Morning Jolt - Has America Lost Its Ability to Delay Gratification?

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

April 9, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. Congressional Black Caucus Embraces a Different Anti-'War' Argument

2. Last Week Was a Good One to Be on Vacation

3. Has America Lost Its Ability to Delay Gratification?

4. Addendum

So, did anything happen while I was away?

Jim

1. Congressional Black Caucus Embraces a Different Anti-'War' Argument

Perhaps I'm growing cynical, but I did not expect to find the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus criticizing the Democratic party's leadership about overheated rhetoric.

The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), on Sunday condemned the charge by some Democrats that Republicans are engaged in a "war on women."

Cleaver appeared on an Easter Sunday panel on CNN's "State of the Union" to criticize the claim by some conservatives that the Obama administration is prosecuting a "war on religion" through its policy mandating that employees of religious organizations have access to contraception.

Cleaver assailed that accusation as "absurd" and took issue with a criticism from evangelical activist Ralph Reed that the president had demonstrated "total insensitivity if not outright hostility to the religious beliefs of millions of Americans."

"We've got to quit exaggerating our political differences," Cleaver said. He pointed out that he had condemned fellow Democrats for comparing Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler.

When Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, responded by asking if it was similarly wrong for Democrats to accuse Republicans of engaging in a "war on women," Cleaver said yes.

"Yes, that is wrong, and I have never said it, not one time," he said. "I condemn it. If it's a Democrat, if it's my cousin, then it's wrong."

It will probably not surprise you that some liberal bloggers are now turning their fire on Cleaver. Because of course, the Republicans' accusation of a "war on religion" is divisive, inaccurate hyperbole, but the Democrats' accusation of a "war on women" is a perfectly valid metaphor! Over at FireDogLake:

Very good news today, coming from the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Mr. Cleaver is concerned about the tone of politics these days, and since it's unfair for the Republicans to charge the President with waging a war on religion -- because he isn't -- it's only fair that Democrats stop claiming the Tea-Party GOP is waging a war against women-- even though they are. [Warning: the video forces you to watch 30 seconds of oil company propaganda.]

This is a great moral victory for the advocates of false equivalency, not to mention the holy mostly-male warriors who have introduced and/or passed hundreds of bills in state legislatures and Congress to repeal or restrict women's reproductive rights, rights to demand equal pay, and access to the benefits of government programs designed to benefit millions of women that are being systematically defunded by the GOP's war on government (sorry).

Henceforth, those Tea-GOP efforts affecting women's rights and benefits will be described more respectfully, using such words as "non-hostile" humanitarian actions. Please adjust your vocabulary accordingly.

Charles Lane, recovered from his exhaustive work of exposing all of the fraudulent reporting accounts and brazen lies of Anakin Skywalker during his days at the New Republic, noted a few weeks ago that the war metaphor is pretty tiresome -- not to mention even more glaring during a time of actual wars.

I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of war.

The Democratic National Committee accuses the GOP of a "Republican War on Women," to go along with its "war on working families" (according to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee) and "Paul Ryan's war on seniors" (Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky).

Various Republicans accuse President Obama of waging "war on religious freedom" or even, in the words of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, "a war on religion." According to the Republican National Committee, the president is also waging "war on energy," the sequel, apparently, to what the House Republican Leadership has called "Democrats' war on American jobs."

Progressive author Chris Mooney called his book "The Republican War on Science"; not to be outdone, conservatives Grover Norquist and John R. Lott Jr. have published "Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth."

A Washington Times editorial warned Wisconsin taxpayers that "President Obama and the Democratic National Committee have declared war on you.""Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau observes that "[Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh, et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate."

And on and on and on -- until you could almost lose sight of the fact that not one of these institutions or individuals is describing a physical conflict in which people fight, bleed and die.

There are, of course, plenty of real wars raging around the world; in some of them,Americans are dying. But the folks back home, busy with their election-year quarrels, have little interest in discussing such matters.

A while back, Ed Driscoll spotlighted a comment from the ever-ingenious Jonah Goldberg, who noted that many progressives behave as if the only way to achieve non-war goals is to insist that they are the "moral equivalent of war" and thus treated like war.

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization . . . That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

Of course, the War on Poverty would be easier if you could just carpet-bomb poverty, and if we could beat cancer by dropping daisy-cutters on it, no one would die of it ever again. We as a nation and a society have proven so spectacularly effective at the traditional notion of war and so ineffective or only sporadically effective at these metaphorical wars against poverty, disease, crime, etc., that you would think the "war" metaphor would have proven sufficiently groan-inducing to be shuttered to cliché retirement.

Maybe the war metaphors hold us back, since they set up some subconscious expectation of conquering the abstract concept and forcing it to attend a surrender ceremony on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.

