Jonathan Rauch shares my concern with the state of political discourse. He also agrees with Yuval Levin. Rauch writes,
we will get more traction by thinking of them as problems of social incentives and system design. In other words, it’s the institutions, stupid.
Rauch suggests:
1. direct social action, meaning creating organizations specifically devoted to improved political discourse.
2. indirect social action, meaning boosting organizations in civil society, which will have the effect of binding people together across political lines.
3. re-wiring the social network. His ideas there did not inspire me. I will see what other essayists have to say about them.
His concluding paragraph:
I am not claiming that re-socialization strategies will (or will not) work. We’ll see. What I can say is that they are collectively barking up the right tree. After years in which conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all saw society more in terms of individuals and consumers than institutions and communities, social intermediaries are coming back into focus. Just noticing and thinking about them, instead of looking right through them, is a welcome change.
Still not clear why “polarization” is such a huge problem.
It seems the great apiarists can’t understand how the worker bees have swarmed, split the hive, and flown off with another queen.
General Secretary Xi, Jonathon Rauch, Yuval Levin, and Arnold Kling all know where the guardrails are and more than happy to prescribe the rules for a proper hive. They, of course, can’t be bothered to persuade the bees to behave properly, no, the bees must be manipulated to perform in the desired manner. Never forget that political science and economics are merely subspecialties in the applied practice of the science of marketing.
The eusocial ideal blinds them to the reality that a good portion of humanity might just not fit the bee mold and may in stead be merely social and pragmatic like the cockroach: no castes, roles, greater good, just social individuals being themselves.
The 4th axis might be best understood as the eusocial prescriptive versus the pragmatic egoist.
The prescriptive end of the axis is agog and aghast that the merely social and pragmatic have no need of hive structures, systems, and institutions other than what they will make of them.
The prescribers only believe in spontaneous order when it suits the hive designer’s interests. That millions could rise from poverty in India and China can only be attributed to their genius, the thronging masses having no agency in their view and the only possible way such a thing could have happened is alone attributable to their genius in designing institutions. Because the internet was developed in a context of a prescribed social order, it can only be attributed to that social order.
The pragmatic is no philosophy, they exclaim, it follows no set standards or rules, how can we know what a pragmatic populist wants?
There are many great thinkers whom have spoken to the reality of the pragmatic egoist but the greatest was Max Stirner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Stirner ) to whom my sobriquet is a tribute and whose The Ego and Its Own remains the only honest book ever written.
Stirner writes:
“’I was contemptible because I sought my ‘better self’ outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the ‘human’; I resembled the pious who hunger for their ‘true self’ and always remain ‘poor sinners’; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not—unique. But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me: consequently—adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the—unique.’”
Yes, I said it. There. We are all unique. The great thought crime of the day.
Some of us may be bees, some of us ants or termites, but many of us, like the cockroach, utterly indifferent to eusociality. No exclusive colonies, no bite, no armies, no wars, just getting on with being the unique individuals that we are and avoiding the crushing heel of the General Secretary Xi, Jonathon Rauch, Yuval Levin, and Arnold Kling who would prescribe what our lives should be.
Is there any wonder so many would prefer the pragmatic advantages of a braying jackass like Donald Trump over the hypocritical pieties of his prescriptive opponents who can find a hundred reasons why we should not look to our own unique welfares?
I feel like the Cato institute stating “individuals and consumers than institutions” contradicts most everything they stand for.
I know I am trolling with my above statements but what the defined steps for individuals to take? It sounds like Libertarians long for the Post-WW2 boom years but offer nothing to take us to those institutions and organizations. But honestly can we return to that type of society?
Again, the longer I live more I think the Post-WW2 years, 1948 – 1973, were a historical outlier not how the majority of history was. (This is similar to Noah Smith’s arguments the 1950 were over-rated….I don’t agree with that argument because most the population thought it was great period.)
(And whenever I think about what Trump successfully campaigned for in 2016, I do try to remember that Trump campaigned on bringing our nation back to those days with plenty of 1985 mixed in. It was a very effective campaign if you think about it.)
I still read the essays.
The social networks are rewiring themselves in a fierce competition. Google announce a digital checking service with CitiGroup. Facebook deploying Facebook pay and Libra.
Apple with AppleID, Apple pay and Apple card. They are competing with Fintech in something like a ferocious game changing manner. Wall Street is competing with fintech. Our central bank is rather frightened. The primary dealer system compromised by fintech front runners. The search engines connecting up a world wide movement of debt repudiation. Bitcoin hedging the central banks.
