People who believe that they are morally superior vs. those of us who will not acknowledge our moral inferiority.
Yes, some of the things I have been reading lately have put me in a sarcastic mood.
26 thoughts on “Another way to describe the contemporary divide”
That is unusually discerning.
Thank You
Not just discerning but terse, nearly aphoristic. There is an aphorism in there, just needs condensing to bring it out in its laconic splendor
Let me help.
I’m rubber and you’re glue…
There are militant and self-righteous jerks for anything, but some areas of life can still operate in a “live and let live” kind of moral pluralism / polycentric particularism. I know a few vegetarians who just decide to make a moral decision for themselves, and who don’t hold it against any meat eaters, and in fact aren’t really interested in getting into it. Same goes for people who don’t drink for moral or religious reasons, but without holding it against drinkers and won’t get all emotional about it and use it as a basis to exclude potential relationships.
Of course, these things are not organizational focal points around which political coalitions can currently be built, and so the subconscious mechanisms that moralize those other choices and preferences and raise their perceived level of social and political imperative, are at rest in these instances.
We are in desperate need of new institutions to prevent moralistic runaways.
There is a lot to be said in favor of sarcasm, it sets the reductio absurdum boundary.
Seems like it remains true that there are only three kinds of people in the world: those who believe in the concept of moral superiority, and everyone else.
Does anyone not believe in moral superiority? Regular people acknowledge that honesty, kindness, and work ethic are moral positives, and lying, cheating, and stealing are negatives.
The trouble is that all of those things can be taken to crazy and terrible extremes. It’s a matter of optimization and balance vs. maximization.
Any moral or ideological principle, being non-material and non-empirical by nature, when raised to the point of an isolated axiom, abides no other logically limiting principle. No matter how far any society has gone in the direction of trying to politically implement the principle to the utmost, it is always possible to give up other ordinary wants or values to go even further, that is, “promoting the supererogatory to the mandatory.”
The fundamental problem is that social status is scarce and zero-sum, and “more perfect” consistency with the socially-desirable principle is an avenue to raise one’s status when one has no better (or more efficient) outlets for doing so. By this mechanism, if a society doesn’t strictly control open advocacy and other forms of conspicuous virtue signalling leading in that direction, then it results in a kind of positive-feedback “moral runaway reaction” and an ever-escalating rat-race of competitive sanctimony and ideological singularity.
This process can happen in a few mere years, or it can take centuries to unfold (especially with older communications technologies), and the Anglosphere had several advantages in possessing a lucky combination of institutions experienced in dealing with manifestations of this problem, and tending towards decentralization, limitations on political authority, and precedent-preservation, all of which helped to slow it all down, like a governor mechanism capping the speed on an engine or an autopilot reacting and stepping on the brakes when things start to get out of control.
That allowed for a long, “honeymoon” period of rough compatibility between enlightenment-era liberalizing norms and reforms (and the support for those norms among the people who mattered), and the mostly smooth running of a high-functioning civilization. The rest of the world, however, not being gifted with similar stumbling blocks, was not so lucky, leading in no small part to the multiple monstrous catastrophes of the 20th century.
Alas, the honeymoon now appears to be over, partially due to technological change enabling and favoring centralization, but also the gradual co-option, neutralization, or elimination of those stumbling blocks, and other traditional checks and balances.
I’d have said “People who believe they are morally superior vs people who believe they are morally superior using different moral criteria”.
I think Arnold’s characterization is more apt. There is a definite asymmetry. What label is more likely to affect your life, being called:
– racist or unpatriotic?
– sexist or sexually loose?
– bigot or blasphemous?
– nazi or communist?
I would argue the labels on the left carry far greater social consequences (if they stick). There are sanctimonious people of all different political stripes, but one cohort has been singularly effective at persuading people and institutions to submit to their standards. That group is the “social justice” left.
There is also an asymmetry of attitude. Some of the biggest resistance to the social justice left isn’t coming from the right, it’s coming from those on the left who feel they’ve been ejected by the social justice left for insufficient piety.
I live in the American South, so judgemental conservatives are not a rarity for me. YMMV
Live in coal country and this is absolutely true. Go back home to visit family in the Midwest and it is absolutely true, and not just for conservatives. There are plenty of libertarians who are unbearably smug about their own perceived moral and intellectual superiority.
I think the difference is that conservatives (less so libertarians) have decided to become victims and whine about behaviors that all sides have engaged in since politics was first invented.
