The Charter School Conflict in New York City: The Psychodynamics of Self-Control

New York City is the site of an angry political and communal dispute about its public school system. For those of my readers from outside the United States, many cities in the U.S., in response to failing public schools,  have developed what is called a “charter school network” as an alternative to the customary public schools.  Charter schools are funded by tax dollars but its teachers and administrators are free, within limits, to design the curriculum according to their best assessment of what children, particularly poor and minority children, need. Some charters are not-for-profit institutions, others are in business to make money while serving children and their parents. They do not have to comply with all of the city’s administrative mandates, and more importantly, the teachers they hire need not be members of the major teacher’s union. This last provision is particularly attractive to some principals and school executives, since they believe that union work rules constrain their ability to create fruitful teaching settings, for example by extending the school day so that children leave at 5 pm rather than at 2 pm. City residents are free to enroll their children in any charter school, but should there be more children applying than there are seats available, admission is determined by lottery. The “Success Academy,” a charter school network, is at the center of the current conflict in New York City. In 2015, 22,000 children applied for 2,688 spots available in the network’s schools. Parents want in.   

The proximate stimulus for the conflict is a fight over money, space and permits. The prior mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, gave the Success Academy network of schools free space in current public school buildings. But the current mayor, Bill Deblasio, has threatened to charge Success Academy for the space they use, while also denying it permits to open more schools in the city. The result has been a nasty public fight between Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the Success Academy and Mayor Deblasio. Moskowitz has been astute in mobilizing her parents to protest any constraints on the network’s ability to function and expand. For example, she bussed thousands of parents and children to Albany, the capital of New York State, to protest the Mayor’s threatened decisions.

The conflict also provokes some larger conflicts about privilege, social class, power and poverty in New York City, the quintessential global city.  The Success Academy, while supported by public funds, also gets some money from two hedge fund billionaires. Community leaders and activists are suspicious of the latter’s motives, believing that the two are ideologically committed to “marketizing” public services. This process, activists worry, will undermine a community's experience of itself as a group of people with common interests and resources committed to every member’s welfare. Other critics and community leaders worry that these hedge fund executives are exercising arbitrary authority simply because they have the money to influence events, decisions and elections. They seem to be manipulating society to advance their own private ideals or, in one harsh reading, to indulge in a hobby of “doing good” on their own terms and without being held accountable to citizens and the public.

Two YouTube videos (here and here) highlight the political and communal conflict the Academy’s expansion provokes. The city’s Board of Education held a community hearing to consider the question of whether or not a Success Academy school should be allowed to move into a public school building, thereby taking some space from the public school, called, “P.S. 30,” currently housed there. Both proponents and opponents of Success Academy, including many parents, came to the meeting.  As one can see in the video, P.S. 30 parents and teachers refer to the Success Academy as an “invader” and “intruder,” and as a signal of the city’s gentrification. One speaker passionately invokes the history of school segregation, and bemoans the fact that the Success Academy schools are splitting families apart in a form of a “divide and conquer” strategy. “Look at everybody here,” he says, “We have black and Hispanic versus black and Hispanic.” Parents whose children attend the Success Academy heckle the speaker insisting that they have a right to choose which schools their children attend.

Critics of the Success Academy and its pedagogy believe that its schools are punitive and harsh to both students and teachers. As one journalist reports, “Success has stringent rules about behavior, down to how students are supposed to sit in the classroom: their backs straight, and their feet on the floor if they are in a chair, or legs crossed if they are sitting on the floor. The rationale is that good posture and not fidgeting make it easier to pay attention.” In addition, when students take practice tests, to prepare for statewide exams, they cannot go to the bathroom and sometimes wet themselves. Also, “Students who are deemed to not be trying are placed in an ‘effort academy’ which is part detention and part study hall.” 

In addition, students are suspended from the Success Academy schools at a rate higher than is the case in regular public schools. At the Success Academy Harlem 1 school, 23% of the 896 students were suspended for at least one day in 2012-13, the last year for which the state has data. At Public School 149, a school in the same building, 3% of students were suspended during that same period. Moreover, students who take practice tests and succeed get prizes such as remote-controlled cars, arts and crafts kits, and board games. “Former teachers said that they were instructed to keep the prizes displayed in the front of their classroom to keep students motivated.” In addition, as one journalist writes, “At most schools, if a child is flailing academically, it is treated as a private matter. But at Success Academy Harlem 4, one boy’s struggles were there for all to see: On two colored charts in the hallway, where the students’ performance on weekly spelling and math quizzes was tracked, his name was at the bottom, in a red zone denoting that he was below grade level.”  Finally, as the reporter notes, “A teacher complained that she was expected to announce all of her students’ scores on practice tests, by asking those who had scored a four to stand up, followed by those with a three and then those with a two. The teacher and her colleagues persuaded their supervisors not to make students with a score of one stand up, but those students were still left conspicuously sitting down, she said.”  Responding to the claim that the Success Academy schools were unduly harsh, Moskowitz, the CEO, told a reporter, “We cannot let up on them (the students). Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business.”

Let’s accept for the moment that the culture is harsh, though I believe that as a primary descriptor of the setting, this charge is one-sided. Many observers, and more importantly parents, are persuaded that Success Academy’s teaching and administrative bring order and calm to what is often a chaotic setting. Conduct that seems harsh and unforgiving may also represent a teacher’s total commitment to a student’s success and a belief in his or her ability. A reporter for the New Yorker writes, “At Success, the school year is ten months long and the school days stretch from 7:45 A.M. to 5 P.M. for those in fifth grade or higher. Similarly, one parent writes, “As soon as you enter the doors, one senses there is something different. Teachers are on their toes, politely and efficiently directing where you need to go. All are well dressed, well informed and carry themselves with an absolute commitment to providing the best possible education for students in attendance at one of the 14 Success Academies in New York City. This isn't to say one couldn't find this kind of enthusiasm in a different kind of school, but it's rare. Personally, there are only two times I have ever seen it: as a teacher and staff member for Teach for America, and walking through the doors of a Success Academy school.” Success Academy students are also exposed to more art, music, chess and physical play than comparable students in public schools.  Moreover, they are encouraged to talk as much as possible. “‘We’re not big on hand-raising here,’ Moskowitz said.’”

