And I review the book, Mending America’s Political Divide, by Rene Levy.
For Levy, the most harmful characteristic of tribal politics is lack of empathy. We lose sight of the humanity of our political opponents and instead treat them as an evil force.
He is part of the old world that’s rapidly agin’.
As an analysis, it is weak to the point of silliness. In the great cultural divide, we have all seen a play: the relativist side denies the existence of good and evil, until given the option to redefine it, and then enforce it puritanically. The whole ‘don’t treat them as evil’ is perhaps an attempt to push back to the first stage of that game; but ultimately, no definition of evil is not a stable endpoint.
He brought a knife to a gun-fight. The winner of the culture war will be whichever side is willing to play dirtier.
Yet another excellent piece.
I took the occasion to reread your 2014 piece “Can Evolutionary Psychology Explain Your Political Beliefs?” linked to in the sidebar as well. Remarkably relevant and prescient.
So, “We need to lose the apocalyptic mindset that foresees dire consequences should we lose an election.”
One wonders how one can not foresee dire consequences in the impending taking of the presidency by a candidate who has vowed to:
– end end shareholder capitalism;
– end charter schools;
– create federal entitlement to 2 years of free college;
– require school districts to increase teacher salaries;
– raise federal minimum wage to $15;
– achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050;
– enact a federal version of California’s AB5 law criminalizing the gig economy;
– enact an industrial policy with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars going to politically connected businesses;
– recommit to the Paris Accord and transfer billions more to other countries;
– outlaw single family zoning…
and on and on. Hard to think of a more illiberal portfolio of policies destructive of human well-being.
The never-Trumpers who would prissily allow this to unfold illustrates the necessity of the tribalism function described in TLP:
“Moreover, to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs, and feel good attacking and misrepresenting rival groups.”
Cancel culture thus has benefits that should be exploited for the benefit of the group. When George Will goes on his bigoted rants about “those in thrall to country-music manliness: ‘We’re truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsy-bitsy virus make us wear masks,’” let him be cancelled. He has always been a light weight anyway and never an in-group asset, making his bread carping about those to his right for the pleasure of the left. He is dead to me as he should be to all sentient individuals who care more about human flourishing than their personal brand. In fact, just cancel all the never-Trumpers.
Tucker’s lead writer just got cancelled. Are you outraged?
I have no idea and haven’t read anything about it. I don’t watch Cable TV so Tucker is still something of a mystery to me although I can recall admiring some columns he wrote.
I don’t recall being particularly outraged when Jonah Goldberg made his brand and advanced his wife’s career by cancelling Ann Coulter or John Derbyshire at NR. I figured Derbyshire was worth a dozen Goldbergs in terms of original thought, insight, and writing ability so whoever he wound up with would be lucky to have him.
We have to face that the never-Trump “Jen Rubin” types like Goldberg, Will, and Frum have all done a bit of their own canceling so they should be able to take their own medicine.
I will be more outraged when the Biden administration directs the IRS and other Federal agencies to wage war on Goya foods in the same manner the Obama Administration operated. I think I will go buy some of their products today.
As far as political strategy, I have no use for either major party so the more unaligned, disaffected cancelees there are out their open to constitutional reform enabling people to have a voice in government through new Whig, Liberal, Labor, Christian Democrat, or Black Lives Matters parties the better.
An insight into the endgame:
“18:00 Frank Dikötter: The key point about the Great Leap Forward is really… I mean, Li Rui, Mao’s secretary, put it… He passed away earlier this year, wonderful man, I think he lived to the age of 100. He said it in a review of Mao’s Great Famine, my book, he said, “The core reason of all this is because human beings didn’t treat other human beings like human beings, they were treated just like cattle.””
–Free Thoughts podcast, E314, Oct 18, 2019
I will once again renew my objection to the whole attempt to dismiss the current political tensions as mere manifestations of a general regression to primitive modes of social psychology restored to predominance by recent developments in communications technology.
There are two big problems with it, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Now, I can see why this narrative is attractive, because it seems just like the attitude that people who don’t care for team sports have towards people who get so obsessed with and fired up about their team’s exploits that they take them completely seriously and personally and, when socially reinforced, sometimes lose all perspective, become very nasty people, and use it as an excuse to engage in behaviors everyone would recognize as utterly deplorable in any other context. Fan is from fanatic for a reason.
If it had any chance of working, one could perhaps get behind the project to nudge the nastiest partisans towards better behavior by letting them know that the cool people who control who gets the juicy gigs all agree that these people aren’t stunning and brave revolutionaries fighting for justice, but just being “bad fans” and that the cool people all distance themselves from and harshly judge people acting like that as weird, talentless, mentally ill losers with personality problems covering up for their insecurities and lack of accomplishments.
