Couples who strive to judge each other benevolently — interpreting each other’s good behaviour as deliberate and habitual, and each other’s transgressions as accidental and limited (wherever possible and sensible) — are more likely to be satisfied in their relationships overall.
In political discourse these days, we do the opposite. We see the other’s good behavior as accidental and limited, and we see the other’s bad behavior as deliberate and habitual.
It’s both isn’t it. My wife has some misbehaviors that are occasional, and some that are chronic and never change no matter how much they are discussed and agreed to.
Heck, just read “The Trouble with X” by C.S. Lewis if you want a look at this phenomenon.
https://noeljesse.com/the-trouble-with-x-by-c-s-lewis/
There it is. It seem that this is also tied to Buber’s Ich and Du.
A shorter piece by Lewis which seems to me also on point is Bulverism: “In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.”
We see the other’s good behavior as accidental and limited, and we see the other’s bad behavior as deliberate and habitual.
I still say this was not true before 2008, and especially before 2005. There lots of outlier opinions back in the day but they seemed to either no platform to share or assumed to be marginal voices. (Although Rush Limbaugh made a big impact in the 1990s and was not a marginal figure.)
I still say this was not true before 2008
I am probably a lot older than you, and there has always been some of that, from various sides. It is certainly more visible today, and probably also more common, though just assuming that is to fall for the availability heuristic (squeaky wheels and all that).
I think part of the reason is technological and part economic: cable news, talk radio, and twitter; really pushed over the edge when the Times and Post discovered they could halt their circulation slide by monetizing hatred of the other. I think of it like heroin. Heroin is not “under control” but we have muddled into a situation where the damage is considerably less than it once was. Right now we’re where heroin was in the fifties.
These interpretations are true for some people, and false for others. Couples are more likely to be satisfied if they see each other honestly and if they have chosen to be with someone that they can accept benevolently.
These interpretations can be destructive if you’ve chosen the wrong person to be with. In our political system and in our political discussions, we are increasingly choosing to fight and increasingly choosing destructive candidates.
There is an assumption here: That finding someone else is a reliable solution to the unhappy person. Another option is that changing yourself is the answer.
There’s something to this. The people I know who are happy in marriage were pretty happy-go-lucky people before they were married too. It’s like marriage is the icing on their life cake.
It’s appropriate that different contexts would be met with different approaches and “attribution patterns”.
Marriages are affectionate partnerships for mutual gain where individual interests tend to be more aligned than they are in tension, and there is strong incentive to compromise in favor of preserving a relationship which is (relatively) easy to dissolve if the tension gets too high and interests diverge too much.
Politics, on the other hand, is the thing which is pursued by war by other means and all about dealing with adversarial rivalries and conflicts of intersts, values, and visions often characterized by a great deal of acrimony and a grudging and unstable resignation to non-violent coexistence.
It makes sense to interpret the actions of friends you love and who love you back charitably, with forgiveness, mercy, and grace.
It also makes sense to interpret the actions of conspicuously malicious and antagonistic enemies with a great deal of suspicion and caution to prevent oneself from attack or from being taken advantage of.
Charity and peace and enabled by structural conditions which prevent adversaries from harming their opponents’ interests. In the absence of those circumstances, negative interpretations are merely prudent.
Reads a bit like ‘treat all with different perspectives as enemies, out to get you’.
Politics is very rarely about war. That lens shouldn’t be used as the basis of the usual course of governments.
‘Conspicuously malicious and antagonistic…’
I suspect that the ability for anyone to yell into the internet at a moment of high emotion is probably why things seem a bit more conspicuously malicious and antagonistic than perhaps they did in times past.
Now the words are published and repeated. Previously, i would have been a mere lonely soul muttering my annoyance, and noted by anyone near as best avoided for the evening.
Pundits have been calling the current political situation in the US a “Cold Civil War”. If there a feasible way for states to break away from the federal government, I suspect that you would see the dissolution of the United States. How should such a situation be characterized? Such a country, where most people would rather that their territory be governed by a different nation (perhaps a new one), doesn’t sound like it has normal, democratic politics.
The hog wallow that is US academia, politics, and journalism at the moment consists of little more than organized name-calling. The name-calling – racist, sexist, colonialist, patriarchalist, nationalist, populist, denialist, fascist, privileged, blah blah blah – is from a position of power. Rather than attempt to engage by going through some elaborate contortion to contrive some non-malign motivation, it is much easier to just disengage, find ways to elude their dominion, and look elsewhere for commonalities and community.
