In what way is polarization worse now than it was in the 1960s? I think that the answer has to do with contestable beliefs.
Most beliefs about human affairs should be treated as contestable. For example, would reducing the role of government in American health care result in a more cost-effective or less cost-effective system? I have my own opinion, and I hold it fairly strongly, but I see the issue as contestable.
1. A big reason that I prefer “beliefs about human affairs” to “social science” is that the term “science” sometimes suggests a process for arriving at certainty about issues that I suspect will remain unsettled, such as the issue about the role of government in American health care.
2. Note that my opinion that “most beliefs about human affairs should be treated as contestable” is itself a contestable belief. But I hold that opinion very strongly–more strongly than I hold my opinions about the health care system.
3. I might use the term “sacred beliefs” to describe strong opinions about human affairs that you don’t treat as contestable. For example, suppose that you believe that all adverse outcomes for African-Americans must be ascribed to discrimination and racism. Moreover, you see any questioning of that belief as racist. Then for you that belief is not contestable, and I would call it a sacred belief or quasi-religious conviction.
4. Suppose that you don’t believe that the Holocaust took place. I strongly disagree, and I question your reasonableness, but my belief that the Holocaust took place is in the contestable column, not in the sacred belief column.
5. When you move your opinions out of the contestable beliefs column and into the sacred beliefs column, a number of dangerous things happen. Because your beliefs are not contestable, your discourse no longer takes place in what I call Persuasion Mode. Instead, you turn to Demonization Mode. (See my Cato Unbound essay, Can We Improve Political Discourse?.) You become intolerant. You see disagreement as heresy, and you want to punish heretics.
6. As I remember it, the radicalism of the 1960s did not involve moving beliefs into the sacred beliefs column. In fact, it was more the opposite. There was a sacred belief that really horrible things would happen to us if we another country go Communist, and the anti-war movement challenged that regarding Vietnam, making the belief contestable. There was a sacred belief that if you were homosexual there was something wrong with you (the secular version of this was psychoanalytic), but that belief became contestable. Eventually, a lot of people changed their minds.
Arnold, I thought this post and the Cato essay it links to were very constructive and thought provoking but I am left wondering about something. You say that that we should spend more time in persuasion mode and less in demonization mode and I have no doubt that is good advise.
But I genuinely can’t tell if you regard any of your own beliefs as sacred beliefs that do, and should, provoke demonization. Or is describing a belief as sacred just an insult to be applied to other people’s beliefs in this paradigm?
I really like the Contestable-vs-Sacred-Beliefs model. I agree that something has changed since the 60’s but I’m still not convinced that polarization is the main story.
Instead of thinking about “demonization mode” it might be useful to think about “cheater punishment mode”. Humans place high value on punishing cheaters as is shown in the different strategy used by people and chimps in the Ultimatum Game.
If we had a measure for contestability, overtime this would take the form of a logistics curve where the number of minds changed is flat. The best way to change minds in this flat part of the curve is by cheating and the best way to prevent degradation of the contestability balance is to punish cheaters.
I think what has changed since the 60’s is “attention scarcity”. Perhaps what we perceive as polarization is a psychological problem with switching attention. We spend far too much time punishing perceived cheaters when the “return on the investment of attention” is very low.
My response is standard.
There are 12 eggs to a carton in a large grocery store. Uncontestable and the result, therefore, of a specific, unique economic process.
The exceptions to the rule?
In the very large grocery stores we can get 18 eggs per carton, near the center of town. An on the outskirts we can get 6 eggs per carton at the corner store. There is a science that predicts this, I call it the rescaling process. The solutions are unique, uncontestable and predictable, ex post. The same science used almost every where from physics to botany.
In Japan they come in packs of ten. I call it the metric dozen.
It’s not about ‘contestability’ in the scholarly abstract. It’s about continuing to contest after something is accepted as well-established.
A typical progressive response is to bring up the flat-earthers and ask rhetorically with maximum snark, “Oh, I suppose the idea that the earth is round is contestable too! Isn’t that question ‘settled’ once and for all? And what about gay rights or the wrongness of slavery and genocide? Aren’t those settled issues now?”
In the law of evidence, there is a rule called Judicial Notice, “… allows a fact to be introduced into evidence if the truth of that fact is so notorious or well known, or so authoritatively attested, that it cannot reasonably be doubted.”
That is, you don’t need to lay much or any foundation for the fact, and don’t need to subject it to a battle of expert testimony, sometimes even if the opposite party wants to contest it. An example could be “The crime was committed on the night of November 12th, 2019, with sufficient illumination to distinguish nearby objects, because of a full moon and clear sky.” The facts that, “there was a full moon moon and clear sky” are things the anyone can simply “notice” without more proof simply by looking in an almanac or weather report.
If someone keeps trying to contest it, you view them as more than ‘unreasonable’, and likely wrong in the head in a potentially dangerous way, or perhaps of having some kind of evil intent.
