True or false? "The kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response"

The damaged dogs rescued from Michael Vick's dog-fighting operation were sent to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Angel Canyon, Utah, for rehabilitation.

by Ken

There are writers with whose work you develop an ongoing relationship. It took me awhile to bond with The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, whom we last talked about when he was pondering the question "Is free the future?" (with a follow-up here). At this point, though, his byline on the contents page is likely to make me pretty much drop everything and read. He has a piece in the new (October 19) issue, called "Offensive Play," and while the subject didn't seem to promise the kind of startling new (to me, anyway) insight into human behavior I've come to expect from him, I nevertheless dropped everything and read.

Gladwell begins with a look at the present-day condition of retired NFL onetime all-pro offensive tackle Kyle Turley, and proceeds to a consideration of the long-term damage increasingly understood to occur in the brains of football players and boxers, athletes exposed to tens of thousands of head blows. What the researchers are finding -- insofar as they've been able to examine brain tissue post mortem -- is that the brain tissue is almost always scarred in a way that's characteristic of not first- but second-stage Alzheimer's. He conducts his usual interviews around the question of whether this can be reduced by rule changes or is inherent in the game, and what can be done about it, 'cause for sure nobody is going to entertain the idea of abolishing football.

But what's really interesting to me is Gladwell's insistence on the moral dimension of the problem, to which end he draws a running parallel with the "sport" of dog-fighting, with particular reference to the spectacular downfall of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick after his dog-fighting operation was uncovered, leading to his suspension from the NFL and his subsequent prosecution, conviction, and incarceration. The blurb under the title of the piece reads: "How different are dogfighting and football?"

Gladwell quotes at some length a gruesome description of an actual dog fight, which ends -- or rather climaxes after the fight has ended with the losing dog, named Black, having its back legs broken, with blood gushing from her throat -- thusly: "A shot rings out barely heard over the noise in the barn. Black's body is wrapped up and carried by her owner to his vehicle." Gladwell continues:

It's the shot ringing out that seals the case against dogfighting. L.G. [Black's owner] willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. "I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting," [NFL Commissioner Roger] Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case.

Later Gladwell visits the special animal care facility, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Angel Canyon, Utah, where the dogs owned by Michael Vick were sent after his arrest. He describes the extraordinary care these animals, horribly damaged mentally as well as physically, have received, in many cases achieving surprising degrees of rehabilitation. All the while he makes clear that the poor creatures are still unable to live normally. He writes:

What happens at Best Friends represents, by any measure, an extravagant gesture. These are dogs that will never live a normal life. But the kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response.

I've paused here for emphasis only. That last sentence is the one in the piece which continues to engage me, and we'll come back to it. In the piece, however, what follows continues without interruption, not even a paragraph break, from the above:

In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a "cur," and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess 'gameness,' and game dogs are revered.

In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff -- and dogfighting fails this test.

Now Gladwell's inquiry into the parallel cases of football and dogfighting is absorbing in its own right, but what has fascinated me, again, is that excellent sentence, "The kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response." I think what fascinates me about it is that, while this moral repulsion would undoubtedly be widely acknowledged, even in the 21st century I don't think it's as universally felt as Gladwell seems to assume, as witness the mere survival of the "sport," despite ever-heavier official disapproval and illegalization.

Damned if I didn't find myself thinking of the contrasting models that George Lakoff has described for the political Right vs. Left: the "strict father" model on the one hand vs. the "nurturant parent" family on the other. Now I don't say that all right-wing adherents are dog-fight fans, or that no lefties get a kick out of this spectacle. But it does seem to me that in the "strict father" model, which sees this as (and there's no reason why you should forgive the expression) a dog-eat-dog world, there really isn't anything particularly repellent about dog-fighting.

It occurs to me that in many of our most violent points of political contention, left vs. right, at work quietly in the background is a basic difference in notions of moral acceptability which is well illustrated here.

The difference is not, I should add, that the owners of the dogs don't love them. Gladwell makes a persuasive if stomach-turning case that they surely do, and are deeply hurt when they cart off the carcass of this animal that showed the depths of its love by allowing itself to be ripped apart. Again, though, I may be overly influenced by my ongoing reading of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,whose virtual catalog of sociopathologies common to the authoritarian mentality leaves a reader punchy and quite prepared to believe that this could pass for love among the human specimens under scrutiny here. (One frighteningly common thread is how many of these men survived big-time childhod mental and especially physical abuse, and went on to lead movements built on abuse. "Strict father," indeed!)

