Brussels: It doesn't matter if the perceived risk is (mostly) fiction

The Brussels attack today has everyone back on their heels again. It goes without saying that the "genius" of terrorism is that it elevates the perception of risk beyond reality, and provokes responses that are out of proportion to the odds of someday being a victim yourself. If you're used to thinking in terms of financial securities, you can think of what terrorists are doing as shorting the public sense of security (which has a very high value and is hard to build) at fire-sale prices to steal a political benefit to just a few (in this case, ISIS/Daesh). The narrative that we are not safe is created, one that is so strong that it's hard to walk it back (even after the debatable happy ending to the Paris attacks with the arrest of Salah Abdeslam). If you don't like financial market analogies, another way of putting this is that the terrorists are fragmenting the public to create a stable constituency comprised of individuals who are so scared that they are willing to destroy themselves in order to save themselves; once this constituency is big enough, all they have to do is sit back and watch it destroy itself.

So, today, stock markets are weakening, the US is ramping up security, Trump is already demagoguing it.

It doesn't matter that the perceived risk to any one individual is largely a fiction. In fact, it's worth taking a detour to talk about how fiction works so that we can understand why we as humans are so comfortable taking extreme, maximalist positions in response to terror attacks.

Fiction writers, especially novelists, are implored by their editors and other experts to raise the stakes quickly, in the first 50 pages, or else lose the reader. It doesn't matter if the material is tragic, comedic, romantic, thrilling, or otherwise. Fiction must find a way to capture your attention and pull you in. And if you're the author, editing your story to create that tension might involve asking yourself some of these kinds questions (taken from an article in Writers Digest by Jessica Page Morrell):

• Have you begun the story at the last possible moment?
• Does the opening create intense curiosity?
• Is there a single dramatic question that focuses the story? 
• Is the story overpopulated? 
• Does the story locale contribute to the tension?
• Are the subplots a source of tension?
• Do the flashbacks contain tension, or do they meander backward in time?
• Is there a major reversal or surprise midway? 
• Is there too little or too much foreshadowing? 
• Have you withheld information from the reader until the last moment? 
• Are the stakes high and the consequences for failure dreadful?

In short, does your story involve real crisis? Are the stakes well defined, and do they really matter to the characters and the readers?

What focuses our attention is the tension that comes with anticipating how the story will unfold. The Empire's destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars made it quite clear that the Rebel base on Yavin 4 would certainly be destroyed if the small band of fighters failed to destroy the Death Star (in contrast, there was nothing at stake in The Phantom Menace). Frank and Claire Underwood live with everything to lose in House of Cards, and even if I don't like them as people I find myself compelled to see how they maintain the cracked and plastered edifice that keeps them in power. In The Hunt for Red October, the Soviets stand to lose their revolutionary stealth propulsion system if Marko Ramius can find his way to surrender the submarine under his command to the United States; at the same time, the captain of the USS Dallas makes a huge gamble to trust that Ramius is indeed planning to defect. It could go very badly for either party. The vast bulk of Arthur Dent's adventures in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occur after his home planet of Earth is destroyed, and so drawing us in to wonder what could possible come next.

It's no accident that the stakes, as a concept, are both (1) a way in which we evaluate compelling fiction, and (2) how we define the fault lines of cultural change. If the stakes are high, and the actions of a group or groups would lead to greater risk of loss, then the change will be resisted. Conflict sells as fiction, AND it's the engine of cultural change. What do I mean by this?

In fiction, a character who has lost everything discovers he has a son he never knew about. The discovery reintroduces the possibility of loss to the character's story, and the character now embarks on a journey to prevent that loss. The stakes go up even more if the son has some reason to be fearful of his long-lost father's reappearance: say, for instance, the father was connected to the mob and the son is running for office. The stakes define the range of plausible actions that the characters might choose, both foreshadowing the development of the story, and introducing a conflict with an uncertain outcome in which one side or the other might lose big.

In cultural change, the stakes establish the boundaries for how and -- very importantly -- how quickly cultural change can be expected to take place. As long as the stakes remain high for a group or sub-group, you can expect them to resist change. The fossil fuel industry is less likely to give credence to climate change research since doing so would imply an imperative to act to reduce / cap emissions, thus stranding their assets in the ground and gutting their balance sheets.

In fiction as in culture, the stakes evolve in four different ways:

• Fizzle: The loss associated with a cultural change is no longer deemed serious, either because another solution has appeared or because the problem that the solution solved is no longer a threat (e.g., as child mortality rates drop, so can birth rates)
• (New) Crisis: The loss associated with NOT undergoing a cultural change reveals itself to be more serious than the loss associated with the change itself (e.g., the impact of future climate change if nothing is done) -- even then, there will be core constituencies, usually the most powerful with the most to lose, that will not buy in, so the conflict may still continue
• Upside: The benefits or advantages associated with a cultural change reveal themselves to significantly and immediately (or very quickly) outweigh the cost (e.g., getting a smart phone versus a flip phone)
• Death: The loss associated with a cultural change is now moot due to lack of standing interest (e.g., the dead have no need for a lower retirement age).

These are the fundamental building blocks of cultural change, and each of them involves changes to the perceived stakes. They punctuate what would otherwise be periods of stasis while everyone does the routine, every-day work of doing what they believe will protect what's theirs.