Steve
There is a difference between having an opinion and forcing that opinion on someone. I can’t think of meaningful realities of conservatives in the Midwest or anywhere else forcing their views on anyone. The left is all about force (defined more broadly to include being made unemployable in college grad corporate America, or being unable to run any kind of business that doesn’t to the line).
What exactly happens to someone that calls for he genocide of white people? They get jobs at the NYTimes.
how about those who are neither
Wouldn’t that just be those who do accept their moral inferiority?
Ah! A true seeker of enlightenment! Excellent!
Would that category not also include those who recognize that morality is a human mental construct subject to the same limitations and potential flaws as all other human constructs?
Or has the strength of our belief in eudaimonia caused us to neglect the possibility that we may simply be engaging in hubris?
I am willing to accept that I am morally inferior, I just reflexively get my back up every time I sense my family and friends from back in the midwest being dissed by people who have no clue.
Perhaps this group is just overexposed to college campuses, where a perception of asymmetry could be easily forgiven.
Liberals have had this same whiny sense of grievance for longer, and it has always detracted from their political effectiveness.
Conservatism used to be about dealing with the world as it is, not as it wants it to be. It used to have some basic emotional toughness. Its really sad to watch this infect it down to the core too.
It’s it just college campuses. It’s most corporations. It’s most schools your young children attend. It’s most papers you read, media you consume, even totally unrelated matters get an infusion of progresssivism.
This isn’t the early 90s where PC is a few whiny studies majors on campus everyone ignores and Micheal Jordan said that republicans buy sneakers too. It’s different now.
You are confusing issues. An “infusion of progressivism” is not the same thing as a claim that taken as a whole, progressivism is considerably more intolerant of discourse than social conservatism is.
We are all well aware that progressivism and a particular strain of social conservatism have separated like oil and water. Wherever you are, you are more likely to experience less of a mixture than before. But there are two large minorities that have concentrated feelings in one direction or the other. Arguing only one exists, or that only one is unreasonable seems to me to be confirmation bias, and little more. The conservative side isn’t being led by gentlemanly country club Republicans like Romney. You just can’t seriously claim to be the more civil side of the debate when Trump is your flag bearer.
Yes, social conservatives can hold unreasonable views (as anyone can) – but what power do they have in 2018? Is anyone getting fired, denied acceptance at university, being put of business, or being sued for expressing leftwing views? I doubt it.
As for complaints by particular conservatives who have been victimized by the Left’s vindictiveness and demands for conformity – of what relevance to these complaints is Trump’s incivility? Do Trump and his more boorish supporters somehow make it legitimate for the Left to declare open-season on anyone who disagrees with them (not that they had not done that before)?
BTW, when the conservative side was led by a “gentlemanly country club Republican like Romney,” your side accused Romney of waging a “war on women” and Biden told a black audience that the Republicans wanted “to put y’all back in chains.” Such are the wages of civility for conservatives.
Accusations of ‘whining’ present an interesting and revealing case. If we had a single, neutral standard, universally applied, that would be one thing. But it’s pretty clear that this is yet another manifestation of corrupting identity politics.
That is, it’s socially ok to dismiss some people’s legitimate complaints as exaggerated and petty, even when they involve significant practical consequences like ability to have forthright intellectual discussions or get or maintain a job, but it’s practically taboo to question complaints coming from members of other identity groups, even when it’s all about some inscrutable emotional matter like a claim of offense (or event the micro-offense from a micro-aggression) or humiliation. If complaining about a thing someone voluntarily calls a ‘micro-aggression’ doesn’t automatically self-define as ‘whining’, then what does? But the kind of people who complain about ‘whining’ from conservatives, or whites, or males, never seen to demonstrate consistency and criticize all microaggression talk as also being mere, unworthy ‘whining’.
A recent egregious example would be that when Ta-Nahesi Coates says that when some brash New Yorker in a rush (a totally rare specimen of humanity) yells “come on!” at his young dawdling child blocking an escalator or something, no one who matters accuses him of ‘whining’ about a completely minor and trivial matter, blowing it up all out of proportion, or being hypersensitive, or having a chip on his shoulder, or being a racism-seeking hammer interpreting every little thing as a nail, or tries to correct his paranoid overreaction. Instead they all go along with the frame of it being a clear racist outrage about which “something must be done.”