That’s a lot less risky than telling them they are simply wrong on the merits to their faces. Bad fans have a bad answer for that! Which is why in the parking lots outside every major stadium you can find spots of discoloration that you will rightly suspect are blood stains.
That strategy requires all the actually cool people to pick up on the strategy and play along to bootstrap the perception of solidarity and consensus, instead of what actually and predictably happened, which is that a lot of them – cough, Ezra Klein, cough – immediately sided with the bad fans. “Bad Fans are Good Fans! Nice Fans are *Weak* Fans!”
And of course there are plenty of nasty people out there for whom the group brawls, rumbles, hooliganism, and sadistic skull smashing is fun and not some unfortunate side-effect but in truth the real point for which any excuse would do, and the excuse of being a dedicated and loyal sports fan is plenty good enough. In England there are organized and terrifying groups of these scrappers that are actually called ‘firms’.
When things get bad enough in this regard, the logical implication is the perhaps even having these “sports” around is not worth the trouble if we can’t get people to regulate their passions, behave in a civil manner, and stop going completely nuts. Maybe we should just prohibit sports altogether. Or prohibit attendance. (NB: the excess deaths for young people since the lockdown is a negative number.)
If you view some major current political dispute as basically stupid and pointless, then you are going to look at its passionate partisans as nothing more than bad fans who have lost it and who are acting badly.
But here are the two problems:
1. Even Bad Fans don’t “lack empathy” in terms of failing to understand the perspective and “””thinking””” of opponent bad fans. They understand them all too well! Really the abuse of the word ’empathy’ in these kinds of social-psychology arguments is utterly fallacious, circular, and frankly condescending.
What people like Levy are doing is starting from a goal, supported by several false premises.
He assumes there are not really many monstrous people out there, which is deeply wrong. More to the point, there really is no such thing as “monsters” vs “people” outside of very rare cases of mental illness who can’t function normally or adjust well to society. There are people who are nice and kind and compassionate and normal just like you and me in most circumstances, but who are psychologically compartmentalized and *also* potential monsters for different circumstances. Keeping the monster side down is one of the big jobs of social technology essential to civilization. Forgetting about the monster side and relaxing that effort are the undoing of civilization.
The ugly truth is that there are not many *non*-monsters, and the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, which is why evil is banal. Levy is assuming that only niceness is banal, and that meanness is extraordinary and exceptional. The truth is otherwise, and here’s the key, *we all kind of already know that about each other*. When we call each other monsters, when we think the other side is full of evil monsters, we are, contra Levy, *correct*. The only error is to fail to recognize the same thing in oneself and one’s allies.
We all kind of know that we and our friends wouldn’t shed any tears if certain people we disliked were to suddenly not exist tomorrow, and that those people likewise wouldn’t shed any tears over our disappearance either. Sure, that guy seems perfectly nice and courteous to you now, but if things suddenly changed and he thought he could get away with it, he would stab you right in the throat and laugh, and his buddy would pat him on the back.
This is the root of the tensions which are always simmering just below the fragile surface of civil society. Civil society is *an illusion*. It isn’t even a consensual hallucination, we are only *pretending* to share a consensual hallucination.
It is still a great achievement! We should all be rooting for it! But it isn’t some natural, automatic, and spontaneous order and takes tremendous amounts of effort and pressure to keep it going.
This is really the common-sensical explanation for why atrocious things like Rwanda can happen where things go from “tense but normal-ish” to “Twenty thousand Tutsis A Day” overnight, mostly with machetes in the hands of ordinary, normal people, i.e., ‘monsters’. This explanation doesn’t rely on things like magic brainwashing powers of a few ultra-charismatic demon pied pipers.
Now, Levy wants people engaged in political debates to always act nice and civil towards each other, despite their major differences. So it must simply be incorrect to view people on the other side as potential monsters.
But instead, it is correct, but we can be nice to each other anyway! If you aren’t going go down the “abolish sports” route and try to build solidarity by erasing the very consciousness and notion of “teams”, then what permits us to engage in civil and productive ways with people we know to be monsters on the other side is the knowledge that under-girding all of our interactions together is some higher *Real Power*, that is, a mechanism of coercive terror so overwhelming intimidating that it maintains balance and decorum, lowers the stakes, and keeps us in our proper places and prevents us from stepping over the line and on each other’s core interests and fundamental rights. “If you kids don’t hold it down back there, I am going to pull this car over and beat you so hard you’ll both see stars for a week!” (backseat goes silent).
