Like most animals, humans strive to dominate each other, in order to rise in the local “pecking order”. And control over ourselves and others is widely taken as one of the strongest signs of dominance and non-submission. But unlike other animals, humans have norms against overt dominance and submission, and norms promoting pro-social behavior, that helps others. So we do push to dominate, but we pretend that we are actually just trying to help. And as usual, we are typically not consciously aware of our hypocrisy. In our mind, we are mainly aware of how they are doing the wrong things, and how they would be so much better off if only we could make them do things our way.
I am fond of the dichotomy between prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. You get prestige by being good at something. You get dominance by imposing your will on others. For me, it’s pretty simple. Yay for prestige moves, boo for dominance moves. Actually, it gets complicated because the process for creating norms for prestige can involve dominance moves.
As an aside, a reader points out that Robin Hanson engages in asymmetric insight, which means not taking people at their word. An essential part of Robin’s outlook is his view that people’s true motives differ from what they themselves claim or even believe them to be. I would love to see a debate between Robin and Jeffrey Friedman on this issue. Jeffrey thinks that not taking people at their word is a violation of intellectual charity.
Singling out paternalism as opposed to maternal or ‘older sister’ type relationships seems on its face simply an example of sexist rhetoric. However, his claim might be part of something with substantial historical weight; that is, the idea that all human actions are at their roots totally selfish.
He might just assert that all putative positive family-like relationships are actually either a cover for, or subconsciously, about power and dominance – claiming to provide protection to obtain subordination. The obvious extension is that all claims of oppression are similarly meant to demand protection and favor. This has been tied back to economics and to evolutionary biology; but it is in essence a religious claim, about nihilism.
The argument that this is not charitable – intellectually or otherwise – falls on deaf ears because the existence of charity has been ruled out, entirely.
You are ignoring that RH acknowledges “But unlike other animals, humans have norms against overt dominance and submission, and norms promoting pro-social behavior, that helps others.” At least for analytical purposes, voluntary compliance with norms promoting pro-social behavior is a strong sign of charity.
No, you inserted ‘voluntary.’
I think there is a difference between arguing ” all human actions are at their roots totally selfish” and “all human actions are self-regarding”. The former is false; the latter could well be true.
If I get pleasure from my wife being happy, my trying to make her happy is certainly self-regarding. In economics jargon, it increases my utility. But it really isn’t “totally selfish”. If I see a person trying to merge into a long line of traffic and I slow down and flash my lights to say “come on in”, I feel good. Being the weird guy I am, I may even think, “if I’m nice to other drivers, I’ll make it more likely that they’ll be nice and eventually it will make my driving easier”. Which is self-regarding but not “totally selfish”.
Sex developed for reproductive purposes, to get genes into the next generation. But even the Catholic Church doesn’t believe sex is “totally about reproduction”. For many people, sex is about avoiding reproduction. Similarly, many people’s self-regarding acts are actually about avoiding selfishness.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced,
Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste
– T.S. Eliot
Insisting on motives becoming the core of the discussion is a form of dominance. It has the appeal of truth, because we really do all have underlying motives, but it fully disables the conversation and dismisses all it touches. It is a failure.
Not recognizing a dominance move when you are confronted with one is a failure.
Recognition is different from insisting on motives becoming the core of the discussion.
And what does that recognition do for you? It gives you permission to dismiss. It takes persuasion off the table. It is a mechanism for closing your mind.
The pattern is now familiar. Define normal human friction in hysterical terms. Voila! Paternalism is converted from low grade arrogance into a high grade threat.
Hanson is wrong. Most social animals, and most human beings find the notion of dominance very unpleasant. They compete. They jostle for status. They find their place.
Domination is a whole other thing. It is a heavy, dangerous game that only a few of us can stomach.
Any time you offer a novel theory of human motivation in general, you are claiming special insight into the motives of others that they do not have into your motives (until they have embraced your theory). It does not seem useful to label this a claim of “asymmetrical insight.”
It may be impolite to attribute motives to people that they do not acknowledge, but that does not mean the attribution is incorrect.
I’ll go with Hanson over Friedman.
Robin Hanson believes the vast majority of people people do not recognize or examing their motives with thorough-going honesty. He is on solid ground, backed by all major religious traditions. That is very different than accusing someone of duplicity.
One of the main purposes, if not THE main purpose, of achieving prestige, is to allow more dominance.
Even Gandhi and Mother Teresa, gaining very high prestige thru charity, sought to change the behavior of others. By become “morally dominant”, and making their way of life the norm.
“Moral superiority” is both a push for prestige, and an attempt to dominate the culture, the norms of behavior. Prestige and dominance are related but different concepts.
