Course Syllabus
Your Next Honors Seminar
DRAFT
Bridging “Unbridgeable” Divides: Good Listening, Empathy, Hubris, Bias, Neo-liberal Assumptions and Disdain for the Truth
Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe
The aim of this seminar is to discuss some central problems in modern political and social life by working through a series of books and articles that confront a number of the serious concerns that many of us have. We think that:
Modern political discourse has become unmoored from any constraints imposed by “the facts of the matter;”
Good listening is something neighbors, citizens and leaders don’t know how to do or do not care to do—thus undermining the possibility of empathy, of learning from others, or even of the accurate perception (noticing) of others;
Old biases have deepened or become more evident and pernicious;
The economic and social policies of both sides of the political spectrum have helped redistribute income and life chances upward, thereby increasing inequality and polarization;
The hubris and privilege of some college-educated elites risks alienating them from many of the citizens they see themselves as serving. In addition, some of the elite have sacrificed public service to privilege, gain, and power;
Disagreement about or disdain for the truth, and public lying by some powerful political elites and intellectuals, as well as regular folks, has poisoned discourse and opened the door to authoritarianism.
Format:
The seminar will meet monthly. Each seminar session will be 90-120 minutes.
We will assign each of you to a working group. The five participants of each working group will meet before each class for a discussion of the reading and the discussion questions posed prior to each monthly seminar. The aim of these small-group meetings is to help organize our collective thinking on the topic for the full session. We will plan on starting each class by getting short, initial reactions about the readings from at least half the class.
The seminar itself will be run similar to Swarthmore-style seminars, with guiding questions and facilitation by the faculty, and an occasional mini-lecture.
Guiding Principles for Participation
1. Participants are encouraged to actively and attentively listen and also come to sessions prepared to actively discuss the issues. This will not be a lecture class.
2. The group will determine a time limit for individual comments.
3. Please plan on attending all sessions and completing all assignments.
4. All participants will participate in a small group discussion prior to each seminar.
5. We will turn off the use of the chat feature during the sessions to minimize distractions.
Readings for the Class: The syllabus below lists the books and articles for the class. You will be responsible for finding the books; we will give you either links to the articles or send you pdfs.
Session I. Good listening
This session is aimed both at discussing the importance of the virtue of good listening to productive discourse and at laying the groundwork for how we want the seminar to run. Good listening is crucial for getting to the truth, is crucial for bridging the chasms that mark modern political life in the U.S., and will be essential to the functioning of our seminar.
Readings:
Beatty, J. (1999). Good listening. Educational Theory, 49.
Lydia Millet, The Unwhole Truth, New York Times Magazine, November 20, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/magazine/20lives.html?pagewanted=print.
Ezra Klein, “What I Have Learned and What Comes Next,” Vox Conversations 21 December 2020 (especially minute 6 to minute 28)
https://dcs.megaphone.fm/VMP2770632294.mp3?key=073d4989270097f9180b50bdcab2c16f.
Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, pp. 3-37.
Pre-Class Exercises
1. Split yourselves into two groups of two. The fifth person will be an observer for one of the two groups. Here is the exercise. Explain to your partner why you think Lydia Millet blows the conversation with her friend (2 minutes). Have your partner tell you back what you said. If you think your partner did not hear you correctly say again what was missed and have your partner explain it back to you. If you have the “observer” in your group she/he/they will observe and comment on the listening particularly in light in Beatty’s analysis of what good listening demands.
2. Explain to your partner what Hochschild means by the “Great Paradox” by picking one of the people in Chapters 1 and 2—Mike Schiff or Lee Sherman—and explaining the paradox they unveiled (2 minutes). Have your partner tell you back what you said. If you think your partner did not hear you correctly say again what was missed and have your partner explain it back to you. The third person in your group will observe and comment on the listening particularly in light in Beatty’s analysis of what good listening demands.
[We suggest that you do both of these exercises and rearrange roles so that everyone gets to be a speaker and a listener].
