Perhaps the most obvious problem with balancing metaphors is that they suggest a relationship that is always, by necessity, zero sum: If one side rises, the other must fall in exact proportion. Also implicit in balancing talk is the idea that equilibrium is the ideal, and anything that upsets that balance is a change for the worse. That’s probably true if you’re walking a tightrope, but it clearly doesn’t hold in other cases. If you have a perfectly balanced investment portfolio and somebody gives you some shares of stock, the balance is upset (until you can shift some assets around), but you’re plainly better off—and would be better off even if for some reason you couldn’t trade off some of the stock to restore the optimal mix.

In my own area of study, the familiar trope of “balancing privacy and security” is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates, because while there are clearly sometimes tradeoffs between the two, it often seems that the zero-sum rhetoric of “balancing” leads people to view them as always in conflict. This is, I suspect, the source of much of the psychological appeal of “security theater”: If we implicitly think of privacy and security as balanced on a scale, a loss of privacy is ipso facto a gain in security. It sounds silly when stated explicitly, but the power of frames is precisely that they shape our thinking without being stated explicitly.

There’s a deeper problem, though: Embedded in the idea of the scales is a picture of a process for arriving at sound decisions—which if the metaphor is sufficiently pervasive we may come to think of as the only method for making sound decisions. A scale is a machine for reducing diverse objects—or in the metaphor, interests and values—to a single shared dimension. You might have items as varied as toasters and giraffes on the opposing plates of the scale, but all the scale cares about—or all we care about when we employ it—is that they both have weight and mass. Every other difference between the items in the balance is irrelevant so long as they have this one shared property, this one dimension along which they intersect, which allows us to quantify each in terms of the other.

If you think about the cases in which we employ balancing rhetoric, though, it’s often unclear just what this shared dimension is supposed to be. Sometimes that implicit dimension seems to be the universal currency of happiness or utility—the ultimate good that more concrete values like privacy or utility are presumed to serve. But often the imaginary scales conjured by balancing talk conceal the fact that we don’t have a clear sense of what that shared dimension is supposed to be, what single quantity is supposed to serve as our standard for comparing such heterogenous goods. The jurist or political philosopher who assumes a scale—perhaps without realizing he’s doing so—may be rather like the economist in the old joke who begins by assuming a can opener.

Paradoxically, this may make disagreement seem more intractable than it really is. We often say that even when people are agreed on the facts, they may “assign different weights” to competing values, which if we really did have a single agreed upon scale or dimension along which to balance, could only be understood as some kind of irreducible brute preference.

The distortion is magnified if the values we hope to “weigh” are not just qualitatively different from each other, but internally plural or diverse. Legal scholar Dan Solove, for instance, argues forcefully that “privacy” is not a monolithic value defined by any singular essence, but a cluster concept defined instead by overlapping family resemblances. (The classic example from Wittgenstein is the idea of a “game,” instances of which range from football to chess to Myst to the unstructured pretend-play of Cops and Robbers.) In Solove’s schema, privacy encompasses an array of quite different interests: Colloquially speaking, we recognize that one’s privacy may be violated by physical intrusion on the seclusion of the home, by the disclosure of sensitive or embarrassing personal facts, by the denial of autonomy to make intimate medical or sexual decisions, by the mere knowledge that one’s actions (even one’s “public” actions) are being systematically monitored and recorded, by having one’s image (again, even an ordinary photograph snapped on a public street) plastered on billboards and television without one’s consent. The point is not, of course, that the law should forbid all these things; merely that we find it perfectly intelligible to describe each as, in some sense, an incursion on privacy.

Even bracketing the zero-sum framing problem, think about how squeezing all these dimensions of privacy on to a unidimensional metaphorical scale tends to flatten the debate, at least outside the context of the scholarly journals inhabited by folks like Solove. Obviously, we need to use shorthand terms like “privacy” and “security” to keep discussion manageable, but is it really especially illuminating to treat every proposed security measure as though its consequences can be reduced to quantity subtracted from an undifferentiated lump of privacy stuff, and a quantity added to a blob called security? The task of analysis is always aided when we can render heterogeneous interests more easily comparable by reducing them to some uniform measure, of course, but balance metaphors imply that we’ve already achieved this. This may be why so many legal opinions employing “balancing tests” feel so thin, and so many arguments about where to “strike the right balance” between competing values founder. The metaphor assumes a lot of analytic background work that hasn’t actually been done—and conceals the fact that it still needs to be.