Most importantly, the Academy’s schools are successful. An independent university based evaluation of 3^rd graders’ achievement in the network’s first school in Harlem found that the students did better on tests of math and language competence than students who had applied to the school but had not won a seat through the lottery.

In addition, “Last year, sixty-four per cent of the third grade students at Success Academy Harlem 5 passed the state English exam and eighty-eight per cent passed the state math exam. At Public School 123, the Mahalia Jackson School, which is located in the same school building as Success, only eighteen per cent of students passed the English test and only five per cent passed the math test.”

If we grant the Success Academy the benefit of the doubt, that it is successful, the question is what meaning can we make of the sometimes harsh discipline the school imposes on its students. One straightforward hypothesis is that discipline is one vehicle for helping students develop self-control. My readers may recall the famous “marshmallow test” in which pre-school aged children are presented with a challenge: “Sit in front of a marshmallow alone in a room for 15 minutes. If you don’t eat it you will get two marshmallows. If you do eat it, you only get the one in front of you.”  The experiment’s originator, Walter Mischel, found that children who passed the test were more successful as adults. As one journalist writes, “Follow-up studies on these preschoolers found that those who were able to wait the 15 minutes were significantly less likely to have problems with behavior, drug addiction or obesity by the time they were in high school, compared with kids who gobbled the snack in less than a minute. The gratification-delayers also scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT.” (An entrance exam for college applicants.)

The link between self-control and achievement is readily apparent. A precondition for achieving any worthwhile goal is the ability to not only delay gratification, but more importantly, to tolerate pain, frustration and difficulty. The pain is a measure of the work required for success. This suggests that Success Academy’s disciplined approach would have merit for poor and minority children insofar as they are less able than their middle or upper class peers, to control their impulses. Certainly, many risk factors that shape a child’s ability to control their own behavior affect poor and minority children negatively. 

For example, “Children whose parents, particularly mothers, have greater formal education are better able to exhibit self-control in social and school settings. Mothers with lower educational attainment have children who perform worse on tests of self-regulation..while other studies have found that higher educational status for both parents positively predicted behavioral regulation. Moreover, “The available literature indicates that minority status may be a risk factor for lower self-regulation. When controlling for a host of risk variables, Sektnan et al. (2010) found that being African American was significantly correlated with lower self-regulation in kindergarten.”

There are probably several channels through which risk factors, such as poverty and race, shape a young child’s capacity for self-control. For example, children in single parent, poor families, may experience their setting as unreliable and untrustworthy. They don’t believe, based on their experience, that by delaying gratification and tolerating pain they will garner rewards. In addition, children who internalize their parent’s experience of victimhood, one possible result of settings shaped by institutional racism, may feel unworthy. This means that they don’t expect to be treated fairly; to be rewarded commensurate with their effort. In addition, surveys document that African American parents use more physical discipline than their white counterparts, partly because they believe that their children live in higher risk settings, where misdeeds and mistakes are more likely to expose them to predators. To be “no-nonsense” parents, they physically discipline their children preemptively to keep them out of a larger harm’s way.

But physical discipline tactics can short circuit a child’s development of self-control. The child learns to avoid the parent rather than to modify his or her own behavior. The parent is not experienced as a figure to be admired and imitated, but as one to be feared.  

Finally, it is a well-established finding that children in poor households are exposed to 30 million fewer words by the time they are three-years-old than children from high-income households. But one way in which children develop self-control is by speaking to themselves, first overtly by talking out loud, and then covertly. For example, two researchers found that, “Children talked to themselves more when they were faced with a difficult task, when working by themselves, or when a teacher was not available to help.  They studied the private speech in Appalachian children, (a region of great poverty), as well as middle-class children. They found that Appalachian children’s private speech developed at a slower pace than those who were middle-class.”

Psychoanalysis helps round out our understanding of the dynamics of self-control. Certainly one puzzle of human motivation is why people would inflict pain on themselves. The high school athlete who trains to the point of exhaustion, the high school violinist who practices for hours a day are submitting to what at times is self-imposed tedium, discomfort and disappointment.  One possible explanation is that they anticipate great rewards. But in fact, unlike the setting of the Marshmallow test, these rewards are far in the future and very uncertain. A different hypothesis is that starting out, as young strivers, they are rewarded by their teachers’ and mentors’ approval, but that later, as they mature, they internalize this approving voice. The voice becomes part of their psychological makeup, so that they can reward themselves with feelings of self-esteem and worthiness even when their objective achievements are partial or incomplete and their experience is unpleasant.  

Psychoanalysis calls this internal voice, the “ego ideal” while developmental psychologists describe it as a process of “moral internalization.” Broadly, this process describes how young people are acculturated. Consider the extreme case of a young research scientist who spends a decade on a research question encountering only one dead-end after the other. In this situation the scientist’s internalized “voice” has become abstract, represented not by a person, but by the ideals of scientific study and its meaning for human achievement. One way to understand Freud’s use of the term ‘sublimation” is to envision a developmental movement in the psyche’s structure, starting with the “teacher in the flesh,” moving through the internalized voice of a mentor, and arriving at an end point where a person subordinates himself or herself to abstract cultural ideals such as the scientific method. When parents use physical disciplining tactics excessively, they derail the moral internalization process.

Psychoanalysis proposes that this developmental movement does not proceed smoothly and without conflict. In this way of thinking, children and adults do not readily relinquish what gratifies them immediately, that is why people under conditions of stress resort frequently to drug use, drinking or sexual acting out. Freud argued that in this sense the process of civilizing the individual creates in its wake conflict and discontent. It is never complete and can create unhappiness, hence the regression. One way then to understand the harsher features of the Success Academy schools, is to posit that the school must become an agent of necessary acculturation, imposing the pain and discipline the child must suffer through, in order to gain the self esteem and sense of self-worth that achievement and approval brings.

But I can well imagine my reader recoiling from such a proposition. There is after all a very vital and powerful tradition of theorizing about schooling, “the progressive education movement,” which posits that the acculturation process can be naturalized, so that children, led only by their search for pleasure, their innate curiosity and their wish to play, can acquire all the intellectual and emotional skills they need to thrive as adults.  This idea has been expressed in innumerable pedagogical innovations, for example the “open classroom,” “whole language teaching,” “project based learning,”   “self-guided instruction,” "teaching 'critical thinking skills' (as against a substantive understanding of a discipline),"  “child-centered pedagogy,” and “constructivism.”