Either everybody gets to complain and have their similar complaints taken with equal seriousness, or nobody does. Or we’re asking for trouble.
I would totally concur that there is lots of whining on both sides. That’s my argument here. Each side has valid points. Its rather a matter of what weight we give to our grievances that determines affiliation.
For example, I’m sure even blatant racists would agree that African Americans are viewed more suspiciously by police than white people are. They just choose to give more weight to other perceptions.
Everybody should get to complain all they want. I part company with you where you want similar complaints taken with equal seriousness. I’m sure you must be able to see how impossible and problematic that would be.
Believe me, Ta-Nahesi Coates gets a mountain of pushback for his views too. He’s probably heard your complaint of paranoid overreaction many thousands of times. Thats the nature of public debate.
When I was a recent Stanford grad making good money in Silicon Valley (Sili Valli?), I had a girlfriend and we both strove, explicitly, for “moral superiority”. I as a Libertarian (candidate for Congress, ’88) even, she as a vegetarian “cruelty-free” lifestyle. Now I think that was a mistake.
I think lots of PC is an unspoken search for moral superiority. Most normal US folk are more Christian — we are ALL sinners. Normal folk are NOT morally inferior to the elites, nor to the elite wannabees.
The lies and failures of the elites, plus their own immorality, should make them ashamed of themselves. Instead, they’re ashamed of America, and of most everybody else.
Why was striving for “moral superiority” a mistake?
Striving to be moral, to do the right thing, to contribute to society more than one takes, all seem good principles to adhere to. Libertarianism does espouse moral political rules, which is good. What am I missing?
With regards to Kling’s previous post on Yoram Hazony and subsequent post on Claire Lehmann, this attitude is apparent.
On the nationalism/immigration issue, the open border crowd absolutely believes they have moral superiority, and often feels justified overriding voting outcomes they don’t like.
Claire Lehmann founded Quilette whose entire premise is featuring high quality ideas and speakers that have been censored/exiled/banned from the more prestigious channels of idea dissemination.
This reminds me of this post (http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/) where SSC says, “what sort of moron wastes their time suppressing a leaderless movement that nobody believes in or cares about?” People will only invest effort into suppressing good ideas that are widely held and deeply cared about.
I’d love to hear Kling elaborate more on this, but I’d imagine that veers too far into polemic for Kling’s taste.
That is unusually discerning.
Thank You
Not just discerning but terse, nearly aphoristic. There is an aphorism in there, just needs condensing to bring it out in its laconic splendor
Let me help.
I’m rubber and you’re glue…
There are militant and self-righteous jerks for anything, but some areas of life can still operate in a “live and let live” kind of moral pluralism / polycentric particularism. I know a few vegetarians who just decide to make a moral decision for themselves, and who don’t hold it against any meat eaters, and in fact aren’t really interested in getting into it. Same goes for people who don’t drink for moral or religious reasons, but without holding it against drinkers and won’t get all emotional about it and use it as a basis to exclude potential relationships.
Of course, these things are not organizational focal points around which political coalitions can currently be built, and so the subconscious mechanisms that moralize those other choices and preferences and raise their perceived level of social and political imperative, are at rest in these instances.
We are in desperate need of new institutions to prevent moralistic runaways.
There is a lot to be said in favor of sarcasm, it sets the reductio absurdum boundary.
Seems like it remains true that there are only three kinds of people in the world: those who believe in the concept of moral superiority, and everyone else.
Does anyone not believe in moral superiority? Regular people acknowledge that honesty, kindness, and work ethic are moral positives, and lying, cheating, and stealing are negatives.
The trouble is that all of those things can be taken to crazy and terrible extremes. It’s a matter of optimization and balance vs. maximization.
Any moral or ideological principle, being non-material and non-empirical by nature, when raised to the point of an isolated axiom, abides no other logically limiting principle. No matter how far any society has gone in the direction of trying to politically implement the principle to the utmost, it is always possible to give up other ordinary wants or values to go even further, that is, “promoting the supererogatory to the mandatory.”
The fundamental problem is that social status is scarce and zero-sum, and “more perfect” consistency with the socially-desirable principle is an avenue to raise one’s status when one has no better (or more efficient) outlets for doing so. By this mechanism, if a society doesn’t strictly control open advocacy and other forms of conspicuous virtue signalling leading in that direction, then it results in a kind of positive-feedback “moral runaway reaction” and an ever-escalating rat-race of competitive sanctimony and ideological singularity.
