What is wrong with isms?

In one famous scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the titular hero remarks to the audience,

[My history test is] on European socialism. I mean, really. What’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan to be European. So, who gives a shit if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists and it still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism. Or any “isms”. “Isms”, in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”. He should believe in himself. John Lennon said it on his first solo album. “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” A good point there. After all, he was the Walrus.

Bueller, the ostensible epitome of libertine individualism for the materialist eighties, gracefully sweeps aside all ideologies -isms- as being distant, impractical, and destructive to the dignity of an individual’s ego.

Twenty years later, South Park echoes very nearly the same point. In one especially far-fetched episode, the character Cartman freezes himself to skip the following weeks because he cannot wait until the Nintendo Wii comes out. Unfortunately, he doesn’t awake for another thousand years, during which Earth is embroiled in a civil war – between different factions of atheists. The atheists fundamentally agree with each other. but are fighting the war over what the name of the atheist organization should be. Through a series of convoluted and equally far-fetched situations, Cartman eventually changes the past from his place in the future, keeping the world from becoming universally atheist.

Cartman:      Wait… Isn’t… everybody at war over atheism?
Shvek:     Atheism? No. We’ve learned to get rid of all the isms in our time.
Medic:     Yes. Long ago we realized isms are great for those who are rational, but in the hands of irrational people, isms always lead to violence.
Cartman:     So there is no war now in the future.
Blavius:     Of course there’s war. The stupid French-Chinese think they have a right to Hawaii.
All:     Yeah!

The events of the episode can best be seen as a criticism of Richard Dawkins (who is featured and satired extensively during the show) and Christopher Hitchens. Coming from very different directions, Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens, a political pundit, independently published two similar books shortly before the episode aired (namely, The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively). Part of their theses is that war and irrationality is an inevitable result of any form of theism, and that atheism will bring an end to so many of our troubles. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker retort that the problem lies not in the specific doctrine of any form of theology, but rather in the very concept of an “ism” itself. People are irrational and their irrationality is amplified when arbitrary, rhetorical lines, such as “atheist”, “agnostic”, and “theistic”, are superimposed over them. Just as “Christendom” Europe fell into an unending war between Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists in the early modern era, any unified atheism will eventually deteriorate into an equally irrational insurrection between rival atheists.

Bueller’s off-quoted observation and the anti-ism sentiment of Stone and Parker dovetail to form a very specific brand of anti-intellectual populism (which of course, is an ism itself). Each human is indescribable on a very base level. If people consciously accept any particular ism, they stop thinking for themselves and lose part of themselves. Socialism, atheism, capitalism, and theism are arbitrary constructs dreamed up by academics unconcerned with the practical concerns of the everyday lives of individuals. This position has perhaps not been articulated rigorously, but it has a certain common-sensical appeal.

However, contrast this with the collectivist-historicist schools of the nineteenth century to see just how great of a departure such a paradigm is from the mainstream thinking of not so long ago. According to thinkers such as Hegel and Tolstoy, the events of the history, led by isms, determine the choices of individuals. Attempting to escape from the grand scheme of history is pointless, as whatever occurs in one’s life is brought about solely by forces outside one’s control. Even a reasoned desire to escape from or remain ignorant of isms can be construed as an inevitable historical movement itself. Above, I mention that I believe it to be best understood as a form of populism and individualism. If anti-ism becomes a more complete source of thought, there is nothing keeping us from giving it a real name.

With the historical radicalism of rejecting the ascription to any ism in mind, consider what isms are more literally. Merely, they are words and a method of categorizing people and ideas. Ultimately, any legitimate criticism of isms must be a criticism of categorization. If we categorize everyone by two sets of political beliefs, Conservativism and Liberalism (as defined in the US), we lose a tremendous amount of information. Yet, don’t we gain more in this perverse oversimplification than if we had done nothing at all? Neoconservatives, the religious right, and paleoconservatives all share strands of similar political beliefs, however strained the relationship between the groups may be this moment. In categorizing, we give ourselves the ability to communicate abstract ideas rapidly without the need to lay out every political opinion one has. To say that one is a conservative is to say that one is probably against abortion, probably in favor of the War in Iraq, probably in favor of smaller government, and so on. If we open our vocabularies beyond such a false verbal dichotomy to our full range of named isms, we only are all the better able to quickly communicate our complete array of political preferences. Isms are the vehicle allowing us to do that.

