There’s one thing I’m still not clear about from the book. You distinguish talk from thought but … many readers do not make this distinction…
Three antagonistic framings of issues that the three tribes use in a constant intellectual war – the antagonism causing them to represent each issue entirely as one of civilization versus barbarism, or oppressor-victim, or coercion-liberty. This leaves little room for hope as it has nothing to say about what people think: perhaps it’s not simple partisanship but how they really think too.
In theory, I see a distinction between:
1) arriving at an opinion by yourself. Call this private reasoning.
2) justifying your opinion to others. Call this public justification.
I mean for three axes model to apply to (2). But in practice (1) and (2) are so closely related that it is easy to slip into applying the model to (1).
Let’s use an example. Take the travel ban from Muslim countries. Along the oppressor-oppressed axis, what stands out is the fact that many American non-Muslims are wary of Muslims, and to progressives this makes Muslims an oppressed class. For a progressive, this justifies opposing the ban. Along the civilization vs. barbarism axis, what stands out is the threat that Muslim extremism poses to our civilization. For a conservative, this justifies supporting the ban. Along the coercion-liberty axis, what stands out is that the ban coercively deprives innocent people of an important right. For a libertarian, this justifies opposing the ban.
However, I do not wish to say that any person adopts a single-axis reason for supporting or opposing the ban. In fact, a person who self-identifies as progressive and who takes a progressive position on many issues might, for some reason, support the ban. Our tribal axis plays a role in private reasoning, but it is not everything.
When I say “justifies,” I mean public justification, not private reasoning. In public (i.e., talking with others), a progressive is likely to:
a) make oppressor-oppressed arguments against the ban;
b) view favorably others who use such arguments;
c) accuse supporters of the ban of being oppressors
In fact, even if a progressive for some reason had decided to support the ban, that progressive still would be receptive to (a) – (c). With regard to (c), the hypothetical ban-supporting progressive probably would feel a need to say, “Yes, I know there are many Islamophobes out there who support the ban, but my reason for supporting the ban is not Islamophobia.”
It is easier to escape your preferred axis privately than in public. When you are among members of your own tribe, it is almost impossible to escape from your (tribe’s) preferred axis.
I hope that helps.
OT — Prof. Kling, can you recommend any studies of Canada’s single-payer healthcare system? Thanks!
“It is easier to escape your preferred axis privately than in public. When you are among members of your own tribe, it is almost impossible to escape from your (tribe’s) preferred axis.”
Another reason multiculturalism fails. People only debate reasonably amongst people they trust. You can have an in good faith disagreement about methods with someone you believe has your well being at heart. You can’t debate with an enemy out to destroy you. However, there is a limit to how different people can be from one another at a fundamental level and still consider themselves part of a single in-group.
I believe that progressives couch support for the ban in oppressor/oppressive framework. In this case something called “radical Islam” as distinct from “real Islam” or “Arab peoples” is actually oppressive and therefore needs to be banned.
In fact Trump tried rather hard to base his ban around this rhetoric but he got basically no credit for it. Just like he got no credit for being the most sexually libertine Republican in a long time. Trump made some rather distinct plays for progressive voters: 1) Democrats won’t acknowledge that oppressive “Radical Islam” is a threat to progressive social values and 2) That certain Democratic policies have harmed blacks in the Rust Belt. 3) Some kind of cease-fire on social issues with progressives holding on to all gained ground as of 2016.
He didn’t get much in return for these overtures, especially when you talk about educated progressives. It seems to me proof that Republican outreach to progressives is impossible.
It doesn’t matter what he says, it’s what he does.
You say “Some kind of cease-fire on social issues with progressives holding on to all gained ground as of 2016.”
But what does he do? His appointments and executive orders are most certainly rolling back ground on social issues.
Yes, he’s the “most libertine…” But Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III? Seriously?
The Muslim ban is anot her example. Worried about terrorists? Then ban Saudis for God’s sake!!!
There is another level of social phenomenon implied from the logic of public justification within a frame. That is, advocated trying to influence public opinion will tell a story about some situation in precisely a manner so as to fashion the maximum in-frame narrative so that members of their own side will make the intended interpretations, even if that involves some Procrustean stretching of the truth.
