The problem with epistemology: science, deconstruction, wisdom and ritual

What might be called sense-data epistemology always niggled at me. It seemed to be that our apprehension of reality was more interactive and immersive than the sense-data framing implied. It was not, however, until I came across the online lectures of psychologist John Vervaeke that I became aware of a framework that gave my niggle substance. The answer turned out to be, as should not have been surprising, not more philosophy, but more cognitive science.

A problem with how epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, has been predominantly practised in Western philosophy is that episteme — which referred originally to a specific type of knowing: knowing that or propositional knowledge — is only one form of knowledge, yet it is the form of knowledge that mainstream philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition, has overwhelmingly concentrated on. There is also techne, procedural knowledge, knowing how; noesis, perspectival knowledge, knowing of; and gnosis, participatory knowledge, knowing in. Our knowledge of reality is, like our cognition, not only propositional, it is embodied and extended.

So, no analysis of episteme, of propositional knowledge, can remotely provide an adequate theory of knowledge. Experience is not a proposition, yet we definitely have knowledge of our experience. I think therefore I am is a proposition. The experience of thinking is not, but is part of our knowledge.

Moreover, as psychologist John Vervaeke puts eloquently, each form of knowing has a different mark of connection with reality. With episteme it is truth, with techne it is power, with noesis it is presence and gnosis it is something like attunement.

A theory of knowledge that is some variety of justified true belief is not going to be a satisfactorily complete theory of knowledge, given that truth is a feature of propositions, so is neither a comprehensive measure of connection to reality for knowledge nor a feature of all knowledge. Unless we are going to claim that things which are not propositions can be true. Which is a usage that does occur, but is better understood as meaning reality-connected. Conceiving of belief as entirely propositional is not a good basis for a comprehensive theory of knowledge.

(Thinking of knowledge as much more than just propositional knowledge may cast some light on why it has been so hard to teach robots to walk. Walking is not only a propositional matter, so is not a straightforward computational problem.)

Deconstruction

The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.
Stephen Hicks

What happens if we isolate propositions from truth? If we deny that propositions can have any reliable connection to reality and so cannot have their specific measure of reality connection (truth)?

We continue to act in the world. We still have techne, noesis and gnosis. What will happen is the other forms of information, of knowing, will become both more salient and less tested.

If discourse is entirely self-referential, if it is not reality-connecting, then we are left with power. If discourse cannot be about truth, then it must be about acting in the world. Words become acts of power. Society becomes interactions of power, structures of power relations. Human social action, if it is not about expressing experience and feeling, becomes about power without purpose except power: having it, acquiring it, rearranging it.

We still have our perspectives, but without episteme we cannot interrogate or connect our perspectives except in terms of power. Every perspective becomes validated within itself. Their social validation is a matter of acts of power, not of truth seeking or truth judgement.

We still have our experience of being us, but we have the same problem. Without episteme, we cannot interrogate or connect our experiences, except in terms of power. Every person’s experience becomes validated within itself. To the extent there is any social validation, it will be via acts of power, not of truth seeking or truth judgement.

In other words, if we isolate propositions from truth, we are left with standpoint epistemology. With epistemology without episteme.

Conceiving knowledge as just episteme cripples our understanding of knowledge. It renders knowledge thin and bodiless, without experiential depth.

Conceiving of knowledge without episteme also cripples our understanding of knowledge. Indeed, it cripples our understanding generally.

Both separations are crippling because both approaches cut us off from the full range of knowledge. The first makes knowledge bodiless computation, the second decapitates it from interrogated understanding.

The foundation documents of the Enlightenment were Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) and Rene Descartes’ Meditations (1641). These were about propositional knowledge, about episteme. The pervasive critique, indeed rejection, of Enlightenment ideas that was such a feature of French theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, was very much about deconstructing, not only any meta-narrative, but the reign of episteme. The adaptations from their thought that have fed into the constellation of thinking around critical social theory have continued to dethrone episteme. Hence, its adherents enthrone experience, feelings and power and embrace identity romanticism.

It also leads to the generating of amazing amounts of bullshit: in the technical sense of statements made for persuasive effect without regard to their truth. The persuasive effect typically coming from manipulation of salience. Decapitating knowledge from episteme dethrones truth, but salience remains. Hence creating amazing amounts of bullshit. (Often highly profitable bullshit, however, having persuasive salience.)

Science and mathematics are very much episteme, so they are also in the firing line. Discussing whether 2+2=4 is open to debate is the epitome of dethroning episteme, of decapitating our apprehension of reality. A metaphorical guillotining of our cognitive order.

It also creates a great capacity for self-deception. As John Vervaeke points out, you cannot lie to yourself — you cannot make yourself believe what you don’t believe — but you can bullshit yourself. You can accept things for their congenial or otherwise reinforced salience, rather than their truth. This can involve systematically ignoring awkward facts, possibly to the extent of putting any attempt to raise such facts outside the realm of the morally acceptable. Thus, raising inconvenient facts can cast one as a member of some unacceptable out-group.

Relying on episteme alone will not permit the self-awareness required for wisdom. But, without the capacity to interrogate our beliefs and actions via episteme, the self-awareness necessary for wisdom is also unattainable.

Ritual

To return to the observance of the rites through overcoming the self constitutes benevolence. …
When employing the services of the common people behave as though you were officiating at an important sacrifice. …
When those above love the rites, none of the common people will dare be irreverent …
The gentleman has morality as his basic stuff and by observing the rites puts it into practise …
Kong Qiu, Analects, XII:1, XII:2, XIII:4, XV:18.

Thinking of knowledge as having a much wider range than propositions, than knowledge that, also casts light on the ubiquity of ritual in human affairs. If we look at life as a computational problem, as a set of propositions to solve, then ritual looks very odd. What propositional purpose or function does ritual serve? Little or none.

Now, think of ritual as acts utilising all the modes of knowledge. You experience ritual, ritual generates a perspective, ritual requires technique, ritual affirms propositions. Ritual engages all our ways of knowing and does it as a common experience. That makes ritual an act of social alignment. It is the seeking or signalling social alignment that generates the ubiquity of ritual.

The more controlled the social alignment that is sought, the grander, the more encompassing, the more ubiquitous, ritual is likely to be. Hence, highly hierarchical institutions, which are, by their nature, very much about control, such as armies and prisons, tend to have many ritualised interactions. Such as saluting. Totalitarian regimes, which are thoroughly about control, about creating an unavoidable, an inescapable, social alignment, engage in mass rituals for the same reasons. Up to, and including, reducing elections to rituals.

That Kong Qiu (Kong Fuzi or Confucius, 551–479BC) put so much emphasis on ritual as a basis of civilised existence is highly congruent with him being very much the philosopher of social alignment. One, moreover, doing so in a highly hierarchical society.

