Interpreting The Parable Of The Prodigal Son In The Midst Of Mooting Merit v Diversity

 

Here is my interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son inspired by my answering a friend who sees the parable as informing the issue of merit against diversity, the latter accomplished by racial hands up.

The exchange was provoked by these words from Heather Mac Donald:

“Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. 

The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.”

Me: (his comments apparent in the points I answer)

The older son wasn’t necessarily more “capable” if that’s measured by talent. There is nothing in the parable about which son was more talented. It’s just that one did what he was supposed to and the other was a blatant wastrel. And the parable doesn’t say the older son got nothing or nowhere. It says he got all that his father could give him. Its theme isn’t unequal treatment even though the older son may have thought so. It’s redemption, the generosity of grace and forgiveness and the depth of filial love. In fact, the parable as I read it makes no mention of the elder son’s final reaction to his father’s explanation for the celebration of the prodigal’s return:  

“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

The parable’s analogue to what HMD asserts about diversity trumping merit is off kilter and betrays a misunderstanding of the story.

Whether both sides, I assume they’re the racially admitted and the more meritorious rejected, can be convinced about the rightness of diversity trumping merit is beside any point. SCOTUS, as I noted, is likely to settle the issue. 

Sweet La-La Land by Robert W. Campbell, Not Noir But Rather Human Black Hole

   

Some choice bits from the end of Sweet La-La Land 

Hooligan went out and gathered up Canaan and Whistler. The two cops walked Whistler back through the alley to the highway, one on each side. It was like escorting a dead man. There was no feeling of life in him. He just shuffled along, staring at the rain falling in front of him as though that were all there would ever be in the world again. The strange persistence of the rain. 

…

They were huddles together on the broken catwalk on the pitted roof, under an evening sky going sulphur yellow form the pollution that hardly ever left the air, like the last two survivors of a city destroyed by nuclear holocaust.

…

“How about Bitsy? Where’s Bitsy?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Whaaat?”

“He done it.”

“Done what?”

“Done it to Mimi on the roof. Later on they proved he killed Moo and that woman from Magdalene House too,” Roach said.

“That lady what came around with the hot chocolate and the big nigger.” (Latter is JoJo)

…

“How could they all come together in the same place at the same time, so that all the terrible things that could happen happen?” Bosco asked, his hand laying on a copy of Oedipus, After Sophocles. “Sometimes you hear about them finding a body somewhere and you think that’s the picture, but it ain’t the picture. It’s just the trailer.”

….

“Hey,” said Bosco, “the worst corner of hell is home sweet home to some poor soul.”

——————————

Finished the book. Hopeless tragedy is the key phrase. As I said, not noir but rather a human black hole.

Systemic Racism, Glenn Loury And Lara Bazelon

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6aoUCQ21w&ab_channel=Bloggingheads.tv

My response to someone:

I thought this was an interesting exchange though at about, if I’m recalling right, the 46’ mark give or take, right up until the very end they veer off issues of systemic racism and problems with the administration and substance of  American criminal justice. They spend the last 1/3 or so on purely personal issues to both of them, especially Loury, who comes across in much of his previous troubled life as a human train wreck such that one cringes, or at least I cringe, listening to it but can’t turn away.

Anyway, Bazelon’s case for the existence of systemic racism is weak and by and large, or at least often, she conflates it with her critique of the criminal justice system writ large, ie affecting all who come into contact with it regardless of race, white, red, yellow, black and brown. She doesn't seem to realize that her analysis is more class based than race based. 

Her characterization of her essential issue with Loury is whether racism is now vestigial, a relic of the bygone past or whether it is, in her exact phrase, “baked into” laws that are now on the books. The line between the two is blurrier and less stark than she thinks. For vestigial racism means long past systemic racism’s effects continue and are an undeniable factor in present disparities. Loury, as well as McWhorter, would be the first to say that’s so. 

The functional difference between the two is that “baked into”  means that present laws and institutions have in them components of the past that were specifically rooted in institutional racist intention and racist practices. Loury, I infer, denies that that is an apt wholesale characterization of present laws and institutions and practices, while he might, but doesn’t in this conversation, allow that outlier examples of what Bazelon particularizes—namely, the PIG law in Louisiana and the practice of non unanimous juries—may exist.

