This recent Newsweek article points to some psychological research that has been causing a bit of an upheaval (click here for the whole 145 page manuscript if you’re REALLY interested).  The gist of it is that one area of the field – research psychology – is calling the work of another area – that of therapists and counselors – “an unconscionable embarrassment.”  Well, to be specific, a large-scale study has shown that some therapists have a sort of anti-science bias, admitting that they “value personal experience over research evidence” and that they “rely more on their own and colleagues’ experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient.”  This means that even though “scarf therapy” might not do a whole lot for you, therapists who hear that it works from their therapist-buddies might go ahead and use it on you anyway (and charge you for it)(and expect that it will make you better).  The other disturbing half to the problem is that they might choose to use an unorthodox therapy like this even when an effective treatment (e.g., one that has been validated time and again in research trials) is available, because they either don’t keep up with the literature or don’t trust that research support is all it’s cracked up to be.

Well, this is interesting enough in and of itself, and I’ve had a few debates with clinicians over whether or not empirical support ought to count as the end-all, be-all for selecting therapeutic methods (also please note that I don’t for a second think that all therapists are like this in the first place.  I like to imagine that most of them actually know what they’re doing).  But what’s also interesting is psychological science’s accusation of why this is occurring: because many undergraduate psychology programs, they claim, produce weak scientists, and – worse! – these science-weak undergraduates often go on to science-weaker graduate programs for which there is often no research requirement (indeed, this is the selling point).

In some ways, I fear I agree.  At the UC level, for example, a majority of my Psych majors were ex-Biology students on the run from all the math they were expected to complete to get into Med school (where many UC freshmen think they’re destined to go).  When they saw they were expected to take Statistics still, they’d moan and groan and a lot of them would try and flee to Sociology (where they STILL had to take qualitative methodology, at the very least, if not worse).  During research methods, many of my science-phobic students would make it quite clear that they felt this was simply a class they had to get through but that had no real pertinence to them.  They were going to be therapists and really help people, not do all this lame research stuff.  I found myself constantly pointing out to them that being a good therapist meant keeping up with current research and understanding it well enough to evaluate it critically and integrate its findings where appropriate. 

Furthermore, I’ve been noticing another disturbing trend: that is, everyone thinks they need to go to graduate school.  I used to get requests for letters of rec from only my outstanding students; in the last years I was at UC Riverside, I had “C” students begging me for letters.  I warned them that all I could in good conscience write was, “this person did not fail my class,” but they were still happy to get it.  When questioned, many of them pointed to the fact that a plain BA in psychology nowadays (in fact, a plain BA in almost anything) was more or less akin to a High School diploma.  Everything, they told me, had been bumped up one notch: whereas you might have been conisdered pretty educated in the 1950s if you had an Associate’s degree, now you can’t be considered “pretty educated” unless you have your PhD.  This is NOT, I think, the ideal way to encourage people to utilize their strengths the most suitable ways.  Not everyone is meant for a Master’s or PhD program (and these programs are also not what everyone needs!).

So now you have people who fled from math, giving short shrift to their reserach methods and statistics courses, demanding to go to graduate school despite poor performance, and… here’s the last piece… easily finding someplace to go anyway.  That’s right – nowadays, just about anyone can get a MA in psychology – many schools will take anyone who can pay, and one of their big draws is (you guessed it) they aren’t very heavy on the empiricism/quantitative side of psychology.  A lot of these schools aren’t even accredited!  But that doesn’t stop people from getting degrees at them (I just now checked, for example, to find a number of unaccredited universities that will grant the Master’s in Psychology online).

Thank goodness I do not feel this way about the programs at my current institution; smaller and more private though it is, I have seen the director of the brand new PsyD program make every effort to create rigorous admission standards and a rigorous curriculum (just as she has for our clinical master’s degree program). 

