Our expectations shape our politics.

Our expectations shape our politics.
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“But evangelical prophecy --the prophecy of rapture and tribulation-- also has much to say about how one should live now, in this moment. As we saw in the last chapter, it can provide a script for social living and a script for the reading of human history. . . . It puts seemingly random events and chaotic world events into a coherent scheme. . . . With prophecy as a tool for what Wahneema Lubiano calls ‘world-making.’ believers receive a script not only through which they can interpret world events but also through which they can interpret their own lives” (Frykholm 132).
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We really can't set goals without a sense of what's realistic and what's impossible; our models of how the world works, what we can gain or lose. No matter how much we might want peace and justice, we're not going to invest in those outcomes if we don't believe they are possible.

Once they're set, it's hard to change our expectations, because they can be to some extent self-fulfilling. We push real hard to realize our hopes. Sometimes we simply discard data that doesn't fit our preconceptions. Teachers especially are warned not to start with low expectations of students, because it's so easy to affect their performance by the way we treat them. Similarly, we can weaken our struggles for freedom if we hang on to very unrealistic expectations.


• Some common expectations.
Halliburton based the recent episode in the endless war on utterly baseless assumptions about Iraqi servility and passiveness.

Apparently some people still believe that wars can be fought as decisively and neatly as they are on TV. We recognize these cultists by their high-school gym discourse: Let’s kick ass! Bring it on!

Some generals reckon war is just one of the normal tools of state, like embassies and trade agreements. Kennedy's enthusiasm for small wars was developed in the context of the cosmic battle against world communism; Halliburton liberated it from such petty constraints. Instead of the traditional mission of defense against attack, militarists see war as a normal, usual, reliable tool of foreign policy, like spies and embassies, only more expensive. The expectation, in other words, is that we will almost always be invading somewhere. The variation will be among periods of greater or less intensity.

My neighbor says, however the Iraq wars started, we have to see them through because "It's just common sense" that Iran would invade a leaderless Iraq, and that Muslims have nothing so interesting to do as plotting to conquer Europe. Some Israelis and Palestinians don't believe that, after so much bloodshed, they can ever live side by side in peace. And jihadist Christians egg them on, celebrating Mideast war as confirmation of their apocalyptic fantasies. Because they shape our fears and ambitions, these contending expectations likewise determine our politics.

Some liberal Christians, rejecting the idea that self-interest is the prime mover of human action, pray for God to change Halliburton's mind. (Regardless of religion, Steve Jenkins (2002) implies that, with all our rhetoric of empowerment and grassroots participation, in practice the great majority of our efforts go into cajoling elites into being gracious, generous, reasonable . . . .)

With respect to the broader community, Christians and left-wingers share an intense faith in education: we can learn to do better. I’ve had the most interesting conversations with folks trying to evangelize me, as I was trying to do with them. We just differ on what “better” means. And what “education” means. (In somewhat parallel fashion, many different traditions look to nature as an authority for how we should act.

For some Christians, what's possible is personal salvation. We can't change this wicked world, but we can shield ourselves from it and wait for rescue. In the meantime, because we are all sinners, the best we can hope for is a strong boss who will restrain our naturally evil tendencies. Even liberal Christians can take a similar tone, casting their social justice work as personal paths of virtue in the face of inevitable, unbeatable corruption and injustice (notes 10-16-02). I wonder how much that salvationism bleeds over into the common secular belief that as individuals we can have material success, too, while our neighbors suffer the worst violence and deprivation. Similarly, Christian notions of sin may have profoundly influenced ostensibly anti-Christian ideas like those of Hobbes or Spencer, who maintained that people are just no good, so we can only order society through domination.

Some friends of mine take a more optimistic approach. The very facts that today it’s a crime to kill women and black men, that the EPA limits how much poison a particular factory can spew, demonstrate beyond dispute that progress is inevitable, guaranteed, and, as far as we are concerned, automatic and effortless. We needn’t get too distracted by wayward nukes, biobombs, networks of secret torture prisons, ethnic war in some dam desert, or mass extinction because despite occasional glitches, overall things are just naturally getting better and better. The people who actually fight racism and pollution are worry-warts, drama queens, and faintly silly. (A left version: sure, revolution can be messy, maybe a bit of scapegoating, all very regrettable, but afterward we just naturally calm down and justice alights on us with gentle wings, like Marquez’ butterflies.)

A different set of folks reckon that we are mostly just products of our circumstances, so to change ourselves we must change the world.

The perennial conflict of expectations among liberals resumes every election cycle, as "pragmatists" and "utopians" duke it out over candidates. Clinton or Obama (or whatever are this year's versions) are the best we can do, goes one side of the argument, while the bolder disdain the choice without a (big) difference; rather than tinker around the edges, they say, we need to change the terms of the debate, the rules of the game. You may recall the bitterness Nader’s presidential campaigns generated, as possible spoilers of Democrat victories (as opposed to, say, the Democrats’ Republicanism). Who are the real realists-- the incrementalist, work-in-the-system types, or the disrupters of business as usual? Of course we need both, though not in equal measure. Can we get a mandate for radical change, or are we just trying to hold the line against further atrocities?