Great advice for couples — and my wife and I have even talked about it, explicitly. When either of us “assumes” that the other’s mistake is deliberate, especially when it’s happened before, lending support for the idea that it’s habitual. It’s also true there might be a bad habit involved that needs far more work to change.
On politics:
We see the other’s good behavior as accidental and limited, and we see the other’s bad behavior as deliberate and habitual.
Arnold, please give some examples of famous and respected elected Reps who do this, wrongly. Trump has been calling the Dem news “Fake News” for years — because it WAS fake news. It was deliberate and it was habitual. Similarly with the elected Dem circus over the Kavanaugh nomination.
I flatly do not believe elected Reps are accusing Dems who make mistakes of bad deliberate behavior — they are complaining about bad Dem behavior and bad policy.
I recall an argument about gay marriage. I was against it because I claimed it’s main purposeful effect was to be used to exclude Christians. To designate the Christian view that homosexual behavior is sinful as “hate speech” and intolerance, and thus to support discrimination against Christian. You saw that Chic-fil-a has been excluded from another airport?
I challenge you and all commenters to provide similar elected Rep proposals or statements that are similar.
I think any blog writers who want to criticize both parties for “something” should at least give an example of that similar behavior with critiques for each behavior.
See recent David Limbaugh rant on this:
https://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2019/04/12/leftists-whipping-themselves-into-a-jacobin-frenzy-n2544666?1210
If you support Social Security reform, you want old people to get sick or die. If you favor border enforcement, you are a xenophobe and a racist. If you oppose abortion, you want to deprive women of their autonomy and health care.
This is the kind of pervasive demonization of conservatives that leftists are engaging in every day, which leads to the horrific mentality that it’s OK to deprive them of their rights and treat them as second-class citizens.
David notes that elected Dems are OK with all Rep demonization, and even do it. Reps, so far, have not be OK with demonization, but most are glad that Trump, at least, is fighting back using truth: he WAS spied on, he had NO COLLUSION – thus it WAS Fake News.
Those who say “it’s the same on both sides” are asking for Reps to escalate demonization of Dems, which is slowly starting to happen. If the Dems are not more clearly blamed, and stopped, the “equality loving” and “double-standard hating” Reps will join the Dems in unreasonable hatred.
That’s not good, but at least it’s a form of justice.
If you support maintaining Social Security, you just want to give away money and make government bigger. If you dont support the idea of a wall, you want rapists, terrorists and MS 13 to come here. If you support abortion, you are a baby killer. (And by the way, it is OK to kill one of those abortionists every now and then.) All of those things make it OK for you to say that people on the left are not “real Americans”, a term used, to the best of my knowledge, only by the right.
Your lack of awareness of this being a both sides says more about your living in a bubble than anything else. This really is a both sides thing.
Steve
“If you support maintaining Social Security, you just want to give away money and make government bigger.”
Well, Social Security does give away money and make government bigger. You may think there are offsetting positives, but it doesn’t change what it is.
“If you don’t support the idea of a wall, you want rapists, terrorists and MS 13 to come here.”
After decades of bad faith and a purposeful attempt to change the demographics of the nation I’m not sure what you expect. Talking about terrorists is a polite way of saying we need less brown people without saying we need less brown people.
“If you support abortion, you are a baby killer.”
Aren’t you? This seems like something where the definition of life simply is what it is. If you believe it’s a life, then it is murder. If you don’t think its life then what’s the big deal. Isn’t this difference in the definition of life the impasse that causes all the passions.
“(And by the way, it is OK to kill one of those abortionists every now and then.)”
I’d guess 99% of pro-life people would be against this.
That fails to make an important distinction.
The first kind of statement is a claim that someone is being dishonest about one’s true (and reprehensible) beliefs and motives. “You say you support racial integration but that you are against busing because you want your kids to go to the closest neighborhood school. But you are lying about your true motives, and the truth is that you’re a closet racist and segregationist and you specifically chose to live in your white neighborhood to get yourself and your kids away from blacks because of your bigotry and irrational animus.”
The second kind of statement is that someone is being truthful about their motives, but that they making an ethically obscene choice in a moral trade-off, picking a greater evil over a lesser one, while trying to deny, minimize, or dismiss the heinous consequences of their preferred policy.
For a not insubstantial portion of the left, being called a “real American” is an insult. Murica and all that.
“For a not insubstantial portion of the left, being called a “real American” is an insult. ”
Name some. Quotes please. A lot of us served overseas. We have friends who died and make it point to visit the Wall (in DC) every year. We go to church. We drive pick ups. We live in rural areas. We pay taxes, we own guns, we go hunting and fishing. But to you, I am not a real American.
