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This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring.
I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming over, waiting to get to the “good stuff”. And I noticed that what I meant by “good stuff” was stuff that supported the theories that I already believed. I was essentially only absorbing information that matched what I already thought. Using Latour’s terms, I was essentially skipping his “Constitution” of due process, and only accepting external inputs that matched my pre-existing mental hierarchy. No outside voices were making it past my filters.
In the case of Latour, I eventually slowed myself down and was able to absorb some of his other ideas, which helped to restructure my mental hierarchy. And I absolutely love it when that happens. My original cognitive subroutines post describes that moment when I connect a bunch of different ideas, and a whole set of synapses light up, as things shift into a recognizably better configuration. In Latour’s terms, my personal collective finds a new hierarchy that is able to absorb the new ideas that had been floating around my head. I try to keep my mind and eyes open for inputs that will help me to gain new perspective and let me find different ways of putting ideas together. I’m always looking for ways to add to the internal collective.
This is a good opportunity for a digression back to Latour’s book. He points out that modernism, as he describes it with its coldly rationalist viewpoint, is destructive with time. The final goal of modernist Science is a perfectly rational set of equations which is purely objective - everything else, all multicultural viewpoints and perspectives, have been weeded out of reality. He contrasts that with his idea of collectives that are continually encountering new external influences and finding ways to absorb them, such that the collectives are always growing. I like this picture, especially as applied to my individual collective - I am always reading and looking for new ideas, ones that will help me re-form and re-structure my mental hierarchy, as mentioned towards the end of this post. It seems like a much more life and growth-oriented viewpoint.
Getting back to my original point about filtered world views, the danger of not accepting Latour’s description of the temporal nature of reality, and instead believing in a One True Reality, is that you end up with the situation I originally found myself in, where I only accepted inputs that already matched my internal collective. I was not open to new inputs that might change my mind. And I would guess that most people operate like this.
I’ve addressed this point glancingly in posts like the one on conservative postmodernism but this sort of observation drives home for me the pointlessness of the “object-oriented” Western philosophy (which I describe in this post as our inclination to “try to stuff all of the properties of an object into the object itself rather than the network of relationships surrounding the object”. Huh. Now that I think about it, that “object-oriented” viewpoint is actually another restatement of what Latour calls Modernism, where the true object has an “essence” that exists outside of time, and that our poor human brains are too limited to fully perceive).
Anyway. My point is that because of the filters inherent in our internal collectives, our mental hierarchies, two people can look at the exact same thing and see completely different objects. One person sees the Confederate flag and sees a proud symbol of the Southern states, the other sees a flag symbolizing hatred and racism. Same object, different viewpoints.
And it becomes even more relevant in the case of information. Because of our filters, we only absorb information that matches our internal hierarchy. This comes up most often in the case of politics, when one person sees Bush as being presidential for ordering military action, and another sees him as being imperialistic. Those people live in fundamentally different worlds (or Latour-ian collectives), even though they are experiencing the same events. And that’s even before we get into the separate media that they consume.
This is also why Lakoff’s work on framing is so vital. By controlling the language, we can put information into a form that will get past people’s filters. If it matches up to their mental hierarchies, it sneaks right on in and start subverting some of those hierarchies from the inside. Which sounds horrible and Machiavellian, but the problem is that it works. People change their minds because of this stuff. And the conservatives are using it. So, given that we live in what is rapidly becoming a direct democracy, we can either take the high road and expect people to research issues and develop coherent platforms, or we can accept that they don’t, and fight back.
Man. Do you start to get the sense of what it’s like to live in my brain? In this post alone, I’ve linked Latour’s work with everything from electoral politics to my ideas about art to cognitive subroutines. Everything is linked in my head. It all fits together in some ungainly way. I didn’t even mention the part where the awareness of the temporal nature of reality is another aspect of being a good information carnivore or how I’d noticed the congruence between liberal arts and science myself, but didn’t follow it up, and of course wouldn’t have come up with a process as elegant as Latour’s.
It’s all connected. Everything informs everything else. This blog is my attempts to capture my internal collective on disk. And as it grows more coherent, and as I find the language to make the connections less fuzzy and easier to communicate, maybe I’ll be able to turn it into that book. But enough for now.
I start my new job tomorrow morning, so my time for blogging will probably decrease over the next few weeks while I get up to speed. But I think I’m mostly done with the Latour thread for now, so I’m okay with that. On to new and different topics.
Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to handle the meeting of two collectives, and then move on to how this work ties into some of my previous thoughts.
For the purpose of yesterday’s discussion, I made the assumption that we were dealing with a single collective, but the examples I gave should have made it clear that there can be many such collectives. Whether you call them different cultures, different paradigms, or even different reality coefficients, it is apparent that there can and will be conflicting versions of reality in play among different people. How should this situation be handled?
