Tag Archives: political economy

La Revue du M.A.U.S.S.

A little over a year ago I linked to a few pieces which explored Durkheim’s vision of “communism.” I’d like to follow that up with two pieces I found recently which touch on the socialist leanings of his nephew, Mauss . Both are by professors at Goldsmiths, in London. The first, published in In These Times, is by David Graeber, and deals directly with Mauss’ politics:

By all accounts, though, Mauss was never taken completely seriously in his role of heir apparent; a man of extraordinary erudition (he knew at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit, Maori and classical Arabic), he still, somehow, lacked the gravity expected of a grand professeur. A former amateur boxer, he was a burly man with a playful, rather silly manner, the sort of person always juggling a dozen brilliant ideas rather than building great philosophical systems. He spent his life working on at least five different books (on prayer, on nationalism, on the origins of money, etc.), none of which he ever finished. Still, he succeeded in training a new generation of sociologists and inventing French anthropology more or less single-handedly, as well as in publishing a series of extraordinarily innovative essays, just about each one of which has generated an entirely new body of social theory all by itself.

Mauss was also a revolutionary socialist. From his student days on he was a regular contributor to the left press, and remained most of his life an active member of the French cooperative movement. He founded and for many years helped run a consumer co-op in Paris; and was often sent on missions to make contact with the movement in other countries (for which purpose he spent time in Russia after the revolution). Mauss was not a Marxist, though. His socialism was more in the tradition of Robert Owen or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: He considered Communists and Social Democrats to be equally misguided in believing that society could be transformed primarily through government action. Rather, the role of government, he felt, was to provide the legal framework for a socialism that had to be built from the ground up, by creating alternative institutions.

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Economies And Cultures

I wasn’t happy with how my undergrad course on political economy went last time I taught it, so I spent a lot of this week looking for good introductory texts I could use. My big discovery was Richard Wilk’s Economies And Cultures: Foundations Of Economic Anthropology. I rarely use entire books in my classes, preferring to mix and match articles and book chapters, but this slim volume really impressed me as a solid and highly accessible introduction to the field of economic anthropology.

Searching for Middle Grounds

For my book I have been reviewing the literature on the concept of ‘middle ground.’ Although notions of ‘frontiers’ and contact zones have been around for a while, the particular image of the ‘the middle ground’ first really came together in Richard White’s “The Middle Ground” in 1991, which grew out of the literature on history, anthropology, and colonialism that was popular in the eighties. Since then I haven’t found a lot of work in anthropology that takes the image up — but perhaps I just don’t know where to look. I do remember Conklin and Graham’s excellent paper “The Shifting Middle Ground” in American Anthropologist in 1995, and Paul Sabin has a good article entitled “Searching for the Middle Ground” on oil extraction in Ecuador that is actually quite close to the gold mining frontier in Papua New Guinea that I am discussing. I wonder if anyone else has run across this concept, particularly as applied to resource frontiers in the contemporary world?

Margaret Atwood and Vicente Rafael on Debt

Speaking of the financial crisis and the relationship between anthropology and economics, I thought Margaret Atwood’s editorial in today’s Times did a good job of getting us to think about debt outside the confines of the banking system. Here she talks about the role of debt in Christianity:

In many religions, for instance. The version of the Lord’s Prayer I memorized as a child included the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. And although many people assume that “debts” in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others.

One anthropologist/historian who has looked at the importance of the language of debt in religion is Vicente Rafael. His excellent book Contracting Colonialism looks at how Tagalog concepts of debt altered the meaning of Catholic religious traditions as they were translated into the local context.

Among the Spaniards, the contraction of obligations between two parties was always articulated with reference to a third term that stood outside the exchange yet determined its contours. Whther figured as God, the king, the state, or the law, this third term served as the central figure in all negotiations, acting as the origin, interpreter, and enforcer of the terms governing exchange …. By contract, the tripartite structure of the contract gives way to a different configuration in utang na loob ties. The contracting of debts …. is premised not on the sanction of a transcendent third term but precisely on its elision. … The effect of this elision is to render the hierarchy found in utang na loob ties explicitly arbitrary. … Token payments of debts are made not to memorialize authority (and thereby to consolodate hierarchy) but rather, as in the case of offerings profferd to the nono, simply to loosen the pressures from above (and so to deflect the full force of hierarchy). (p. 130-131)

Note: It seems Atwood started working on her well-timed new book over three years ago.

