All Bets Are Off

I’ve written previously about how puzzled I am by the use of walkathons, bikeathons, and similar events as a way of soliciting charitable donations. If a friend were to come to you and say, “I’d like you to demonstrate your loyalty to me by contributing $50 to cancer research, which is a cause I strongly believe in,” I think most people would consider that rude —taking inappropriate advantage of a friendship. Yet if the same friend were to say, “I’ll be walking ten miles in support of cancer research, and I’d like you to sponsor me at a rate of $5 per mile,” that would be considered perfectly legitimate. I’m not sure why, since the only difference between the two cases is that the latter one requires the friend to engage in a thoroughly unproductive activity that does nothing to contribute to curing cancer.

Lately I’ve been having a similar reaction to the many requests I’ve been receiving — by email and, increasingly, by text — from political candidates asking me to contribute to their campaigns. That’s certainly considered legitimate, but I’m not sure why.

A contribution to a political campaign is not the same as a charitable gift. If I donate to a charity, it’s because I know that my contribution will support work that I consider valuable. But in the case of a candidate, even if I think that the candidate intends to work toward noble goals, my contribution does nothing to advance that work — it only indicates my wish for the candidate to be elected. If the candidate is not elected, my money has accomplished nothing.

You would probably object that my contribution doesn’t merely represent my desire for the candidate to get elected; it actually helps the candidate get elected. If that’s the case, perhaps my contribution should be thought of as an investment rather than a charitable donation. After all, if I invest in a business venture, I have no assurance that the venture is going to be successful; it’s quite possible that I’ll lose my money with nothing to show for it. But a campaign contribution is different from an investment in two important ways.

First, if I do invest in a business, it’s because someone has shown me exactly how my money is going to be used, and has demonstrated to me in detail how their plan for building the business is likely to pan out. With a political campaign, I have no idea how my money will be used, and I have no reason to be confident that my contribution will change the outcome of the race.

Second, my investment in a business buys me something. I become a part-owner of that business, and therefore benefit directly from its success. My contribution to a political campaign buys me nothing. You might argue that if my candidate wins, I will benefit from the policies that elected official will put in place, and that would constitute the payoff from my investment. But people who didn’t contribute to the campaign would get exactly the same payoff, so what is the benefit to me of making that contribution?

Well then, if donating to a political campaign isn’t equivalent to a charitable contribution, and it’s not equivalent to an investment, what is it? Perhaps it should just be thought of as gambling. I put down my money, and I either get the reward that I want, or I don’t. The outcome is a result of pure luck, or more accurately, a complex interplay of forces beyond my control.

You might say, as before, that the money I put into the system affects the outcome, and that therefore what I’m doing is technically not gambling. But there are plenty of other situations that are similar. If I buy more raffle tickets than any of the other participants, my chance of winning is better than theirs. If I drop quarters strategically enough into a Las Vegas quarter-pusher machine, I have a better chance of making a bunch of quarters spill over the edge. But in both cases, what I’m doing is still considered gambling.

As a rule, I don’t gamble, and so it would be easy enough for me to say that I therefore will ignore all of those requests for campaign contributions. And yet, that conclusion doesn’t feel right, either. As much as I believe that political candidates shouldn’t have to raise huge amounts of money to run for office, and that some sort of public financing is the best solution, it seems unlikely that any such thing will come about in the foreseeable future. We have a rotten system, but it’s the only system we have. I only wish that people would stop accepting it as reasonable and normal, in the way that they so inexplicably have accepted walkathons.

Posted October 4, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Society
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Vote of Confidence

On November 8, 2016, an hour into teaching my regular Tuesday night class, I announced that I was going to end the lesson early and turn on the news of the presidential election. The polls had finally closed across the country, meaning that news organizations could now release their projected results. “OK, turn it on, but you’re not going to like it,” said one student who was already staring at his phone.

Sure enough, when I switched the digital projector over to CNN, I was shocked to see a US map largely drenched in MAGA-red. “This wasn’t supposed to be possible!” I said to myself in horror. Then, a moment later, another thought occurred to me: Why had the student assumed that I wasn’t going to like it?

I had always been scrupulous about keeping politics out of the classroom. I wanted every student to feel included and accepted regardless of whether their political beliefs aligned with mine, and the easiest way to ensure that was never to discuss politics. On every Election Day, I would exhort students to go out and vote — even offering to excuse them from class if there was no other time they could make it to the polls — but never said a word about whom they ought to vote for. Eight years before, during a similar Tuesday night class, I had turned on the news just as Barack Obama was being declared the first Black person elected to the presidency, and felt constrained to show no reaction, even as I watched tears come to the eyes of several of my students of color. Now, watching Donald Trump emerge victorious, I had to avoid displaying my despair.

I don’t know where I got the idea that part of my role as a teacher was to remain politically dispassionate. Certainly, many of my colleagues strongly believed the opposite — that it was their duty to bring politics into the classroom, regardless of what subject they were teaching. The college administration had an explicit policy of advocating for social and environmental justice. Faculty members were expected to support and encourage activism among their students, many of whom came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or immigrant families.

Not surprisingly, I share those beliefs in progressive causes. Nevertheless, I chafed at being expected — to some degree, required— to hold a particular set of values, and I didn’t want to put my students in that same position. My job was to teach my students how to think, but not what to think. If I were to present my values as being true, I would be, in effect, telling some number of my students that theirs are false. I’m not prepared to do that.