Latour suggests that the ancient art of diplomacy provides a solution. Diplomacy is valuable for a couple reasons; for one, it is a negotiation that does not necessarily assume anything at the start, and two, the diplomat is unabashedly a representative of his/her culture or collective, rather than making any claims towards objectivity. Since Latour has spent the entire book tearing down the claims of objectivity, this is a key distinction. Latour contrasts it with a parody of anthropology as now practiced:
“Thanks to nature, I know in advance, without needing to hear what you have to say, who you are; but tell me anyway what representations you have made of the world and of yourselves - it would be so interesting to compare your visions to the equally factitious ones of your neighbors.” (p. 210)
The diplomat, on the other hand, is exploring a new reality. He/she is also at a distance from his/her own collective, knowing that not everything currently in the collective reality is essential to that reality, and that, through a process of negotiation, two collectives can agree to merge, throwing away what is painfully decided to be superfluous, and keeping what is deemed to be truly essential. By both being an open representative of his/her collective, and yet detached from it, the diplomat is essential to the negotiations necessary for two collectives to communicate rather than fight. As Latour says,
Apart from a diplomatic trial, no collective can differentiate between what is essential and what is superfluous: it will go to war over anything, because it sees everything as equally necessary. Only slowly, through preliminary negotiations, pourparlers, will a collective agree to reconsider its own constitution, by differentiating what is essential from what is superfluous according to other principles.” (p. 214)
The first part reminds me of “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” or of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Or even of the Christian fundamentalists, insisting that every word of the Bible is true. Every part of their reality is equally necessary.
Moving onto my personal take of Latour’s work, I think that it is so important that people are aware of the provisional nature of reality established by a collective. That they understand that there is not a “One True Reality” that only they are privy to. I also think that it reminds us to go humbly when we enter the realm of a different collective.
I also like Latour’s discussion because it fits so well with my friend’s theory of reality coefficients, where I said “My friend’s insight was that when you don’t share the same set of reality coefficients as another person, the two of you essentially live in different worlds/realities.” Here’s where I think I’d like to extend Latour’s theory, because if I can make a mapping between reality coefficients and collectives, it implies that people can simultaneously be members of multiple overlapping collectives. And then things get really interesting.
The logical extension is to have each person be their own collective that negotiates with other collectives to form unions of collectives on certain issues. What does that mean? I’ve already covered it, in my cognitive subroutines extensions post, where I hypothesized that our brains take in parts of the external world for use internally, from walking sticks for the blind, to virtual prostheses such as browsers and email for people like me (inspired in part by the book Me++). We have integrated nonhuman aspects into our personal collective. And the process that I mentioned in that post maps really well to what Latour suggests:
By expanding the scope of the cognitive subroutines to include external influences and external controls, we then build in the power of the collective learning machine, because each of us will choose which elements of the external environment to leverage. … It gets incorporated into their internal cognitive subroutines, and soon it is embedded so deeply that they can’t distinguish it from “reality”.
In Latour’s terms, various external influences and controls apply for membership in my internal collective. Those that make sense to me, that I can find a place for in my internal hierarchy, I integrate into my collective, and they become so embedded that they are now part of my reality. This idea of a personal collective has been a running theme for me, all the way back to this conversation where I speculated that my self was a mosaic that I composed out of bits and pieces I found in the world around me.
I think Latour’s work also may give some clues as to how to move forward with negotiating between various factions in society, a problem I lamented in this post:
both sides need cognitive tools to help understand the others’ perspective. Otherwise, we are forced to treat them the way we treat anybody that is delusional - we declare them insane. Insanity is society’s way of saying “Your way of viewing the world is not valid.” When somebody says that space aliens are talking to them, necessitating an aluminum foil hat, we don’t give credence to their thoughts, even if they are lucid in all other ways. When a conservative claims that “We had to invade Iraq to keep its WMDs out of the hands of Al-Qaeda!”, a liberal often dismisses them in a similar fashion as the aluminum-hatted gentleman. I’m not sure what such cognitive tools for understanding look like. But they are clearly necessary as we drift further and further apart in our basic assumptions about how the world works.
It sounds like we need both sides to develop better Latour-ian diplomats.
I think I’ll stop here for the day. I’ve got one more post in this thread, where I go into a little more depth into how our internal collectives affect what we see and perceive. Plus, I’ve got a couple more references to old posts that I think are relevant. But I have to pace myself and my readers.
Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and fill in details.
The idea is that at each point in time, we have a provisional agreement that describes reality for us. Who is the “us” in that statement? Latour calls it a “collective”, a term meant to include both humans and non-humans. It is meant to indicate everything that is part of our currently described reality.
