As for most major social problems, the causes of demonization are complex, defying perfect comprehension. I bring just one more cause to our attention, a factor that complicates the analysis: the rise of what social theorist Frank Furedi labeled “emotional correctness” in his book What’s Happened to the University? Furedi maintains that a governing purpose of higher education today is to protect the emotional comfort of students and others, regardless of how subjective and unreasonable the claim for comfort might be.
In 1957, sociologist Robert Merton conducted a study of how mass media functions via interpersonal influence within a small town. He juxtaposed “locals” to “cosmopolitans”; “locals” were parochial and fundamentally self-interested to the exclusion of the nation and society around them, while cosmopolitans were “ecumenical,” seeing themselves as connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward
Note that this distinction seems to have been independently rediscovered by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, where he speaks of “somewheres” (Merton’s “locals”) and “anywheres (Merton’s “cosmopolitans:).
Usher goes on to write,
My sense is that we are stuck in this battle between cosmopolitanism and localism/parochialism because those who identify as the most cosmopolitan are often the most likely to be narrow-minded and judgmental.
Overall, this issue of Cato Unbound might strike you as boring, because there is so little disagreement with my original essay. Perhaps they should have recruited one of the commenters here, perhaps Handle, to write one of the responses essays!
Since the higher-education problem is confined mostly to the anywheres/cosmopolitans, a 4th axis, as Kling calls it, is required to account for what the “Deaths of Despair” literature refers to as the “non-urban” geographies.
Perhaps Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model accounts for the incivility between the cosmopolitans while Charles Murray’s Coming Apart accounts for the incivility between the urban and everyone else.
I still come down to incivility is primarily today comes down towards it is a lot easier to share your various opinions and theories. Look at the protest today and compare to Vietnam era or say 1920.
And look at our view the 1990s. Sure after 1994 It was the internet is going to change the world but the early 1990s was just as weird as today! I graduated college in 1992, so my class was the center of Generational complaining that we were latch key, over-educated, and unable to handle modern and family life. And lord knows what was said about the African-American inner cities. Just read any Ron Paul newsletter from the late Reagan era to see the alt right was heavy back in the day.
2) Can we stop get all misty eyed on our past? We love over-simplify the 1950s world in which:
2a) 80%+ of the population was better off economically. I bet if that were true to day this incivility would decrease.
2b) The 1950s weren’t that quiet if you read history. Civil Rights started that decade and troops had to escort black children to white schools!
2c) 98% of the nation was segregated and the laws were more unwritten outside the South. Any reading of California history sees this everywhere.
2d) How much control of the white population in 1950s was the old line “At Least I am not an African-American” (Fill in more colorful language.)
A Vietnam era 40-character anti-war slogan on a protest sign could reach a very high proportion of the American population via 3 television networks. Today you have to create content that goes viral. I don’t think William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal was civil. I don’t think the protestors outside the Republican Convention were civil.
Each era/system has its tradeoffs and both positive and negative externalities, often emergent/unintentional/unexpected. I don’t have the confidence of our host that the emergent externalities of social media are heavily weighted towards the negative.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Better off than what? I don’t see how you could possibly think that 80% of the population was better off economically in the 50s than now.
There are various charts and figures but the reality the economic boom of the 1950 was real and felt by everybody. Of course, it was partially felt by everybody because everybody was comparing themselves to the Depression economics. Even the middle class was struggling in the Depression.
One reason why everybody is so grumpy is there are few people these charts are showing only about 50% of the younger population are better off than their parents.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/504989751/u-s-kids-far-less-likely-to-out-earn-their-parents-as-inequality-grows
OK, so you’re not saying that most people were better off in the 50s than they they are now, but that in the 50s more people were better off than their parents had been, or something like that. Could be, though you are right to mention the Depression. In the 50s, the Great Depression was not very far in the past, and most everybody was a lot better off than then. I think there was a similar feeling in the 80s and 90s, though the preceding period was nowhere near as bad as the Depression. Right now, we’re still recovering from the Great Recession, but the recovery has been pretty anemic and I’m sure you’re right that that contributes to the general “grumpiness”.