A philosopher concerned with ritual implies a wide understanding of our apprehension of reality. Not something that will make much sense to those who see our apprehension of reality as a computational problem.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Why we all need to stop having conversations about race

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
Booker T. Washington (1911)

The term ‘race’ … is a fiction but it is not entirely a fiction. It is a social fiction built around something that we might call population or lineage and those things are real biological phenomena whereas ‘race’ is polluted by politics. … A one-drop rule is obviously a political phenomenon not a biological phenomenon.
Bret Weinstein

Racism is the belief that races exist. … Racism is the belief that there is some sub-specific, naturally occurring population within Homo sapiens that exists between the level of the species and the local breeding population and those are called ‘races’. I have often said to people that every time you hear the word ‘race’ think ‘unicorn’, because it’s the same thing.
Adolph Reed

We humans, as a global species, have had at least five great “out of” migrations. We are in the midst of the fifth, the out-of-the-countryside migration. In 1500, around 5 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. Now, around 60 per cent do and moving to cities has generally been accelerating over time.

The four preceding major “out of” migrations were:

Out of Africa. In a couple of waves, around 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged from Africa and spread across (eventually) every continent except Antartica. If their spread across the Americas is any guide, they expanded their territory at a rate of around 10km a year. They absorbed and replaced every other genus Homo species on the way through, becoming the only biped primate left standing. (“Absorbed and replaced” is, of course, something of a euphemism — there was rather more replacing than absorbing.)

Out of the River Valleys. In a series of expansions, starting around 10,000 years ago, wherever farming was invented, waves of farmers spread across the arable lands (typically expanding at a rate of around 1km a year), absorbing and replacing the foraging populations. The genetic record suggests rather more replacing than absorbing, farmers and foragers having very different patterns of life and skill requirements.

The foragers generally lived distinctly healthier existence than the farmers, but farming increased the ability to extract calories from the landscape by up to 100-fold, so the sheer numbers of farmers overwhelmed the foragers. The last continent this process reached was Australia, with the beginning of British settlement in 1788. The process is still underway in some parts of the world.

Out of the Steppes. Starting around 5,000 years ago, the original Indo-Europeans began to expand out from the Pontic steppes. They were pastoralists who had domesticated the horse, had the wheel and axle, used wagons and expanded across the steppes at about 10km a year and across Europe at about 5km a year. They eventually reached all of Europe (except the Basque Country and Sardinia), Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, northern India and northwest of China. About 4,000 years ago, they invented the chariot, which increased the extent and rate of expansion.

They were patrilineal kin groups of related warriors who replaced a lot of the men in the conquered areas and absorbed the women into their societies. (To speak very euphemistically.) They were also mutants. They were lactase persistent: they could consume milk as adults. Being able to raise animals for dairy permitted them to extract perhaps five times as many calories from a given amount of grassland than just raising animals for slaughter, a huge biological advantage that could not be copied.

Out of Europe. Starting around 1500, Europeans expanded into the Americas, across Siberia and later into Australasia, absorbing, replacing and dominating the local populations, creating a Eurosphere extending across four continents and a significant part of a fifth. The exporting of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas greatly aided this expansion.

This, the fourth great Out-of migration, was an interactive mixture of state expansion and settlement. It was by far the fastest expansion of the four and the only one by cultures that only recognised single-spouse marriages. (Until very recently, it has been far more common for cultures to permit polygamy than to ban it.) These Euro-Christian cultures lacked strong kin groups but had, in replacement, developed a very flexible range of cooperative social mechanisms. With the most successful cultural group, the Anglosphere, displaying even more persistently the relatively high levels of political bargaining that developed in Northwestern Europe in particular. Political bargaining that tended to expand over time and spread to other cultures.

Why that state-and-settlement pattern of expansion? The institutional variety between competing states within Europe led to the evolution of unusually effective states, as that variety gave the selection processes of history far more to work with. Especially as there was enough cultural similarity to make successful mechanisms by one state easier to observe and adopt. The combination of institutional variety and competition also encouraged accelerated technological development.

The geography of Europe was probably a factor. It meant that European states were insulated from steppe invasions and their empire-encouraging, institution-flattening effects. The geography — lots of mountain ranges and peninsulas, no dominating central plain — was, once the social technology of state-building had spread beyond the Mediterranean littoral, antipathetic to a unifying empire, keeping the institutional and technological innovation going. A colder climate may have encouraged more interest in technology.

Non-kin cooperation is a key element of Homo sapien success as a species. It turns out, that if your societies put non-kin cooperation on steroids, you can end up dominating the planet. Until, of course, other people start copying your tricks.

There are those who hold that the low melanin count of those spreading out from Europe makes the fourth of the great Out-of expansion a particularly evil Out-of sequence. This is nonsense, the Europeans were just acting like Homo sapiens. Or, indeed, any species population with exploitable advantages seeking access to greater resources.

If someone waxes eloquent about all the dreadful things that happened in a particular history, congratulate them on noticing that it is, indeed, a history of Homo sapiens. Also be a bit wary. History provides a rich source of information and understanding. Separating us from that enormous information source by presenting us with some narrow caricature of history (of either the oh-so-heroic or of the oh-so-tragic variety) is a great mechanism to deprive people of the basis for critical judgment and thus to disorient, and so dominate, them.

Of course, there can be a sort of grandeur in being the scion of a heroic history or a righteous critic of an oppressive one. Conversely, accepting the being-Homo-sapiens nature of a history can be distressingly mundane.

We can trace this enormous scope of history, including the dynamics of European history, without mentioning race. This is because race is an analytically useless concept in understanding this history. Until we get to ideas that evolved during this history.

A concept in people’s heads

Race is a concept in people’s heads, and what is in people’s heads affects their behaviour. But why is race a concept in people’s heads?

Once upon a time, race was about ethnicity. People in Europe might talk of the Czech race, or the German race, as they would of nation or tongue (meaning language group). Early medieval chronicler Regino of Prüm (d.915) defined ethnicity in his Chronicon as:

Diversae nationes populorum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.

For those (such as myself) that are not up on their Latin, that translates as:

The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.

Ethnicity does obviously matter in understanding how people might see themselves and others, how they might behave, and so on. To the extent that the term race ever makes much analytical sense, ethnicity can usually be substituted for it just fine, as ethnicities are local breeding populations with large elements of common culture. (Complicated by the fact that people can choose to adopt cultures and cultural identities.) Especially if we adjust Regino of Prum’s definition slightly to substitute norms for laws, as all ethnicities have norms but not necessarily specific laws.