I know that I am at some risk of crossing swords with experts, but as far as I understand the history of these innovations, none have been successful when applied to the teaching of young children, particularly children from low-income families, except when seriously modified or implemented by charismatic teachers.  One reason that I can say this with some confidence is that the driving impulse behind these pedagogies is the faulty assumption that just as children learn to speak a language and master the social rules of the playground spontaneously, so they should be able to spontaneously learn to read write, figure, and think critically. But our modern understanding of the mind is that it is modular in construction (See, Egan: 2002). The skills for learning language or understanding a social hierarchy are specialized and innate. They do not represent a generalized ability to learn. In this sense, it is useful to see progressive pedagogy as one branch of “utopian thinking,” a schema through which adults project onto children the wish that a society could socialize its members so that individuality is never compromised and individual impulses are never suppressed.

There is remarkable piece of social history that is relevant here. From 1967 to 1995, the U.S. federal government launched and sustained, Project Follow Through, which remains still today, “ as the world’s largest education experiment.” “Over the first 10 years more than 22 sponsors, worked with over 180 (educational) sites at a cost of over $500 million in a massive effort to find ways to break the cycle of poverty through improved education.” Schools with the support of parents could adopt one of a number of educational models. The reading portion of this study involved over 15,000 students and was designed to test the effectiveness of models of reading instruction by gauging three outcomes; basic skills, cognitive growth, such as critical thinking skills, and the child’s affective experience, for example his or her self esteem. Program results were measured by tests that assessed children’s academic achievements in math and reading competence, their cognitive skills, and two tests of their affective experiences, --their self-esteem, and their readiness to attribute their successes and failures to their own efforts. Interestingly, a plurality of parent groups and schools, chose a program called, “Direct Instruction,” (see YouTube), a highly scripted teaching program that emphasizes both drill, assessment and individual attention. Abt Associates, the premier program evaluation firm of the last decades of the 20^th century, conducted the evaluation of Project Follow Through with the following results.

To the embarrassment of progressive education theorists, Direct Instruction, a scripted and teacher guided method of instruction was by far and away the most successful program on all three dimensions, the academic, the cognitive and the affective. Many of the programs in fact reduced achievement. The Harvard Educational Review published a critique of the Abt evaluation methodology and the evaluators countered with a spirited defense in the same issue of the journal.  A group of progressive education theorists persuaded the National Institute of Education, to not disseminate the results of the study in part because, “The audience for the Follow Through evaluations is an audience of teachers for whom appeals to the need for accountability of public funds, or the rationality of science are largely irrelevant.” In other words, teachers would not care.

There is another piece of this story that helps shed light on the political passions that that the Success Academy network of schools provokes. Some of my readers may recall or may have learned about a visceral and dramatic conflict that took place in New York City in 1968 between the teachers union (UFT), black parents, community leaders and the city’s board of education, over who would control the schools. The teachers, wary of local community boards who might decide to fire or remove teachers at will, went on strike, opening up a social and psychological chasm between white teachers and black parents. The conflict also exacerbated tensions between the black community and the Jewish community (many teachers were Jewish) in the city. It was by all accounts a visceral, and an emotionally draining conflict. Some political scientists argue that the historic Black-Jewish political alliance, which was fashioned and strengthened during the Civil Rights movement, never recovered.

One result of the conflict was that a group of parents at Public School 137 in the Ocean-Hills Brownsville section of New York City, -- the epicenter of the communal conflict – decided to bid for participation in Project Follow Through and then chose Direct Instruction as the model they wished to test! As two researchers write, “ The well publicized conflict between the administrators and staff at Public School 137 and the United Federation of teachers in 1966-1968 over the issue of community control irreversibly politicized the Ocean Hill Brownsville District and P.S. 137 in particular. Related activities got parents involved in schools in such a way not found in any other poverty-ridden area. Parents learned how to use power. Some used this power to have P.S. 137 chosen as one of the schools in the national Follow Through program and to select the structured Direct Instruction model. Parent support has kept the program going for 14 years, despite cuts due to the New York City budget crisis of 1975 and subsequent reductions in Federal funding.” Reporting on an evaluation of this program at the school, the researchers note that Direct Instruction was a success.

I think this bit of social history provides some insight into the raw feelings and conflicts that Success Academy has provoked. Let me speculate on what I believe to be the question that community leaders in the black community are raising.  Can the Black community in old inner cities collectively empower itself? Can it, through its own political consciousness, bring will and self control to the aid of its parents and children?  Answering this question in the affirmative may be the only route through which the black community can exercise its forcefulness, without succumbing to the kind of street violence we saw in Ferguson Missouri, after a jury acquitted a white policeman charged with murdering a young black man. This self control was also what the Nation of Islam offered Malcolm X, a reprieve from his criminal impulses, so that through rigorous religious practice and faith he could recover his many and extraordinary talents. Or if the answer is "no," will this community become the object of social programs and social experiments that others -- elites, policy specialists, urban planners, shape and lead? 

If I am right about this question, I wonder if there is not a deep yearning for recovering what was in fact the greatest exemplification of self control in a political movement -- when the Civil rights movement and its leaders taught its members to respond to beatings, murders and fire-bombings, non-violently. But the distressing issue this yearning raises, is on what grounds can community leaders who hope to build empowerment collectively by building political consciousness, possibly deprive individual children and parents of an opportunity for a better education? This is why in the YouTube video of the community meeting, the opponents of Success Academy must concede to its proponents, parents of children who attend its schools, that they do have the right to choose where their children will study. I believe that this concession undermines the opponents’ moral standing and political effectiveness.

Diane Ravitch, a scholar of education and a fierce opponent of charter schools, argues that charter schools undermine the society’s commitment to public education. The question is what vision of public education in the inner city is on offer. The reality is inescapably dispiriting. As I write from Philadelphia, the schools are segregated, students are promoted to higher grades without mastering the requisite skills—a form of psychological expulsion -- and parents do not exercise a strong voice in shaping the school’s climate. Only the black community can save itself collectively from these conditions. No one else cares enough. Absent that, charter schools are an escape valve for the many children lucky enough to attend the good ones.