This process can happen in a few mere years, or it can take centuries to unfold (especially with older communications technologies), and the Anglosphere had several advantages in possessing a lucky combination of institutions experienced in dealing with manifestations of this problem, and tending towards decentralization, limitations on political authority, and precedent-preservation, all of which helped to slow it all down, like a governor mechanism capping the speed on an engine or an autopilot reacting and stepping on the brakes when things start to get out of control.
That allowed for a long, “honeymoon” period of rough compatibility between enlightenment-era liberalizing norms and reforms (and the support for those norms among the people who mattered), and the mostly smooth running of a high-functioning civilization. The rest of the world, however, not being gifted with similar stumbling blocks, was not so lucky, leading in no small part to the multiple monstrous catastrophes of the 20th century.
Alas, the honeymoon now appears to be over, partially due to technological change enabling and favoring centralization, but also the gradual co-option, neutralization, or elimination of those stumbling blocks, and other traditional checks and balances.
I’d have said “People who believe they are morally superior vs people who believe they are morally superior using different moral criteria”.
I think Arnold’s characterization is more apt. There is a definite asymmetry. What label is more likely to affect your life, being called:
– racist or unpatriotic?
– sexist or sexually loose?
– bigot or blasphemous?
– nazi or communist?
I would argue the labels on the left carry far greater social consequences (if they stick). There are sanctimonious people of all different political stripes, but one cohort has been singularly effective at persuading people and institutions to submit to their standards. That group is the “social justice” left.
There is also an asymmetry of attitude. Some of the biggest resistance to the social justice left isn’t coming from the right, it’s coming from those on the left who feel they’ve been ejected by the social justice left for insufficient piety.
I live in the American South, so judgemental conservatives are not a rarity for me. YMMV
Live in coal country and this is absolutely true. Go back home to visit family in the Midwest and it is absolutely true, and not just for conservatives. There are plenty of libertarians who are unbearably smug about their own perceived moral and intellectual superiority.
I think the difference is that conservatives (less so libertarians) have decided to become victims and whine about behaviors that all sides have engaged in since politics was first invented.
Steve
There is a difference between having an opinion and forcing that opinion on someone. I can’t think of meaningful realities of conservatives in the Midwest or anywhere else forcing their views on anyone. The left is all about force (defined more broadly to include being made unemployable in college grad corporate America, or being unable to run any kind of business that doesn’t to the line).
What exactly happens to someone that calls for he genocide of white people? They get jobs at the NYTimes.
how about those who are neither
Wouldn’t that just be those who do accept their moral inferiority?
Ah! A true seeker of enlightenment! Excellent!
Would that category not also include those who recognize that morality is a human mental construct subject to the same limitations and potential flaws as all other human constructs?
Or has the strength of our belief in eudaimonia caused us to neglect the possibility that we may simply be engaging in hubris?
I am willing to accept that I am morally inferior, I just reflexively get my back up every time I sense my family and friends from back in the midwest being dissed by people who have no clue.
Perhaps this group is just overexposed to college campuses, where a perception of asymmetry could be easily forgiven.
Liberals have had this same whiny sense of grievance for longer, and it has always detracted from their political effectiveness.
Conservatism used to be about dealing with the world as it is, not as it wants it to be. It used to have some basic emotional toughness. Its really sad to watch this infect it down to the core too.
It’s it just college campuses. It’s most corporations. It’s most schools your young children attend. It’s most papers you read, media you consume, even totally unrelated matters get an infusion of progresssivism.
This isn’t the early 90s where PC is a few whiny studies majors on campus everyone ignores and Micheal Jordan said that republicans buy sneakers too. It’s different now.
You are confusing issues. An “infusion of progressivism” is not the same thing as a claim that taken as a whole, progressivism is considerably more intolerant of discourse than social conservatism is.
We are all well aware that progressivism and a particular strain of social conservatism have separated like oil and water. Wherever you are, you are more likely to experience less of a mixture than before. But there are two large minorities that have concentrated feelings in one direction or the other. Arguing only one exists, or that only one is unreasonable seems to me to be confirmation bias, and little more. The conservative side isn’t being led by gentlemanly country club Republicans like Romney. You just can’t seriously claim to be the more civil side of the debate when Trump is your flag bearer.