The descendants of American (i.e. US) slaves are an ethnic group. A result of ethnogenesis happening in a new continent within the direct gaze of history. Afro-Caribbeans are a different set of ethnic groups. Recent African immigrants to the US are from a different set of ethnic groups again.

Ignoring its more prolix late C19th and C20th “race science” versions, race in the modern sense refers not to ethnicity but to, in effect, continental ancestry. To express this in the classic colour-coded way, whites come from Europe, blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, reds from the Americas, yellows from East Asia and browns from the Middle East and South Asia.

Notice how the only generally acceptable colour markers for race left are whites and blacks. A matter for deeply sceptical contemplation in itself. Notice also that these are not breeding populations with a common culture; they are geographical aggregations containing within them a wide range of local breeding populations and cultures. They do have some (extremely fuzzy) physical markers due to facing broadly similar evolutionary pressures (especially pertaining to sun exposure and so melanin count) and (outside of Africa) specific ancestries from bottleneck events. (The Americas, for instance, was originally settled by a population of maybe a few hundred people.) But these continental aggregations do not match actual genetic lineage patterns.

People are quite accurate in picking their own continental ancestry, but that is not surprising. One is likely to have some idea which continent (or continents) one’s ancestors came from. Nor does the ability to pick our continental ancestry quite accurately mean that continental ancestries are other than geographical groupings of various local breeding populations. (Folk are not as accurate in picking out their ethnic ancestry.)

So, in what circumstances do we want to analyse people by such broad continental groupings of ancestry? In no instance that makes serious analytical sense. Cultures and history matter, after all, but they vary widely across and within continents. But we might engage in continental-wide generalisations if they are useful for some other reason. Perhaps we want to explain, and/or justify, how people from one continent end up dominating people from other continents. Or because we want to have an excuse to engage in mass slavery against people of a particular continental ancestry.

Slavery creating race talk

The latter turns out to be exactly where the first serious ranking of people by skin colour came from. Except it does not come from within a “white” group but a “brown” one.

The original practitioners of mass slavery, the Romans and the Greeks, did not need to engage in moralised categorisation by continental ancestry for two reasons. First, their slaves came from a wide range of sources. Including people who looked exactly like them.

Second, they were not adherents of a universalist morality; they did not conceive of everyone as having a shared moral identity and common moral status. This matters, because they could simply categorise slaves as “losers” and that was the moral end of the matter.

If, on the other hand, you have a universalising morality, then clearly slavery, reducing people to property, is an offence against the notion that we are all moral beings sharing a common moral identity. So, some moralising story has to be told to explain why this group could be enslaved, could be so dramatically exempted from the moral status and protections granted to everyone else.

Any such story is not going to be a positive one for those targeted for enslaving.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle did write about “natural born slaves”. Aristotle’s ethics had a universalising tendency, so he was forced to give some moral story about why some people were slaves and others weren’t. But there was no ancestry basis for this, as patently people from all and any ethnicity or ancestry could and did end up as slaves.

The Romans generally regarded such natural-born slave theorising as Greek silliness. Of course there was no natural justification for slavery. Hence freed slaves could become Roman citizens. (I.e. be promoted to winners.) In fact, Rome operated one of the most open slave systems in history. (A nice discussion of the complexity of Roman slavery is provided here.) Rivalled in its openness only by Islamic mamluk “slave to lord” systems, whereby slave boys were trained as warriors, yet could come to hold an iqta tax-collecting land grant, and so be one of the lords of the realm.

It is within Islam that we first get discourses that tie colour to continental ancestry, and then to alleged moral qualities, as it is within Islam that we first get the deadly combination of universalising morality and mass slavery.

Islam holds that we are all children of Allah who should be led into the community of submission to Allah, the sovereign lawmaker of the universe. (Sharia being the human understanding of the laws of of the sovereign of the universe discerned through fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.) Sharia explicitly permits slavery. Indeed, capturing slaves was one of the benefits of engaging in jihad; in the righteous struggle to spread submission to Allah across the globe.

Slaves were, moreover, very useful. So useful, it was good to have groups permanently outside the territory of submission to Allah, so that they could be regularly enslaved. For those who have submitted to the rules of Allah could not be rightfully enslaved. But there had to be some justification for not bringing the sources of slaves within the fold of submission to Allah. The answer was, of course, that their systematic defects of character made them particularly fit for slavery.

Thus we have Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) writing in the Islamic fifth century in his (1068) Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations):

The rest of this tabaqat, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples. (Chapter 3: Nations Having No Interest in Science).

It is amazing how stupid and lazy slave groups are so often reported to be. It is almost as if slavery is antipathetic to commitment to hard and diligent work.

This is classic denigration of a slave group because your universalist morality (they are children of Allah who should be converted to Islam, or brought within its rule) contradicts the convenience of continuing to enslave them en masse. When mass slavery later became part of their societies, societies that professed universalist moralities, Christian and Enlightenment writers responded to the same imperative in the same ways. Except, of course, they were specifically enslaving people of African origin, not Europeans as well.

Sa’id also denigrates sub-Saharan Africans for the same justifying-mass-slavery reason. He then has a problem, however, for South Asians clearly have very advanced mathematics and science but very dark skins. He wants to make it clear that they are a very different group:

The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal [essence] of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are people of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions. In spite of the fact that their color is in the first stage of blackness, which puts them in the same category as blacks, Allah in His glory, did not give them the low characteristics, the poor manners, the inferior principles associated with his group and ranked them above a large number of white and brown peoples. (Chapter 5: Science in India).

Wasn’t that good of Allah?

Race as a category flattens, indeed trivialises, human identity. This makes it ideal for any project of dehumanisation. Slavery reduces people to property, clearly a dehumanising move, but slaves also have to be managed, which creates a persistent tension in slavery between dehumanising effects and practical management and human interaction. The tension is more intense the more moral justification is required to make slavery acceptable.

Racism did not cause slavery. Slavery, in the context of universalising morality, generated justificatory classification by race (i.e. continental or sub-continental ancestry) and so racism.

About slavery

Slavery was obviously a very prominent feature of European settlement of the Americas.

This was because the spread of the Eurasian disease pool into the Americas had depopulated the Americas and meant that labour had a higher scarcity value than land. The normal historical response to labour having a higher scarcity value than land has been some sort of labour bondage.

Labour bondage is the separation of ownership of the labour services from the person doing the work. Either by banning exit from an estate without the owner’s permission (serfdom) or some form of indenture or by turning the person into property (slavery). These are all ways of creating a compulsory employer. They meant that the person doing the work could be reduced to a subsistence income while transferring the scarcity value of the labour to their compulsory employer (usually, though not always, a landowner).

