In TLP, I contrast demonization rhetoric with persuasion rhetoric. As an exercise, you might try to pantomime each. That is, act out the facial expressions and hand gestures of someone who is demonizing another person. Then act our trying to persuade another person. I am pretty sure that you will appear more open and relaxed doing the second.
Demonization and persuasion are mutually exclusive. If you are demonizing, you are not persuading, and conversely.
When I wrote the book, I assumed that everyone would believe that persuasion is better than demonizing. My thought was once people recognized that their political rhetoric was demonizing, they would want to change.
But the religion that persecutes heretics actually prefers demonization to persuasion.
Why the singular? All known religions that ever had any amount of power had periods when they persecuted heretics. This includes all Christian factions and denominations I’ve heard of, as well as its “Enlightenment” offshoots (French cult of Reason, Fourierism etc.) Why would a reasonable person expect M.42 progressivism to be any different?
Are folks willing to be persuaded?
Some of us are open to changing our views/priors, even admitting when we were wrong, but I’m not sure even half of folks out there feel that way.
Admitting that you are willing to be persuaded is probably viewed as admission of being malleable (weak) or wrong in some way.
Also, allowing oneself to be persuaded seems higher effort than demonizing. Who wants to do more work?
Persuasion might be overrated.
Since we are talking about religion perhaps we should expect demonization and persecution of heretics?
Religion in the modern sense is largely a Western idea. Many cultures didn’t have a word for it. And some religions don’t distinguish it from other aspects of life. For example Judaism doesn’t seem to make clear distinctions between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.
The archaeological evidence is that early humans were remarkably less violent in Japan than elsewhere. Perhaps not a coincidence that Japan had no concept of religion since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning?
The modern Western notion of religion, since about the 16th century, seems to place a heavy emphasis on the “sacred, “ what Durkheim describes as the “set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community.” And the community is always threatened by the outsiders. Casting out the heretics is essential to maintaining the “single moral community.” In this sense, universities and newspapers act as churches.
There is no more sense in trying to get a university administrator or newspaper manager to tolerate pluralism than there is in attempting to get this pope to respect business people. They seek to dominate and control and reason has nothing to do with any of it.
Resistance can take many forms. But perhaps the strongest form of resistance is in living and loving. Per Wikipedia “In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge.”
A powerful appreciation of the mundane can be liberating. Theodore Roethke’s poem The Waking which begins:
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
seems to espouse a healthy alternative.
Going where one has to go and all the rest falls away. The world is so much bigger and greater than 1619 Project shaming, pronoun bullying, and Portland cosplay drama. Allowing oneself to get trapped in their moment seems narcissistic. Great nature offers more authentic and virtuous paths to tread.
But I got carried away. What I had meant to talk about when I started writing the above was about how Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never sympathetically addresses how the environmental religion addresses the needs of its adherents. Chapter 12 “False Gods for Lost Souls “ seems to hit the mark:
“Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language is science, which provides it with legitimacy.” (Page 273)
Understanding intersectionality and all the rest of the gobbledegook religion persecuting heretics in this manner explains why persuasion is irrelevant.
Perhaps in not seeing religion as the enemy, we can benefit from the spiritual nature of democracy. In a happy bit of serendipitous synchronicity, I happened to start David Gilbreath Barton’s Havel, Unfinished Revolution the prologue of which sets the stage by discussing the humanistic roots of democracy in Czechoslovakia:
“….the general ideas known as Masarykian humanism. As a philosophy professor, Masaryk had taught that democracy had a spiritual foundation, one based on the recognition that society existed for the individual. Nevertheless Masaryk also understood democracy was a challenge, a tall order. It required an educated citizenry capable of participating in free and open discussion, which was only possible with a citizenry savvy enough to see through the language of demagogues.
The failure of any democracy is part mystery and part tragedy. Democracy is often unsatisfying, requiring a compromise between different factions. Everyone receives a voice, but no one gets everything they want. Moreover, the freedoms provided by a democracy are deeply unsettling, especially to those who fear they own freedom, those who prefer absolute authority to the hard work of forming reasoned opinion.”
The TLP are appeals to absolute authorities. Progressives claim the absolute authority to demonize oppressors, conservatives barbarism, libertarians coercion. An optimist might find in this a path to overcoming the demonization-persuasion divide through pluralistic new languages of democracy in which the spiritual needs of boundaries and belongingness are recognized and tolerated.
