Politics & Culture

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch — and Ideology for Dinner

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On my drive into the Caffeinated Press office this morning, I flipped around the FM dial, searching for nothing in particular. I settled, grudgingly, on the local Michigan Public Radio channel, wherein NPR’s Weekend Edition was already in full swing.

Apart from some brief news about Sen. Bernie Sanders and his trek to South Carolina, the segment I heard featured the host speaking to an academic about the allegations of a rape culture at St. Paul’s, the elite boarding school that has prepared many of America’s top political and financial leaders.

The part of the interview that caused an involuntary, Spock-like eyebrow raise came when the guest asserted something to the effect that all of the stakeholders at St. Paul’s must band together for a “discussion” about ways to stop male upperclassmen from treating “girls like currency” in their competition to “score.”

Golly.

So let’s stipulate two things from the outset. First, that St. Paul’s — a 150-year-old institution that only recently allowed the admission of females — consists of teen-aged students from the upper-upper-crust of American society. And second, that if the stories about the schools are true, the school’s culture permits or even celebrates young males targeting even younger females for sex, yet there’s been only one allegation of rape. And that allegation is disputed.

Two points follow.

The first, and the more minor, point is that there appears to be a curious disconnect between the broad, left-leaning culture that mocks sexual abstinence training — see, for example, John Oliver’s take on sex ed in the U.S. — and the reaction to what happens when teenagers actually do what the sex educators encourage. Because the salient point at St. Paul’s is that even if older male students seek sex with younger female students, there’s been but one allegation of coercion in an environment where the occurrences of such liaisons is probably very high. In other words: The sex-ed folks say: “Do it, safely, and with consent,” and except for a single reported occurrence to the contrary, the kids seem to have followed their education. So what, exactly, is the problem that requires “discussion?”

Perhaps I’m cynical. But we should not be surprised when the left-leaning consensus is that we should train middle-schoolers to enjoy the fun of sex responsibly, that when those middle-schoolers pass the puberty mark, they’ll behave as they’ve been taught. If one student raped another student at St. Paul’s, then prosecute that occurrence. But to probe a deeper cultural problem? It’s not clear what such a problem could be, given that the students of St. Paul’s by and large seem to stick to the syllabus.

The bigger point, I think, is that the desire for a “discussion” about “treating girls like currency” in a male-on-male competition to “score” speaks to something quite unrelated to the current sexual mores of the students at St. Paul’s. Granted that in today’s ideological climate, any allegation of rape will find a chorus of professionals claiming a deep-seated cultural problem — hey, sociologists gotta pay the bills, too, even if every problem they see is a nail and the only tool they own is a hammer. Put that knee-jerk reaction aside long enough to reflect on just how curious it is that people assume that with the right degree of consciousness raising, we can consistently rise above hormones and instinct to be a New Soviet Man better person.

Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for lunch. What he meant was that the collection of habits and pre-rational behaviors that directly affect how people interrelate will always undercut an agreed-upon strategy that doesn’t square with that culture. For example, Microsoft’s strategy of unifying its software under one common codebase was, for a long time, hampered by an organizational culture that tied employee compensation to different internal business units sabotaging the success of other business units to improve their own relative metrics. When that sort of adversarial culture thrives, you have roughly zero chance of achieving a strategy that conflicts with it.

Let’s introduce the Gillikin Corollary: Culture eats ideology for dinner. In other words,  the highfalutin maxims of both the Far Left and the Far Right so often fail in the real world, because the real world is a messier place with a culture much more firmly rooted in the principles of evolutionary biology. The Gillikin Corollary is why both liberals and conservatives are mistaken in their pronouncements on sex ed: The conservatives are wrong because an abstinence-only training program (or worse, a “let’s pretend parents will teach their kids about sex” get-out-of-jail-free card) conflicts with teenage hormones. The liberals are wrong because on balance human males are sexually aggressive and human females are sexually receptive, so training everyone to be a metrosexual contractarian is doomed to failure. We’ve been wired over thousands of generations of pre-history that sexual dominance meant reproductive success and that human social frameworks were optimized for relatively small tribal groups. (See, e.g., the writings of E.O. Wilson.)