Questions to Think About:
1. Good listening is important to be a friend. Most of us think that good listening is easy: just sit down, be quiet, and listen. But Beatty argues that good listening takes a lot more than this. Why is it so difficult? Is there a concrete example of “good listening” (or “bad listening”) from your own life that illustrates this?
2. Beatty talks about the “bad listeners” in Chekhov’s story “Heartache.” What makes them bad listeners? In general, what makes someone a bad listener? When have you been a bad listener?
3. What lessons do you learn from Lydia Millet about when and how to listen? About how to tell the truth? About how to speak your mind?
4. Give an example of a tough choice that you make all the time when you are trying to listen well? What makes it tough?
5. What does Beatty mean by the virtue of “openness” and why is it a necessary disposition or habit for good listening?
6. Beatty also talks about the virtue of "detachment" (by which he means at least four different things!). But if a friend is "detached" how can this person be a friend? And if good listening is at the heart of friendship how can "detachment" be critical to good listening?
7. What do you notice about how Hochschild notices—how she listens and how she observes when she talks with Mike and Lee? What does she hear? What does she observe?
8. What role do you think good listening plays in getting to the truth? What would Ezra Klein say about this question?
Session II. Hochschild: Strangers in Their Own Land
Hochschild (a Swarthmore grad) spent significant time in the midst of people about as different from her as it was possible to be. Whether it takes this kind of immersion to develop an understanding of the “other,” and whether this would be enough to overcome our great political divides are questions we will be exploring in the course of this session.
Reading:
Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land. Read carefully chapters 3-10; 15-16.
Pre-Class Exercise
Putting yourselves in the hearts and minds of Hochschild’s respondents, would you be attracted to the “deep story”? Why or why not? What might change your mind—or your heart—about this story?
Questions to Think About:
1.What is the great paradox about the attitudes toward environmental protection and politics that Hochschild discovers in Louisiana? Can you explain how one of her characters best exemplifies this paradox?
2. Looking at one of her characters can you explain how he or she has both criticized or fought against environmental degradation and at the same time supported the Tea Party? Can you make this plausible to someone who has not read the book?
3. In Chapter 1, Hochschild briefly reviews common explanations for why people support the Tea Party seemingly against their own interests—seemingly irrationally: the education and grassroots organization strategy of billionaires like the Koch brothers (Jane Mayer); the way people are misled or duped (Frank), local geographical cultures (Woodward), self-interest based on cultural values (Haidt). She says what is missing from these explanations is “a full understanding of emotion in politics” (15). What does she mean?
4. Although Hochschild emphasizes the emotions and beliefs of the people she talks to in Louisiana, she also underlines the political and economic structures they are enmeshed in, and the forces that eroded and threatened their livelihoods, families and ways of life. What are these political and economic forces? How do her respondents think about them?
5. Listening carefully to her respondents, Hochschild discovers a moral justification for their position: it is not just about, or even primarily about, racism or lack of care for the environment or resentment of big government. It is also about justice and fairness, about “line cutting”; about being abandoned by unjust and hypocritical big city liberal elites who do not understand them, don’t care about them, and importantly, want to give unfair advantages (the line cutting) to blacks, women and immigrants. How do her respondents react when she runs this story by them? How do you react to this story? Why?
7. Is good listening a double-edged sword? Listening is the first step toward comity, more unity, common purpose, seeking the common good. But it does not necessarily get us there: it could get us the opposite. Understanding others could be used to control and manipulate people as well as to bring unity. In a sense, Trump empathized (and listened to) the grievances of white, lower middle class, often rural America. He understood the grievances that the Tea Party had built on before him. Trump mobilized these understandings to support his interests and the interests of wealthy national business elites (oil and gas, dark money), and to undermine political institutions and constitutional checks and balances. His brilliance at manipulation was based on his understanding of the deep grievances and disrespect his followers felt from liberal elites, technocrats, perhaps from many of us. And so, “good listening” can make problems worse, rather than better. What does this suggest about what we need in addition to good listening to enable it to help make political discourse better?