In case you were wondering, Gladwell isn't especially optimistic about the application of morality to football, where the owners don't pretend to think of the players as more than parts of their money-making machine. "What football must confront, in the end," he writes, "is not just the problem of injuries or scientific findings. It is the fact that there is something profoundly awry in the relationship between the players and the game."

But even if it turns out, as increasingly seems the case, that no changes in the rules could seriously reduce the risk of permanent brain injury to players, he recognizes that nothing can or will be done, because there is no chance of banning football. "We are in love with football players," he writes, "with their courage and grit, and nothing else -- neither considerations of science nor those of morality -- can compete with the destructive power of that love."


VISIT THE BEST FRIENDS WEBSITE

There is (as yet) no sanctuary for battered football players, but if you can visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary website without tearing up, well, I have to wonder. (Are you by chance a rabid right-winger?) The good news is that many of the animals are rehabilitated to the point of adoptability, and the sanctuary actively tries to place them -- and visitors are welcome.

Search for an adoptable pet from Best Friends

Best Friends has about 2,000 animals looking for their forever homes. You’ll find many of them on these pages, and we’re adding more every day!

Best Friends began as a special haven for dogs and cats who were deemed "unadoptable."

But these animals are anything but! Some of them have special needs, like medical conditions, shyness or old age. Others overcame their special needs long ago, and are as healthy and happy a pet as you'll find anywhere.

All of them are looking for homes to call their own, and every one of them deserves a chance. Please take your time browsing. On these pages, you’ll find dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, horses, pigs and more, all of them anxious to meet you.

If you don’t find your new pet today, please bookmark this page and check back regularly. There are always new animals arriving at the sanctuary.

The pussycat pictured above is Ferrari, a four-year-old female who was rescued from a broken-down shelter, "and something about all the neglect she suffered there makes her wary." However, "Ferrari wants to be a lap cat; she really does. When you come meet her, she'll be the first walk right up to you. She's delighted that you came! She loves it when you pet her, too. But then, she suddenly gets scared." She's "naturally affectionate," her profile says. "She just needs time to overcome."

Of course, your local shelter has a lot of abandoned animals who could use a good home, and would repay a little love with a whole lot of it. With animals, that nurturing stuff works both ways. (Some people think it works with people too, but that's a tougher case to prove.)

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I'm just asking, can we afford to live in a world where ideas have no inherent value?

I'm not expecting that anytime soon the water at Niagara Falls is going to abandon its traditional habit of moving downward. I'm just wondering how obvious it is that the same natural laws apply to the downward spiral in the value of "content."

by Ken

Earlier this week I called attention to, and made some observations based on, what seems to me a direction-pointing essay-review by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, "Priced to Sell: Is free the future?" The Gladwell essay takes as its point of departure a new book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in which the author works from the premise: "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

Anderson writes, "In the digital realm you can try to keep Free [oh yes, he insists on capitalizing "Free"] at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win." And of course, practically speaking, what he's saying is grounded in reality. And there's no question that digital media have made it painfully easy to appropriate -- a fancy way of saying "steal" -- ideas. As Gladwell puts it: "The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'"

What I find shocking is how little discussion there is of the proposition -- the reality, I guess Anderson would say -- that ideas no longer have any economic value, whether they're good or bad.

In another lifetime I could, I suppose, have considered myself a "professional writer." I never actually made my living as a writer, except perhaps for brief periods when that was more or less the only income I had, and I can assure you it didn't constitute a "living." Even in those periods, if I dig deep into memory, I would probably have to acknowledge that part of such income as I had came not from writing but from editing and proofreading.

There was at least the positive development that I learned this way that I was not cut out temperamentally to live the freelance lifestyle, especially in the absence of any instinct or aptitude for marketing my wares. Not with a landlord insisting that he must have a rent check each and every month, not to mention this unshakable habit I had developed of insisting on eating on a regular basis.

I can't say that my writing did much to make the world a better place, but in that other lifetime I did have the experience, by no means invariable for a writer, of writing stuff (a) that almost exclusively was stuff I wanted to write, and (b) that a certain number of readers recognized and appreciated as coming almost exclusively from my own perceptions and beliefs, such as they were.