And it's all about perception. Our perception of actual risk is often inflated. I grew up in the 70s and 80s on a white bread city block in Long Beach, California, swarmed by hordes of children playing in the streets. Today, those streets are empty. There aren't any fewer children, but parents don't let them roam free like they used to. I'm not sure what triggered the change, but I tend to think it's tied to the emergence of national news broadcasting delivered in the style of local news, or maybe it was John Walsh's personal tragedy and his show America's Most Wanted. Not to diminish the real risk of non-family / stereotypical kidnappings of minors in the US, but I would expect that national media exposure of tragic cases in a nation of ~300M people would tend to elevate the perception of risk among parents beyond the actual risk, to the point that the upside to "roaming free" is no longer possible to discern. So in cultural change, it doesn't matter if the perceived stakes are a fiction (or just exaggerated). Until the perceived stakes evolve in one of the four ways listed above, don't expect anyone to see it otherwise. In fact, expect cultural solutions to adjust to fit the stakes (i.e., kids no longer roam the streets).

Same with Brussels. The narrative told by terrorists, using explosives as their medium, is so powerful that we are drawn into the story without much real reflection. Governments then try to tell a counter-narrative with a cultural solution that involves trying to 100% guarantee everyone's safety. (Except that the Belgians appear to be realistic about this counter-narrative, even if Trump isn't.) Thus, unless we can (1) find a way to tell another narrative that successfully fizzles the threat from terrorism, or (2) our actions create new cultural crises that everyone recognizes as worse than the terrorist threat itself, or (3) we identify huge and immediate upsides to avoiding buying into the terrorist narrative, or (4) the people who remember the Brussels attack all die off, don't expect people to see this in any other way than an existential risk, even if the odds of being hurt or killed in such an attack (1 in 20 million) is still far less than being attacked by a shark (1 in 11.5 million), killed by a dog (1 in 18 million), or killed in a car accident in your lifetime (1 in 100 ... wear your seatbelt and don't drive like an idiot!).

There's something interesting here about fiction, as well. What are we doing when we tell stories? Are we working through the implications of conflict so that we can better understand the risks and benefits of our decisions? Are we simply entertaining ourselves with tales of high stakes? Or is fiction just a way of reflecting how we think as humans? Or is it a way of building and reinforcing cultural solutions, regardless of whether the cultural solutions are the most rational?

The Trump effect: what would it mean to grow up during a Trump presidency?

I'm a little late to it, but Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post opined last week about the effect that she believes Donald Trump is already having on behavior of school children who have been exposed to either the words of Donald Trump himself, or his words filtered through their parents.

“Build the wall!” That was the chant at a high school basketball game in Indiana last week, directed by kids from a majority-white school who held up Trump signs and yelled at the opposing players and fans, who were from a predominantly Latino school.

"Get ’em out!" is what Trump screams at rallies when he sees Black Lives Matter and other protesters, even silent ones. This is not far off from what some third-graders allegedly said to two brown-skinned classmates in their Northern Virginia classroom. The mother of one of the children, Evelyn Momplaisir, posted an account on Facebook:

I just got a call from my son’s teacher giving me a heads up that two of his classmates decided to point out the 'immigrants' in the class who would be sent 'home' when Trump becomes president. They singled him out and were pointing and laughing at him as one who would have to leave because of the color of his skin. In third grade . . . in Fairfax County . . . in 2016!

Fairfax County school officials confirmed the account. “The teacher has spoken with the students, and communicated with parents of the class, regarding appropriate classroom decorum,” said John Torre, a spokesman for the school system. “FCPS works to create an environment that is conducive to learning and where everyone is treated with respect.”

Are these just a few bad apples? I don't know. But I've seen the footage of Trump rallies, and I know what's being said. And we insult our own intelligence if we think this kind of rhetoric isn't feeding a very dark and very dirty message to our kids.

I believe the cat is already out of the bag with a wide swath of Republican voters. Trump has sold public civility at fire-sale prices to serve his own ends. There really isn't any going back from that. This newly consolidated, energized bloc of voters are now a community that will reinforce each others' message and teach the message to their children.

I keep thinking about someone I met in New Orleans over a decade ago while passing through with a friend on our way to do field research in Central America. My friend suggested we stop by his uncle's place while we waited for our flight. He warned me, "He's pretty conservative, and from a different world, so maybe don't stick your neck out by saying anything too provocative." I decided to more or less keep my mouth shut.

My friend's uncle was a very gracious host. He offered us food and I gave him a nice bottle of bourbon as an advance gift for putting us up in his house on our return trip. We talked about hunting and fishing, their family, old times, and what it was like to run a small business in a town like New Orleans (pre-Katrina). And my friend and I watched him finish off my bottle of bourbon at an alarming rate.

As I suppose can happen in those moments, the conversation turned to the n*****s (sorry, Louis CK) on the other side of the flood control canal who could never be trusted and would rob you blind if you didn't watch your back. I was stunned to silence. I might have chuckled nervously. After all, I was eating his food and would be sleeping in his house in a week or so, so just walking out wasn't an option. He had plenty to say on the subject, which eventually meandered to a wide ranging discussion of the evils of liberalism, and then communism (oddly). I remember saying, "Hey, I'm not a communist or a socialist, but isn't it a good idea to protect labor? Not everyone can be a wealthy industrialist, and the wealthy industrialist needs labor."

And then he said, "My daddy always said communism's evil. You callin' my daddy a liar?" OK, drunk guy ... got it.

