So I’ve been musing about why my students love, love, love to try and use rational choice theory, and fail in more-or-less spectacular terms when they try.

See, it’s because of the way they teach theology down here.  Bear with me for a sec, and you’ll see what I mean.

The particular brand of conservative evangelicalism that infests Texas (and, I might add, most of the South and much of the Midwest) combines a deep philosophical commitment to individualism with a profound reverence for the totemic sacredness of the Bible.  So far so Calvin. 

But this latter point — reverence for the Bible-as-totem — comes with a peculiar, and quite old-style Catholic approach to text.  Which is to say that while one must profess to read the text, gaze upon its letters, adore its beauty and mystery, and proclaim loudly and often one’s love for the object, one cannot and must not delve too deeply into the meaning of the text.  Reference it as a symbol as often as you please, but do not attempt to profane the text with one’s untutored and filthy attempts at interpretation.  Don’t trouble your pretty little head with that complicated book, in other words.  Leave that to God’s duly constituted authorities on earth.

In practice what this means is that individual believers take what they believe and profess to be true (especially that which has been taught them by authority) and assign its provenance to the sacred symbol (note, this is different from how Catholics do it, more on which below).  So, if homosexuality is evil, it must be because the Bible says its so.  If America has a high and lonely destiny to bring democracy to the Middle East, it must be because the Bible fortold it.  If worldly riches are a sign of “right living,” it must be because the Bible tells us so. 

Here is where Bush’s own particular take on faith encapsulates the whole thing: when he says that Christianity is central to his belief system, that it is central to his “values” he typically does so by using a curious circumlocution: in his last debate with Sen. Kerry in 2004, for instance, he said “When I make decisions, I stand on principle, and the principles are derived from who I am.”  By “who I am” he (presumably) meant his identity as a Christian.  But note the causality there: the principles derive from his identity, and not the other way around. 

Notice what he does not say: he does not say “when I make decisions, I stand on Christian principles.”  He does not say, “when I make decisions, I stand on principle, and those principles are Christian principles.”  No, instead his principles are derived from him.  His faith is entirely, wholly, “internal” in this respect.  He is a “Christian” because he has decided he is a Christian (and he has done so in a particular way — by “taking Jesus as his personal saviour”).  And when he acts “as a Christian” it is because he, internally, looks to his own judgement as to what constitutes Christian conduct and Christian principles.  And his judgement as to what constitutes Christian conduct and Christian principles is always, already “correct” precisely because (a) he has taken Jesus as his personal saviour, and (b) he is God’s own anointed leader on earth.* 

This is very different from the way most Mainline Protestants — or, indeed, most Catholics and Jews — understand what it means to move from faith to principles to action.  For Catholics and Jews especially, but perhaps less so for Mainliners like myself, faith is “external” inasmuch as we look to “reason, experience, scripture, and tradition” (in the words of the Methodists) to tell us what it “means” to be a “good Catholic,” a “good Jew,” or a “good Christian.”  To be sure, faith is often a matter of wrestling with tradition, or the text, or the pronouncements of the hierarchy, and trying to live up in our hearts to what we are told constitutes rightness.  And while Catholics don’t traditionally spend much time reading the Bible themselves, there is a great body of tradition and authority that dictates what constitutes “Catholicness.”  One cannot declare oneself a Catholic and then state baldly what “Catholic principles” are, just as I could not tomorrow declare myself a Jew and then proceed (such arrogance!) to say that I made decisions as a Jew because Jewish principles derived from my identity as a Jew.  Doing the first used to get you burned at the stake.  Doing the second is probably merely risible, but would also speak to a profound disrespect for what it “means” to be a Jew.

Bush (and evangelicals more generally) step outside this whole conundrum entirely.  They have discovered a means by which they can declare that they are acting “as Christians” basically “because I said so.” 

What does this have to do with rational choice theory, I hear you ask?  Plenty.

Rational choice theory posits that all of social analysis can be reduced, in the last instance, to the examination of individual actions.  Individual action derives, solely, from individual preferences (which are “given” and thus amenable niether to prediction ahead of time, nor to change).  While the ability to act on one’s preferences may be subject to the resources at hand, and certainly subject to the actions of others, that’s basically it.   