To quote Barack Obama: “Now, let me be clear.” I condone neither rape nor cultural norms that subtly compel people to engage in sexual behaviors they might have avoided but for engagement with that culture. If the student accused of rape at St. Paul’s is found guilty of rape, he should be punished.

Yet I cannot help but shake my head in amazement as the folks at NPR look at the story out of St. Paul’s and bemoan the fact that young males at an elite school engage in allegedly predatory sexual practices. Do all the left-wing sociologists and anthropologists out there really think that what they need is the right mandatory consciousness-raising program and that with it, a quarter-million years of evolution will therefore dissipate into a warm and loving enlightment completely untethered to hormones and pre-rational instinct? That a half-day seminar about “no means no” will perfectly empower testosterone-driven, highly competitive teenage males to default to asking, “May I unbutton your shirt now? May I kiss you? If your BAC is above 0.05, can we wait until we both can provide informed consent? Are you OK if we always use condoms until marriage?”

Riiiight.

The culture of an elite school serving elite families revolves around succeeding in a socially competitive world. That’s the culture. And a strategy of sexual egalitarianism will never thrive as long as that culture — and its supporting cast of hormones and instinctive behaviors — continues to imperfectly align with it.

I suspect there are ways to more effectively frame sexual education for both males and females — but those methods must be rooted in the human condition as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.

So for me, the most fascinating part of the whole St. Paul’s story isn’t the “Senior Salute” or the rape allegation; rather, it’s the putatively earnest belief that something like the “Senior Salute” could have been avoided with the right combination of training, seminars and consciousness-raising events. It’s pretty obvious that left-wing nostrums about hyperinformed and explicit consent are just as untenable as right-wing nostrums about virginity until marriage — and they’re both off-base for exactly the same reason.

Culture eats ideology for dinner.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Epochs, Ideology and the Things That Matter

