My inner curmudgeon wants to recoil—and recoil hard–from any intensely unified group. Instead, I want to read, write, think, discuss, and draw distinctions.
That said,this petition looks quite interesting. I hope that it leads to a preference cascade. Thanks to a reader for the pointer.
[UPDATE: and here is another open letter.]
“My inner curmudgeon wants to recoil—and recoil hard–from any intensely unified group. Instead, I want to read, write, think, discuss, and draw distinctions.“
It’s not curmudgeonly, it’s naive. You are competing against certain forces that are better organized and have the support of academy and the popular media.
You keep thinking that logic, ideas and discussions are a sufficient counterweight to this woke nonsense, yet you are continually outmaneuvered.
In short, hold your nose and and try something different.
“Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
https://youtu.be/ZKbZMIP4XUE
The letter’s resolutions recognize that it’s to time to fight. The minority that has taken over the universities will try to cancel the professors that sign the letter –and to be clear cancelation goes from reprimands to termination to threats of violence against their families. Yes, that minority feels that they are too close to winning all they have been seeking for decades and are ready to destroy all opposition. Good luck in the fight against the barbarians.
Who is financing the barbarians? We should never that all our projects need to be financed, either with our effort and money or with the efforts and monies of others. Yes, some barbarians may be founded by their rich parents or by their efforts as university employees. But their campaigns require much more than that. Although I cannot assess the reliability of this FoxNews report, it points to the intermediaries but not to the ultimate sources of the funds:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/left-wing-dark-money-groups-2020-report
“Even when it comes to nonparticipation in groups, I don’t necessarily want to be grouped with the nonparticipants.”
!!! Ah Timothy Taylor you are a genius.
I can relate to that.
This position is reminiscent of the pacifism of people who have never had to wield arms in their defense and despise those who do. Often they also despise the very people who wield arms in their defense (“defund the police!”) It is, in effect, an expensive luxury, one we can no longer afford.
The present political system requires compromise. Any coalition is inherently premised on compromise. No two people agree on absolutely everything.
At some level I can sympathize with being true to your own ideas and refusing to make compromises or support group coalitions. But that strategy forfeits political capital and leads to a political loss. If you genuinely believe in any political idea, there is a real cost to losing. If you are quite comfortable with losing for curmudgeonly reasons, it’s reasonable to deduce that you didn’t really care that much about the ideas or causes that you were advocating for.
You have a point about how compromising one’s purest ideals by participating in group action with other imperfect humans can be more efficacious in achieving goals than working in pure, uncompromising isolation. I doubt that Taylor would dispute that point.
Perhaps Taylor was objecting to something a little different, which is “being grouped.” By this I gather he is talking about retaining personal autonomy.
When talking about “being grouped,” Taylor writes about “any intensely unified group” and the deep human desire to “combine with a group of other people who have unified set of thoughts and statements and action.”
Personal autonomy, on the other hand, is self-directing freedom and moral independence. It is somewhat similar to the enlightenment value of individualism that Dr Kling references. Many people believe that personal autonomy is an ethical principle and that autonomy of persons ought to be respected.
An example of why we also might want to be leery of “being grouped” for example, is Osama bin Laden’s desire for Biden to be president. Bin Laden actually wrote a letter to Al Queda instructing them to not risk any action that would harm Joe Biden because he wanted Biden to became president because as president Biden would destroy the USA. Taylor’s comments suggest that a person who is a Biden supporter might not want to be grouped with Al Queda or Bin Laden, even though they all share the goal of a Biden presidency.
I would add, that just as we may not want to be grouped in this manner, we should in turn avoid inflicting this sort of grouping upon others. It happens though, and quite frequently by those who would object to being grouped with Bin Laden. Defining a group through guilt by association and using group labels as casual slurs against populists and nationalists, as well as socialists and Marxists, by ascribing to individuals the worst of what some other individuals have been labeled.
In short, a person having personal autonomy is not precluded from participating in a group action. And the election to participate in a group action is not necessarily a renunciation of personal autonomy.
“In short, a person having personal autonomy is not precluded from participating in a group action. And the election to participate in a group action is not necessarily a renunciation of personal autonomy.”