8. Look at the “story” Hochschild creates in Chapter 9 and then tells to those she interviewed. How is this story different than the story these liberal elites tell about the white rural folks Hochschild is studying in Louisiana? If someone asked you to explain which story was the true one, what would you say? Is the problem here a disagreement about “the facts”? And would you aim to challenge one story or the other—to convince one side or the other—to change their story by marshalling facts? If it is not about “the facts,” what is it about? Could divisiveness and lack of communication be bridged by dialogue? Or would it (also) take a political struggle to change national priorities and policies to begin to bridge that dialogue?
III. Implicit Bias and What to Do about It
Hochschild’s book reveals the role of categorization and stereotyping as an obstacle to accurately finding and working through differences. Such bias is typically “implicit,” and is present in people who sincerely believe themselves to be unbiased. It is also present in people who may exhibit no animus toward the people who are the objects of the bias. Most of the work on the topic of implicit bias concerns race, but it can and has been applied to gender and class as well. One of the world’s leading researchers on this topic is Jennifer Eberhardt. We will be using her lens to discuss this topic. Eberhardt says that bias gets wired into our brain and “is part of being human. It’s how we sort and categorize the overload of stimuli that constantly bombard us at any given moment. It brings coherence to a chaotic world. So, whether you like it or not, if you have a brain, you have bias. Bias isn’t always bad or wrong. It actually helps us to decide to approach the house pets and leave the wild animals alone....Bias is a marker of our history, a marker of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. But left unchecked, unconscious bias can lead to great detriment for social groups and for the world that we share. It can shackle us in place.” [minute 7:20 to end; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egw-iheD1Mc]
Reading
Eberhardt, J.L. (2019) Biased (Chapters 5 and 6 can be skimmed if you’re short on time). [Note that at least the paperback edition of the book has a bunch of questions for thought and discussion at the end that you might want to reflect upon.]
Jennifer Eberhardt TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_l_eberhardt_how_racial_bias_works_and_how_to_disrupt_it
Eberhardt, J.L. How to Check Your Unconscious Bias. 14 June 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egw-iheD1Mc
Pre-Class Exercise
Can you think of interactions and decisions in your own life in which you were guilty of implicit bias or observed it in someone else? How did you detect it? What did you do about it? What would you do about it if you had the chance to relive that experience? What, if any, general lessons can be taken from your experience?
Questions to Think About:
1. When you say “so-and-so is biased” what do you generally mean? Is it a criticism, and if so, what kind?
2. Does Eberhardt’s description of bias challenge your everyday use of the term? How? She says for example: “bias gets wired into our brain” and “is part of being human. It’s how we sort and categorize the overload of stimuli that constantly bombard us at any given moment. It brings coherence to a chaotic world. So whether you like it or not, if you have a brain, you have bias. Bias isn’t always bad or wrong.” [How to Check Your Unconscious Bias, minute 7:20 ff]
3. Eberhardt is particularly concerned about “unchecked, unconscious bias” because it “can lead to great detriment for social groups and for the world that we share. It can shackle us in place.” Is it obvious which biases need to be made “conscious” and “checked”? Eberhardt is particularly concerned with racial bias and gender bias, the bias that white’s sometimes have against blacks, men against women. But imagine yourself into the hearts and minds of Hochschild’s informants in Louisiana: how would they describe the unconscious biases of liberal elites?
4. Eberhardt has evidence that people can learn to recognize their implicit biases—and question and change them, or at least not act on them. What kind of implicit bias training is she critical of? Give an example of her alternative methods.
5. An important issue for Eberhardt is the detrimental impact of racial bias in policing. How has she approached dealing with this and what evidence does she have of success?