On The Limits of Economics

Upon winning the Nobel Prize for Economics, Paul Krugman re-posted an autobiographical essay he had written in 1992. In that essay he wrote about the appeal of economics over other social sciences:

Those who read the stuff may be aware of the classic Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists — the “psychohistorians”, who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods — the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

In his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal; however, Krugman seems to have moved slightly away from this pessimistic view of the social sciences. In his book Krugman attempts to understand how America could have gone from relatively low levels of inequality in the 1950s to the outrageous levels of inequality we see today – levels not seen since the twenties. After going through various typical economic explanations, such as “skill-based technological change,” globalization, etc, he comes to the conclusion that it is “largely due to changes in institutions, such as the strength of labor unions, and norms, such as the once powerful but now weak belief that having the boss make vastly more than the workers is bad for morale” (p. 136). He then goes on to argue that these institutional and normative changes were closely tied to America’s changing political structure. In particular he focuses on the Republican party’s “Southern strategy” of appealing to disaffected Southern white men, which was first successfully adopted by Nixon and used with great effect by Regean and both Bush I and Bush II. He uses this to explain how it was that “advocates of a smaller welfare state and regressive tax policies [were] able to win elections, even as growing income inequality should have made the welfare state more popular” (p. 172).

I won’t go into the details of Krugman’s argument, or its merits, instead here I want to focus on the fact that even though Krugman arrived at the questions he asks via his economic models, his answers stray far outside the territory of traditional economic analysis. He hasn’t exactly taken up anthropology here — his arguments read like a combination of Talcott Parsons and Douglas Massey, both sociologists — but it’s a start.

More controversially, at least among my friends and colleagues, I’d also like to suggest that we anthropologists take more seriously “the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions.” I was shocked by the way in which many anthropologist friends reacted to the bailout bill recently before congress. There seemed to be widespread misunderstanding about the causes and magnitude of the crisis, as well as the importance of acting quickly (historical research on previous economic crises shows that timely intervention is one of the most important factors in averting disaster). Considering how much anthropologists write about globalization and other issues, it might behoove us to read some economists besides Michael Moore and Naomi Klein. Krugman might be a good place to start…

A Special Offer and a Note About Blogging

Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds — it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree — in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

  1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
  2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
  3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

Seeing Like an Economist

Brad DeLong (a huge fan of Savage Minds) has posted a review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, in which he castigates Scott for not more openly acknowledging his intellectual debt to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has replied by pointing out that markets require real trade-offs and “we should acknowledge the costs of markets” even as we tout their benefits. While I applaud Henry for cautiously pointing out the costs of markets, I think that both he and Brad both underestimate the extent to which Scott is correct when he states:

the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity

A good example is the recent failed attempt by aid organizations to employ markets to distribute much-needed mosquito nets:

In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets.

When Kenya started giving nets away for free instead of charging for them coverage increased dramatically and the “deaths of children dropped 44 percent.”

Both David Harvey’s book, A Brief History of Neoliberism, and Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine discuss numerous cases where the (often forced) imposition of markets have had disastrous consequences. Perhaps not as disastrous as some of the famines discussed in Scott, but still pretty bad. Like the examples in Scott’s book, these free-market ideologues like to make use of political instability in order to conduct their social experiments. Case in point, Iraq, where the first order of business by Paul Bremer was to privatize Iraqi business and lift trade barriers. (As well as dismantling the trade unions, one of the more important pillars of Iraqi civil society.)

Below is a video for Naomi Klein’s book made by Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuarón. While I haven’t read her book yet, it seems as if it popularizes many of the arguments found in similar books by Harvey, Stiglitz and others. For a more thorough filmic treatment of these themes, I highly recommend Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt.