Yes, this. Libertarians need to get over themselves and learn to behave “groupishly” no matter how uncomfortable and slimy that it might feel. There is too much at stake here.
Ok, but “behaving groupishly” means intimidation.
It means loyal and reliable cooperation and members being committed and pressured to do what is necessary to credibly threaten one’s adversaries with punitive collective action to a degree sufficient to get them to back down and accept your group’s demands.
You have to play tit-for-tat, and you have to be willing and able to back it up. At the very least, “defund the enemy”, but in general, there is no way to succeed when people are terrified without a balance of terror and scaring people more than they are scared by your opponents.
I am not holding my breath for the emergence of “The Party of Punitive Pushback”, but like it or not, there is no feasible alternative.
“Ok, but ‘behaving groupishly’ means intimidation.”
[don’t get personal–ed.] It doesn’t mean anything remotely like intimidation.
Since we descended from the trees several hundred thousand years ago, we have acted exclusively within groups. (please find a counter example).
You are welcome to critique the ideas and moralities of such groups (I do all the time). But, it is quite something else to assume that groups in and of themselves are immoral (i.e. agents of intimidation).
Handle wrote “Ok, but ‘behaving groupishly’ means intimidation.”
Quite aside from Hans Gruber arguing about morality, could you clarify what you mean about practicalities?
More than a decade ago, I started a free software project and ran it for some years, There were more than a dozen serious contributors, who together likely did at least a dozen man-years of work on it. In many ways there was an active culture of cooperation within the group, which sounds like ‘behaving groupishly’. Intimidation didn’t seem to be involved in any important way. I’m guessing that this isn’t a counterexample to what you are trying to express, but it seems like a counterexample to what you wrote.
It *was* important that it was in practice reasonably protected from intimidation. Free software projects like mine relied heavily on freedom of association, and recently similar projects have had that squashed pretty badly by increasingly routine intimidation against people’s education and careers running through woke courts and woke regulators. I would be reluctant to try to make such a project work in today’s environment, and I might grant quite generally that ‘behaving groupishly’ requires some effective protection against intimidation. But even granting that, protection against intimidation doesn’t necessarily mean (using or otherwise relying on) intimidation.
Sometimes freedom of association can be protected by the state. That’s generally fundamentally violent, but not everyone would agree that it’s intimidation, especially in corner cases like purely defensive violence, such as spikes on top of walls.
Beyond that, sometimes freedom of association is protected merely by remoteness or by other not-particularly-violent forms of inaccessibility. Historically it seems fairly common for networks of traders to span multiple distant uncooperative jurisdictions, and I really doubt intimidation is central to how all those networks work. One can get quite a lot done with just energetic application of freedom of association: shunning, blacklisting, and such. (It’s notoriously tricky to use this to enforce some kinds of arrangements such as cartels, but that doesn’t mean it’s impractical to use it to enforce norms of not cheating within the group.) It is also common for emigrants to carefully choose destinations where many of their group are already established, and violence doesn’t seem to be particularly important in protecting that kind of choice either.
Beyond *that*, various forms of concealment can also be protection. By its nature, effective concealment can make it tricky to give convincing examples.:-|However, I conjecture that some of the zillions of dissident splinters in the Reformation and Counterreformation relied more on concealment and freedom of association than on intimidation.
Totally my fault for not being clearer. I was referring only to the narrow political context of these open letters, petitions, and other expressions of discontent with the cancel culture and the broader, eagerly-persecutorial spirit among those on the left and the purity-purges of various institutions they dominate.
My point was simply that the minimum level of group cooperation necessary to improve the current situation would be one in which the collective organization of those who oppose this state of affairs was able to deter such bad behavior from the canceling mob, which I believe at this point in the development of the situation cannot be done without a countervailing ability to make credible threats that are intimidating enough to make a would-be canceler think twice.
Now, if you have trouble herding the cats enough to even get them to sign the open letters and petitions and whatnot, then you are probably light-years away from what it takes to maintain enough cohesion and cooperation to keep the troops in formation enough to do the minimum it would take to remedy our current situation, which is what I misinterpreted “acting groupishly” to mean – acting as a cohesive coalition for mutual protection and benefit, really, a big gang.