Women in High-Tech: Disappointments for the class of '94, Stanford University

Stanford University is closely identified with the growth of high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. One 2011 study estimated, “That Stanford alumni and faculty have created 39,900 companies since the 1930s, which if gathered collectively into an independent nation, would constitute the world’s 10th largest economy.” In addition, “32 percent of alumni described themselves as an investor, early employee or a board member in a startup at some point in their careers.” The link between the university and enterprise is extraordinary. (http://engineering.stanford.edu/press/study-reports-stanford-alumni-create-nearly-3-trillion-economic-impact)  

In a recent article in the New York Times, “A Brand New World in which Men Ruled,” the journalist, Jodi Kantor, reports on the reunion of Stanford University alumni who graduated in 1994. These alumni she notes, “finished college precisely when and where the web was stirring to life, and it swept many of them up, transforming computer science and philosophy majors alike into dot-com founders, graduates with uncertain plans into early employees of Netscape, and their 20-year reunion weekend here in October into a miniature biography of the Internet.” (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html)

She focuses in particular on one question. Why did many more men than women from this class become the entrepreneurs, founders, investors and early employees of enterprises connected to the Internet and the World Wide Web?  She suggests that this outcome is puzzling since the class of ’94 entered Stanford, “When the university had embarked on a bold diversity experiment, trying to dismantle old gender and racial barriers. The university retooled its curriculum and residential life to prepare its students for a more diverse future. No one was allowed to know the name of his or her freshman roommate before arriving on campus, to prevent prejudgments based on ethnic names. In seminars by day, students read texts by Aboriginal Australian writers; in the evenings, dorm counselors held programs on black and feminist issues. With no iPhones, text messages or even websites to distract them, students immersed themselves in long discussions about how sexism had expressed itself in their families back home or, in later years, about Condoleezza Rice’s policies as provost.”

But yet, as she goes on to note, “Instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones, according to interviews with dozens of members of the class and a broad array of Silicon Valley and Stanford figures. ‘We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses,’ said Kamy Wicoff, who founded a website for female writers. It was largely the men of the class who became the true creators, founding companies that changed behavior around the world and using the proceeds to fund new projects that extended their influence. Some of the women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple or hopping from one start-up adventure to the next. Few of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley.”

One question is why this happened, particularly when, as she notes, nearly half the class were women, “And plenty were adventurous and inventive, tinkerers and computer camp veterans who competed fiercely in engineering contests; one (woman) won mention in the school paper for creating a taco-eating machine.”

Kantor never quite alights upon an explanation. This is reportage not scholarship. But she does offer a series of probes that when taken together provide insights into this puzzling outcome. For example, Kantor notes that many of the women who were scientifically minded became physicians. They eschewed the uncertainty associated with Internet startups – after all most fail – for the more certain path of a medical career. “Throwing yourself into the exhausting marathon of medical training at least promised a lasting, meaningful career; throwing yourself into an equally demanding start-up was likely to yield nothing at all.” As one of her informants who enrolled in medical school notes, ‘The Internet was the Wild West. You could do anything there, but it was such an unpaved path.’”

The issue of risk, and the excitement it creates, is echoed in Kantor’s descriptions of two male members of the class of ’94, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal, and Sacks was among its early employees. PayPal was a generative vehicle for entrepreneurship. Its early employees went on to found YouTube, LinkedIn, Telsa Motors, Yelp, Palantir Technologies, and SpaceX. Describing the reason he left a good job at Mckinsey Consulting to join Paypal, Sacks wrote of,  “The desire to live on the edge, to fight an epic battle, to experience in a very diluted way what previous generations must have felt as they prepared to go to war.”  “Unbridled capitalism,” he suggested, “has become the preferred vehicle for channeling their energy, intellect and aggression.”

Thiel was motivated by a strong libertarian philosophy and an impulse to fight central governments that exploit ordinary people. He originally envisioned PayPal “facilitating trade in currency for anyone with an Internet connection by enabling an instant transfer of funds from insecure currencies to more stable ones, such as U.S. dollars…. The very rich could always protect themselves by investing offshore. It's the poor and middle class, who get screwed. PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,’ Thiel predicted. ‘It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try, the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.” (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=698654.0;wap2)

Sacks’ reference to war and Thiel’s battle with corrupt authority, draws our attention to the intense pleasures men may experience when belonging to what Shakespeare describes in Henry V, as a  “band of brothers.” (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”) This pleasure results from each band member’s intense dependence on the others in facing both danger and the prospect of overcoming it. This danger stimulates intimacy, as each member experiences the others’ struggles to draw on their innermost resources of courage and intelligence in the fight to survive. Indeed, PayPal faced a succession of significant challenges from competitors, regulators, the mafia, Russian hackers and the company that eventually bought them, Ebay.  Under these conditions of risk and danger, the pleasure men feel can be described as “homoerotic,” without being homosexual, as psychological and physical proximity stimulate feelings of love and gratitude. Sebastian Junger, the war correspondent, describes dangerous war zones as the occasions to experience, “a male Eden.” 

To be sure, business is decidedly not war, but the risks of an early start up can feel “existential” as people invest their time, energy, and standing in what are inherently fragile undertakings that in all likelihood will fail. Describing the “band of brothers” at PayPal, Thiel notes, “The kind of common ground shared by the early PayPal leaders is always the critical ingredient of the founding teams. You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.”

One hypothesis that may shed some light on women’s experiences is that a band of brothers’ élan rests on excluding women. Were women present, the intimacy could too readily provoke sexual desire, distracting men from their shared goal, while inducing competition between them. This may be one reason why these early startups were built atop a “nerd culture,” in which women, while they are sex objects, are also unapproachable. Max Levchin, another PayPal co-founder, argued that the company had a hard time hiring women, “because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?” As Kantor goes on to write, “Lauri Schultheis said that when she interviewed to be PayPal’s office manager, and its first female employee — before even Mr. Sacks arrived — an engineer asked her, ‘Does this mean I have to stop looking at porn?’”

