Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. It will certainly make my list of best books for 2018. My review on Amazon says,
Uncivil Agreement addresses the topic of polarization from the perspective of political psychology. The author advances the view that social identity is more important than opinions on issues as a driver of political behavior in general and polarization in particular.
The book is timely because it can help to explain the high levels of political anger that we see around us. The book is convincing in part because it makes intuitive sense (at least to me) but mostly because of the author’s clever and careful empirical research. Even a skeptic should find her studies persuasive.
We might naturally assume that our political selves are shaped by our interests and our views of policy. The alternative that Mason proposes is that our political selves are shaped by our sense of where we fit in socially.
From this alternative perspective, the increase in polarization arises from the fact that people are becoming more certain of where they belong in the social sphere. Our social class structure has become more segregated. Fewer people cross the bridges between status groups defined by location, education level, wealth, race, religiosity, etc.
As the social structure solidifies, political antagonism increases. People who are locked into their identity as Democrats only care about seeing Democrats win and Republicans lose. Republicans, too, have come to care more about winning than about issues. I would note that Democrats loved Barack Obama’s victories, even though at the state level the party hollowed out while he was President. By the same token, Republicans love Donald Trump’s victory, even though it seems to be devastating the party’s future.
Another trend is an increase in what Mason calls “blind” activism. That is, political activism driven by anger and enthusiasm, rather than by reason and practical considerations.
I think that the publisher is wrong to position this as a purely academic book or textbook. It should be of value to the many people who have a general interest in the nature of political behavior. I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found that I had to squint to read the graphs. But it was still very much worth it.
Finally, I cannot resist saying that if you like this book, you may also like my own more amateurish effort, The Three Languages of Politics. Although my book is very different in style from Uncivil Agreement, I think that the two books share some of the same underlying psychological outlook.
I think that there are libertarian implications that the author does not mention. If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.
Note: Handle has a comment on an earlier post that goes against Mason in some important respects. I will discuss this next week.
Voting, though not “enchanting,” is often the best way of making social decisions, but it would be good if many fewer such decisions were put to the vote and more were allowed to emerge from the market process.
If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.
There is not a Yes/No acting self-interest or tribally and let us say the mix is 70% self-interest/30% tribally. And long term I believe that people tribe is defined by their self-interest. (This is the primary reason why church membership has gone down. Up until 1960, the local shopkeeper and business owners had to attend church to signal their customer they were one of them.)
1) Of acting tribally could mean a person views their tribe by religion or even by their workplace or company. Companies spend billions to increase their sales and leadership to view the company as their tribe.
2) For most people, acting tribally is acting self-interest. It is no accident that people who act tribally working for the oil companies tend to believe more drilling helps everybody. Or teacher tribal teacher union will believe paying teachers more means your kids are better educated. (I am not saying all this is true but I do believe most professionals tend over-exaggerate the benefits they give society. ) So this is the reason why Hollywood loves diversity so much….Have you seen foreign grosses on their blockbuster movies?
3) And in terms of politics you saw a lot voters act both as a tribe and self-interest. Trump did win a slight majority of high income voters but also won a good portion of low income voters with the message of increased manufacturing n the US.
You’re describing an interest group and calling it a tribe. Tribal is far more gut-level than whether you work for Google or Shell. It’s the cultural construct you overlay on the world.
You and others are also over-homogenizing the population. Some groups (globally and now in the US) are 90% tribal. Some are 70% tribal. Some are 40% tribal. Some are 20% tribal.
There’s a threshold above which voting as a means for social decision-making starts to break down. Partly because the groups can’t see beyond ‘this candidate is in/for my tribe or not in/against my tribe’ separate from the policies under consideration. Partly because beyond a certain point they can’t even agree those of other tribes should be treated as fellow citizens with broadly e
I have work for a large corporation and they do a number things to make you part of their tribe. They spend millions of dollars to big all their sales team into a hotel and update them on the latest products and services. But they will hire someone like Jordan Peterson in 2014 to give a pep talk to build up the Sales team. They bring in head of sales of Europe to talk about how to do global business. I was recently part of merger and the new company spent a bunch to convince us the new team members were part of the same tribe.
Political tribes is really on only type of tribe. Don’t churches create a tribe?
You have your causality backward. Your tribe (cultural identification if you prefer) influences where you would be willing to work and your religion (although religion and cultural identification are intertwined).
Damore @ Google can be analyzed as inter-tribal warfare between two tribes at one company…the sort of company that I assume (not being a Googler or wanting to be…tribe…) conducts the sort of pseudo tribal ceremonies you describe.
I’ve worked at a couple companies that did/do that sort of thing. They are trying to create attachment to the company. But that doesn’t materially impact the tribe/cultural identification of the employee base in the way the OP describes. One place had very strong programming of that type and a very distinct company culture at the same time we were having robust political discussions (back when you could do that at work). The programming increased attachment to the company and influenced how we approached our work but had no material impact on the broader ‘tribal’/cultural identification of the employees.
bah.
…equivalent rights.
I will note that based on their behavior over the last few years and especially since Trump’s election the left has demonstrated they are in the ‘too tribal’ category.
In the current environment, groups at lower tribal percentages have to start acting as tribes or lose to tribes are are voting and acting as blocks.
“If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.”