When students read this, they basically say “ya ha! That’s the theory for me!”  They do so because as a set of propositions it most closely “fits” with what they have been taught in Sunday school (you and you alone make decisions, on the basis of principles that derive solely from your identity).  It probably “helps” that other theories we discuss (conflict, especially) bring up “ugly” or “pessimistic” subjects (such as exploitation) or even “heretical” ideas (such as the existence of social structures that impinge upon individual agency).  So, when given a “choice” of theories to “prefer” they go with the one that “sounds right.”

But then they take it one step further.  In almost all cases, my students apply their theological training to the explication and interpretation of the theory.  Which is to say, they decide what it means “internally” without bothering to read the text (Mancur Olson, James Coleman, etc.).  They impute to the text meaning which is plainly not there (where, precisely, in the Bible does it say drinking, dancing, and smoking cigarettes is a sin?  Where, precisely, in Foundations of Social Theory does it say that when people do things you wouldn’t do, that means that they are acting “irrationally?”).  They create arguments “applying rational choice theory” that are entire fictions of their own (often poorly-written) imaginings precisely because they are writing on the basis of their own understanding of the theory, and the theory derives from who they are.

When David Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University** says — and I quote — that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education, I believe he’s saying something basically along the lines of what I’ve laid out here.  And it frustrates me to no end to have to deal with the intellectual fallacies that result from taking the theological principle of “the priesthood of all believers” to its perverse, reductio ad absurdum, extreme.  

*Here is where the heresy takes on a fabulously self-contradicting twist: although everyone (in principle) should become a Christian in this way, in actual fact only a particular category of people can decide “on the basis of who they are” what constitutes Christian principles.  I, by dint of my sexuality, am not one of those people.  Therefore, this whole essay is “obviously” untrue. 

**By the by, my own namesake took his divinity degree from that same institution.

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Every day, another outrage (pronounce “oo-trahzh,” of course).

I’m all for college hijinx, but dude, on MLK Day?  Have some respect for the dead, why don’t you?

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Openmindedness for me, but not thee.

So, every year I teach a couple sections of a course that operates as a combination intro-for-non-majors, satisfy-the-distribution-requirements, and ramp-up-the-credit-hours-the-department-generates.  I find it interesting to teach, mainly because I use it to teach social theory about pretty basic stuff (race, class, gender, sex — you know, the usual).

At the beginning of each semester, I give a survey.  The survey covers all kinds of things — mainly attitudinal questions, but also some demographics.  At the end of the survey I put in one open-ended question that I use primarily as a way to troll for ideas for the next semester.  The question asks what people think is the most pressing issue facing society today (not quite that wording).   The answers I get are usually pretty uninteresting, but occasionally there are flashes of brilliance.  And, for the record, I have in the past seriously re-worked the course on the basis of suggestions made in the question. 

Every year so far there’s been at least one thing that’s surprsed me.  So, the first year I was astonished at how privileged my students really are (reported median family incomes somewhere north of $125k).  Another year it was the openness with which they expressed their sense of class entitlement — on the one hand many of them thought that inequality exists to benefit the rich and the powerful, and on the other hand at least some of those same students thought that inequality is necessary to ensure America’s prosperity.  I sincerely hope that these particular students (this year there are only three) pay special attention when we read Weber’s “Protestant Ethic.”

This year’s eyebrow-raiser, however, came with the last two questions.  The most common answer to “what’s the biggest issue facing America” was some version of “intolerance” — variously expressed as “lack of open-mindedness,” “lack of acceptance” or “unwillingness to tolerate others’ beliefs.”

Now wait for it…

About half a dozen of those students — so, not many, but about a tenth of the class — also stated that they believed homosexuality to be “always wrong.”

So, acceptance is a problem, but homosexuality is something different. 

Teaching is such a delicious challange, isn’t it?

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So, one of the authors at this other site (written by gentleman far smarter and more hard-working than myself) notes a curious thing: people are constantly drawing analogies about the person, or the administration, of George W. Bush.  And these analogies typically compare our current incumbent to some former President.  As in “George W. Bush is like Nixon for the following reasons” or “George W. Bush is like Truman for the following reasons.”

