Narrative self-enforcement and the refusal to notice

If believing X makes one a good person, then avoiding evidence to the contrary preserves one’s virtue.

Don’t see, hear or speak anything that threatens my identity and standing.

Contemporary progressivism regularly treats failure to embrace various beliefs or narratives as a sign of intellectual or moral delinquency (or both). The various -ist or -phobe terms that get bandied about label people as suffering morally crippling cognitive delinquency.* At its most trenchant, this attitude to dissent leads directly into an ongoing pattern of “submit or be stigmatised”: either accept claim X or be stigmatised as an -ist or a -phobe.

The claim that those who significantly disagree are morally delinquent is often also tied to a claim of intellectual delinquency: that there are either (1) obvious facts or truths about the world that such dissenters are ignoring or denying. Or (2) that there are facts or truths about the world that folk clever enough to notice understand and yet those who disagree are ignorant of. Moreover, ignorant of in a way that is typically taken to either condemn them, or elevate those who do so understand, or both.

Both sorts of claims are claims about being well-informed. That the folk making such judgements are so very well informed about how the world is, what other’s beliefs are, how the crucial factors work, and so on. Such claims imply a certain willingness to make an effort to be so informed.

It is therefore quite striking to see a pattern of quite the opposite. A pattern of people using various techniques to not be informed. Or, more precisely, to not be inconveniently informed. Comedian Konstantin Kisin has observed that, in the Soviet Union, you would avoiding looking at (or into) certain things, for if you did, that would lead to wrong-thinking, which was dangerous. A similar pattern has become increasingly pervasive in Western societies.**

The protective flaw
The most common technique I have observed to avoid being inconveniently informed is finding some reason why some commentator, publication or other source is so inherently flawed that nothing that they say can be taken seriously. What that typically means in practice is that the source in question does not adhere to the correct narratives and perspectives.***

As a way of self-policing the information one receives, it is excellent. As a way of genuinely understanding what is happening the world around us, it is dreadful. Even if the alleged flaws ascribed to the source are actually in some serious sense a problem, just because a source has problem X it does not mean it is not an accurate source about Y. For instance, just because Sir Isaac Newton engaged in numerological examination of Biblical texts does not mean that he was not a great scientist.

Statements should be judged on their factual merits. But this is precisely what is not being done. Instead, their author or bearer’s alleged position in the moral universe is taken to eliminate the possibility of them providing useful information.

This is both a very bad strategy to being genuinely informed about the world and an attitude that is deeply corrosive to freedom, democracy and science. If a person, group, publication or whatever can be so comprehensively dismissed, then their entire participation in public discourse becomes “problematic”. The narratives of virtue are apparently so powerful, that it enables people and sources to be entirely cognitively dismissed in advance. While that is a deeply self-flattering attitude to take, it is also utterly incompatible with any serious commitment to freedom, democracy and science in its utter dismissal of any legitimacy for dissent and its blocking of anything resembling serious discovery processes.

A version of this strategy is to dismiss some perspective or analysis because of who also endorses, propounds or agrees with it. This is, if anything, even worse because it makes cognitive and moral illegitimacy contagious.

Such strategies are very obviously products of status strategies. They exemplify a sense of being profoundly morally and cognitively superior to any proponents of dissent.

Hijacking science
As part of the rhetoric of moral dominance, the hijacking of science to support narratives of virtue has become a recurring pattern. Such hijacking is a perversion of science in the service of establishing moral authority and narrative dominance. Philosopher Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shopcraft as Soulcraft (a nice review of which is here), expresses the fundamental conceptual error involved well:

You can’t really follow the science because science does not lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, for example by quantifying the risks that attend each, to specify the trade-offs. But it can’t make the choices for us.

Via such slogans as “follow the science”, science is being used as a rhetorical bludgeon in service of moral presumption. Any notion of rule by or through experts, including alleged moral experts, has to involve some moral framework, typically embedded in some legitimating discourse, that frames and directs the expertise. By pretending proper social action is a matter of “following” “the” science, the underlying moral framework is both hidden behind science (or claims about “the” science) and elevated out of the realm of the legitimately contestable.

As Crawford points out, falsifiability is a key to what makes science, science. Authority, on the other hand, requires certainty (or, at least, an aura of certainty). Turning science into a tool and prop of authority means trading in what makes science, science in the service of generating deference. Science becomes incorporated in alleged certainties, so a faith system, so becomes something more like a religion.