So Arnold, you do know your own mind. You clearly have chosen to dismiss, and to, arguably, demonize progressivism. You write far more about this than you do about arguments that appeal to how to reduce oppression. So why did you feel that way?
If I were to guess, you would probably explain it as a reaction to a severe lack of good faith from opposing points of view. I’m sure you could empathize with a progressive who sees the same from Trumpy people. So this appears to be a spiraling case of mutually reinforcing distrust over time.
Can you say that you are consistently adding to, or countering the force of this spiral? Why do you feel the way you do?
I can offer a possible explanation. Go back to TLP and the three paradigms:
• Progressives: Oppressor vs Oppressed
• Conservatives: Civilization vs Barbarism
• Libertarians: Freedom vs Coercion
Each of these world views are based on small “T” truths – oppression, barbarism, and coercion really do exist in the world. However, none of the views is the whole truth.
The truths on which we choose to concentrate, however, affect how we live our lives and the quality of our lives. It seems to me that the oppressor/oppressed model is inherently destructive in a way that the other two are not. Yes, it’s true that there are oppressors and oppressed in the world. It is also true, however, that every individual is, to some degree, both oppressor and oppressed. At some time in our lives we have each been less than just to others and others have been less than just to us.
But seeing the world in oppressor/oppressed terms leads to the belief that there are only the two possibilities; we must choose to be either the oppressor or the oppressed. If we concentrate on our oppression by others, we lose our sense of agency. The more we see ourselves as helpless victims, the less we will strive to better our conditions. While concentrating on one’s own oppression is self-destructive, the desire to turn the tables and become the oppressor is socially destructive. A growing number of people on both the left and the right have decided that it’s time for a new set of oppressors to take over.
I don’t buy the conclusion that oppressor/oppressed is distinctly destructive.
If you see the world as a conservative, you are choosing to take the side of your perceived social order, but you can be barbaric in defense of that order. This is the central to complaints about police brutality.
If you believe in freedom, you will inevitably run into a conflict with another person’s freedom, and coercion can simply be a matter of perspective.
I still contend that this is more about game theory than values. Cooperation and trust are harder work, but they produce much greater value. At some point, the deterioration of trust reaches a threshold and a phase shift occurs where you no longer try to get along and achieve more, but instead seek to defend your position and seek less.
That a conservative might be barbaric in defense of civilization is true, but that’s a tactical point rather than one that is a necessary component of the world view. Progressives are equally capable of displaying brutality in trying to further their aims as witness the behavior of Antifa rioters. As to the freedom / coercion model, if one believes in negative rather than positive rights – as libertarians do – conflict will be minimal. Again, the issue you raise, while real, is tangential to the model, not integral. By contrast, the oppressor / oppressed model has conflict built into its very premise. While libertarians can quietly negotiate where one’s freedom ends and the other’s begins, what sort of peaceful negotiation can be contemplated between oppressor and oppressed? There is only oppress or be oppressed, kill or be killed.
Remember that Arnold chose these words. They aren’t on some stone tablet handed down by God.
I could ask what sort of peaceful negotiation can be contemplated between civilization and barbarism? How do you negotiate when one side is defined as lacking the capacity to maintain culture and are cruel and brutal?
And yes, I accept that anyone along any axis can be brutal.
I do not accept your core point. I believe it is possible to have a vibrant civilization with stable norms and still be open to the notion that we can improve and that some grievances are legitimate. Someone along the progressive axis would be a fool to claim there has not been significant progress made in reduction of oppression over the last 60 years.
Someone once wisely observed that each year, we’re flooded with a new set of barbarians – they’re called “children.” The biggest “struggle” that most Americans have with barbarians is raising their kids to be as mindful of other’s rights, beliefs, and sensibilities as they are of their own.
You’re certainly right that there has been significant progress made, but it seems to me that much of the BLM, Antifa, and anti-racist movements are based on claims that no progress has been made and that no progress can be made until the status quo is overthrown. I don’t see how those claims are consonant with a vibrant civilization with stable norms.