“Aren’t you?”
Then if you oppose abortion you are a Mommy killer. arent you? Motivations.
“After decades of bad faith and a purposeful attempt to change the demographics of the nation I’m not sure what you expect.”
Because this is not true. The left has voted for all of the barriers that are currently in place. Go look at the votes instead of reading Breibart. Tons of people were deported when Obama was POTUS. And you deliberately, I assume , forget that we are talking about motivations. Find me the people on the left who say they want more MS 13 to come here. The right just makes up these motivations for the left, and unfortunately people like you accept them.
“Well, Social Security does give away money and make government bigger. You may think there are offsetting positives, but it doesn’t change what it is.”
Again, motivations. I dont see anyone on the left saying that there goal is to just make government bigger. That is a false motivation made up to smear.
Look, I think I can safely assume the most people here dont support universal health care programs. I think that is because most people here have a libertarian mindset. However, one could just say you want poor people to die bbbecasuew that is what is happening. As you said ” but it doesn’t change what it is.”
Steve
“Then if you oppose abortion you are a Mommy killer.”
How does not getting an abortion kill the mother?
The vast vast majority of abortion are elective procedures done because the mother finds the existence of the baby inconvenient to her. Her life is not in danger.
The lefts view on immigration and demographic change are pretty well known.
I don’t even know what you are trying to get at with SS anymore.
I do think that, if the costs become particularly high, that allowing some people to die instead of engaging in herculean efforts of medical care can sometimes be reasonable. In nearly all aspects of life we have something called the “value of human life index” that tries to put some hard math of the limits of what expense we will undertake to save a life, because we don’t have infinite resources.
Steve, I never said you aren’t a “real American” and I never would.
I stand by my statement. To a not insubstantial portion of the left, America is deeply racist, sexist, and lots of other bad things. Real Americans are also those things. A recent pop culture phenomenon has been the proliferation of Murica memes. They are all about about how stupid, ignorant, dangerous, low class, look-down-upon-able Muricans are. Muricans, the real Americans. Google “Murica meme” for a taste if you haven’t seen any already. (You’ll also see some counter-memes.)
+1
Thanks, Steve, for a good attempt at WhatAboutIsm – noting that “Reps” do this too.
Yet without quotes? Because most elected Reps do NOT do this.
It sure does seem that Trump is willing to play the demonization game, fighting back with the same kind of false claim that Dems make, and many Reps support his fighting back.
I do.
Here’s Trump recently (my Twitter is suspended by I can still read):
Democrats must change the Immigration Laws FAST. If not, Sanctuary Cities must immediately ACT to take care of the Illegal Immigrants – and this includes Gang Members, Drug Dealers, Human Traffickers, and Criminals of all shapes, sizes and kinds. CHANGE THE LAWS NOW!
He has long been claiming that the Wall is needed to stop the bad criminals coming in. That’s not quite the same as claiming those opposed to the Wall “want” the criminals, but he might well have said on some tweets that Dems want the criminals.
His willingness to tweet dirty defamations is a huge reason so many Reps are uneasy / unhappy with him, with this aspect of him (I don’t like it) — yet still support him fighting, and fighting effectively.
I know many pro-life folk who do think, and say, each abortion is a murder — but not elected Reps. Where are the quotes? Virtually all pro-life folk have condemned the few anti-abortion murderers, and every elected Rep. Most elected Dems DO claim that anti-abortion folk want to deprive women of their choice, their autonomy.
The Dem media is good at finding radical Rep voters, and expressing those ideas, and then claiming that’s the elected Rep position — but the elected Rep has a more moderate position.
The elected Dems actually do have the radical position and do have the demonization rhetoric. Same with many famous Dems – compare Clint Eastwood’s reasonable critique of Obama with Robert DiNero’s almost unhinged obscenity laced rant against Trump.
Trump & his vulgarity & demonization is a small Rep step towards equality with Dem negative attribution of desire. If Dems don’t stop the Dem demonization, more Reps will be following Trump and doing more demonization.
The neg attribution control stick of culture is firmly in the hands of the Dems, especially in colleges (which discriminate against pro-life folk & against Reps). Accepted discrimination becomes competitive demonization & neg attribution.
Self-sorting seems like a relevant factor here. When you interact with a lot of people from the other side often, it’s harder to view them as an abstract, malicious force, but when you don’t know any of them, you’re less likely to attribute humanity to them. I think this goes with groups in general, races, genders, nationalities, etc.