Slavery and other forms of labour bondage have been ubiquitous across human civilisations, extending into modern times. The first Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union, re-introduced slavery. State-owned, slaves, of course. It did so in its labour camp system, in which coerced workers were stripped of all rights, treated as the property of the state and provided with bare subsistence. It also re-introduced serfdom. From June 1940 to April 1956, no employee could change workplace without the permission of their current workplace; the defining element of serfdom. Nazi Germany also used slave labour. North Korea still uses state slavery: indeed, effectively exports the services of slave labour.

In some parts of post-European contact Americas, the indigenous population survived the shock of the arrival of the Eurasian disease pool in sufficient numbers that a form of serfdom was imposed, the encomienda system. After 1542, it was replaced by repartimiento labour service. Generally, however, the collapse in the indigenous population of the Americas that created the resource opportunities for the incoming Europeans was so great that some form of serfdom or other labour service from local labour was not an option. Hence any bonded labour had to be imported. Thus, there was extensive use in the British American colonies of indentured labour, and convict labour. But that had various limitations, as the bondage was for limited periods of time and indentures required people to be willing to sign up for them.

The classic form of imported human bondage is, of course, slavery. Slaves are people turned into property precisely so they can be moved around at will, including being imported. Ideally, from a considerable distance, as that isolation from their place of origin made them easier to control. Having physical markers distinct from the non-slave population also made enforcing ownership somewhat easier.

Across the Atlantic from the Americas was Africa, a continent where disease, predators and megafauna (a herd of elephants can strip a farmer’s field in a few hours) meant that labour was always more scarce than land. Sub-Saharan Africa had a well-established pattern of local slavery which, with the expansion of Islam, become an extensive pattern of export of slaves. (The Sahara passage to Islamic countries was every bit as horrible as the Atlantic passage, and lasted centuries longer.)

Expanding an already existing pattern of export slavery to satisfy the demand for labour in the Americas was remarkably easy. Of course, approximately doubling the export of slaves also hugely intensified the effect of slavery on African societies.

Slavery is currently returning to Africa. (In some parts of West Africa, it never entirely vanished.) Slavery is returning as a trade into Islamic countries or in Islamic countries such as Libya. Production by slaves feeds into global supply chains, including for very prominent companies.

In the Transatlantic African slave trade, the Europeans bought slaves. They almost never did the enslaving. They didn’t need to, the infrastructure of the trade already existed. For Catholics, actively enslaving discovered peoples was banned by a 1537 Papal encyclical. (Owning or trading in slaves was fine, however.)

So began the Atlantic slave trade. The overwhelming majority of the slaves went to Brazil and the Caribbean, where the death rate of slaves was so high, they needed constant replenishing. Temperate zone North America had a much lower death rate among slaves, so (even with smuggling) it probably only received about 10 per cent of the flow of slaves across the Atlantic.

There is a simple, grim, indicator of how high the relative slave death rates were. If slaves lived and then reproduced in significant numbers, they adopted the religion of their masters. If there was much higher turnover in slaves, because of much higher death rates, then African-derived religious ideas were much stronger, as the slave population was constantly being replenished with newcomers while Christianity had less ability to take root. Hence temperate zone Americas had much higher take-up of Christianity among slaves and tropical zone Americas much more African-derived religious beliefs. A division we can still see among their descendants.

If racism and race talk in the Americas was just the legacy of slavery, it could be expected to fade as slavery recedes into the past. To a significant extent, it has in the Caribbean and Latin America. What appears to give race some continuing life, notably in Brazil, is being very class-hierarchical societies where class has a lingering continental ancestry pattern due to low levels of social mobility. Or, rather, continental ancestry patterns make it easy to see how low social mobility actually is.

This is mildly complicated by melanin count becoming a marker of status, as it is obvious that the elite are overwhelmingly of low melanin count. But this is clearly a product of the class hierarchy being made more physically visible by the patterns of continental ancestry. Plus some lingering association of sun effects on the skin with the negative status-marker of outside manual labour. Trying to analyse this class-status pattern through the prism of race is to confuse effects for cause.

What gives race talk so much more life in the US than the rest of the Americas is that slavery did not generate the only use of race talk within the US.

The ancestry problem in American colonies

At the time the British colonies in the US were being settled, European states were avidly continuing their long practice of fighting each other. The European states were not peace states that occasionally went to war, but war states which experienced intervals of peace. Hence the British conquest of Dutch and French colonies in North America.

So, as the North American colonies tried to construct new societies, there was an obvious need to create an identity that bound newcomers into the new societies without importing the rivalries of Europe. Even the British Isles had ethnic and religious fracture lines. The advent of railways and steamships from the 1820s onwards, which is when mass prosperity really began to be built, increased the scale of migration to the US and broadened its ethnic origins.

They were people from one continent (Europe) settling in, and invading, a new continent (North America) and some of whom started importing slaves from a third continent (Africa).

Continental origins were clearly in play, so continental identifiers were the obvious and easy place to go. Whites were the civilising creators of the new societies, reds were barbarians to be defeated and dispossessed and blacks were the slaves serving the white civilisers. Thus Europeans, of whatever origin, could be whites together. Provided they took appropriate steps to fit in.

Inevitably, there were complications. Such as indigenous Americans owning slaves. Race was a gloss on much deeper social patterns and racism a justification for the otherwise morally awkward bits of those patterns.

The white (and black, and red, and later yellow) terminology separated people from their history. (No-one has a continent-wide culture or history.) That made the terminology advantageous in the situation of colonial North America and the independent US. Separating people from potentially divisive European identities within a common American identity was much of the point. The American colonies, and then the United States, were creating a supergroup (to use scholar Amy Chua’s term) around the identity of white. Groups “became” white as they were absorbed into the supergroup. Whatever your European ancestry (and there was no common European identity: there was not even a common religious identity, given the post-Reformation fracturing of Christianity) folk could be “white” together.

There was also a drive by the slave-owning plantation elite to create a common “white” identity. This had begun before the Civil War, once steamships and railways had increased the rate of European migration, but took on much more urgency after the abolition of slavery. In the Antebellum South, the identity construction of race was, with some ambiguities, so as to divide poor folk of European ancestry from the slave folk of African ancestry. In the post-Reconstruction South, it was so as to divide working folk of European ancestry from working folk of African ancestry.

One can tell much about the dominant moralising of a period by what sermonising myths parading as history are popular. This is a genre with a strong tendency to the grandiose, both in moral and in explanatory pretension, flattering both author and audience. Hence its enduring appeal. The current trend is for sermonising myth with a strongly penitential air. This is epitomised by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a disingenuous exercise subject to a great deal of criticism for its distorted and highly selective take on history. (It is difficult for slavery in the US to have started in 1619 if slavery was first legally recognised in the British North American colonies in 1641.) But then, applying Adolph Reed’s principle stated above, a race-centred history of the US is going to be a unicorn history of the United States, so historiographical failures are to be expected.