A couple reasons come to mind why Arnold might be particularly focused on progressivism. He may believe – as I believe – that in the long run, progressivism will be the dominant ideology and conservatism will fade. Demographics strongly suggest this. Maybe today conservatism is a concern, but it seems (particularly in its Trumpian variety) moribund while progressivism is fast on the ascendant. Conservatives have their issues, and in part because of those issues, they’re already losing ground, while progressives are gaining ground despite (or because) of their issues. That’s one theory.
A second reason is that Arnold is an academic who (I assume) lives in a deep blue area and probably socializes mostly with people on the left. He may thus encounter more demonization from the left than from the right. He is particularly concerned about academia in his writing, and from that perspective, focusing primarily on the left makes sense since the right is virtually non-existent in academia. Maybe if Arnold lived in Alabama and were especially concerned about the internal politics of Evangelical Christianity rather than academia, the right might be the principle concern.
I don’t see anything but oppression coming from so called “Progressivism”. That’s what causes me to be so dismissive of their ideas. I think what led me to this conclusion was a progressive author: George Orwell… When I read Animal Farm.
Maybe I’m just overly religious. I have committed to minarchism as the ideal way for society to be shaped. But I belong to one of those fringe religious groups, I think.
Let me clarify for myself. People of all persuasions demonize out of habit. It is a bad habit. I hope they can be talked out of it.
But only the social justice activists embed demonization in their ideology. If you try to talk them out of it, they demonize you. That was their reaction to the Harper’s Letter. The asymmetry is not in my position. The asymmetry is in their preference for demonization mode over persuasion mode.
…only the social justice activists…
The President of the United States is the most aggressive and most consequential demonizer in the history of American politics and has the unconditional support of what remains of the Executive branch and the Republican party, along with a full third of America.
Are you really claiming that Trump does not have demonization embedded in his ideology?
Have you ever listened to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity for 5 minutes? They have had the largest radio audiences in the country for decades, and have spawned dozens of successful copycats.
Why can’t you see this?
Your comment assumes that Trump *has* an ideology. Or even ideas. Trump-world is Trump. Period. Attack him, he demonizes you. It’s that simple. Limbaugh, Hannity, and Trump’s other enablers endlessly try to cobble together some sort of rational explanation for his verbal belches, but it’s a hopeless task.
One nitpick: Trump most certainly does not have the unconditional support of the executive branch (sometimes known as the swamp or the deep stayw).
Richard –
I agree that it can sometimes be easy to dismiss Trump’s ideas as a jumbled mess, but for the purposes of this conversation, he is clearer and more consistent than anyone.
He embraces the emotional spirit of the civilization/barbarism axis 1000%, and his lack of intellectual clarity only serves to allow him greater freedom to demonize the “barbarians” without any need to make a legitimate point.
If someone is predisposed to the oppressor/oppressed axis, he is terrifying.
I’m libertarian on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; conservative on Tuesdays and Thursdays; and disgusted on the weekends and the guy terrifies me too.
Tom: you need to work on your reading comprehension.
I’m not being mean to you, and I’m not trying to insult you. I genuinely hope you get better at it and stick around here and are able to contribute your perspective to productive discourse.
But that is impossible if you won’t understand what people are saying, and react like they said something else. If you misinterpret their points as strawmen to knock down, that doesn’t help anyone.
In this particular case, it was explained quite clearly that there is a big and important distinction to draw between:
1. People who sometimes demonize opponents, but who view it as a moral lapse or unfortunate necessity or just plain political fun that still ought to be tolerated from any side – including from their opponents – in the rough and tumble of open public discourse, and
2. People who believe that the proper political order is one in which a giant range of possible ideas is completely off limits as heresy and that people who express them must be harshly penalized, and that people who don’t cooperate with this ideal by defending those bad people or opposing those penalties must also be subject to publicly condemnation and harshly penalized.
Tom, this is an obviously true and important point, whether you want to admit it or understand it or not. It is also general and doesn’t even have to rely to on specific details of the current political context.
As to the merits of the specifics: the Harper’s letter was the mildest possible plea for slightly more free-ish speech. It didn’t appear at this time and place randomly and for no reason whatsoever, but because there was a alarmingly sudden and severe intensification of a major social problem.
Demonization comes from all sides and has been part of politics from the beginning, but this time is different, which is why the letter exists.