There are things that are covered by that reality, and there are things that the collective has decided to ignore for now. At the beginning of the process, one of the things that we have ignored rises up and demands to be taken notice of. This thing could be composed of humans (e.g. a group of workers unionizing or terrorists trying to overthrow a government), or nonhumans (e.g. prions making themselves known via mad-cow disease, or the negative effects of asbestos). Once it has presented itself to us, it is our responsibility to decide on the relative merits of its claims. This involves finding spokespersons to speak for it, whether scientists using instruments to determine what prions are doing, or union foremen using discussions to determine what the workers want.
Once the demands are made clear, it is up to the collective to decide whether to accept those demands for reification, and to decide how to integrate these new elements into the previously constructed reality. It involves finding a new hierarchy that incorporates both new and old elements. Sometimes it is impossible to find a new order that works, and the new elements are rejected and sent back outside for another round. Other times, a new hierarchy is found, and it is institutionalized as the new provisional reality, ready to handle the next round of supplicants.
This is really fuzzy, I’m sure. So let’s take a concrete example from science, quantum physics. For years, scientists had been noticing all of these anomalies in their experiments, where results were not what they expected. Light was behaving as a particle when they expected it to behave as a wave. The energy spectrum of certain decays was discontinuous. Blackbody radiation theory was predicting infinite energy. Each of these individual results was knocking on the door of the then-current paradigm of classical mechanics, but the scientists had no place for those results in that paradigm, so they were ignored and marginalized. Then came a round of phenomenological observations such as Planck’s suggestion that blackbody radiation was quantized rather than continuous, and Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect. Then Heisenberg and Schrodinger came along, and established a new hierarchy of theory that encompassed all of the new results, providing the new provisional reality for the next round of experimental results. The similarities to Kuhn’s paradigms are pretty apparent, which makes sense given Latour’s background in science studies.
But Latour’s insight is that the exact same process can be applied to human political dynamics as well. A group of people who are currently excluded from the collective demand admittance. They formulate their demands. They negotiate with the collective to find a place for themselves in a new hierarchy. And either the negotiations are successful and the collective is expanded, or the demands are rejected and the supplicants are marginalized again. Whether talking about rebels performing a coup, or union organizers negotiating with management during a strike, the process is general enough to cover the situations.
Several aspects of this process impress me. One is that Latour specifically includes discussion (he calls it consultation) as part of the process. In other words, he thinks that it can only work if the collective is forced to explicitly make choices about what it is or is not included at any point in time. Otherwise, things get swept under the table. The tradeoffs are not apparent. I like his example of automobile deaths:
This is the case, in the example given earlier, of the eight thousand people who die each year from automobile accidents in France: no way was found to keep them as full-fledged - and thus living! - members of the collective. In the hierarchy that was set up, the speed of automobiles and the flood of alcohol was preferred to highway deaths. … for the time being, the rapid use of cars is “worth” much more in France than eight thousand innocent lives per year. (p. 124)
Under our current system, we never examine the tradeoffs of the choices we are making. Under his, we make them explicit. I’ve ranted about this before (using the example of cars, actually), but it drives me nuts to see people making decisions without discussing the tradeoffs.
The process also avoids letting certain people short circuit the discussion prematurely. One short circuit that Latour describes is that of the Scientist, who, in the world of the Cave, is able to dismiss entire lines of argument with the sentence “That’s not objective.” Multiculturalism, anything based on morals, the Scientist waves away. Another short circuit is that of the moralist, who refuses to accept anything less than total victory e.g. if one single snail dies, the entire undertaking is unacceptable. In the real world, compromises have to be made, and it is better that the compromises are made with all parties having a voice at the table.
Another thing that I like about the process is that it is iterative. Things that are dismissed this time around can knock on the door and be let in next time. He uses the example of asbestos:
The case of asbestos can serve as a model, since it is probably one of the last objects that can be called modernist. It was a perfect substance (was it not called a magic material?), at once inert, effective, and profitable. It took decades before the public health consequences of its diffusion were finally attributed to it, before asbestos and its inventors, manufacturers, proponents, and inspectors were called into question; it took dozens of alerts and scandals before work-related illnesses, cancers, and the difficulties of asbestos removal ended up being traced back to their cause and counted among the properties of asbestos, whose status shifted gradually: once an ideal inert materia, it became a nightmarish imbroglio of law, hygiene, and risk. (p. 23)
The original reality of asbestos, as accepted by the collective, was the “magic material”. Only as time went on, and as we proceeded through several iterations, did other properties of asbestos become apparent and added to reality. Latour argues violently against the idea that those properties are inherent in the material. They can be discovered in a process of investigation, but to say they are part of the eternal “essence” of asbestos is a misleading statement, because it implies that we as humans can know the “essence” of an object without investigation. Since that is not possible, assuming that as one of the premises of a system leads to yet another short circuit of discussion.