A case could be made that the faction of "realism" and "pragmatism" are too distrustful of the rank and file, on the one hand, and on the other, the greatest wishful thinkers of all, imagining some technical fix that will solve our problems without actually inconveniencing the people who make their living from these problems. Where do the incremental changes lead? What do they add up to? Can we change the terms of debate? Can we change the rules? Call it radical opportunism.

Speaking of Realism, uses and abuses of, the more self-abasing of the professors rationalize our economic system by a very bizarre set of expectations: a universe of many independent buyers and sellers, each pursuing the greatest money profit, in conditions of perfect information, competition, and freedom from government influence, and other aburd or self-limiting assumptions.

An earlier authority said the poor will always be with us. Some people take that to mean, handouts to beggars can earn us a get-out-of-hell card, but we needn’t worry about what it would take for everyone to have enough food, housing, schooling and medical care. Ain’t gonna happen.

I’ve talked to some rich people, rich like me, who still believe that once Obama or Warren Buffett rescues us from the current economic unpleasantness, we can get back to “normal”, i.e. gorging on ten times our share of the planet’s resources, and expelling the waste in our own living rooms. Some leaders of our labor and advocacy groups offer us a fine example, leeching up 5 or 10 times the average income of their constituents, with a sense of entitlement based on --heck, I have no idea what it could be based on-- but they expect it, and grab it.

At the same time as they hold such high expectations for their own prospects, many of these same leaders have little hope that we can halt or redirect the juggernaut of corporation-controlled technical and economic change (Fletcher and Gapasin, 91, 143). Instead of understanding our situation now as the outcome of specific political battles and decisions, they seem to see it as the necessary unfolding of some universal law of nature. Resistance is futile! All we can do is jump on board and hold on tight.

A very sensitive expectation is that we will survive and prosper if we play by the rules (whatever they are supposed to be at a given moment). Sensitive because rules are just our firmest type of expectation; we need them to have any sense of order or agency in the world. We may cling them most strongly when they seem least valid, when our confidence in the future is most in peril. I wonder if that’s the only non-racist element to this ferocious backlash against immigrants: supposedly, they didn’t play by the rules. Perhaps like homeless people or young people everywhere, immigrants violate our expectations by seeming to get something for nothing.

Darnton describes popular culture in 17th century France. For peasants and city workers alike, the world was scary and chaotic. They had little traction in their lives, few ways to anticipate or cope with the apparently random opportunities and disasters that came their way. The trickster was their hero. He could beat the system by sheer nimbleness. His greed often got him in trouble; then he used others' greed to get himself out. Outwitting the king and all the big shots, sometimes the trickster got the princess and half the kingdom.

If the world is cruel, the village nasty, and mankind infested with rogues, what is one to do? The tales do not give an explicit answer, but they illustrate the aptness of the ancient French proverb, 'One must howl with the wolves.' Roguery runs through the whole corpus of French tales, though it often takes the milder and more agreeable form of tricksterism (54).

Many cultures have their honored tricksters, from Bre'r Rabbit to the Native Americans' Coyote, Chile's Pedro Urdemala, the mouse deer of Indonesia and Eshu among the Yoruba of Africa (see Lewis Hyde's exhilirating treatment, Trickster Makes This World). Tricksters can represent defiance of authority, overcoming limitations, or the possibility of bargaining with the gods. I loved the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, reread Eric Frank Russell's sci-fi trickster The Wasp many times, and studied every episode of “Secret Agent” in the 1960s. Though Brecht's play Caucasion Chalk Circle is a thinly veiled rationale for some of Stalin's crimes, the accidental judge Azdak remains my favorite literary character.

And he broke the rules to save them
Broken law like bread he gave them
Brought them to the shore upon his crooked back.
At long last the poor and lowly
Had someone who was not too holy
To be bribed by empty hands: Azdak.

As Darnton points out, though, tricksterism makes no pretense of changing the world or overthrowing the powers. Our hero, still smelling of the sewer, merely sneaks his way into the boudoirs and treasuries of the mighty.

These days, of course, any lingering culture of defiance has been thoroughly defanged & domesticated, lobotomized, purged of wit, transformed into myriad profit centers through fantasy personas like Rambo, O'Reilly and a slew of chubby gangsta rappers. Instead of challenging our lords, the smug new "outlaws" pick on women or the harried gnomes slaving away in the twilit basements of our self-spayed government.

For some folks, even covert resistance seems impossible. Instead, they can rise far above their fellows through extraordinary service to their masters. Perhaps they panic in open spaces, these anti-feminist women, low income immigrant-bashers, Republican Columnists of Color . . . . I know a woman who is utterly furious, enraged at the world all the time, and has an unerring instinct to attack the weakest of her neighbors, in service to the strong. She likes to blame immigrants and other women for her problems, and snitches on them to her patrons.