Ya know, it’s a funny thing when you start drawing analogies. Every time you say “X is like Y because of Z” you focus attention on Y.  It’s basically a way of shifting the analysis from the thing at hand to something else.  Now, in the social sciences and humanities (and even in the “hard” sciences, for that matter) people well understand the possibilities of deceit (or false direction) that come with reasoning by analogy.  But we continue to use analogies because sometimes we simply can’t analyze something directly. We shift the analysis from the thing at hand precisely because the thing isn’t “at hand” and we cannot (for whatever reason) analyze it directly.  So, physicists look at photographs of electron scatter plots because they can’t quite “look” directly at the inner structure of an atom.  Anthropologists look at ritual practice in action because examining texts, or even reported narrative recollection, gives you a very different “sense” of what goes on in human interaction (so, reading King Lear is one thing, and listening to someone tell you what it was like to watch King Lear is another.  And neither is at all the same as sitting in the audience yourself).  Sociologists come up with “proxy” measures all the time — a methodological form of reasoning by analogy — when they can’t come up with “the real thing.”  So, we can say we’re studying “globalization” but that’s really too “big” a concept to actually measure.  So what do people do?  They look at the speed of global resource flows, or organizational connectivity, or what have you.

That’s not what’s going on when people say “Bush is like President X because of fact Z.”  No, people draw analogies for President Bush because they desparately don’t want to analyze President Bush directly.  To do so would require them to face some cold and ugly facts.  Stop analogizing, people.  Bush is not like anybody — George W. Bush is George W. Bush.  If you want to defend the man, defend him on his own terms.

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So it snowed, literally, like half an inch this morning.  Half an inch of the puffiest, powderiest, most beautiful snow imaginable.  As good for driving as could be wished, and while not perfect for snowball-making, not half-bad either.

In response to this, the university closed.

On a happier note, Governor Goodhair’s inauguration was… cramped in style, though not cancelled.  I am not one to dabble regularly in theodicy, but I will admit I am sorely tempted.

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Turns out, a vegan.  Or perhaps not “fuck” exactly, but at least patronize.

So I’m eating dinner at my local vegan restaurant (no shit, and they have the best chopped BBQ sandwich in Cowtown).  Just minding my own business, reading some old sociology of the gay ghetto.

When I look up on the wall, and staring down at me is a movie poster.

Wait for it.

Africa - Texas Style! The cowboy who came to tame a bucking bronc called Africa!

Date of release? 1967.

Note the child riding the zebra.

In the immortal words of Aaron McGruder: wait, you mean to tell me there’s a place where white people eat that’s called “Cracker Barrel?”

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So, would it be too much (or too obscure) f I put up a copy of this cartoon next to the sheet where students sign up for office hours?  

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Where does the agency lie in this sentence?

“Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

Now, I’ll grant that the author (or rather, speaker) of this sentence appears to take a hit when they include the second clause.  Taking responsibility for things that you apparently did not do involves a certain degree of generosity.  Or something.  However, the author (or rather speaker), by committing a grammatical error, accomplished two tasks: they reproduced the kind of sloppy speech endemic to most of the writing I see almost every day in my line of work.  Secondly (and, I’ll quickly add, much more seriously), they constructed a sentence whose grammatical structure logically contradicts its face-value semantics.  This latter issue constitutes a serious political problem when the speaker is the President of the United States and the issue at stake involves a war that has consumed the lives of 3,000 American men and women and scores of thousands of Iraqis.

See, this constitutes a textbook case of the passive voice.  Note what the sentence could say, but does not:

A.) “I have made mistakes, and the responsibility for those mistakes rests with me” (or, more pointedly: “I have made mistakes, and I take responsibility for those mistakes).

B.) “Some members of my leadership team have made mistakes, but as Commander-in-Chief the responsibility for those mistakes rests with me.”

In both of those latter cases, the author of the sentence makes the agency clear: they highlight the subject (”I,” “some members of my leadership team”), the verb (”made”) and the object (”mistakes”).  By simplifying the subject-verb-object relations, the author of sentences A and B clarifies who made the mistakes and (by extension) who bears the responsibility for those mistakes.