Of course those accomplishments, minimal as they were, were made possible almsot entirely by the fact that I did not depend on the proceeds from that writing to provide food and clothing and shelter. It also mattered that I was only responsible for my own needs. Even at the time it occurred to me that I had no idea how I would have managed if I'd had family reponsibilities. (Eventually there were family responsibilities, for my aging mother, and what I did, from a financial standpoint, was to rack up a rest-of-lifetime's worth of debt. But that's another story.)

Fast-forwarding to this present lifetime, I do still write, but mostly this is what I write. Don't get me wrong. Beyond whatever satisfaction there is in getting something said more or less right, which happens once or twice a year, I feel privileged to have contact with DWT readers. That's where this actually gets to be fun sometimes.

I guess I'm past the ego thing of writing for no pay. It even has its compensations, like never having to worry about whether what you're writing is worth what you're being paid -- although this is of surprisingly little consolation when I'm struggling to make some point in minimally coherent form. And I can't say that it was often a realistic concern in my old writing-for-pay life, since it was usually my standards I was writing to, and they didn't often have much in common with those of my paymasters. (In addition, the pay was in general so meager that the buyers could hardly complain about not getting their money's worth.)

(There's another compensation: After a lifetime of living in terror of having writing errors slip through, I no longer have to worry. Oh, I do worry still, and I try to clean that stuff up, eventually, but you'd never imagine the agony it once caused me when as much as a typo appeared in print.)

At the same time, it's an odd perspective, looking out at a world in which more writing than ever is being done, some of it for pay and some of it not for pay. (This isn't quite as black-and-white as it sounds, because there are lots of people -- working in both the nominal "for pay" and "not for pay" realms -- who are paid so little that it hardly counts.) I'd like to think it's only natural, but maybe it's just my background, for an onlooker to wonder how easy it is to distinguish quality-wise between the paid-for and un-paid-for writing.

Obviously if you're reading this, you're a reader. And I wonder what you've observed. It seems to me pretty clear that an awful lot of paid-for writing is, um, not enduringly wonderful (which isn't exactly the same thing as saying "it's crap," but it certainly allows for that possibility), while an awful lot of stuff being churned out online for little or no pay -- of course we readers have no for-sure way of knowing which is which, and I suppose it's really none of our business -- not only is first-rate but makes potentially invaluable contributions to the future of our civilization.

I don't really have more to say at this point, except that I think this is a conversation that we've got to have, preferably before Chris Anderson's reality is set in stone (sorry, I can't think of any digital equivalent to use here, digital media being so alarmingly impermanent). It's not so much a personal consideration as a societal one. It just seems to me that the advancement of civilization has always depended on ideas, and I stubbornly resist the idea that we can live in a world where good ideas have no value. Of course you still have to figure out how to make money off them -- that's always been true -- but the notion that the ideas themselves have no value . . . well, that scares me.

What I find shocking is how little discussion there is of the proposition -- the reality, I guess Anderson would say -- that ideas no longer have any economic value, whether they're good or bad. Of course, assigning a dollar value to services performed has always been at best an inexact science, and in my next post, I'm going to be calling one of the clearest thinkers I'm aware of, the great E. B. White, to the witness stand with some thoughts on the point. (This will also be an opportunity to DWT business left unfinished owing to the mysterious disappearance of my old Perennial paperback copy of the White anthology The Second Tree from the Corner. I've got a newer and, believe it or not, much better copy now.)

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The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell ponders the question: "Is free the future?"

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win."

"Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

-- Wired editor Chris Anderson, in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, as quoted by Malcolm Gladwell (see below)

*

"The digital age, Anderson [right] argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.' Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: 'In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.' To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and 'yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.' . . .

"He goes on: 'There may be more [professional journalists], not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.' . . .

"It would be nice to know . . . just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does [Anderson] mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson's reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference."

-- Malcolm Gladwell, in Priced to Sell: Is free the future?,
his July 6 New Yorker essay-review of the Anderson book

by Ken

Funny how these things come together. Just yesterday, in reporting Dan Froomkin's new gig as Washington bureau chief of the Huffington Post (following his unceremonious dumping by the lords of washingtonpost.com), we were glimpsing the future of journalism though the eyes of Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. And that's going to lead us more or less directly into the remarkable essay-review by Malcolm Gladwell that I've sampled above.

