Shots in the Dark

In an otherwise thoughtful column, New Republic editor Jonathan Chait takes an egregiously wrong shot at the critics of Larry Summers.

Chait begins thusly: “There are certainly subjects that liberals refuse to discuss without resorting to hysteria and name-calling. (Ask Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who has spent much of the year groveling abjectly for having delicately suggested the possibility that maybe inherent differences play a role in the paucity of female scientists.)”

Now, just hold on a second there, fella. Let’s consider that throwaway parenthetical a little more carefully.

What Chait is really saying here is that the idea that “inherent differences play a role in the paucity of female scientists” isn’t such a big deal, certainly not one that anyone should have to “grovel” about.

This is the kind of statement that only a white man could say and believe to be true.

Larry Summers posited a genetic deficiency to women. (“Prove me wrong,” he added.) And I think if you’re a woman, you’d have every right, and maybe every responsibility, to take that seriously indeed.

Imagine if Summers had said that “inherent differences” played a role in the paucity of African-American scientists. The outrage would be fast and furious, and few would deny its legitimacy.

So why is this argument seen as a kind of casual, harmless intellectual meandering when it’s applied to women?

Kurt Andersen has a lovely review of Garry Trudeau’s new Doonesbury book, “The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time,” in today’s Times.

The book is something of a twist for Trudeau; it’s a collection of his strips about B.D., the football player-turned-soldier who lost his leg in Iraq. I read a number of the strips when they were published in newspapers, and remember thinking how odd it was that one of the few places in the American media dealing so honestly and poignantly about the wounds of war was…a comic strip.

However much later it is now—a year?—I still feel that way. There is so much important reporting, so much urgent storytelling, to be done about this war, and, with the exception of all-too-brief segments on the national news, our major networks do none of it.

When I was a kid, my mother, who is slightly to the left of George McGovern, hung a poster in our kitchen that said, “What if they had a war and nobody came?” I didn’t really understand what the Vietnam-era slogan meant till later, but now I think the slogan should be updated: “What if they had a war and nobody cared?” Or: “What if they had a war and everyone watched reality TV?” Because the visual media seems to have decided that the war doesn’t exist if they don’t show it.

A second thought about Andersen’s review. He concludes by writing that “Garry Trudeau, who by all rights should be phoning it in by now, still takes his responsibilities to the strip and his audience seriously, and in service to them still takes large and interesting risks.”

I couldn’t agree more. I think that one key to leading a meaningful life is to cherish the presence of genius in the moment, not simply to value it after its passage. That’s why I watched Michael Jordan play as much as I could, even though I’m not a particularly big basketball fan, and why I was heartbroken when John Belushi died, and why I prayed that Jerry Garcia would finally quit using heroin (how well he played during those years when he was free of it!).

Garry Trudeau has been writing Doonesbury for, what, 35 years now? Remarkable. We should never take this man for granted.

I’ve finally joined the ranks of the landed and purchased an apartment in Manhattan, which means that posts may be erratic over the next few days. (It’s also a sign that anyone thinking of going into real estate speculation shouldn’t, as my entry into any market is generally a good sign of its imminent collapse.)

We’ll see how our conglomerates—Verizon, Time-Warner, Con-Ed—and newer challengers (Earthlink, Vonage) perform in the next few days. Hopefully this transition will be as seamless as possible.

Meantime, thanks so much to all who came out for the Harvard Rules discussion in Washington yesterday, and to the organizers of it. I know I enjoyed it, and I hope you did too. And fantastic questions….

Here’s an anti-Bush plank for Democrats to run on in 2006 and 2008: corruption. As in, the Bush administration is full of it.

There’s more evidence of that today, as the Times reports that political appointees at the Justice Department “overrode the objections of career lawyers running the government’s tobacco racketeering trial and ordered them to reduce the penalties sought at the close of the nine-month trial by $120 billion.”

The man who made this bizarre decision, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, happpens to be a Skull and Bones—mate of Bush’s who—it’s so predictable—was previously a partner at an Atlanta law firm that represented the tobacco industry.

But let’s return to that $120 billion figure. Career Justice Department lawyers had spent years building their case against Big Tobacco, and at the very last minute, the penalties they were seeking were reduced from $130 billion to ten billion by one of the president’s cronies.

Imagine what that money could go to. A hell of a lot of medical care. Funding for public education. Or, if you prefer, a year of war in Iraq.