In nerd culture, men don’t compete directly for women but they do compete, sometimes viciously for status and resources. The wonderful movie “The Social Network.” a fictionalized account of how Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook, is suggestive here. Zuckerberg was ruthless in pursuing his goals. After all, three early collaborators sued him (in the film, and in real life).  But alas, for all his success, he cannot, at the end of the film, get the girl he wants. Sitting at his computer after this triumph, alone in a room, he tries over and over to “friend her” but gets no response. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UhONY3-1os) He remains a Nerd.

Finally, Kantor wonders if the university’s focus on diversity and identity group consciousness might have actually backfired. She writes, “Looking back years later, some alumni wondered aloud how well the thunderous debates about gender and race had really served them. At what turned out to be a formative hour for Silicon Valley, diversity had come to seem to them like a matter of overheated rhetorical contests instead of mutual compacts for success.”

This is a provocative idea. How could the concept of “diversity” as the framework for a curriculum, have held back women in general. If true, this would be most puzzling, since feminism’s project is to empower women. Let me propose the following hypothesis. Individual and collective aggression helps fuel an enterprise's start-up. There are so many obstacles to overcome. This is one reason that Sacks references, “aggression” along with “energy” and “intellect” as central features in the war for success. Yet, a diversity curriculum may devalue male aggression, perhaps by linking it too closely to the idea of “domination” particularly in sexual relationships. The curriculum may reinforce a climate of opinion in which male aggression becomes synonymous with male coercion. This reinforces the curriculum’s focus on, “forgotten people,” people who were and are victims of male coercion, such as slaves, minorities or women. This may be why efforts at many campuses to reshape the college curriculum along the lines of diversity first led to campus speech codes to protect minorities’ self-esteem, and recently, to codes of conduct for regulating a man’s sexual behavior when in bed with a woman. The model of sexual relatedness has become “informed consent” at the most intimate level, subject to a high level of control and regulation. 

If this hypothesis has merit, one can see how a diversity curriculum and the climate of opinion it sustains, can in fact make it more difficult for women to form what Kantor felicitously calls, “compacts for success” with men.  Such compacts, which help groups mobilize collective aggression to face and overcome obstacles, can thrive only under conditions of spontaneous give and take. But such spontaneity necessarily leads to misunderstandings and missteps -- for example from unwelcomed personal aggression -- as well as to moments of sublime cooperation.

Moreover, early startups facing limited resources and even more limited time cannot tolerate uneven performance. Writing about the period in which he joined PayPal, Sacks emphasized how the ideal of a meritocracy shaped the culture of the startup. “In the start-up crucible,” he wrote, “performing is all that matters.” In a meritocracy the desire for self-esteem has no standing per se. Instead, a person feels good about his or her worth only upon performing excellently. Perhaps the diversity curriculum soured women on the prospects of having to tolerate men’s aggression, with its inevitable assaults to self-esteem, based on one’s objective performance.

In addition, perhaps men too soured on this prospect. Indeed, both Thiel and Sacks, when students at Stanford wrote articles and a book attacking the diversity curriculum. In an op-ed piece they published in the Wall Street Journal while still sophomores, they wrote, that, “In Cultures Ideas and Values,  (CIV), the freshmen requirement that replaced western culture, students compare the U.S. bill of rights with Lee Iacocca’s Car-buyer bill of rights.” Plato and Aristotle are read, but more to contrast their logocentrism with the more holistic approach of Chief Seattle. Students not only read Shakespeare’s The Tempest but A Tempest written by 1960’s radical Aime Cosaire who tells the story from a slave perspective. These motifs have been a-historically combined in an end of quarter skit in which students dress in Roman togas and depict European Imperialism in the New World.”

I am sure this essay’s mocking tone masked a good deal of exaggeration.  Today, Sacks is apologetic for what in retrospect looks like inflammatory rhetoric, particularly when he impugned homosexuals. After all, his partner Thiel revealed only much later that he was in fact gay. As Kantor reports, “Mr. Sacks said in an email that he was “embarrassed by some of the things I wrote in college over 20 years ago, and I am sorry I wrote them,” adding that he was “horrified” by his old views on homosexuality and that he calls himself a supporter of gay rights and marriage equality. ‘These views do not represent who I am or what I believe today.’”

Nonetheless, it is helpful to plumb the meaning of Sacks and Thiel’s attack on the diversity curriculum rather than simply to dismiss it. It seems reasonable to suppose that they saw the curriculum, not unreasonably, as an attack on the legitimacy of male aggression. There are two grounds for their response, rational and emotional. A person can oppose the attack on male aggression, or at least term it one-sided, on rational grounds. For example, male aggression, when detached from violence, has been one among several sources of the West’s cultural and technological achievements. Freud called this “sublimation” and saw it as essential to building civilization. A diversity curriculum highlights the West’s history of violence and its victims to remind us that sublimation often failed and that male aggression has been destructive. But the rational response can in turn reference Steven Pinker’s 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined,’ which proves definitively and statistically, that civilization’s advance has in fact led to a decline in violence.

But it also likely that 18 year-old men would react emotionally to the attack on male aggression insofar as they are unsettled psychologically about how to express their own sexual desires. The heterosexual “nerd” desires women, but does not know how to mobilize aggression to get their attention. One response is that they turn women into objects, for example looking at porn, which under certain conditions women may experience as assaultive.  For example, before he launched Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his friends at Harvard created a website, “Facemash” through which a user, “could compare the attractiveness of two Harvard (women) students, voting with the click of a mouse. The site, which was open to the world and which used official Harvard headshots, went viral over email lists, nabbing 22,000 votes from over 450 people. Facemash managed to offend a lot of people, including Harvard University, seeing as Facemash violated all sorts of usage, privacy, and property codes.” (This story is retold in the movie-LH. ) “Mark was hauled before the Ad Board, Harvard College’s administrative board, and rumor had it around Kirkland House that he was almost thrown out of school.” (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/08/mark-zuckerberg-at-harvard-the-truth-behind-the-social-network.html)

This was a quintessentially juvenile prank, but is a fair representation of the sexual development of a certain kind of heterosexual male 18 years old, anti-authoritarian, brilliant, aggressive, who objectifies women, thus demeaning them, because he does not yet not know how to approach them directly. Looked at psychoanalytically, we can describe such young men as still operating at the tail-end of the “latency stage" where sexual desires are kept at bay partly by deflecting them through a focus on sports, tools, objects and same-sex relationships. In adulthood this leads to what Rosabeth Moss Kantor once called a “homosocial culture.” This is also the basis for the long-standing caricature of the engineer who keeps his pens visible in a “pocket protector” and, should he be an extrovert, “looks at your shoes, instead of his own.” 

Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple computer, reveals some of the features of this character structure in his autobiography, highlighting in particular the experience of being sexually awkward, almost a sexual misfit.  Reflecting on his experience beginning in 6^th grade (he would be about 12, just on the doorstep of puberty) he writes, “I felt shunned by all these kids who suddenly and for no reason I could understand just couldn’t accept me anymore. I did electronics when a lot of others started hanging out and partying and drinking and going to, well I guess you call them make-out parties. This started in sixth grade and in many ways that shyness is still with me. Even today, I have friends who can just go up and talk to anybody. They’re suave and make friends so easily. Small talk, they can do that. I can’t possibly do that.”

Describing the time he met his first roommate in college he writes, “My roommate was Mike. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the dorm room with my bags was that he’d posted up about twenty foldout Playboy centerfolds on the walls. Wow, that was different! But I thought Mike was a neat guy, and I used to like listening to his stories…. He was very sexually advanced, I thought. Sometimes he’d tell me he wanted the room alone on certain nights and I knew why. I’d say, “Well okay.” I’d take this tape recorder, I had and a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes—Simon and Garfunkel- and I’d go over to Rich  Zenkere’s room and come back later.. He was really something.

There is a lovely directness and honesty to his writing as well as evocations of innocence; for example, in his use of the words, “wow,” “neat” “suave,”” make-out party” “really something.” Later he describes his meeting some hippies in Santa Cruz, California, noticing that, “One of them, a young girl, sitting on a bench, was breast feeding. Breast feeding! I’d never see anything like that in my life!”  But as he later recounts, “The sad thing was eventually even these hippies didn’t want to hang around me anymore. It made them uncomfortable that I didn’t do drugs.” I think it is fair to say that Wozniak, a self-described Nerd, is describing the perils of arrested sexual development which can seal a young man’s commitment to electronics, computers or any other suite of tools, while estranging him from women and sexuality.

To be sure, Wozniak is probably an extreme case. This may be one reason why he never struggled with Steve Jobs for primacy, and was content to focus on engineering, permanently leaving Apple computer in 1987.  Sacks, and the classmates who identified with him, had more moxie and drive. But one hypothesis is that they responded emotionally to the attack on male aggression because it amplified their own uncertainty about how to join sexual desire to the requisite aggression required to win a woman. In other words, they suffered from a deficit rather than a surplus of aggression.[1]

One question this line of thought raises is, what is, or should be, the model for men and women working together in high stakes, high-risk ventures. There is no doubt that such settings stimulate sexual feelings. It is in the nature of high-risk settings which are felt to be both dangerous and exciting, that men and women experience each other at their fullest, as every person reaches down into his or her innermost being, to both cope with the challenges of the work and bear the excitement associated with its potential success. It is certainly common enough that such settings can lead to sexual relations that are in their nature disruptive.  The question is whether we can learn to develop and live into work settings that provide such experiences without the finality of these disruptions.  In contradistinction to the ethic of political correctness we would not be controlling sexuality and the spontaneity it thrives on. Instead, we would allow for its efflorescence, while deflecting it from its traditional aim in sexual relations. Perhaps this requires a level of emotional maturity that our culture simply cannot support.

I want to propose one more hypothesis that helps illuminate the link between work and sexuality. I suggest that the metaphor we invoke, mostly unconsciously, for creativity in general, the one that is closest to our bodily experience, is in fact sexual relatedness. It is not simply or only that sexual relations “creates” children, in homosexual love it does not. But rather, under certain conditions it can give birth to something that is new in each of us. And that is the ultimate experience of creativity.This is also why artists are  inspired by muses, for example Picasso drew inspiration from six different women over the course of his artistic career.

There is a wonderful moment in a current TV show on Showtime called, “The Affair.” A middle aged man, Noah, with four children, and a married woman, Allison, who has recently lost her 4 year old son in a drowning accident, meet in a vacation setting, fall in love and have an intensely sexual relationship. The relationship is enormously disruptive to Noah’s family as he is grows emotionally apart from a wife he once loved while his children, sensing the estrangement, act irresponsibly, often in dangerous ways. After Noah and Allison appear to have broken off their relationship, (only to rejoin one another later in the series), Allison describes an encounter she had with Noah to a friend. She says, “This time, this moment in the very beginning when I was walking away from Noah and he grabbed my hand and he pulled me back to him and he just looked at me. He really just looked at me. It was the most perfect erotic moment of my life and I sometimes feel like everything that’s happened since is just us struggling each other trying to get back to that moment and." The visual flashback the viewer sees as she describes this moment adds to the sense of its psychological and erotic depth. The gesture of kissing is so simple but so direct. The erotic moment is a moment in which another discovers something true and deep in ourselves that we have in all likelihood lost sight of.

(To see the video, copy the address below into the address bar of your browser. Clicking on the address does not work.- LH)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErJWYSE31AM&feature=youtube

  
Of course relations at work cannot approximate this experience. It would be far too disruptive. But this idealized experience can function as a north star reminding us of what it means to be “fully present” at work and stimulating us to engage with our teammates and the work before us in ways that engage our spontaneity and sexuality. This is a far better ideal I propose, than the model of relatedness we have inherited from political correctness.

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[1] Thiel wrote the articles and book attacking the diversity curriculum before “he fully realized he was gay.” He tells a Fortune reporter, “In retrospect, I should have known, but I was somehow incredibly confused about it.” http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strategy. This suggests that he had a valence for joining a “band of brothers” for the libidinal feelings it stimulated. This may be one reason he was attracted to a  “cause” which promised to unite his aggressive and loving feelings in one gesture or moment. A heady mixture)

The ISIS surprise and its meaning

ISIS' rapid advance through Syria and Iraq and its indifferent brutality have been frightening. Starting as an Iraqi terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, it has grown amidst the chaos of the Syrian uprising by capturing weapons and Humvees, robbing banks, and taking over oil fields. Obama’s opponents see its progress as one sign that his policy for containing threats to the United States and its interests is failing. Obama himself has projected a degree of uncertainty when he said that, “The intelligence agencies had underestimated the peril posed by the Islamic State," and that the U.S., “Did not yet have a strategy” to confront ISIS. 