All of this on a certain level is completely banal, but it must be said. To say that you don’t believe in an ism and that you only believe in yourself sidesteps what the ism actually is. An ism is not a set of sworn precepts to which one must adhere. It is merely a signpost pointed roughly in one’s political direction. Refusing to use signposts because they are not a perfect representation of who you are is nonsense. Socialism, fascism, and anarchism will not get Ferris his car, but they are useful for understanding history.

In the jargon I just used a second ago, South Park creators Stone and Park argue that isms cause people to swarm around sets of core beliefs and become irrationally fanatical about them. For example, the existence of the Republican and Democratic parties in America in effect arguably pushes their members towards the party lines and causes them to hate the other party all the more. The factual validity of this is mixed.  Compare such a generalization to religious history. On the one hand, the Catholic Church once required strict adherence to its dogmas with the very real threat of excommunication and interdiction… only to have its powered neutered by the continuous splinter groups who first disagreed on specific issues and later were demarcated with an ism (Lutheranism, Calvinism, etc) representing those beliefs. Again, for example, it is strange to view the ism in Lutheranism as what caused the German nobles to revolt against the Holy Roman Empire when the word “Lutheranism” scarcely existed, even as they used Luther as a pretext. Collectively, they radicalized, but the root of that has been established historically as the nobles’ desire to decentralize authority, rather than their consciousness as a separate group known as Lutherans.

In general, religions and political parties are far more plural than the ilk of Stone and Park give them credit for. History, especially recent history, is only oversimplified by thinking in terms of “Christians attacked Muslims in Holy Land; Muslims eventually won”, or “Muslims attacked Christian/Atheist West; West retaliated”. The Muslim community is diverse in its opinion and tolerance of the West, from the fully acculturated to those living peacefully in Turkey to some burning American Flags. Even the arguably most dogmatic of the Christian sects, Catholicism, has a broad array of theological view points, from the ultra-conservative curia or the liberation theology socialists. The lushness of such dissent in both groups greatly undermines the notion that the creation of the ism caused the sins of their members. We would expect singlemindedness, not schism.

While a certain validity remains in the idea that collectivizing individuals causes chaos, a “mob mentality” does not inevitably develop in every ideology. Any number of factors at any particular time in history determine whether that will take place. Bigotry has been the status quo for much of world history, but for that bigotry has only spordically coalesced  into widespread virulent fanaticism. That is to say, hatred and insularity is widespread around the world, but genocide is not. It takes an extreme set of circumstances to get us from mistrust and prejudice to the Holocaust, Bosnia, or Sudan. No evidence is offered as to how isms gets a society over that “hump” from prejudice to genocide. If you wish to blame isms on prejudice itself, that is again impeached by history, where isms have nearly always existed merely to represent pre-existing differences in religious practice, political opinion, or what have you. The history of the very concept of nationality, the most basic “ism” of all, demonstrates this most emphatically; we have always been fearful of those different from ourselves, even before we had a name for those who are different.

Categorization and generalization are essential communicative cornerstones without which our basic abiliy to think inductively is destroyed. While I focused on the pop culture examples of Ferris Bueller and South Park, similar arguments have appeared elsewhere. Specifically, the well-recieved 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven, portrayed a very analogous message. Former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges wrote the semi-popular I Don’t Believe in Atheists, which provided many strangely parallels to South Park (it was published after the episode aired, in case you jumped to the conclusion that South Park simply transplanted Hedges’ ideas).  This fear of isms has ingrained itself on certain aspects of our culture, but the fear is unfounded. While we should by no means pigeonhole ourselves where unnecessary or uncritically follow any ism with which we generally agree, our ability to discuss any abstract matter intelligently is severely impaired if we renounce isms altogether.

Is Freedom of Association Fascism?

The New York Yankees in recent years have upset very many people with their policy of enforcing “patriotism” during the Seventh Inning Stretch. Security forces every patron in the ballpark to remain still while “God Bless America” is sung. The blogosphere has generally condemned such draconian measures, as this requirement apparently struck a nerve. For example,

Yankee Stadium security deserves no benefit of the doubt here, nor in this instance does the Steinbrenner family if they’re the ones who have ordered the policy be implemented. Forcing paying customers to stand at rapt attention during a song isn’t some cute little attempt at patriotism to bolster the legacy of Mr. Born on the Fourth of July Steinbrenner, it’s FASCISM. Roughing them up over their failure to stand still during a canned recording of a song that’s been drained of all meaning by its endless repetition is in diametric opposition to what the song and the country it so proudly celebrates stand for; this is about as un-American as you can get.