Obviously there are plenty of groups that are not just gangs and have other purposes and capacities which have nothing to do with intimidating other gangs which are posing active threats to one’s welfare. And obviously there are plenty of ways to encourage people to stick together, feel solidarity and dedication, and cooperate to achieve the same collective objectives and missions, besides pressures amounting to soft or hard coercion of members.
All that being said, if the problem is the cancel culture, then my position is that if people are opposed to it and actually want to fix the problem, then they have no other practical option at this point but to “act groupishly” like a gang organized specifically with that objective in mind and to be ready, willing, and able to do what is necessary to achieve that goal.
To add my two cents to this remark:
There are, but if the group is fighting (and that’s what is being discussed here, fighting, just not with normal weapons) these ways have to be backstopped with coercion of some kind or the bottom will just fall out as the going gets progressively tougher.
@Handle
Excellent analysis and nice rebound!
In terms of the petitions, I see them as trying to accomplish two goals:
1) to signal to others that they are not alone. I think this is often overlooked. There is almost nothing worse than feeling ideologically isolated on an island. See the McWhorter article that ASK linked to a few days ago for more info.
2) to provide courage for others to provide opposing viewpoints to the now dominant woke narrative.
My conclusion: these petitions may not be adequate, but they are certainly a good first step and better than nothing. And, for sure better than standing on the sidelines pretending that the best curmudgeonly ideas will win the debate.
Unrelated, but interesting update:
Decided on this scope for my 6yo daughter’s AR-15-22. Pretty cool setup imho.
Any thoughts or disagreements? I’ll take the most charitable view of your feedback.
https://vortexoptics.com/vortex-crossfire-ii-2-7×32-riflescope.html?vortex_reticle=978
“Since we descended from the trees several hundred thousand years ago, we have acted exclusively within groups.”comment.
I did not descend from a tree. And, no I am not living in a treehouse.
Good point! Let me try to restate using an alternative story…
The Almighty created the earth and all of its creatures in 6 days roughly 10k years ago. He created Adam and then tore asunder Eve from his rib.
Since that time, humans have basically subsisted in groups with competing ideas and cultures. Fortunately, the culture that came to dominate and evolve placed an emphasis on individual rights, science and reason.
Those ideas are now under assault as many seek to replace them with group identities and lived experiences. The responses to such attacks have largely been unorganized and relegated to small scale mom-and-pop media outlets. The libertarians, as usual, are MIA. The End.
So Taylor, and you, and presumably a lot of other people, want a free marketplace of ideas to exist. It is certainly a good thing to have and it is an environment conducive to intellectual activity, so I understand the sentiment. It is not wrong per se to have this sentiment, but it is short-sighted. I think that the situation with the free marketplace of ideas is a non-economic analog of the problems Nick Szabo pointed out years ago with deriving law governing economic activity from contracts. Just as contracting in a free marketplace depends critically on the prior existence of tort law and an entity enforcing the law and preventing coercion and the negative-sum games arising from coercion, discussion in a free marketplace of ideas depends critically on something enforcing the rules of discussion and preventing the disputants from coercing one another, and – this is the crucial point – the entity enforcing the law or the rules must be intensely unified or it will not be able to perform its function. (Early-mid-90s Russia is an example of an environment where the state was nowhere near unified enough to enforce laws and rules. Citizen Ivan had no assets or power to play the game and suffered what he must, but those who did have assets or power existed in an environment that perhaps came closer to anarcho-capitalism than any recently.) The only circumstance I can think of where such enforcement is not necessary is when there is no mechanism by which coercion could be applied. The old blogosphere was perhaps to an extent such an environment: nobody outside understood what it was, knew or cared about what went on in it, so there were no levers to connect blogosphere reputations to real-world activities. American intellectual institutions, I suspect, used to rely partly on being irrelevant in the manner of the blogosphere, but mostly on the norms of fair play and gentlemanly behavior of the society in which they were embedded, enforced by the credible threat of social opprobrium arising from the society’s elites acting as an intensely unified group for these purposes (Anglos were famous for allowing eccentricities in many things, empirically proving that it is not necessary for the group to be unified in everything). However, the stock of sociocultural capital represented by these has been dwindling for many decades, and the results are now becoming apparent.