In fact, considering how John Kerry stopped supporting the Iraq War the moment it became difficult, the way most Democrats treated Afghanistan as "the good war that must be fought, in contrast with Iraq" up until the moment the Iraq War wound down, and the way this president has so rarely discussed the difficult truths about our mission in Afghanistan, it's easy to conclude that the only endeavor that our friends on the Left do not deem to be the "moral equivalent of war" is actual war.

2. Last Week Was a Good One to Be on Vacation

Sigh. You saw this, right?

I'm still sorting out my thoughts on all this, and wondering whether there's any point in going into it all. It will probably not surprise you to learn that I think the Powers That Be did the right thing.

I'm just one guy with one job -- to inform and entertain -- and decisions on these sorts of things are well above my pay grade. I realize on any given day you'll pick up NR or click on to NRO and encounter some (hopefully thought-provoking) piece that you may or may not agree with. I almost enjoy reading a column in here that I disagree with strongly, because you know it will probably challenge you to think through why you believe otherwise,

But with the piece in question, there really wasn't much of that. It was "this group is this way, that group is that way." I remember having a discussion with a friend who had an editing position at a well-respected quarterly political journal. He mentioned receiving detailed submissions from (white) political scientists who dabbled in genetics and demographic studies who exhibited an enormous determination to prove that whites were smarter or better in some ways that African Americans. (Derb's screed echoed this sort of research.)

My friend sighed and said that he would never run an article arguing that. This conversation was years ago, but I remember him saying something like, "Imagine that you could, somehow, definitively prove that African Americans had less intellectual capacity than whites. I don't believe it, and I doubt I could ever believe it, but suppose you somehow could prove, beyond any doubt, that one race was smarter than another, then what? We're a country that is built upon equal justice before the law, regardless of color, and a vision of opportunity and equality for all citizens. The one thing that almost every schoolchild knows is Martin Luther King's line, 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Since then, we've been inching our way toward becoming a nation where people are judged by the content of their character. If you could somehow definitively prove the supposed superiority of one race over another, what good would putting that argument out there do? Because you can imagine all of the bad things that would flow out from that."

My one other observation is that whenever we have some sort of race-related national media firestorm -- Clarence Thomas, O. J. Simpson, the Duke lacrosse players, Don Imus, Trent Lott, almost anything involving Al Sharpton -- the one thing that becomes clear is almost everybody comes to the conversation with some sort of grievance and sense that he's been wronged. Almost everybody feels as if he's been judged by the color of his skin or appearance at some point in his life, and if you're among the very few who has never felt judged by the color of your skin, you probably feel as if you've been accused of racism unfairly at some point. Watching coverage and public discussion of these matters, it seems many Americans have those feelings of resentment right beneath the surface. It also seems as if almost everyone comes out of those hurtful experiences by concluding that everybody else is the problem. The subtext of these discussions is often, "How can I be a racist? I've been the victim of racism!"

Humility and the recognition that we probably have hurt others, even unthinkingly, in our lives would be nice things to see during these surprisingly regular national controversies. But the coverage and discussion of those controversies aren't really designed to elicit humility and empathy, are they?

3. Has America Lost Its Ability to Delay Gratification?

This Easter weekend, Jake Tapper talked to Rick Warren:

Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren told me that the poor economy has continued to impact his congregation, saying, "Most people would not think they're better off economically than they were four years ago."

While he says his church has worked to provide aid and counseling services to those in need, Warren said there is "spiritual cause" to the country's economic and debt woes.

"The biggest problem for all of our economic problems is our inability to delay gratification," Warren said, with individuals and the government following the attitude of, "I want it and I want it now, and I'm going to buy it even if I can't afford it."

If we can't delay gratification, then our long-term outlook as a nation of individual responsibility doesn't look too promising, does it? Warren's remark reminded me of this 2006 David Brooks column:

Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation's human capital. But when policy makers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care, try vouchers.

The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. And yet policy makers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success? To ask that question is to leave the policy makers' comfort zone -- which is the world of inputs and outputs, appropriations and bureaucratic reform -- and to enter the murky world of psychology and human nature.

And yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol.

For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teen pregnancy, drugs, gambling, truancy and crime.

I would write more about the importance of delayed gratification, but it would take too long.

4. Addendum

Jeff Greenfield: "Is there ANY prescription drug ad on TV where the side effects don't sound WAY worse than whatever illness the drug is for?"

It's the casual mention of "sudden death" at the end of the side effects that always gets me to stop and look up at the television with a chilled wariness. Really? That's a "side" effect, gentlemen? Because that sounds like a front-and-center effect to me.