If one prefers history to be an experience of genuine discovery, I can recommend Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States (2010). Part two of the book, How White People Lost Their Rhythm, explores how various groups — the Irish, the Jews and Italian-Americans — climbed the racialised hierarchy of their new land. Innovative attraction to the vitality and vibrancy of African-American music and dance by each wave of newcomers recurrently turned into rejections of such associations in the pursuit of a sober “whiteness”. A cultural supergroup identity parading as a biological one.

Fitting in meant embracing the cultural model of citizenship built on an English and Puritan cultural core: sober, hard-working, self-controlled, diligent, responsible, restrained. A self-image often not embraced by African-Americans, either during or after slavery, much to the frustration of many African-American intellectuals, including Martin Luther King. But, then, why would they embrace that constrained ideal? They were literally excluded from citizenship when slaves and functionally excluded afterwards by Jim Crow and segregation. The autonomies of pleasure provided refuges from, and rewards independent of, their social exclusions. Hence the cultural vibrancy that waves of newcomers found attractive but whose rejection facilitated inclusion in the American supergroup.

In telling the story of how various groups “achieved” “whiteness”, Russell nicely exposes a key feature of race talk: how much it is a moveable feast. What purports to be biological is very much a matter of social categorisation whose coverage shifts over time. One “rose” to whiteness in large part by one’s embrace of the sound-citizen identity. The effect was to build a supergroup; “white” Americans, who were expected to downplay their past identities in favour of their new one. To not be hyphenated Americans but members of a new-nation supergroup based in part on a double separating rejection — of the hedonistic and unruly black and the barbaric red. After the rise of Chinese immigration, it was based on a triple separating rejection — of the black, the red and the alien yellow. A created aggregation rejecting created antinomies.

There was also a heroic national myth, a sacred history, to provide a binding historical narrative. With the US Constitution being a binding civic icon and sacred object.

Creating a new national identity (and manipulating it for sectional advantage) gave race talk a power within the US that way outlived the end of slavery in 1865.

A utility that was broken, in its overtly racist forms, by the civil rights movement. (Race talk has since made a comeback in ostentatiously anti-racist form.) Martin Luther King invoked, with soaring rhetoric, the principles of the American Revolution to claim, correctly, that systematic separation of Americans of African ancestry from the political life of the United States was a profound offence against those Revolutionary principles, against the deeper story and promise of the American founding. Which, of course, it was.

This was a bid to create a new supergroup: Americans regardless of ancestry. A supergroup of all those who embraced the citizenship, principles and history of the United States. Martin Luther King did not merely want African-Americans to be full political and legal citizens, he also wanted them to be embrace the culture of citizenship. A debate that continues to rumble along.

The convenient divisive cheapness of identity politics

The Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965 coincided with the Immigration and Nationality Act 1965. The shift in migration policy proceeded to hugely complicate the ethnic make-up of the United States.

Having an inclusive politics of citizenship in a situation of increasing waves of new migrants from a wide range of countries, most obviously from Latin America, proved inherently difficult. For the migrants were not part of, but rather tended to break up, the local connections that effective citizenship and resident politics is based on. Given that the new arrivals tended to concentrate in coastal and border cities, that began to create a two-track politics in the US.

There was rural/small town/small city United States of the interior, with few ethnic minorities, who came to broadly accept the notion of a common American citizenship. A process that was easier if there was no prior history of slavery in their region. (As, in the most of the United States, there either wasn’t or else slavery had been relatively minor and locally abolished.)

Then there was the politics of metropolitan United States: ethnically diverse, dominated by an increasingly cosmopolitan elite. The trouble with citizenship politics in such a situation was (1) the increased weakness of local connections due to resident flux and (2) citizenship politics implies resident politics and working-class politics. And if you are part of the networked elite you would prefer politics not go down that path. You would much prefer politics that breaks people up into separate, and separating, identities. Just as had the plantation elite in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South.

Race talk, especially elite race talk, is a discourse of domination precisely because it divides citizens, residents and workers into separate identities. Race talk is very obviously a discourse of domination when justifying slavery. But it is also a discourse of domination when being used to, for example, create split labour markets divided by, say, melanin count.

Here’s the thing. Race talk does not have to be overtly racist to separate people. On the contrary, ostentatiously anti-racist race talk can perform exactly the same function. One simply identifies racism as a major threat, tag it as coming from a particular group, tag another group or groups as suffering under its burdens, and you are away.

It is even better if one invokes a concept of systemic or structural racism. For systemic racism, and the whole identity politics schtick, is a great way to avoid accountability. If there is this pervasive force that affects everything, then no actual decision-maker is responsible for anything. Nor is racism, with its presumptive malice, a useful term with which to tackle the legacies of past race politics. (Unless, of course, the point is to divide people.)

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michael’s point that identity politics is class politics has a great deal of truth behind it. Throughout US history, race-talk politics, of both the explicitly racist and the ostentatiously anti-racist versions, has recurrently been elite-useful politics.

Various disparities between groups can be trotted out to “prove” that systemic racism is pervasive. Yet there are plenty of disparities between groups who have the same continental ancestries. While some previously highly discriminated against groups, such as Chinese-Americans in California or Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, now do, on average, very well.

It is perfectly true that, for example, Americans of European ancestry have an average income of $37,000 while Americans of African ancestry have an average income of $23,000, almost 40 percent lower. But Indian-Americans have an average income of $53,000, more than triple that of Burmese-Americans, who have an average income of $17,000. Nigerian-Americans have an average income of $27,000, Haitian-Americans of $18,000 and Somali-Americans of $3,000. Macedonian-Americans have an average income of $51,000, more than double that of Pennsylvanian-Dutch/German-Americans with an average income of $24,000. The disparities between groups within the same continental ancestries are hugely greater than those between aggregated continental ancestries. How long a group has been migrating to the US, the skill levels of migrants, what selection processes have been operating on who migrates; all these factors affect average incomes.

Median household income also shifts the patterns somewhat, because of differences in family size. (There are difficulties with ancestry data, but since I am only comparing it with itself, that’s fine.)

Moreover, the most common age of Euro-Americans is 58, that of African-Americans is 27. That has huge average income implications.

Pointing out the lower average income (and lower assets) of African-Americans on one hand, who make up around 13 per cent of the US population, a proportion that varies wildly depending which part of the US you are in, and then claiming that every member of the (much larger) Euro-American population (73 per cent) “benefits” from racism is nonsense on stilts. Especially as the most obvious race-based disadvantage Asian-Americans suffer from is the operation of affirmative action to benefit African-Americans.

The disparities-so-racism game may not stand up to deeper analytical scrutiny, but it is simple and rhetorically very powerful.