The author (Jaffe) complains in very strong words about the rights of those that dissent from the requirement to pay respect. Essentially, he argues that the requirements curtail his Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Speech, Jaffe implies, is not simply about government censorship, but an entitlement to express one’s personal opinions, whatever the circumstances.

This broad interpretation of Freedom of Speech erases the power of its close cousin, Freedom of Association. Yankee Stadium is not the public square; it is private property. If the owner of that private property requires that you perform some legal action (e.g. paying respect during a patriotic song) in order to stay therer, you must do it, if we are to say that the owner is really “free”. As the oft-quoted 19th century judge said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” During a decade where ostentatious displays of patriotism are in the vogue, Freedom of Association may annoy liberals in circumstances such as these, but there is little grounding for referring to it as Fascism. Whether Jaffe likes it or not, Steinbrenner has just as much right to throw people out of the stadium for appearing unpatriotic as Jaffe does to throw someone out of his house for voicing, for example, Neo-Nazi propaganda. Freedom of Association is Fascism only in a world where all humans have an indelible right to take a shit in their neighbor’s yards. There really isn’t another way to spin it.

There are complicating factors to the specific issue; the circumstance that set off Jaffe above involved an anecdote where security allegedly manhandled a fan out of the stadium without a refund. To my understanding, the ticket gave the fan a license to be in the stadium and a refund would have been necessary to legally kick him off the property. Obviously, the actions taken by the security officer were also over-the-top, as Freedom of Association is not Freedom to Assault. Yet, these issues were not the crux of any argument I’ve seen on the blogosphere; instead Jaffe and his ilk have used them almost solely as an embellishment to the outrage they feel for needing to pay respect during the song. Nonetheless, the anecdote is just that, an anecdote, and one that was voiced by a fan who was likely drunk at the time and who had every reason to punch up his story a little bit. It’s not fair to form generalities on that type of thing.

The more theoretical criticism I can see of this policy is whether Yankee Stadium should be considered purely “private property”. Major League Baseball teams have long been run almost as public trusts rather than a classic, profit-seeking enterprise. New York City has substantially subsidized a new stadium for the franchise, which is set to open next year. If one considers the new stadium public property, the question changes drastically, although it is still not cut-and-dry. Public property still does not immediately imbue one with the right to voice any opinion whatsoever, and I do not mean that in the banal, “yelling fire in a crowded room” sense. There is no reason why a town hall cannot throw someone out for yelling obnoxiously, and of course, liberals themselves harshly denounce religious statements on public property. This is not to say that this circumstance neatly falls into any of those categories, but the door is open for discussion. My standpoint, although it is not a very firm one, is that the Yankees can continue this practice until the city uses the funds as a gateway to instruct them otherwise.

Freedom of Speech, and more generally, Freedom of Expression, are negative rights, not a positive ones. Censorship occurs when the government explicitly stops you from doing something you could do with your own means. Referring to two private parties (you stand during the song and pay me $80 in exchange for being here) as censorship is both dishonest and a complete non-sequitur. Analogously spurious and deceitful are claims that stem-cell research is banned in the United States (it’s legal, but “failing to fund” is construed as “banning”) or that failing to increase funding for public broadcasting is censorship. All of these arguments make the preposterous assumption that Freedom of Expression is somehow an entitlement rather than a protection from government coercion. To put it another way, these views reprehensibly argue that freedom to choose gives those who invoke it the inalienable right to express their values or beliefs through the property of others, whether literal or through taxation. From that perspective, equating a failure to provide a positive Freedom of Expression to Fascism is nonsensical. No society can function that way without becoming duplicitous or lawless.

The Residual Fallacy

For hardcore baseball fans, the “Pythagorean” record, called such for its ostensible appearance to the Pythagorean formula, represents how many games a given team “should” have won over the course of a season. The formula uses nothing but a team’s runs scored and runs allowed and spits out out a winning percentage that very closely correlates with the actual win total of a team. Even more surprisingly, this Pythagorean record correlates closer to the following year’s win-loss record than the previous year’s record does. This strongly suggests, although hardly definitively, that runs scored and runs allowed are a better indicator of team quality than win-loss percentage itself.

Amateur analysts have taken this as a very happy research opportunity. Some looked at how many games a team has won over its Pythagorean record as proof of a team’s strength in ways not measured using runs scored or runs allowed alone. The differential has been used to put numbers to statistical bugaboos like team chemistry, the effectiveness of the coaches, and the usefulness of the running game. However, these methods have fallen out of practice as those variables have failed to exhibit any year-to-year statistical significance in explaining the differential. The only objective factor that has been shown to explain any of the differential is the strength of a team’s bullpen, and that effect is not strong.