Domination is also part of the parameters of the Overton Window – what can be discussed.
Lenin was correctly asking the important question: What is to be done?
Humans achieve and advance thru cooperation. Both voluntary and involuntary. I owe, I owe, so off to work I go. Does this make me wage slave? (Almost)
As Hanson very cogently points out: we actually do often need leaders to make central decisions that effect many others.
Here in Slovakia, the choice of Bratislava development is either the leader accepts a bribe to say OK to some development, which some or many people dislike, or else there are so many vetoes on any real possible building that nothing gets built. With a reasonable (small) bribe-accepting leader, reasonable stuff does get built. And the “honest”, uncorrupted leader, who built almost nothing, gets booted out in the next election (rightfully so!).
Both Robin and Jeffrey have good points on motives. The solution should be, from Reagan, “Trust, but verify”. Accept peoples’ words about their motives, but verify them.
The verification is falsified when hypocrisy is detected “do what I say, not what I do”. People’s actions show their (dominant) motivation more than their words.
And most motivations involve muti-variate comparisons with realistic alternatives. Yet that makes honest discussion about “motivations” almost impossible, due to so many alternative possible explanations, and no way to know what is really true. Even of people about themselves (Hanson right), and it’s hard to achieve the Greek ideal: “Know Thyself”.
Hanson is obviously correct, as he spelled out at length in his excellent The Elephant In The Brain. Most people are not aware of their true motives, and the mechanism of self-deception that permits this socially-useful hypocrisy and appeal to socially desirable causes makes it all seem sincere and authentic and is adaptive for human group coordination. People are self-naive and delude themselves with all kinds of rationalization to defend their ego and self-regard, and it is thus also naive to accept their claims about their motives at face value.
That doesn’t mean they are consciously lying or practicing bad faith, and I think that’s the accusation which is ‘uncharitable’.
Part of why the wokepocalypse is so dangerous to intellectual life is that it makes every dispute personal and a function of social position and group identity, which is a fallacy and incompatible with sound epistemology. The point of engaging with someone on the merits from the objective perspective is to depersonalize the dialectic as much as possible so that rigorous standards of logic and evidence have a chance to win out over social power plays.
Charitable interpretation is a norm of friendly sociability which requires peaceful relations, that is, mutual reciprocity of good faith. Without consistency and reciprocity, sticking to any norm is like unilateral disarmanent and making oneself vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Peace is better than mutual hostility, but hostility is better than the guilty triumphing over the innocent. Cooperate-cooperate is better than defect-defect, but defect-defect is better than letting a defector get away with crushing the cooperator.
It is a good presumption to give people the benefit of the doubt, but they should not continue to receive those benefits when there is no longer any doubt.
You can’t argue there’s a wokepocalypse going on, and simultaneously argue Hanson is right, because Hanson is saying that we are deeply motivated subconsciously by social position and group identity as a natural part of the human condition.
That just makes no sense at all. “Cause and effect” are not “simultaneous contradictions”.
It is because the latter has spun out of the control of the social technologies of traditional institutions that is the *cause* of the former.
“You can’t argue there’s an obesity epidemic going on, and simultaneously argue that people naturally deeply hunger for sugar and fat in a way that is maladapted to cheap calories and a sedentary lifestyle.”
See? That’s an analagous statement and just as absurd in its mischaracterization of cause and effect.
I’m agree with your analogy. They match up because they are both pairs of bad arguments, and the answer to both is to stop thinking that way.
Hanson seems spot on when he writes:
“In our society today, paternalistic authorities often claim that they are disciplined not so much by profit, voters, or law, but by “science”. You see, they only make people do things when “science” says that is for the best. Having seen how such “science” actually works in these contexts, I’m relatively skeptical of this as an effective discipline today. Too often, this is just a way to justify applying the widespread opinions of social classes and coalitions with which regulators ally.”
Perhaps Yuval Levin’s discussion in his The Great Debate of the different approaches to paternalism that he perceives in Burke and Paine might help frame Hanson’s notion of paternalism in a historical context that usefully can help us to parse the relevance of scientism.