The “Muslim ban” rhetoric provides a good example. It’s not a Muslim ban. It’s a temporary ban of everyone of any religion from a small minority of Muslim-majority countries that are uncontroversially disproportionate sources of terrorists while also being incapable, unreliable or intentionally uncooperative with US security screening efforts. Muslims from any other country, to include the majority of mostly Muslim countries, are unaffected. One can’t even argue that it has the effect of being a “Muslim ban” in practice, because it doesn’t. But that doesn’t fit the needs of the interpretive axis, so progressive advocates feel the need to claim they can “see through the veil” and get to the real heart and motivation of the order, while justifies them characterizing it in maximal “oppressor-oppresed” terms, and to leave others who don’t know better with the wrong impression of what the order says and does, to the point where most people also blindly parrot the misleading language, in a process that gives false social proof by accumulated exposures to repetition.
There is also marketing and polarization, which you don’t even have to truly believe.
Another tell is how they extrapolate from a clearly constitutional (don’t take my word for it, take the word of 9 justices…and ni, i dont like it) travel ban to “Trump is Hitler.” They even resorted to extrapalating his public statements in and extralegal juris prudence move. He isn’t the oppressors that he would have to be for their position to make sense, so they pretend he is.
I think you give too much credence to reason. Most of it should be modeled as driven by emotion which drives social status fights. How you feel about members of group X or Y pretty much determines your outcome. Rationalizations come later. It is really hard to get your tribe on the same page with facts and figures, but it is pretty easy to do it with Twitter hash tags!
As Scott Adams might say, and others less saliently, the issues are too complex facts to matter.
“It is easier to escape your preferred axis privately than in public. When you are among members of your own tribe, it is almost impossible to escape from your (tribe’s) preferred axis.”
But am I never really among my ‘libertarian tribe’ — that happens pretty much only online. There are some around here, of course, but I’d have to go out find them, and I haven’t done so. I suspect the same is true of a lot of small-l libertarians. But among libertarians online, I really wouldn’t hesitate to express non-orthodox opinions for fear of being shunned. That worry doesn’t even occur. Among my progressive acquaintances in Ann Arbor, though, it’s a definite possibility. So it really doesn’t seem symmetrical to me. I find libertarians more likely to rely on reason than emotion and less groupish/tribal. And this is what Haidt discovered in studying libertarians:
“On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.”
http://righteousmind.com/largest-study-of-libertarian-psych/
How do you sell libertarian ideas to people who lack the capacity (or at least the inclination) to ‘reason their way to ideology’? It’s a problem. I don’t think libertarian ideas are inherently foreign — I suspect my progressive neighbors would be perfectly happy classical liberals if that was the done thing around here. But there’s no way they’re going to do it when it would make them oddballs.
It’s funny because the libertarian’s an oddball now, but not in the state of nature. In society, he’s a foreigner. In the state of nature, he is himself, in a way that a domesticated man, according to Rousseau, can never be himself.
The un-domesticated man is Rousseau’s natural man, the savage in the woods, the un-social animal. “The natural man, who lives a truly human life and for whom the opinion of others means nothing, follows solely his inclinations and his reason, without regard for public approval or blame.” Truly human, as Rousseau says, but not recognizably human to any of us who live in society. To us he’s not just an oddball, but a beast.
You do realize that we are more educated, smarter and technology oriented than everyone right?
We just don’t do group think. It is primitive.
Sigh. Two things. First, there’s nothing odd about individual libertarian beliefs. There are plenty of ‘non oddballs’ who agree with me on ending the drug war and gay marriage and reducing the size and aggressiveness and share a lot of my cultural tastes. Those folks are progressives. And there are plenty of ‘non oddball’ people who agree with my appreciation for free markets and school choice and would like to see the size and intrusiveness of government scaled back. Those people are conservatives. The current oddness of libertarians comes from not fitting in with either of the dominant tribes and being unwilling to change opinions in order to do so. It has nothing to do with specific beliefs being weird.
And it also definitely doesn’t have to do with being a ‘natural man’ separate from society. Libertarianism is about voluntary organizations instead of bureaucracies. It’s also about the cooperation embedded in markets. One of the most famous libertarian writings is “I, Pencil” which is about the enormous, distributed, unplanned cooperation involved in producing even ‘simple’ modern manufactured products like pencils. One of the reasons I’m no fan of ‘buy local’ efforts is that I love the idea of an integrated world and the mutual benefit from global networks that bring me wine from France, coffee from South America, electronics from China, and the car I drive from Japan by way of a plant in Indiana. Awesome stuff. Why on earth would I want to try to restrict my dealings to only people within a small local area?