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A liberal looks at the country and, in his eagerness to immanentize the eschaton, rejects well-functioning tradition for want of some high-theoretic World State. A conservative looks at the country and, in his eagerness to restore long-abandoned traditions, rejects much scientific and cultural progress for want of Duck Dynasty. Yet a healthy body politic needs both visions; liberals and conservatives are merely opposite lobes of Uncle Sam’s lungs, diseased though each may be in its own special way. Lose one to cancer, you lose a lot.
Lose both, though, and you lose everything. The Zombie Apocalypse test is apropos: What really matters after catastrophe strikes? Think of an event like Hurricane Katrina, when public order in southern Louisiana was shaky for several weeks and ordinary survival became a genuine ordeal. In such a climate, does anyone really care about “trigger warnings” or carbon footprints or into which cathole the transgendered person gets to pee? Almost all of the current causes célèbres of the Left are what kids these days call #FirstWorldProblems. The issues that progressives adore are so irrelevant to life on the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy that it’s a wonder so many people invest so much time into advocating for so little substance.
Yet in that Katrina situation, the Right isn’t appreciably better. The preppers hide in their bunkers while the guys with guns take stuff from the guys with yoga mats. If public order is a long way off, you’re much more likely to end up with a descent into strongman-led tribalism, with a pecking order directly related to what you can contribute to the group in terms of rare skills or biceps size.
And therein lies the rub. Neither conservatives nor liberals currently articulate a comprehensive worldview that successfully encapsulates the value of ancient knowledge and antique skills, with a respect for the sundry joys of High Culture and a sophistication for harmonizing new insights with old wisdom. Today, we can afford to obsess about Facebook offering dozens of gender options. Tomorrow, when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, those same people who eagerly set their Facebook genders to “Cis Woman” or “Transmasculine” are unlikely to survive a week without dying of dehydration, injury or human-caused trauma. Today, we can afford to let conservatives be the voice of anti-elite sentiment. Tomorrow, when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, those same people who disdain higher education will be the first to chuck the last copy of War and Peace on the fire when the menfolk return with a fresh kill of some endangered species.
We might get lucky; we might get a world that looks like Falling Skies, with a healthy balance between warrior and academic leading the group. But we might end up with Lord of the Flies, instead. It scares me that I can’t tell which scenario is more probable.
We could, perhaps, console ourselves with the belief that the Zombie Apocalypse — a term of art, of course, for any great civilizational catastrophe — won’t occur. But such consolation is empty given the sprawling narrative of human history. The May edition of the estimable First Things included, as a feature article, “The Great War Revisited” by George Weigel.  It is a masterclass narrative in a magazine that, itself, sets the high bar of literary merit.
Weigel recounts the willful blindness of world leaders in 1914. No one could quite believe that the stability of the Westphalian system could collapse so quickly and so completely in so little time, so they acted as if it couldn’t.
Consider. On January 1, 1910, Tsar Nicholas II ruled an ancient, vast, autocratic Russian empire. Kaiser Wilhelm ruled a powerful, prosperous Germany freshly ambitious after Bismarck’s consolidations a generation before. Emperor Franz Joseph ruled the elegant if creaky Austria-Hungary — since 1848, no less. The Ottomans were in control, albeit tenuously, in Istanbul and had been for more than half a millennium. The Qing Dynasty ruled a decrepit China through a monarchy with roots two millennia old. America was quiet and disinterested in foreign affairs, with William Howard Taft presiding over a prosperous, growing but inward-looking country.
On January 1, 1925 — a mere 15 years later — the Romanovs were decomposing in a shallow grave while the Soviet Union crushed internal dissidents on Stalin’s orders. Germany was a shambles, the harsh Peace of Versailles spreading misery among Germans of every stripe and depriving governments before Hitler of any real, legitimate power … thus sowing the seeds of the next major war. Austria and Hungary were cleaved apart and the last Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed VI, had been deposed while Ataturk began his secularizing work (potentially sparking the tinder of later Islamofascism, to boot). The KMT was consolidating control in a democratic China while Japanese forces still stung by the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 had correctly gauged the exhaustion of the West and plotted accordingly. The United States, after Woodrow Wilson’s collectivist war policies and internationalist exhortations, was enjoying the Roaring Twenties under Calvin Coolidge. And families across the world were still coping with the devastation wrought by the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
All the things that looked so permanent in 1910 had been laid waste over five years of war and a decade of ill-managed peace. An entire generation had bled to death for naught on the fields of Europe, and others — India, Japan, China — took notice. The suicide of the West took some time, but each slice of the wrist was unmistakable —

  • The sinking of the Titanic (1912) — we began to doubt scientific progress
  • The Guns of August (1914) — we went to war because we couldn’t find a reason not to
  • The battles of Somme and Verdun and Passchendaele (1916-1917) — we killed millions knowing it was futile
  • European acquiescence to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia (1938) — we looked away from evil
  • The Yalta Conference (1945) — we let Stalin get his spoils without a fight, condemning millions
  • The Counterculture (ca. 1968) — we stopped being serious about shared culture
  • The War on Terror (ca. 2001) — we over-reacted to a minor threat, then under-reacted to major threats