There’s a similar phenomenon in American politics, which I long ago mentally dubbed The Voldemort Effect. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it seems like especially recently, if you ask a strong political partisan—conservatives in particular, in my experience—which political figures they like or admire, and why, they’ll enthusiastically cite the ability to “drive the other side crazy.” Judging by online commentary, this seems to be an enormous part of Sarah Palin’s appeal. Palin herself certainty seems to understand this. Her favorite schtick, the well to which she returns again and again, is: “Look how all the mean liberals are attacking me!” Weekly Standard writer Matt Continetti even titled his book about the ex-governor “The Persecution of Sarah Palin.” Perversely, liberals end up playing a significant role in anointing conservative leaders.

This is, I think, a bipartisan phenomenon everyone at least subconsciously recognizes: A political figure—though more often a pundit than an actual candidate or elected official—gains prominence largely as a function of being attacked or loathed with special vehemence by the other side. Which means it’s crying out for a convenient shorthand so we can talk about it more easily; I propose “The Voldemort Effect.”

I had the sense that a year or so back, the Obama administration was rather cannily trying to exploit the Voldemort Effect deliberately, treating Rush Limbaugh as the de facto conservative/Republican leader in hopes that conservatives would fall in line, precisely because Limbaugh is very popular with the conservative base and not so much with everyone else. Which, incidentally, is a danger of the Voldemort Effect: It tends to encourage the base to embrace polarizing figures who turn off moderates, which I suspect is why it is normally observed with pundits (who can do that and remain successful) rather than with candidates.

A: Wow, what conservative X said sure was racially offensive/ignorant/insensitive.
B: Are you calling him a racist? You just called him a racist! You’re saying he’s exactly like a klansman!
A: Well, look, the problem with what he said…
B: Don’t you understand the deep pain a slur like “racist” inflicts on white people? Why are you such a bigot?
A: [INCREDULOUS STARE]

It’s a weird bit of judo that seeks to leverage the social consensus that racism is beyond the pale by parsing criticism of an idea or statement as an attribution of this binary, all-or-nothing property—”racist”—to a person or group. The focus then shifts from the propriety of the idea or statement to whether the deployment of this rhetorical nuclear option is justified. (Even if, as in this case, it hasn’t actually been deployed in so many words, except in the imaginations of conservatives.)

  Interestingly, we don’t really seem to have this problem to the same extent with “sexist.”  We can point out sexist remarks or attitudes without getting derailed by pointless discussion of whether a particular person “is a sexist.” It even sounds a bit weird to pose the question as though it were a simple matter of “yes” or “no,” with the world neatly divided into sexists and non-sexists. Rather, we all get that, the culture being what it is, basically decent people—and occasionally even level-seven gender studies Jedi—will have imbibed unexamined sexist presuppositions or adopted mistaken empirical beliefs about gender differences. 

This is, presumably, because for all that our society may have historically denied women full equality, even at its worst it stopped short of denying their humanity. “Racism” is associated, in its practical consequences, with a system of violence and repression so irredeemably evil that we want to think of it not as a species of error, but as something so monstrously “other” that it creates a chasm between those contaminated by it and those free of its influence. This is understandable, in a way, but ends up being awfully convenient in practice: “I’m no Klansman, so clearly I have no need subject my tacit attitudes and beliefs about race to critical scrutiny.”

We’d probably have more productive conversations if we just agreed that its not hugely useful to ask whether someone like Haley Barbour “is” a “racist,” or to reflexively read that accusation into every criticism involving race. Then we could focus more narrowly on what ought to be a relatively uncontroversial proposition: That his misguidedly sanguine view of the Citizen’s Councils reflects a lamentable (and perhaps self-serving) ignorance of the uglier aspects of his own state’s history, and that we should expect our elected officials to be better informed.

