One wonders if there are issues that justify demonization.
The climate emergency was not discussed in either of the interviews linked to, but it seems as if you believe one side or the other then demonization of the other is the appropriate response. For example, the dominant position as espoused by Greta Thunberg this week at the UN is apparently widely accepted as gospel by the elite castes in the US: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! … … if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/world-leaders-generation-climate-breakdown-greta-thunberg
If one is persuaded by one side of the other, then isn’t demonization of the other side the correct response? Won’t those who refuse to demonize the other side be condemned by the ultimate winners as sympathizing with monstrous evil the way that Pope Pius XII is now condemned as “Hitler’s Pope”?
Now that Elizabeth Warren appears to be the likely 2020 Democrat presidential nominee, maybe it is worth looking at her plans in 3 axes terms and asking ourselves which, if any, can people of good faith differ upon, and those of which if any, only a sympathizer with evil could countenance a conversation?
For example, at her campaign website on of the first plans set out, she proposes “Presidents and Vice Presidents would be required to place their businesses into a blind trust to be sold off.” On the progressive axis, this would characterized as preventing oppressive business people from holding office and allowing anti-oppressors a better opportunity to hold office. Conservatives would see this as barbarians taking over the governance of the country and denying civilized wealth producers representation. And perhaps libertarians would see this as similar to progressives, benefitting the victims of coercion as the expense of the coercer Trump who supports coercive measures like enforcing immigration laws and attempting to advance US business interests at the expense of Chinese exporters and the consumers who benefit from Chinese imports (but of course Warren claims that she would be even stronger against China than Trump.) Is demonization appropriate in this instance? Probably. The Warren web site attributes wide spread corruption throughout the government to Trump acting in his businesses’ interests in his capacity as president. Conservatives would argue that severely penalizing individuals with business success to prevent them from holding office would diminish the quality of future officeholders and likely increase the relative advantage of individuals with government careers and who benefit from government caste support in ways that will result in less human flourishing for the population at large and directly contributing to the decline of public health resulting in tens of millions of lost years of potential life. How can anyone who believes in either side tolerate dissent? To engage in polite conversation about such a proposal is only to legitimize opposition and to accept the accompanying evil.
And there are hundreds of more such proposals that are equally as divisive and polarizing.
Rather than prioritizing civil discourse, might it not the issues at stake and the prices to be paid for various policy proposals make it rational in many instances to advocate all out opposition by any means necessary, including in some cases demonizing political opponents?
People in every age and in every place have had to ask themselves how they will accommodate themselves to a government that they do not support. US citizens are not exempt.
I watched the Russ Roberts interview when it was live-streamed but I found the libertarianism.org podcast more engaging. I’m not sure if it is Kling’s uncomfortableness in front of an audience and/or camera or my own state of mind but he seems to shine in the audio format. As an aside, I find it odd that libertarianism.org uses “the” image of Mary Wollstonecraft in their web banner; she is certainly an interesting and important historical figure but not one I naturally associate with libertarianism.
08:19 Trevor Burrus: And you were predicting Donald Trump, I assume, when you wrote this book in 2013, like no one was.
08:26 Arnold Kling: No, I was not. And I think…
09:14 Arnold Kling: …a lot of the Trump phenomenon is best captured and I call it the bobos versus anti-bobos, which goes back to David Brooks’ bourgeois bohemian
This is a great example of Kling’s humility and willingness to be self-critical of his own ideas/models.
17:42 Aaron Ross Powell: … So, I’m thinking Progressives seem much more concerned with barbarism than they used to be, but they see barbarism as assaults on institutions and Trump supporters representing this.
18:23 Arnold Kling: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, although that doesn’t… I think it doesn’t truly fit the oppressor-oppressed narrative
The interviewer’s conflation of anti-barbarism with progressivism demonstrates a different perspective on the issue I have with Kling’s claim that Conservatives are most concerned with the Barbarism-Civilization axis. Its hard to argue that the cosmopolitan minded Progressives are unconcerned with civilization. I think what Conservatives truly care about is personal responsibility vs. degenerate behavior (D-Gens for the Letterkenny fans out there) of individuals with below average socioeconomic status. This is nit-picking about the labels but I found the incongruity of the question illuminating.
A while back in comments on this blog, I criticized Haidt’s “Moral Foundations” approach to political differences by pointing out that his survey methodology was flawed and that you can’t trust self-reporting about self-regard. It’s the same difference between stated and revealed preferences, and one needs “revealed moral foundations”.
