Ineffective Message

Two years ago I enrolled in a course at the Osher Institute which highlighted contemporary issues.  Each week the course committee of four which organized the presentations invited an expert, about half from my state university faculty, the others from non-profit agencies that promote the communal good.  I sort of panned the class in the semester evaluation and never enrolled in subsequent semesters, in large part because of a message theme, that idea version of the Greek Chorus, which for many classes registered as I'm not buying that.  Most of my other course selections get rave feedback for content, effort, and teacher.  As a university graduate, medical graduate, and physician, credibility has always been the coin of the realm.  I have no reason to dismiss Thermodynamics even if my understanding is now paltry, or to tune out a survey of American education where disagreements with the presentation are integral to the discussion and welcome.  For the contemporary issues, there was a committee agenda and challenge was sidestepped.  The price of not confronting legitimate challenges to the party line is usually some version of disrespect.  The legitimate points unify with the dubious, or even manipulated ones. They go into the mental wastebasket without separation.

There's a disturbing poll making the news.  Without getting into the science of polling, just accepting the results at face value, it seems young people ages 18-24 expressed a majority view that the world would be better without Israel.  https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/

As an older fellow, I fall into the senior citizen majority, an overwhelming majority.  Indeed, from the mid-30s, that age when Americans can be elected President, there is no element of Gee Whiz.  It is as much a poll on responsibility as it is on political views.  Indeed, my first Presidential vote went for McGovern at age 21.  He wouldn't appear in my political universe at age 40, if only because I had become partly responsible for an America of respectability.  That is probably the best interpretation of the results.  Though not the only one.

Following the poll's release, Jewish advocacy agencies came out in force to belittle the young adults, their secular educators, the news media, cyberspace.  But sometimes Pogo is right, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Back to the OLLI Course.  An esteemed guest, the regional associate director of the Anti-Defamation League, took her turn on the weekly Zoom presentation.  I absolutely support the aims of the ADL, reporting my own anti-Semitic encounters to their ongoing database, and putting their retired Executive Director Abe Foxman as the most esteemed Jewish advocate I have ever personally met.  And she dutifully told the OLLI group the activities and initiatives of her agency.  She put public education of anti-Semitism at the top of her list.  The ADL has been doing this for a hundred years, prompted by the lynching of Leo Frank in a very racist Georgia prior to World War I.  The obvious question at the presentation, at a time when the anti-Semites were becoming more public in their American presence, would have run along the lines, "if the ADL is so good at this and has so much experience, why is anti-Semitism ever on the rise in America as it is now?"

There are a lot of answers to this.  They probably have an element of Dunning-Kruger, where people and agencies overestimate their ability.  A more valid assessment would be that education makes the advocate feel accomplished but really does not impact behavior nearly as effectively as enforceable laws.  We see that in many settings.  Public Service Announcements on seat belt use and smoking cessation appeared regularly on TV for decades.  People drove unharnessed and smoked until fines for not buckling up and eliminating smoking from public buildings and the workplace became the enforceable behavioral expectations.  Of course the insight of the legislators who enacted these came in part from the understanding of the problem that the advocates promoted, but the solution came not from education but a vision of how to achieve a desired outcome.

So with the poll, AJC, ADL, every Jewish advocacy organizations have their pet excuses, though never an internal one, never the realization that educational initiatives do not bring desired results.  Yet they lack any enforceability.  They may not even have the ability to create negative consequences for deviance.  And our universities don't help.  Some of those elite institution Admission Offices laid an egg.  These kids already demonstrated the ability to learn, which is why they have acceptance letters from the places that sent me thin rejection letters in my era.  The goal is not to change attitude but to change behavior.  And that means creating consequences that favor one behavior over another, something our advocacy groups don't seem to understand.  The alumni of those elite schools are not in that 18-24 cohort.  They understand propriety.  They understand what type of person makes a good protégé.  So the solution would be to create a disadvantage to sloganeering for the odious, either by fist in the air or online trail.  When the med/law interviews don't come, when the lucrative hiring goes someplace else, behavior would change.

Does forced, or coerced behavioral change reverse fundamental thinking or reasoning processes?  It probably does, though not for certain.  People did not really reject American slavery as an institution until abolition was mandated.  Once they couldn't own slaves, it was short shift to shouldn't even if allowed.  Same with seatbelts.  Behavior forced, but soon accepted as the proper thing to do.  Or integrated restaurants or not smoking.  I can't eventually becomes I won't even if I could.  It is a difficult transition, one requiring examination of what our esteemed agencies really want to achieve, and abandoning what has not worked well, especially when it can never work well.

Alas, I think many of my Jewish advocacy agencies, whose goals align with mine, have just gotten too inbred to schect their sacred cows to breed a sturdier cow.