To wield science in such a way is to profoundly undermine it as a discovery process. This undermining is very congenial to all those who regard science as a tool of patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacy. It is not remotely a path that is in any way good for the health of science. Nor for freedom of thought, nor for democracy, as any dissent becomes “anti-science” and so illegitimate.

Crawford makes the point that the expanding rule-by-expertise, which is also to a significant degree rule through emergency, involves:

... a de-legitimising of common sense as a guide to action.

This fits in very nicely with “woke” progressivism, which characterises the entire existing society as a set of moral emergencies due to being a structure of power, oppression and marginalisation. Such progressivism also pushes moral narratives regarded as of such obvious moral power that any significant dissent is inherently delinquent. It grounds its justifications in complex theory. It sets up a structure of ever-evolving linguistic taboos developed by, and selected for, the highly educated in a way that naturally tends to exclude those who are less educated from the realm of legitimate public discourse. “Follow the science” and the de-legitimising of common sense supports all these elements.

One of the reasons I have trouble identifying contemporary critical constructivist (i.e. “woke”) progressivism as “left” is because it is so profoundly antithetic to popular, and particularly working class, participation in public debate.

Identity self-protection
This hijacking of science as a moral bludgeon in the service of the prestige-and-dominance plays that are central to contemporary progressivism fits in very well with narrative self-enforcement. If progressivism is just “follow the science”, then any dissent must be “anti-science”. Anything that is “anti-science” is clearly not worth attending to, so can be excluded from one’s consideration, thereby protecting your adherence to the narratives that establish one as one of the smart and good people.

Such narrative self-enforcement, such not noticing, is required to sustain the claim that one has to believe X to be a good person, the more so the more particular to a time and place such a belief is. And many of the current you-have-to-believe X-to-be-a-good-person claims are very particular to this time and place. Such as all the results of conflating sex (which gametes your body is structured to produce) with gender (the sets of behaviours, expectations and cultural narratives associated with how your body is structured).

When folk wonder how mad and destructive claims keep spreading, the short answer is because so many folk have come to believe that either endorsing them is required to show you are a good person, that you are an informed person, that you are a smart person, or that adversely noticing their spread deprives you of such status. So long as such claims, or such avoidings of noticing, continue to be successfully paraded as being what the smart-and-good-people believe and do, people will continue to practice narrative self-enforcement so that they can stay within the set of persons who constitute the smart and the good.

If I wanted to summarise contemporary progressivism in one sentence it would be (1): the systematic sacrifice of discovery processes in the service of moral status. (Including shielding one's moral status.) Or (2) the possessors of human capital and the possessors of commercial capital getting together to screw over the working class. (But that is a pattern for another time.)

Narrative self-enforcement, blocking one’s own acquisition of inconvenient facts or confronting realisations, is engaging in such systematic, sacrifice of discovery so as to protect one’s sense of being one of the smart and the good. Doing so, so as to clothe oneself in the protective public status of being such.

I used to wonder how people in the past could not notice that the social system, or key parts thereof, that they relied upon was threatening to, or was, collapsing around them. I now realise that it can be remarkably easy to simply refuse to see what is too cognitively threatening to notice.

ADDENDA

*For instance, finding some statement that, if you squint at it in just the right way, can be derided as racist, thereby discrediting everything from that person or source.

**Commentator Steve Sailer has just about built a career on noticing how (progressive) folk refuse to notice.

***This can be used to discount an individual, a group of individuals or an entire organisation.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]

Freedom, Democracy and Science: three things you cannot have without offending people

The UK Court of Appeal continues the march to give up on all three.

In a recent decision, the UIK Court of Appeal has decided it was fine to ends someone’s employment if they expressed public support for Christian views of sex and marriage, as such views may offend people.

Christians should not be surprised by this. After all, Jesus was nailed to a cross because what he said and did offended people.

Citizens of the United States should not be surprised by the notion that saying things may offend people. After all, the Declaration of Independence offended many, many people. Starting with King George III and most of the British Parliament.

It would be hard to find any major democratic movement, or any fundamental shift in science, that did not offend someone.