I’ve long experienced queasiness at what was for a time called “virtue signaling” (and now appears to be called “performative behavior”). When people posted about their political beliefs on Facebook, I wouldn’t regard their posts as saying something about the world — at least not anything that hasn’t been said a million times before — but as saying something about themselves: “Look how noble I am to have these opinions.” In the words of P.T. Barnum, talk is cheap. If I’m not doing something to better the state of the world (and I honestly can’t claim to be doing much), then I haven’t earned any right to tell others what my feelings are about it, and they have no reason to care.

So when that student said, on election night, that I’m “not going to like it,” I immediately wondered what led him to assume that I favored the liberal candidate over the conservative one. Had I failed in keeping my opinions to myself, and if so, how? I knew that I hadn’t said anything in class, or even outside of class, and I hadn’t posted about politics on social media. I couldn’t have communicated my desired outcome unconsciously — say, through body language — since until that moment, I didn’t have any idea who was ahead in the election.

All I could come up with is that, having spent a few months in my classroom, the student had intuited that I just didn’t seem like a Trump supporter. I treated my students with respect and was genuinely interested in their ideas. I was flexible. I was compassionate. I often initiated discussions of ethical issues in class, but I hadn’t attempted to impose my values on my students or make judgments about theirs.

If that was indeed the reason, then I could be happy. It meant that I hadn’t failed; I had, in some sense, succeeded. It meant that I didn’t have to explicitly express my values and beliefs; I could simply live them, and know that some people might benefit. It meant that even if I wasn’t doing as much as I should to make the world better, I could take solace in the fact that in my own limited way, I was at least not making it worse.

Posted January 4, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Society
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Dance Academy (2)

(part two of two)

I recently saw a performance (well, four performances — more about that in a moment) by my favorite San Francisco dance company, FACT/SF. The piece, called “Split,” is performed by a single dancer for a single audience member, eight times a night. Four different dancers perform the show in rotation, each with a different, personal interpretation of the choreography. Naturally, then, I went to see it four times.

As you might expect from a piece that’s performed one-on-one, “Split” is largely about identity — or as FACT/SF’s director Charles Slender-White puts it, “the relationship between dissociative episodes and identity formation,” particularly among members of the queer community. In other words, it’s about the experience of finding out that you’re not who you thought you were.

Seeing the show started me on the path of thinking deeply about the nature of identity. “Identity” is a word we use all the time, but it’s not always clear what we mean by it. When I was an undergraduate philosophy major, one of the fields I studied was that of “personal identity,” which addresses questions like “If all the cells in the human body are replaced over a period of seven to ten years, in what sense can I be considered the same individual that I was ten years ago?” But that’s a technical application of the term, and not the way it tends to be used in ordinary conversation.

The news these days is filled with talk about “identity politics,” which is the idea that your membership in a group — particularly a group that has experienced oppression or discrimination — dictates your political agenda. More controversially, it holds that people who are not members of that group cannot understand your life experience, and therefore have no right to speak for you. In this context, identity can be considered simply a collection of categories into which one fits. In any political discussion, I would be considered an old, straight, white, cisgender, Jewish American man.

But does that description really constitute my identity? After all, I didn’t invent those categories. I may have some beliefs about which I fit into, but other people — or society at large — may have different beliefs. If neo-Nazis start rounding up Jews, it won’t help for me to tell them that I’ve never practiced Judaism. In practice, they get to decide my identity; I don’t.

I think that if “identity” is to have any real meaning, it would have to be something that’s inherent in me, not something that’s determined by others. And yet, when people talk about their own experience of establishing an identity, they tend to use those same externally defined categories. We’ve all heard people say “I thought I was straight, but I realized that I’m gay.” “I was assigned male at birth, but I’ve always been a woman.” “My light skin makes people think I’m white, but I’m really Black.” Of course these distinctions have real social and political consequences, but fitting into a particular group or category can hardly constitute who one really is.

So I came to ask, what’s my identity? Descriptors like “American” or “male” may apply to me in a political context, but they don’t resonate with me personally. “Straight” may describe who I’m attracted to, but it doesn’t say anything about who I am. “Old” may characterize my body, but not the being that inhabits it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that real identity is undefinable and indescribable. I am who I am, and nothing more can be said about it.

It occurred to me that this may be why I’ve always had problems with my name. I’ve never much identified with the name Mark Schaeffer (or, for that matter, either Mark or Schaeffer). When I hear myself referred to that way, my immediate mental reaction is, “Who’s that?” So I’ve always sensed that I have the wrong name, but it all these years, I’ve never been able to figure out what the right one is.

I’ve asked friends — some of whom have changed their own names — what they think my “real” name would be. People have offered suggestions, but all of their proposed names felt equally arbitrary. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that all names are arbitrary. They’re just labels that we each put on a collection of cells that’s being replaced every seven to ten years. How do I know that I’m the same individual that I was ten years ago? At least I can say, “Well, I have the same name.”

But my true identity — whatever that is — doesn’t have a name, and it doesn’t have categories. Neither does yours. As I stated in my previous post, the dance is the dance. Now I have to add: The dancer is the dancer.

Posted October 12, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Philosophy
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