This temporal nature of an iterative reality is also good because it reminds us that we have to make decisions based on imperfect information all the time. Latour scoffs at the idea of an ideal world, where Scientists can have infinite time to discover everything there is to know about something before it’s used in the “real” world. We know the world doesn’t work like that. We look at what we know, we weigh our options, and then we take our best guess. This is a cooperative effort. Scientists give us their current theories. Moralists serve as spokespeople, speaking for those who don’t have a voice (whether nonhuman, as in the case of the environment, or human, in the case of indigenous natives). Economists try to break things down into a model to give us rough estimates of the various tradeoffs. Politicians work out compromises between the various factions. Everybody brings something to the table.
I think that covers the broad outlines of Latour’s process, and what I like about it. I could spend pages going into more details, but I think I’ll stop the book review here. I’m skipping a lot of his efforts at deconstructing various academic ideas, because I think they’re mostly relevant as responses to other academic works that I haven’t read. But these last two posts capture the ideas that I think are the most important and relevant to my thoughts going forward; in other words, the ideas that have become part of my personal collective.
More tomorrow on ways that Latour’s ideas integrate readily into my own, with references back to previous posts that I think are relevant.
A friend of mine commented that Jeb Bush was a strange emissary to send to southeast Asia to oversee disaster relief. My friend also wondered why Colin Powell was along, given that he left the administration recently. My immediate thought was that the Republicans were giving Jeb a higher profile statesmanlike image to boost his chances in 2008 if they needed him. Jeb has said he’s not going to run, but given the current state of the field, they may want to keep around as a viable high profile candidate just in case. And I could totally see Powell being there as a possible vice-presidential nominee.
That started me speculating on who the possible nominees for 2008 are. I honestly don’t know. Nor does anybody else. I don’t really believe that most of the candidates that MSNBC mentions have a chance. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that Senators make very poor presidential candidates. The number of compromises made in any omnibus deal opens you up to too many attacks, as John “Soft on Defense” Kerry found out this year. Where you really want an experienced senator is in the VP slot, where they can knock heads together to achieve a legislative agenda (think LBJ to JFK). In fact, in retrospect, the ideal Democratic ticket this year would have been General Wesley Clark with Kerry as his VP. Alas. I’d hoped for Clark from the beginning to no avail. He never put together a decent campaign team and couldn’t even win his own state.
So ignoring the Republican senators, who’s left according to MSNBC? A couple low profile governors (Pataki is lower profile than the mayor Giuliani, for instance). Not looking promising. There’s always Giuliani or Arnie as possibilities, but that would mean alienating the evangelical conservatives, since neither Giuliani or Arnie are exactly pinnacles of moral rectitude. It will be interesting to see which way the Republicans jump on this - continue moving towards being the party of the evangelical right, or move back towards the center (Senator McCain might fall in this category as well). It will depend in large part whether the Arnie Amendment goes through; I think they would decide that Arnie was popular enough to declare their independence from the evangelicals. They have a bonus in that the evangelicals, at worst, will just stay home - they would never defect to the other side.
On the Democratic side, the drums have already started beating for Hilary. I think it’s a terrible idea. I don’t think the Republicans could ask for a better candidate to unify all of their different factions. She alienates the big business guys because of her attempt at health care reform. She alienates the evangelicals pretty much by existing (Lakoff had a great bit in Moral Politics where he described how Hilary basically violates every single Strict Father precept). There couldn’t be a more polarizing figure. Not that polarizing is necessarily bad, given Bush’s candidacy. But if you have a polarizing candidate, they better be able to mobilize 100% of your voters, and I don’t think Hilary can do that; too many left-wingers have felt betrayed by the Clintons.
Edwards is a hopeless candidate, because he’s not only a senator, but he’s an inexperienced senator, so he has all of the downside and none of the up. Barack is too far off. Basically, I hate all my choices. So I’m going to toss out one of my own.
Eliot Spitzer. In 2012. The high profile attorney general of New York is running for governor in 2006. In the modern era, governors make the best presidential candidates for taking back control of the White House; after Nixon, we have Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush as the candidates that won back the White House. Spitzer has hard core credentials for fighting for the little guy on his side, taking on multi-million dollar companies. He seems like a pretty intelligent guy. If he wins the governorship, and does as good a job of general administration as he has in running his cases, I could see him as a very viable candidate in 2012. Long way off, though.
What to do for 2008? I don’t know. I expect the Republicans will try to get the Arnie Amendment passed and run him. If that doesn’t work, their fallback plan is probably Jeb Bush in a “I will serve my country if asked” kind of deal. The Democrats will probably nominate Hilary, because they have no other viable candidates, and she’ll have the best political machine for the primaries. The Republicans will win, because the Democrats are idiots. So, yeah, 2012. Spitzer. Here’s hoping.