Yes, social conservatives can hold unreasonable views (as anyone can) – but what power do they have in 2018? Is anyone getting fired, denied acceptance at university, being put of business, or being sued for expressing leftwing views? I doubt it.
As for complaints by particular conservatives who have been victimized by the Left’s vindictiveness and demands for conformity – of what relevance to these complaints is Trump’s incivility? Do Trump and his more boorish supporters somehow make it legitimate for the Left to declare open-season on anyone who disagrees with them (not that they had not done that before)?
BTW, when the conservative side was led by a “gentlemanly country club Republican like Romney,” your side accused Romney of waging a “war on women” and Biden told a black audience that the Republicans wanted “to put y’all back in chains.” Such are the wages of civility for conservatives.
Accusations of ‘whining’ present an interesting and revealing case. If we had a single, neutral standard, universally applied, that would be one thing. But it’s pretty clear that this is yet another manifestation of corrupting identity politics.
That is, it’s socially ok to dismiss some people’s legitimate complaints as exaggerated and petty, even when they involve significant practical consequences like ability to have forthright intellectual discussions or get or maintain a job, but it’s practically taboo to question complaints coming from members of other identity groups, even when it’s all about some inscrutable emotional matter like a claim of offense (or event the micro-offense from a micro-aggression) or humiliation. If complaining about a thing someone voluntarily calls a ‘micro-aggression’ doesn’t automatically self-define as ‘whining’, then what does? But the kind of people who complain about ‘whining’ from conservatives, or whites, or males, never seen to demonstrate consistency and criticize all microaggression talk as also being mere, unworthy ‘whining’.
A recent egregious example would be that when Ta-Nahesi Coates says that when some brash New Yorker in a rush (a totally rare specimen of humanity) yells “come on!” at his young dawdling child blocking an escalator or something, no one who matters accuses him of ‘whining’ about a completely minor and trivial matter, blowing it up all out of proportion, or being hypersensitive, or having a chip on his shoulder, or being a racism-seeking hammer interpreting every little thing as a nail, or tries to correct his paranoid overreaction. Instead they all go along with the frame of it being a clear racist outrage about which “something must be done.”
Either everybody gets to complain and have their similar complaints taken with equal seriousness, or nobody does. Or we’re asking for trouble.
I would totally concur that there is lots of whining on both sides. That’s my argument here. Each side has valid points. Its rather a matter of what weight we give to our grievances that determines affiliation.
For example, I’m sure even blatant racists would agree that African Americans are viewed more suspiciously by police than white people are. They just choose to give more weight to other perceptions.
Everybody should get to complain all they want. I part company with you where you want similar complaints taken with equal seriousness. I’m sure you must be able to see how impossible and problematic that would be.
Believe me, Ta-Nahesi Coates gets a mountain of pushback for his views too. He’s probably heard your complaint of paranoid overreaction many thousands of times. Thats the nature of public debate.
When I was a recent Stanford grad making good money in Silicon Valley (Sili Valli?), I had a girlfriend and we both strove, explicitly, for “moral superiority”. I as a Libertarian (candidate for Congress, ’88) even, she as a vegetarian “cruelty-free” lifestyle. Now I think that was a mistake.
I think lots of PC is an unspoken search for moral superiority. Most normal US folk are more Christian — we are ALL sinners. Normal folk are NOT morally inferior to the elites, nor to the elite wannabees.
The lies and failures of the elites, plus their own immorality, should make them ashamed of themselves. Instead, they’re ashamed of America, and of most everybody else.
Why was striving for “moral superiority” a mistake?
Striving to be moral, to do the right thing, to contribute to society more than one takes, all seem good principles to adhere to. Libertarianism does espouse moral political rules, which is good. What am I missing?
With regards to Kling’s previous post on Yoram Hazony and subsequent post on Claire Lehmann, this attitude is apparent.
On the nationalism/immigration issue, the open border crowd absolutely believes they have moral superiority, and often feels justified overriding voting outcomes they don’t like.
Claire Lehmann founded Quilette whose entire premise is featuring high quality ideas and speakers that have been censored/exiled/banned from the more prestigious channels of idea dissemination.
This reminds me of this post (http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/) where SSC says, “what sort of moron wastes their time suppressing a leaderless movement that nobody believes in or cares about?” People will only invest effort into suppressing good ideas that are widely held and deeply cared about.
I’d love to hear Kling elaborate more on this, but I’d imagine that veers too far into polemic for Kling’s taste.