In the original sentence, however, the author declined to include a subject, and the object precedes the verb.  This leads to the grammatical illusion that the object “did” the verb, causing a logical recursion.  In other words, even though semantically the sentence reads that the author (“me” – the very last word in the sentence) takes responsibility for those mistakes, grammatically the sentence reads that mistakes “happened” without an agent.  And if we cannot find (or name) an agent for an act of malfeasance, ineptitude, or dereliction, then the task of assigning responsibility becomes rather more difficult. 

In the realm of criminal justice, for instance, claiming assault (or any kind of damage, really) requires naming the agent who caused the tort.  True, in certain limited cases (environmental pollution, for instance), the government steps in as the agent of last resort.  But this happens only where the responsible agents no longer exist (i.e., bankrupt companies) or where the damage is, in the insurance companies’ phrase, “an act of God” (i.e., Hurricane Katrina).  In the latter case, of course, the government steps in to repair the tragedy which has befallen the commons – which is less an act of grace than simply the sort of thing for which we pay taxes. 

The author (or speaker) of our original sentence does not claim either of these two special cases.  The President does not, it appears, believe that the agents responsible for the Iraq debacle no longer exist – else presumably he would have trumpeted that fact in his speech.  Nor, it appears, does he quite suggest that the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East constitutes a matter of happenstance (though Rumsfeld, in his famous phrase “stuff happens” came close to saying that).  Nor even, for a man so quick to appropriate Biblical language, does he pull a Pat Robertson and claim to see the will of the Almighty (else he might have to admit that God, in His unknowable wisdom, has seen fit, in the words of Job (12: 17-19), to “leadeth counsellers away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools.  He looseth the bond of kings, and girdeth their loins with a girdle.  He leadeth princes away spoiled, and overthroweth the mighty.”)

No, instead he used a grammatical error to put forth a logical fallacy. In doing so, he accomplished a nice piece of political sleight-of-hand.  He not only refused to take on the role of agent himself (thus evacuating of meaning the second clause of the sentence).  He also declined to “name names.”  This monstrous act of bloody ineptitude arose, in the President’s view, not out of chance, not from causes we do not yet understand, but by the will of agents whose identity he chooses deliberately to obscure.  Mistakes were made, in other words, but he will not dwell on who made them.

But that is not all.  In what sort of context did the author/speaker of this sentence put this passive assumption of responsibility?  In a rather ugly Lakoffian frame.  The rest of the paragraph reads as follows:

“The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do.  Where mistakes…” etc.

The author/speaker makes the agency quite clear in the second and third sentences of this paragraph.  Those sentences contain no passive voice.  No, the author/speaker highlights that “our troops” (subject) “have fought” (verb) “bravely” (adverb).  “They” (subject) “have done” (verb) “everything” (object).  The speaker of those two sentences knows exactly whom to credit for bravely fighting.  He knows exactly whom to credit for doing everything.  And he follows up that agentic credit with a deliciously, scandalously, fallacious sentence where the agency is unclear.

So. Who chopped down that cherry tree, George? 

Hmmm? 

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So, in the spirit of procrastination from (a) revising my Research Methods syllabus, (b) drafting my annual report, (c) drafting a paper for my annual professional conference, (d) writing a rec letter, (e) applying for a job somewhere far beyond Satan’s Dominion on Earth, and (f) putting up a fence, I propose the following conundrum:

To wit: what is an acceptable non-answer answer to the question “what guy would you flip for?”

This question arises out of a rather convoluted set of circumstances surrounding the my+partner’s busy holiday schedule.  See, one evening last month we had no less than three holiday parties to attend on the same night.  The first party was fun, but forgettable (seriously: I can’t even remember at this point whose party it was — a product, perhaps, of what transpired later that evening).  The third party was fun, if hallucinatingly boozy (seriously: one poor woman had one too many of my martinis — I warned her! — and spent the next half hour standing and swaying in front of the outdoor fire pit muttering to herself “ooh, look at the pretty colors!”  Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that a plastic deck chair had fallen into the pit…).