We’re lucky that in baseball, unlike real life, we have an amazing degree of data capture and an embarrassment of historical riches, with nearly complete yearly records going back more than 125 years. Retrosheet even has made available full play-by-play data for every season for more than forty years. Every play, every action, of all 162 games, (now) all 30 teams… it is a bewildering accomplishment. This treasure chest of data, an ostentatious auric ensemble of empirics, allows analysts to respond to numerical questions with genuine answers.

Yet, that’s not all. In baseball, every action is discrete. A hitter smashes a home run. A second baseman fields a ball and throws out the runner. Each event is distinct and countable for all to see. Furthermore, the data encapsulates what is important, which is why the pythagorean records work as well as they do. If the subjective, uncountable variables were what really drove a record instead of runs scored and runs allowed, the pythagorean record would not have its predictive power.

The subjective, uncountable variables like team chemistry likely have some effect to a team’s final record, but we have no idea what the effect is. It is now widely accepted to be a fool’s errand to try to tease anymore meaning from the differential. Yet, outside of baseball analysis, the problem of identifying the cause of residuals appears in far more important matters. However, since real-life data rarely possesses the ideal characteristics found in baseball statistics (gratuitous amount of data, countability of actions, importance of objective factors over subjective ones), we cannot take the same logical positivist approach to analysis; that is to say, we cannot ever rely on data to confirm any hypothesis definitively. We may be able to identify correlations for objective causes with some certainty, but we would only be lying to ourselves to think we had captured everything important.

Thomas Sowell has pointed out such presumption in what he calls The Residual Fallacy. The fallacy states that if we control for every objective variable we can find, that persistent statistical significance of a “soft” variable proves that the “soft” variable was directly responsible. But, as stated above, in real life, we don’t have a full picture of everything important. Imagine if in baseball, we only had the number of home runs hit and the average height of the players and were asked to use it to estimate the team’s win-loss record with such information. Without information about the other things that matter, we might pick up on some statistically significant relationship between win-loss record and, for example, average attendance. Would it then be fair to conclude that we have taken everything important into account, and that large crowds cause teams to win more often by cheering?

Yet this is what we do, routinely, including academics and scholars. Courts accept it as evidence. The example that Sowell points to is “proving” racism empirically. It is a fact that, in most industries, if you adjust for age, years of education, marital status, and everything else for which data is easy to collect, Asians make more than Caucasians and Caucasians make more than Hispanics and Blacks. Does this prove racism and put a dollar number on it? Of course not. It is likely that there are additional subjective differences between the groups. This does not mean it’s an INNATE difference or that the groups are somehow better than one another; it means that there probably exist other explanatory variables that analysts cannot capture. At the same time, this does not disprove racism, either. It could well be true that if we could somehow control for literally everything important, race would still be a persistent factor. The point is that we do not know and can’t know in any meaningful sense by throwing everything objective in a regression and seeing what sticks. It just isn’t evidence.

Baseball is a weird case, a rare human event where we can boil down most of what’s important to a few numbers. Still, this doesn’t turn the minds of baseball traditionalists -especially reporters- who spend years with the team and believe team chemistry to be an essential part of a winning organization. They could be well be right; if we could measure chemistry meaningfully, it may explain both some of the differential between the actual and pythagorean records and a reason why the team scored those runs in the first place. Yet, it is strange that some hold standards higher for baseball, where there is evidence that we have captured everything important, than in sociological questions with enormous political ramifications, where believing we no everything is nonsense.

The Problem with Kitsch

Video game “purists”, many of whom have now passed forty, insist on a Golden Age of arcade games that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. During this era, young companies bombarded young fans with hit after hit, from Centipede to Asteroids to Defender to Donkey Kong. As games becomes more complex, the old guard aged and ended their interest in later hits like Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog. I have gradually slipped away from playing new games myself after devoting my early teen years to eagerly awaiting the next big thing. At twenty-two, Mario Kart 64 holds my interest more effectively than anything else that has come out lately.

On the one hand, this is natural. I have better ways to spend my money and free time than I did when I was 13. On the other are those who insist that “retro” games, which tends to mean whatever games came out when they were between the ages of eight and fourteen, are the best games in the history of the world. Still there are other who were born five years after Joust was published and play it on an emulator and will mention that fact whenever given the opportunity.