Of course, I’m going to be continuing to keep an eye on this. In one of my fantasy worlds, I’ll spend the next year or so scouting out the candidates, call it correctly in 2006, join the right candidate’s campaign early, ride the campaign to a position of prominence and then be set for life as a political advisor or commentator. Isn’t dreaming fun?
I was struck while reading Travels in Hyperreality a few months ago by the realization that the conservatives had appropriated the techniques of the Academic Left such as postmodernism and deconstructionism, and put them into the service of the conservative movement. I find this supremely ironic, given the utter disdain with which conservatives view postmodernism, a disdain which is almost required since the relativism inherent in postmodernism takes away the moral hierarchy which defines much of conservatism, the Christian God over Man over Woman over Child, that Lakoff details in Moral Politics.
So what do I mean when I say that the conservatives are using these techniques which are anathema to them? Let’s start by analyzing the parts of postmodernism that I find relevant to the discussion. I spent some time this evening reading the Wikipedia entries on Postmodernism and Deconstruction that I linked to above. One of the core ideas of postmodernism is that the text is not final in and of itself. The text is just a series of markings on paper. What the text means is a cooperative construction between the reader, the text, the author, and the environment in which they all interact. Therefore, as Eco points out, “The battle for the survival of man as a responsible being in the Communications Era is not to be won where the communication originates, but where it arrives.” You don’t have to control the media if you control the viewpoint of the reader.
The relevance to the conservative movement should be obvious. The conservatives have decried the power of the “liberal media” for so long that it has become a staple of their discourse. To fight this power, they needed to attack somewhere else along the communication chain. They attacked the context. By planting the idea of a liberal media in the minds of their believers, they have systematically undermined the authority once associated with the media and the news. By giving them a well-defined filter to view the world through, one promulgated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, they have eliminated the need to control the media; the only messages that will penetrate the filter are the ones they want.
It’s even more insidious than that. Because the idea of a liberal bias is so firmly planted, there is no way to convince people in such a context to change their minds. Any counter-arguments that might be made are seen as evidence of the deranged liberal bias they have been told about. There is no such thing as “truth” any more. There is merely one side of an argument, and the other. And you choose your side based not on reason, but on faith. This is a scary development to anyone who believes that there is truth, that there is a reality separate from perception. But it is also a development that follows inexorably from the idea of a context inseparable from meaning. The conservatives just figured out how to leverage the idea first.
To take another example, one of the articles that Wikipedia points to has this criticism of deconstruction:
“Another objection to deconstruction comes from a different perspective on language. According to Wittgenstein, rather than representing a correspondence between propositions and reality (cf. our tenth article), language is a series of games or practices that enable us to achieve whatever goals we have in a situation; thus, as we said earlier, meaning is defined by use. On these terms, deconstructionism is simply beside the point: language adapts to its use and pulling a text apart fails to take account of this.”
“…meaning is defined by use.” This essentially means that language can mean anything you want it to mean. Apparently, Derrida and the other deconstructionists are infamous for using language in a playful, almost meaningless, way to reinforce this point. It’s freeing one up from the literal definition of language, and using words however you want to use them.
This is one of the things that drives people, and especially conservatives, nuts about deconstruction. They are decidedly grounded in the literal. To them, there is no difference between the signifier and the signified, which is why they want to pass an amendment banning the burning of the flag. They believe that burning the flag is the same thing as burning America. And it’s not. It’s a signifier. To play with language, to explore alternative meanings, to construct wild symbolic pastiches, is similarly destabilizing to the conservative world view.
But let’s look at this more closely. “… language is a series of games or practices that enable us to achieve whatever goals we have in a situation.” This is an idea that Frank Luntz, among other conservatives, has taken to heart. Language is a means of achieving a goal. The conservatives have no qualms about twisting the language to mean whatever they want it to mean, as Lakoff points out:
This strategy has been adopted in how the Right talks about the “Clear Skies Act”, which increases pollution and mercury contamination, and the “Healthy Forests Act,” which permits clear cutting and the destruction of forests.
Yet again, the conservatives have taken a tool of the Academic Left, one they mock unrelentingly, and incorporated it as one of their most powerful political weapons.
I find it fascinating. It also points to a fundamental schism in the Left. There’s the Academic Left, the Left of Derrida, Marxists, post-structuralists, etc., where social relativism, postmodernism, and deconstruction rule. Then there’s the Enlightenment Left, the one that believes in reason and truth as our tools to achieve more. And the two are fundamentally incompatible. If there is no truth, no meaning, then reason is just another viewpoint. And the conservatives have zeroed in on this and used it to their political advantage, as the infamous reality-based community article indicates.
