I have difficulty wrapping my mind around is the creating of life part.  I mean, in order to experience parenthood, do we need to create a person?  A person who will undoubtedly have emotions, struggles, love, and a personality?  That seems nuts. 

Now, I can’t say that I remember, but I’m pretty sure that I didn’t ask my parents if I could be born before I came into this world.  And, any sort of kid that I might manufacture along with my eventual wife sure wouldn’t ask to be produced either.  So, by choosing to have a child, my wife and I would be dictating that a person come into the world and experience all that it has to offer.  How can a conscious mind bare that responsibility?!  Does anyone else understand where I’m coming from here?

Let’s face it:

• This world isn’t exactly in the sort of shape that can comfortably keep sustaining all of the new bodies we can throw at it.
• Adoption seems like a much more logical and sustainable way to achieve any of the child-rearing experiences I hope to acquire.

Whether to pass on a family name, make someone else happy, or by accident, it all makes me question why the heck someone should be made to go through this life and experience all of the great and crappy parts of it.  The thing is, all of the reasons I’ve always wanted to have a family seem to be self-centered.  It blows my mind to think that I’ve always thought of having kids because it’s just kind of the thing to do once you hit a certain age.  Me, Andrew Kurtz, and my wife, Mrs. So-and-so, making a life, and a body, and a conscience, and a mind…whoa.  

I’m glad my parents brought me into this world, but man, what were they thinking! I’m sure they could have spent a whole lot less money, done a whole lot more stuff together, and not had a bunch of their favorite things ruined by poop, spit-up, crayons, fire, scissors, hammers, iguanas, muddy shoes, branches, lacrosse balls, and running in the house.

So while young adults are planning out the future branches of their family tree, and figuring out which fruit, piece of nature, or rock star to name them after, I will continue to be blown away, wondering how these folks can be so happy and what their prerogatives are for making new life.  Then again, I’m sure I’ll be joining them sometime within the next five to ten years of my life.

Let’s start discussing.

Please help me see the light.  Andrew Jr. depends on it.

I think I’m going to go call my mom.

My parents had very little foresight when they named me.  Although Jourdie seemed like a reasonable female name to them, the world disagrees.  I was paired with a male locker partner in middle school because of my first name.  I have variously been called Courtney, Julie, and Jodie because those names [while not being my name] at least sound kind of like my name and are certainly “girls’” names.  In fact, the senora I lived with in Spain told me she would not call me Jourdie because “es un nombre de muchachos [it's a boy's name]“.  I won’t even get into the many and sometimes humorous misspellings of my name.  What I will do is be the female voice the The Captured Perspective–until I am either replaced or joined in this endeavor by another female voice.

So what else do I do besides lament my first name?  Currently I am spending a year in an NIH-funded clinical research training program trying to determine the genetics of malignant behavior in a common brain tumor.  A year of research has also given me some free-time to teach a course on HIV/AIDS to fourteen high school students from St. Louis, which I am thoroughly enjoying.  I have finished two years of medical school at Washington University in St. Louis and look forward to beginning my two clinical years this June.  I studied Spanish and chemistry at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and am an avid Tarheel basketball fan.  I also enjoy tennis, cooking elaborate meals, and Lake Michigan.  I grew up in East Grand Rapids, Michigan–just a few blocks away from the alma mater of several of the other contributors.

Although I don’t particularly like to write and have always been a little anti-blog, I look forward to contributing to the Captured Perspective.  I am also looking forward to “borrowing” the ideas of other contributors to sound more intelligent at dinner parties.

David Brooks is way ahead of me in summarizing Obama’s picks (or likely future picks) in the new administration (Clinton, Steinberg, Rice, Furman, Goolsby, Levin, Orszag, Craig), and he suggests that this group, “looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”

So, will these people fall into the same problems as the prominent intellectual advisors of 20th century American foreign policy? Perhaps… but Brooks goes on to list other traits these first few appointments might bring to the table:

First, these are open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence. Orszag, who will probably be budget director, is trusted by Republicans and Democrats for his honest presentation of the facts.

Second, they are admired professionals. Conservative legal experts have a high regard for the probable attorney general, Eric Holder, despite the business over the Marc Rich pardon.

Third, they are not excessively partisan. Obama signaled that he means to live up to his postpartisan rhetoric by letting Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship.