Now I’m curious to hear what you think, and whether you think this very same non-science bias occurs (and is rewarded!) in any other discipline?  And what do the sociologists have to say about this belief that everyone must have a graduate-level degree lest they be worthless in the job market?  Do you believe this trend to be true?  In 50 years, will we have to invent a degree that is one step higher than a PhD just to differentiate again??

I love to start a good fight.

Seth

Notes from North of 49ºN.

Macleans magazine, like any other, likes to create lists.  I was going through old issues before I pitched them and I spied an article about Canada’s Most Dangerous Cities.  {Here’s the 2009 version}. Caledon, Ontario for two years straight was deemed the safest place in Canada, a town of 58,000 about 40 kilometers/25 miles from Toronto.  I’ve seen Caledon from the air, heading into Toronto’s Pearson Airport, a town on the edge of the greater Toronto area {GTA}, where the 410 freeway peters out on the rural outskirts.   I recall the town where I worked the past few years, Thousand Oaks, CA, was deemed one of the safest places by the FBI, which wasn’t too surprising.  It was fairly affluent, suburban, and homogeneous at 85% white in the 2000 Census.  The 2008 Macleans article went into the reasons why Caledon had such low crime, while crime seemed to be on the rise in neighbouring Brampton.

How safe is Caledon.  According to the Macleans article::

“Of the 100 biggest cities or regions in Canada, Caledon is the safest. In 2006, the most recent year for which there’s annual data, it ranked the lowest —107 per cent below the national average — for a score combining six crimes (murder, sexual assault, breaking and entering, vehicle theft, aggravated assault, and robbery)”.

So, what makes it so “safe”?

• Strict police
• Visible police {6,000 hours of foot patrol with 100,000 interactions and only 12 public complaints}
• “Restorative justice” {which brings suspect and victim together with a mediator instead of a court judge} has been used extensively since 2006 to resolve non-violent incidents, from neighbour disputes to vandalism.
• Relative wealth:: median income of about $32,900, compared with $24,800 across Ontario.
• The population is overwhelmingly white and English-speaking {almost half of all residents are third-generation Canadians or more}.

Are problems on the horizon?  The local youth complain of nothing to do and a lack of public transportation makes them feel “stuck” unless they have a driver’s license.  Petty crimes and vandalism are a going concern in Caledon.  The big concern is growth.  Problems with crime in Canada are correlated with areas of growth, where the local infrastructure and support mechanism are outgrown.  Crime has followed the pattern of Canadian growth in the West.  Population in Caledon is expected to increase by 48% by 2021 and “racial fights” are starting to erupt in local schools, where students from nearby Brampton {a town with over 60% first-generation Canadians} are being bussed to.  Also, while robberies in Caledon are rare, Brampton is seeing a spike, so local law enforcement {Caledon’s Ontario Provincial Police} is trying to be proactive with robbery prevention seminars.

What’s the policy implication here?  What’s the relationship between diversity and crime?  Toronto celebrates its diversity {the seal of Toronto has the motto, “diversity our strength”} and enjoys on of the lowest crime rates in North America, so the socioeconomics of cities likely plays a role, along with other factors like geography and demography, not to mention the cultural differences between Canada and the US.

I think what Caledon has now is a sense of “community,” based on a way of life that tends to be more homogeneous and with a slower pace.  Does impending growth threaten this, particularly with the scalability of the public infrastructure.  Specifically, if growth outpaces the capacity of the public infrastructure, could there be a danger of those with the means starting an exodus -or- will those in the community work to strengthen the infrastructure?

A few weeks ago, I was in Sleepy Hollow, NY in Westchester County, less than a hour north of Manhattan.  While on the surface, the Village of Sleepy Hollow seems like a homogeneous suburb on the Hudson, it actually is diverse culturally and socioeconomically.  The “downtown” core is a vibrant shopping area and let’s face it, it’s Sleepy Hollow and has caché as a Washington Irving/Halloween-themed tourist destination, but one gets a sense of community and meaning.  I’m actually interested in visiting Caledon to see if it has what I observed in Sleepy Hollow.  I never got a sense that Thousand Oaks had any sense of community and meaning, but I freely admit I never looked very hard to find it.