[Added text in response to readers' good questions: The purpose of this post is to explore the nature of this uncertainty as Obama experienced it. I am not actually examining the real politics of ISIS and its impact on international affairs. I am speculating about how Obama might have seen this real politics. I am arguing that Obama has been hobbled by a stance of ambivalence toward the U.S engagement with the Middle East. He believes, I speculate, that the Iraq invasion and its aftermath represented a kind of defeat for the US, but that the stakes for the US in the Middle East do not allow for disengagement. I suggest that this ambivalence underlies why he might have been surprised by ISIS,  and why he was defensive in responding to the claims that he was surprised.This process is one example of the impact of ambivalence on executive action]

One question journalists and others have sensibly asked is why was the president and his administration surprised, and why doesn’t Obama have a strategy? After all, as one broadcast journalist reports, in describing ISIS’ origins and expansion, “That process actually began as early as mid-to-late 2009. It was at that point that the Islamic State was in some ways forced to devolve into a typical terrorist organization. At that point it relocated much of its central leadership to Mosul (Iraq), which was a relative safe zone, and it was at that point that it essentially began its period of recovery.” 

It seems unlikely that with this extended history, the ISIS insurgency was a complete surprise. Indeed, when Obama faulted the intelligence agencies for failing to grasp the threat it represented, several intelligence heads replied in public that in fact they had warned the Obama administration. Indeed, one intelligence official testified to Congress this past February saying, “ISIS will probably attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah.” Similarly, CIA director John Brennan, “Defended his agency’s performance on intelligence in Iraq, saying that the CIA had been watching for ‘many months’ how ISIS was 'growing in capability in Fallujah areas and how they were expanding their reach.'”

Nonetheless, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Admral Michael Rogers, acknowledged that the intelligence community had underestimated the Islamic State’s transformation, “From an insurgency to an organization that was now also focused on holding ground territory. ‘It’s an area we talked about,’ he said, ‘but in hindsight, I wish we had been a little — I’ll only speak for me and for NSA — I wish we’d been a little stronger about.’” In other words, everyone was watching ISIS, but intelligence analysts, at least at the NSA, failed to anticipate the change in its intentions, from being an insurgency wreaking havoc with suicide bombers, to becoming a group that wanted to hold territory. This failure, if Rogers’ statement is accurate, evokes two classical challenges to intelligence. First, it is very hard to gauge an enemy’s intentions, particularly if you do not have spies on the ground.  Second, an untested assumption-- ISIS is an insurgency rather than an army occupying territory -- shapes what information you pay attention to and what you ignore. It can become your blind spot.

Indeed, the Obama administration misread the Iraqi army’s capability as well. Commenting on ISIS, a panel of intelligence agency officials, including the CIA’s Brennan, concluded that, “One of the biggest blind spots was the lack of good insight not only into the Islamic State, but into the readiness and state of the Iraqi security forces that the United States had been training and equipping for years.” Brennan went on to note that, “One of the most difficult things is trying to determine the will to fight. It speaks almost to intent.” In other words, good intelligence helps you assess an enemy’s or ally’s state of mind, and not just its position or material resources. As the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu argued, one does not defeat the enemy per se, but the enemy’s strategy, which is an outcome of his intentions and his self-assessed capabilities. But this is as much a matter of psychology as it is of data gathering. 

This failure highlights yet another source of intelligence failure, and that is the failure to deconstruct the assumptions behind’s one’s own strategy. It appears that for some time the Obama administration, viewing ISIS as an insurgency, worried most about its threat in the West—terrorists killing individuals- rather than to the West—hostile armies taking territory. Hundreds of young men with European passports were going to Syria and joining up with ISIS. Would some return to their countries of origin, determined to wreak havoc in Europe the U.S. and other western countries, by bombing facilities and killing individuals? Examining the Syrian insurgency one reporter noted, that administration officials were asking,  “Is this a local fight? Are they going there to really just battle the Syrian forces and topple [Syrian President Bashar] Assad? Or is there even a small percentage of these folks who are going to return home and turn their sights on western victims and their fellow citizens?” As Obama noted, “In terms of immediate threats to the United States, IISL (ISIS), those folks could kill Americans.” Indeed, on September 18, “Counter-terrorism raids in Sydney, Australia were sparked by security intelligence that ISIS was planning a violent random attack as a demonstration of its reach.” In this sense, it was necessary to focus on threats to citizens in the West but it was not sufficient. ISIS is operating on two fronts, fighting as an army and acting as terrorists, with success on one front triggering success on the other.

One question is whether or not these intelligence failures; the failure to gauge an enemy’s intention, an ally’s capabilities and to test one’s own assumptions, were in some sense motivated. By “motivated,” I mean that there are emotional and thus un-verbalized reasons for neglecting intelligence that is available. Motivated failures can lead to what Zvi Lanir calls, “fundamental surprises.” For example, the Israelis’ were surprised by the success of Egyptian and Syrian attacks in the first days of the Yom Kippur war (1973), not for want of intelligence,-- the prime minister’s cabinet debated a preemptive air strike six hours before the war began-- but because their victory in the earlier "six-day war" (1967) created a self concept of themselves as a regional power that could enforce the status quo. Moreover, military doctrine presumed that the Arabs would attack only to destroy Israel, a near impossibility, rather to gain tactical advantage, as Egypt eventually did, despite its defeat militarily. As Lanir goes on to note, “In this context, information about the enemy, accurate as it was, had very little relevance in creating a more complex understanding of the national “self,” nor did it support an understanding of the “other” in relation to them.”

The question is what concepts of the national “self” and of the “other” have underlined Obama’s response to the ISIS threat. One hypothesis is that Obama represents the idea of the United States as a militarily defeated nation. In light of the enormous expense of the Iraq invasion and its chaotic aftermath, the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the failure to secure a legitimate government in Baghdad, this self-concept of the U.S. as a defeated nation may in fact appear reasonable. But with this self-concept there is a temptation to see the enemy, the “other” in Lanir’s terms, as a group of outlaws or brigands who can be contained or eliminated through police actions rather than military activity. This may be one reason why Obama came to rely on the use of drones to kill individual terrorists as the best exemplar of U.S. power. 