Architecture, Rationalization, Codes, Power

architecture1.jpg

Continuing themes raised in my previous post, I’d like to present another riddle of rationalization and reflect on its meaning and impact.

As part of the planning process for the building project in which I’m involved, I joined my colleagues in various fieldtrips to other institutions. In the course of those travels I saw and heard about many odd cases in which codes of various sorts, complicated by their local interpretation, had a significant role in shaping architectural decisions. The example that I wish to consider could have happened anywhere, so its precise location doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the buildings in question are located at an American institution of higher education.

The institution built an addition that links two late 19th-century buildings. At the time of construction, local authorities said that only two of the four entrances on one side of the complex had to meet the accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since the average distance between the entries is only slightly more than 50 feet, this seemed sensible. Adding two more large ramps would raise costs significantly and, more important, deface the historic buildings. (Although they are historic, they aren’t on the state or federal historic register, an issue I’ll get to in a second.)

A couple of years after the building was opened, though, the local code official, apparently under pressure from higher-ups elsewhere, reversed the earlier decision. Now all four doors either had to be made ADA-compliant or the two non-compliant ones had to be decommissioned as public entries.

The institution, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is committed to the letter and spirit of the ADA. But absent a budget for the addition of two substantial concrete ramps and a willingness to compromise the look of handsome old buildings, the institution removed exterior handles from the doors in question. Continue reading

Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 2

[This is part 2 of a two part review of Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. You can read the first part here.]

Chatterjee’s book is divided into two parts. The first part consists of three lectures delivered at Columbia University in 2001. This is the tightest part of the book, in which he develops the arguments I mentioned in the first part of my review and which I will continue to focus upon below. The second half consists of a series of other lectures on a variety of issues, including globalization, the war on terror, and India’s urban development. Because of the fragmentary nature of this book, we really only get a hint as to the nature of “political society” and its utility as a concept. There is certainly more depth to the discussion that the brief account I’ve laid out so far, but it is frustrating that many of the most difficult questions are avoided. The first, would be the applicability of the concept to the developed world; but the second is even more pressing: Chatterjee shies away from tackling the history of communal violence in India and the alliances which marginalized political societies often make with the most reactionary political groups. I understand why, he does this. He is intent on showing the democratic potential of political society and wishes to challenge India’s left-leaning middle classes to actively work with political societies rather than shunning them. In this sense the history of communal violence forms the context in which such a book is written. Nonetheless, if we we want to really demonstrate the analytical usefulness of the category it can’t just be presented as a progressive phenomena.

Another question I like to ask whenever I see an author introduce a new analytic term is whether or not the concepts can’t already be handled by existing terms, specifically Gramsci’s term “civil society.” Chatterjee’s main criticism is that civil society is elitist:
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Living and Teaching in the Information Economy

I received a strange piece of advice recently. As… well, as nearly everyone knows, I’ve been struggling to finish my dissertation for a couple of years. Between personal crises, departmental woes, and a struggle to make a livable income, I just haven’t been able (or, to be honest, as willing as I’d like) to put the time in I need to finish the damned thing. So I’m talking to a colleague back east, a well-respected anthropologist who is, nonetheless, not attached to any academic institution, and he asks me if teaching is what I really want to do.

“Yes, it is,” I reply. “I love teaching.”

“Well then,” he says, “maybe you should give some serious thought not finishing your dissertation, to not finishing your PhD.”

(Not actual quotes, of course – just roughly what was said.)

His logic was this: Continue reading

Recent Debates on Race and Class

The concept of race as applied to humans has long been discredited by anthropologists. And yet it is not possible to discuss issues like the high rates of incarceration of black men, or the better medical treatment received by whites, purely in class terms. At the same time, immigration, DNA testing, intermarriage and other phenomenon have made the lived experience of racial categories more complex for many people. Changing attitudes have also made racial categories less useful as a basis for political action.