It was signed almost exclusively by some of the most progressive people around. E.g., Noam Chomsky and Matt Yglesias. And they made clear multiple times that they believe people on the right are awful and dangerous.
And many of those people were *still* demonized or got into trouble for it. Some had to “disavow” and apologize.
Now, who demonized them? Who put pressure on them? On what basis?
Well obviously it was the libertarians and the conservatives, who always demonize social justice progressives, so this is just what one would expect.
Oh, wait, but it wasn’t. The libertarians and conservatives were on the *same side* as these uber-progressive signatories on this subject, and were rooting for them. They all share the same values and agree that there is a big problem.
What is the name for the problem?
It isn’t ‘demonization’. Everybody demonizes. No, this is a problem that is somehow confined to a *particular group* that is *exclusively* on the far left, and which is the natural expression of their particular *political beliefs*.
That is, it’s a “social justice activist ideology” problem, just like he said, and just like you didn’t read.
In that ideology, the demonization is not a moral lapse but a moral *mandate*.
The above explanation is about as clear and obvious and simple as it is possible for one to make. If you still don’t understand it, then there is no point in talking to you, because there is no way to communicate ideas across that kind of comprehension gap.
Handle –
Please excuse me if I misunderstand what you have written, but it seems to me that your definitions for classifying demonization are somewhat self serving. You are worried about very, very serious demonization, while the other side is just engaging in typical roughhousing.
I fully agree that there is a mob of SJW on the internet swarming around and demanding cancelation, but they are, by our blog author’s judgement and a host of others, generally a bunch of losers. It is a bad trend and we all should be concerned.
The level of danger is a function of both how destructive the ideas are and how much power they can attract.
You have successfully argued that going around ruining careers over their opinions is scary stuff. What I think you have failed to do is reasonably judge the degree of real power that has been attracted to these aims. There has been some influence and some consequence, yes, but not much real power.
Yet, you are able to largely dismiss the danger of having the most powerful person on earth persistently demonizing a side you lack empathy for. They are every bit as afraid as you are.
Trump is throwing around some real weight, and can do more in one hour than all the SJW have ever done.
I am suspicious that you may be weighting these matters based primarily on their potential to influence you and those you care about, rather than what is most dangerous for society.
Tom DeMeo — Not much real power? Tell that to all the people that have been losing their jobs and reputations (and one person who just committed suicide). One thing that really bugs me about the social justice activists is that they talk about sticking up for the marginalized, but within the campus community, they are not marginalized, they are the ones with the power. And increasingly outside campus as well, in newspaper offices, publishing companies, big corporations, and other places.
Oh, and I should note that most people slammed by Trump aren’t really hurt by it. They wear it as a badge of honor. I’m sure there are some examples I’m not thinking of right now, but I think you might be exaggerating his effects.
MikeW
You can always use that rhetorical technique. If it happens to you, it is always important. And I agree with you that this matters.
I think you are not picking up my argument. I have not dismissed cancelation as trivial, just that it needs to be viewed in perspective. Some people have always felt vulnerable to cancelation.
I’m not arguing for asymmetry here, I’m arguing against it.
You write far more about this than you do about arguments that appeal to how to reduce oppression.
I can’t speak for Arnold but one reason I don’t speak much about oppression in America is that I don’t think there is much of it. A black person in Mississippi in 1960 was oppressed. A black person in Mississippi in 2020 is not.
Constantly looking for oppression (and with any imagination, you can find it anywhere) is like reverse cognitive behavioral therapy. It makes the putatively oppressed less able to improve their lives.
Looking for oppression takes attention away from things that might make things better. If every black child were, in the words of Clinton Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, “a planned and wanted child”, a significant part of the white-black disparity would disappear. Even better if all children were such. But if saying, “you can do better” is “blaming the victim” and off-limits, things aren’t going to get better.
They have redefined “oppression” to mean having a social system that rewards functional behavior (delayed gratification, stable family formation, diligence, politeness, creativity in problem solving, restraint in demands for “honor,” etc.) and therefore disadvantages dysfunctional behavior, where this has a negatively “disparate impact” on ideologically favored groups.
And if you disagree with this redefinition of “oppression,” you are labelled an oppressor and a bigot.