As usual, I’m torn. I like many of the ideas associated with postmodernism. I like the idea that context determines meaning. I think that framing is a very powerful tool for changing people’s minds. However, I am also a strong believer in reason. I want to believe that people can analyze situations, and look beyond the framing, to see what’s “really” going on. I want to teach people critical thinking skills so that they’re not susceptible to such techniques. And given that the conservatives have taken our tools and discovered how to use them against us, I think we all need to put our minds to developing defenses against those techniques.
The other question I’d like to toss out there is whether there is any hope of pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of the conservative movement’s use of these tools that they allegedly deplore. I don’t think so, offhand. Hypocrisy is only a relevant motivator among those who can review their viewpoints in the abstract, and it’s unclear to me that a lot of people have that capacity for self-reflection. I’d argue that this lack of self-reflection is more prevalent in the world of conservatives, but I think that’s another post.
Dave Policar has been having some interesting discussions over on his journal about religion and politics, thinking about some of the same issues I’ve been struggling with. The comments and discussion on yesterday’s post were particularly interesting. Several people including myself got involved with a variety of viewpoints. There are some really tangled issues here which could use quite a bit of thinking about. We need more fora where people have such discussions, where they can take out their assumptions and look at them with a more critical eye. Reading and commenting on the discussion definitely helped me clarify some of my gut reactions. So take a look. And tell me where to find more such fora.
I’ve been forwarded or seen a bunch of different websites from liberals bemoaning the results of the election, from JesusLand, to Fuck the South, to Sorry Everybody. I particularly liked the rant at Urban Archipelago, because it tied in with some ideas that had been percolating through my head. And even though those ideas are still in a somewhat disconnected form, I figured I would write up what I have and see what other people think. Warning - this is long and rambles around quite a bit. Hopefully I can figure out how to refine it later.
Part of what got me started was that in light of my recent post about coping and my decision to at least attempt to understand the other side, when I happened across a conservative site a couple days ago, I stuck around and read a bunch of it. This “discussion” about why the Left hates Bush is a good example. The editor of the site invites two liberals and two conservatives to have a discussion, and then joins up with the conservatives in beating on the liberals in a Crossfire-esque way. The “moderator” started the discussion with this statement:
The Bush administration has liberated 50 million human beings from two of the most barbarian, vicious and sadistic regimes of our modern time (Saddam and the Taliban). President Bush is leading the force of democracy and freedom against religious fanatics that persecute women, homosexuals and all other democratic rights that are at the core - supposedly - of leftist ideology. Yet the Left clearly sees Bush as a far greater evil than anything that Al Qeada and Islamic fundamentalism represent in the War on Terror and has taken the side of the enemy. What explains this bizarre phenomenon?
After reading that, I knew I was probably going to get really angry by reading more. And I did. I’m actually surprised with how patient the liberal representatives were, considering they were told they must support death camps and Stalin based on their support of the Left. The accusations and ad hominem attacks from the conservatives were bizarre, to say the least.
But reading the discussion made me realize a few things about why conservatives think what they do. One is that, like many of us, they believe what they are told (I commented to a friend today that a disturbing thing about America is that since the average American’s critical thinking skills are minimal, they have no way to distinguish between real science and pseudo-science - both are the inscrutable pronouncements by experts). And the pundits at conservative foundations and think tanks have done a good job of coordinating their message over the last couple decades so that the average person hears something enough times to believe that it must be true (I have a whole other post lined up about how the conservative movement has appropriated the tools developed by the Academic Left such as the distributed authorship and deconstructionism of postmodernism as well as the concept of cultural relativism as it relates to facts and truth. I’ll try to get to that one soon). The other is that because they surround themselves in media which reinforces that message (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News), they have no way of knowing that anybody thinks differently.
To a large extent, members of the left suffer from the same problem. I was talking to a friend before the election, and while talking about our disbelief in the looming re-election of Bush, he asked, “Do you know any Republicans? Because I don’t.” And after thinking about it, I had to admit that of all the people that I consider friends, and that I interact with enough to know their political leanings, I’m not sure I know a single person that supported Bush. Not one. I have a bit more experience with the conservative mindset than many liberals because I grew up in a town and county that was 95% Republican (home district of Dennis Hastert, current Speaker of the House), but since I left for college, I’ve lived in bastions of liberalism. We listen to NPR, read the New York Times or Salon, and send each other links like Fuck the South.