Twitterversion:: Dissecting Canada’s “safest” cities. Role of diversity? Scalability public infrastrture? Community/meaning? http://url.ie/2xmk #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: Lavender Hill – The Kinks

Charles Kurzman’s recent essay in the Chronicle Review, “Social Science on Trial: Reading Weber in Tehran” (http://chronicle.com/article/Social-Science-on-Trial-in/48949/), seems to confirm much of what we already suspect about non-Western fundamentalist regimes. Namely, that religious government and civil society are incompatible. Saeed Hajjarian, political scientist and “leading strategist in the Iranian reform movement,” was coerced in a recent show trial to “admit” that key principles of Max Weber’s theory of government were not applicable to modern Iran. Kurzman links this recent episode to a longer history of Iranian “crackdowns” on social science for its influence on the reform movement and for its role in secularizing government and social life in Iran, where social science is increasingly the study of choice among university students: “In 1976 there were about 27,000 social-science students in Iran; now there are more than half a million.”

This episode re-stages the contest between religion and social science, especially in non-Western contexts where “social science,” the language of reformist anti-fundamentalists and proponents of a free public sphere, stands in stark contrast to “religion.” Social science and “the West” are intimately linked. Studying Weber—studying society—as Iranian authorities correctly point out, plugs one into the secular equation that recalculates “religion-as-faith” (non-rational, metaphysical) to “religion-as-ideology” (false consciousness, discourse). It’s this recalculation that is widely accepted as the hallmark of secularization, and justification for the relegation of faith to the private sphere, where it is decreasingly a part of public life and politics (a phenomenon well underway in Iran, according to Kurzman: “private expressions of religiosity have begun to replace official events like state-run Friday prayers, where attendance has declined by a third since the 1979 revolution”).

Kurzman, a sociologist, concludes that “The Iranian government’s goal, it seems, is to undermine not only the institutions of civil society, but the very idea of it.” Of course this is true, but there’s a larger issue here than simply the persecution of science by religion. Even from Iranian social scientists and reformers, there is dissent from the necessary equation of civil society with the principles of social scientific rationality. Kurzman notes that upon Jurgen Habermas’s visit to Iran, students took a critical view, asking: “Must a society rid itself of religiosity…in order to develop a ‘rational’ public discourse? Are Western notions of religious tolerance unique to Christianity? Can traditional Islamic institutions, such as study circles and charitable foundations, contribute to the formation of a robust public sphere?” These are deeply felt concerns about the compatibility of religion with Enlightenment democratic values. They express the worry that the study of society in a conceptual language not native undermines religion with a theory of the “public sphere” bound to conception of “reason” that cannot brook faith or other “non-rational” modes of being in the world. For non-fundamentalist critics, this conception of reason (and thus of civil society) is highly historically contextual to the West.

As the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy has written in his essay “The Politics of Secularization and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance” (Alternatives 13: 2 [1988]: 177-94), that very idea of secularism is tied to a European genealogy of social science. Western secularism’s credo:

“One can have religion in one’s private life; one can be a good Hindu or a good Muslim within one’s home or at one’s place of worship. But when one enters public life, one is expected to leave one’s faith behind. … Implicit in this ideology is the belief that managing the public realm is a science which is essentially universal and that religion, to the extent it is opposed to the Baconian world-image, is an open or potential threat to any modern polity” (180).

Nandy, a fierce critic of both this Western concept of secularism and of religious zealotry, sees secularism as a hegemonic language, one also responsible for an “imperialisation” of scientific categories that have come to define, describe, and proscribe our lives (e.g., “IQ” for something like intelligence, “proletariat” for an oppressed people, “primitive” for oral culture, “development” for something like social change, and the like). This is a history of scientific language and classification that Ian Hacking describes as “making up people” (http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics2.htm) and that Michel Foucault has described as the roots of “biopolitics.”