She in virtually the same breath notes, by the way, that both the laws she cites have been repealed and that progressive criminal justice personnel were involved in her client’s exoneration. 

Functionally for Loury, vestigial racism means the psychological, economic, family dynamic and sociological effects of undeniable past systemic racism, largely de jure undone by the 1964 civil rights legislation and the eventual erasing of persisting pockets of it like red lining. 

For Loury, a problem with vestigial racism is it’s immeasurable as far as conduct and dysfunction go and that it informs a kind of victimhood pathology that blames it for all manner of disparate outcomes including without limitation public school performance, top tier university admission, a standard deviation less on test scores, all manner of indicia of success, staggering overrepresentation in crime and jail and massive out of wedlock births punctuated by absentee fathers. 

He says whatever the immeasurable factor comes to, the rest by and large is community and family dysfunction, which is essentially from where improvement must come. 

Bazelon agrees with some of this as she notes when clarifying what common ground they share. But then her case for “baked into” is weak since so much of it proceeds from just the one example of her unjustly convicted client, as though such travesties haven’t happened and don’t happen regularly to whites as well. Which then goes to my point that she mish-mashes a general critique of the criminal justice system, which is class based, with her notion of baked into systemic racism. That many of the lower classes are black is racial correlation and not racial causation 

Interesting to note that when they discuss why her client had a gun, she defends his criminal conduct—he needs it to sling dope or he’ll get shot; he needs to sling dope to overcome his family’s poverty. 

But she doesn’t deal with the point Heather Mac Donald makes in reviewing an ideologically similar book by University of Chicago sociologist Alice Goffman, a point that others have made as well: why isn’t this criminal acting out typical of most impoverished black youth; why is it that among her client’s cohort it’s only a minority of them, not the majority, that act this way?  This disparity in who acts criminally and who doesn’t devastates the argument that systemic racism is more the cause than individual choice among those similarly situated. 

She also weakens her case from the get go to the extent she agrees with Loury. She agrees to the extent that systemic racism is, in her words, “elasticized” and “overextended.” But isn’t that what systemic racism is, a pervasive, wholesale feature of a society? If it’s not that, then how is it systemic? 

She gets particularly overly-ideological in downplaying the recent upticks in violent crime by saying they’re nowhere near what the numbers were in the nineties. Loury rightly takes exception to that saying that that doesn’t rebut a 30-50% increase in murders and other felonies in big U.S. cities nor that in NYC increasing crime is at the top of its citizens concerns nor that likely the next mayor will be the more law and order ex-cop Eric Adams. Bazelon blames it on media hype but for me in that she comes off as slightly blasé, which is to say, reality hasn’t yet mugged her.

This doesn’t go to systemic racism but she is weak on touting the virtual abrogation of the cash bail laws. Her reason is that the poor can’t come up with the money: poverty being criminalized is her point By the way, this is an example of her noted conflation. 

But doesn’t she have this point backwards? 

Even granting the presumption of innocence, when it comes to bail traditionally the strength of the case is a big factor. The likelihood of flight  and recommission are big factors. So is the financial inducement to stick around by risking forfeiture of what’s put up as bail security. So are ties to the community. So is the seriousness of the offence. 

Thus, if but for bail reform, an arrestee is denied bail, poverty isn’t being criminalized. Rather a preceding crime is being dealt with in the consequence of its perpetration. If rich people can make bail and poor people can’t, is that a reason to let violent felons out pending trial, including ones who’ve already committed a further crime? If everything income inequality touches is to be foregone, we’re on our way to dystopia. Some poor will always be with us. 

As Loury notes, it’s sheer irrebuttable common sense that if charged felons including repeat offenders are out every time before trial, they’ll likely offend again. And in fact they do. 

They get off substance when they began speaking about the politics of all this. 

On Vaccine Hesitancy And Fake News

 Vaccine hesitancy https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-konstantin-kisin

My comment to a friend:

Strong piece.

Thanks. 

Does it convince you that vaccine hesitancy is justified?