Child members of the Italian Fascist youth organization Opera Nazionale Balilla. Hyperbole? Maybe, maybe not. (source)

We know that the cultural leanings of parents have a strong influence on those of their children. The influence extends from the community and nation as well (on the positive side, see the Boy and Girl Scouts; on the negative side, see Italy's Fascist Youth, and Germany's Hitler Youth in the 1930s and 1940s). It's tied to the newspapers and magazines that are found around the house, the TV channels viewed, the radio listened to, and perhaps most importantly the kinds of cultural problems faced by their families. It's guided by what's heard in school. And if the stakes are high, and the odds of domestic catastrophe feel a little too close for comfort, then the simplest scapegoats are the first to be hit. The best demagogues know how to facilitate that. Trump, if anything, is an excellent demagogue. He knows that it's easier for his followers to fight for scraps under the table than to fight for a seat.

And when that influence goes on for long enough (in the case of Trump for almost a year), it has a lasting effect. Mussolini's little fascists may have recanted in adulthood, possibly even felt shame in what they did as children (or what their parents and community guided them into doing), but the longer they lurked under its umbra, the more that shadow felt like home. Who are we to call their daddies liars?

Boy bands, weed, and abortion: how fast does culture change?

How fast does culture change, and what controls it? This topic deserves a lot of words (even more than I'll write here), so it's going to feel a bit long, and it won't be as topical as some other posts (e.g., Trump's effect on US culture). To keep the discussion grounded, I will draw from real-life examples of cultural change, such as boy bands, marijuana legalization, and the abortion debate (below).

But before diving in, I need to construct some conceptual building-blocks. You'll might be familiar with some of these:

1. Intergenerational conflict
2. Generation length
3. Loss aversion
4. Multiple time scales

The first concept is intergenerational conflict. I wrote in a previous post, "[C]ultural change is the result of a continuous conflict, taking place as the world continuously changes, between the entrenched, habituated, but efficient 'old', and the brash, foolish, time-wasting, creative, non-entrenched 'young.'" Norman Ryder of the University of Wisconsin made a similar point in 1965* when discussing the sociology of intergenerational conflict:

Society persists despite the mortality of its individual members, through processes of demographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion of birth cohorts. These may pose a threat to stability but they also provide the opportunity for societal transformation.

This conflict's constant dynamism ensures that the experience of the old and the new insights of the young are continuously "metabolized" to create novel -- hopefully positive -- cultural solutions.

This is not a perfect process. If the balance is off (and it is a near certainty that it will be), then the tendencies of one side or the other predominate. If there is too much "parent" influence, then novel cultural solutions tend to look calcified, inappropriate to their times, outdated, possibly self-damaging, and maybe even catastrophic. Too much "children" influence, and society roams too far into uncharted territory, without the wisdom of experience, making self-damaging and maybe catastrophic decisions along the way. Theoretically, a good balance could be struck where neither side "wins" outright, but rather the community does (see here for more). Here are some simple examples of intergenerational conflict:

1. A toddler wants to touch a hot stove out of curiosity; her parent tells her not to and holds her back from harm.
2. A grown son wants to farm his family's land, just like his dad did; daddy's still farming it.
3. A boy wants to see more of his father (he misses his daddy); dad needs to work harder, away from home, to pay for his son's eventually very expensive university education.
4. A child is curious about where babies come from (and is in danger of hearing the incorrect story from peers); the parents would like to hold off discussing it as long as possible (to avoid putting ideas in the child's head).
5. The young want government investment in education and infrastructure; the old want government investment in the social safety net, especially for retirees.
6. "Don't trust anyone over 30" (quote attributed to Jack Weinberg, 1964)
7. "A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." (Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, but possibly coined by Edmund Burke)

None of these is rocket science -- these examples are just natural conflicts that exist between generations. There are no obvious solution to any of them, only the process of finding a good answer. The toddler wants to touch the stove, and the parents make the correct move to prevent the toddler from doing so. But it would be a mistake to discourage the curiosity itself. The grown son might solve his farming problem by moving away and buying/leasing his own farm; but then the father would lose an experienced right-hand man.

In general, due to their deep experience, the older generation wants to continue to control and guide the activities of their communities (see Hillary Clinton); but the young can see where that experience is outdated, or where it doesn't solve their own problems, and so advance solutions of their own, regardless of support from the old (see Bernie Sanders). Meanwhile, the old push back and put roadblocks in the way of the young (see Democratic super-delegates). In any event, the young want to invest in future possibility, while the old want to invest in the past comfort they have become accustomed to (or they at least fall back on the cultural solutions they developed when they were young, e.g., Clinton praising Kissinger). And so on. No equilibrium is ever reached; there is no stable "fitness" maximum (i.e., Sewell Wright's adaptive landscape). Nevertheless, this is the principle engine of cultural change.

The second concept is generation length, or the average familial generation length (see here, too). This is the time between the birth of one familial generation and the birth of the next (on average). In developed economies, this time period is typically in the upper 20s or 30s, depending on the country. In developing economies, generation length has consistently remained in the lower 20s. It makes sense that generation length should set a tempo for cultural change -- by the time a person is grown enough to have children of their own, their personality and foundational experiences are already locked in (i.e., culture has been set); a great deal of effort would be needed to push those experiences aside. But before that happens, young people are as malleable as they will ever be, and so the time available for cultural attitudes, beliefs, and habits of thinking to change is approximately the generation length.

To make writing about time scales and generation lengths easier, I'm going to adopt some symbols. I'll use a capital T to refer to the generation length (i.e., T = 27 years, etc.).