Imagine being a normal person born on January 1, 1890. You saw the entire world change before you greeted your first grandchild. You were born into a world without widespread automobiles, powered flight or amenities like indoor plumbing or electricity; as a child, you likely heard stories from your parents of the Civil War, the taming of the American Frontier and the era of tall ships. You lived through the Great War and World War II and the Cold War. If you lived to the ripe old age of 80, you died after seeing a man walk on the surface of the moon.
Think about that.
History is replete with moments in time where everything changed within a generation and old truths and new ideas fought bitterly for supremacy. The Great War was such an inflection point. So was the political upheaval of 1848. So were the Napoleonic Wars a generation earlier and the French Revolution that lit their fuse. So was the Reformation, starting with the 95 Theses posted in 1517 and persisting through centuries of wars of religion in Europe. So was the discovery of the New World in 1492. So were the Crusades. So were the crowning of Charlemagne, the Mongol invasions, the collapse of Rome and Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
So why do we persist in thinking that such an earth-shattering event can never again occur? Why must we be so un-serious about the future that we can relish small-potatoes political idiocy as the world smolders while waiting for the tinder for the next world-historical dislocation?
Today’s domestic politics isn’t up to the task. Neither the Right nor the Left can articulate a coherent vision for what the world ought to look like next week, let alone a century hence.
Some of today’s more enlightened pundits — I’m thinking especially of George F. Will and Peggy Noonan — correctly note that the race for 2016 is hamstrung by both the Republicans and the Democrats lacking a consistent and comprehensive message about what they want for America. Debates currently focus on irrelevant personalities (Bill Clinton, the Koch Brothers) or on issues that aren’t really significant in the grand scale of things (marijuana legalization, the minimum wage). We’re back to small-ball politics.
But while politics is about legislative agendas, ideology is about the big picture. And on that front, all the main ideological voices in America lack a conceptual coherence that applies with equal validity and rigor to life on a college campus as well as life in a post-apocalyptic village. Ideology requires a conception of the human condition that applies regardless of any individual human’s specific condition. It requires a nuanced teleology. Ideology shapes politics, so with ideologies in disarray, it’s no surprise the our politics follows suit.
Progressive ideology spends so much time on harmonizing complex identity relationships that the framework it’s built upon cannot endure in adverse material conditions — what works in faculty lounges at Berkeley won’t work in a rural farming community in Nebraska, and certainly won’t work in a long-term survival situation. It fails the test of universal relevance. Conservative ideology lacks coherence on the big questions of life and human relationships; half of engaged conservatives appear quite willing to live within Leave It to Beaver and eschew politics entirely while the other half can’t figure out if it’s for or against the NSA, for or against starting council meetings with an invocation to Jesus, for or against vaccines. The libertarians fail to concede that humans are social animals, and that eusociality imperfectly squares with contractarian principles, so they seem like the rump at a linguistics conference that really, really wants you to believe that Esperanto is a logically superior alternative if only people would abandon their native tongues and give it a chance.
(Sneaky thought: You know who actually nails the big picture effectively? Catholics and Jews, and non-radicalized Muslims.)
I want conservatives, in particular, to advance a coherent framework that tells me what kind of America we aspire to in the year 2114. Don’t recite policy — recite the principles that policy will be shaped by. That framework will give a compelling, universal why as well as a specific answer to the tough questions we prefer to elide:

  • If human life is precious, will we abolish the death penalty when we abolish abortion?
  • Which is better: A well-reared child attached to two same-sex parents, or a poorly reared child of two opposite-sex parents?
  • Under what circumstances will we invade a sovereign state? To acquire resources? To avert genocide? Never?
  • Can we force children to get mandatory vaccination against parental consent, for diseases that could devastate large populations?
  • Does human destiny reside in the United States, across the globe or among the stars?
  • What should be in the public square, versus entirely private, versus private but subject to government monitoring?
  • To what degree should individual risk be socialized?
  • What is the purpose of a well-lived life?
  • Is society stronger with a Judeo-Christian worldview, with a secular worldview or with a Greco-Roman ambivalence about religion?
  • To what degree should a person be required know how to change a tire, raise a garden or build a fire in the backcountry?
  • What is the point at which we agree that gulf between “have” and “have not” is too wide to tolerate?
  • How do we balance libertarian autonomy with the stabilizing power of society’s little platoons, without rendering either useless?
  • At what point does market inequality amount to de facto duress for the economically disadvantaged?
  • What is the proper response to a person who is biologically female but professes to be male in gender?
  • To what degree are people free to make choices that may not redound to their long-term advantage (smoking pot, eating too many cheeseburgers, avoiding dental exams, driving without a seatbelt, etc.)?