What is remarkable is granting such authority to the claim, or even the hypothetical possibility, of being offended so as to affect the employment of others. Loss of employment is surely a much greater harm than a few words, unless they are remarkably powerful words.

The essence of freedom of speech is that our status as citizens trumps the status of words, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Hence we are free to speak.

The converse of freedom of speech is the heckler’s veto. The right to block the speech of others.

If given sufficient authority, it can extend to the ability to punish the speech of others.

This decision of the UK Court of Appeal is clearly a case of a heckler’s veto. A veto over speech of others that is remarkably empowered by such decisions but also highly selectively available. For granting a universal “right” not to be offended would obviously either bring public discourse to a halt or render it so anodyne as to pointless; any statement of substantive content being likely to, or being able to, offend someone.

What the notion of “offensive” speech does, under a very thin veneer of alleged concern, is set up a limited class of empowered people and perspectives that are granted the authority of the heckler’s veto. An authority that will clearly be used, and in an increasingly restrictive way, as the incentive is to use it, and so to expand its ambit so it can be used even more.

When people talk of “offensive” they mean offensive to right-thinking people. It is an instrument of cultural hegemony, thinly disguised as concern for others.

Indeed, it naturally transmutes into thinly camouflaged social thuggery: camouflaged, above all, for those engaged in it or acquiescing in it so they can, self-righteously avoid or deny any sense of being engaged in restrictive social thuggery. Social thuggery that the UK Court of Appeals has now given aid and comfort to.

In the words of Lord Justice Underhill, the motivating concern was:

... that the expression by the Appellant in the national media of his views about homosexuality risked impairing the willingness of gay people with mental health difficulties to engage with its services.

The Employment Tribunal, whose decision was being appealed, found that:

11.6 Both parties accepted in evidence that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (‘LGBT’) members of the community suffer disproportionately from mental health problems. Both parties also accept that there have been significant difficulties with a lack of willingness on the part of LGBT members of the community to engage with mental health services such as those provided by the Trust.

11.7 The Trust (and the Respondent) see it as vital that its staff and Board should not do or say anything that could be perceived as giving rise to a risk of losing the confidence of trust of any section of the community it serves, including those, such as LGBT individuals, where there has been historic distrust and difficulty with engagement. The Claimant accepted that it was vital that LGBT members of the community should feel welcome in the Trust and should be encouraged to access its services if they need them.

In other words, the greater the deemed vulnerability, the greater the authority of the heckler’s veto.

As the Lord Justice Underhill says:

... they included opinions also on same-sex marriage and “homosexual activity” and were accordingly the more likely to cause offence or invite misinterpretation.

A simple statement that the views of one non-Executive Director about marriage, parenting and adoption do not represent the views of Trust or staff was not sufficient. His words had to punished by termination, they could not countered by other, more authoritative words. The judgement is saying that the only demonstrated harm from the words, the termination of employment of the utterer, is reasonable and lawful.

In particular, that it was the Appellant who had to acknowledge the problem with his statement of what he believed:

... the Appellant’s conduct made it in practice impossible to try to find a way forward that might have respected both parties’ interests … but for him to acknowledge the sensitivities and the consequent potential for damage of the kind noted above, and to engage with the Trust about how to best to address those sensitivities.

That the Appellant offered other reasons for his views apparently meant that their religious grounding was no longer sufficient protection:

The fact that that belief is rooted in his religious faith is part of the context, but the interview cannot be characterised as a “direct expression” of the Appellant’s Christianity.

So, the addition of reasoning beyond the religious was sufficient to remove the religious protection. A remarkable piece of legal reasoning that surely renders the protection for religious belief and expression rather moot. It is even more remarkable in this instance as it is, after all, true that children are statistically much safer if they are raised by both biological parents.

Lord Justice Underhill distinguishes between the belief and the objectionable manifestation of the belief. This is apparently based in recent case law, but it is a usage that should surely make one nervous. It makes it much easier to claim not to be restricting freedom of speech, or punishing beliefs, just their “objectionable manifestation”. A distinction that could easily amount to remarkably little difference.

This is a free speech issue. As the Lord Justice Underhill says:

The issue raised by this case is not about what beliefs such a person holds but about the limits on their public expression. …there are circumstances in which it is right to expect Christians (and others) who work for an institution, especially if they hold a high-profile position, to accept some limitations on how they express in public their beliefs on matters of particular sensitivity. …This is a decision on the facts of a particular case, and wider conclusions should not be drawn from it.