The third concept is loss aversion,** or the fact that there is a much stronger impulse among humans (and probably other species) to avoid a loss than there is to seek a similarly sized gain. This aversion is particularly intense when times are lean, and even a small loss could lead to catastrophe. If a cultural change looks like it will leave you with less than you had before (in terms of influence, money, property, a comfortable daily routine, connections, etc.), then it is very likely that you will resist that cultural change. By this logic, loss aversion should be more intense when real effort or competition is involved, or when people perceive the odds of catastrophic loss as high. As long as the risk of this loss is perceived to be real, then people will resist the cultural change that drives that perception. I make the general assumption (while fully expecting there to be exceptions) that when the stakes are high, loss aversion entirely prevents individuals, and by extension communities, from changing their minds. Only big cultural or external changes can shake the deeply held, politico-economical perceptions of entrenched and very often older cohorts.

The time it takes for people to get around, over, or through the perception that loss will result from a cultural change sets the core time scale of cultural change. For simplicity, I'll use the greek letter tau, \(\tau \), to describe this time scale. \(\tau \) is the time it will take before we can expect one or many of the following to allow the perception of potential loss to be overcome:

1. Fizzle: The loss associated with a cultural change is no longer deemed serious, either because another solution has appeared or because the problem that the solution solved is no longer a threat (e.g., as child mortality rates drop, so can birth rates)
2. Crisis: The loss associated with NOT undergoing a cultural change reveals itself to be more serious than the loss associated with the change itself (e.g., the impact of future climate change if nothing is done) -- even then, there will be core constituencies, usually the most powerful with the most to lose, that will not buy in, so the conflict may still continue
3. Upside: The benefits or advantages associated with a cultural change reveal themselves to significantly outweigh the cost (e.g., getting a smart phone versus a flip phone)
4. Death: The loss associated with a cultural change is now moot due to lack of standing interest (i.e., the dead have no need for a lower retirement age).

The fourth and final concept is that culture can change over multiple time scales. This might seem like a trivial point; after all, we would expect fashion (\(\tau \) ~ 0.5 yr; Paris Fashion Week happens twice a year) to change faster than the legal system (\(\tau \) ~ 25-100 yrs), faster than the interstate highway system (\(\tau \) ~ 60 yrs), or faster than the reverberations from our nation's history of enslavement and plundering of African Americans (\(\tau \) ~ 400 yrs). Some cultural changes occur many times within a generation, while others may not happen at all in our lifetimes.

This is all true, but the point is that while culture is changing, so are the individual people who comprise society. New ones are being born all the time, and the old die off. So what I really mean by multiple time scales is that there are processes with time scales that are tied to the cultural problem itself (\(\tau \)) and there are others that are tied to the people and how quickly they "turnover" across their generation length (T). We would expect that some things change faster than a generation length, and some things change more slowly.

I'll use all of the concepts discussed here as I dig into the examples. You'll note that each is organized to illustrate different values of \(\tau \) with respect to T:

• Boy bands: \(\tau \) < T, where cultural change requires less time to happen than generation length
• Marijuana legalization: \(\tau \approx T\), where cultural change occurs at the same time scale as generation length 
• Abortion debate: \(\tau \) > T, where cultural change requires more time to happen than generation length

(These also correspond to three of the four "cultural institutions" buckets in the 2-by-2 matrix I shared in the posts on Trump: "transient," "fragile," and "fundamental," respectively. More on this in another post.)

BOY BANDS

So let's dig in. Fandom in the boy band universe is about meeting deep, largely adolescent or pre-adolescent needs that can't be met elsewhere, such as the need for romantic escapism. Until other means of meeting those needs are found, typically prior to the close of adolescence, being a fan of a boy band is one of many means of coping with the stress of adolescence and even surviving it. So given what stands to be lost should these two to five boys from the boy band stop doing what they're doing (or get accused of lip-syncing ... remember this?), perceived catastrophe is just around the corner, and boy band fans will do what they can to avoid that (i.e., loss aversion).

Normally, once a cohort of fans committed to a particular boy band moves beyond the need for boy bands (i.e., the perceived loss fizzles; see above), then -- with a few exceptions like the Beatles (see Beatlemania) who also hand mind-boggling songwriting talent -- the boy band will quickly wash up. Sure, if the members still get along and can still produce music and go on tour, and they are still young and cute, they could continue to draw fans; but as young and cute as they might be, they're not younger or cuter than the next generation of boy bands ... you know, the ones who really have little sister's attention.

Here's a timeline of the history of boy bands since 1958 (sources here and here):

An abridged timeline of the history of boy bands, 1958-2016.

Note the rapid rise and fall of different bands, especially since Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block's 1988 album Hangin' Tough. Not only does the throne rapidly switch owners, but there are even periods where the public becomes sick of the lot of them, or at least contemptuous of them enough to not pay as much attention for a few years. Widespread mockery and derision followed after accusations of lip-syncing were leveled against Milli Vanilli (totally justified) and New Kids on the Block (partially justified, but the claim was later recanted). Then the mid 1990s saw a resurgence of boy bands with Boyz II Men, Take That, the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. Boy band "overload" led to another backlash in the early to mid 2000s. The gap was filled in 2006 by the Jonas Brothers, and more recently and overwhelmingly by One Direction.