Well put
Perhaps I phrased this poorly. My intent was to point out a lack of persuasion, which is the point of this thread.
You don’t write about the perspective of another axis necessarily because it interests you or see the world that way (by definition you don’t), but because you want to persuade another axis. If you are interested in a policy, you write to the concerns of the other axes to persuade them.
Can you show us how it’s done Tom? Can you give us an example of some verbal argument that will persuade social justice types to stop trying to cancel people? It would literally be worth trillions of dollars in expected social welfare and stand alongside the coronavirus vaccine. On my honor, if you can produce such a thing, I will personally commission a bronze statue of you to be put atop one of the many plinths which have recently gone on the market.
But I’m not holding my breath.
The Harper’s letter was the best attempt possible, coming from respected and influential friends and allies who mostly share the same goals and values, trying to persuade people on their own side to open their minds and behave better, and even throwing them a few gratuitous right-demon bones.
There is no evidence I’ve seen to indicate it worked, or even persuaded *a single person*. It was a miserable, total failure.
What is your explanation for this failure? That they could have done better, but flubbed it?
You really have only two possibilities. Either these elite progressive public intellectuals were actually too dumb to think of even a mildly persuasive case. Or that persuasion is *impossible*.
I have no doubt that some of the signatories even signed on thinking that the real purpose of the letter was precisely to prove by demonstration the fact of this impossibility, which it certainly did.
That’s why the letter fails and that’s the big trouble we’re in. It *is* impossible. “Persuasion Is Over”.
This is really hard – both intellectually and emotionally – for public intellectuals to grasp, since their comparative advantage in life is persuasive argumentation, and they live and breathe and thrive in that world. It was a good world! It’s gone.
How can persuasion be impossible? There are two easy explanations.
1. Irreconcilable conflict of values and priors. A typical approach to persuasion is to say that one’s behavior in support of some value is inconsistent with another, higher value. But that only works if they actually believe in a higher value. Otherwise you are just ‘haggling over price’ or arguing about whether the timing or speed is counterproductive in a practical sense. If you can’t identify the higher value, you can’t use this tactic to persuade. Is it “liberty”? Lol, no. It is “free speech”? They don’t believe in free speech. Is it decency? No, those who need to be cancelled are the ones being indecent, and it is likewise indecent to do nothing and let them get away with it. This is what the Harper’s letter didn’t do because it was what it *couldn’t* do, the set of higher values is empty.
In other words, it’s an ideological problem.
2. “Rigor Is Over”
For persuasion to work, verbal arguments have to work, and that means that people have to stick to certain norms about rules of behavior and epistemology for discourse and dialectic, just like lawyers at trial. Words have to mean something. Ideas should be consistent and coherent. Logical fallacies should be avoided and conclusions cannot hinge on unfalsifiable claims about subjective mental states. Evidence should be trustworthy, verifiable, replicable. People must feel it is safe to make their case without personal ruination.
We no longer live in a world where there is anything like a shared commitment to either those norms or even to those basic rules of usage of language and rational thinking. Yes, it is really that bad, and it is getting much worse very quickly.
The tragic irony is that the letter-signers who suddenly realize that they have been encouraging others to start sawing off the very branch they are standing on – have built their whole careers on – are alarmed just at the moment it has become impossible to use their particular argumentative skills to stop it.
They poisoned their own well, but now thirst. You can’t brainwash the kids with “feelings are more important than arguments” for two generations and then try to argue them out of it when they take you too seriously.
Thus, Persuasion Is Over. Rigor Is Over. Discourse Is Over. That’s why demonization is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming right at our Titanic.
The thing about the Titanic is by the time they saw the saw that the iceberg was right ahead, it was already too late and they were doomed. The crew scrambled as fast as they could and did everything in their power to avoid the collision, but all for naught.
The trouble was that they had spent the previous days plowing full speed ahead into hazardous territory. By the time they realized their mistake, there was nothing left to do about it.
Handle-
1. Sticking to the 3 languages theory, the Harper’s letter was decidedly not the best attempt possible. It did not make an argument using the language of the oppressor/oppressed axis.
2. You seem to have somewhat unrealistic expectations. It was one brief letter. A single round of persuasion. Persuasion takes work. To the extent it was successful, it did create an opening edge and created significant debate. There was lots written both pro and con. Reasons were given for why it wasn’t more convincing. Respond to that. Round two is next. That is the basis for moving forward.