We can hope that the Zombie Apocalypse never comes, despite history’s ample lessons. But while we maintain this foolish hope, will we think prudently about what kind of life ought to persist between our cyclical catastrophes, or will we duck our heads in the sand and continue pretend that today’s hot-button social issues really do have meaning?

Religion

The Nature of Faith

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Last Sunday, we had a closing four-hour retreat for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Robert of Newminster. The session was pleasant and the people at that parish are really quite delightful. The experience, at the time when Palm Sunday opens Holy Week, reinforced for me a concept I don’t take seriously enough — that is, the role of religiosity in the lives of ordinary people.
The social scientists tell us that formal religious profession is on the wane. Only one in five Americans visits a place of worship in any given week. Although three-quarters of us confess Christianity, demographers project that Christianity will be a minority faith tradition by 2030 given that one-third of people under age 30 claim no religious affiliation whatsoever.
Yet the religious impulse, as a human phenomenon, is quite different from religious practice. For the unchurched or the atheistic, their religious impulses tend to find expression in other pursuits — sexual licentiousness, radical environmentalism, unfocused spiritualism, unfettered egoism, etc.
Look at the pseudo-messianic undertones of the climate-change True Believers. Some of them suggest that people who disagree with their interpretation of climate models aren’t just mistaken — they’re morally defective and ought to be silenced — or even put in jail. Look, too, at the furor over the departure of newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Some representative supporters of same-sex marriage have argued, loudly, that one man’s private donation six years ago is a public matter because he’s a public face of a company. Think what you will about climate change and same-sex marriage: The zeal to persecute non-believers is a religious impulse that goes beyond mere disagreement about facts, theories or policies.
The phenomenon is simple, really. Human nature is what it is, and that nature prompts us to seek to belong to a tribe. The evolutionary biology and developmental psychology of humankind is fairly well understood on the matter, thanks to pioneering work by researchers like Jared Diamond. Our tribes both fuel and channel our passions and inspire emotional bonds that transcend abstract, dispassionate reason.
Tribes are funny things. In simplest form, they’re society’s little platoons, the places where we discern meaning and level-set sociocultural expectations and find refuge in a like-minded community. In years past, tribes in the United States looked like ethnic bars, churches, fraternal clubs and neighborhood associations. Yet these mediating institutions, across the board, are failing. Gentrification is leading to the erosion ethnic identity for most white Americans; church attendance is on the wane; fraternal organizations are a shell of their former glory; neighborhood civic groups have been superseded by online communities.
So how do we find our tribe? How do we belong? We do it the same way we always have — we find people who “look like us” and share our worldview. Except now, we’re not finding communal solace in religion or civic virtue but rather in political and public-policy forums, and our potential fellow travelers don’t need to hail from our neighborhood but rather can come from anywhere there’s broadband access. Hence the polarization of the electorate: We’re sorting ideologically across party lines because we have fewer purely local social ties to bind us.
Religiosity, when channeled through institutions that have had millennia to develop, is mostly benign. Religiosity, divorced of anchor institutions and self-directed through political channels, is harder to manage. Harder to mediate. Without a diversity of those “little platoons” to provide a broad-based context, we fall into the solipsism of a single-issue messiah. Political activism sourced from a wholly self-contained belief system cannot be reasoned with; it can only be confronted or accommodated.
Hebrews 11:1 reminds us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith compels us; even people who profess atheism nevertheless need faith in something. It’s hard-wired into us as humans. As the rich tapestry of competing loyalties — a diversity that helped to check the excesses of any single constituent part — fades for many of our fellow citizens into a single-issue monochromatic print, our faith loses its grounding.
Some may argue that religious conservatives are ignorant. Or superstitious. Some probably are. But their faith in something bigger than themselves offers their religiosity a more humble, more humane path. Those whose faith hails from their own privileged beliefs, answerable to no higher authority than their own egos, have a tougher struggle to maintain a similar humble, humane demeanor. And, in this poisoned climate, it shows.
As a Catholic, then, I must confess: I have not really appreciated the gift of faith until I finally understood people whose faith is little more than a megaphone for their own psyches.