For anyone who is interested in how academics have attempted to deal with the dilemmas of theorizing race in the contemporary world, this recent Monthly Review article by David Roediger is must reading. In “The Retreat from Race and Class”, Roediger focuses on four works. Three from around 2000: Paul Gilroy’s book, Against Race, “Race Over” written by Orlando Patterson in The New Replubic (link for those with library access), and Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason“, as well as the more recent (2004) After Race by Darder and Torres. All of these works are very critical of contemporary racial discourse, and Roediger takes them each to task for failing to adequately address the problems of what he calls “white supremacy.”

Roediger’s review is too short to provide much insight into such a complex literature, but it does provide a great set of references for further exploration, such as in this passage where he responds to After Race:

Insofar as Fields, Darder, Torres, and others contend that inattention to class distorts inquiry into all inequalities in the United States, they are exactly right. However, the strategy of banking on the retreat from race to solve that problem is a highly dubious one. It leads to an extremely embattled tone and to ignoring the most exciting work building on materialist insights. From Cheryl Harris’s brilliant studies of whiteness as property, to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research on racial systems, to somewhat older South African scholarship on racial capitalism, to Lisa Lowe’s important observations on race, universality, and labor at the start of Immigrant Acts, much work seeks to revive the class question by bringing racism and class together more systematically. But you would not know it from After Race.

While I’ve read some of the older stuff, such as Adam’s classic on South Africa, Modernizing Racial Domination, I’ve been negligent at keeping up with this literature, and am happy to have an informed guide to current debates. And while the idea of “teaching the controversy” might have been appropriated by ID advocates, I do find that such debates make for an excellent teaching tool.

I would also like to see more discussion about race in the liberal blogsphere, which is generally good on labor and gender issues, but strangely silent when it comes to race.

(via Political Theory Daily)

UPDATE: In looking for some of these citations online, I came across this excellent site on “Race, Racism and the Law” by Vernellia R. Randall.

Product Endorsement

I’ve been reading Keith Hart’s Money in an Unequal World with the participants in my Alternative Economies class, and finding it hugely exhilirating. For quite some time I had been wondering when my next big intellectual crush was going to come along; I haven’t felt this swoony since I discovered the work of Joan Martinez-Alier and James O’Connor while writing my dissertation thesis.

Call me an old-fashioned girl, but even though I acknowledge that Bruno Latour has definitively skewered “the modern critique” I find it’s still what I like. “Network theory” doesn’t do it for me; I still want history (1) systematically accounted for and (2) demystified with a flourish. I can’t help it: in spite of agreeing with all the remonstrances about how I oughn’t to fall for it it remains my idea of a good time, every time.

Sidney Mintz it aint, but…

The New Yorker has a brief “talk of the town” piece about an academic studying Starbucks. It caught my eye because as a grad student, doing fieldwork at hospitals in Boston, I spent a lot of down time in Starbucks thinking about just such a project, every time I witnessed two starbucks employees debate the best way to bilk the Mass. welfare system, or discuss how “fair trade” was not revolutionary, etc. Unfortunatley, most of what this particular history professor seems to be doing is simply going to Starbucks, and occasionally counting the number of patrons, or observing the demographic mix–hardly fieldwork.

I like the idea of a Mintz-esque study of the political economic transformation that Starbucks has wrought–to say nothing of their successful introduction of real coffee to the furthest reaches of America–but I guess I’ll have to wait, or do it myself. But even when I was contemplating such a project, I ultimately decided that if one were serious about a corporate anthropology, or an anthropology of corporations, one would proceed directly to Wal-Mart, without passing go, without collecting $200. Where else could one satisfy one’s pleasure in discovering the exotic in 1300 locales in 10 countries?

Sticky?

How does it feel to be the University of Chicago professor who has co-authored a book containing the following paragraph?

“We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch and feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon… We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes — the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.”
“Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006073132X/ref=pd_kar/002-8783501-4320000?n=283155 pg. 140.