6. As you think about the relationship between racial bias and policing ask yourself some of these questions: Do you think it is best to work directly on implicit bias (e.g. Eberhard’s improvements on bias training workshops) or should efforts be directed at the larger structural changes in police organization and criminal justice that encourage or perpetuate this bias? For example (a) change personnel and recruitment to “less biased” people; (b) change allowable procedures—new rules and restrictions (e.g., prohibit choke holds); (c) require body cameras; (d) change chargeable offenses (not broken windows, not kids washing car windows, not people jumping turnstiles, not delinquent parking tickets, not possession of marijuana); (e) require that police jointly work with social workers and mental health workers on drug cases and domestic violence cases; (e) rebuild the police forces (e.g., the Camden N.J. police force, where Dept of Justice in DC intervened and demanded restructuring); (f) re-organize policing around community policing; (g)weaken police unions and strengthen power of police commissioner and mayor to discipline the police; (h) create civilian oversight bodies with real power over police procedures and practices.
7. Eberhardt suggests that since implicit bias is automatic, fast, and unconscious, we need to introduce “friction” into the system—some set of practices that breaks or slows the connection between judgment and action and gives our rational faculties time to reflect on what our automatic processes are telling us. Is slowing things down enough? Is slowing things down all that her own interventions do? If not, what sorts of rational processes do we need to nurture and encourage such that the addition of friction will reduce bias and lead to better decision?
Session IV. The Threat of Autocracy
Readings:
Applebaum, A. (2020). The Twilight of Democracy. (You can skim Chapters 2 and 3 if you’re short of time).
Watkins, S. “The Fractured Right, NLR 126, November-December 2020 (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/susan-watkins-the-fractured-right)
Pre-Class Exercise:
Pick two Republicans whose backgrounds and records might have predicted that they would have opposed Trump’s systematic lying, or opposed attempts to undermine the Mueller investigation, or opposed his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Why did one oppose and not the other? Alternatively, look at Applebaum’s comparison of Lindsay Graham and John McCain in her Atlantic article. What explanation would you or she give for their different positions?
Questions to Think About:
1. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate in German philology, and he had literary, journalistic and dramatic interests. He became Hitler’s intellectual propaganda chief and famously said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-table-of-contents). If sectors of the intelligentsia and political elites in Europe and the U.S. are playing this role today, how is it possible to wage a war of truth against the falsehood?
2. Is the best way to combat falsehoods to put energy into the discovery and defense of truth? Or is it combatting the neoliberal economic policies and glorification of the unrestrained market that have deepened economic inequities and created a willing audience for the lies? Or is it to confront head on the racism that makes these lies attractive?
3. Susan Watkins writes in her New Left Review of Applebaum’s book that Conservatives on right may be correct when they argue that it was not that they shifted to the right, but that Applebaum shifted to the “international ‘liberal-bureaucratic’ mainstream” and abandoned the crusading right. Perhaps this shift to the center will strengthen the liberal-bureaucratic bloc “at the elite level,” says Watkins, but this “still leaves the problem of mass electoral support to be solved. This is where questions of democracy come in.” What does Watkins mean?
4. Is the conservative ideology of the clercs who supported Trump and the anti-liberal authoritarians in Europe sufficient to explain why Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell were willing to lie to support autocracy? If not, where else would you look for to answer the “why” question? Was it fear of Trump? Was it “bad character”? Were they simply “selling” their ideas—and riding Trump’s coattails because they sought gain or glory or power?
5. Would you be surprised if these intelligentsia explained their positions to you, off the record, this way: “for us this is just a market transaction. We’re just selling our ideas on the market like an entrepreneur would sell any goods or services. Like the bankers who brought you the mortgage crisis. We’re just investing intellectual capital in the marketplace of ideas. If our ideas sell, we get ahead. That’s just market capitalism. We’re just competing in the market for ideas. So don’t gripe.”