One of secularism’s chief “conceits,” argues William Connolly in Why I Am not a Secularist (U Minnesota P, 1999), is that of a “single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of ‘personal’ or ‘private’ faith.” It is a “conceit” because it is not a reality but a fiction that (supposedly) allows for the negotiation of competing understandings the world. But as critics of secularism point out, it can be a poor fiction: the idea that secularism allows for faith even in the private realm assumes that faith can be shed as we leave for the office or the market or the library, and that faith has nothing to offer public life other than bigotry and zealotry.

But as Connolly and Nandy both point out, “dogma” and zealotry result from attempts to occupy the center: they are the result of being relegated to the margins. For both critics, there are other ways of thinking about civic life than through the language of social science. Nandy, for instance, locates two meanings of secularism—the European one with which we’re all familiar, and another one, native to the Southeast Asian societies he studies, which contains an implicit notion of the necessity of accommodation, in public life, of diverse metaphysical understandings. In this view, science and religion co-exist because they both offer viable interpretations of the world (because science itself is a kind of metaphysics). For Connolly, this means “refashioning secularism” to “temper or disperse religious intolerance while honoring the desire of a variety of believers and nonbelievers to represent their faiths in public life.”

We see this competition for the center in Iran, and its “constipating” (Connolly) effects—that is, its tendency to force people and their passions into rigidly defined domains that disallow vital experience and expression. Moreover, we might rethink this particular contest in Iran not through the eyes of the secularist, but rather as expressing some other, deeper contest. The tempting secular conclusion to “social science on trial” would confirm that that civil society (and therefore the study of it) can’t function where religion is present, and vice versa. In this view, the popularity of social science in Iranian universities is a validation of the secular principles of scientific rationalism. It is a question of either/or—either secularism or religion. The same can be said about the government’s persecution of social scientists. Can we instead read the Iranian interest in social science as a reaction against religious fundamentalism? In other words, might the turn to social science in the context of Iran be understood as a polemic, an expression of discontent, rather than a de facto affirmation of Western secular values? If so, we might preserve the possibility that science and religion, far from having exclusive claims to a positive reality, are the languages by which we have come to understand the contest for the center of public life.

Notes from North of 49ºN

Toronto Mayor David Miller recently unveiled the opening of city datasets on the OpenTO website, ushering in the city’s new era of Gov 2.0.  In less than an hour, the above map of the city’s wards  was generated from the shapefiles.  According to Now Magazine::

“Basically, OpenTO amounts to the city offering up puzzle pieces and the public putting them together. It costs taxpayers next to nothing, creates a wing of local government in which citizens can participate directly, and makes everything more transparent.

At present, not a whole lot of data sets are available. But now that some have been liberated, it won’t be long before others follow.”

While it is true that there isn’t that much data available right now, it’s clear that there are great possibilities here.  The openness of the data will allow crowdsourced analysis of urban questions facing Toronto, which is a hotbed of urbanist activity.  This ostensibly can create more knowledge for use by Toronto’s Planning Department, as well as grassroots activists, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and corporate interests.  The transparency has a flipside.  While transparency of data can serve to “keep the city honest,” in the future, as more data goes online, how will individual citizens’ privacy concerns be addressed?  For example, should data on ex-convicts {or the like} be listed for public use, such as Megan’s Law databases in the United States?  What about data on abandoned property?  While this could assist in redevelopment, it might be used for more nefarious purposes.

While data openness is a hallmark of Web 2.0, in terms of policy, what parameters should be in place?