I hope Usher and Downs bring a bit more friendly adversarialism and disagreement to the discussion.
But Rauch’s’s suggestions seem very naive, and, frankly, I think the whole approach suffers from a common but mistaken take on polarization in general. Let me explain.
Once might call this perspective ‘transcendent’ or ‘meta’ which has a positive ring to it, though it is of an elitist and condescending variety, but one could be negative and say ‘oblivious’ or ‘obtuse’ or ‘tone deaf’.
I prefer ‘Imperial’, as in, the kind of sneering and eye-rolling attitude a Roman or British governor might take when hearing about some local petty Hatfield-and-McCoy squabble over something that, from his higher and superior perspective, is an obvious frivolous absurdity barely worth mentioning let alone killing each other about.
Look up some of Lord Cromer’s experiences governing Egypt for a taste, though one can easily imagine Pontius Pilate feeling the same way, or, a more recent example, an American military commander in Afghanistan presiding over some trite local tussle
It’s similar to Cowen’s ‘mood affiliation’, in that the general mood counter-polarizers take is one is which various noisy rows are merely provincial and tribal follies and stem from something like the “narcissism of small differences”. And, if only the participants could step out of their tribal identity for a moment and share the perspective of athe imperial, distant, neutral, and disinterested party – if only they could step out of their bubble – they too would immediately realize the pointlessly destructive foolishness of it all.
Thus, the issue is really not seeing the major political arguments as ‘worthy’ – not just intellectually but certainly failing to justify high levels of domestic discord, animus and acrimony – and thus not taking them seriously. Sure, an Imperial political transcendentalist might concede that the unenlightened gang fighters in the political arena may feel genuine and intense passions about their causes, but from the higher perspective, this is all a kind of mass delusion and complete loss of perspective driven by primitive instincts of social psychology, and, in truth, these are petty, trivial, and largely purely symbolic issues that are the ideological and political equivalent of “first world problems”. It ought ot be morally embarassing to complain about petty “first world problems”, and it ought ot be just as shameful to engage in highly-polarized and hateful social conflict over “first world politics”.
From this perspective, it’s a mistake and distraction to get into the weeds of any particular argument, which is completely arbitrary and besides the point and part of a broader performance of signals of group identity and loyalty and jousting for relative status, and so, at root, irresolvable because the fight is the point. A driving parent might as well try to get into the details and serve as judge in the case of some argument between bickering siblings in the backseat, instead of understanding the true nature of the fighting, and simply insisting as the only mature adult available that everyone simply learn to get along or at least just shut up and stay on their side of the car. Sometimes people complain because they have actual problems and they want actual solutions, and sometimes people complain even though they don’t really care about what they’re complaining about, for the sake of nagging as subconsciously desired status testing and relationship drama.
If I’m not describing that mood and perspective accurately, please feel free to offer correction, but that’s my impression of the general tone and approach.
From this perspective, the tendency towards polarization is not to be taken seriously but simply lamented as part of imperfectable human nature and the tragedy of the human condition, which can still be mitigated or exacerbated by social conditons, particular forms of political organization, and developments in communications technology.
The solution is thus not material (i.e., settling the dispute), but at heart, psychological and spiritual, to defuse passions through epiphany of agape, and thus in encouraing people towards the enlightened realization of the pettiness and tribal-nature of their squabbles, and to beahve better, be nicer, and love each other more. You might recognize this to be a religious solution.
The important question from this perspective is not “What are the arguments about and how severely do they affect the interests at stake, is there a Zone Of Possible Agreement, and how can we reach accord, settlement, and compromise?” but only “Why is it getting worse lately?”
That framework of interpretation leads to two common and related answers to ‘lately’, which are (1) Social Media, and (2) Weakened Institution.
So then the thing to do is either to control Social Media to ensure better behaviors, and / or to encourage the development and adoption of new cultural adaptations of norms of consistent respect and civility better suited to the new normal world with Social Media in it. At the same time, it would be a “time to build” and salvage old institutions or construct new ones from scratch which will help establish the social mixing and other conditions one hopes will mitigate and suppress the worst tribal tendencies.
The trouble is, what if the Imperial attitude is just all wrong? What if the cause of polarization is not unworthy or petty or symbolic or a pretext for ulterior motives of coalition formation and opponent domination, but instead involves high stakes conflict over irreconcilable ideological differences and/or critical interests?