I don’t know if they do post-facto addendum essays, but I’d be happy to write a respectfully critical and polished one for free along the lines of, and expounding upon, the comments I left here, if they’re down for that.
Seconded. Handle is excellent and underexposed.
third.
The world must know!
Fourth. Handle is good at arguing both sides of issues.
cosmopolitanism and localism/parochialism
Wow! The battle is between Real Americans versus the coastal elite and Identity driven minorities. That defines the lines fairly distinctly.
Also, show how conservatives economically defended localism/parochialism before Donald Trump.
“the causes of demonization are complex, defying perfect comprehension”
Oh balderdash.
And the answer is most definitely not “more civic education.” Only an educator could be oblivious to such condescension and the miserable track record of such group think exercises and how they only promote more demonization.
The answer is simple: the corporate tax code causes demonization.
A breadcrumb superhighway to this result has been laid out on this blog over the past couple of days.
Start with Dr. Kling’s post “The Virtue Industries” on Nov. 17. The spillways at colleges pour fourth entire generations of graduates unfit to do anything but correct other peoples use of pronouns and sit in bitter desolation because there isn’t a high-paying job for every virtuous buzzword they were trained to fall in love with by the illiberal and radical leftist professorate. The redemption of their hopes and dreams rest on the creation of vast new government bureaucracies to achieve “progress” and those new government programs can only be justified by creating the perception that there is something deeply wrong with the rest of society that requires the genius, empathy, and superior intellect that a women’s studies undergraduate degree brings to the table. The failure of the world to recognize this truth verifies the world’s philistine ignorance and galvanizes the fighting spirit to put the ignorant racist, sexist, homophobes, etc etc standing in the way, back in their place.
This phenomenon is a direct consequence of the corporate tax code creates the essential bigotry at the heart of US society by proclaiming what is virtuous (“non-profit”) and what is not (taxable). Codifying centuries of aristocratic disdain for the merchant class, the businesses of clothing, feeding and sheltering people and providing them with the physical objects they desire to go about their lives are deemed “commercial” and therefore non-virtuous and subject to tax penalty.
“Making a difference” by advocating for preferred policy outcomes, inherently political art, and peddling educational credentials, the tax code deems “charitable” and therefore virtuous and tax-exempt and worthy of all the resources they can consume. Meanwhile, the non-virtuous employed in the industries of clothing, feeding, and sheltering seethe in resentment as they bear the brunt of the disproportionate burden of taxation and see their income fall and their jobs exported to communist China.
From this, demonization is born.
This is further illuminated in Dr. Kling’s post of Nov 21 “Science: increasing and decreasing returns.” The corporate income tax incentivizes employers to invest in developing new technology to replace workers and deny shareholders dividends who in turn invest less in industry. And tax-exempts devour increasing shares of research expenditures producing “Victimization of Transgender Foot Fetishists in Rural America” and “Residual Cis-Gender Oppressive Traits in Contemporary Buttplug Design.” So of course the taxed resent the increasing flow of resources to the untaxed and see no benefit and the untaxed have not alternative but to double down finding a supply of prejudice to meet the unfilled demand.
Follow the money, it is all there.
It might be fun to take a straight look at the Three Languages in terms of financial incentives as well.
Replacing the moral distinctions inherent in a corporate income tax with a pure, across the board tax on consumption (like a VAT) or a Georgian real estate (land)/ virtual real estate (URLs) tax as Tyler Cowen implicitly suggests, would diminish the monetary incentives behind demonization.
But looking at the political power protected by the US kritarchy, there is little hope of any meaningful tax reform.
Individualist resistance to the rules of this game appears to the only thing that will keep the USA from further devolving into a third-rate kleptocracy.
The demarcation is forced by the Constitutional structure from a hard bound. 250 years we suffered this split, never yet fond a solution. So we are stuck with Senate governance by the small, local states. Wyoming, for example, is composed of a few cities with 50-60k citizens.
We know how to fix the problem, and so do the small state senators in the Senate. It is likely going to be fixed else we get a permanent shut down in the Swamp.