Update: A handy video guide (via Alan Pyke):

Nope.  Turns out the contorted shapes of the districts Gerry had to draw to keep his party’s supporters in the majority reminded a contemporary cartoonist of some kind of monstrous lizard or salamander—hence gerrymander. Learn something new every day.

Painfully tempted to do a parody rewrite w/John Galt as hipster & Gulch in Williamsburg RT @thecalebbacon: Atlas shrugged and said “meh.”

The 60-page speech to be replaced by a Tom Verlaine solo…

Which inspired:

ziege19
@normative Who is John Galt? Oh, you probably haven’t heard of him, he’s really obscure. #HipsterShrugged

Which was all it took to set folks off.  Some of my favorites:

normative I guess it’s fair if Hank always pays the rent / And he doesn’t get all bent / About sleepin’ on the couch #HipsterShrugged

normative So, I stopped the motor of the world, which was fine because I got a great deal on this fixie. #HipsterShrugged

radleybalko I stopped contributing to society way before “going Galt” was cool. #HipsterShrugged

SandyS1 Dagny Taggart: Relationship status: It’s complicated. #HipsterShrugged

normative Yeah, it’s my revolutionary new material. As flexible as tights, but you can totally wear them like jeans. #HipsterShrugged

ziege19 I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own face on the T-shirt I am wearing. #HipsterShrugged

jacobgrier I have John Galt’s entire speech… on vinyl #hipstershrugged

sethdmichaels @normative Side A is Side A. #hipstershrugged

normative I swear by my life and my love of it, if I have to hear “Oxford Comma” one more f*ing time… #HipsterShrugged

normative No, it’s *Rearden* Metal. I mean, it looks just like 80s metal, but it’s ironic #HipsterShrugged

laughinghyena13 That hamburger sandwich is fine, but I’ve had much better at a diner in Wyoming. #hipstershrugged

normative Yeah, it’s kinda grungy, but this train tunnel is still a lot cleaner than the bathroom at Northsix that time… #HipsterShrugged

grandmofhelsing Galt’s Speech really isn’t as good as his earlier work. #hipstershrugged

grandmofhelsing But 19th Century Mortors was better. RT @willwilkinson 20th Century Motor Company used to make a sweet hybrid. #HipsterShrugged

normative “We are going back to the 80s.” He raised his hand & over the desolate earth checked his neon Swatch. #HipsterShrugged

normative Yeah, Ragnar was in Sigur Ros for a while, but he bailed when the label got so hardass about piracy. #HipsterShrugged

normative Actually, Francisco’s got this trust fund, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. #HipsterShrugged

willwilkinson Yeah, Francisco’s super-rich, but he’s totally cool politically. #HipsterShrugged

ziege19 I just unlocked the “Helping Is Futile” badge on @foursquare! #HipsterShrugged

petersuderman I used to like the government, but that was before it got big and popular. #HipsterShrugged

conor64 People vilify Dagny Taggart, but I wish more corporate execs always traveled by rail #HipsterShrugged

jacobgrier Camping out for the new iPhone. Rearden Metal finish, Galt motor. Pretty sweet. #hipstershrugged #stilldropscalls

silentbeep3000 Rosa DeLauro is a f**ing moocher #HipsterShrugged

peejaybee Galt’s Gulch used to be pretty cool. Now it’s like, strollers everywhere. #hipstershrugged

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

I’m fairly solidly in the Guesser camp on the whole—though I can’t hold a candle to my late maternal grandmother, a paragon of New England reserve.  As was explained to me before one of her visits as a young child, I should not expect her to be so unspeakably gauche as to ask that I “please pass the potatoes” (say) during dinner. One might as well just leap on the table and plunge one’s head directly into the bowl. No, if the potatoes were down at my end of the table, she would say something along the lines of: “Oh, do have some potatoes” or “Have you tried the potatoes?”—it being understood that the civilized response was “Oh, no, you have some.” As I say, I don’t take it quite that far, but I do think I internalized the association between civility and indirectness.