6. Here is a solution—or is it? In medicine, we limit the free market of doctors selling services and medical suppliers selling products by demanding testing, evidence, standards. Even in economic markets we have certain product standards, safety regulations, etc. So why not have standards about ideas: they need to be regulated if they don’t have some relationship to reality. “No,” you say? That threatens first amendment rights to free speech. If so, do we just have to let the “market place” for true ideas decide.
7. Perhaps the way to contain the “truth for sale” is to have strong institutions that traffic—more or less—in facts. At the end of the last century, for example, there were institutions like the press—the fourth estate—the fourth branch of government. Has the decline of newspapers and radio and high journalistic standards eliminated this institutional home for the truth? Or were these less strong supporters of truth than many now imagine? And what of the rise of social media? In a New Left Review book review of Applebaum’s book, Susan Watkins writes: “The new clercs—ideologues, journalists, spin doctors—are adept at deploying these social-media tools to reach those predisposed to authoritarianism and seeking certainties in complex times,” a point Applebaum makes (e.g. 111-118). How much blame does social media deserve, and what can be done about it? A “supreme court” organized by Zuckerberg to independently monitor Facebook? Regulations on the profitable algorithms on Facebook which encourage readers to click on like-minded sites?
8. Every piece of propaganda—every public lie—requires both a messenger and a recipient. Applebaum focuses on the messengers. But what about the recipients? How do we inoculate recipients against the virus?
Session V and VI. Meritocracy, Hubris, Polarization and What Can be Done About It
Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, has written a challenging book about meritocracy. Most of us think that meritocracy is a very good thing, especially when compared to the alternatives. We probably think that we are where we are in life in part because of meritocracy. Sandel points out both the difficulties in assessing merit and the consequences of taking merit too seriously when it comes to forging a coherent national political culture. Merit, he argues, is not a solution to the problems of inequality. Worse, the current meritocracy encourages the hubris of those who make it and the humiliation and loss of recognition of those who don’t. What are the causes? Are there solutions?
Session V: Meritocracy, Hubris, Polarization and How We Think About Ourselves
Reading
Pre-Class Exercise:
Questions to Think About:
1. What is the connection Sandel sees between the culture of meritocracy and credentialism on the one hand and the hubris of elites on the other? How is this connected to the humiliation and lack of recognition the working classes feel?
2. Beatty and Hochschild are deeply concerned about the obstacles to good listening, noticing, and empathy. Sandel implicitly identifies a central obstacle to good listening: college! That’s because the college educated, technocratic, professional meritocracy suffers from hubris and has humiliated millions of Americans; it has not shown them respect and recognition. These elites—we elites—can’t hear their stories. Reflecting on your own attitudes or on people you know, can you think of examples which support or counter Sandel’s proposition?
3. A core assumptions American liberalism makes about equality and justice is: level the playing field of life and all will be well. Sandel is not opposed to liberal efforts to make “the playing field more level” but here argues that “merit is not a way out of inequality.” Why?
4. He also argues that the rhetoric of “level of the playing field and all will be well” is wrong morally and dangerous politically. It risks denigrating the dignity and respect of those who do not make it. To believe that merit is a solution to inequality creates a public mindset and culture of blame and denigration for all those who did not make it because it must be their fault for not trying hard enough. How would you agree or disagree with this argument?
5. Sandel identifies a deep religious presumption underlying the meritocratic culture in Protestantism: that hard work and individual responsibility are the path to grace, to recognition, to merit; and that good fortune and luck of birth, class, family, culture are to be ignored. Why is this presumption problematic morally? And why is it dangerous politically?
6. Do you tell yourself and others a “merit story” when explaining how you got to be where you are in terms of work and lifestyle? Is what is left out a kind of lie would you describe it in another way? Will reading Sandel get you to tell yourself, and others, a different story?
7. Why did many liberals like hearing Obama talk about “smart policies”—and what kinds of things was he contrasting his smart policies against? Why is Sandel’s critique of such “smart policy” talk? (104-110) Is he right that economists are among the meritocratic of technocrats and that their claim to “follow the science” has justified economic policies that have been destructive?