The internet may make this worse, since it allows people to self-sort for social interactions in which they previously wouldn’t have been able to (as easily, at least).
I see little evidence this is true. Interaction with other people often simply confirms negative views of them. I was less racist when I barely interacted with black people. More racist when I moved to Baltimore and had to interact with lots of them. Go down the list, and what I was told about group X, institution Y, or ideology Z growing up turned out to be a lot less favorable in real life. Real life interactions, if anything, make it impossible to believe pleasant lies about people.
It’s interesting the CS Lewis’ advice which was cited above, was not to think good things about other people, but to focus on the bad things about yourself. How different from the ‘love yourself first’ approach.
I’ve seen plenty of evidence it’s true as well. Gays in my own family have made my parents more open-minded on that subject.
Not saying I’ve clinched the argument. It’s just messy.
I think that one of the disconnects between the upper levels of society and the rest is that the upper levels of society mainly interact with people like themselves. So the primary aspect of everyone they meet is that they are together enough to be part of the upper level of society. The traits that make that possible are far more salient than their race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. So the impression one gets is “I see all these people from all these groups that are agreeable enough, so it must be the case that there is nothing wrong with these groups.”
The problem of course is that only a tiny sliver of any particular group is visible to them, and the behavior of that tiny sliver is very different from the group in general. So when they extrapolate that beyond their social context they have an inaccurate view of the wider world.
Regular people have to deal with something closer to the group averages of these different groups, so their impression is far different. For them the stereotypes are true, and indeed something that effects them in important ways in their daily lives
This was driven home to me when the NYTimes published a very detailed map of gay households. What I noted was that in places like DC, SF, etc there is a high concentration of very successful gay couples (household income averaging >250k), some of whom even adopted and played house. If you are an opinion maker in certain DC neighborhoods you have plenty of “gays are just like us” examples to point to.
However, if you run the numbers this makes up a very tiny sliver of gay people overall. Actual gay behavior is very different than the impression you would get from this small group. And so the difference in opinion you get comes in many ways from the fact that “exposure to the other” means different things for different classes of people.
Indeed the gay person in my family is a woman and a former member of SFPD. Been married for years to her partner.
The class dynamics are interesting here because the straight men you’ll meet in a place like DC or SF are orders of magnitude better behaved then what you’ll find in flyover country, where pointless macho posturing and reckless behavior are common. “We’d be wrong to think well of straight men by judging them by DC or SF standards.” So this can work against traditionalism too.
When describing straight men, aren’t you really just describing “non-elite men”. Seems a class distinction to me, not even political or geographical.
If you live in DC you are no doubt well acquainted with its black population (yes, they are on the other side of that road mostly) and five seconds of observing them in public would yield behavioral observations worse than any flyover prole by an order of magnitude. Yet rather than contrast to an easily available example of deplorable behavior right next to you one speculates on what someone going to Covington Catholic thousands of miles away might be up to.
In my own neighborhood we have a bunch of white proles (they even have their own bar) and while they don’t conduct themselves they way I would, they have never created a disturbance of note to anyone else. They don’t engage in crime. They don’t riot. It’s not their (black) mayors that are being arrested for corruption every few years. By contrast the blacks come into my neighborhood from other places to commit absurd crimes. So yeah proles will be proles, but the white ones don’t seem that bad to me. They do me no harm. The ones that got jobs in our building maintenance are actually really nice to interact with.
Heck, even within your class…have you observed the behavior of many college grads in the city at night? From my observation it isn’t all that pretty, especially given that people of that class have all the means and tempermant to do better with their lives. If we grade on a curve, they fail.
It’s also worth noting that the “gay” couple is question are lesbians. Most people think gay men when they hear gay, and gay men are the face of the movement. It’s their behavior, not that of lesbians, that has always caused the pushback from broader society. If gay men acted like gay women nobody would care. Gay men have Grindr, STDs, molested all those alter boys, etc. Lesbians make some bad literature and keep to themselves while they mostly do what regular women do.
“All stereotypes are true”.
That’s how they get to BE stereotypes.
And any individual, or even small group of individuals, can be different from the stereotype. This fact is exactly why MLK was correct that we should judge people on their character, not their skin color (or tribal group identity).
As the Dems push different tribal identities, rather than “all of us are Americans” (like Trump often pushes), the push for tribalism will highlight different averages.
SAT scores of minority blacks vs minority Asians is an increasingly clear indication of this disconnect.