Well, first of all, when we talk about politics being ‘tribal’ in the U.S., we’re using a metaphor. U.S. politics isn’t literally tribal in the sense that it is in some African countries. There, the parties/tribes don’t differ on policy particularly — they differ mainly on whose members get the spoils of office. Our metaphorical ‘tribalism’ poses different problems than the real thing.
But as a libertarian, I’ve long been disenchanted with voting in the following sense. Democracy is the best method for making decisions that need to be made collectively. But in a heterogeneous society, in order to reduce the level of animosity and conflict, we should be making as few decisions collectively as possible. And collective decisions should be pushed down to the lowest level political unit possible.
But, the red and blue ‘tribes’ don’t agree. In a country where political power is as balanced as it is here, neither can bear to give up the dream of finally vanquishing the other side and imposing their will generally, so they’re really not interested in de-escalating, reducing the winner-take-all stakes in politics, and looking for solutions to how we can all live side-by-side in the same country without being at each other’s throats (again, metaphorically speaking). It is discouraging.
I look forward to that discussion. I don’t have much time at the moment, but I suppose I should try to put some meat on the bones of the argument in anticipation.
But I’ll note that there are other implications of the reasoning behind this:
It could also warrant some disenchantment with both Diversity (a population’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic homogeneity tending to prevent tribal impulses from latching onto the most obvious identity sub-groupings) and market-generated Inequality (level material conditions probably complicating perceptions of differentiation and additional effective agitation of the emotions of envy and resentment.) Maximizing the former is a sacred cow of progressives, while my impression is that doing as little as possible about the latter has a similar status among libertarians.
For the big picture, I’ll point out again that in current practice, “tribal” (or ‘sectarian’ in some instances) is always used as an insult and epithet, never as a merely neutral description, or with the positive valence of ‘unity’ or ‘solidarity’. This is even though certain kinds of sub-population coalition – class, interest group, or identity group solidarity – are considered perfectly legitimate and even positive and morally compelling. As usual, progressive ideology tells us not that in-group solidarity (i.e. ‘tribalism’) is bad for everyone, but that it is good for oppressed or under-represented groups, and only bad for privileged groups (even under-privileged members of privileged groups) or when nationalistic.
This allows for a kind of specious ‘coherence’ when progressives especially accuse conservatives of being ‘tribal’, but are using it for outgroup-denigration, which is precisely part of the content of the accusation. But if I believe mine it rationally true, and yours is unrigorous error, then I’m being fair, and you’re being ‘tribal’. It’s precisely this kind of dynamic, and how commonly I observe it, that leads me to believe that use of ‘tribal’ is more harmful than helpful to clear thinking on the subject.
This dissonant situation seems to have arisen as a kind of noxious hybrid of the ancient trend in Western philosophy towards moral universalism on the one hand, and the New Left transition to a political formula incorporating identity politics and culture war implementations of progressive principles of morality and social justice, on the other.
Current examples of sectarian or ‘tribal’ political situations today could be Lebanon or Iraq, where there are a few exceptions, most of the time and on average, Sunnis vote for Sunnis, Shiites vote for Shiites, Kurds vote for Kurds, etc. Within those groups, political debates are most likely to be based on ideas, values, or policy preferences, but with a general perception that most everyone is on the same big team, in the same collective boat. But between groups, it’s all about group interest.
Now there are two aspects to this which must be disaggregated to think clearly about it. The first is that in a sectarian political equilibrium and “incentive structure”, this is hardly irrational, or not based in self interest or preferences. It is absolutely rational and aligned with self-interest, whether it is avoiding the very real threat of predation, oppression, and domination from the other group, should they get a hold on effectively plenary state power, or in pursuing the equally real benefits and spoils of preying on them, if the shoe is on the other foot. (One can imagine this as being locked into the defect-defect equilibrium in the prisoner’s dilemma game). That’s why political structures in those countries tend to based on some kind of quasi-quota schemes to lower the risks and stakes of winning elections.
The other part of ‘tribalism’ that I think people are really complaining about are really (A) a suite of exaggerated negative sentiments that members of one group feel for another, and (B) Willingness to engage in unprincipled conduct and bad behavior, and to put forward lies and fallacious arguments, and otherwise do whatever it takes to win, however immoral or otherwise unjustifiable.
As for (A), certain levels of fear and animus may be rational given the circumstances, but these are heightened far past what can be justified by historical frictions and the space of future outcomes. One sees extremely high levels of mutual suspicion, distrust, and willingness to presume highly derogatory and negative features of the character and motives of typical – not rare outlier – members of the other group. We see a kind of malicious “theory of mind” at work, where “we” are just trying to defend ourselves, whereas “they” are dumb, evil, conformist ogres and sadists who long to crush us for the thrill of it. And we see highly elevated rates of self-sorting and “preferential association”, geographically, professionally, socially, and even matrimonially.
As for (B): The bad faith, the double standards, the favoritism, inconsistency, “heads I win, tails you loose” framing – well, our information dissemination media are daily drowning in it.
I’m out of time, so I’ll have to truncate here. The bottom-line point, however, is that much as one might like to bemoan the bad thinking and behaviors of the polarized ‘tribal mindset’ – I don’t think it’s separable from the “collective interest coalition solidarity” aspect that our culture generally favors. We can have both (baby and bathwater), or neither, since the baby was never good anyway.
Don’t see how we get to the neither, how to get rid of the solidarity in favor of one collective interest or another.
It’s more realistic to spend time on how minimize the expected loss, or to minimize the maximum loss, when your collective / tribe loses.