So both sides need cognitive tools to help understand the others’ perspective. Otherwise, we are forced to treat them the way we treat anybody that is delusional - we declare them insane. Insanity is society’s way of saying “Your way of viewing the world is not valid.” When somebody says that space aliens are talking to them, necessitating an aluminum foil hat, we don’t give credence to their thoughts, even if they are lucid in all other ways. When a conservative claims that “We had to invade Iraq to keep its WMDs out of the hands of Al-Qaeda!”, a liberal often dismisses them in a similar fashion as the aluminum-hatted gentleman. I’m not sure what such cognitive tools for understanding look like. But they are clearly necessary as we drift further and further apart in our basic assumptions about how the world works.
I’ve also been thinking about the science of networks, as described in Six Degrees. One of the key parameters of a network is the balance between clustering (the likelihood that one of your connections knows your other connections) and long links (links between radically separated parts of the network, e.g. me knowing somebody that lives in Kansas City - the separation can be physical or ideological - knowing a conservative in this case would be a good example). I need to go back and read a bit more carefully, but I believe that it’s safe to say that if there are too few long links, the network is prone to breaking into large chunks. It loses its cohesion. The analogy to our political situation is obvious.
I feel like that when links are few and non-diverse, the network consists of tight clusters widely separated from each other. Taking this back to the real world, what does that mean? It means that people who have minimal experience of the world, and of people different than themselves, are more likely to clump together into such clusters. To take a real-life example, when I went back to my high school reunion a few years ago, I was shocked to realize that the vast majority of my classmates had graduated from high school, gone to college in state, and returned to live and work within 30 miles of where we grew up in an identical cookie-cutter white upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. It’s no wonder they were all Republicans - they had lived in a Republican culture all of their life and probably had no idea that another mode of thinking even existed.
Meanwhile, among my friends, most of us have travelled internationally, or at least have lived in several parts of the US. We have a diverse group of friends, including people from different countries, different races, different cultural traditions, etc. We live in cities or college towns, which support a variety of experience that is unseen by most of the country. We are true members of the Urban Archipelago. And I think that this diversity of experience is the basis for our liberal values.
When you live in a city, you can’t help but be confronted with people different than you. Even in a place like the Bay Area, where even the Democrats are considered conservative, there are people from all over the country and world who offer very different perspectives. That diversity of viewpoint is one of the strengths of the left, and is one of the reasons why the innovative people that I know are all liberal. To create new ideas requires being able to see things from different perspectives. And that is not something that the conservatives can ever understand. Their movement is based on seeing the world in black and white, good and evil, no alternatives.
As a side note, I think the liberal movement often takes it too far. We’re so open to alternative viewpoints that we can’t agree on anything, and are hopelessly disorganized when it comes to actual political action. But that’s another story (yes, that’s a foreshadowing of yet another post I have kicking around my brain).
The other danger of having a limited perspective, besides lowering innovation, is that it makes one more susceptible to manipulation. Among my friends, any new idea is often immediately attacked. But it’s not attacked in the rabid way that conservatives would attack an idea, as evidence that one has gone insane. It’s a probing of the idea, with questions asked about its validity and its scope. It’s an attempt at understanding. We kick the idea around, figure out its strengths and weaknesses, and collectively come to a better understanding. This freedom of thought is one of my most cherished memories of MIT, where we’d spend hours just kicking ideas around, arguing late into the night. I believe that such an attitude harks back to the Enlightenment, where it was believed that reason would be able to answer all of our questions. As most of my friends are scientists and engineers, it’s not surprising that we think that logic and reason can answer most questions in the world.
The conservatives come from a different perspective. Lakoff’s Moral Politics goes into more detail, but one of the things that ties the conservative movement together, from the business end to the military to the evangelicals, is a belief in hierarchy. There are authorities, and they should be listened to and obeyed. An idea is not open to be questioned by anybody. It is handed down, like the Ten Commandments. Obey or be expelled. This quashes the natural impulse of humans to question everything, an impulse which is evident in children who ask “Why?” about, well, pretty much everything. This can lead to spectacular screwups when the leaders make a poor decision and everybody else falls into line. I think the invasion of Iraq is a prime example, of course.
Okay, one more tangent and then I’m wrapping this up. One of the main ideas I wanted to express when I started was that I think that monocultures are dangerous. Agricultural monocultures are particularly vulnerable to disease and the Microsoft monoculture has demonstrated its vulnerability to viruses. In a similar fashion, I believe that the conservative areas of this country are vulnerable to memetic infection, due to their lack of diversity. Because they do not have a broad range of experience to draw on, often having lived in the same area or culture their entire life, and because they are part of a hierarchical culture, with its attitude of not questioning experts, they can be easily influenced. Obviously, I’m trying to find a way to rationalize the fact that 40 percent of America believes Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, and that Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs when we invaded.