And this kind of profound, positive sum, global cooperation produces not just pencils and iPhones, but improved morality. People involved in markets are more trusting and more willing to treat strangers fairly:
https://www.livescience.com/8110-play-nice-strangers.html
I wasn’t talking about Henry David Thoreau, or Leonard Read.
When I say “in the woods” I mean the primeval forest, with the gorillas and chimps.
What I’m talking about is Rousseau’s “natural man,” his “savage.” More beast than man. Which is why Voltaire mocked Rousseau with the line about “going on all fours.” Voltaire understood the impossibility of actually un-doing society and returning to the state of nature. Which means that Voltaire read Rousseau correctly, because Rousseau himself wasn’t saying we could actually delete the last couple hundred thousand years.
Think of the wolf. The wolf is the un-domesticated dog. The libertarian is the un-domesticated man. Not a mimic. Not eager to please. Libertarians think for themselves. As we all agree.
That’s the difference between libertarians and humans. Humans aren’t rational or cerebral. They’re social, imitative, cultural. Humans don’t use their heads. Humans take their directives from the collective brain. “Individual reasoning” isn’t human. But it is libertarian. And it is odd.
“That’s the difference between libertarians and humans. Humans aren’t rational or cerebral. They’re social, imitative, cultural. Humans don’t use their heads. Humans take their directives from the collective brain. “Individual reasoning” isn’t human. But it is libertarian. And it is odd.”
In the 19th century, classical liberals were a mix of people who reasoned themselves into it and people who picked it up by osmosis (there were a lot of classical liberals — known then just as ‘liberals’ — around to pick it up from). That’s less true now. But it doesn’t have to remain that way forever — there’s nothing inherent in libertarian ideas such that only rationalist/individualist types could hold them.
But the problem is one of creating a critical mass, making it easy for ‘normies’ to hold libertarian ideas via agreeableness and conformity. It’s a very hard problem, and not one that will be solved by ever more beautiful rational arguments.
Consider this framework:
Language is useful for exchange, and exchange implies more than one agent. This is analogous to economics as optimization (one person) as compared to economics as exchange (many people).
Robinson Crusoe on an island alone does not have to justify his actions to anyone other than himself. But once an action becomes political, involving Friday or Ricardo or both, then that action has to be justified in itself, or has to involve some form of exchange involving other actions in order to attain the approval of the others. Otherwise the action is force.
Politics can be exchange, so long as we seek the approbation of all interested parties. However, factions emerge when we only seek the approval of a closed group. In order to signal sympathy within that group an individual has to adopt that group’s patois. Shibboleths provide that in-group cohesion.
Thanks Dr Kling, I’ve got it now
The libertarian axis of coercion-liberty seems to be an axis for both private reasoning and public justification. The Declaration of Independence asserts that the purpose of government is to secure liberty (“unalienable rights”), and (most) libertarians seem to accept this axiom. From this axiom, it follows that the proper criterion by which to evaluate government policies is their effect on liberty.
While I think the axes may be what is distinct and unique between groups, it is stereotyping to place individuals in that framework and make that their sole basis of emotion/reasoning/justification. People in general are much more complex and while some claims may ring more true, most have a variety of feelings on the subject that may or may not accord with these caricatures.
Considering the muslim ban, it is in part trying to square freedom, in particular, freedom of religion, with limits on entry and immigration, and concern over effectively fighting terrorism, and distinguishing those like us from those not like us, and these can go either way. For some, people’s similarities dominate their differences, while others may find this a misapprehension. Some will consider this a religion like any other while others believe this a foe to tolerance and freedom of those not of that faith. Some will consider most to have accepted mutual tolerance and freedom of religion or wish to persuade them to and to try to separate them from those that don’t, while others are wary they haven’t and won’t, or may not even realize themselves what this means. Some will worry this has more potential for creating terrorists than combating them or at best a monumental diversion from more productive measures, while others will think it hasn’t gone far enough. Some will reject the crude and thoughtless first attempt while not being blanket in their objections.