And the question of “stakes” brings us to the second problem.
2. Bad Fans are bad because of the ridiculous disproportion of it all. They are “sweating the small stuff” and “making a mountain out of a mole-hill” to the heights of absurdity. They care so deeply and they are extremely passionate about something pointless and inconsequential to their lives that is fundamentally unreal in that it is socially constructed: it’s only important because people imagine everyone else thinks it’s important too.
In other words, as with Sayre’s Law, because the stakes are so low.
But the stakes are *not* low! Not any more!
They only stay low if the Power I mentioned above keeps them low, keeps people from fearing that the core interests in life of their side’s monsters are about to get trampled upon by the other side’s monsters.
If you view some current political debate as mostly pointless and ‘symbolic’, and “butter-side-up / butter-side-down”, then you are apt to scoff at the whole ridiculous mess and assume the stakes are just as low as the stakes Bad Fans argue about.
But even for largely ‘symbolic’ arguments, if the expression of the position of one side means that one is going to get excommunicated and unable to get a job, then suddenly the stakes are very high indeed!
You may argue that all this seemed to happen with the rise of social media, so twitter makes us hate each other. That’s not really it. What twitter did was suddenly make it *much easier to raise the stakes much higher*, much easier for anyone at no cost and no risk to create and broadcast to a mob big enough to create trouble scary enough to intimidate any person, company, institution .. anyone and anything. “High Stakes Makes Us Hate”. This happened at the same time the evolution of high-status progressive ideology developed to the point where it had accepted a justification to visit such major negative consequences on people for certain kinds of offense and heresy, which was fuel on the fire.
If there were no excommunications or fear of potential excommunications, then people could resume the more open norms around discourse that prevailed a generation ago, and assume that there are plenty of people of good will and good faith on the other side who have good arguments that are worth trying to understand, and whose lives and situations are also important to know about so that one can empathize, mentally walk a mile in their shoes, and see where they are coming from.
Everyone wants to be seen and understood and granted social charity that way *themselves*, and so it seems only ethical and Golden Rule compliant to extend that courtesy to others in turn.
But here’s the thing.
You have to ask, where do those good, valid argument even come from? Why even take the the time and effort to craft them?
You may have noticed how, quite suddenly, rigorous, quality arguments are in very short supply and few feel embarrassed to not have them and indeed feel entitled to not even have to try to have them at all.
The reason is that the only situation that allows for civil, quality discourse is when all other avenues and channels for coalition-struggle are *blocked off by Power* as costly and unprofitable. If good arguments are the only way to move the ball forward, as with lawyers in a fair trail constrained by the power of the judge and the court and the bar over them, insisting they behave, play fair, and play by the rules, then you will invest your effort in making good arguments. And so will the other guy. And it will possible to engage socially across lines of opposition as lawyers do in their cases in court.
Take away that Power, and one realizes there are other ways to win, and the monster inside has some advice. The demon on one shoulder tells the angel on the other shoulder, “Take a break, buddy, I’ve got this one.”
And these are the demons we’ve unleashed. To recognize them as demons, to call them out at demons, *is not wrong*! It is not because of tweets or negative polarization or lack of empathy or civility.
It’s because we forgot to keep the demons in their cages. Whoops! Worse, we stopped believing in demons at all, and are constantly befuddled at all the pentagrams made of mutilated remains popping up around every corner.
The last thing left in Pandora’s box was ‘hope’. The only hope we have is to come to our senses, remember the truth about demons, and do what is necessary to shove them all back in the box. *Then* we’ll get civility, niceness, and empathy back again.
As a populist despised by all nice people in all the important institutions, I have no voice or stake in anything. They will never have empathy or sympathy for me and my kind so I see no reason to turn the other cheek. To advance the populist agenda of peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy, I say let internecine conflict consume all the tyrants obstructing constitutional reform. Trump has done more to promote peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy than any president in my lifetime, so even if he completely sucks when it comes to cutting spending, as a pragmatist, I have to support him. I donated to many of his opponents in the primary, but now see that was a mistake. The one thing uniting the establishment on left and right is hatred of Trump. There will be no civility, empathy, or sympathy for Trump from left or right. All this kumbaya nonsense going around is just a way of saying let’s put aside our differences so we can toss out Trump and put the little people back in their place. Collusion between elites will never mean anything but misery for the average working people who are the majority of Americans. Let the elites take each other out. What good have they done for anyone anyway.
