Grief counselors are in high demand nowadays

Shoe, March 14, 2018:

Think carefully before demanding that the government take up your cause

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"The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears
that instead of regarding government with apprehension,
he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent,

concerned only with protecting him and helping him."

- George Reisman

Human nature being what it is, no government in history has ever been able to live up to the expectations that the current generation of Americans has for our government, and no government is ever likely to.

The government cannot take up your cause without oppressing those who do not embrace that cause.  If you're okay with that, then you are the reason our forebears regarded government with apprehension.  Modern government is full of people like you -- fine with the idea of oppression, as long as the oppressors are your fellow ideological tribespeople.

#RESIST the left's unhinged rhetoric

"Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist

dictator that literally no one fears speaking out

against him on literally any platform."

— Sonny Bunch

You privileged white men are so judgmental!

Image via Meoso

Most people don't really believe in free speech

Here is the Churchill quote in context:

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

On the all-too-common phenomenon of assuming one's ideological foes to be ignorant, immoral, or insane

Aaron Ross Powell has written a mostly-excellent essay on the extreme tribalism (although he doesn't call it that) which underlies the emotions aroused by virtually every contentious issue of the day.  As I opined in a previous post, the positions we take so earnestly are the rational end of a long chain of propositions that go all the way back to the one or more foundational propositions that form the foundation of our worldview (and are usually accepted without question).

Because our conclusions about the issue of the moment are so mindbogglingly obvious to us, we don't see how anybody could come to any other conclusion. If they do, it's a sure sign that they're ignorant, that they know better but are just too morally corrupt to embrace the right view, or that they are genuinely mentally ill.  I don't think I am amiss in assuming that most of us have felt this way about our ideological foes at one time or another, or have been the target of such speculation.

Here's how Powell illustrates the conflict:

Say we believe that Policy A, which we support, will lead to good Result X. We encounter someone who instead advocates for Policy B. Because of our certainty about the evidence and how to interpret it, too many of us too often see that person’s support for Policy B coming not from a good faith and reasoned belief that Policy B is a better way to get to Result X. Because if what we believe is both correct and obvious, then the advocate of Policy B must know that it will undermine the achievement of X. And if X is a good result, then this person doesn’t just disagree with us, but actively wants something bad to happen.

Unfortunately, this all-too-common way of thinking about political debate leads to serious problems, because it means that our empirical beliefs are essentially closed to critique unless that critique comes from someone who already shares our policy preferences. If our interlocutor doesn’t share our policy preferences, then before the conversation can get off the ground, we’ve already decided he is either stupid (he’s too dumb to see his error) or immoral (he maliciously prefers evil outcomes). But, of course, if our empirical priors or interpretive framework are wrong, then someone with better priors will likely come to a different policy conclusion.

Thus individual policy preferences exist as a signal of their holder’s intelligence or moral worth—and a challenge to one’s policy preferences gets interpreted as an attack on the holder’s smarts or basic goodness. Because we believe that certain policy preferences signal moral worth, we adopt our policy preferences based on how we would like to be perceived. And we hold to those policies regardless of their actual, real-world outcomes, or pay so little attention to their outcomes that we never feel the need to revise our political preferences.

If you see nothing wrong with this phenomenon, and your chief goal in any ideological conflict is to vanquish your foes, there's not much left to talk about.  Just carry on doing what you've always done.  The current chaos that is the 2016 presidential campaign is the world you live in and apparently enjoy.

If, on the other hand, you wonder if it's even possible to coexist with people who hold points of view that bug you so much, hoping that it is possible, stick around.  Understanding this ingrained human tendency to organize into tribes is, I believe, the only alternative to putting the maximum distance possible between all human beings.  I also believe that understanding our tribal thinking is the first step to finding a way to knowing how to bring others around to our point of view. 

This is going to be a running theme on this blog as I continue to ponder the riddles of human interaction.  I hope you'll find it worth the read.

Why most online arguments about politics and religion end in a stalemate

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Scenario: Two people are engaged in mortal ideological combat on Facebook.  Each person argues their point passionately, genuinely baffled that what is manifestly obvious to them does not register at all with the other.  Since The Truth™ is so obvious, each combatant starts wondering why their opponent refuses to concede the point, eventually attributing such incorrigibility to bad character or, even worse, to mental illness. 

What is actually going on here?  Why do most skirmishes like these end with nobody persuaded and with bad feelings all around?

I believe this happens because the actual conflict usually does not lie in the topic itself, but in the long chain of presuppositions that lead rationally and inexorably to each person's view on the topic.  Within the closed system of a person's worldview, the point they're arguing makes complete sense to them, flowing logically from the worldview's foundational principles (i.e. the collection of assumptions forming the filter through which reality is interpreted), many or most of which are accepted as givens.

You won't get them to budge on the topic being debated unless either (a) you can convince them that the point they're arguing is inconsistent with the foundational principles of their worldview, or (b) you can somehow erode their confidence in the foundational principles themselves.