Which band rose to prominence at any given time was entirely market driven, and so the particulars almost don't matter for how we understand the process. Basically, their success was founded on lots of kids buying singles and albums, and attending concerts. And the time scale of change was set by the time it takes for a boy band to burn through an adolescent's musical attention span (or by a much rarer capacity to carry their success into subsequent cohorts or to evolve along with the kids who made them huge). Here, \(\tau\) is set by the time it takes for the underlying cultural problem solved by boy bands to fizzle.

So the time scale of cultural change in the boy band universe is less than the generation length. There are lots of cultural phenomena that behave this way. In general we would call these phenomena low stakes (see recent post) because (a) we don't put much faith in these sorts of cultural institutions enduring for very long, and (b) only a subculture cares about them anyway. But calling them low stakes is misleading; in the moment, to those participating, the stakes are quite high. The difference is that these phenomena are fundamentally transient and the constituency is limited. They are associated with limited periods in our lives or important events that present specific, short-lived, but still intense problems (e.g., adolescence, work functions requiring formalwear, getting married, going to a wedding, taking advantage of the latest technological advancements, a newborn infant, first day at school, this spring's fashions, etc.).

The generation scale doesn't matter much in this case, except insofar as an inspection of human life histories would tell you that adolescence is a very sensitive and scary time for everyone, as well as short, and all sorts of cultural solutions are thrown at the problem to try to manage it, none of which are long-lived, but all of which leave their mark on our collective view on the evolution of what is often narrowly defined as popular culture.

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION
Until recently, the use of marijuana was something that I more or less expected to be illegal. I recall, in my childhood (30-40 years ago), hearing my parents and their peers talking about marijuana almost entirely with a chuckle. Stoners were made out to be funny, as was being high itself. My recollection as I was growing up of the arguments made by those who would have opposed legalization is that their arguments (had it come to the ballot) were based on a defense of law-and-order.

Poster for the 1936 film Marihuana. Note the odd overlay of intravenous drug delivery (the needles), which makes no sense if you know anything about marijuana, and the oversexualization of the drug's use, including two images of scantily clad women (one of whom is hanging out with a guy in a suit who looks like he could be black?) and what frankly sounds like a sales pitch to young moviegoers (orgies, passions, parties). Source.

In fact, the history of marijuana criminalization in the US is one of a prolonged battle to keep lawlessness at bay (source here and here) with high stakes perceived by those who feared (and fear) its legalization. So as we dig into its history, keep it in the front of your mind that the only way that marijuana was ever going to be legalized was if those stakes were somehow lowered to a negligible level.

As early as the 1890s, the American press began to report on purported marijuana-induced gang violence across the border in Mexico. The potential for that violence to spread with the drug then began to emerge in the public consciousness, even though few knew what the drug was or how it was used. In the decades that followed, cannabis smoking became more common in the United States, thanks in part to the Mexican Revolution driving an influx of Mexican labor in the early 20th century. Smoking mature male flower parts (rather than rendering them as hash) became the most popular form of administering the drug, especially among jazz musicians (Louis Armstrong, who called it "gage", was arrested for possession and sentenced to a 6-month suspended prison term).

After alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, the temperance movement, having for a long time embedded themselves within government institutions with a mandate to curb the distribution and consumption of illegal substances, needed to turn its attention to something new. Concerns about the supposedly unpredictable effects of marijuana reached a fevered pitch in the late 1930s (the same decade that produced the laughably risible 1936 film Reefer Madness), and those concerns reached their logical conclusion with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which banned the use, sale, and distribution of marijuana in the United States, at the Federal level. Harry Anslinger, the zealous anti-drug crusader who led the federal Bureau of Narcotics from the 1930s through the 1950s, even tried to get jazz musicians to inform on each other. Quoted by Doug Snead, Anslinger once said:

Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him ... 

So the American public, already used to the idea of criminalizing drug use (e.g., the Volstead Act), driven into hysteria by misinformation about the effects of cannabis smoking (along with the racial overtones of its Mexican source and transparent use among African American artists), and with many laws on the books, finds itself in the 1940s and 1950s institutionally and rabidly opposed to cannabis smoking. When the actor Robert Mitchum was arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession (I can almost see Kevin Spacey's Jack Vincennes from the film LA Confidential making the arrest), people kind of flipped out. People Magazine wrote:

The press nationwide branded him a dope fiend. Preachers railed against him from pulpits. Mothers warned their daughters to shun his films.

In the 1950s Anslinger and other strong drug control advocates used the increased public fear of out-of-control drug use, and the subsequent social mayhem that would ensue, to start branding marijuana as a "gateway" drug, meaning that pot smokers were more likely to move on to heroin. At this point there was a perception among the vast majority of the public that the stakes associated with legalizing cannabis use would be very high.

But then something important happened: a stable constituency appeared in favor of cannabis use that would eventually successfully fragment its near universal opposition. In the 1960s, cannabis smoking began to expand into the white, middle-class, college student demographic. White kids, previously only minimally exposed to cannabis, found themselves with access and motive to give it a try. The "don't trust anyone over 30" crowd tested the assumptions that they and their parents (and their government) had made about the use of the drug. While most college students still opposed its use (for standard reasons), there was now a core -- if small -- constituency that was regularly experimenting, and had no problem with legalization. This was a relatively protected constituency, too; there was little appetite to start locking up American colleges' best and brightest white students.

By the end of the sixties, even Life magazine was wondering why cannabis use was still illegal. More and more voices were defending its use, or at least openly wondering why cannabis was singled out but alcohol and tobacco weren't.