Politics & Culture

On Libertarians and Ron Paul

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By popular demand (i.e., Abbi), I present a brief synopsis of why some people like Ron Paul.

A few points:

  • The most basic ascription of a libertarian is someone who believes in maximal individual liberty and minimal state intervention. Libertarians are in favor of things like gay marriage and drug decriminalization, on the theory that a consenting adult shouldn’t be prohibited from engaging in an action that doesn’t infringe upon the life, liberty or property of another. State regulation is limited to basic infrastructure — including a predictable property-rights regime — intended to provide individuals a defense against force or fraud by others. Libertarians tend to be non-interventionists in international affairs and favor user fees instead of taxes for public goods. They’re also often more trusting of the free-market system despite occasionally demonstrating cynicism about very large corporations and multinationals.
  • Libertarians often (but not always) align with Republicans on many issues, because many Republicans tend to favor smaller government and lower taxation. However, this association strained during the George W. Bush years; libertarians did not support intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor did they smile upon the “compassionate conservative” agenda that included Medicare Part D and democracy-building across the world.
  • The above notwithstanding, there’s really no such thing as a “typical libertarian” any more than there’s a typical conservative or liberal. Adherents of libertarian thought argue robustly among themselves about various aspects of their ideology, perhaps even more so than denizens of other main ideologies.
  • Some libertarians — again, like some liberals and conservatives — have their hobbyhorses. Ron Paul, for example, doesn’t much care for the Federal Reserve System and America’s current monetary policy. Paul doesn’t much care for “fiat money” — that is, money issued solely on the credit of the issuing government — and favors a return to a gold-backed dollar. The dollar was actually backed by gold until as recently as 1971, when President Nixon unilaterally terminated the convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold.
  • Ron Paul is, by all accounts, a highly intelligent man. He’s also not much of a team player; House leadership could rarely count on him to vote against his principles for the sake of a party goal. Some characterize him as a crank. Others think he’s a modern-day Cato.
  • Many young people who favor conservative economic policy but remain uncomfortable with the quasi-evangelical social policy of today’s GOP aligned with Ron Paul.

Questions? Bueller? Bueller?

Politics & Culture

Zero Political Shades of Gray

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The meta-debate about same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court prompted a side conversation with a friend that highlighted my frustration with people whose opinions on any given subject constitute little more than a rationalization of the inverse argument offered by an ideological opponent.

Conservatives don’t care much for progressives. Progressives don’t care much for conservatives. Yet too many people from each camp content themselves to find an explanation — any explanation, no matter how flimsy — to justify their oppositional defiance to a caricature of the position of the other side.

Put differently: Not only do we lack 50 shades of political gray, we lack any shades of gray. Positions distill to paired binaries; you’re pro or con without any hope of a middle ground or an alternative position. Deviate from the black-and-white model, and you’re either a traitor to the cause or a wacko kook outside the mainstream.

Almost every political question being tossed about in the mainstream press — entitlement reform, gun control, abortion, same-sex marriage, defense spending — distills into a straw man. Policy issues with several distinct facets are ground into a single surface that reflects back a mere bumper-sticker slogan.