But, of course, they will be. The expression of Christian beliefs can lead to lawful sacking. The UK Court of Appeal has found so.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to be in error. If error has no rights, there is no freedom, just complete power being held by those with the authority to declare what is in error.

Causing offence is simply a way to be deemed to in error, and to be declared to be such.

Democracy, freedom and science all require the clash of ideas so error can be detected by emergent processes, not top-down diktat. The robust operation of democracy, of freedom and of science must entail offending people. Consider how many people were offended by Darwin’s ideas about natural selection.

Consider how many people are still offended by taking evolutionary biology seriously.

Judges of the United Kingdom swear (by the relevant ultimate religious authority) or affirm a Judicial oath of office, that:

I, ____________ , do solemnly sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second in the office of ____________ , and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill will.

Freedom, science and democracy are surely part of the laws and usages of the Realm. Perhaps British judges should not continue to march along the road of giving up on all three?

[Cross-posted from Medium.]

The social justice steamroller: a pervasive and profound attack on citizenship

Political scientists Eric Kaufman and Matt Goodwin, in a recent online dialogue, discussed how centre-right parties have not found a language to deal with the current woke surge. There is language available: it is the language of citizenship. For the woke surge is, by its nature, a profound attack on citizenship.

Do you belong to an organisation that passed a crucial motion at the end of the meeting with very little debate? Was such a motion cast in such a way that dissent was treated as immoral or otherwise contemptible? Did the motion pass itself off as anti-racist, a matter of social justice, or something similar?

Congratulations, you have experienced the social justice steamroller in its most complete form, the critical social justice steamroller.

The basic premise of the critical social justice steamroller is that any pushback to social justice is itself just replicating oppression, and the discourses of oppression, and so is inherently oppressive and illegitimate. As error has no rights, not only should such discourses of oppression not be given any expression, things should ideally be arranged so they have no chance of being expressed.

And everything that does not endorse social justice is a discourse of oppression.

All versions of error has no rights are profound attacks on citizenship. All of them: hate speech, political correctness, wokeness, critical race theory, critical social justice ...

They are all profound attacks on citizenship because citizenship rests on the status to speak.

From the status to speak we build the social and political bargaining that makes democracy work.

Bargaining requires voice, and democracy requires bargaining

People think that democracy is about elections. They are half right. Democracy is about social bargaining where elections make the social bargaining matter.

To engage in social bargaining one has to be able to express one’s concerns. That is the crucial element of citizenship: the status to speak, to discover common voices, to cohere with the like-minded. It is the status to speak, and to discover common concerns, plus a vote that (collectively) matters that generates the ability to bargain about the future of one’s community and society.

Without the status to speak, elections just become rituals.

Bargaining plus elections creates democracy: 

democracy = bargaining + elections.

Social and political bargaining require voice, it requires the status and ability to speak in public and in private. To seek to drown dissenting voices is to block the ability to bargain, to block participating in the political life of your community and society in any open and effective manner. Without the ability and status to speak, politics is just a game of approved insiders and elections are just rituals.

Elections without bargaining are just rituals: 

elections - bargaining = ritual. 

That’s how the ritual elections of totalitarian societies work. Official propaganda drowns out any other public discourse,* and forces public acquiescence to the supporting narratives the dominant regime wants to push. Only approved organisations or groups are permitted in the public and political space. All bargaining is blocked and all one is left with is the legitimating ritual of elections that express the dominance of the regime.

No voice = no bargaining.

No bargaining = no effective citizenship.

No effective citizenship = no democracy.

We are in the midst of a pervasive campaign to deny citizens their voices. People are afraid of getting sacked if they say the wrong thing. This fear of losing one’s job is a form of job terror. It is a profound denial of your status as a citizen and of your ability to be an active citizen.

If you can control what people feel able to say, you can control the public spaces, and even private spaces. You stop the ability of people to express their concerns, to find and cohere with other people who share their concerns.

Such conformity, enforced by Twitter mobs, and other social media pile-ons, seeks to replace citizenship with social dominance by mobilised conformity.

The public rage by so many progressive voices at the Brexit vote in Britain, or the election of Donald Trump in the US, is the rage of frustrated social dominance.