Nevertheless, this new cannabis-smoking constituency, arising from white middle-class America, scared the bejeezus out of Richard Nixon (and most everyone else, to boot). As before, its use was perceived as a strong signal of cultural decay. With his "War Against Drug Abuse," Nixon began to enlist the support of pop-cultural icons. Incredibly, Elvis himself was eager to sign on, requesting in a six page letter to Nixon that he be installed as a "Federal Agent-at-Large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (source). Ironic. In 1970, Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, which placed cannabis in the most restricted category along with heroin (Oxycontin and cocaine are in a less strict category). By now, the war on drugs was well under way.

Elvis Presley meeting President Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970.

And now it was a cultural conflict. On one side was a relatively meager minority of people who felt either that (1) the drug should be legalized because it's harmless (or at least no less harmless than alcohol) or (2) that keeping the drug illegal was preventing its useful properties from being delivered to people who needed it. On the other side was the weight of a 50+ year history of villainizing the drug and its users, stoked by fears that people would lose their minds, that the youth of the country would be corrupted, that racial minorities would insane and destroy our cities, etc.

What came next is an excellent example of fizzle coupled with the rollover of demographics as American culture passed through one generation length after another. Cannabis use was becoming less likely to be viewed as a high stakes problem, so the need for a strong cultural solution, like prohibition, was becoming weaker over time. There were even perceived upsides, such as the use of cannabis to address a range of medical ailments (this rationale is widely abused today in the "medical" marijuana world). And there was a crisis, as society writ large was beginning to understand the damage that had been done to poor and minority communities by the war on drugs (especially through the high rate of drug-related incarceration among young, black males). Furthermore, those who had fully absorbed the anti-cannabis perspectives of the bulk of Americans throughout the 20th century were now dying off, and young people were coming up in the world wondering what the big deal was. If alcohol was legal, then it was very hard to understand why weed wasn't. Fewer people were still alive who remembered Robert Mitchum's and others' arrest. And eventually, this initially small, but stable constituency grew, and public opinion shifted to legalization (or at least de-criminalization).

So the fizzle and die-off led to a huge change in attitudes toward marijuana legalization over the course of 1 or 2 generation lengths:

There is still a very large chunk of the population that would like marijuana use to remain illegal (and I would say they have many valid arguments, and many bad arguments), but they are facing a tough demographic battle, as young people growing up today now live in a world in which cannabis use is nearly fully mainstreamed, with no clear downside effects that are any worse than the use of alcohol.

By fragmenting public opinion in this way, a shift in attitudes that was based largely on the merits became relatively easy (putting it in the "fragile" box of the 2x2 matrix, and eventually in the "fundamental" box). The cultural solution to the problem of marijuana's existence tipped from prohibition to acceptance. Today, it's very hard to imagine the debate reversing itself, barring the appearance of a newly realized "crisis" associated with the drug.

(Side note: Trump's success in the presidential campaign has been due to his early identification and stabilization of a still small but strong nationalistic, xenophobic, and even racist constituency among Republican primary voters, which formed out of response to the perceived crises of falling economic fortunes, illegal immigration, and a social-order flipping black President.)

THE ABORTION DEBATE
Note the discomfort you feel as you start this paragraph. Boy bands ... ha ha ha. Marijuana ... ha ha ha. Abortion ... very serious. You might have strong feelings about the abortion debate, but even if you don't hold a strong position, you are concerned about discussing it candidly, and for good reason. The topic is very high stakes and dominated by what seems to be an irresolvable debate in the United States. Both sides have a position that is robust to argument, and there is a squishy middle in the electorate that will react if policy swings too far one way or the other. While unresolved, the stability of the debate and the low probability of a resolution in the near future put it squarely in the "fundamental" box of the 2x2 matrix.

In contrast to transient or fragile cultural phenomena (boy bands and marijuana legalization, respectively), the abortion debate is a very high stakes battle that does NOT take place in the market. It is a battle of attrition, fought with grudging intensity for every inch, until the enemy is destroyed. This stance is reinforced by politicians who use the debate to galvanize and consolidate their supporters, which means that opinions on the debate now fall along party lines and become part of package deals that include other party planks. (Indeed, nothing could be higher stakes for the pro-life community right now than an Obama Supreme Court nomination to fill Scalia's seat on the bench.) When actual policy action is taken, it's usually carried out by the courts, or by supermajority state legislatures that feel they have the mandate to make a sweeping change for their constituents.

Opinion on abortion has been highly stable since Roe v. Wade in 1973. There appear to have been no meaningful moves that weren't promptly reversed (Gallup):

Both sides have existential arguments: (A) those who express varying intensities of the pro-life stance are deeply uncomfortable with the loss of potential life (if they don't already see it as murder), and many see it as a a gateway to increased cultural erosion of sexual morality and traditional family structure (which has its own forgotten backstory as a backlash against feminism and women's economic liberalization); while (B) those who express varying intensities of the pro-choice stance are deeply uncomfortable with the State controlling women's bodies, let alone controlling their economic and social lives, and see a return to the pre-Roe world as a return to world of widespread economic and medical harm to all women. I do the debate an injustice by summarizing it so briefly, but I think I make my point that both sides see battle as very high stakes.

The way that the stakes are perceived on both sides and the size of their respective constituencies means that the abortion debate is something different from marijuana legalization. Proponents of legalization, once they began to be taken seriously, found that very few of their opponents' arguments were strong enough to win over hearts and minds. Loss aversion evaporated as the stakes fizzled, new status quo crises emerged (mass incarceration), and some upsides were realized. Ultimately, with enough demographic turnover, the opposition to legalization evaporated.