If despite the smirking and the urging you’ve got a free hand, there is something else you can do with that paragraph, and it relates to the book’s success. From its opening scene (a homeless black man with “expensive headphones”), to its closer (a black scholar who “beat the odds” and made it from underprivilege to a fellowship at Harvard), with a marquee story about the impact of legalized abortion along the way, the book constructs a slithery aperture into transformative transactions from which many of its presumably most enthusiastic readers have otherwise been shut out.

This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which — not to participate in, but — to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that “economics” is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.

That’s the point, so much so that most of the material which fluffs out the text (shoddy footnotes, sleight of hand interpretation of titillating evidence, a long final chapter that doesn’t even pretend to be anything but an extended chortle on what negro and po’ white mommas name their babies) hardly matters. Freakonomics is a pandering invitation to a certain societal segment of bombasticators to re-flate their bellows.

That’s all I’ll say for now, but to get back to the question with which I began: the obvious answer to my opening query is that it feels great to be that prof, and that not only does he sleep at night but that rolling in book-sales mega-bucks has given him a lovely and dew-like complexion. But I still wonder. Maybe it feels kinda sticky.

The Most Dangerous Ideas

Edge, the onine community of “third culture” advocates (the “third culture” is meant to be a bridge of sorts between traditional science and the humanities — in practice, it is largely an invasion of traditionally humanist concerns by scientifistic methods and theories), has released their Annual Question: “What is your dangerous idea?”. Last year’s question, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” produced some really great musings on the nature of science and knowledge, but despite my respect for many of the participants (though I admit that Stephen J. Gould’s presence at Edge is sorely missed), after having dipped into a random-ish sample of contributions, I find this year’s contributions somewhat predictable and even humdrum.

Of course, as far as I can tell, there’s no anthropologists on Edge’s “council” of scientific thinkers (I may have missed one or two — there’s a lot of people associated with Edge), and the handling of culture overall tends to be a little sloppy, with a lot of reductionism and not a lot of nuance. Which is maybe why it makes sense that Steven Pinker would think his contribution — “Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments” — might actually be a dangerous idea. Pinker notes that ideas relating to sex and race differences are widely perceived to be dangerous, citing for example the villification of Harvard president Larry Summers after last year’s comments on women’s under-representation in the sciences. However, I don’t find this to be a very dangerous idea at all — an uncomfortable one, perhaps, but one that most people hold to some degree or other. I would consider dangerous an idea whose ramifications had the potential to drastically alter the way society is structured, and I don’t see that the assumption of innate differences between groups would have that effect. Given the centrality of such assumptions in the history of the modern world, I think it’s fair to say that Pinker’s “dangerous idea” fits quite comfortably with the status quo — it is after all the idea that many of our social institutions are built on.

In fact, I think a far more dangerous idea is that people do not differ genetically on a group basis, at least not in any significant way. Of course, I side with the effort Pinker dismisses with his straw man description of those who would “reengineer” the “intellectual landscape” to rule out hypotheses about race, intelligence, innate predelictions, and so on a priori. But consider the ramifications of an absolute equality of talent, potential, temperament across the human species: if all humans are innately equal in their potential to succeed and to make meaningful contributions to their societies, then the fact of poverty, of small-mindedness, of difference itself has to be explained as cultural, which is to say it has to be considered as something that we create ourselves. The infant with the potential to become a great doctor, physicist, peace activist, parliamentarian, anthropologist, designer, artist, parent, urban planner, minister, author, friend, diplomat, geologist, therapist, singer, gardener, athlete, or diviner but instead ends up dead at 18 of drug overdose or gang shooting or collateral damage or murder conviction or disease or suicide bombing or knife fight or suicide or car accident is our collective fault. And if we are serious about the commitment to “political equality”, to “universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups” as Pinker claims to be, then the ramifications of the prospect that differences in station cannot be attributed to differences in biological makeup implies a radical restructuring of our societies, institutions, and thought patterns. And if we are not committed to equality on these terms, it implies an ever-increasing dissonance between the ethical precepts that supposedly guide our social and institutional efforts and the reality we embrace, or the outright abandonment of those precepts.

That’s what I consider dangerous!