3. Ultimately, the best argument is the hardest one. We go around to the beginning. I asked why no attempt is made to persuade, and it boils down to a collapse of trust. I have been arguing this whole time that Arnold is very wrong in his assertion of asymmetry. SJW don’t trust the system any more than the system trusts them. Read the rebuttals to the Harper’s letter. It is quite symmetrical. Start by talking and not demonizing. Eventually they will stop demonizing too.
@Tom: Didn’t use the axis? You can’t just ctrl-f for “opp”, and be done with it, so again, this comes down to reading comprehension.
How about the beginning, “Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society … But this needed reckoning …we applaud the first development”
That is 200 proof oppressor/oppressed: “We applaud the overdue reckoning for all the racial injustice and social injustice such as that perpetrated by the funded police,” is *textbook* (or Kling’s book) progressive SJW cant.
“The forces of illiberalism … have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.”
Orange Man Bad. Why? Because he’s goal is oppress us by means of taking away the voice and power a tolerant democracy gives us.
The whole parade of horribles starting with, “But it is now all too common …” are instances of people being oppressed unjustly, it’s only that the trouble is the SJWs say these people had it coming, so that oppression doesn’t count.
The Harper’s letter says all that oppression and the consequences of it is bad. The SJWs say it is good. Is what is lost from risk aversion a higher ideal than what is gained from less offense? A conflict of values cannot be reconciled.
“The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power”
Who lacks power? The oppressed, that’s who.
“We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences”
I.e., “Please cut it out with the cancel culture, which is defined by the unjust oppression of imposing dire professional consequences on people who don’t deserve it.”
The objections to the letter you noted all reply the same way, “On the contrary, they definitely deserve it! When people say things that criticize the actions or hurt the cause of oppressed people, that is unjust oppression too (“objectively oppressive” just like Stalin’s “objectively fascist”) and they deserve bad consequences. When those who deserve bad consequences get what’s coming to them, that’s called ‘social justice’.”
There is no way to bridge that gap.
That gets back to the larger conversation about political persuasion really works, when it can work at all. It’s not like being able to show all the steps in some mathematical proof. It isn’t even by following the rules and procedures in a trial court. Cialdini and Hanson are both very good on this.
A lot of persuasion has very little to do with evidence, logic, arguments, and so forth (“Logos”) and Aristotle also identified Pathos (emotions) and Ethos.
Now, Aristotle defined Ethos in a somewhat limited way as a means of signalling the personal character “ethics” of the speaker, which enhances the perception of trustworthiness and reliability.
But ethics is only one part of Ethos. More broadly, one could define it as the the individual’s overall ability to influence people on the basis of personal qualities that are not directly related to the controversy.
Some of those personal qualities might be rationally related to “trustworthiness” and “credibility”, but many aren’t.
When an individual is perceived to be attractive, charismatic, socially important, prestigious, high-status, powerful, someone who can do things for you, for which there is some possibility of reciprocity of furthering each other’s interests and views in a log-rolling clique, someone with whom it would be unwise to argue, and with whom it is worthwhile to signal affiliation because important third parties would react favorably, then there is a tremendous amount of subconscious pressure working below the surface of one’s awareness.
All of a sudden, one warms up easily to the ideas, drops the shields of skeptical critical scrutiny, finds the ideas somehow more compelling, and at the first sign of a ‘strong’ (socially acceptable) rationalization, that seals the deal, one is convinced and “persuaded”.
People sometimes report these experiences of influence as being “chemistry” or “magical” and “being under a spell” or “mesmerized” and having to “snap out of it”. This happens in all kinds of contexts, academic, legal, sexual, commercial, religious, etc. It is the basis of cult psychology, and all cults are also always cults of personality.
In retrospect these people realize, often to their own embarrassment, that none of the arguments made sense or were convincing on the basis of mere words, quite the contrary, but nevertheless, at the time, under these personal influences, they felt the overwhelming urge to ‘agree’ and go along that felt completely sincere, genuine, authentically like making up their own mind and “being persuaded”.
By the way, this is yet another big reason why online learning is no substitute for in-person instruction. You need to be able to leverage some of those trans-credibility aspects of Ethos in person in order to influence at the highest levels.