This reminds me that I recently watched a good TED talk by Steven Pinker on our quirks of indirect requests—elaborated at greater length here. (Slavoj Zizek also has some clever riffs on this, which I’m too lazy to hunt down at present.) The thing to remember, of course, is that whether one is more of an asker or a guesser generally, there’s probably still greater variation in how the same person behaves in different contexts.  The polite indirection of “Guess Culture” is, as Pinker suggests, often a way of preserving a deliberate ambiguity, which we generally want to do in social relationships where there’s an intermediate level of intimacy—whereas relationships at the poles, with either close friends or strangers, tend to be governed by more direct asks.  So, for instance, a purely commercial transaction with a bartender will be ask-centered: “I’d like a Magic Hat, please.” And if I’m at the home of a good friend I visit frequently, the same: “Hey, mind if I grab a beer from the fridge?”  If I’m visiting an acquaintance for the first time, on the other hand, I’ll probably wait for them to offer.

We do this, I think, precisely because those intermediate relationships are ambiguous: We’re indirect because we’re negotiating just where on the gradient we fall. So, to use the example from the original Metafilter thread, a close friend could certainly ask to be put up for a few days on a visit to town, in part because there’s no worry that if (for whatever reason) I have to turn them down, it somehow reflects on or defines our relationship.  (It would be bizarre for a stranger to make the same request, but not really awkward—and maybe not even so bizarre anymore, since there are sites like CouchSurfing which work to arrange such things in a businesslike Ask Culture fashion.)  Ambiguity in the intermediate stage is useful precisely because it takes two to tango, and the precise contours of the relationship need to be defined by small mutual adjustments. To ask too directly at that stage can seem rude because it effectively demands a binary verdict on a work in progress.

One interesting question is why we see not just individual but regional tendencies toward one culture or another. Etiquette is often associated with words suggestive of urban life—”civilized” or “urbane” or “bourgeois”—and it makes sense people would have more need for these norms just when they moved from small communities where neighbors were often also relatives to larger communities with more of those intermediate sorts of relationships. Of course, as you get to really massive modern cities, you might expect a flip back toward Ask Culture as interactions get more neatly sorted into the anonymous arms-length type and the genuinely intimate type. The Internet, on the other hand, might  resurrect the need for indirection as people become able to sustain many more “weak ties” social relationships through sites like Facebook. I’d love to see someone try to develop some kind of Ask/Guess scale, and see if there’s some kind of correlation with either population density or network connectivity.

Addendum: You know, I poked fun at the old New England table manners, but probably there’s something to be said for raising kids in a way that drives home the idea that you really ought to be attentive to what others might want or need, without necessarily having to be asked directly, and not necessarily be so concerned about pressing your own demands too forcefully.  We can, after all, be rather selfish little creatures by instinct.

Slightly less fanciful: Suppose someone lists Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as an influence.  At the formal end, an economist whose interest in the discipline was sparked by reading Friedman as a kid might say this even if he later came to disagree with all of Friedman’s specific policy views. A little further down, you might come away with a general view about the virtues of unregulated markets, and further still, with a specific conviction about (say) school vouchers.  Of course, you might simultaneously be influenced in all these ways—and indeed, it would be hard to imagine someone finding the particular policy argument compelling without adopting the middle-level view to some extent—which probably tends to obscure the different levels of influence involved.  The theoretical/practical dimension is especially fuzzy for writers and academics, for whom there’s not as clear a division between “what you think” and “what you do.”  But even for us, I think there’s a rough distinction between adopting a belief and adopting a habit of thought. So if I’m a columnist who’s been persuaded by Friedman’s mid-level view of the virtues of lightly regulated markets, a more theoretical form of influence might be that I’m disposed to invoke Friedman’s arguments in a political debate—to assert certain kinds of propositions—while in a more practical mode the same arguments might function as conceptual tools I use to understand a new issue more than statements I’m prepared to endorse. In terms of the old Zen koan about the finger pointing at the moon, you might call this the difference between looking at the finger and following it to the moon.