The logical next step, of course, is attempt to block the ability to vote the “wrong” way. For votes “in error” have no rights either. But blocking the ability to express concerns is more easily managed. Online media can and is used to block online access by those deemed not to possess the status to speak.

The apologists for political correctness claim it was just about being kind to people when you speak. Just as the apologists for wokeness say it is about protecting the vulnerable.

Except, in both case, it is the PC and the woke who get to define what counts as kind, what counts as protecting the vulnerable, and who counts as vulnerable, who counts as people to be kind to.

The entire approach, in whatever form, harnesses the wish not to hurt others, the care/harm moral foundation, as a mechanism of social dominance by enforcing the boundaries of what counts as care/harm and when.

All of it, even the it-would-be-nice-if-everyone-was-nice-version, is an attack on citizenship.

No social reform worth having was built on just being nice, on not offending. Which is why the wielders of PC and wokeness reserve the right to be shreikingly offensive to anyone they disagree with.

Other citizens have the right to tell fellow citizens when they are being an obnoxious jerk. Even when they are being a stupid obnoxious jerk. (Lots of people on all sides of politics can be amazingly obnoxious jerks.)

A right to speak is not the demand to be agreed with. That is what the enemies of citizenship push.

It is the denial of the legitimacy to speak that is the attack on citizenship. It is the claim to set the boundaries of legitimate discourse, of legitimate talk, which is the play for social dominance.

It is an attack on citizenship because it is an attack on the status to speak. Not the status to be agreed with, or not to be criticised, but the status to speak.

The new taboo-and-dominance Brahmins
In his very revealing assembly of data (pdf) on postwar elections in the US, the UK and France, French economist Thomas Piketty writes about modern politics having become a contest between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right.

The term Brahmin Left is brilliant, because what did the original Brahmins do? They organised rituals, systems of taboos and they sought to grant and deny legitimacy. What interactions were legitimate, what were not. What foods were legitimate for whom to eat, or not, and when. And so on.

This, in new forms, is exactly what the modern Brahmin Left, the Brahmin progressives do. They seek to grant and deny legitimacy. To say what concerns are legitimate to express and what are not and how they it is legitimate to express them and how it is not.

That is why modern political talk has become so full of -phobe and -ist terms. It is all about granting and denying legitimacy under the guise (above all to themselves) of protecting the vulnerable.

It is an attack on citizenship, on denying the status to speak to anyone who dissents in what they say or how they say it. On maximising the level of vulnerability of anyone who dissents.

The social justice Great Awokening is not a fight for social justice. That is just a legitimating story they tell to themselves and that they present to us, and themselves, as an approved public narrative.

We can tell it is not a fight for social justice by all the things the shrieking modern Brahmins ignore, downplay or obfuscate.

Such as the surge in homicides in African-American urban communities that followed the 2014 Ferguson riots, the surge in anti-police activism and the surge in highly selective media coverage over which deaths by violence get covered and how and which do not.

Or the failing to notice, the failing to get outraged over, the serial rape and sexual exploitation of thousands of underage girls in Britain, the Netherlands and Finland by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs, and the priority given to discourse management to avoid noticing that they are overwhelmingly Muslim gangs.

Or that we are supposed to believe in white supremacy when people with low melanin counts have become just about the only racialised group one can safely denigrate. Or in the pervasiveness of patriarchy when men have become the only sex one can safely denigrate.

The social justice steamroller is a fight for social dominance, and it is a fight for social dominance that represents, and requires, a profound attack on citizenship.

It is by the language of citizenship, and the defence of citizenship, of the status to speak, to express concerns as citizens and to, bargain over them, that an effective counter-attack against the self-righteous drive for social dominance using the guise of social justice must be mobilised.



* Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. Theodore Dalrymple.

Piety Display not Virtue Signalling

I have an essay in Areo Magazine arguing that piety display is often a more accurate term than virtue signalling for what people are typically referring to. The piece then examines the dynamics of, and the reasons for, political correctness. Read it here.

Not a free speech issue

If a private publication sacks a writer because they do not wish to be associated with his declared opinions, this is not a free speech issue. It is a branding issue, it is an employment issue, but it is not a free speech issue.

This is particularly true of a publication that is explicitly ideological in its role. (Using ‘ideological’ in its most general sense of having an explicit normative view of the world.)