McCallum is the second Bush official in recent days who’s been shown to have greater loyalty to his prior employer than to his present one. Phillip Clooney, former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality—the man who used to work for the American Petroleum Institute—doctored already approved White House documents to soften warnings about global warming.

This trickle of corruption will become a torrent as Bush’s second term winds down. That’s the way second terms work—especially when you have a president who polices the morals of everyone except the people who happen to work for him.

The president of Harvard appears to have become a touchstone for every social debate about prejudice of any sort.

Writing originally in the Washington Post, Abigail Trafford cites Summers in a column defending—yes—older drivers.

I’ll quote a little bit, because it contains one of the most glaring examples of fallacious argument I’ve seen in quite some time.

“‘Oh, my God, they’re sooooo slow.” These words, quoted in a newspaper article, come from a 20-year-old woman in Florida. The subject of her condescending mirth: older drivers. Florida is full of them - white hairs in big cars, poking along… chuckle, chuckle.

“But what if the “they” in such a quote were black postal workers? Sooooo slow!”

“Or girls in algebra class? Sooooo slow!”

Instead of chuckles there would be outrage and charges of racism and sexism.”

Okay, let’s just dissect this. In the first instance, a 20-year-old attributes a quality to a demographic group—bad driving and old people. The ability, driving, is directly linked to the physical condition of the aged, at least in this young person’s mind.

But in the latter two examples, the argument is applied to another group—African-Americans—based on their skin color, and to girls based on their gender. Totally different.

“Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, nearly lost his job after he crossed the “ism” line with his remarks about the scientific ability of women,” Trafford writes. So how come we don’t get so upset about age-ism?

Well, lots of reasons. First, while there is certainly age-ism (what a terrible word) in American society, the elderly are also an enormously powerful political group, and are hardly discriminated against.

Second, because many older people (like many younger people) are terrible drivers, albeit for different reasons. It’s not their fault that their coordination has deteriorated. But I’ve seen lots and lots of older drivers who clearly shouldn’t be on the road, and just can’t afford (or don’t want) to give up their mobility.

I write this as someone whose father recently lost the ability to drive, and I know how difficult that is….

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen muses on the recently reported study arguing that Jews have a genetic basis for superior intelligence. No one got particularly upset about this study, Cohen argues. So why did Larry Summers take so much flack for suggesting that there may be innate differences in aptitude between men and women?

Key graf: “I cannot be certain that Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has read the article. But if he did, I bet he wondered why it is possible to suggest that certain Jews are smarter than other people but not remotely possible to suggest that women might not be as brilliant in science and engineering as men. When Summers did precisely that back in January — when he wondered out loud about such matters as “intrinsic aptitude” — he got his head handed to him. He was not, mind you, stating this as a fact — just throwing it out along with other factors that might account for why men outnumber women on the science, engineering and math faculties of first-rate universities. What he did not do — and this was his mistake — was limit the possibilities to the only politically correct one: sexual discrimination of one sort or another.”

I can be certain that Larry Summers read the article. You bet your ass he did. And I’ll admit, when I read of this study, I imagined Summers reading it and feeling some sense of aggrievement.

There are differences, though. Important ones.

First, the Jewish-intelligence study attributed positive characteristics to one particular group, but unlike Summers, it didn’t single out any specific group as coming up short.

Second, it’s possible that when it comes to genetics, people are more likely to believe such assertions about specific ethnic groups, rather than entire genders. In other words, we may believe that Jews have great intelligence as compared to some other groups, but find it hard to accept that intelligence is divisible by gender.

A corollary: this is potentially quite troubling. Cohen must surely understand that one reason people didn’t make such a fuss over this survey is that it reinforces prevailing stereotypes: Jews are smart and good at business. That happens to be a positive stereotype. Perhaps if that conclusion had been phrased differently, the reaction might have been more violent.

Third—and how many friggin’ times do I have to repeat this?—the greatest outrage over Summers’ remarks was not his assertion of differences between men and women, but his strong suggestion that this, rather than discrimination, was the greater explanation for the paucity of women in the sciences.

What’s clear is that we’re just beginning to understand the relationships between genetics and intelligence…but the amount we don’t understand is vastly greater than that which we do. And until that ratio changes, people have to be very careful about drawing conclusions based on pop-science and the occasional isolated study, no matter how provocative they may be. It’s kind of like the blind men and the elephant. Give some people just a little knowledge, and they can draw some bizarre conclusions.