Consider just two questions: Same-sex marriage and gun control. On SSM, you’re either for “marriage equality” or for “traditional marriage.” Very little serious attention is paid to the best, ideologically hybrid solutions, like splitting religious and civil marriage or treating marriage like a personal contract like any other. On gun control, you’re either in favor or against tougher laws; not many have bothered to adjust their solution set in light of a copious stream of data that suggests that some regulations are useful and others aren’t.

America’s problems have solutions. Social discord has an exit strategy. But as long as we insist on treating every policy question like a zero-sum game with only one valid answer per ideology, we all lose.

Politics & Culture

Knock It Off: An Open Letter to @RepJustinAmash

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Dear Congressman Amash:

Greetings from one of your constituents, a long-time resident of Kent County, Michigan.

I’ll be blunt. Congressman, we need to talk. I think you need an intervention.

When Rep. Ehlers retired at the end of the 111th Congress, the people of the Third District faced a three-way contest for the Republican nomination.  In that race, I supported Bill Hardiman, an experienced leader with a good read on the pulse of our community. Alas, Hardiman and Steve Heacock — another respectable candidate — split the grown-up vote, letting you squeak by on the vapors of the Ron Paul Revolution and the advocacy of fired-up youth who thought Facebooking votes is a sign of virtue.

You are from West Michigan. You know as well as I do that the people here — the actual voters, not the Country Club Republicans here who pull the strings — are a sensible lot. We don’t like unnecessary and counterproductive conflict or obviously self-aggrandizing behavior. We favor quiet competence over flashy showmanship, which is why we have a long track record of electing men like Vern Ehlers, Paul Henry, Hal Sawyer and Gerald Ford to the House of Representatives. That’s why giants of the Senate like Arthur Vandenberg hailed from Grand Rapids, too. We favor substance over symbolism. We like our leaders to matter, and we reward them with re-election when they do.

During your first term, your whole communication apparatus seemed to consist solely of Facebook and Twitter. You’ve been the black sheep of the 112th Congress, bucking leaders so often on so many issues that people stopped trying to persuade you about anything. No one heard much about you, except for odd commentary about you being the lone Republican dissenter on bills — with your dissent rooted in distinctly Libertarian interpretations of the Constitution that differ in important ways from the ideals of mainstream contemporary conservatism.

(Seriously? Voting “present” on defunding Planned Parenthood or NPR because the operative legislation might be a bill of attainder? And then apparently believing that out of all the members of the House, you alone have the penetrating insight into the Constitution to see a bill of attainder for what it is? Chutzpah!)

It wasn’t until you got the boot from Budget that people really started to notice you. And we noticed because you decided to break your radio silence with a series of blistering, ill-formed attacks on the House GOP leadership.

Word on the street among your real-life constituents (as opposed to your make-believe constituents at Reason): You’ve embarrassed us. Your reaction to being removed from Budget has all the hallmarks of a temper tantrum, complete with idle threats against the Speaker and infantile protests that you’re the only one out there who’s actually a conservative — that the rest are spineless Beltway types who’ve failed the Reagan Revolution.

As John Stossel would say: Give. Me. A. Break. A real leader wouldn’t conspire over an ill-fated coup against the sitting Speaker; a real leader would have met privately with the Speaker to smooth things out in private, without affecting an air of entitlement about something as inconsequential in the long run as a committee seat. In fact, this whole Budget kerfuffle should never have happened — first, because you shouldn’t have treated the party that elected you as if it were some sort of annoyance to be dismissed at will; and second, because when you finally felt the consequences of your behavior, the right response was to seek redress of your grievances in private.

What do you expect when you’re an unreliable member of the caucus who snipes from afar? Do you think you’ll be coddled and empowered? Did you really expect Speaker Boehner or Leader Cantor or Chairman Ryan to say, “Hey Justin, thanks for being a great Monday-morning quarterback whom we can’t count on when the chips are down; how’d you like a raise and promotion?” Politics is, and always has been, about the art of balancing the possible against the ideal. Open revolt and unreliable allies make it harder to tip the scale closer to that ideal, so effective leaders will minimize this disruption for the benefit of the greater good at the expense of the black sheep.