You can’t lead on zoom. You can’t coach on zoom. You can’t really motivate on zoom, and you can’t rely on socially-inspired attentiveness on zoom. Good teaching involves all of those things, which is why you can’t teach on zoom. Except to kids who were going to learn regardless, “the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”
The reason the Harper’s letter was the best possible attempt was precisely because of the prestige, status, important, and influence of all the prominent and extremely progressive co-signers. The content of the thing could have been “blah, blah, yadda, yadda”, instead of Logos and Pathos, and it wouldn’t have made much difference because the list of signatories is dripping with the kind of Ethos I described above, the persuasive power of personality.
But it’s all for nothing, because it it doesn’t matter how awesome your persuasive triangle is when it *can’t be done* because what you are trying to do is fundamentally *impossible*.
This is hardly some controversial statement. It is an obvious banality that some disputes simply cannot be settled with arguments, and when they can’t be, von Clausewitz explained perfectly well what comes next.
You write far more about this than you do about arguments that appeal to how to reduce oppression.
Sneaky. Asking why Arnold doesn’t write more about reducing oppression is like asking “When did you stop beating your wife?” The goal is to provoke accidental self-inculpation.
I wasn’t trying to be sneaky at all. Arnold defined the languages. Persuasion becomes the ability to frame a political position in a way that cooperates with the language of others.
I would think likewise that a progressive would want to show how their position wouldn’t threaten civilization or promote barbarism if they wanted to persuade a conservative. That is why “defund the police” was so incredibly stupid, even if a more nuanced discussion about that might be justified at some other time.
Persuasion is the act of convincing someone who thinks differently than you that your position won’t be threatening to their concerns. To do that, you need to appeal to their axis.
Seems related to conflict vs. mistake theory: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
My own synthesis is that conflict theorists and mistake theorists are both right; mistake theorists really are engaged in conflict, and conflict theorists really do make a lot of mistakes.
Interesting that the SlateStarCodex post is still there, even though at the top level it still says that everything has been deleted. Anybody know what’s up?
Scott restored all his old posts (though not yet the comments or the old site style), on July 21st, a month after the deletion. It looks like The New York Times is now more likely to respect his anonymity if and when they publish the article, but of course they are not going to publicly admit they backed down on their “””policy”””. My guess is that this information somehow got to Scott in a way that was conditional on his playing along as if he didn’t know one way or the other.
Cade Metz apparently felt bad about the whole thing and a rumor is that he had advocated for such an outcome, though, considering who he works for, he shouldn’t have offered any assurances in the first place.
Demonization is persuasion. Only it’s not persuading one’s opponent, but rather persuading one’s own supporters. When you have a captive audience at hand, everyone becomes a performer.
This is a nice insight. Demonization seeks to persuade the people on your own side that those on the other side are baddies. A simply point but a deep insight
It’s not just “on your own side”. Consider a prosecutor trying to convince a judge or jury to convict a defendant. The judge or jury is not “his side”, they have to be persuaded, and one way to persuade them is to ‘demonize’ the defendant.
In court there are rules of the game which tend to discourage the worst types of demonization, though there have been plenty of times and places when such rules were not enforced, and we may be getting a taste of what that is going to feel like soon.
Now, persuading a jury is different than persuading *the defendant himself*. Say, to let his hostage go and turn himself in. You aren’t going to get very far if you are demonizing him to his face.
But what if the exact point in dispute is whether what someone did should be a ‘crime’ at all? Lets say it is before prohibition and you are trying to convince people to give up drinking. You can try telling them about the health effects and theological arguments against consumption of alcohol, but if they disagree about those effects, have difference preferences in which the trade-off is worth it, and don’t believe in the same religious values, you are out of luck.
Then the question is, do you just accept these limitations and take your lumps and walk away, or do you escalate? For example, by means of contributing to a campaign to prohibit alcohol nationwide, in part by demonizing drinkers to “the jury” of decision makers as wicked scum of the earth who beat their wives and steal the bread out of the mouths of their own babies. Really, you are demonizing those drinkers not just in the name of virtue and righteousness and poor, hungry babies, but really out of paternalistic regard, that is, for their own good.