The problem is that it would still resemble an unworthy social argument in terms of the symptoms of social dynamics, in the emotions, passions, antagonisms, social groupings, etc. But it wouldn’t be a hollow, empty, pretextual, or illegitimate fight. How to tell the difference between the worthy and material and substantive and the unworthy and symbolic and tribal? Some colds present the same symptoms as asthma, but it would be an error to diagnose them as asthma, and a bigger mistake to treat the infection as if it were asthma.
Whether there actually is a wolf, or someone is merely crying wolf, it sounds the same: “Wolf!” If one is going to react as if the claimant is merely crying wolf, one should at least make an argument as to why that conclusion is justified.
So, what if the older brother is mercilessly beating and bullying the younger brother who cries out for help, but the parent rolls his eyes and doesn’t even look back to see if there’s any justice in the plea, and yells at the younger brother to “Shut Up! Don’t provoke him, and don’t respond to his provocations.” Older brother can barely contain his laughter and just smirks at getting away with it.
If the polatization is valid and legitimate, the prescription would be very different. There’s no fixing or soothing it over singing kumbaya and sharing hot cocoa. Instead, the answer, as it happens, is the classically libertarian one: don’t let the state have the power to allow people to dominate and control each other, and allow people to choose options that suit their diverse preferences and associate without restriction so that they can avoid impositions and conditions they find unwholesome, obnoxious, oppressive, and so forth.
But that answer is utterly incompatible with progressive assumptions, and so if that level of argument is to be avoided, one has little choice but to deviate from the the correct diagnosis and prescribe universal conversion to the religion of niceness.
I’m not sure if your view is healthy skepticism or chronic pessimism but I think I share your pessimism regarding Rauch’s Kumbaya-ism and Collin’s skepticism of Levin’s BeaverCleaver-ism. What I like about the suggestions is that they are compatible with libertarian LetItBe-ism rather than yet another government expanding policy.
If non-governmental solutions work, great. But what if they don’t? There’s no use avoiding the hard question of choosing a lesser evil even if one is constitutionally allergic to the idea of using state power.
In the final analysis, one is either willing to organize for effective deterrence to protect an interest, or willing to capitulate and surrender it. If one is not going to surrender, then one is making a choice to amass and leverage power somewhere in the state-like range of coercion, and at that point it hardly matters in terms of impact whether one does it within or outside the state.
However, something to keep in mind is that there are advantages in terms of legitimacy and social peace and containment of plumbing your deterrent power through the pipes of the state’s stable bureaucratic apparatus vs having it run by an unstable mob.
It sounds like you are slipping from chronic pessimism into something closer to delusional paranoia. I’m pretty comfortable with the current scope of state coercive power and I’m confident that the use of this power will continue to trend downwards. I’m not sure what interests in your life require deterrence and amassed power but the worst case scenarios in my world only require the power to dial 911.
Synchronicity! https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/
Again, notice above-the-fray (or maybe “above it all”) tone and mood, and Gurri-like insistance on the “It’s Because The Social Media Changed Everything” thesis.
As if History isn’t totally full of examples of social polarization, intensely passionate factions and divisions, and people clawing at each other’s throats over political and ideological differences.
Why not go further back – indeed as some historians did – and say it was really printing press technology, or cheaply mass produced pamphlets that was the real culprit in these matters. The methods by which those of the founding generation ‘argued’ with each other were hardly civil and they often played dirty with name-calling, slanders and base scandal-mongering and faked identities. They certainly argued publicly with each other via letter and article with plenty of resort to “moral grandstanding” and in tones angrier and more insulting than anyone would deploy face-to-face. As if “disinformation campaign” is a new invention. Real historical amensia on display.
Someone should ask Burke-scholar Levin whether in his Reflections of the Revolution in France Burke attributed the orgies of bloodletting to Le Tweetere, or instead to the lure of domination, “When men play God, presently they behave like devils.”
If it wasn’t pamphlets, then whatever causes ‘polarization’, media isn’t a sufficiently complete answer. If it was the pamphlets, then did we somehow solve the pamphlet problem in the meantime, or is Social Media actually nothing new that doesn’t really change anything.
Look at it this way. At every school and workplace – even within the same family – there are the Real Fans of Our Local Team, and those who are completely numb or even annoyed or bored to death by sports, who don’t feel it and don’t get it. Maybe one can see this as a typical Jocks vs. Nerds thing, but that’s not necessary. Though I think the way intellectuals typically rant and rail against the exorbitant emphasis on and funding of popular sports at universities gives one a taste for the kind of elitist contempt they have for their sports-loving opponents.