Twitterversion:: @mayormiller’s OpenTO offers #Toronto’s database access, offering Gov2.0 transparency& crowdsourcing opps. #ThickCulture http://url.ie/2tfw

Song:: The Planners Dream Goes Wrong – The Jam

Notes from North of 49ºN

Up here in Canada, Remembrance Day is coming up on the 11th, so plenty of red poppies have cropped up, which is a Commonwealth tradition.  Until Afghanistan, it’s been a while since Canada has been in a “war” and the specifics of getting out of Afghanistan has entered into the news up here.  The Conservatives and the Liberal parties in Canada already agreed in 2008 to withdraw from Afghanistan::

“Canada’s top soldier, Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk, has given the order for Canadian Forces logistics whizzes to begin mapping out the move, expected to be finished by the end of 2011. That’s in keeping with a 2008 deal between the Harper government and Opposition Liberals that extended the combat mission until July, 2011, with a pullout taking until Dec. 31.”

On a sidenote, shortly after Harper’s announcement, news of the pricetag was released.  It was reported that by 2011 the military mission in could cost up to $1.8B CAN, or $1,500 per household.  While the decision was made last year, the logistics and details of the estimated skeleton crew of 500-600 soldiers to stay behind to protect redevelopment efforts and train local police has remained an open question.  In the interim, the war has become increasingly unpopular and according to Allen Sens, a University of British Columbia political scientist::

“Canada’s government and public is suffering from Afghanistan fatigue…There’s been a lack of progress, and I think the public has a sense that it’s time for other countries to step up and move into the south, where the fighting has been the toughest.”

The Obama Factor

The Liberals in Canada are quick to point out the failure of humanitarian efforts.  Canada had the objective of building 50 schools by 2011 but because of the instability, only five have been built.  So, why should Prime Minister Harper {Conservative} drag his feet on the “drawdown” planning?

“the Prime Minister acknowledged that not every single soldier will return with the combat pullout, and is expected lingering pressure from the Obama administration to help out may lead to a contingent remaining.”

Will Canada cave to possible pressure from the Obama administration to stay?  Politically, the opposition Liberals would be wise to shift as much decision-making on Harper and the Conservatives before triggering another federal election, something the Liberals have been threatening for most of the year.  Obama is faced with a tough decision and is running out of time.  Barack is faced with::

1. A deteriorating situation in Afghanistan
2. White House decisions based on reports painting an incomplete picture
3. Little progress despite doubling troop numbers in 2009 {hence balking at McChrystal’s original recommendations}
4. The election débâcle in Afghanistan where Karzai won amid fraud allegations
5. Waning public support in the US of the war

Obama needs to assess whether his objectives can be met in Afghanistan, specifically in terms of what is possible and probable as outcomes, given a flailing domestic economic situation.  While the stakes are clearly lower for Canada than for the US and Obama, I wonder if Canada will react to any pressure from Obama to stick around, even with just 500-600 “non-combat”  troops.  I also wonder if the Liberals will try to push decisions that may irk Obama onto Harper.

Image:: Iconic Tim Horton’s coffee shop in Kandahar.

Twitterversion:: Canadian Forces pressure deets on wthdrwl fr.Afghanistan. What will Obama do&how will Cdn politcns play it? #ThickCulture http://url.ie/2t3

Song::  Shipbuilding – Elvis Costello & the Attractions {about workers building ships for the UK Falklands War with Argentina}

I’m finally back in Toronto, but had an interesting sidetrip to Québec and will be blogging about separatism and Canadian identity in a future post.  I saw on Twitter that a trending topic was the hashtag, “#thingsdarkiessay.”  I knew it had to be some “inside joke” or meme I wasn’t aware of and the above tweet explained that it originated in South Africa, but was gaining attention in the US, due to the use of the term “darkies.”  Several observations on people’s tweets, pointing out the “irony,” noted that blacks were making it a trending topic.  I didn’t go through the thousands of tweets, but I’ll surmise {given the above} that the hashtag originated from black South Africans.

Regardless of intent, as a meme goes viral, it takes on a life of its own, making Roland Barthes‘s Death of the Author{s} quite salient.  Is this related to -or- independent of an idea that with some content {e.g., race or language referring to race}, the author becomes irrelevant or somehow transformed?  How does this inform dialogues about race, particularly as the Internet blasts apart contextual boundaries, let alone the determination of the “offensiveness” of content in a global context.