This self-concept may also be why Obama had hoped early in his administration, to pivot his attention from the Middle East to Asia. The presenting issue Obama faces in Asia is how to coopt China as a partner while acknowledging its increasing standing and global reach. While he can project power in Asia by “increasing U.S. naval and air force assets in the Pacific,” he will exercise power if he can create economic arrangements that tie China, its Asian neighbors and the U.S. together. The challenge is using economic diplomacy not military forces.

But John Kerry, the current Secretary of State, described one additional rationale for the pivot to Asia. “Obama wanted to signal that the Bush-era obsessions with the Middle East, democratization, and terrorism were over.” The term, “obsessions” suggests, if Kerry is an accurate reporter, that Obama believed that the focus on the middle-east had been inappropriate and misdirected, that Bush had inappropriately personalized the issue. But in light of our hypothesis it also suggests that the Pivot to Asia was a psychological defense against confronting the intractability, messiness and failures associated with the middle-east. This may be one reason why Obama and the intelligence agencies misread the Iraqi army’s capabilities. If the Iraqi army was competent, the U.S. troop withdrawal would not jeopardize the region’s stability, and Obama could undertake the pivot without risking the reputation and standing of the U.S. 
 
My reader might still object that the idea of the U.S. as a defeated nation is after all realistic. But I want to suggest that Obama has internalized this idea psychologically under feelings of duress, rather than as the foundation for a strategy. He is resisting the idea just as he is has embraced it.  This point of view can account for three examples of Obama’s defensiveness in articulating his thinking about ISIS,

First, as we have seen, he initially blamed the intelligence agencies rather than himself for failing to anticipate ISIS’ rise. Second, when a New Yorker reporter interviewed Obama, he characterized ISIS and other terrorist groups as “junior varsity”* basketball players when compared to “pros” such as Al Qaeda. The reporter described Obama’s remark as “uncharacteristically flip.” A person’s flip response, particularly when it is uncharacteristic, signals their defensiveness, their unwillingness to consider a difficult and psychologically threatening question seriously. Third and finally, this may also be why he willingly conceded, that despite ISIS’ long-term buildup, he had no strategy for confronting it. This self-defeating comment is sensible only if his failure to secure a strategy meant that the obstacles ISIS presented were almost too great to be overcome. If so he should not be held accountable for lacking one. These defensive comments suggests that he lacks conviction in his own decisions. If my argument is reasonable, he lacks conviction because he believes but cannot yet suppose that the United States is a defeated power. This situation creates emotional duress and impairs judgment.

This duress may have deeper roots. Obama faces the dilemma of choosing between two different frames of reference for countering the threats in the Middle East. On the one side he can look at the region as the setting for the struggle against fundamentalism, or on the other, as the struggle for democracy. Despite our wishes, the two struggles are decidedly not equivalent and their difference has bedeviled Obama since the beginning. For example, Egypt as an autocracy is a good defense against fundamentalism, but a poor example of a democracy. Hamas was elected democratically, but maintains a fundamentalist cast. Iraq is a limited democracy burdened by fundamentalist currents. Bashar al Assad, the president of Syria represented secular Arabism but dictatorial tendencies. Indeed, as late as 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state said that, "The elements that led to intervention in Libya -- international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution -- are “not going to happen” with Syria in part because members of the U.S. Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is 'a reformer.'"

There is of course a strand of American idealism in the field of international relations that considers the choice between combating fundamentalism and supporting democracy to be a false one.  This was the basis for Bush’s confidence in invading Iraq in the first place. He would advance democracy in Iraq and in the process defeat fundamentalism in the region. He would export “democracy” much as the Soviet Union once exported revolution. This idealism allowed him to be decisive even if ultimately mistaken. This was also Christopher Stevens’ worldview, the American ambassador to Libya, who was killed in the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Shortly before leaving for Libya he shot a video for the Libyan people, describing his pride in pluralism and democracy and his belief that Libya, like the United States could achieve these ideals, and if necessary, through conflict. Of course, the collapse of Libya as a nation state and its devolution into an arena for tribal warfare is yet another witness against the case for this idealism.

It is reported that during the Cuban missile crisis, Richard Neustadt, the famous Harvard political scientist wanted to warn John F. Kennedy against precipitous action. The then Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, is purported to have said, “I know your advice, Professor. You think the president needs to be warned. But you’re wrong. The president needs to be given confidence.” Idealism to be sure is one source of confidence, but realism can be another. Acting realistically often means considering two choices that rub up against each other and choosing one as the focal point and the other as the backdrop. It is a matter of setting priorities. One takes action in relationship to the focal choice, for example fighting fundamentalism, while creating contingency plans and enacting defensive tactics, should the background choice, for example, supporting democracy, prove more decisive in the longer run.

When a leader fails to make such a choice, their actions take on the quality of ambivalence and detachment. Indeed, it is the ambivalence that stimulates the detachment as a psychological defense. The detachment reduces the felt burden of failing to choose.  It is now a common trope that Obama projects a kind of detachment as a leader. In a recent interview, Leon Panetta the former CIA director under Obama and author of a new book, Worthy Fights, said of Obama, "Too often in my view the President relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader." The reference to the professor evokes the idea of the “armchair” theorist who thinks coherently but can’t translate thoughts into actions.

I think that Obama’s professorial stance has much strength. As Philip Tetlock shows in his masterful study, Expert political judgment: How good is it, how can we know, detached observes who take an ironical stance toward the world are often better prognosticators. They are not impassioned by a worldview that oversimplifies their conception of a complex political situation. This may very well have been Bush’s fatal flaw. Moreover, the detached observer can avoid impulsiveness, a tempting stance when reality seems too complicated to decode. But at the same time this detachment in the hands of an executive who must take actions, can stimulate withdrawal, defensiveness, and ultimately mistakes. I want to suggest that Obama is caught in a situation of ambivalence, accepting but resisting the idea of the U.S. as a defeated nation, while stuck in the choice between promoting democracy or defeating fundamentalism

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*For my colleagues outside of the U.S. the “junior varsity” is a group of inexperienced basketball players, often on a high school team, who take a back seat to the varsity players when the team plays opponents from other schools.