The Accident(s) of Birth: Opportunity Knocks

“You’ve got the world by the strings, kid. Just don’t blow it.”

-- Advice from a Caddy, Myopia Hunt Club, c. 2000

Last week, Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung wrote a terrific column on the need to engage white men in ongoing efforts to make a more inclusive, more opportunistic society—in Boston and across the country. Leung quotes Colette Phillips, President and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications, Inc. (a Boston-based public relations and marketing communications firm), who stated, “In Boston, we need to create a new normal — white men at the table. You can’t talk about inclusion and exclude.”

Phillips’ incisive and earnest sentiment is all-too-often absent from discussions about a wide variety of issues—from reproductive justice (viewed as a “woman’s” concern, rather than a central element of public health for all) to corrections/policing policy (where elected officials often seek to curry favor in communities of color, but do little to engage white voters on the same issues).

This absence is particularly notable since political parties often speak about the need to embrace a “big tent” theory of coalition politics that bridges the divide between many segments to achieve a governing consensus. Neither party has done a particularly good job at this in recent years—as both Republican Tea Partiers and Democratic purists have imposed strict litmus tests on candidates, hollowing out the middle of the American political spectrum in the process.

There is plenty more to say on that subject in later posts. However, today I want to focus on a central idea raised by Leung’s column: how people privileged by the accident of birth should approach (and use) that privilege.

A Road to Opportunity
Myopia Hunt Club, Bay Road, South Hamilton, Mass.

I’m one of those privileged souls—a paradigmatic example of a beneficiary of centuries of prejudice. Some of the factors are immediately obvious to anyone who sees me. I’m White. I’m male. I’m rich. I’m healthy.

Other factors secured to no credit of my own aren’t apparent on the surface, but also form a basis for my privileged position. I’m an American Citizen. I’m heterosexual. I grew up in a two-parent/two-income household. I had a network of people who looked out for me as I was growing up (teachers, Little League coaches, fellow congregants at the First Church of Wenham, the parents of close friends, etc.).

The caddy who offered me advice at the age of 16 was not so blessed. He grew up poor, in a single-parent home in Peabody. His mature approach to offering counsel to his naive co-caddy was evident, both from his willingness to cop to mistakes he made along the way and his steadfast effort to make sure that I didn’t let the riches that I had inherited go to my head. More importantly, by characterizing my position as one in which I had “the world by the strings,” he made it abundantly clear that the world would judge me less by the opportunities provided by Grace, and more by what I chose to do with those opportunities.

Taking advantage of opportunities is, to some degree, a straightforward proposition. Work hard. Pay attention and adhere steadfastly to First Principles. Devote your professional life to your most cherished values.

The harder part is resisting the urge to judge others by the opportunities they have/don’t have. It is telling that the Ten Commandments include a directive not to covet what others have, but do not include a similar, more affirmative edict to do your best with what you’ve been given. Whether it’s “real estate envy” in New York or jealously about the personal or professional lives of friends or colleagues that always seem one step ahead of ours, the human inclination to worry about what we lack, rather than revel in what we have, threatens our ability to seize on opportunities as they arise and undermines our capacity to work with people to solve collective problems.

In the end, no matter what your race, class, sex, or creed, we all bear the burden of not “blowing it”—of seizing on the opportunities that come our way to better the lives of our fellow citizens.

"Innate Differences" and Ideology as an Obstacle to Truth

It does appear that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.

-- Lawrence H. Summers (14 Jan. 2005)

9 years ago, Lawrence (“Larry”) Summers, President of Harvard University, openly wondered whether the underrepresentation of women in the sciences could be explained, in part, by differences in ability between the sexes.

The immediate reaction to his remarks was fierce. Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the New York Times, "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.”

Others came to Summers’ defense. When asked by the Harvard Crimson whether then-President Summers’ comments were “within the pale of legitimate academic discourse,” Harvard Professor Steven Pinker (a former professor of mine) replied, “Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.”

Summers, who had endured a series of smaller disputes with faculty during his short tenure at the helm of America’s oldest university, would eventually resign the Presidency, in February 2006.

8 years later, stories of “innate differences” between the sexes continue to stoke controversy. Just this week, two stories—one a 60 Minutes feature on how drugs affect men and women, the other a feature in the Times Magazine concerning whether egalitarian marriages have less sex—once again placed sex differences from and center.

As CBS reported, the FDA recently cut the recommended dose of the popular sleep drug Ambien in half for women because men and women metabolize Ambien very differently, leaving women with more of the drug in their bodies the next morning, and therefore at a greater risk of impaired driving.

Physicians interviewed for the 60 Minutes piece hypothesized that drug studies ignored or failed to even consider gender differences because, in the past, “women’s health” was confined to reproductive issues and breast cancer.

I think this explanation misses the boat. Instead, let me suggest another, more insidious explanation: that in the latter quarter of the 20^th century in America (and perhaps the first decade of the 21^st), it was unacceptable to even consider the idea that men and women had innate differences. The fear, unspoken but real, was that if studies showed that men and women were different on one metric, what was to keep science from identifying differences between the sexes that made us uncomfortable—that suggested that tendencies typically ascribed to socialization and patriarchy were, in fact, rooted in biology.

This political correctness was so deeply entrenched that what appears common sense in retrospect—the need to study the effect of drugs on both men and women—wasn’t even considered. As Doris Taylor, a leading stem cell expert at Texas Heart Institute in Houston told 60 Minutes, “I am embarrassed to admit that, as a woman, it had never really occurred to me that doing the experiment in male versus female animals would give completely different results.”

The Times story suggests that the decades-long effort to eliminate gender discrimination and make relationships more egalitarian—laudable as it is—may have unintentional negative consequences on the sex lives of heterosexual couples. As Esther Perel, a couples therapist, told the Times, “[T]he values that make for good social relationships are not necessarily the same ones that drive lust…[M]ost of us get turned on at night by the very things that we’ll demonstrate against during the day.”

What Summers’ demise showed and what these latest stories once again raise, is the danger of ideology, in science and in politics. Ideology, as I am defining it, is not the belief in certain goals. Rather, ideology is a rigid adherence to a means to an end—an unyielding belief, for instance, that doing right by the poor means lowering taxes on the super-rich, evidence be damned. To the ideologue, truth is irrelevant. In fact, even a free and earnest search for the truth is viewed as a threat to be condemned.

The truth, however, is precisely what we should seek in determining the course of action best tailored to reach the goals motivating our professions—whether curing disease in medicine, creating wealth in economics, or improving public policy in government. To that end, we must seek out leaders who are willing to change their mind about the best way to achieve our collective goals, rather than shunning these individuals as “flip-floppers” or worse.

As Pinker stated,

[T]he truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.

That radical concept—free inquiry—must remain at the heart of the American Experience, not only on our campuses and our labs, but also in our Town Halls, Statehouses, and the hallowed halls of Congress.