Perhaps these men and women feel compelled to justify to themselves why, when their peers stand up against the murder machine, they themselves are too afraid; they find in the least among us an excuse for their own servility. Just as compelling, there is little market for their services in the ordinary line of duty (as investment analysts, talk show hosts, the National Security Advisor). No, their greatest value is as prison trustees, keeping fellow inmates in line; and even that job pays well only when revolt threatens. Tobias writes about anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly,

What attracted her to the [Equal Rights Amendment] controversy was her oppostion both to the theory and practice of feminism. But frustrated as she must have been with her lack of political success so far [she had campaigned for Goldwater, lost out in a bid to become president of the National Republican Women's Federation, and lost two runs for Congress], anti-ERA also offered her a political opportunity to exploit. It is her opportunism, even more than her conservatism, that explains why Schlafly suddenly shifted in 1972 from lobbying generally for conservative causes to pursuing an almost single-minded opposition to ERA (Tobias 140).

Because it has the potential to mobilize a great range of constituencies, the environmental movement has been a critical force for resistance in recent decades. It arose from evolving or conflicting expectations about nature and society: the claim that an unchanging nature exists (was created!) for our amusement, that we could plunder and pollute endlessly without harm to ourselves, versus a newer sense of the planet as a delicate closed system, as represented by those famous Earth photos Al Gore took from his space expedition. I always figured it pretty strange that rightists combine such an expansive view of material possibility --when we’ve finished paving over the planet, we’ll just move to Mars-- with the stingiest view of what humans can do in community. Then I realized I combine these broad and stingy expectations myself, just the other way around.

Some people I know and like insist that their choice to buy more expensive organic food and recycled paper helps change the world, though they belong to no advocacy or education groups and consume entirely in private. Evidently their secret virtue generates some karma-like force that propagates through the universe, eventually impinging on some CEO's neurons to make him forswear the profits from toxic waste. Christians are clearer about the need for public witness, though here too the testifyin’ gets more attention than what messages, if any, are received.

Other expectations also affect environmental policy. For example, when a company poisons a river or strips a mountain we might demand that they "clean it up," "restore" or "reclaim" it. In fact it is not possible to fix or clean up some kinds of destruction, not in the span of several lifetimes at best. Another widely held model is that any incremental change is reversible, that we can tiptoe up to catastrophe and then back off. Other observers point out, however, the existence of threshold effects, of profound and possibly irreversible effects from one small change at the right point in a continuum; the straw that broke the camel's back. "Tipping point" is the latest phrase I've heard. We've already set in motion the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs went to heaven. Another such phenomenon may be climate change. Perhaps the next generation will remember as the good ol days the images of the old people and kids waving from rooftops in flooded New Orleans (the people our country-club leaders expected to have SUVs to load up and drive away from the hurricane).

Still, we hear the constant promise that new technology can fix any problems we get ourselves into. Here in the U.S., for instance, we needn’t worry about vast overconsumption, because scientific miracles will transmute polluted farmland into new Edens, chemical spills into ice cream, and nuclear waste into chewable multivitamins in the shape of little bunnies.

Rich people like to say the secret of our success is faith and hard work. We don’t say too much about peace, stable government, and the social infrastructure, though sometimes mom gets a nod. So, many of us figure that we’ll never need any help that we can’t mobilize from our personal ties and investments. The fact that not everyone achieves such success must be due to some flaw of character or motivation. The converse must be true as well: faith and hard work should guarantee success. I’m prosperous because I deserve it; the folks who are not, don’t.

Scott talks about a different set of expectations among Asian peasants, which might be shared by many low income people. Like Simon's "satisficers," these folks didn't see maximizing profits as a smart or even possible strategy. (This was all before the Green Revolution reengineered the surviving farmers.) Life is full of hazards and setbacks. Their big concern was less with squeezing that extra couple percent of yield out of their crops or animals, than simply surviving from one season to another, in the face of drought and flood and the ever-increasing demands of landlord and warlord. For them a bad season could mean not the loss of stock options or postponing the luxury cruise, but losing their land or their lives. They diversified their "social capital" as they did their skills and crops, to ensure some resources even in disaster years (1976 p. 4, and throughout). Their expectations of what is possible and likely put them squarely in the way of "modernizing" elites. (Who themselves have begun to reconsider their risk models, hence the newly fashionable interest in Taleb’s “Black Swan” and related ideas. Of course, hindsight is as easy as shooting Asians from helicopters. Too bad these brilliant investors didn’t think like peasants before they trashed the planet.)

In many cases we don't rightly know what to expect. One worker snitching on another has to consider the risk of reprisal versus the magnitude of likely favors from the boss. An abused person would have to know the chances of getting killed in her partner's next drunken rage --which, statistically, we can know to some reliable degree, in the long run, but individual victims often do not, especially in terms of tomorrow and next week-- as opposed to the physical, emotional, and economic risks of breaking the relationship. The victim of a toxic waste spill could sell her home, pack up the kids and leave town, or sue the bastards for medical care, or mobilize the neighbors to demand government intervention. But the likelihood that any of these paths will succeed is very hard to know ahead of time; all we can be sure of is that the costs will be very high in every case.

(In truth, all my life I’ve enjoyed the utmost comfort and security. My private desperations have been uniformly trivial in comparison to, say, what a child goes through in Baghdad. So, as you can tell, my speculations about how we respond to risk are cast from the remotest of ivory towers.)