Moreover, systemic racism more or less immediately de-legitimises any conservative viewpoints — they are boxed away as apologists for “systemic racism”. As the politics of rural/small town/small city of the interior US can be expected to be more conservative than the politics of the increasingly cosmopolitan metropolises, systemic racism talk, as part of identity politics, becomes a rallying cry for metropolitan politics while identity politics separates the citizens, residents and workers of those metropolises into competing groups.

Hence we arrive at the phenomena of “woke capital”. The networked corporate and professional elites like identity politics just fine. None of this awkward citizen or resident or working-class politics. No, instead we have easy purchases of moral legitimacy plus a divided metropolitan citizenry, residents and working class, all at once.

Hence also the odd pattern of the Party that has for decades dominated the cities and states where minorities mostly live getting to blame the Party that runs the places where minorities mostly don’t live for any difficulties that members of the minorities may be experiencing.

A neat trick if you can pull it off. Which, with a sufficiently friendly metro media, you can.

While we could multiply examples of this “not us, honest” dynamic (who has run those police forces folk are complaining about?), affirmative action, in its operation among African-Americans, provides a nicely revealing example of the bankruptcy of race-based policies and politics.

The race-based affirmative action con job

I am deeply sceptical about the alleged value of affirmative action in higher education. Social effort would be much better directed much earlier in people’s lives.

Moreover, taking top-in-their-local-school students and positively continental-ancestry weighting their test scores so that they systematically become bottom students in their university classes is more or less bound to create aggrieved students with lots of emotionally-bruising experiences. Especially if their education actively encourages them to see every negative experience in their life as “racism”.

Allocating affirmative action by continental ancestry turns it into a transparent con-job. It does so by lumping recent African immigrants and their children, who include notably successful groups in the US (said children having already included a US President) and are not the descendants of slaves, as well as Afro-Caribbeans, who have a history of self-government after the earlier abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, with the descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow, who have a very different history and burdens therefrom. (Then again, at some level, all race-based anythings are going to be a con job: remember the unicorn principle.)

One of these days, one of the major Parties may even include a descendant of American slaves on their Presidential ticket. (It hasn’t happened yet.)

The flattening away of the varying legacies people are heir to in favour of melanin count is a profound intellectual, social and moral fraud. Except, of course, pressure is put on to make sure that people do not publicly notice the racialised affirmative action con job.

Re-jigging affirmative action so that it was explicitly for the descendants of American slaves would, however, expose the emptiness of race talk, and the interlocking status, political and income-generating strategies built on it.

One of the many, many reasons Americans, and others, should stop having conversations about race.

Especially when it is used as money spinners in a burgeoning, and toxic, legitimacy-purchasing “diversity” industry. Legitimacy purchased at what might be considerable cost in team dynamics: this is not a good commercial move for a company, however advantageous it might be for morally grandstanding executives or congenial for HR and marketing folk living in social bubbles of the like-minded. Of course, if the aim is to discourage unionisation, then encouraging workers to think of themselves as divided by identity groups may well be helpful.

But while spending vast sums on toxic anti-training may be the most grotesque manifestation of having conversations about unicorns, aka race, it is not remotely the worst or most potentially disastrous.

For if there is no common citizenship, no common heritage, no common principles, then there is nothing to sustain a common nationhood. And if differentiation by constant allegations of pervasive racism, of pervasive oppressive malice, for malice is what the term racism invokes, are used to build careers and protect (and so also deny) access to status and resources, then becoming the violently Dis-United States becomes that much easier.

The United States has already had one Civil War over protecting status and access to resources via exploitative differentiation of people by continental ancestry. Sliding into another one because an academic, professional and corporate elite finds identity politics a convenient path to gain, and retain, access to status and resources would be a world-class tragedy.

Race flattens and trivialises human identity, hence its facility for dehumanisation. The two groups most obsessed about race — woke progressives (or PC authoritarians) and white identitarians — share more than an obsession with a concept ideal for dehumanisation. A recent study has found that (pdf) both groups share similarly elevated rates of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (the Dark Triad) plus entitlement. If what you see most about other people is their race, then you see their humanity that much less. Of course that is a viewpoint that attracts manipulative, self-serving and entitled personalities.

The words of the former slave and playwright Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence, echo down to us:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.)

In a tweet of 31 August 2020, an anonymous person presenting as a parent of children of mixed continental ancestry expresses a hope that we should all embrace:

I want them to be the generation that at last transcends the limiting and soul-destroying American “skin game”.

We all urgently need to stop having conversations about race and start taking our common humanity, and the realities of specific legacies, much more seriously.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Cro

Dark Triad politics attracts Dark Triad personalities

In my previous piece, I analysed how the Jacobin model of politics (politics unlimited in aims and unlimited in scope) was inherently a vehicle for Dark Triad politics. Moreover, that the moral or social grandeur of whatever project the Jacobin model was attached to was a vehicle for people to bullshit themselves into following politics that was narcissistic, Machiavellian and psychopathic.

Two recent studies in social psychology have highlighted the reverse problem: that particular forms of politics or social action attracts Dark Triad personalities. (I became aware of the studies through this podcast.)

Virtuous victim signalling

The first paper, ‘Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities’, uses a series of studies to show that those possessing Dark Triad personality traits are particularly likely to engage in (pdf) virtuous victim signalling. The authors defined victim signalling as:

a public and intentional expression of one’s disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations.

They defined virtue signalling as:

symbolic demonstrations that can lead observers to make favorable inferences about the signaler’s moral character.

The series of studies provide evidence that:

victim signals are effective tools of social influence and maximally effective when deployed with signals of virtue.

Which makes virtuous victim signalling a potentially successful social strategy, including for extracting resources. The authors conclude that:

our studies present converging evidence that the virtuous victimhood signal is an effective mechanism for persuading others to part with their resources in a way that benefits the signaler and that people who tend to engage in amoral social manipulation to achieve their goals are more likely to emit them.

As the authors note, the highly egalitarian norms of contemporary Western society, creating a presumption of social or moral failing by the wider society if people conspicuously do less well than others, combined with the high moral premium put on avoiding harm, makes the virtuous victim signal a potentially effective resource extraction strategy. Once an effective resource extraction strategy can be identified, those who are least inhibited are more likely to be attracted to the (deceptive) use of it. Which is what the studies suggest does indeed happen.

Extrapolating from the study, the more strongly the presumption of believe the victim is pushed, the greater the effective social licence is being provided for such behaviour. Any implied notion that some forms of social action are so pure than no bad actors will adopt them is an open invitation to exploitive behaviour. An open invitation that Dark Triad personalities can be predicted to seek to take up.