The publication in question is the National Review, the premier magazine of American conservatism founded by the doyen of postwar conservative movement writers and activists William F. Buckley Jnr.

The author who was sacked was expatriate British journalist and writer John Derbyshire. He was sacked for this article in Taki’s Magazine.

If Derbyshire were to be prosecuted for publishing the article, that would indeed be a free speech issue. But National Review deciding that it does not wish to be associated with particular opinions, that is a matter of branding, of ideological identity, not free speech (as is, for example, being claimed here).

Colour awkward
The politics of race are endlessly fraught in the US and deciding that American conservatives are ipso facto racist is a common conceit among American liberals (using 'liberal' in its peculiar American usage) and folk further left. (That sometimes reaches the level of deciding that conservative support for black figures, such as Condi Rice, Justice Thomas or Herman Cain, is itself a manifestation of racism.) Without getting into the history of American conservatism and race, there are certainly historical reasons why the National Review might have some sensitivity on such matters.

There are also generational shifts. Younger conservative activists are post-civil rights folk. They accept civil rights as a positive feature of American history and a usually very against revisiting opposition to civil rights: young conservtive bloggers actively campaigned against Senate Majority leader Trent Lott after his implicit endorsement of Strom Thurmond’s opposition to civil rights, which led to Sen. Lott’s resignation as Senate Majority Leader.

Either way, the National Review’s decision makes perfect sense. Particularly when leading the ideological assault on a serving black President.

Probability wrong
So, what’s wrong with Derbyshire’s article?

A pretty standard thing: a statistical tendency is not a defining characteristic. It is perfectly true that the homicide rate among black Americans is much higher than it is among other Americans. This is primarily a problem for other black Americans.

It is true that more American whites are murdered by blacks than blacks are murdered by whites. But if a minority group has a much higher homicide rate than a much larger group, it is to be expected that more members of the majority will be murdered by members of the minority than vice versa.

So, Derbyshire has a point then? No, Derbyshire is a statistical illiterate. The chances of any particular black person being a perpetrator of homicide is extremely low. A propensity to violence is not a defining, or even a likely, characteristic of any given black person; particularly a black person who is not young and male. But even a young male black is far more likely to be no risk than high risk. (Their high incarceration rate has everything to do with the insane war on drugs—the systematic, and grievously failed, attempt to deny people dominion over their own bodies—very little to do with any tendency to violence.) Indeed, young black males are far more likely to be the victim of homicide than a perpetrator any white person is.

Even if one accepts a genetic explanation for higher rates of hyper-aggressiveness in African and African-migrant populations, it is still not a likely characteristic of any given African or person of African descent. (Yes, I know we are all ultimately of African descent; I mean descended from folk who were not part of the prehistoric out-of-Africa diasporas.) It is Derbyshire citing averages, when the issue is likelihoods, that demonstrates his statistical malfeasance.

Focusing on someone’s blackness is not focusing on a risky characteristic. It is actually very bad advice to give a young person.

Which is another reason for National Review to sack Derbyshire.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Voice, exit and virtue

Political scientist Xavier Marquez has proposed a suggestive political triad building on Albert O. Hirschmann’s analysis of exit, voice and loyalty.

Marquez suggests that right-liberals (including libertarians) focus on exit as their preferred response to problems of domination, that left-liberals focus on voice while serious conservatives focus on ensuring any existing domination is a legitimate one.

So, right-liberals favour market solutions:

in great part because they think that whenever such markets work well, they enable some people to escape from particular relations of potential domination: to leave jobs, or to switch products, or to escape oppressive social conditions, etc. The competitive market functions here as an ideal of exit, even if actually existing markets do not always work as advertised. … Domination, from this point of view, is captivity, and freedom is primarily understood as the ability to exit a relationship.

Analyses of the power of competitive jurisdictions fit within this pattern.

Conversely:

left-liberals (and other people on the left, though not all) are often far more enamoured of democracy than the dinghy realities of actually-existing democracies would seem to warrant, with their refractory electorates, poor quality deliberations, capture by organized minorities, etc. This is not necessarily because they are blind to their failings, but because their default solution to the problem of domination is to increase voice – more consultation, more deliberation, more organized representation, and the like. They find voice itself desirable, and understand freedom partly in such terms: to be dominated is to have no means of affecting the direction of a relationship, to be voiceless, and to be free is to have input into the relationship, to have a say, which in turn legitimates a relationship. … Democracy is the normative ideal of voice, just as competitive markets are the normative ideal of exit.

