My argument with the zeitgeist

With Robert Wright

I recently talked to Robert Wright, co-founder of Bloggingheads.tv which hosts The Glenn Show, author of a number of books and a newsletter called Nonzero. We talked about the problems with today's climate of public discussion, and about how each of us is, through our podcast work and in our own way, trying to save the world.

In the segment below, Bob asked me to describe how I see my work and how I feel about the way my message is met by people who either agree or disagree with it (I’m pretty much in despair on that one).

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WRIGHT: If God came down and said, justify what you're doing right now, what contribution are you making to the world, what would you say?

LOURY: Okay, so I'm resisting the temptation to be self-aggrandizing right now… 

God might smite you for that, so that's probably wise.

…to characterize my enterprise as, at some level, of saving civilization, or something like that.

I'm in a sustained argument with the zeitgeist about the nature of the country in relation to the unresolved issues of racial domination and subordination, inequality, exclusion, discrimination, and so on. It's not the only thing I'm doing, by any means, but it seems to me it's the main crux of the matter.

I think the discourse is off the rails, badly, historically wrong-headed, and feel that I have something to say about that. I say my mouth is no prayer book—you know, not like I've got the answer—but that I've got something to say. And I feel like I'm playing this role of the gadfly, of the person stepping out from the consensus—I know, it sounds self-aggrandizing, that's why I hesitated to go down this road in the first place—uniquely situated to be able to articulate certain lines of concern that otherwise might not be effectively communicated. Something like that. I'm trying to make that kind of contrarian, outside-the-box intervention in the national conversation about justice and racial equity. 

And when you say the conversation has gone off the rails, how would you characterize the problem in the most generic way possible or at the highest level of abstraction?

Here's a stab at that. I've put this in some things that I've written for popular venues, like in City Journal and lectures that I've given. I say you have two narratives that conflict with each other, the bias narrative and the development narrative.

The bias narrative is white supremacy has done us wrong. America has its knee on the neck. Black exclusion, discrimination, and so on. Historical injustice. Mass incarceration is, in effect, a conspiracy to confine Black people—I mean, that puts it a little bit too sharply, but it’s, ipso facto, a manifestation of an age-old story. George Floyd dying in Minneapolis is but the 21st century extension of Emmett Till being killed in the South in the 1950s. Bias. White supremacy. Racial domination, racial exclusion. The bias narrative.

I want to contrast that with the development narrative, in which I put center place the incomplete project of empowering African Americans who have been impacted adversely by history to acquiring the capacities of function and performance that allow for effective competition in a world that is basically a level playing field. 

Of course, it's not completely and perfectly a level playing field. But the question should be, if I take incarceration as a case in point, I've got kids, young adults behaving in ways that are socially disruptive, manifesting in that behavior the incomplete process of their own socialization and human development, acting out in ways that are destructive. One can certainly give accounts of how it is that they, and a community full of people like them, might've come to be in the situation that they are. But the first order imperative is at the acquisition of skills, the acculturation of patterns of behavior, the redress of the background social conditions that led to this dysfunction, the redress of those developmental deficits manifested in their behavior, which led to them being incarcerated.

These are two radically different ways of looking at the problem of over-representation of African Americans amongst those who are incarcerated, which I give as only one example of this larger phenomenon.

Where you see gaps, disparity, and deficits, your story about them can either be—and of course these are not mutually exclusive, I use this only to characterize the terrain in the stark way that you asked me to do—“exclusion and discrimination and bias” or “performance and behavior and development.” And I'm saying the latter. 

So you take something like affirmative action. Now, there's a whole big legal argument about it, but, to get down to the basics of it, African American kids presenting test scores that are low relative to the test scores being presented by others who would like to get into this exclusive school or whatever.

Now, there is racism. There is implicit bias. There are all kinds of imperfections and whatnot. But if you have a persistent phenomenon of substantial quantitative disparities in the measured performance on intellectual work by race, your solution to that can't be changing the standard so as to accommodate the difference and still get the numbers right.

That's not justice. That's not equality. That's a corrupt, cowardly avoidance of the historic challenge of actually acknowledging, reckoning with, and redressing the performance differences that are reflected in these tests.