Political extremism and personality

That Dark Triad personalities may be prone to use the resource extraction opportunities that virtuous victimhood provides is not exactly a shock, though it is nice to have confirming evidence. The second paper, ‘The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes’, is somewhat more revelatory.

The paper makes a very useful distinction (pdf) between PC Authoritarians (PCA) and PC Liberals (PCL). The authors define Political Correctness (PC) as:

a set of related attitudes characterised by the desire to avoid offense and avoid disadvantaging certain groups in society.

PCL and PCA can be distinguished because:

Those holding PCL attitudes — or belonging to groups characterised by PCL attitudes — argue for the removable of ostensible social or emotional barriers of disadvantaged groups, whereas those holding PCA attitudes are primarily concerned with physical and psychological safety. A core aspect of PCA attitudes is the belief that aggression and force are appropriate methods to achieve ideological goals.

The third group studied were people who adopted White Identitarianism (WI), defined as:

a set of political attitudes characterised by strong feelings of white identity, solidarity and a belief in white victimisation.

What the paper finds is that PC authoritarians and White identitarians are both disproportionately likely to show Dark Triad characteristics, plus a sense of entitlement, and to do so to very similar degrees. Indeed, both groups are far more like each other on measures of Machievallianism, narcissism, psychopathy and entitlement than either group is like PC liberals, who score effectively no correlation with any of the four measures, apart from being mildly negatively correlated for psychopathy.

In my previous essay, I noted that the abandonment of the normative constraints of liberal politics make adoption of the Jacobin model of politics unlimited in means and scope that much easier. The quite stark contrasts found between PC Authoritarians and PC Liberals speaks to that.

Moreover, it points to a clear danger from reluctance among progressives to call out bad behaviour by people ostensibly pushing the same cause. It allows their moral decency to be used as cover by seriously bad actors.

The main contention of my previous essay was that the Jacobin model of politics itself fostered Dark Triad politics, regardless of whatever political project it was tied to. Though the scale of the political project did affect how much damage applying the Jacobin model did.

This PCA/PCL/WI paper points to the reverse problem, that the Jacobin model of politics attracts bad actors. A politics that denies limits is going to attract those who reject limits.

Jacobin model politics and Dark Triad personalities, especially if they have a strong sense of entitlement, are made for each other. They are made for each other regardless of where any particular political project may be placed on some political spectrum or what moral grandeur it may cloak itself in.

Indeed, the moral grandeur is much of the problem, as it justifies the abandonment of limits. It promotes self-deception by people, leading them to override the normative constraints that they would otherwise accept.

Politics that is unlimited in scope, politics that goes everywhere, is also politics that enables self-serving strategies to be pursued everywhere. The more politics is turned into the dominant pay-off strategy, the more it will attract manipulative, self-serving, personalities.

Virtuous victim signalling is a resource acquisition strategy open to manipulation by self-serving actors writ small. Politics unlimited in means and scope is a resource acquisition strategy open to manipulation by self-serving actors writ large. Potentially, an absolutely socially dominant resource acquisition strategy.

Those who argue in defence of looting, those who riot for ‘social justice’, those who seek to drive dissent out of the public sphere and various social arenas, may mask themselves under some grand moral project; but it is what they do, not why they say they are doing it, that is truly revelatory.

Physicist Steven Weinberg was far too specific when he said:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

Any moral or social project parading itself as absolute moral trumps is capable of having that effect.

Politics without limits is a profoundly destructive social force that naturally and inherently attracts destructive, manipulative, self-serving personalities. The grand moral claims that politics without limits are attached to provide the perfect cover for antisocial personalities to seek benefits for themselves, regardless of the costs to others. Adding in the capacity to allow otherwise decent people to justify to themselves doing, or acquiescing in, acts of social cruelty greatly magnifies the destructive effect.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Licenses to self deceive: How much of the Dark Triad can be packed into a single ideology?

Psychologists identify the Dark Triad as being made up of Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy.

Psychologist John Vervaeke has a nice discussion of narcissism as being an inner emptiness that requires the light of attention to be shown towards the narcissist, otherwise they are left with the dark emptiness inside.

Machiavellianism is manipulative behaviour towards others displaying a high level of callousness and indifference to norms, particularly moral norms.

Psychopathy is a somewhat contested concept, but involves high social assertiveness (boldness), poor impulse control with a demand for instant gratification (disinhibition) and a lack of empathy, use of cruelty to gain empowerment, exploitative tendencies, and defiance of authority (meanness).

About ideology

Ideology can be reasonably understood as a framing for understanding the world. Political ideologies often ask good questions, but their answers tend to be rather less valuable. Indeed, an inherent problem with an ideology is precisely that it tends to pre-commit to some particular sets of answers.

In providing a set of presumptive answers as a framing for understanding the world, an ideology can encourage emotional reactions towards things in the world and other people. In doing so, an ideology can definitely encourage a collective narcissism; creating or amplifying the demand for positive attention while its intellectual and emotional thinness generates an inner emptiness. An ideology can encourage a manipulative attitudes to others, especially if its normative structure encourages discounting the concerns, including the moral concerns, of others. An ideology can, especially via dramatic claims about social transformation and/or pervasive evil, encourage high assertiveness, undermine contrary impulses, justify use of cruelty to gain empowerment, be a vehicle for exploitation and for defiance of (contrary) authority.

So, the answer to how question of how much of the Dark Triad can be packed into an ideology is: close to all of it. Particularly any ideology that adopts the Jacobin model of political action. This a secular model of political action first developed by Robespierre (1758–1794) and his supporters during the French Revolution (1789–1799).

By the Jacobin model I mean politics unlimited in means and unlimited in scope. That, is, politics that does not rule out any means (including killing and repression) to achieve it ends, and is willing to expand into any and every aspect of society and social interaction. A model of politics that relies on its sense of profound moral purpose, of moral grandeur, to justify its refusal to accept limits in its means or its scope. The Jacobin model also tends to rely on a sense of profound social understanding to give the required confidence that what it does will lead where it intends.

The Jacobin model can be applied to a wide range of political projects. Lenin very self-consciously applied the Jacobin model to Marxism. So, Leninism (or Communism as it named itself) is Marx + Robespierre. Mussolini, the former revolutionary socialist, applied the Jacobin model to Italian nationalism. So, Fascism was Mazzini (1805–1872) + Robespierre. Hitler applied the Jacobin model to Aryan racism. So Nazism was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) + Robespierre.

As one can see by how they operated, and the human wreckage they left in their wake, these were all ideologies that incorporated a great deal of the Dark Triad into their workings. They mainly did so by adopting the Jacobin model of politics.

The scale of the project also matters. Italian Fascism created orders of magnitude less human wreckage than did Communism or Nazism because the project of Italian nationalism was far less in scale than either the elimination of capitalism to create a society without alienation or creating continental-scale Lebensraum for those designated to be Aryans.