This is bizarre and peculair. Consider what differentiates “classic” or “retro” from contemporary ones. Technology. “Retro” games have poorer graphics, sound, controls, and pretty much everything you could measure objectively. Now, while many of these games may possess excellent gameplay or other je ne sais quois, no evidence is offered to suggest that they, as a rule, monopolize such subjective factors. Nothing, beyond such non-sequiturs as “they’re too complicated” (so was Donkey Kong compared to Pong) or “they’re commercial” (it was always about the money if you read the history), are offered to dispute that. Even if one assumes that such qualitative, subjective factors have not improved in twenty years -an awkward assumption given the improvements everywhere else- new games are still better. The consumer can pick the subjectively superior ones AND get graphics improved by twenty-five years of development. Any presumption that “retro” games are somehow better than contemporary games for reasons outside of nostalgia is completely false.

While this is a subject I’m far less familiar with, I believe the same carries over with film. Dated comedies are no longer funny because they are dated. Dramas from the fifties are painful to watch due to ancient cinematography and wooden actresses with unnatural, high-felutant accents. Watching them is something for academics or professionals do, not something to watch casually and enjoy.

I say this because people do choose retro games and classic movies over their contemporaries, and consciously, for reasons besides nostalgia. They do so while knowing the graphics or acting sucks, but think that it adds to the “charm” or makes it more “genuine”. This is what I mean by kitsch. Many have the need to choose entertainment that is objectively worse so that they can feel better.

“Hipster irony” is an analogous concept to this particular to a certain subculture with society. “Hipster” males might wear, say, ugly, thick rimmed glasses and an overly-tight fitting sweater. They then feel superior to people who wear proper clothing because they are self-aware of how ridiculous they look. This brand of style and sensibility has been satirized to death pretty effectively at the now-famous blog, Stuff White People Like. Its author points out the ludicrous motivations of “white people” (hipsters) who drive the Toyota Prius, eat organic foods, get arts degrees, and identify with the movie Juno. Some of their environmental concerns may be valid, but the overriding theme of their choices is to appear superior by consciously choosing poor options “ironically”. In a speech at google, the author says,

What [Stuff White People Like really is] about is that “white people” is more of a class than a race thing [...], a different generation of people who still have the same desire for status and competition among neighbors, but unlike in the past when that status was determined by material wealth like the size of your house or the size of your diamond ring, it’s been replaced by “authenticity”, [and] environmental awareness, [...]. It’s about this sort of shift [all the while] we are still as competitive as ever.

To that I add, when choosing environmentalism or indie rock or classic movies or retro video games for reasons of aesthetics rather than substance, there is something wrong. It is especially difficult to pull apart what is what or which choice is genuine since, well, “white people” (or movie aficionados or retro gamers) get very defensive if questioned.

Really -and any entry from Stuff White People Like argues it better in any one of its entries than I can by essay- choosing genuine or environmentally conscious options really boils down to feeling superior. Going to farmers markets or jumping headfirst into another culture is more ostentatious than effective by any measure for those goals. I’m not overstating or misrepresenting these attitudes; for example, there is literally a raw foods restaurant with a sign outside that says “conscious food for conscious people”. All too often (while not always) the end goal of purposely putting annoying restrictions on one’s self, whether that be spending a lot of money on a Toyota Prius, not eating cooked food, or only playing video games with pixels the size of my fist is too congratulate one’s self for doing so.

But still, let’s be honest here.

When I first read Stuff White People Like, I thought it was amazing. It perfectly described the irrational aesthetics of my friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Certain entries, like Arrested Development, The Daily Show/Cobert Report, and traveling, especially resonated with me. Some of my friends went through the list and counted all the entries that defined them- many. I went through the list and counted all the entries that defined me- few. I liked this fact.

It took me a few weeks to grow sick over the fact that I like that I’m not a “white person”.

Choosing kitsch for the sake of kitsch, whether that is playing thirty year old video games or going to farmers markets, is wrong because it is dependent on feeling unique and superior to others. By acting counter-culture to the counter-culture movements of kitsch, I was doing the same exact thing. Even now, I question my awareness of that as further evidence of trying to trick myself into feeling superior. I really don’t know; is my repulsion to traveling and The Colbert Report out of my objective opinion or only to feel superior to kitsch? Conversely, do I only try to form “objective opinions” so that I can feel superior?

These are the types of realizations that make me want to throw up. Please join me in my bulimia.

And again, I cannot separate in my mind whether that invitation is true or a way to feel superior to the reader.