Marquez notes that, as unrestricted exit tends to undermine voice, the partisans of voice are typically sceptical of exit solutions. Exit tends to undermine voice by undermining the incentive to use or organise for voice as well as the resources available to do so: particularly if the more articulate and better-resourced are disproportionately those who leave.

If folk on the left are partisans of voice, this helps explain why "left-liberals" often end up being so concerned to regulate speech either formally (anti-hate speech laws, speech codes, etc) or informally (denunciation): if "voice" is your preferred mechanism to change social outcomes, then it is a precious resource to be husbanded and used with maximum effect. It also likely, as Xavier Marquez suggests, to lead to strong concern about who has access to the mechanisms of voice and how it is used. This notion of the normative importance and power of voice can be taken further and become a view that changing the language can itself fundamentally transform human and social relations.

Either way, elevation of the power of voice segues into a demand that certain voices (or at least certain uses of voice) be ostracised or blocked. Voice-as-mechanism comes to trump voice-as-manifestation-of-autonomy. Reaction to such outlooks generates the various critiques attacking the intolerance of the ostentatiously tolerant and the ad hominem abusiveness of the conspicuously compassionate: the tendency to accusation parading as argument familiar from so many comment threads. (Charles Krauthammer amusingly characterised this tension as "conservatives think liberals are stupid, liberals think conservatives are evil". A nice example of criticising Keynesian economics being taken as a failure of moral character is cited here.)

Modernism, post-modernism
A tendency towards ad hominem abusiveness attacking the motives and moral character of those who disagree flows from further steps in the process of elevation of voice. Voice is a manifestation of belief: one typically uses voice in accord with one’s beliefs. So good and proper beliefs lead to “correct” uses of voice, those that promote social harmony (or whatever the designated goal is). Harmful or wrongful beliefs lead to "incorrect" or "wrongful" uses of voice, those that inhibit the designated goal or goals.

[Read the rest at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Demolish, do not exclude

This is based on a comment I made here.


Someone from a libertarian-conservative think tank publishes an opinion piece suggesting that same-sex marriage is a reasonable thing. As the piece concludes:

If marriage is so socially beneficial, why not encourage as many to join it as possible? The choice is between excluding gay people from the foundation of strong families or inviting them in.

This prompted a prominent Australian anti-gay activist, Bill Muehlenberg, to write a piece claiming that homosexual motive was to change marriage and that same-sex marriage would be a social disaster:

The truth is, homosexuals do not at all have in mind what most of us understand marriage to be. Indeed, they have something radically different in mind. Most seek to radically expand and alter the common understanding of marriage. Long-term monogamous fidelity is seldom part of this new understanding.

This is the standard “Homosexual Agenda” move: homosexuals have An Agenda and it's Baaaaad. After quoting various queer folk (six) suggesting that monogamy would not be part of same-sex marriage, Muehlenberg concludes:

The attempt to radically redefine the very essence of marriage is not a minor word change. It will be a major transformation of society as we know it. But the radical social activists know they have to weaken up the public to accept such massive social changes.
That is way it is a truism that social engineering is always preceded by verbal engineering. And there is plenty of this verbal sleight of hand taking place right now, even by so-called conservative social commentators.

This is the “Homosexuals Will Corrupt Anything They Are Allowed Into” move combined with the “There Can Be No Moral Truth To Their Claims, So It Must Be A Trick” move.

So far, fairly standard anti-gay activist stuff: if anything, a relatively mild version.

Muehlenberg’s piece was published on Online Opinion, a very open online opinion website. The organiser, Graham Young, had packaged his website with various other ‘high end’ Australian blogs in a common domain for advertising. After some activism against the site for running Muehlenberg's piece, ANZ and IBM decided to pull their advertising, as Christopher Pearson set out in an article in The Australian. This is a form of secondary boycott, as Skepticlawyer explains in a post which prompted the original version for the following.

So, my response is one of: good grief, where to start?

First, equal protection of the law is a good reason NOT to have hate speech laws and codes. These things are never equal in application or coverage. Some ‘hate’ or ‘offense’ always counts more than others.