You can pick a bunch of different types of books and try to imagine what the different forms of influence might look like at different points of this schema.  Say Miles Davis’ autobiography.  Formal/Theoretical: I get interested in reading more about the lives of artists and musicians, or the history of jazz. Formal/Practical: Miles dealt with all sorts of personal hardship, and I take away lessons for my own life from that. Substantive/Theoretical: I have a richer appreciation of Miles’ music because I have a fuller understanding of the context of its creation. Substantive/Practical: I want to be a jazz trumpeter (and either try heroin or stay far the hell away from it).

Anyway, I wanted to toss this out there mostly because I noticed that the books I picked were mostly influential somewhere around the middle of both axes. In other words, they were books that I found I could strip-mine for a lot of handy multipurpose conceptual tools I find myself applying in a variety of contexts.  So the important thing about Code wasn’t that it convinced me to take a particular position on (say) intellectual property laws—though it probably did that to a degree, in tandem with a bunch of stuff I read later—but that it got me interested in thinking about certain categories of issues in a particular way.  So looking over other people’s lists, while of course it’s revealing to learn which particular books people named as influences, it’s also interesting to infer from what people say about them how they tend to be influenced by books.  Now maybe someone can flesh out this schema and write a meta-influential book that influences the way people are influenced by other books.

Code — Lawrence Lessig I can trace my interest in most of the core issues I’ve spent the last five years writing about to reading this book as an undergraduate—both the ones where I ultimately shared Lessig’s position and the ones where I vehemently disagreed. How the Fourth Amendment adapts to technological change. How the architecture of networks affects the balance between autonomy and state power.   How intellectual property law shapes culture. I’d probably still be a writer if I hadn’t read Code when I did, but I might well have ended up writing about completely different subjects.

Reasons and Persons — Derek Parfit It’s telling that quite a few others have named this book, which suggests that it deserves to be better known outside the walls of philosophy departments. What’s perhaps most striking about it is the sheer density of original insight and (with a few exceptions) the powerful rigor with which it’s laid out. It always seemed like a book published far too late to possibly contain so many ideas that were both compelling and really novel. Just about all of my thinking about ethics, identity, and rationality—whether I agree with Parfit or not—is at some level shaped in response to his way of thinking about the issues.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia — Robert Nozick Probably the first modern book of libertarian political philosophy that the rest of the discipline felt obliged to take seriously. Rather like the previous two books—though perhaps to an even greater extent—this is a book that influenced me less because it made a single overarching argument that persuaded than because it’s such a fertile toolbox of thought experiments and analytic strategies.

Sandman — Neil Gaiman I’m cheating a bit here by grouping the whole run together as a “book,” but this is the series that taught me comics could be used to tell serious and complex stories right around the time I was (temporarily) growing out of funny books about well-muscled men and impossibly-endowed women in bright spandex. Also the first work I can remember consciously appreciating for its hypertextual/intertextual nature—something I’ve since realized is a common feature of art I like.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter Thompson The initial influence of this one was to inspire me to use a cigarette holder for a few months as a teenager—an influence that has, mercifully, abated. I’ve also mostly outgrown the temptation to ape his style, which is fortunate, since few people can pull that off well. But it’s book that fed my sense of journalism as an adventure at a crucial point. And especially in tandem with his later more overtly political writing, something of that sensibility and that feeling has stayed with me—even if I’m more likely to be on a bender of reading law review articles than taking an acid-fueled road trip through Barstow.

Political Liberalism — John Rawls Theory of Justice is the famous one; I wish the main ideas of this one were as widely dispersed. Obviously I don’t share a whole lot of Rawls’ substantive political commitments, but I’m very sympathetic to his meta-politics. PL lays out a view of liberal societies governed by a relatively thin form of public reason designed to enable peaceful social cooperation between people with wildly divergent metaphysical/religious views and conceptions of the good life. I ended up writing my philosophy honors thesis in college on it, and I’ve pretty much stayed a neutralist liberal deep down.