I know that his explanation for it is his gist rather than justification but I still easily think the hesitation is irrational.

In other words, despite all the skilful narrative of rushes to judgment, supposed experts being wrong, media pile ons, elite condescension, outright deceit and hypocritical special pleading, I still have faith in objectively coming to terms with much of what he strings together, from the Covington kid, to Jussie Smollett, to the emptiness in much of the hysteria and fake news about Trump during his presidency—since his defeat he’s gone totally off the deep end, to the vindicating-of-America trial of Chauvin. The latest minor stir is the undermining of the received narrative about Amy Cooper, the Central Park dog walker with now disclosed undisclosed new facts. So my point is, everything he says is so; he gives voice to a deep ubiquitous problem. But still there come with time objective counterweights that allow us in to help navigate the hysteria, the duplicity and the rushes to judgment. They don’t displace or even solve the problem but they reside alongside it, sometimes outweigh it and give us a fighting chance.

And so, while I get some of the reasons for the hesitancy— it’s overdetermined—I continue easily to think it’s irrational.

My Most Recent Political Realignments

Note to a friend:

So, my politics tend to realign themselves by a threesome of visceral reaction, standing where I sit and a degree of moral principle. 

My second last realignment came with Clinton H’s email imbroglio. She was so high handed, dismissive, prevaricating, hypocritically smug, holier than thou, sanctimonious and ensconced in her own privilege that she disgusted me with her and all elements of elite privilege endemic to Democrat Party politics. So I moved away from her and the Democrats generally insofar as I had a notional say that mattered—I do know I never did. I tended to drift right, was happy—and I was a former #nevertrumper—when she lost, was thrilled to see her writhing in excuses to rationalize her defeat. I became anti anti Trump. I defended him against foaming-at-the-mouth haters. I turned my back on and became revulsed by liberal elite media—CNN, MSNBC, and their personae. I watched more Fox. I started to become more absorbed in certain right wing positions. 

Now I’ve just gone through another visceral sea change brought on by two main triggers.

One is my complete disgust with post-election Trump, his conduct marked by among other things the transcendence of his ego above all considerations, his ego becoming the slave master of nearly all semblance  of norms, which he was willing to trash in service of himself, his lying and false claims, his willingness to torpedo Republican electoral chances by lashing them to his ego driven desire for more limelight and not be seen as a loser, all complemented by an unhealthy dose of Republican subservience to his post-election efforts. When in office all these tendencies in him were muted by the demands and constraints of his office and by his solid accomplishments. He has now vindicated those less-than-hysterical, ie sober, thoughtful, concerns about him and has soiled his legacy. He has cast his post-election shadow back over it.

The other is the issue of vaccination and less so policy approaches to dealing with the virus. The stupidity of the anti vaxxers and their fetishizing individual liberty at the expense of trammelling the public good has likewise disgusted me and has sparked an insight, too long coming, into the irrationality of liberty-extremism. The issue has become for me microcosmic of various other positions held by the right that place individual liberty on so high a pedestal it becomes attenuated by reason of the thin air. 

One sign of my shift is that my wife and I at long last have a political/cultural issue with which we strongly agree.

I’m still put viscerally off by what I despised in Clintonia. And so I have moved I think more solidly to the independent centre, giving more room to what was always latent and nascent in me, the politics of the Third Way. https://www.britannica.com/topic/third-way

Ongoing Note To R On Interpreting Literature

My long held view is that novels, novellas, short stories and dramas project worlds and can be seen as integrated wholes. Lyric poetry is an exception in typically projecting a glimpse of something, say a slice of experience, or some things that make up a singular experience. They too can be seen as integrated wholes. 

Where any genre fails in that, it’s a flaw the verges the work on incoherence. Incoherence is btw to be distinguished from purposeful hence artistically controlled ambiguity or ambivalence typically expressed in a fundamental structure of literary art, paradox and its necessary distinguishing feature, tension, emerging from conflict. 

In Michael Oakeshott’s book, Experience And Its Modes, he argues that we organize events into patterns, see experience as patterned that we to try to see whole. A useful metaphor for the result of this effort is “world.” Worlds are marked or bound by what makes them cohere, to which there is no singular answer. It depends on the world. 