The True Fans get all into it, feel the enthusiastic spirits of the pep rallies, genuinely feel the intense group emotions of belonging, solidarity, loyalty, rivalry, care deeply about winning and losing, and even come to sincerely despise and sometimes even wish harm to the other team. It’s not uncommon for groups of True Fans of rival teams to get into arguments with each other and then get into giant mob fight rumbles which occassionally spin out of control and can become deadly serious.
One might try to temper all this with appeals from high status authority figures to good sportsmanship and, I guess, “good fansmanship”, but everyone is familiar with this kind of thing.
Now, think of the perspective of the sport-indifferent individual. All of this ‘polarization’ seems completely arbitrary, juvenile, and ridiculous. There is no real merit or substance to the low-brow arguments about the various strengths and weaknesses of each team, and fans have no good reason aside from mere place of residency or condition of birth to favor any one team over any other. And at the end of the day, it’s just a meaningless game and can’t possibly justify all these strong passions either way, and especially not the negative excesses that threated to spill over into real violence.
This person is likely to see the whole phenomenon and set of social dynamics as an immensely ludicrous folly deriving from herd-like impulses and other low, primitive, ‘tribal’ instincts that are felt by, say, 80% of people who can’t escape their own perspective to realize how childish they’re being and how they’ve totally lost all sense of proportion and balance by exagerrating the importance of petty trivialities and attaching their own identity, group affiliation, and sense of happiness to the outcome of a silly game of ball movements. Adult, in particular, who should grow out of such childish interests and past times, are acting in a particularly embarassing way when they get completely caught up in all this.
Now, in my impression, this is the same attitude, tone, perspective, and mood the prominent public-intellectual counter-polarizers are taking towards contemporary political and ideological disputes. That is, they don’t (maybe can’t) take any of those arguments seriously, it all seems to be arbitrary and trivial and chlidish. And, to the extent sheep and cattle people acting that way is unavoidable, it should at least be tempered by norms of civility which can prevent the social fractures and fragmentation that lead to a tense political situation spinning out of control. “Oh Jesus, what are those dumb apes arguing about now?”
But if this perspective and mood is wrong, and the underlying dispute is much more important than a matter of sportsball, then the whole analysis and remedial effort is fundamentally misguided.
In what I think is a true irony, Haidt doesn’t seem to be able to pass the Ideological Turing Test that shows he grasps the perspective of those silly tribal partisans trying to explain that, actually, they have real important interests at stake and aren’t just picking sides in a game of sportsball.
Because it escalates into a violent zero sum showdown between might-is-right whack-jobs like your buddy Stirner or the Callicles character in Plato’s Gorgias in which Socrates closes the dialog with:
2400 year-old truths have lasting power.
That was supposed to be a response to Stirner Says.
So you know what is virtuous and right and other individuals do not. Noted.
the Golden Rule is my North star. Might-is-Right is an abhorrent philosophy.
Yes to (1) direct setting up organizations — but US colleges were supposed to be that? Their tax exemptions & loans are based on them supporting Free Speech. Their failure should result in them losing those benefits.
First.4
(2) boosting other orgs? Great idea in theory. Using what incentives? Rotary service clubs are actually good — give members of service clubs more civil service points when they apply for gov’t job? Tax breaks?
It seems more new orgs are being formed that implicitly, if not explicitly, separate the PC SJ cult tribe from the others, the heretics. It’s more comfy for most folk to be with other right-thinking (their-thinking) folk.
The increasing polarization is happening because the Dems are claiming that every org MUST be “woke”, including the NFL & NBA. If we can’t go back to less politicization of sports and other groups, it’s silly to talk about creating new mixed-politics groups.
(3) Facebook and Google will continue to be dominant, and anti-Rep, anti-Christian, anti-conservative, until they are legally broken up/ nationalized / have their business model hugely struck down. Like making the cost of advertising on Google or Facebook, because of their monopoly power, NOT a business expense, so it comes out of post-tax profit.
More likely a Digital Media Commission that exerts huge power over such market distorting monopolists.
Dems losing in 2020 is a prerequisite for most positive changes.
Tom, from my libertarian perspective, your social conservative beliefs on Pro-Life and Anti-BigTech cross-over into immoral Golden Rule breaking territory when you applaud laws that enforce those beliefs on others. This is exactly how I feel about social justice activism when it steps beyond free speech territory. I know you think my morality perspective is purely argumentative but I assure you that it’s heartfelt. One can wish for a world without abortion without supporting coercive laws and calling for the breakup of Google is ironically evil.