Second, Online Opinion is precisely about that: a vehicle for expressing opinion. It does not have an opinion line and it is ludicrous to target it as if does so (or expect it do to so), let alone thereby penalising such a varied range of blogs.

Third, Muehlenberg is very intellectually low rent. A task I keep putting off is wading through his stuff and documenting how intellectually poor it is.

Muehlenberg has the same problem that anti-Semites had when granting Jews equality before the law was a fraught issue: invoking a large majority against a small and vulnerable minority can so easily be portrayed as the monstrous bullying it is (or seeks to be). So, anti-queer activists such as Muehlenberg use exactly the same tactics as anti-Jewish activists did:

(1) Claim there is a single view and purpose among said group (hence all homosexuals have the same purpose regarding marriage, according to Muehlenberg).

(2) Claim that they are actually powerful group, not a small and vulnerable minority at all (which the secondary boycott nonsense just feeds).

(3) Claim that they are fundamentally perverse by nature (so, gays aren’t monogamous: of course, lesbians notoriously have stable monogamous relationships, but we just ignore that, as we do heterosexual infidelity and the argument that promoting monogamy is precisely a reason to extend marriage).

(4) Claim that they have enormous corrupting power. Hence allowing same-sex marriage will profoundly change society. The historical evidence is that is nonsense. But Muehlenberg does not want to consider evidence that the endless war against human sexual diversity he advocates is a pointless and destructive war (except for the purpose of promoting the prime benefit of bigotry — selling effortless virtue and selling oneself as a “gatekeeper of righteousness”).

Arguments for equality for any group usually display two broad approaches:

(1) This society/institution is fine, it should just stop excluding us and will continue to work fine if we are included.

(2) That we are excluded shows this society/institution is deeply flawed and needs to be replaced/restructured, which our inclusion/liberation will be a lever to do.

Arguments against granting some group full membership of the moral community and equal protection of the laws regularly use advocacy of (2) to argue that (1) cannot happen, which is precisely what Muehlenberg is doing. The evidence is, again and again, that there is a great deal more continuity than profound change when exclusions are lifted. Giving Jews, Catholics, Protestants, blacks, women etc equal protection of the laws did not undermine the basic structures of society. On the contrary, it improved access to their talents and stopped wasting resources on exclusion. Giving votes to women made politics more responsive to their concerns, but the continuity in basic patterns and structures clearly far outweighed changes beyond such responsiveness.

But, since the entire argument for exclusion typically rests on “they are not adequate/proper versions of the human”, the opponents are bound to, in effect, agree with the radicals and deny the case of the just-includers. As the claim of the excluders is, in fact, profoundly wrong, the reality of common humanity again and again proves to trump claims of special identity and produce far more continuity than change.

As it will here, as the anthropological evidence makes quite clear. But Muehlenberg is not interested in evidence except when it is convenient.

The historical evidence about marriage in general, and same-sex marriage in particular, is much more complicated than Muehlenberg’s simplicities imply. Regarding the medieval evidence, for example, it took the Church quite a lot of debate to decide that consummation was necessary for marriage, which makes contemporary natural law theorists making such a big deal of penile-vaginal sex as an “obvious” defining feature of marriage amusing. While Saint Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx had this to say, in his Spiritual Friendship on Jesus and St John:

Jesus himself, is in everything like us. Patient and compassionate with others in every matter. He transfigured this sort of love through the expression of his own love; for he allowed only one – not all – to recline on his breast as a sign of his special love; and the closer they were, the more copiously did the secrets of their heavenly marriage impart the sweet smell of their spiritual chrism to their love.

Then there is the fun dispute over Orthodox rites of same-sex bonding.

Yes, of course Muehlenberg is pushing a bigoted line. Bigots ALWAYS claim to be defending moral decency, because bigotry is always and everywhere a moral claim: it is a claim about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, in the moral community.

Secondary boycotts just feed the notion that he and his are Heroic Fighters Against A Force of Great Corrupting Power which anti-queer activists make in the same way and for the same reasons anti-Jewish activists make. But it is easy to knock over Muehlenberg’s arguments, which makes feeding the noxious analysis of social dynamics his sort of activism feeds off all the more deeply stupid and self-defeating.

UPDATE Things get murkier: it appears has been alleged that it was a failure to police the comments on Muehlenberg's post which was the big problem. But that may be an exaggeration.