Libertarians would like to limit influence to the acts of persuading people to act differently, but without threatening them with serious negative consequences if they persist in their actions.
But the great irony is that they will allow for no enforcement mechanism of this norm, and when they try to persuade people to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Which is why, like pacifists facing down an approaching orc army, they are probably just going to go extinct with everyone else.
It’s not just that: you can also persuade someone by demonizing a third party that *isn’t* present. E.g., “look at how terrible your side is, that’s not you, you’re better than those Nazis,” or as my college professors used to do, make jokes insinuating that people who believe X (usually something 40-80% of people believe) are obviously morons, but “we” know better. Students sympathetic with X but not confident and look at their professor as an authority may second guess opinions or if undecided on an issue, strongly adopt the opposite opinion from social pressure. Even if there’s no audience, demonization – just not of the interlocutor – can still be emotionally persuasive.
It’s much worst than that. Let me explain.
The trouble is that one’s perception of that contrast as the boundaries of the territory is limited by one’s experience of the tail-end of the three-centuries-long high water mark for norms of rigor and fairness and for discourse quality in general.
But the true spectrum goes much, much further out in the direction of total degeneracy than mere “demonization”, or “convincing people on your side to close their minds”. Demonization in terms of making typical accusations of transgression is at least theoretically answerable in terms of some remaining ability for an innocent person, even if he is forced to bear the burden of proof, to mount a defense using prevailing standards of language and reason. But soon you will be hoping to that people will stick to merely demonizing each other in that manner as opposed to using language in even more terrible and strategically unanswerable ways, to make power plays and other gambit moves in the social game, with catastrophic consequences.
The slide in this “postmodernist” direction, with all the strategic and deliberate ambiguity traps, semantic Catch-22s, and impregnable fortification at the meta level such that one never has to engage with the merits of any dispute, is one of the key contributors to the recent collapse in the quality and rigor of progressive argumentation. Go read a typical progressive article from 25, 50, 75, or 100 years ago and the difference is completely apparent and truly shocking. That’s how you know that sooner or later we’ll start approaching the unpleasant end game.
We have good examples from Soviet, Chinese, and French history of how much further down this rabbit hole can go from here.
What will happen next – what is in fact already happening – is that accusation alone is ruinous and even if one can in principle demonstrate one’s innocence, it will be too late. After that, it will be impossible even in principle to defend oneself, because based on unfalsifiable claims of subjective mental states. After that, it will not only become impossible to mount a defense, but even the attempt at doing so can only aggravate and exacerbate the situation and will be taken as additional, corroborating evidence of one’s transgression and thus, one’s irredeemably transgressive nature.
The only hope of rehabilitation is to prove your redeemabiltiy by means of immediately demonstrating remorse, confessing your guilt (soon also the guilt of everyone you care about), apologizing to your victims and your whole society, paying restitution of everything you have, cancelling oneself from one’s positions, and humiliating oneself before one’s accusers by begging for mercy and thanking them for holding you accountable.
It still goes down further down from there! The above cases characterized the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin’s purges and the worst bits of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but at least didn’t necessarily have to involve the racial element and the whole favored-identity hierarchy in the calculation of Who, Whom.
But that is now a clearly established part of the progressive political formula, which has also run out of room to pay off their lower status clients in merely material welfare or social position quotas. The logical implication is the ultimate personalization of politics and the regime endorsing and backing up a system of social domination in which particular individuals will always be able to exercise the potential to be real-life Anthony Fremont monsters who possess an absolutely superior moral authority and trump card in all matters over their second-class compatriots.
Those very bad times will eventually be ended in equally or perhaps even more ugly ways, but what we will have left at the end of that path will be mere shadowy remnants of that high water mark. At this point probably the best we can do is construct and execute a plan to create the quickest feasible shortcut to that end.
Unfortunately, demonization is effective.
I don’t suppose it matters, but perhaps we should begin here by describing people with different points of view as, “Highly intelligent but with different points of view.”
But the other side will demonize us anyway, so I say we should demonize them too.
Persuasion and demonization are one thing. Banishment and ideological purity tests are the order of the day in institutions that have become churches of the new religion. Reading this case study of the customs of the religion: https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-my-own-lived-experience-says-otherwise/
one can only conclude it is time to defund all the government schools. Persuasion is a lost cause.