And, in that case, one finds all kinds of overlap and crossover, regardless of what people think about themselves in surveys, and the alternative interpretation is that people are really psychologically quite similar after all, they just hang their same underlying set of impulses on different hooks of topics and symbols and groups.
Likewise, I believe that the Three Languages framework ignores the same overlaps and crossovers that are easy to find in a quick internet search. The reason each value appeals (albeit in different ways) to members of each of the groups is because they really aren’t that different, and merely attach similar impulses of affection and aversion to different hoooks that correspond to their interests, values, and outlooks. Animus derives not from ignorance or failure to understand one another, but to understand one another too well, and to realize that the differences are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Whenever progressives are defending “Our way of life”, current arrangements, or what they consider more ‘enlightened’ ideas, they talk about threats to our civilization, and barbaric, uncivilized behaviors. This is most apparent with regard to physical violence in the form of the death penalthy, (ACLU: “the death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice”), or corporal punishment, or spanking, or even treatment of animals. It also comes up with regards to anything involving the conduct of war (or wars they don’t like), and of course with harsh treatment at the hands of police or interrogators. Slavery is said to characterize an “uncivilized past”.
When progressives complain about “hierarchical power relations” in the workplace, in the family, in religious communities, etc. they immediately start talking about coercion and autonomy.
Whenever conservatives defend something like the right to bear arms (which gets up as many ‘dopamine hits’ as anything, just ask them) they talk about state oppression and coercion and self-defense, but never anything about barbarism. Likewise for over-regulation of business or land. With libertarians, whenever the topic of taxes comes up, it’s plenty of oppression and coercion language.
The common theme of all this is simply ideological favoritism or, “Who over Whom?” / whose ox is gored or goring, as determinative of how each moral foundation / language of politics is applies given one’s particular ideological outlook.
Again, I must object to the psychologized-dismissal of core ideological differences as if it was all groupthink for pointless and meaningless butter-side-up vs. butter-side-down debates. It is not as bad as the political abuse of psychiatry in Communist countries, but it is still inescapably dehumanizing towards others because it tends to consider people with different political opinions or legitimate cause for animus to be mere sheep who don’t have any real reasons for wanting what they want or feeling threatened by the prospect of their opponents obtaining power over them.
Imagine some Venezuelan trying to oppose Chavez and his quasi-communist movement from coming to power, and some political observer saying, “Oh, your anger and animus towards your opponents is completely over the top and alarmist and lacks appropriate levels of civility and respect towards people we can safely assume are good and kind just like anybody else. “Destroy the country” – oh please. You’re just doing that because of group psychology.” – “Oh really, speaking of psychology, I’m fairly cerain you’re the one who is crazy!”
Both. To a progressive like Pope Francis, Oppression is Barbarism when it represents a regression to a a formerly common state of affairs of a less enlightened age, that is, a formerly uncorrected state of inequality and “power relation dynamics” leading to exploitation of the weak, but which was mitigated one way or another by various contributors to cultural progress.
I think if one tries to be more abstract in terms of common motives, it helps clear up these instances.
For example, there is the common motive of “Protecting what we like about our current system and way of life.” Likewise, “Attacking what we dislike.”
This allows for a great deal of flexibility with regards to positions and principles depending on current conditions and whether one has the upper hand or not. The progressives flip from favoring freedom for speech they liked to enthusiastic censors and witch-hunters for speech they don’t like represents just such an instance.
Likewise, conservatives who were skeptical about introducing effectively unlimited right of pornography and vulgarity and overly-weakened defamation law have now come around to the view of these things being a price worth paying to preserve free expression more generally.
To be honest, I almost never see conservatives use the word “barbaric” anymore except in places the progressives would agree, and when I see them defend Western Civilization, it is simply with a positive view of heritage, the way things currently are, and “to preserve the things we like about those inherited values, principles, institutions, and cultural norms.”
Literally “to conserve”, and to thwart unwanted changes, to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”. When conservatives take a negative view of the current state of affairs or trends, and want to restore prior conditions or resist more bad changes, they resort to oppression or coercion language (e.g., taxes, guns).
Thus, when progressives (and libertarians too) want to preserve what they see as cultural progress (that is, a more enlightened form of civilization), they use civilization / barbarism language.
My point is that we see every group showing similarity in psychology tendency and linguistic usage, depending on how things relate to their degree of power and how the current state of affairs compares to their conflicting visions for the ideal form of civilization.
And that deep and irreconcilable conflict of visions is what is really at the heart of the divide, the polarization, the anger and animus, etc.