Fourth, they are not ideological. The economic advisers, Furman and Goolsbee, are moderate and thoughtful Democrats. Hillary Clinton at State is problematic, mostly because nobody has a role for her husband. But, as she has demonstrated in the Senate, her foreign-policy views are hardheaded and pragmatic. (It would be great to see her set of interests complemented by Samantha Power’s set of interests at the U.N.)

Finally, there are many people on this team with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests. Dennis Ross, who advised Obama during the campaign, is the best I’ve ever seen at this, but Rahm Emanuel also has this capacity, as does Craig and legislative liaison Phil Schiliro.

Three themes stick out to me: open-minded, lacking excessive partisanship, and non-ideological.  While I have no doubt that Obama’s administration will bring a progressive agenda, he seems to be making a conscious effort to surround himself with a group of advisors who are beyond old-party line in their intelligent (and somewhat divergent) approaches to complex problems.  This type of perspective diversity has been shown (uh oh… here comes my social science bent) to prevent ideological amplification, or the tendency of like-minded groups to become more extreme over time…. a characteristic that for policy decision-making in a quickly changing world can be a very good thing.

While it is only a start, I have to admit that so far I stand in agreement with Brooks in his positive assessment of Obama’s personal decisions.  My agreement stems in large part because of how I see the limitations of ‘expertise.’  What I have been arguing in the past two posts is that social science is a powerful but systematically limited tool for understanding the world. It is powerful in that it is the best way we have to tease out causality in social phenomenon.  It is limited however in the way in which it is unsuccessful at its ultimate goal of removing future uncertainty.  That being said, I am by no means arguing for its abolishment as a science… I am after all a social science PhD student, so that would be akin to arguing for the positive personal benefits of unemployment.  I am just trying to craft a valid place for it in the policy world.

What I think Obama’s picks do seem to demonstrate is his tendency to surround himself with people of divergent viewpoints (for counter-point, see Tuuk), who are also open to being persuaded by evidence when it deviates from their intuitions.  These are both characteristics that I think help harness the power of academia without being constrained by it.  The first few appointees are but the start of a larger journey at the helm of the executive office, but so far it seems Obama is making decisions to surround himself with an able crew.  They seem well prepared to understand the world in models, while also being willing and capable of moving beyond them when necessary.

The rumors are starting to converge on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Obama is getting credit for putting together a Team of Rivals. While it may be true that Obama and Clinton were rivals during the campaign, trying to find an issue on which they disagreed was difficult. It came down to some little detail in their massive health care plans about whether I would be forced to get insurance or not. As if it mattered what the candidate’s plan was; the Democrats in congress will write the bill, and the president will sign it. Saying that Clinton is some sort of foil to Obama is false; they are both middle-of-the-road Democrats who made sure not to think anything too outrageous on foreign policy, lest it hurt their chances in the election.

The talk thus far has centered on the office politics of Clinton at State, but Hillary Clinton is not prepared for the job. Her main qualification for the position is having sat on the Senate Armed Services committee. Looking at all the SecState’s back to Kissinger (there are 11) we see that none had as thin qualifications as Clinton does. Muskie, who served during the last half year of Carter’s term and had been merely a senator before he was tapped for the job, is close. He at least had been Chairman of a committee though.

With the world at his fingertips, Obama ought to quit with the McCain-Palin-esque charade of trying to appeal to a constituency with the appointment of an underqualified figure.

In a response to my first post on Obama’s Experts, Peter Tuuk makes the helpful point that when criticizing social science, we must first consider the alternatives.  And in that sense, he is completely right in identifying social science as the best way we have to understand social phenomenon.  For example, economics helps us segment out the veracity of competing claims about economic recovery.  Take this recent interaction between journalist George Will and Economist Paul Krugman:

One of these talking head’s claims is more true than the other (in this case, it appears to be the Nobel Prize winner Krugman), and determining this has implications for how we understand the current economics crisis.  As Berkley Economist Brad DeLong argues, “Will argues that New Deal policies made the Depression worse. Krugman retorts that the New Deal was working nicely until FDR’s concern with balanced budgets and fiscal restraint created a new recession. Conservatives are right, in other words, that the “everything was terrible until FDR came along and fixed the Depression” story is wrong, but FDR’s problem was being too conservative.”  He goes onto demonstrate this claim visually in the chart below.*