The reflex to get rid of the instrument of assessment because it reports to us the objective fact, the racial disparities, and performance must be resisted. It infantilizes the people on behalf of whom it's been undertaken. It's the easy way out for the institutions that purport to advocate for justice and fairness, but that in fact simply want not to acknowledge the problem.

I could go on in this way for a long time, but you see the distinction that I'm making. There are other points, but that's one of my central points where I feel like I've got my finger on something important that the zeitgeist has got wrong. 

So you think in a certain sense buying into the bias narrative is unhealthy for the people advancing the bias narrative are trying to help.

And that could in principle be the case, even if there's a lot of validity to the bias narrative, right? You're also saying that you wonder how much validity there is, at least in the sense that you think we've got a pretty fair playing field. But at the same time, it could be that we could have one that's more unfair than you believe to be the case, and it could still be the case that the bias narrative is just an unhealthy thing to walk around with, right? That's in principle possible. 

Yeah, that's in principle possible. 

Let me ask you about the conversation itself. We are said to be, and I think we are, in a time when it is hard to communicate effectively with people who disagree with you about important issues. The polarization, the tribalism, whatever you want to call it. How happy are you with the way your message is or is not resonating and who it is or is not resonating with?

I'm almost completely in despair about it, Bob, to be completely honest with you.

Again, I have to acknowledge in advance that anything I say here is bound to seem to be self-promoting, self-aggrandizing in some way or another. The intensity of vilification and the ferocity of people's reaction who don't like what I'm saying unsettles me.

I mean, it's not just that Twitter has mobs. Twitter has mobs. I know that Twitter has mobs. Or that there are people in the comments section who are trolls. I know that that's the case.

But you know, I don't take too kindly to being called a hack, Bob. 

You're not alone. 

Glenn: I'm a fellow of the Econometric Society. I'm a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association. I've published in Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Labor Economics. There are Wikipedia articles about research papers that I have written. Some of my papers have thousands of citations. I'll stop.

Yeah, we don't want God to smite you. 

I'm a goddamned hack? There's no way that I'm a hack.

I'm willing to stipulate that you're not a hack. Let's take that possibility off the table.

I’ll go on in this vein for just a moment to try to make a point. You've asked me how I am experiencing the discourse, and I say it sometimes drives me to despair. And one of the things that causes me that is the vitriolic way in which I am received by people who simply have a different opinion than me about affirmative action or whatever. 

There probably are people who have been criticized by you and/or John McWhorter on your show who feel that you have sometimes spoken about them in, let's say, an animated tone.

Okay. Fair enough. Perhaps I draw some of this vitriol by the way in which my rants veer off into a vitriolic dismissal of certain people with three names who I don't have to name here, whom I've called empty suits and lightweights and so forth and so on.

So, okay. Fair enough. Maybe I'm poisoning the well a little bit, and I do take responsibility for losing it sometimes. I'm sorry, I apologize.

But a similar disquiet sometimes overtakes me when I read affirmations and celebrations of what I've said by people who comment, in effect, "Thank God there's some sensible Black people in this country who see the world the way I see it." Some of these people are Donald Trump supporters, avowedly so, who say in effect, "Yeah, finally somebody gets it right;" who, in effect, take comfort from the critical line that I'm taking on behalf of positions—I'll just mention one, racial realism. These are the people who think there are essential differences between the racial populations that account for contemporary socioeconomic disparities in a one-to-one or direct way. And they say, "Why don't you just take the next step, Loury? You're almost there. You're almost there."

That is also unsettling, especially as I realized that part of the vitriol coming from the people who reject what I say is motivated by an observation about the warm glow feeling that I seem to give to some people who like what I'm saying.

See what I'm saying? 

It's hard. Life on the internet is hard. If you have a platform of any prominence, unless you're super boring, there are going to be people saying horrible things about you. But you've definitely gotten more than your share.

And although I did suggest that, viewed from the other side you might look like part of the problem, there is a genuine asymmetry that I believe is the case here, which is that I think you are willing to have a discussion/debate with any of the people you're criticizing. And few of them are willing to have one with you, so far I can tell. Is that not the case? 

That's the case, Robert. Thank you for noticing that. And I would just go one step further on this campaign of self-aggrandizement.

I'm also capable of articulating in detail exactly what they believe, even as I reject it. And they would not be able to know how to begin to give a coherent and nuanced account of what it is that I'm on behalf of. Their representations of me are all stick figures and sloganeering and platitude.