For every scholar seriously undertaking examination of the question of the historical reality and extent of the Holocaust, with some attempt to rigorously critique the prevailing view of things on one small detail, there are ten thousand hateful morons – who absolutely cannot be persuaded by anything – in a choir yelling “It’s all just a Big Lie the Jews tell!” that totally downs out his voice.
At some point it’s reasonable to apply heuristic filters and it’s unreasonable to ask someone to take a close seoncd look at every piece of chaff out of the slim possibility that they could glean one grain of wheat out of it eventually. “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
And that’s the kind of thing a progressive would say. They would say that their believes aren’t dogmatic, sacred, or unquestionable in some abstract epistemological way, and instead their beliefs, like all others, should be able to be demonstrated by means of logic and evidence, in just the same way we teach children about, say, the round earth or the Pythagorean theorem. They would be happy to explain it all to you!
Before someone takes you through a proof of the Pythagorean theorem or that the earth is round, these are perhaps ‘personally contestable’ facts. But after the demonstration of proof, to continue to contest them usually indicates some kind of psychological quirk. Or, lets say you can’t understand or verify these things for yourself, but you can’t disprove or argue against them either, every respectable and successful person around you insists on the absolute truth of the matter.
Now there are occasions where one might be correct in going against the tide, but most of the time this happens, the person has some kind of mental defect. This is, of course, the biggest problem with accurate contrarianism and trying to get a fair hearing of correctly heterodox ideas, because 99.9% of contrarians are kooks and cranks and cretins and crazies, and you get lumped in with them.
And, in fact, we acquire the vast majority of our beliefs socially and without personal verification, as Dalrymple argued in In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas. I mean, who personally verifies the round earth by going to measure the shadows in wells like Eratosthenes?
I think what a progressive would say – indeed the whole thrust of the idea behind the panic over “Russian Collusion Bots” or viral conspiracy memes or social media disinformation campaigns – is something along the lines of the “safe for democracy” argument about entering into WWI.
Part of the idea then was that autocratic societies were inherently more militaristically efficient and thus had an inherent competitive advantage over democracies, and so, if democracy was to survive, the democracies had little choice but to band together and crush any potential threats to their existence of that nature, while they still retained the lucky capability to do so.
Progressives look at non-progressive ideas in the same way. They are ‘informational pollution’ which, unfortunately, appeal to certain negative psychological tendencies and thus have a competitive advantage over the subtle, difficult, non-obvious truth. After all, you can hardly signal you’re one of the special smart people who ‘gets it’ if it was so easy that everyone could grasp it.
Not just progressives, actually. Libertarians have been complaining in thousands of pages over the last century at least of the competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas of the more emotionally compelling lure of Socialist bad concepts. Bet you any free-market supporters left in Venezuela wish they could have made the badness of those ideas legally ‘uncontestable’ before Chavez and his masses destroyed the country!
This is in the same way that a ‘dirty industry’ emits actual pollution and is at a competitive advantage over an environmentally clean one, or a firm with fair labor practices is at a disadvantage over a sweatshop. We need to “make the market safe for clean industry”, or “make the market safe for fair labor practices”. Regulation prevents the ‘race to the bottom’ in these scenarios, but what is preventing a ‘race to the bottom of ideas’? If we regulate physically toxic pollution, then why not also informationally toxic pollution, to “make social media safe for the truth”?
My view is that the only way to “make ideas safe to contest” is to give people broad social immunity for contesting them. We’ve reached such a far point in the Gramscian march that the First Amendment, Academic Tenure, Civil Servant Job Security, and Judicial Lifetime Appointments have all now failed to maintain a general environment of meaningful and effective protection of the Freedom to Contest.
The only way to do this that is compatible with our existing legal system and structure is to add ‘opinion’ to anti-discrimination law. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but if we don’t take the bitter medicine, then we’ll succumb to the disease.
I thought that Rod Dreher has it correct in advocating that Christians “let the dead bury their dead”, and imitate the Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. If libertarians have such great ideas, they should form their own communities that put those ideas into practice (to the extent possible), and quit worrying about everyone else. The US and the West are largely a lost cause for those sorts of ideas right now, and just as inhospitable to religious faith. They also need to prepare for the fact that their beliefs will mean that they are barred from many professions and that they are not welcome in “polite company”, and that people will not want them as neighbors and will instruct their children to ostracize the children of heretics from the progressive confession. Most people won’t be able to retain their core beliefs and values in that situation, but from a libertarian perspective, so what? For Christians there is the risk of eternal damnation, but nothing comparable for libertarians.
The trouble is, “the persecution is the point”. The thing about witch-hunting is that it’s fun, motivating, and rallying. People will go completely out of their way and cause a fight over nothing for no other reason than just to make some heretic’s life a living hell.
Long after any residual religious sentiments posed any threat whatsoever to Communist or other revolutionary regimes, one still saw plenty of conscience-shocking mistreatment of the faithful because in such circumstances nothing less than total eradication will do. The ‘mopping-up operations’ are the worst.