It was the second party, however, that was the true disaster.  See, it was put on by two friends of ours from church.  The wife is a lovely women, a bustalicious ash-blond whip-smart sexually self-assured ordained minister from the geographic dial tone of America.*  Her husband is a terribly shy computer nerd/corn-fed farm boy, the sort of fellow who marries a mean woman to protect him from the world.

So far so good, right?  Who could lose with such promising hosts?  We thought so too, especially inasmuch as we thought that it would be a typical grad-student party — crowded and lousy with pretentious and disgustingly over-educated divinity school students — and hence the kind of party where we would (a) fit right in, and (b) be able to duck out after a standard 30 minute cameo.

We were wrong.  Boy howdy were we wrong.  There were seven guests, including the hosts, the partner and I.  That left three other people, one of whom was also ordained (Catholic), one of whom was in the process of leaving her prior career as a gym teacher to become a Unitarian minister, while the third — a nurse — came with the gym teacher/seminarian.  Needless to add, the last two were lesbians.  So, a tally of: two gay men, two lesbians, two straight people, and a Catholic priest.  This had the makings of a bad, bad joke.

We proceed to play Apples to Apples.  Oh, but it gets worse.

Halfway through the game, the hostess — ticked, perhaps, that the lesbian seminarian was cleaning our clocks, or maybe simply bored — throws down her cards and announces to everyone: “Alright, I want to know.  Who’s your gay fuck?  [My husband] won’t tell me his!”

And a hush fell over the crowd.  The partner and I, being well-bred WASPs and so desperate to maintain some semblence of decorum, decided to take the conversational ball and run with it.  We first established that what she meant (of course) was, who’s “the chick you’d switch for?” (or, in the case of her now-mortified husband, guy you’d flip for).  That, while we ourselves hadn’t ever considered the possibility, we did have it on good authority that for women it’s typically Angelina Jolie (or, in the case of our hostess, that girl from The Karate Kid). 

Thankfully, we were soon relieved of the sight of poor hubby being grilled by his wife (not to mention the possibility that the priest might actually offer up an answer — Macauley Culkin?  Anna Paquin?  The thought does not bear dwelling on) by the toot of the Mexican doorbell calling us for pick-up to our next party. 

But the question has hung around in the back of my brain since that night.  Not so much my own answer, of course — I suppose it would be some combination of Susan Sontag (circa 1970), Nancy Pelosi (circa 1980), Michelle Yeoh, and this one foxy Columbia law student I took to see the Ice Storm about ten years ago. In other words, a smart, principled woman who could kick my ass and looks great in a pair of corduroy overalls.

No, the question that’s hung around in the back of my head is this: what answer would serve to save this poor fellow the embarassment of having his wife constantly bring this sort of thing up at parties?  Because the content of the answer quite obviously matters far less than having an answer.  It was painfully clear that the man had never, not in all his born days, considered the possibility.  It was equally clear that his sexually self-assured wife considered it her bounden duty as a third-wave feminist not simply to explore such possibilities herself, but to make fordemsure that her provincial hubby take on a metrosexual identity.  Which, evidently, includes serious contemplation of the limits and extensions of one’s own desire. 

So, what answer is (a) believable, (b) won’t lead to follow-ups along the lines of “oh, well if you like A, then you must like muscley red-heads!”, and (c) would be publicly defensible if it were to come up in public conversation in the future? 

Some possibilities that have already been offered:

a.) Joe Montana, circa 1990 (because I mean, really, who didn’t love Joe, despite his scab antics?)  Along the same lines: Drew Bledsoe, or Bret Favre.

b.) Justin Timberlake (as in, if you go out with your buddies to the titty bar and don’t take anyone home, he’d probably be amenable to helping you out at the end of the night, right?)

c.) A superhero — probably Spiderman.  Though it must be said that comics require enough sublimation of the erotic anyway that suggesting something like that threatens too many deeply-cherised psychological barriers.  Or in the inimitable words of a college friend of my partner: “no straight man could actually acknowledge a wookie as a fuckable object.”

And on that note, I will open up the floor for suggestions.

*That would be one of the vowel states there in the middle of the country, ya’ll.

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