“There will be no civility, empathy, or sympathy for Trump from left or right.”
If Trump doesn’t win he is going to lose a lot more than an election.
Would Biden pardon Trump, were Trump convicted of any crimes? It would certainly benefit Democratic politicians not to have conservatives and Trump supporters fired up for the 2022 midterm elections. However, prosecuting Trump is likely something Biden cannot stop without picking a big fight with much of the Democratic coalition, and the media will definitely have blanket coverage of that and prosecution of the Trumps, because it will be ratings gold. So it looks like the demons will continue to run the show for the democrats.
As someone told me here on this site the other week, “do you want laws enforced or not? It really is that simple.”
I love this post.
My only quibble would be that often people are not willing to actively stab each other; empathy/sympathy with someone not obviously threatening one’s life, family or property seems to stop 90% of people. You are correct that most politics now does threaten those very things either in fact or in delusions, and so yea, people are much more ready to kill. The power of politics makes monsters of us all, and the more that is politically decided for everyone, the greater the monsters we become.
We are about as tribal as we were in 1970. I compare the acts of rebellion, they seem about the same, if not a bit tamer today. I believe this is quite typical.
Levy seems to have a cargo cult mentality about empathy. Empathy is not the cause of people getting along. Empathy is a manifestation of people getting along. Love, fear and hate are all facets of the oxytocin response. You can’t separate them.
You can’t will yourself to have empathy, and you certainly can’t will others to have empathy for you. It just doesn’t work that way.
It is really impossible to have any productive discussion at all if key terms are not well-defined in a way that people agree upon. People who actually lack empathy are rare sociopaths. People who think their ideological adversaries are dumb and evil are … normal. And often correct.
What Levy really doesn’t like is the tendency to dehumanization and demonize our enemies and opponents. He wishes people could disagree and still be nice to each other, and think better of each other.
But the reason people aren’t being nice to each other and think their opponents are evil and dumb has nothing to do with some psychological inability to imagine what it’s like to be in the other guy’s position.
It’s actually not uncommon in the history of warfare for combatants who are mowing each other down to not really hate their adversaries at all and even afford them a kind of esteem, admiration, and respect for their competency and prowess and exemplary display of martial virtue. T.E. Lawrence wrote of the German troops that way in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Patriots on both sides of a conflict know exactly what is going through the minds of their counterparts and that many of them are being noble in their own way and in own minds, fighting for their home and families and countries.
And they have no problem cutting those guys down to smithereens without hesitation. After all, if you don’t, he’s going to do it you. How do you know? Empathy. That why empathy and “being nice” are not the same thing.
Jordan Peterson had a comment once, that a mother bear has empathy for her cubs, and if you get between her and her cubs. And the reason why she will tear you to shreds is because of her empathy.
Any political issue can become the focus of “tribal” politics. For a century after the Civil War, American politics was mostly about economic issues, and the politics became quite polarized, tribal and vicious at various times. Up until the 30s, labor-management disputes frequently became violent, as did conflicts between farmers and cattlemen out west. There was a significant terrorism problem in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
The point is that, as Handle discusses at length above, the potential for politics to degenerate into a hateful, Manichean state is a permanent part of the human condition. The Left now has sufficient control over most of the relevant institutions (state and city governments, state courts and prosecutors, the media, professional associations) that it is now allowing its “activist” wing to engage in rioting, apparently in the expectation that this will hurt Trump and the Republicans (they seem to be right about that, so far). The same lop-sided balance of power in the Left’s favor results in the “cancel” culture.
I would add that another important mechanism for leashing the “demon” that sits on everyone’s shoulder – a mechanism that is now also failing – is the existence of shared culture in a given society. We now see that is precisely this shared American culture that is under attack by the American Left (including the Democratic Party). We have gone well beyond the Confederate monument issue, the Left now has issues with Mt. Rushmore, Jefferson and Washington and, in the more extreme reaches, Lincoln and Grant. The NY Times has taken the position that everything in the history of white America before the modern Left is hopelessly tainted by racism, and is now pushing this tendentious view into school curricula. We are expected to take seriously arguments that white Americans of today are tainted by racism, and any attempt to deny it just proves them guilty. There is no way to have a civil debate in which one side argues that the other side’s main demographic group (middle class, heterosexual whites) is essentially evil and its society and culture should be dissolved, or at least declared subordinate to the racial, ethnic and lifestyle groups the Left favors (so much for the value of “equality”). This is not a debate about tax rates or funding this or that government program. There is no nice, polite way of telling somebody to disappear, or to go eff himself.