I had been delighted to learn from Glenn's report that Dan Froomkin was in fact "inundated" with approaches regarding potential employment, and on that basis I was happy to quote Glenn's comment, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices." I wasn't so confident, though, about the rest of the paragraph from which that sentence was excised:

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

I certainly agree that the Infotainment News Media have done themselves no favor by (a) shrinking and dumbing down their news coverage and (b) purging it of anything that might be felt as hurtful by people in positions of power. Newspapers might have a stronger claim on readers' interest and loyalty if they were actually attempting to, you know, report the news, without fear or favor. And certainly it's good to know that some alternatives are taking shape, even if it's happening almost exclusively online.

Where my optimism runs aground is in any suggestion that we have even glimpsed a workable alternative to the mainstream "news" media that are now in possibly irreversible decline, however well deserved that decline may be.

In good part, this is because of the developments that are described in Chris Anderson's book -- as represented in Malcolm Gladwell's essay-review, I should make clear. While it may be true that newspapers could have tried bolstering rather than diluting their journalistic commitment as a counter to their economic decline, that's pretty much irrelevant to the array of social and economic forces that brought on that decline.

And the reason I'm recommending the Gladwell piece to you as urgently as I possibly can is, I'm guessing, the same reason Gladwell himself was moved to devote so much time and energy to writing about the book: that the reality it represents really is to a good extent real, and has to be grappled with by anyone who cares about ideas, the quality of ideas, and indeed the concept of "values" in civilization.

In case it isn't already clear, I should note that Gladwell doesn't draw at all the same conclusions from the phenomena observed by Anderson, or share any of Anderson's near-giddy excitement over those phenomena. This giddiness is reflected in Anderson's habit (as you may have noticed) of capitalizing the word "free," or should I say "Free"? It may well be true that we are witnessing "an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'” But is it really of no concern whether this is a good thing?

Here is Gladwell again:

The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.

Gladwell begins his piece by recounting a scene that I like to think will send a chill through most readers:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he'd just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper's content to the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic reader. "They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue," Moroney testified. "I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device." The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. "I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device -- not just ones made by Amazon?" He was incredulous. "That, to me, is not a model."

I suppose someone of Anderson's world-view might answer that it doesn't matter what the publisher thinks, since, after all, "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." (To which Gladwell replies: "But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?")

I recognize that it may be difficult, perhaps extremely difficult, to resist this trend, but difficult isn't the same thing as impossible, and of course not remotely the same thing as undesirable. I imagine that back in the days before copyright laws, cranks who argued that the people who created the content of published materials ought to have some rights in their selling were told there was nothing that could be done. "What are we supposed to do," voices of reason might have said, "travel all over the world grabbing larcenous publishers by the lapel and saying, 'See here, you can't do that, my good man. Why, you've got to give those chaps money, like a percentage of every copy you sell'?" I imagine that argument sounded pretty ridiculous the first several thousand times it was advanced.

If nothing else, I'm grateful to Chris Anderson for raising these issues -- possibly even grateful enough to read his book. And I don't want you to think I've given you more than a sampling of either his arguments or Malcolm Gladwell's responses.

There's an awful lot to discuss here, once everyone has read the Gladwell piece. I myself have, if not exactly a personal stake, then at least an active interest, as someone who used to write for money and now writes for, well, free. (No, not Free.) But that will have to wait till another time. For now, let's just bring this back to the questions raised by Glenn Greenwald about the future of journalism.

"Clearly, journalism itself is not dying," he says, and I guess I understand what he means. It's true that if you look around the blogosphere, you'll find a healthy number of people ready and willing, even eager, to do real journalism. It's also true that hardly any of those people are able to do more than eke out a bare-subsistence living -- and those are the lucky ones.

Because it also remains true that, at least as far as I know, nobody has yet imagined even the foggiest outline of a new form of news-gathering or news-disseminating system to replace the rotting hulk of the decaying Infotainment News Media. In other words, however badly the New York Times and Washington Post may be doing their job, nobody I'm aware of has even a ghost of an idea what could take their place.

(To be continued, I think.)

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