Rules and Order — Friedrich Hayek Or maybe I shouldn’t have said “designed” when talking about public reason above. This is a slender book, and one of Hayek’s more abstract, but the basic view here frames most of my thinking about social institutions to some extent. I keep waiting for more folks who write about digital culture to rediscover this one.

On Liberty — John Stuart Mill Compact, elegant, and for all the well-worn difficulties, basically right. Hard to ask for more than that.

The Meme Machine — Susan Blackmore I could’ve swapped in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which I read around the same time. Blackmore and Dennett were my introduction to an evolutionary view of human culture and ideas, which you can find lurking in the background of a great deal of what I write, on everything from copyright to religion.

Philosophical Investigations — Ludwig Wittgenstein An occasionally maddening but invaluable judo manual.

What’s actually going on here is that some free-market economists, among them Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, have won the prize, and so some folks who don’t especially care for their views feel compelled to try to deny them the aura of respectability that comes with the Nobel name.  But insofar as that respectability never really had much to do with the personal blessing of a 19th century arms dealer, it’s hard to see how this makes sense, and always strikes me as a little petty.

Update: Ok, Ygz says he had no particular axe to grind here, and wasn’t even aware of the various Chicago Schoolers and other free-market boosters who have won the prize.  My bad for implying otherwise. But this isn’t a crazy theory of a “vast left wing conspiracy” that I dreamed up.  The bit about how the Economics Prize isn’t a “real” Nobel—usually coupled with the suggestion that it was dreamed up by banking elites as a scheme to legitimize their academic minions—is a pretty common trope of folks who want to attack winners they dislike, which in my experience has usually been the Chicagoans. Google around; you’ll find plenty of instances.

The thing is, as I started drafting a tentative script and blocking out shots, I realized that my intuition and my sensibility is to bricolage tiny snippets of visual pop culture to illustrate what I’m talking about.  So, for instance, I though about something like this:

Voice Over: The first statutes authorizing National Security Letters were passed back in the 70s, but with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act…
Video: Newly-passed Laws walking down Capitol steps from Schoolhouse Rock, How a Bill Becomes a Law.

Voice Over: …powers that had been quite narrow and limited grew massive in scope…
Video: Soldiers shooting at giant monster ants from the classic sci-fi movie Them!

Now, by any sane standard, it seems to me, this kind of appropriation should be covered by the principle of Fair Use. The video would be non-commercial and educational in nature. The copying would be “transformative,” using the copied material as a small element of an original and very different form of expression. The proportion of each work used would be miniscule—never more than a few seconds—and indeed, partial, insofar as I probably wouldn’t use the audio in most cases. And in no plausible way would the quotation of those short snippets affect the market for the original work or derivative works.

Yet as I noted in one of my very first videoblogs, we seem to have reached a level of copyright insanity where a lot of people—or at least a lot of lawyers—would feel very anxious about all this copying, however intuitively it might seem to be covered by fair use. And that creates a vicious cycle where the principle itself seems to contract as licensing of even the most minimal copying becomes normalized.

It might seem that the kind of appropriation I suggest above is frivolous—that I could just as easily make a video without it.  But I don’t think that’s true. Sure, I could deliver a dry lecture on National Security Letters, maybe punctuated with some PowerPoint slides, but it wouldn’t be nearly as engaging or visually dynamic. And more generally, this fear of quotation and allusion in multimedia work robs us of the ability to make use of our shared culture in absolutely vital ways we take for granted in speech and writing. In an op-ed on the same topic, someone might write that “Big Brother is watching.” Think of all that goes on there. At the content level, it acts as a kind of conceptual hyperlink, invoking a whole rich set of associations that serve to anchor and reinforce the point in the reader’s mind. But at a meta-level, it also binds writer and reader together as members of the same community of reference.   You know something has gone badly wrong with American copyright when such a natural human cultural activity—funny as it might sound to call video editing for YouTube “natural”—exists under such a shadow of uncertainty.