8. Failure to “respect the facts” was an oft-voiced critique of Trump. Saner heads would say: “follow the facts,” “follow the science,” “I believe in science,” “I believe in ‘smart’ policies.” Sandel, however, has a warning here: when technocratic elites emphasize “the primacy of facts” (p.109) and “smart” policies (104-108) they often forget the importance of cultivating the habit of reasoning together (p.108). Climate change shows us that it is a mistake to think that the more we know about facts drawn from science, the more we will agree. Hochschild observed this too. So, what kind of deliberation will it take to find common ground on issues like climate change?
9. What does Sandel mean by “weaponization of college credentials”?
10. To what extent, if any, does our current college sorting process contribute to the creation of the clercs that Applebaum writes about?
Session VI: College, Work, Meritocracy, Hubris, Polarization: What, If Anything, Do We Change?
This week we will continue our discussion of Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit looking closely at his chapters on College as a “Sorting Machine” and “Recognizing Work.”
Reading
Pre-Class Exercise:
Questions to Think About:
1. One problem Sandel points to is that many colleges and universities (especially the more prestigious) sort by criteria that are not merit based. Is it unjust or unfair to give preference to the wealthy or powerful? To athletes? To minorities? But drill deeper: even if these special privileges and admission scams were eliminated, there is still a problem with the current admissions—and sorting—process. Why?
2. Sandel is also concerned with another effect of the current college sorting machine:
the bad impact meritocratic admissions and culture has on the content of what is taught and learned in college. How does it alter the motivation of students, turning it narrow and instrumental? How does it undermine the virtues and skills of learning like good listening, empathy, reflection, deliberation, openness, humility? How does it undermine the virtue of love of truth? How does the very reward structure of college undermine the virtues and skills graduates need to “see” and give “recognition” to those who are not credentialed?
4. Do you think that Sandel’s criticism of the ideology of merit might feed into the current attacks on truth and science: if college teaches professionals and technical elites to respect “facts” and “science,” isn’t a critique of the meritocratic elites also a critique of facts, science and the value of the truth?
5. Sandel denigrates liberal hubris, but what about right-wing anti-intellectual hubris? As Hochschild observes: “we are left with an important issue Sandel does not address: the targeting by the right wing of colleges themselves. This isn’t new [but it] has taken a shockingly partisan turn. For the first time in recent history, the less education you have, the more you lean right and distrust higher education itself.” (NYT, 30 Nov 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/the-tyranny-of-merit-michael-j-sandel.html
How are we to defend what colleges do, or what they should do, from this sort of attack?
6. Sandel’s last chapter is about the moral degradation of work. He acknowledges the way work has already been denigrated by neoliberal economic policies and globalization, the policies that have unleashed the financial sector and its casino-like and unproductive role in the economy, and job-killing technology. So how has the tyranny of merit intensified the moral degradation of work, the loss of dignity and recognition in (nonprofessional, non-technocratic) work?
7. Sandel writes that “Equality of opportunity is a morally necessary corrective to injustice...no one should be held back by poverty or prejudice. But a good society cannot be premised only on the promise of escape....Even a society more successful than ours at providing upward mobility would need to find ways to enable those who do not rise to flourish in place, and to see themselves as members of a common project. Our failure to do so makes life hard for those who lack meritocratic credentials and makes them doubt that they belong.” (224) What would an alternative look like? If we change our dominant notion of justice from distributive justice to contributive justice would that help?
8. Is there hope in Sandel’s call to challenge the “tendency to confuse the money we make with the value of our contribution to the common good.” (213) An exception seems to be the recent pandemic: “The pandemic of 2020 prompted many to reflect, at least fleetingly, on the importance of the work performed by grocery store clerks, delivery workers, home care providers, and other essential but modestly paid workers.” (213) The tendency to equate wages with contribution to the common good seems to have been challenged. Will this challenge last?
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