Now, while the study of economics helps us conclude that Krugman is speaking more accurately about the causal mechanisms behind the recovery from the Great Depression, what it does a less strong job of is understanding the complexity of the factors involved in the real world and how changes in these factors may alter the stability of prediction (factors which muddy the models).  In this sense, I would argue that causality is not certain over time if significant factors change in the larger moderating environment.  This serves to potentially undermine the accuracy of prediction and speaks to MacIntyre’s larger point on the difficulty of finding stable social ‘laws’.  Perhaps the whole task is more amenable some of the tools of complexity science– such as agent based or systems simulations- though these tools have significant limitations of their own (i.e. identifying all the right variables to look at). In the kind of world where complexity reigns and the ‘moderating’ environment changes over time, we cannot eliminate uncertainty but instead have to rely on competing models of varying plausibility.

All this makes choosing the right policy difficult and uncertain. Take the current financial crisis.  Paulson writes, “There is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced. We adjusted our strategy to reflect the facts of a severe market crisis, always keeping focused on our goal: to stabilize a financial system that is integral to the everyday lives of all Americans.”  What we see here is that in movement away from a specific descriptive task, such as describing the causes of the recovery from the Great Depression, one enters a world where social scientific data becomes one of many pieces of insight to reach some ultimate goal (stabilize a financial system).

Foreign policy decisions mirror this as well in the way they depend on both understanding what an opponent will do (descriptive/ probabilistic) and a sense of how one ought to respond (normative). Neither task is exceptionally clear.  Here is Robert Kaplan’s summary of Donald Rumsfeld’s approach to the Iraq insurgency:

Rumsfeld was so busy thinking about the Iraqis’ “obvious” military moves—launching chemical weapons, making a last stand in Baghdad—that he neglected to hedge against what they actually did: melt away and return weeks later as small bands of insurgents. Because of the meager resistance to our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and the swiftness of our apparent victory in Afghanistan in 2001, which Rumsfeld had played a great part in orchestrating, by early 2003 the specter of a debilitating Vietnam-scale insurgency against the United States military had been sufficiently exorcised to seem “unfamiliar,” and therefore to be confused with “the improbable.” By the time Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad, we had become too impressed with our own military to see it as a “superb target.”

In this case, history of what was done in the past (social ‘laws’?) did not lead to an accurate prediction of what the Iraqi’s would do… not would, I would argue, economic models of incentive structures or laboratory studies of military decision-making.  While the tools of social science will duly help us piece apart what really did happen after the fact, and also identify probabilitic ‘trends’ in these types of situations, in this specific case (and many others) it did not allow for accurate prediction. Additionally, we also see how relying on this information in this situation actually served to create more certainty than warranted.  This seems to lend credence to Kuklick’s claim that one key lesson to learn from American foriegn policy in the 20th century is, “the best traits to be inculcated into specialists are humility and prudence, just the traits that vanish with their education and growth in experience” (2006: 230).

*- To be fair, DeLong is a left-leaning economist who worked at the Treasury department in the Clinton administration.

First, I am honored to join Peter and friends in this endeavor. I hope for this to be a space where diversity of opinion truly enriches and refines our consciousness and worldviews. This being my first year out of college, I see this as a building year, a time for me to orient myself in the world and determine where I ought to throw my weight; I hope this blog is an important part of that journey.

One might say that I am primarily interested in politics, religion, music, and social impact. While I have studied these things at some level, I cannot claim expertise. While it is true that these categories are my primary areas of passion, I am becoming more and more interested in those categories as they relate to the following two questions:

What does it mean for human beings to flourish?

Who is my neighbor?

These are the questions that keep me up at night. I am interested in neither skepticism as a practice nor deconstruction as accomplishment; both are too easy. I feel compelled to build and create, what and for whom I hope to find out.

I currently work at the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a civil society organization building a global movement of religious pluralism among young people with greater aims of strengthening civil society and stabilizing global politics. It’s an exceptionally exciting enterprise and I feel blessed to be a part of it.

I look forward to entering this conversation and building a community centered on mutual excitement, shared vision, and collaborative minds. I am thrilled to see where this goes.