With Barack Obama in the White House and Harry Reid calling the shots in the Senate, the power of the House of Representatives is circumscribed by reality. Yes, the House GOP should fight for the best deal possible on every issue of public policy that comes up for debate. But the best deal possible in this climate isn’t going to be the most ideologically pure solution. That’s just reality. We can lament it all we like — and boy, do I lament it! — but we cannot escape it. To think that the House alone can force fiscal sanity upon the nation by simply digging in deep enough is, I believe, delusional. You know: Baby, bathwater.

Worse, our focus as a party and as the conservative movement is substantially harmed by the infighting that arises from battles to prove who’s purest. We need to fight Obama and Reid and Pelosi, not each other.

Congressman, on a purely personal level I don’t much care if you oppose the House leadership. I don’t care if you write 10,000-word essays on Facebook about your votes. Just as I am not a fan of childish dissent, I’m also not a fan of lock-step conformism, and I believe that Libertarians have just as much right to seek to influence public policy as conservatives and liberals. I’m not asking you to change your beliefs or to stop articulating your personal perspective — I am, however, asking you to change your behavior and your voting pattern. I’m asking you to recognize that you represent the people of the Third District — a people who aren’t doctrinaire liberarians — and to behave in a manner that seeks our best interests and reflects our innate dispositions. We didn’t elect you to be Ron Paul’s designated heir.

Please don’t act as if you’re some sort of martyr being silenced by a corrupt establishment. You’re not, and protests to the contrary reflect poorly on we hard-working folks in West Michigan who yearn for leadership instead of drama. Actions have consequences, and the consequence of abandoning your party and your leadership is that you’re not going to be granted access to the levers of power. Them’s the rubs. Deal with it and quit the public whining and sniping. Please.

One more thing. With the 2010 redistricting, your constituency has changed. Not many local politics watchers are confident that the Second Coming of Ron Paul will be able to hold this re-formed district in the long haul. You were damned lucky that the local Dems had a bloody enough primary season that Steve Pestka was mortally wounded before the fight began. Next time, you might not be so lucky; already, locals are showing their decided lack of amusement in your antics. I’ve even heard whispers of a primary challenge in 2014.

There’s a battle afoot, in Kent County as well as other communities across America. Sometimes the struggle is pitched as “Tea Party versus Establishment,” but this characterization isn’t quite right. It’s more like a struggle between the pragmatists and idealists. The idealists have made inroads recently, but the pragmatists are fighting back.

Congressman Amash, I implore you: Stop being a source of distraction and an agent of fragmentation. Given the choice, the people of the Third District would rather see you be a loyal Republican over a dogmatic Libertarian. We want news about you to be positive — that you’ve written a great bill or brokered a valuable deal. We grow weary of headlines about you launching coup attempts and declining to support conservative causes over pet Constitutional theories that only you seem to find.

We want a Member of Congress who fights for us. For all of us. You have the potential to get there — but will you be a leader or a bomb-thrower? I’m praying for the former.

Regards and best wishes,

P.S. — If Speaker Boehner ever does decide to visit Grand Rapids, he’ll have a warm welcome by a whole lot of us, even if you decide to sit at home and play on Facebook.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

No Comments

A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.
As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.
As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.
One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.
Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.
More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.
The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.
Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.
People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.
One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.
But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)
Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.
When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.
Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.
The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”
We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.
Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.
More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.
Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.
[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

No Comments

A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.

As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.

As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.

One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.

Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.

More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.

The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.

Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.

People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.

One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.

But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)

Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.

When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.

Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.

The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”

We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.

Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.

More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.

Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.

[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reflections on a Friend’s Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

No Comments

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.

A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.

But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.

In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)

Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.

Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.

So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.

The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reflections on a Friend's Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

No Comments

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.
A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.
But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.
In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)
Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.
Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.
So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.
The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.