Twitterversion:: Trending topic #thingsdarkiessay originated in #SouthAfrica but sparks tweets in the global Twittersphere. #ThickCulture http://url.ie/2s8n

Song::  F*ck You (Distasteful Ruff n Ready Mix) – Lily Allen

So, I’m in Westchester County, NY and it’s a drizzly autumn evening on the Tappan Zee.  A perfect night to brave the elements to see Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story out at the Jacob Burns Film Center over in Pleasantville, which is a great screening facility.

I find Moore to be a colourful character and I “get” his shtick.  That said, no matter how you feel about his politics or this documentary, he brings up some interesting food for thought.  In the documentary, there is a reference to an internal Citibank {a “zombie” bank these days} report on the “plutonomy.” While the idea of a power elite is nothing new in sociology -or- to anyone familiar with institutions and the macro-structural, I don’t think everyone is on the same page with respect to this being a bad thing or not.  Well, let’s not get too far ahead.  What is this plutonomy business anyway?  According to the Citibank report::

“Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies around the world (the US, UK, Canada and Australia). These economies have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries. Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries. Also, new media dissemination technologies like internet downloading, cable and satellite TV, have disproportionately increased the audiences, and hence gains to “superstars” – think golf, soccer, and baseball players, music/TV and movie icons, fashion models, designers, celebrity chefs etc. These “content” providers, the tech whizzes who own the pipes and distribution, the lawyers and bankers who intermediate globalization and productivity, the CEOs who lead the charge in converting globalization and technology to increase the profit share of the economy at the expense of labor, all contribute to plutonomy. Indeed, David Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker of the NBER demonstrate that the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US – the plutonomists in our parlance – have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US.

So, this is good if you’re in the top 1%, right?  Let’s move on to the “risks”::

“Furthermore, the rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash.Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfrachisement remains as was – one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation (on the rich or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous laborers, in a push-back on globalization – either anti-immigration, or protectionism.We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions. However we are keeping a close eye on developments.”

One of the themes in Moore’s film is that there is collusion between government and business.  Moreover, this is NOT a Republican vs. Democrat issue, as deregulation and the repeal of Glass-Steagall was signed under Bill Clinton’s watch.

Have we gotten to a point where within the context of “democracy,” we are now seeing an unholy alignment of interests of an unfettered private sector that seeks to influence the “rules” of the market and a public sector willing to bargain?  I would argue that we are so far removed from the idealized capitalism of the flavour of Adam Smith’s waxings, as the market has been replaces in many instances by “the visible hand” of managerial puppetry in the private and public spheres.

The checks-and-balances in “idealized” capitalism are that competition and the profit motive driven by shareholders will allow for smoothly functioning and efficient markets.  In financial markets, undermining faith in the institution of the market through insider trading carries stiff penalties.  The plutonomy sees fit to alter the rules for the political and economic elite.  Some may argue that the plutonomy is fine.  The alignment of interests is a way to channel wealth and capital towards successful ventures.  The sociological “Matthew effect” in action, where the rich get richer and success breeds more success.

I’m not convinced.  Historically, Microsoft has a marginal track record at managing and commercializing innovations and the well-heeled US pharmaceutical industry knows that newly patented drugs with incremental benefits are far more profitable than truly innovative drugs with an unknown track record.  The entertainment industry strives to find or replicate a “formula,” rather than try to push the envelope with creativity.  Success breeds plutonomy…and Spiderman 4.

The thing is that the plutonomy doesn’t care about companies or shareholders, let alone workers or pension plans.  It’s all about the power elites, who control, enable, and reap the rewards of wealth creation.  I’m not sure Moore has the answers here, but Scorsese might.  The plutonomy is all about feeding the top of the pyramid.  The motto…”f*ck you, pay me.”