So, consider two frameworks of interpretation regarding the whole anthem-kneeling argument.
On the one hand, one could say this is all about language and simply a different focus of priorities everyone cares about. The progressives view the kneeling as a rehash of the Black Power Salute at the 1968 olympics (which is exactly what it was intended to be), and merely highlighting the effectively officially-sanctioned oppression of blacks by whites in American society.
I don’t actually recall seeing conservatives use the words barbarism or civilization in commenting on the matter. But if they were to use that word though, they might say that the “social peace and harmony” of our form of civilization depended on traditional ritualistic demonstrations of uniformity in common loyalty to certain values, symbols, and institutions that represent the collective as a whole.
But on the other hand, you could say that conservatives view the heritage of the American past in a positive light, are loyal to its collective symbols and institutions, and want it to continue, (i.e., the “Amerikaners”.)
(As an aside, it’s clear that the great political, ideological, and rhetorical weakness of the Amerikaners is precisely this loyalty (e.g., to The Constitution, or The Supreme Court, etc.) which has become altogether misplaced when the institutions they venerate have been corrupted so far away from their original composition, functioningm and purposes – that is, taken over by progressives to accomplish progressive ends.
There is only one historical solution to this state of affairs, so stay tuned for it to enter and play an increasing role in our politics, but it is to highlight the corruption and draw distinctions between Real and True on the one hand, and the Fake and Corrupted on the other. Not just Real News vs. Fake News, but Real Americans vs. Paperwork Americans, the Real Constitution vs. the Corrupted Constitution, etc. As Iowahawk said about the left exploiting the right’s loyalties in this way, “1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.” The perception that old, respectable institutions for the benefit of society at large are now Skin Suit Institutions for the benefit of elites, is part of what drives increasing resentment and distrust, Martin Gurri call your office.”
While progressives view American history in a negative light, as fundamentally flawed and often evil and with some of those sins continuing into the present or current unjust inequalities being the derived legacy of past sins. Any improvements have been more or less progressive reforms to undue that bad past and bad heritage, and since things are still bad, we should continue to intervene to level things and forcefully change the remaining root causes.
So, in this framework, these is no misunderstanding or mere emphasis on different priorities at all. There are completely different visions for what is good in life, what is worthy and desirable, and what form of civilization is best, and, by implication, what ought to be done to the opposition who wants to change the things you like and impose upon you things you don’t like.
One wonders if there are issues that justify demonization.
The climate emergency was not discussed in either of the interviews linked to, but it seems as if you believe one side or the other then demonization of the other is the appropriate response. For example, the dominant position as espoused by Greta Thunberg this week at the UN is apparently widely accepted as gospel by the elite castes in the US: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! … … if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/world-leaders-generation-climate-breakdown-greta-thunberg
And on the other side we have the skeptical dissenters who see a NASA/NOAA conspiracy to tamper with historical climate records to advance an authoritarian agenda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmhTZuFGGE#action=share
If one is persuaded by one side of the other, then isn’t demonization of the other side the correct response? Won’t those who refuse to demonize the other side be condemned by the ultimate winners as sympathizing with monstrous evil the way that Pope Pius XII is now condemned as “Hitler’s Pope”?
Now that Elizabeth Warren appears to be the likely 2020 Democrat presidential nominee, maybe it is worth looking at her plans in 3 axes terms and asking ourselves which, if any, can people of good faith differ upon, and those of which if any, only a sympathizer with evil could countenance a conversation?
For example, at her campaign website on of the first plans set out, she proposes “Presidents and Vice Presidents would be required to place their businesses into a blind trust to be sold off.” On the progressive axis, this would characterized as preventing oppressive business people from holding office and allowing anti-oppressors a better opportunity to hold office. Conservatives would see this as barbarians taking over the governance of the country and denying civilized wealth producers representation. And perhaps libertarians would see this as similar to progressives, benefitting the victims of coercion as the expense of the coercer Trump who supports coercive measures like enforcing immigration laws and attempting to advance US business interests at the expense of Chinese exporters and the consumers who benefit from Chinese imports (but of course Warren claims that she would be even stronger against China than Trump.) Is demonization appropriate in this instance? Probably. The Warren web site attributes wide spread corruption throughout the government to Trump acting in his businesses’ interests in his capacity as president. Conservatives would argue that severely penalizing individuals with business success to prevent them from holding office would diminish the quality of future officeholders and likely increase the relative advantage of individuals with government careers and who benefit from government caste support in ways that will result in less human flourishing for the population at large and directly contributing to the decline of public health resulting in tens of millions of lost years of potential life. How can anyone who believes in either side tolerate dissent? To engage in polite conversation about such a proposal is only to legitimize opposition and to accept the accompanying evil.