So, continuing my view, it’s insufficient for literary criticism just to note events or sequences of events, a comedic plot or a tragic one. In any good work, any self conscious work, worlds cohere. What makes them cohere is a matter of the work. Could be an angry God, could be evil as metaphysical force in the world, could be contingency, could be something in the depths of human nature. 

Identifying the what and the why gets you to the heart of the work. 

Ideas about what drives events and conduct in any particular work can differ for all the reasons you can imagine, which gives literary criticism and discussion endless richness. 

I have noted that Wellek and Warren see the underlying causes as the transcendent stratum of literature, its metaphysical quality, which they encapsulate as “attitude toward life.” And I’ve noted that Frye called these causes or principles themes, “holding the ‘poem’ together in a simultaneous structure.” 

They are hard to discern and state and argue for clearly. They require hard, disciplined work. They require thinking things through to a resolutIonary conclusion. They demand a searching confrontation with the work, plumbing its depths to get to its essence. 

Criticism and reviews that fall short of accomplishing this do exactly that, fall short. Doing it, or trying to do it, is thematic criticism. It’s an exercise that will most engage students as it’s an exploration of what great writers illuminate in their work as to what life is like. 

I don’t say, as you may think I’m suggesting, that a writer sits down and says, “I’m going to write something that shows the world’s futility.” I don’t prescribe or hold to any particular process or presupposition. I just theorize from what I see as the results.

As for poetry, I don’t ask myself, “Why did the poet choose that word?” There’s an arbitrariness to the words chosen, which means that other words might have done just as well. I rather ask, “What work does this word do in this poem given everything else that’s going on? How does it help lead up to, along with everything else, what makes the whole thing fit together, expressible as an idea or ideas that express the whole, IE, what is the poet saying?”

The question of why a poet chooses a certain word, as opposed to the question that should be asked—what work does the word do in the poem?—strikes me as a non- starter. Who know why? Who cares why? The answer can only be unprovable surmise and speculation. But the answer to the word’s effectiveness in the poem is concrete and specific and textually supportable, ie supported with evidence. 

You continue to speak as though interpretation is like a treasure hunt or something external and detached from the work and imposed upon it, often as not to show how clever one is. And as I keep saying, bad interpretations can be like that but they don’t exhaust the exercise, which at its best is a genuine, good faith effort to come to terms with a work and then go to the world with one’s thoughts in the hope of contributing to and enriching the ongoing discussion. Particularly  when in relation to great works, it’s an especially worthwhile activity.

Finally, people don’t normally read to get at a work’s bottom. Nor need they. People normally read for pleasure and often end up with a specific set of responses that they don’t think through. Nor do they pay attention normally to style and technique. That is all fine as the way things are. What I’m talking about when taught leaves students better able to engage what they read and so enter into closer relation with the art that some of our greatest writers and poets have created. Which makes fine even better. 

To reduce what I’m arguing for to getting the moral of a fable or applying only to didactic works is to fail to grasp my point or is self-consciously to evade it. 

Exchange On The Idea Of Moral Progress

 L:

Since I'm skeptical of the whole idea/phenomenon of moral progress, I've give it some thought and here are some results, which I thought I might as well put in an email, for what it's worth:   

Thing is, I think there are two separate things going on: 

On the one hand, there's a pendulum-like back and forth between an "improving" movement in one direction that passes a point of equilibrium, which then builds up opposition or reaction, which becomes a counter-movement, sending the moral pendulum back, but which then goes beyond equilibrium in turn, generating opposition, and so on -- most evident in sexual issues, but it's there in other matters too.

But then, on the other hand, the point of equilibrium itself moves, and this is what often appears as moral progress, on longer time scales. But I think this is a kind of modern, or, as I've said, Whiggish, illusion produced by the relative material plenty that the continuing industrial/technological revolution has brought. 

Suppose, for example, we think of moral ideas and behaviors as on a spectrum, from tough-minded to weak-minded, with variations more or less synonymous: hard-headed to soft-headed, e.g., even bloody-minded to weepy-minded. We all occupy our positions on such a spectrum, as do cultural averages, and from that position, the further ends of the spectrum will appear morally questionable, or worse -- too far in the tough-minded end will appear morally wrong, bad, and ultimately evil; too far in the weak-minded end will appear morally frivolous, silly, or ultimately laughable. 