Twitterversion:: #MichaelMoore’s Capitalism: A♥Story brings up food 4 thought re:plutonomy. In the end, is it just Scorsese’s #Goodfellas. http://url.ie/2qaw @Prof_K

Song:: The Birth of the True – Aztec Camera

I’m on the road in Iowa City, but I saw that this has been floating around the blogosphere {“hat” tip:: LQ}::

So, how do you take this?  Straight-up or with a twist?  Apparently, this caused a ruckus on HuffPo.  Some days are facepalm days over there.

Twitterversion:: #TheHat takes on healthcare in lowfi multimedia glouriousness.  #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song) – Fiona Apple

Just read a jarring piece by Malcom Gladwell’s in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the emerging connection between playing football and developing serious brain injury later in life. One study Gladwell cites finds a significantly higher proportion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) in the brain, a malady caused by trauma, than in the rest of the population. The problem Gladwell discovers, is in the accumulation of micro-traumas to the brain, rather than the accumulation of concussions as was previously believed.

It’s particularly disturbing to read this article as a football fan. At its best, the sport is a celebration of strength, courage, teamwork, and intelligence. Further, it is deeply woven into the American psyche. Television ratings for American football far exceed that of all other sports. FOX, CBS, NBC and ABC/ESPN have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to secure television deals. Personally, my earliest memories are of watching the Miami Dolphins with my dad. As a 12 year old, I sobbed uncontrollably when the Dolphins gave up a 10 points halftime lead to the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVII (damn that John Riggins!!!!) Even academics wax poetic about the muscular ballet of football…check out these two Stanford Humanities professors going on about the aesthetic beauty of the sport.

While it appears that research on brain trauma is in its early stages, it seems the toll the sport takes on its participants is far greater than even they realize. From a policy perspective, it opens up the question of paternalism. When should the state step in to save individuals from themselves? The lure of current riches – both monetary and psychic – draws individuals to enter into contractual arrangements that, in many cases, leaves them worse off than if they had not played. Because they have imperfect information about future outcomes, then exchange future health for current fame and fortune. Should we allow them to?

A more vexing question is whether we as Americans have begun to construe access to football spectating as a social right? Social rights are typically those goods that government provides to help secure our well being. Examples are education, health care, etc. Typically, once Americans consider something a social right, government has a difficult time withdrawing it….see Medicare. Having gone to college in the South as I did, I’d be hard pressed to envision what the vast majority of people would do on a Fall Saturday afternoon if there were no college football to watch. I can’t imagine a politician that would even touch the question of banning football. I’m afraid we have developed such a deep, inviolable attachment to the sport that getting rid of it would be akin to getting rid of universal public education? I say this as someone who still watches the Miami Dolphins and marvels at the brilliance of the wildcat offense. But now when I watch, I’ll do it with both admiration and apprehension.

I heard a great podcast interview with Martha Nussbaum done through the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. The interview is based on her new book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law .

What strikes me as most interesting in her work is the distinction she draws between disgust and indignation, the former being based on a visceral impulse to distance oneself from an object and the latter based on the violation of abstract principles like human dignity. Nussbaum notes that every culture seems to label an “other” as worthy of disgust.

This distinction is important for understanding contemporary politics. A few weeks back, Jimmy Carter made news for suggesting that much of the “tea party” opposition to President Obama was based on racist beliefs towards him, not on ideology. If true, this would seem to be political action motivated by disgust rather than indignation. Indignation would be if opponents truly viewed him as a socialist and weren’t simply masking their visceral disgust for him with a more socially acceptable ideological argument.

The problem is that it is immensely difficult to tease out the difference. How do we know if opposition is truly rooted in racism? Perhaps a combination of disgust and indignation drives opposition to Obama. How much was opposition to Bush driven by digust? How much by indignation?

It’s an important question because disgust can’t be reasoned with. Logical arguments do not make spoiled milk smell better. True racism can be “un-learned,” but how much of that un-learning takes place through reasoning? I’m not sure.