And there are hundreds of more such proposals that are equally as divisive and polarizing.
Rather than prioritizing civil discourse, might it not the issues at stake and the prices to be paid for various policy proposals make it rational in many instances to advocate all out opposition by any means necessary, including in some cases demonizing political opponents?
People in every age and in every place have had to ask themselves how they will accommodate themselves to a government that they do not support. US citizens are not exempt.
I watched the Russ Roberts interview when it was live-streamed but I found the libertarianism.org podcast more engaging. I’m not sure if it is Kling’s uncomfortableness in front of an audience and/or camera or my own state of mind but he seems to shine in the audio format. As an aside, I find it odd that libertarianism.org uses “the” image of Mary Wollstonecraft in their web banner; she is certainly an interesting and important historical figure but not one I naturally associate with libertarianism.
From the podcast transcript:
This is a great example of Kling’s humility and willingness to be self-critical of his own ideas/models.
The interviewer’s conflation of anti-barbarism with progressivism demonstrates a different perspective on the issue I have with Kling’s claim that Conservatives are most concerned with the Barbarism-Civilization axis. Its hard to argue that the cosmopolitan minded Progressives are unconcerned with civilization. I think what Conservatives truly care about is personal responsibility vs. degenerate behavior (D-Gens for the Letterkenny fans out there) of individuals with below average socioeconomic status. This is nit-picking about the labels but I found the incongruity of the question illuminating.
A while back in comments on this blog, I criticized Haidt’s “Moral Foundations” approach to political differences by pointing out that his survey methodology was flawed and that you can’t trust self-reporting about self-regard. It’s the same difference between stated and revealed preferences, and one needs “revealed moral foundations”.
And, in that case, one finds all kinds of overlap and crossover, regardless of what people think about themselves in surveys, and the alternative interpretation is that people are really psychologically quite similar after all, they just hang their same underlying set of impulses on different hooks of topics and symbols and groups.
Likewise, I believe that the Three Languages framework ignores the same overlaps and crossovers that are easy to find in a quick internet search. The reason each value appeals (albeit in different ways) to members of each of the groups is because they really aren’t that different, and merely attach similar impulses of affection and aversion to different hoooks that correspond to their interests, values, and outlooks. Animus derives not from ignorance or failure to understand one another, but to understand one another too well, and to realize that the differences are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Whenever progressives are defending “Our way of life”, current arrangements, or what they consider more ‘enlightened’ ideas, they talk about threats to our civilization, and barbaric, uncivilized behaviors. This is most apparent with regard to physical violence in the form of the death penalthy, (ACLU: “the death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice”), or corporal punishment, or spanking, or even treatment of animals. It also comes up with regards to anything involving the conduct of war (or wars they don’t like), and of course with harsh treatment at the hands of police or interrogators. Slavery is said to characterize an “uncivilized past”.
When progressives complain about “hierarchical power relations” in the workplace, in the family, in religious communities, etc. they immediately start talking about coercion and autonomy.
Whenever conservatives defend something like the right to bear arms (which gets up as many ‘dopamine hits’ as anything, just ask them) they talk about state oppression and coercion and self-defense, but never anything about barbarism. Likewise for over-regulation of business or land. With libertarians, whenever the topic of taxes comes up, it’s plenty of oppression and coercion language.
The common theme of all this is simply ideological favoritism or, “Who over Whom?” / whose ox is gored or goring, as determinative of how each moral foundation / language of politics is applies given one’s particular ideological outlook.
Again, I must object to the psychologized-dismissal of core ideological differences as if it was all groupthink for pointless and meaningless butter-side-up vs. butter-side-down debates. It is not as bad as the political abuse of psychiatry in Communist countries, but it is still inescapably dehumanizing towards others because it tends to consider people with different political opinions or legitimate cause for animus to be mere sheep who don’t have any real reasons for wanting what they want or feeling threatened by the prospect of their opponents obtaining power over them.
Imagine some Venezuelan trying to oppose Chavez and his quasi-communist movement from coming to power, and some political observer saying, “Oh, your anger and animus towards your opponents is completely over the top and alarmist and lacks appropriate levels of civility and respect towards people we can safely assume are good and kind just like anybody else. “Destroy the country” – oh please. You’re just doing that because of group psychology.” – “Oh really, speaking of psychology, I’m fairly cerain you’re the one who is crazy!”