But I think those positions (i.e., the moral equilibrium point) will move depending on material circumstances -- hard circumstances will favor hard-headedness, while easier circumstances will allow space for "softer" moral concerns. 

And since this applies not just to individuals but to groups and whole societies and cultures, I think this accounts for why and how equilibrium points move -- thus generating the appearance of moral progress, which is just a shift in moral concerns from what once seemed weak-minded to what now seems relevant. But notice that there's no inherent superiority of one end of that moral spectrum over the other -- both are judged only relative to the equilibrium point at any one time. 

And that point shifts only according to material circumstances -- should they worsen, for example, then what the culture considers a moral equilibrium will shift back, toward harder moral judgments. 

Or so goes the argument.

Me:

I’m thinking about the idea of moral progress differently than you.

My sense of it is that we need to start from the idea of human betterment, as in materially improving people’s lives. In broad contour I think that in a fundamental  sense material progress goes hand in hand with moral progress, understood as making human lives at the most basic levels more humanely livable.

So, for examples, there’s this set of problems: (https://ourworldindata.org/problems-and-progress):

• Every year 300,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes, this means that on any average day 830 mothers die
• The majority of the world – 65% – lives on less than $10 per day.
• And almost 10% live in ‘extreme poverty’, they live on less than $1.90 per day. 
• The world deforested 47 million hectares of forest in the last decade, that’s an area the size of Sweden.
• 60 million children of primary school age are not in school.
• Almost a quarter of the world population – 23% – live in autocratic regimes.
• 14% of the world’s adults do not know how to read and write.
• And 3.7% of all children die before they are five years old. This means that 5.2 million children every year and on any average day the world sees 14,200 child deaths.

and then these improved numbers:

• The number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes declined from 530,000 women in 1990 to 300,000 per year
• The share living in extreme poverty fell from 21% to less than 10% in the last decade – the share living on more than $10 per day increased from a quarter to a third.
• Global deforestation declined three-fold – from 151 million hectares in the 1980s to 47 million hectares in the 2010s.
• The number of primary school age children who are not in school almost halved from over 110 million in the mid-1990s to 60 million.
• The share of the world living in autocratic regimes declined from 45% in the 1980s to 23%.
• The share of the world’s adults who learned how to read and write increased from 70% in 1980 to 86% today.
• And the share of children who died before they were five years old declined from 9.3% in 1990 to 3.7% – the count fell from 12.5 million dead children per year to 5.2 million.

It’s Pinker’s thesis that over time, even though it’s contingent, not teleologically dictated, variable, with steps backwards, with wholesale failure at all times looking at us, on a whole host of significant indices, we are making general progress. (He reports he didn’t start his book, …Better Angels…,—haven’t read it—with this idea in mind, but, rather, his open minded examination of the data on these indices drove his thesis.) 

I understand the divide between morality where there scarcity and backwardness imperil, degrade and destroy  life itself and where all kinds of plenitude raise second order moral problems. But even amidst plenty there are foundational material problems for which basic morality inheres in their amelioration if not solution. For individual flourishing needs some threshold degree of safety and material provision even as that threshold is indeterminate and subject to relative comparisons given particular societies. 

Even when moral concern isn’t strictly tied to safety and material provision, there are moral lines that go forward rather than swing back and forth.

My sense is they proceed from certain (perhaps) axiomatic moral principles like liberty, equality, individuals’ dignity, basic (innate?) individual rights and freedoms, and justice itself as brought conceptually down to earth by notions of rule of law, due process and space between state and citizen. 

Which isn’t to say knotty, perhaps intractable, problems won’t always be with us when these principles or aspects of them conflict with each other; and here is where the pendulum idea makes sense. 

But the forward going lines seem to me to be apparent in the progress of self evident achievements of true social justice such as for, two examples, enfranchising classes of disenfranchised citizens and extending equal rights to classes of people denied them on irrelevant grounds.