The problem with your constitutional hobby horse, Mathew, is that the same urban/non-urban divergence has occurred in the rest of the Anglosphere with parliamentary systems that do not exhibit the same republic/senator structural biases.
Yes, but we have the hard bounds, we know where they are. The parliamentary systems have to search for the bounds by internal migration.
We are stuck, there will always be small states that are not viable. And our solutions in the past were civil war. But we know where they are, in some of these sates, like Vermont, I can go to the largest city and raise a ruckus about the problem, and eventually half of the 500k people will hear me, they are that small.
Socong, we know the effect quite clearly, earmarks in all our Huse programs. We can fix that with an accounting change, get a large endogenous gain while suffering the problem. We jsut move the earmarks to the front of the budget and have a single earmark swap negotiated before House budgeting begins. That alone is at least a 1% endogenous productivity gain in Congress. It is a simple equilibrium because it is Law, a Law we have not been able to change, so use it. Use the law, make it work .
Rosa Luxemburg: “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much as concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. You know the words that were written about the great work of the General Staff, about Gen. Trotha’s campaign in the Kalahari desert. ‘And the death rattles of the dying, the demented cries of those driven mad by thirst faded away in the sublime stillness of eternity.’ Oh that ‘sublime stillness of eternity,’ in which so many cries of anguish have faded away unheard, they resound within me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.”
As for the real existence of those poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, it’s beside the point, isn’t it? She could just as much as been talking about fictional people. Maybe the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger, dreamed up by Dickens.
The natives in distant Africa were only a handy stick with which to beat Polish Jews and German Jews like Mathilde Wurm, to whom Rosa Luxemburg wrote these words. So yes, Rosa Luxemburg sees herself connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward. But only because she’s so parochial. What she mocks as the special suffering of the Jews is what she’s actually concerned with, but only in reverse, like in a photographic negative.
She protested so insistently on her being a citizen of the world precisely in order to distance herself from the Jews in Europe and Russia. Here she is again in another letter in that same year, 1917: “As far as pogroms against Jews are concerned, all rumors of that kind are directly fabricated. In Russia the time of pogroms has passed once and for all. The strength of the workers and of socialism there is much too strong for that. The revolution has cleared the air so much of miasmas and stuffy atmosphere of reaction that a new Kishinev has become forever passe. I can sooner imagine pogroms against Jews here in Germany.”
The clouds and birds have just as much reality in Luxemburg’s prose as the workers or the revolution. It’s all fantasy. A fantasy of a home as big as the Earth, and the fantasy of the proletariat, to the exclusion of the nation and society around her. Real people are reduced to markers in a game. It’s beyond parochial. It’s self-obsessed.
“those who identify as the most cosmopolitan are often the most likely to be narrow-minded and judgmental”
Enjoyably snarky, but I don’t really buy it. Don’t get me wrong, the “cosmopolitans” certainly aren’t as universally open-minded as they like to believe, but there’s plenty of narrow-minded, judgemental locals as well.
My working assumption is that open-mindedness and cosmopolitan-ness are pretty independent, not correlated but not ironically anti-correlated either.
The issue in my eyes has to do with spatial structure and risk. When people are different and distinct and separated geospatially, it provides buffer zones where people follow similar rules and – if the rules matter for communal well-being, which everyone generally agrees – people far away breaking the rules is a problem ‘over there’ but not here. When the spatial distance breaks down, the perimeter of risk expands. So people can be offended and morally wounded from a greater distance. It used to be a problem to have a witch or a slave-owner or a polygamist or a quack doctor next door – but you could run them out of town. Then they had to be out of the state. Then the country. Now … where does the border end?
So the cosmopolitans are really ‘more narrow minded’ in that their rules must be the _only_ rules _globally_ and the localists may want to apply apparently more strict rules, but only within earshot, or gunshot, or what have you. Then there are fake localists, who want to use local rules to propagate up to larger levels (‘change the rules here and then leverage harmonization, etc, across the nation, the EU, the world…’).
Ultimately, I think that it’s clear: when cosmopolitans are right, they are really really right. Totally, in fact. But when they are wrong, they are a risk to everyone; and global puritanism causes a host of problems and prevents creative solutions.