Abortion is different because the stakes are unlikely to fizzle. Pro-lifers can't easily back down from claims that abortion is murder. And pro-choicers can't easily back down from claims that their anti-abortion foes want to control their bodies. The less committed middle in this country is no less affected. As policy moves in one direction or the other, the bulk of the populations reacts to move the debate back to the center. And so the debate goes on, with little chance of resolution.

There is middle ground that is not comfortable for either side, so it is seldom explored, that would involve having state and federal governments provide aggressive economic support for children born of unwanted pregnancies, especially when those pregnancies have reached a stage where legal restrictions on the availability of abortion are strong. This would lower the stakes on the pro-choice side by fizzling the economic security argument, and do the same on the pro-life side by drastically reducing the demand for abortions in the first place. Thus, abortions are drastically reduced de facto, while avoiding stranding mothers economically as they make what would become the much more common choice to continue with the pregnancy. It's a testament to the deep emotional content of the debate that I don't think this solution would be acceptable to either side. Nevertheless, it is only when the stakes are reduced for one side or the other that change will occur, and it's impossible at this time to know how or when that might occur.

Notes
* See here for Ryder article in the American Sociological Review.
** See Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. 1984. Choices, Values, and Frames. American Psychologist 39:341–350 (here).

The Trump effect: update to matrix

I wrote last week with an analysis of Trump's plundering of the social capital locked up in public civility to serve his campaign in the short-term. But the more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I realized that I hadn't gotten it quite right. So I'm providing an update here:

First, in the last version, I loaded fragile and fundamental with too much value judgement. I even alluded to this in my post-script to the previous post, where I said that there was a value judgment inherent to the way I had drawn the matrix, where making institutions more fragile was implied as being "bad", while building up fundamental institutions was implied as being "good". But we know this can't be right, maybe not even half the time. All we have to imagine is a fundamental cultural institution that has grown unwieldy, inefficient, and no longer able to properly serve the needs of its constituency. I think we can all agree that automobile traffic in LA, Atlanta, DC, Dallas, and other major, fast-growing cities has become truly awful. Efforts to build up alternative institutions are underway. Once the short-term benefits of the alternatives outweighs the short-term costs associated with switching to the alternatives, then the cultural institution of driving everywhere will begin to erode. This would be disruptive (since there will be losers) and yet not laden with negative connotations. Indeed, I've changed the two "process" arrows to disruption and systems building to remove some of the value judgment.

Second, the previous matrix implied that Trump's strongman effect was the major reason for the erosion of the institution of public civility. In fact, that institution has been undergoing significant erosion since the advent of mass media, dog-whistle politics (predominantly wielded by the political right in the US) a half a century ago, and a 7-year GOP-led obstructionist campaign against the country's first black president. All Trump has done is to take advantage of that long-term erosion and fragmentation of civility's "constituency" to deliver the critical strike to an already weak institution, and pick up a large constituency in the process. By selling public civility at what amounts to fire-sale prices, he is securing a short-term, personal advantage at tremendous social cost. Now, the constituency is not only fragmented ... part of it has been zapped off the map entirely. So I moved the strongman effect out of the matrix and labeled it as a way in which fragile cultural institutions are destroyed for personal political gain.

Third, I originally labeled the y-axis to read "high significance" and "low significance", but I've changed these to high stakes and low stakes. In part, I did this to help segue into the next post (which is about the time scale of change). Also, I made this change because it's more precise language. But mostly I changed it because power is wielded and dramatically changes hands if and only if the stakes are high. The word "significance" just didn't seem to capture that.

I plan to continue to iterate on this ... as I said in this blog's introductory post, I'm writing to force myself to write, not because I have all the answers.

US political parties are not symmetrical

Just because our two major political parties are the dominant ones does not mean that they are symmetrical. Krugman wondered yesterday about why the symmetry error persists. Apparently, the assumption of symmetry is common among political scientists. I'm really surprised by this. I'm also a little surprised that Krugman is unable to see the nature of the asymmetry. He writes:

[I]t is a puzzle. I do think that wingnut welfare is part of the story. But there has to be more. Any suggestions from real political scientists would be especially welcome.

So ... I am so far away from being a real political scientist.

But this seems pretty simple to me. Krugman quotes a recent paper by Grossman and Hopkins, who "argue that the Republican Party is the agent of an ideological movement, while the Democratic Party is best understood as a coalition of social groups."

Right. Republicans are ultimately organized around protecting existing cultural advantages, and the monetary advantages of a few. Because the "few" are very few in number, a broader coalition is required, one that finds common cause around avoiding loss and maintaining existing cultural advantages, regardless of any change that might be occurring in the world. They are like the "elders" in this post. Keeping that coalition together is very hard, mostly because it's deeply self contradictory (someone please ask the GOP candidates how they square their campaign rhetoric on foreign and domestic policy with Jesus' radical challenge in Matthew 5:39, or Paul's admonition about law suits in 1 Corinthians 6:7). So it requires strict ideological adherence, with the carrot of "some day, you too could be filthy rich." (The recent disruption of the GOP might be due to the fact that the carrot has turned out to be pretty dried out and rotten.)

Democrats on the other hand, by default, represent a broad coalition of social groups with an interest in establishing fundamental cultural institutions that serve much broader interests. Ideological adherence is not compatible with the role that the Democratic Party plays because the platform necessarily must be built on compromise.

