Category Archives: Politics

Will persuasion work?

Posted on by

Yascha Mounk writes,

Across much of the democratic world, philosophical liberals lack both the ideological self-confidence and the institutional base to stand up for their convictions. This is an existential crisis for the values of a free society. For only if philosophical liberalism can prove that it embodies a truly universal set of principles—one that can win adherents from Hyderabad to Hamburg, from Nairobi to New York—can it hope to retain and expand its influence in the 21st century.

His effort is a substack publication/community. I wish him well. I would like to believe that the number of Americans who are sympathetic to what Mounk calls philosophical liberalism is greater than the number who have adopted the religion that thrives on persecuting heretics.

Incidentally, with a separate post, Mounk scored the first point of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams May season.

My Shelby Steele review

Posted on by

I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.

In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.

Movements vs. Weberian bureaucracies

Posted on by

Wessie du Toit writes,

Weber insisted that to exercise real power, charismatic authority cannot keep relying on the spiritual calling of committed followers. It must establish its own structures of bureaucracy and tradition. According to Weber, this is how prophetic religious movements of the past created lasting regimes.

We seem to live in a time when various Weberian bureaucracies, notably those of the major political parties, have broken down. Meanwhile, new movements, as Martin Gurri points out, emerge without the Weberian elements. In that regard, Yuval Levin writes,

The frustrations that stand in the way of more effective bargaining and policy-making in Washington now add up to an argument for more explicit intra-party groupings that would negotiate with one another and with factions in the other party. But too few of the frustrated activists and politicians in both parties seem to see that, and so too few are engaged in building durable institutional structures for constructive factional engagement — at least beyond the level of rhetoric and communication strategy.

Journal of Controversial Ideas

Posted on by

Insider Higher Ed reports,

McMahan, Singer and their third collaborator, Francesca Minerva, a moral philosopher at Ghent University in Belgium, sit on the political left. But they envision their journal as a home for all well-reasoned, if dangerous, ideas.

Elsewhere, I have read that Larry Summers, Jonathan Haidt, and Philip Tetlock will be on the editorial board. So will the journal be, like, Steve Sailer’s blog but with peer review?

The mind and moral categories

Posted on by

Long time reader Roger Sweeny emails.

I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. . . .

I will copy the full email below. But for now, I have to say that this book presents a very powerful model of how people frame moral issues. I have a learned a lot just from reading a few pages.

The book argues, based on empirical analysis, for a moral dyad theory, based on the extent to which an entity is viewed as having experience (being able to feel pain or joy) and/or having agency (having the ability to change outcomes). Consider this matrix.

low agency high agency
high experience a baby a healthy adult
low experience a rock a robot

Sweeny wants to apply this moral dyad theory to the social justice movement. Suppose that the social justice advocates see whites as privileged, i.e., having “a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer,” like the robot in the matrix, while blacks occupy the opposite pole, like the baby.

Note that John McWhorter and other black intellectuals who deplore the social justice movement are most angry at the way that it denies agency to blacks. It treats them as if they were nothing more than dogs helplessly beaten.

Most people see George Floyd as comparable to the baby and Derek Chauvin as comparable to the robot. That is, Floyd could suffer, but he could do nothing about his suffering. Chauvin was making conscious decisions, but he has no feelings..

But one could tell the story the other way. Floyd chose to resist arrest. Chauvin was reacting to the situation in response to his fears and those of the other policemen. I am not saying that this is the right framing, just that it leads to a different moral assessment.

The authors point out that people see corporations as being akin to robots–having no feelings but having powerful capabilities. There is much more to be said about how the moral dyad relates to political economy, but I will save that for when I have finished the book.

Note that fans of Girard talk of a scapegoat mechanism, which also addresses how people assign moral rights and responsibilities. I like the moral dyad better. It is better defined and apparently more empirically grounded. Here is what Sweeny wrote:

Continue reading →

Sub-Dunbar vs. Super-Dunbar

Posted on by

Marion Tupy writes,

Among the relevant psychological characteristics that humans developed in the Pleistocene were our propensities toward tribalism, egalitarianism, and zero-sum thinking. We evolved in small bands composed of 25 to 200 individuals. We all knew and were often related to one another. Everyone knew who contributed to the band’s survival and who shirked his or her responsibilities. Cheaters and free riders were targets of anger and, sometimes, punishment.

…To summarize, the psychology that evolved when our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer groups prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange between millions of people (i.e., a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (i.e., the global economy). In a way, the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our Stone Age minds to understand it. Yet it is that transition, from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity, that makes capitalism so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass while catering to small communities. That resulting wealth inequality rubs against our egalitarian predispositions and zero-sum thinking. Finally, our tribalism helps to explain why, even when we do consent to trade with other nations, we often continue to resent them and suspect them of thriving at our expense.

I have written a lot about this, both in Specialization and Trade and in essays such as Camping Trip economics vs. Woolen Coat economics.

One reason I suspect that people are reverting back to sub-Dunbar thinking is that smart phones have confused the intimate sub-Dunbar world and the remote super-Dunbar world. Corporate CEO’s used to be part of the remote world, and you did not care about them personally. Now they show up on the same screen as your friends. So they have to take positions on social issues in order to remain on your good side.

1969 vs. 2021

Posted on by

A reader politely points out that I am old man.