In other news, Pope Francis uses the Civilization/Barbarism axis to critique Silicon Valley. But does he really mean Oppressor/Oppressed? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vatican-technology-ethics-idUSKBN1WC11N
Both. To a progressive like Pope Francis, Oppression is Barbarism when it represents a regression to a a formerly common state of affairs of a less enlightened age, that is, a formerly uncorrected state of inequality and “power relation dynamics” leading to exploitation of the weak, but which was mitigated one way or another by various contributors to cultural progress.
I think if one tries to be more abstract in terms of common motives, it helps clear up these instances.
For example, there is the common motive of “Protecting what we like about our current system and way of life.” Likewise, “Attacking what we dislike.”
This allows for a great deal of flexibility with regards to positions and principles depending on current conditions and whether one has the upper hand or not. The progressives flip from favoring freedom for speech they liked to enthusiastic censors and witch-hunters for speech they don’t like represents just such an instance.
Likewise, conservatives who were skeptical about introducing effectively unlimited right of pornography and vulgarity and overly-weakened defamation law have now come around to the view of these things being a price worth paying to preserve free expression more generally.
To be honest, I almost never see conservatives use the word “barbaric” anymore except in places the progressives would agree, and when I see them defend Western Civilization, it is simply with a positive view of heritage, the way things currently are, and “to preserve the things we like about those inherited values, principles, institutions, and cultural norms.”
Literally “to conserve”, and to thwart unwanted changes, to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”. When conservatives take a negative view of the current state of affairs or trends, and want to restore prior conditions or resist more bad changes, they resort to oppression or coercion language (e.g., taxes, guns).
Thus, when progressives (and libertarians too) want to preserve what they see as cultural progress (that is, a more enlightened form of civilization), they use civilization / barbarism language.
My point is that we see every group showing similarity in psychology tendency and linguistic usage, depending on how things relate to their degree of power and how the current state of affairs compares to their conflicting visions for the ideal form of civilization.
And that deep and irreconcilable conflict of visions is what is really at the heart of the divide, the polarization, the anger and animus, etc.
So, consider two frameworks of interpretation regarding the whole anthem-kneeling argument.
On the one hand, one could say this is all about language and simply a different focus of priorities everyone cares about. The progressives view the kneeling as a rehash of the Black Power Salute at the 1968 olympics (which is exactly what it was intended to be), and merely highlighting the effectively officially-sanctioned oppression of blacks by whites in American society.
I don’t actually recall seeing conservatives use the words barbarism or civilization in commenting on the matter. But if they were to use that word though, they might say that the “social peace and harmony” of our form of civilization depended on traditional ritualistic demonstrations of uniformity in common loyalty to certain values, symbols, and institutions that represent the collective as a whole.
But on the other hand, you could say that conservatives view the heritage of the American past in a positive light, are loyal to its collective symbols and institutions, and want it to continue, (i.e., the “Amerikaners”.)
(As an aside, it’s clear that the great political, ideological, and rhetorical weakness of the Amerikaners is precisely this loyalty (e.g., to The Constitution, or The Supreme Court, etc.) which has become altogether misplaced when the institutions they venerate have been corrupted so far away from their original composition, functioningm and purposes – that is, taken over by progressives to accomplish progressive ends.
There is only one historical solution to this state of affairs, so stay tuned for it to enter and play an increasing role in our politics, but it is to highlight the corruption and draw distinctions between Real and True on the one hand, and the Fake and Corrupted on the other. Not just Real News vs. Fake News, but Real Americans vs. Paperwork Americans, the Real Constitution vs. the Corrupted Constitution, etc. As Iowahawk said about the left exploiting the right’s loyalties in this way, “1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.” The perception that old, respectable institutions for the benefit of society at large are now Skin Suit Institutions for the benefit of elites, is part of what drives increasing resentment and distrust, Martin Gurri call your office.”
While progressives view American history in a negative light, as fundamentally flawed and often evil and with some of those sins continuing into the present or current unjust inequalities being the derived legacy of past sins. Any improvements have been more or less progressive reforms to undue that bad past and bad heritage, and since things are still bad, we should continue to intervene to level things and forcefully change the remaining root causes.
So, in this framework, these is no misunderstanding or mere emphasis on different priorities at all. There are completely different visions for what is good in life, what is worthy and desirable, and what form of civilization is best, and, by implication, what ought to be done to the opposition who wants to change the things you like and impose upon you things you don’t like.