Communism did far more damage than Nazism but in the service of a goal far more encompassing in its alleged beneficiaries. This helps account for why Nazism is more systematically reviled. That, and that without the example of Nazism, the “progressive” Communist regimes would be more starkly distinctive in their tyrannical murderousness. Hence “progressive” education tends to dwell on Nazi crimes far more than Communist ones. The adoption of the Jacobin model of politics, making their political projects more effective and more destructive, is the point of commonality between Nazism and Communism.

Rationality and self-deception

In order to understand the dynamics whereby moral grandeur leads to great human suffering and oppression, we need to understand the human capacity for self-deception. Psychologist John Vervaeke argues that you cannot lie to oneself, as it is impossible to make yourself believe what you don’t believe. But you can bullshit oneself, you can adopt beliefs without regard to their truth because they are in some other way congenial.

Often, these beliefs will be true but not accurate. That is, they will have some element of truth that it is congenial to focus on but not be an accurate description of social reality. In this way, particularly if motivated by a shared sense of moral grandeur, mountains of bullshit can be built out of molehills of truth.

The trumping (i.e. prescriptively dominant) nature of moral claims encourages persuasion and rhetoric to be cast in moral terms. Sublimation of self-interest behind a shield of morality, including as a shield from self-awareness, can make someone a more persuasive and effective advocate. Aggression and competition (such as over status and resources) can be sublimated by expressing moral concern; itself a play for higher status. (My ever-expanding essay on structural equilibria examines the wider dynamics of status and norms.)

We can differentiate between logic, the structure of inference; reason, the ability to purposefully infer; and rationality, the ability to coherently manage inference and action. Vervaeke argues that rationality increases as self-deception decreases.

A certain level of self-deception can be a successful strategy, as it allows the more complete and effective use of prescriptively dominant moral claims within a status-seeking and resource-acquiring strategy. Especially if it enables stigmatisation of contrary concerns. Thus, embracing a level of irrationality — for example, adopting standpoint epistemology, privileging particular experience over inconvenient facts or social nuance and complexity — can be an effective dominance strategy, if it is seen to invalidate contrary concerns or evidence. Of course, it will not look irrational from within, however much it may do so to outsiders. It is the licensing of self-deception, via moral grandeur, to discount contrary concerns and evidence that both expresses and hides the irrationality.

Dark Triad dynamics

The embrace of whatever morally urgent project the Jacobin model is applied to sets in train adoption of the Dark Triad characteristics. Validation by external social aim requires the light of outward moral purpose to be constantly shining to cover up inner emptiness, hence the collective narcissism.

The justifying moral purpose is so morally and socially grand, that it requires systematic strategic manipulation of people and events, without regard to contrary norms or concerns, hence the Machiavellianism.

The aim is so morally and socially grand, that it must reject any contrary authority. It also empowers through deemed moral intensity and purposiveness of action, thereby justifying cruelty. That it is a social dominance strategy, as any contrary concerns or limits have no legitimacy in the face of utterly morally urgent aim, creates great capacity for exploitation of others. That provides the psychopathy.

All aspects of the Dark Triad are thus achieved.

All of this generates politics unlimited in means (justifying any action that works towards the grand moral goal) and unlimited in scope (seeking to intrude into every aspect of social to achieve the grand moral goal). Or, to be put it another way, collectively narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic politics. Which, of course, entirely accords with the history of Communism and Nazism.

Self-deception is a crucial part of the dynamics. The movements became successful precisely because they used the prescriptively trumping rhetoric of grand moral urgency or common purpose to create a mirage of common moral grandeur that permit adherents to bullshit themselves into adopting Dark Triad politics.

In some ways, it is politics being unlimited in scope which shows the Dark Triad pattern most clearly. Having politics unlimited in scope means that it does not matter what sphere of social action is involved, whether football, knitting, young adult fiction or whatever, it will be subject to political action and political censure. This is fairly obviously a social dominance strategy. But the insistence that one’s political purpose is so grand that all must defer to it in every social space is narcissism. The expansive intrusion of political strategy everywhere, regardless of ancillary costs, is Machiavellian. The uninhibited imposition of your political concerns at often great costs to others is psychopathic. The Dark Triad in operation.

Status is at the heart of this; taking the prestige of moral grandeur and transmuting it into a social dominance strategy. Prestige is the currency of social cooperation. Add in the benefits and pleasures of dominance, and moral grandeur can become a deeply destructive social force.

If enough collective impetus can be generated, “everyone who disagrees is evil” is a powerful mechanism for social dominance, as it both stigmatises opposition and energises self-deceiving commitment. For instance, the destruction, actual or attempted, of reputations, careers and businesses is social cruelty justified by moral purpose.

All political action involves, or implies, explicit or implicit imposition on the will of others. Moral grandeur both justifies and expands this.

A principle that Nassim Nicholas Taleb identities — that it is easier to macro bullshit than to micro bullshit — has particular force. It is a problem of feedback. Precisely because one is making grand social claims about society as a whole, the elements of factual feedback are much weaker than if you are trying to do some practical bit of physical work.

Thus any highly status-driven environment with weak factual feedback is likely to be highly conducive to the social selection for ideas which promote Dark Triad status-and-resource strategies. Circumstance that can be found in the less scientific parts of academe and in administrative bureaucracies. Somewhat less intense version of such circumstance can also be found in highly abstract or imaginative occupational fields such as entertainment, online IT, media and education generally.

The abandonment of the normative constraints of liberal politics makes adoption of the Jacobin model that much easier.


So, does this seem to be describing anything we can see around us? Do see Dark Triad politics acting destructively while claiming great moral urgency? Do we see cruelty and destruction being justified or downplayed on grand moral grounds? Do we see resource grabs underway in the guise of morally urgent social transformation?

Of course we do. With great amounts of self-deception involved. Great amounts of producing bullshit while consuming it themselves.

Critical social theory, the latest oh-so-urgent grand moral project using the Jacobin model of politics, is a series of exercises in creating mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.

History tells us that the Dark Triad politics of self-deception, wrapped in suitable moral grandeur, can be both incredibly effective and incredibly destructive. Each time the claim goes out, this time is different. Again and again, it turns out that, no, the basic underlying dynamics are the same. Dark Triad politics never, ever leads to good social and human places. How can it?

We are in the middle of a struggle between social action and historical awareness. Highly motivated self-delusion could prove, once again, to be an effective social dominance strategy. Or the awareness that we can collectively learn from history may actually break through, and not generate a new form of recurring disaster.

It is fascinating to watch this struggle play out, scary to live through.

Cross-posted from Medium.