Indeed, the lower the threat level, and the more helpless and meek one’s enemies, the more intense the glee and delight and political utility in whipping up hysteria and stomping one’s boot into their faces.
Dan Klein recently asked about the timing of The Great Awokening, and why, for example, the New York Time would ramp up their anti-white animus and reporting on ‘racism’ by an order of magnitude when any objective indicators of racist attitudes and conditions are at all-time lows. Because the people who would oppose that behavior are no longer powerful enough to do so. So there’s nothing to get in the way of some fun, team-morale-building agitprop.
So, there is zero reason and thus totally naive to believe those hypothetical new isolated communities will be left alone, that is, unless they also operate with a political strategy that concentrates enough power and influence to effectively defend their interests. In which case, why go Amish?
The Constitution won’t protect these people for much longer. As a random example, why should the Catholic Church be permitted to continue with hiring practices that clearly discriminate against women? Because some “law” says so? No worry, just interpret that law away, and whatever precedent to the contrary was wrongly decided no not enough of a ‘super-precedent’.
The state and the law penetrates every corner of life these days and one can hardly breathe without implicating some regulation or requirement. And those laws will always carry ideological and political requirements like warts on a hog and which will inevitably come into direct conflict with religious commitments. In any hypothetically ‘withdrawn’ community, the acts required for merely living and prospering will give rise to “three felonies a day” opportunities for encroachment and abuse.
And if push comes to shove, then there will always be another Waco, and no matter how upright those people try to behave, there will always be some story or allegation spun up and parroted by the progressive press to justify it.
If you think it is the case that the first amendment will no longer have any real power in the US, and that religious minorities and dissidents will be persecuted (i.e. physically attacked, jailed, effectively barred from any form of employment whatsoever) then the rational options would seem to be to prepare for martyrdom of some sort or another, prepare for a civil war, or to emigrate to a more hospitable country. It is a bad thing to happen, surely, but as you note it is what humans do.
There is also organizing more effectively to prevent it politically.
Is that not the debate happening on the right? The the first amendment won’t protect us so we better protect ourselves (brutal realpolitik style) VS the first amendment will protect us so don’t worry too much and don’t try too hard to stop it.
Can’t I try to stop things from getting to the point where I can be attacked, jailed, or have my ability to make a livelihood ruined? Why should I wait around for that to happen?
I find Peter Turchin’s answer more plausible. He has a model of what he calls “structural-demographic cycles”. In that model, our current point is characterized by “elite overproduction”, which is to say that there are far more people who have been led to expect elite status than there are elite positions available. Intra-elite competition becomes fierce because of the higher stakes; losing gracefully is an extremely costly decision. Political violence becomes likely.
OTOH, if “sacred beliefs” are taken to mean “beliefs that justify one group’s claim to elite status”, then perhaps these are two different ways to look at the same dynamic.
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-concept-for-understanding-the-dynamics-of-complex-societies/
I think the 60s radicals had their own sacred beliefs (many of which various radicals indeed listed). However, they weren’t yet strong enough to overturn the sacred believes of the “moral majority” or whatever you want to call it. So places like the ACLU settled on a strategy of “tolerance of free speech” simply because they were the weaker at the time, and tolerance benefits the weaker party. Once the left became strong enough to impose its will, it simply replaced the old sacred beliefs with new ones.
Christianity went through this as well. For a couple centuries it kept asking for “toleration”.
Then it was the emperors religion “maybe” but people could believe whatever.
Then it was the emperors religion and if you wanted to advance in the civil service it would really help to be a Christian, though certain exceptions could be made especially if you pretended to be Christian in public. And meanwhile, if those old irrelevant senators wanted to comfort themselves with their pagan idols, that’s OK for now I guess.
And then it wasn’t OK for the senators to have other religions, and their idols were dragged from the temples.
And then everyone in the cities and all the important people were expected to be Christians, and if you got out of line some cleric would rial the mob into a riot. But if the deplorables outside the city wanted (pagan originally just meant ‘rustic’) to worship their idols, whatever.
And then even the deplorables had to fall into line. And if they wouldn’t they would be made to.
And eventually you’ve got what we are all familiar with.
That took hundreds of years, but it was basically an inevitability given the totalizing claims of the religion. It wasn’t the only one that made the same shift either.
I’ve been referring to this as the moralization of empirical questions. That is, taking a question that has an objectively correct answer that can only be determined empirically, and arbitrarily deciding a priori that some answers are morally right and others are morally wrong.
Science doesn’t result in certainty. It is never settled.
As the great Richard Feynman once wrote:
“It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is *unknown*, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.
That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty… Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth.”
I just finished Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter (really more about Galileo than his eldest daughter). There was something distressingly modern about it.
I also thought of it while reading Razib Khan’s recentThe Coddling of the Neoconservative Mind, which is broadly about pollution/moral taint and investigation.