You have lived much longer than I have. . .Please contrast the 60s to the 20s. From my limited vantage point, I feel like our current situation is completely irredeemable and won’t end well. We are too divided on basic common values. Am I wrong? What does the knowledge gained from the 60s indicate (if anything)?

As of 1968, the country seemed to be coming apart. Assassinations, riots, the Chicago convention, etc.

In hindsight, we know that the movie ended without a civil war. The divide between hippies and straights healed, with the former deciding to get jobs and the latter deciding to wear blue jeans, grow long hair, and celebrate female sexuality and women in the workplace. The mainstream media held onto a reputation for straight reporting (whether or not you think they deserved it). President Nixon ended the draft, which cooled things down a lot.

We don’t know how today’s movie is going to end. Some remarks:

1. As Martin Gurri has pointed out, today’s mobs have more bark than bite. People show up at demonstrations to take selfies, and then they go home and do nothing. Bottom-up revolts break out all around the world, and they almost all have no agenda and accomplish nothing. Maybe Tunisia and Egypt were exceptions, but in the latter it seems like “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

2. The real action is a battle between elites.* I don’t think that the average Joe is exercised one way or the other about the progressive religion. There is a segment of the elite that swears by the religion, and there is a segment of the elite that despises it.

3. It is reminiscent of the 1960s in that the elites of the young generation are overwhelmingly on one side. Just as a lot of middle-aged conservatives and war hawks in the 60s discovered that their children were in the anti-war movement, a lot of middle-aged conservatives today are finding a lot of wokeishness in our children.

4. I think that the battle lines between elites are much harder than they were in the 60s. Back then, there were plenty of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Bipartisanship was still a thing, and it remained so at least through the first years of the Clinton Administration. Perhaps when the Dems owned the House they felt they could afford to be generous and the Republicans felt that they had no choice but to compromise.

5. I agree with Martin Gurri and Andrey Mir that a lot of the dynamics these days reflect the changes in the media environment brought about by the Internet. For example, it was easy to be pro free speech when it was hard for extremists to get control of a newspaper or a TV station. It turns out that a more democratized media environment has a lot of people longing for central control and suppression.

6. In the 1960s, hippies had straight friends, and vice-versa. Today, progressive zip codes are devoid of Trump supporters, and vice-versa.

7. I think that in 2020, just as in 1968, the public longed for a lowering of the political temperature. President Nixon delivered, governing well to the left of where the hearts of the Republicans were. He was re-elected in a landslide. President Biden is doing the opposite, carrying out a progressive offensive. Whether that is due to differences in the makeup of the two men or to differences in the cultural atmosphere I cannot say. I expect Biden to be much less popular in 2024 than Nixon was in 1972.

Andrew Sullivan is also disappointed with the way that Biden is starting. But Sullivan sees Republicans as equally immoderate.

8. I am, perhaps wrongly, anticipating that the Woke Movement will meet its Waterloo. I thought that perhaps there would be sufficient backlash against Major League Baseball and other elite institutions for their posturing on the Georgia voting law that this would prove to be such a Waterloo. But I may be over-estimating the strength of my own side in this contest.

My bottom line is that I think that the country could recover its balance, as it did after 1968. But not if every CEO and Democratic politician decides to act like a university administrator.

*This may also have been true in the 1960s, but I think back then the hippies and war protesters really were outside of the power structure. I am not sure how much effect the anti-war protests actually had. We are unable to run a controlled experiment without the protest movement, but I am willing to venture the opinion that Democratic and liberal Republican elites would have gotten sick of the war, anyway. Nobody ran as a pro-war candidate in 1968.

Julia Galef watch

Posted on by

I found out about her from a FITs owner, who was very enthusiastic. It looks like he was right. Here is Michael Shermer reviewing her new book, The Scout Mindset.

Scouts, Ms. Galef explains, “revise their opinions incrementally over time, which makes it easier to be open to evidence against their beliefs.” They also “view errors as opportunities to hone their skill at getting things right, which makes the experience of realizing ‘I was wrong’ feel valuable, rather than just painful.” In fact, the author suggests, we should drop the whole “wrong” confession and instead describe the process as “updating”—a reference to Bayesian reasoning, in which we revise our estimations of the probability of something’s being true after gaining new information about it. “An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin,” Ms. Galef continues. “An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.”

Martin Gurri (also Andrey Mir) watch

Posted on by

1. Martin Gurri writes,

The information sphere teems with platforms of communication: that is its most typical and abundant feature. The governing elites are not forbidden or unable to speak. They are unwilling to compete for attention. They dread the thought that the public will shout back. This phobia has been the strategic advantage of populists like Trump, who achieve proximity with the public by engaging with it on digital platforms. Until more constructive politicians master the art of online communication, the crisis of the elites will only deepen.

It is a long essay, but worth your time.

2. Gurri interviews Andrey Mir. Mir says,

The internet revealed that the business of the news media rested not on information but on the lack of information. Those conditions are gone. The market is already willing to abandon newspapers, but society is not yet ready. Social habits have slowed down the process. But it is demographics that have begun the final countdown. This is why it is possible to calculate the deadline, figuratively speaking. Millions of students today have never even touched a newspaper. They simply do not know how to consume the press, nor are they aware of why they should do it. As soon as this generation takes command, newspapers are done. Hence the last date for the industry—the mid-2030s.

In July of 2002, I wrote,

The newspaper business is going to die within the next twenty years. Newspaper publishing will continue, but only as a philanthropic venture.