The Trump effect: strongmen and the erosion of fundamental cultural institutions

Donald Trump now has nearly 50% of the GOP electorate in recent national polls (here and here). Whatever else this means (and there's a lot that it means), one thing we can be sure of: Trump has done serious damage to the already fragile expectation that we should all aspire to civil public discourse.

It's well established in research, common sense, and recent experience that if enough people in a group elect to behave in a certain way, then the specific behaviors (or cultural solutions) that they have adopted will become the standard for the rest of the group, and for future generations. This is how culture changes, and this is how I've been talking about it in recent posts (see the last one).

But not all cultural solutions are the same. Some are vulnerable. Some are rock solid. Some we wouldn't want to change even if we could. Others have no real impact on our lives at all, and will twist and fade like snowflakes in a blizzard.

I've tried to organize these categories in the table below, with examples. I built a 2-by-2 matrix (a favorite of ex-consultants) that organizes cultural solutions based on (1) whether they would have high significance/impact if they were changed, and on (2) whether the solution itself is hard to change.

Main categories of cultural solutions, with examples. 

Conventional cultural solutions are adopted solutions that everyone agrees to, that no one wants to change (high cost to switch), and which are no better or worse than their alternatives. For instance, if everyone in the US were to suddenly learn to read, write, and speak French, and then did so exclusively, then there would be very little difference in how the country functioned. That's not to say that it would be easy to make the switch, which is why these are called conventions.

Transient cultural solutions are what most people call "culture." Often the word "culture" is used in a a very limited and often derogatory sense, to imply that the object of study is transient and interchangeable. This is a shameful way to treat this subject, and I think the blame rests both on the accusers for failing to see transient cultural solutions in a broader context and on the students of "culture" for not fighting for it's inclusion in that broader context. Transient cultural solutions include things that are very easy to change (or which could in many cases change with high frequency), and which have no real implication for the group in general if they were to change. Billboard Top 40 is a great example, where the songs listed on the chart are here today, gone tomorrow.

Fundamental cultural solutions are really cultural institutions that have absorbed a great deal of social capital in order to act for the general good. Changing these institutions would have wide-ranging, significant implications for the group. Furthermore, they are hard to change. The group will have built their lives around these institutions, and there will be broad consensus that, although the institutions don't come cheap, they are acting in everyone's interest. Of course, they never act in everyone's interest; that would be impossible. But individual deviations from these fundamental cultural solutions are met with resistance by the group, which sees its own broader interests threatened by apostasy. So to the extent that diverging options are relatively isolated, and if only a few others see a benefit (or at least the lack of a loss) to adopting those diverging opinions, then they will remain on the fringes.

Fragile cultural solutions have succumbed to disruption among a sizable segment of the group, with wide-ranging implications for everyone else. The interplay between fundamental and fragile cultural solutions is where it's at. What Trump has been doing, among other things, is systematically plundering the social capital of civil discourse for short-term, narrow political gain (the "strongman effect"). Normally this is really hard to do. The conditions need to be right, and there almost always needs to be a catalyst in the form of strong, determined leadership to focus contrarian public opinion across a sufficiently broad segment of the group. Twenty years ago, if a politician were to say something off-color (like Trump's comments about Mexican rapists), the media would strike him down where he stood within hours. Game over. Today, someone says "Heil, Hitler!" at a Trump rally and the candidate can't quite get himself to take a stand against institutional racism and the accelerating rise of the white supremacy movement. This is how Trump catalyzes the change. He legitimizes racist and xenophobic discourse beyond the dog-whistle, so that those who would otherwise stay quiet due to what most people would call standard norms of decency (but which Trump and others call "political correctness") are now empowered to speak up and join the ranks. And the ranks have swelled. And the more they swell, the risk of loss associated with being a public racist becomes much smaller when you're among your millions of newly minted fellow public racists.

This one-time massive self-outing of indecent behavior will have implications in the United States for generations to come, as children growing up in Trump households see their parents and elders modeling behavior and speech that would make the founding fathers shudder.

What does Trump get from this? He gets a base that is defined by its indecency, and therefore immunized from arguments made by the other side. In other words, he tears down the idea of civil discourse (both in words and in practice) to yield himself a massive short-term gain.

A final note on the matrix: you probably noticed that the content of the upper two quadrants is the same. This is on purpose. What I mean to show is that there is a battle taking place between the strongmen, who plunder the accumulated institutional wealth of everyone else for their own narrow gain, and the grassroots, a broad coalition of social and political interests aligned around the common good. The extent to which the bullets belong on the left or the right is mostly a function of "who's been winning lately". Unfortunately the battle is not symmetric. Fundamental cultural institutions are not stable. They survive on broad majoritarian or institutional impediments to their destruction. There is always someone who could benefit from tearing them down. And despite their size and momentum, if they are perceived by a large enough segment of the population to no longer serve their interests (or even cause them harm, e.g., undocumented immigration), then they can be torn down. In contrast, they are very hard to put together. Very special conditions must exist to establish these institutions, with broad agreement (the "grassroots effect").

NB. Labeling the two top arrows "strongman effect" and "grassroots effect" implies a judgment that the disruption caused by the leftward pull into the Fragile box is always a bad thing, or that the rightward pull into the Fundamental box is always a good thing. That's not strictly true (you could imagine renaming them something like "disruption" and "institutional investment", respectively), so some day I'll have to refine this matrix. I'll leave it as is for now.