Strategy (a) is possible, but only those who embrace the same worldview are likely to see any success.  If someone of an opposing worldview tries this strategy, the natural reaction is to question the aggressor's motives (thus allowing the target to ignore the argument being made).

Even if strategy (b) has any chance of eventual success, the foundational principles aren't even part of the current debate, so forget about that.

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Imagine a worldview as a tree.  The trunk and roots are the foundational principles; the opinion being argued at the moment is more akin to a cluster of leaves at the end of one of the tree's branches.  Everything between the cluster and the trunk is the chain of presuppositions connecting the opinion to the foundational principles.  Even if someone succeeds in damaging or lopping off that cluster, it'll grow back in due time -- nothing really gained or lost.

Facebook is where I'm most likely to encounter people of significantly differing worldviews.  I've developed an instinct for recognizing when, for my potential opponent, an opinion represents a leafy cluster or something closer to the trunk.  If the former, I'm more likely to refrain from joining the fray, because the most likely outcome is bad feelings and nothing else.  If the latter, I might cautiously engage, in the hope that something worthwhile might transpire.

With the leafy-cluster topics, I will occasionally come across a viewpoint that baffles me so much that I step back and ask myself, How could someone possibly hold such an opinion?  Then, over time, through observation and sometimes through tactfully-worded questioning, I will attempt to discern that opinion's chain of presuppositions.  As I analyze the presuppositions, I usually am forced to reanalyze and reaffirm the presuppositions of my own worldview.

While very rare, the process does occasionally lead me to soften or change my opinions (or at least stop thinking of my opponent as insane).  But -- and this is the point -- I came to this conclusion on my own, not as the result of being outmaneuvered in an online argument.

Intellectual diversity is a threat to progressive hegemony, and it shall not be tolerated

Carl Trueman writes in First Things about the fact that modern universities seem designed to prevent vigorous-yet-civil debate about contentious issues.  As the progressive tribe solidifies its hold on western culture, the name of the game is conformity to the progressive ideal.  Not only will dissent not be tolerated; it will be punished in any way possible.

Universities [...] are not supposed to be confessional institutions inculcating a particular creed, nor should they be built on politicized extensions of child-rearing philosophies founded on self-esteem. They should be places where debate is part of the way of life, and where one has to live shoulder to shoulder with those with whom one differs. Yet they have become the very places where this inability to disagree is now apparently cultivated as a positive virtue. The truly educated person is now no longer the person who understands an opposing viewpoint even as he rejects it. For even to understand an alternative viewpoint is to collude in the oppression which such an opinion embodies.

I suspect that the future health of democracy depends upon university administrators worrying less about the dangers posed by whatever is the micro-aggression du jour and more about providing safe places for those who actually want to hold opinions and have debates. Safe places, that is, that are marked by the very risks and danger involved in intellectual engagement.

Trueman's hope (expressed in the second paragraph of the excerpt) is no more than a pipe dream, at least for now.

Facebook has its uses for those who want to be sure of what they believe

Many people decry the prevalence of political/ideological arguments on Facebook, but I've come to appreciate this phenomenon to a certain extent.  In the past, ideologues tended to keep to their own online neighborhoods, and as a result most people spent their days in the company of folks who agreed with them on the Issues That Matter.

Suddenly, Facebook.  Just about everybody has relatives or friends who hail from some faraway part of the ideological spectrum, and many of those folks are pumped up enough about their worldview to post articles and memes about whatever motivates them.  Facebook is facilitating what seems to be an unprecedented mixing of ideological tribes.  As most with FB accounts know well, that mixing is often not a beautiful sight to behold.

For the most part, I've made my peace regarding this phenomenon in my own newsfeed.  Those articles used to annoy me, and I would often launch into heated debates that never ended up moving the ball in either direction.

Gazing across the divide

Now, though, I see a personal growth opportunity in things that used to make my blood boil.  I have a goal of truly understanding the progressive worldview -- not just its most common positions on current issues (those are usually easy to guess), but understanding the foundational assumptions about reality that set the progressive tribe apart from other worldview tribes.

So, I continue to poke and prod my interlocutors, but not necessarily for the purpose of winning the argument.  How can one have a constructive argument when the two parties don't even agree on the definitions of terms that are important to the argument?  No, my poking and prodding is intended to help me understand what makes them tick.  And I truly do want to understand.  Apparently, this is not normal or common, because progressives, even ones I'm related to, tend to react with suspicion when I tell them this.

To me, it's worth the effort.  Not only am I better able to understand why someone believes something so outrageous (to me), I am also given many opportunities to test what I believe on the topic of the moment, and to decide which hills are worth fighting for.

Once I decide I need to jump into a debate, I'm better able to caution myself about my chances for success, given my understanding that my opponent's opinions usually flow rationally from a sea of assumptions that will never never come up in the current debate.