Levin writes:
“Paine thus looks to politics to overcome impediments to our freedom to live as we choose, which leads him in time to look to the state to ameliorate severe material deprivation. He argues that such deprivation originates from the (sometimes necessary, sometimes avoidable) distortions of mankind’s equal right to the fruits of the earth and is exacerbated over time by regimes that neglect or ignore the rights of their people. To correct for this error, he argues, government has a role in alleviating the misery of the most miserable and giving all something closer to an equal chance of rising by their own merits. In this way, again, Paine understands social obligations as arising primarily out of the importance of individual freedom and choice. Government exists to address violations of rights to freedom and choice, and it must occasionally do so by a modest redistribution of material resources to keep the poorest from falling beneath even the minimal standard of human dignity. Paine is thus an ardent capitalist but one alert to some of the effects of capitalism on the poor. Before the full emergence of the industrial revolution, Paine understood that economic progress would not eliminate poverty and, on the contrary, might create circumstances that could necessitate unprecedented public action. Burke, meanwhile, believed our obligations are functions not of our right to choose but of our deeply embedded place in the social order. Each of us lives in a particular relation to society, which carries with it both duties and privileges, and society will only function well if all its members meet their particular obligations. The care of the poor is surely among these obligations, but the duty falls to the rich, not to the state acting on behalf of all, because it is not something the state could do without causing even greater harm. Precisely because Burke draws a less stark distinction between society and government—treating both as described by the social contract, which is a partnership in all things—he also has a more limited notion of the role of the government. Paine makes a great deal of the difference between government and society, but in practice this difference often means that duties that are taken to be public obligations are all assigned to the government, while private life is kept conceptually separate from politics. Burke’s and Paine’s understandings of social relations, therefore, differ dramatically, and along lines similar to (and rooted in) those of their disagreement over nature and history. Edmund Burke begins from the given world and seeks to strengthen social and political life as a means of contending with circumstances we did not choose. Thomas Paine begins from the principles of liberty, equality, and natural rights and builds political institutions on those grounds to defend the prerogatives of the individual. The two men differ sharply on just how much what has been done before matters and just how pliable human relations will be to philosophically inspired efforts at fundamental reconstruction. In their differing views, we also find echoes of their more general approaches toward effecting political change. The thinker, who works primarily with ideas and principles, looks at circumstances not of people’s choosing and considers them consequences of past applications of principle. Such a person sees in circumstances that are less than ideal the imprint of principles that are less than correct. He therefore seeks to improve on circumstances by offering a new beginning in principles that are more correct. The statesman, who works with political circumstances, begins necessarily from his (mostly given rather than chosen) affiliations with and obligations to his particular community and its various subdivisions and so starts from what exists and seeks within it ways to improve on it. In this way, the distinction between choice and obligation finds its match in the distinction between reason and prescription, as the former distinction applies to the ends of politics and the latter to its means.”
So Paine perhaps is in the dominance hierarchy tradition and Burke in the prestige tradition? Neither Paine nor Burke can be said to have the better of it because each has latched onto truths albeit incomplete truths. Thus, as with so much else, an ideological approach is unhelpful, and we are best served by pragmatic approaches that reform incrementally when possible and accept the burden of radical change when necessary.
The other day I had a friend come by to pick up some infant toys before we move. He installs solar panels on roofs for a living. In the spring he was put out of work by the lockdown. Now he is back at work.
Curious thing is he’s force, by our paternalistic SCIENCE! based overlords, to wear a mask all day at work. This despite the fact that his work involves being on a roof outdoors by himself with nobody around. It’s pretty hot on a roof in 100 degree weather with solar panels all around you. Science doesn’t really say wearing a mask and being hot and unable to breath is necessary to stop COVID, but SCIENCE! and it’s adherent do. By force.
Hanson is probably (motivated by!) arguing especially against Libertarian Paternalism:
the idea that it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behavior while also respecting freedom of choice, as well as the implementation of that idea.
Hanson: “we do push to dominate, but we pretend that we are actually just trying to help.” What does it mean to actually help without domination? Does Hanson think it’s even possible?
His music example uses parents, all of whom are at least somewhat paternalistic, as dominating their kids to play music. I’m sure many parents are like me, sad that I didn’t learn to play when a kid, because I’d often like to play now; but don’t like practicing and can only barely make any music today. We want our grown kids to have the freedom to play, if they want. Such grown up freedom only comes after practice. Many who are pushed to practice as kids, gain enough proficiency to be able to play whenever they want when they’re adults. Many such folks are GLAD their parents pushed them. Many grown ups wish their parents HAD PUSHED them more, so they could play today. Some grown up kids still HATE music, because they were pushed, dominated, into playing.
What should a loving parent DO – one who wants what is best for the child? My guess is that the music playing haters are around 5-10% of those who were pushed.
Note that this example is dominating to push active action – play music. A similar dynamic is negative action – NOT smoking. Virtually all parents want their kids to not smoke, and not start smoking, even if they do smoke. They think that’s what’s best for the kid, and everybody trying to help will be trying to stop the smoking.
Still, lots of “cool kids” smoke, and the cost is small (smaller than the best sneakers or iPhone), and the harm is later. So there’s cool pressure to smoke. Calling parents who are against their kids smoking as “dominating” is missing the point.
What is best for the kids?
How to get there, most often, for more of the kids?