I thought Facebook is now the biggest social media to pass around conservative stories. And Progressives are slowly quitting the platform.
Personally, I think we would be much better off if we had a much higher threshold for passing laws than 50% + 1. If we used at least a two-thirds vote, then we would only have laws where there is significant agreement. I have no illusions that either party would be good with this though. They would rather impose their will on everyone else with the fewest votes possible.
I also think that we should use sortition to select political officials, but this has even less of a chance than passing laws with a two-thirds vote.
Other stuff is going on. Here’s a thought: by mid century, genetics ought to be on track as an applied art. We’ll be able to tell would-be parents something like “We can sort your sperm and eggs to be reasonably certain to produce better offspring than might occur by unaided nature. Your children will be five to ten IQ points brighter, they will live a few years longer, they’ll be taller and healthier, they’ll be more dexterous and less prone to heart disease, less like to be autistic, and 30% less likely to face Alzheimers and schizophrenia in their old age.” Or perhaps, “We’ve looked at your still un-implanted fetuses. It’s possible to intervene to make some improvements.”
Of course this will cost something. Financially, socially. The questions are, should we permit this kind of meddling with the makeup of America’s future citizens? Should we let the free market rule, so that rich people can have those improved babies while ordinary folks settle for … something less? Or should there be a federal program to foot the bill for all? What’s the impact likely to be on the acceptance of abortion? Will we need anti-discrimination ordinances to protect the unmodified? What should Americans do if say France decides gene modification ought to be a right for all French infants? Or if China decides gene modification should be limited to the upper ranks of the Communist Party?
Speaking of the Chinese, by 2050 or earlier, at present rates — a lowly 6% per annum in GNP increases as opposed to our really splendid 2% — the 1.5 billion Chinese will likely have a bigger, more technologically advanced military establishment and likely a much larger willingness to throw their weight around in international affairs. How will the USA, a second tier power by then, outclassed not only by the Chinese but by Indians and perhaps Nigerians and still unrealized European-style unions, react to its loss of worldly dominance? We’re starting to see that happen already under Donald Trump, but it’s not yet a burning issue. That could change.
I mentioned Nigeria. I’ve seen estimates that by 2100 there could be 900 million people in Nigeria — twice the population of the USA. Other estimates would have it that 5 billion people might live in Africa by century’s end, in a world of 11 billion humans. They’ll probably insist on their status in the world’s economic system, probably gain it automatically as living standards — and thus wealth — increase in coming years. How might Americans react to that, the old white Americans?
Could be global warming refuses to be subside as Americans hope. Suppose a day comes when all the world outside our borders insists it’s a problem that must be dealt with, no matter what our conservatives think, and other nations start imposing penalties and trade sanctions against the US until we modify our behavior? Suppose the UN votes that first world nations with vacant space — the US and Canada and maybe Russia — will take in millions of climate refugees. How do we respond?
Interesting new technologies which might happen. Nanotechnology might become a real thing, after 35 years of promising. Extracting trace elements from ocean waters has been talked about, for even longer. Cleaning plastics and other wastes from the ocean is catching interest, and who knows, declining fishery stocks might excite people in a few decades. Seabed mining’s another old favorite, with UN treaties to cover it go back to the 1960s. Really deep mining seems worth tackling — we haven’t done much with that since we gave up drilling for science’s sake in the 1950s. 3D printing is a growing thing. There’s likely a bunch of stuff to do with cryogenics in chemistry and manufacturing. Maybe there are alternative computer architectures … The neat thing is American capitalists aren’t especially interested in any of this stuff as long as they’ve got the internet to focus on, so these potential sources of wealth and power won’t go us — foreigners are going to have them. We might want to talk some about that in the last half of the century.
TL;DR: Our current controversies and arguments will subside as our current trolls and partisans fall into the grave. We’ll probably find new things to shout about, with different demographic divisions.
I just came across this Joe Rogan interview with Malcolm Gladwell where Gladwell lays out his theory of the differing types of crime shows. His theory made me think of your three-axes, at least from the institution/reform aspect.
Since these stories Gladwell identify is how people come to see via culture, I believe they impact where people hit the three-axes.
Summarized:
Westerns: no institution/outsider from elsewhere establishes order
Easterns: institution corrupted from inside/insider fights it, e.g., Serpico
Northerns: good institutions/good insiders using it e.g., Law and Order series
Southerns: bad institutions/good local outsider fights it. Gladwell cites John Grisham’s novels, but I see it also in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird”
https://youtu.be/OnEjzmR9Hvw?t=224