In a broader cultural sense, I think that diversity of experience is valuable in promoting liberal values. When you’ve interacted with people from a variety of backgrounds, it’s harder to dismiss whole groups of people with stereotypes. You realize that gays or blacks or Indians or pick-your-group-to-be-demonized are really just people, like yourself, trying to make it through this complicated world of ours. And it opens your eyes. It certainly did mine. As mentioned earlier, I lived a sheltered childhood in a white upper-middle-class suburb. And it showed in some of my prejudices. Then I got to MIT, and TEP, where I lived with blacks and gays and all sorts of other weirdos, and realized they were all just people. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t do the same for others.
So, promote the Urban Archipelago. Promote diversity of experience. Offer exchange student programs for kids in the suburbs and rural areas to come live in the city for a term. I guarantee it’ll open their eyes, and hopefully their minds. Bring people together, and have them see each other as people, rather than demonizing the other side as ivory-tower communist liberal elites, or gun-totin’ Bible-thumpin’ redneck conservative hicks. Let’s see where that takes us.
P.S. Man, re-reading this after finishing makes me realize how many loose threads I leave hanging around. I have so many ideas to pick up on and expand upon. Argh. Must. Write. More.
I wrote this in an email discussion today, where people were debating why the conservatives are so much more effective than liberals at getting their message out. One guy said that the left doesn’t lack for ideas, but thought that the messages was less important than making sure the ideas got out there, meaning we needed better organization for distributing ideas. I disagreed. Nothing new here if you’ve been reading my rants, but I think I was more concise in delivering the point this time. Maybe. You decide:
I think a good, simple message takes care of the dispersion of the ideas. Part of the success of the conservative movement is that they take very complex issues and boil them down to two or three word phrases (to use Lakoff’s example, “tax relief”) that can be parroted by anybody. Then they put those phrases and those ideas on Rush Limbaugh’s show. Then everybody that listens to the show understands the message and repeats them at the local bar, or at work. By making the message simple, they let their footsoldiers do the work.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, with their emphasis on getting all the details right, make the message, if anything, more complex. They want to prove their mastery of the material. Gore was a wonk. Kerry had some of the same tendencies. The Democrats’ idea of a position is a 20 page white paper. The representative of the liberals tends to be a college academic, who couldn’t say 2+2=4 in less than 20 minutes. On election night, the local news in Cleveland interviewed an Oberlin professor about the turnout in Oberlin and he was just incoherent. They said “10 seconds to make your last point” and he rambled on for a minute.
The conservative pundits, meanwhile, have been trained in their institutes to keep it brief, keep it concise, and keep it on message. They are trained in going on camera and delivering sound bites. They understand the importance of putting ideas in a form that people can then pass on to their friends. Any wonder they’re better at it than us?
Arianna Huffington had an amusing story about an encounter with a friend’s kid (http://www.alternet.org/story/18291):
“Arianna,” he said with the enchanting optimism of a Greek-American boy, “I’m going to convince you that you should support Bush in November. Here are two questions you have to answer. The first question is: Are you for more or less taxes? The second question is: Do you want to fight the war on terrorism?”
Simple message. So simple that an 11-year-old boy can articulate the message clearly.
Can you sum up what Kerry stood for in two sentences? Or even twenty?
A couple weeks ago, I happened to hear Pat Buchanan on Fresh Air (scroll down). I don’t recall all of the details, and I don’t have the time to listen to the whole interview again, but I was struck with a thought while listening to him: the conservative viewpoint is all about selfishness.
The things that Buchanan emphasized were moral/family values, fiscal conservatism, low taxes, less government, and isolationism, or at least no nation-building in the neo-conservative form. Let’s take these in reverse order and see where my thesis of selfishness comes in:
I think each of these core values of conservatism that Buchanan identifies essentially boil down to selfishness. Leave me alone, and don’t do anything that might upset me. This relates to Moral Politics, where Lakoff extends the Strict Father model of American conservatism to include the idea that “Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own” to allow for this idea of being left alone. Anyway. I don’t know if I’m being insightful, or just spiteful, but I figured I’d share my observation.
I also thought it was interesting that when Terry Gross asked him whether he thought that the term “culture war”, which he apparently introduced at the 1992 Republican convention, was justified, and whether it made disagreements more violent than necessary by framing things as an all-or-nothing war. He felt that using the war frame was totally justified, saying that 40 million babies have been murdered since Roe vs. Wade, and that the “culture war” was a matter of life or death for the oppressed Christian religion. Yes, he actually felt that Christianity was under attack in America, which I find laughable. I think he feels that placing any limits on his religion is tantamount to wanting to destroy it, even when those limits are only to make it possible for others to have their own beliefs. Again, it’s the selfish viewpoint that his way is the only right way, so any limitations on it are unacceptable.
As for the idea that Christianity is oppressed, I’d love to see the polling numbers if an atheist ran for office. They’d be essentially zero. Jews and Muslims are more acceptable, because at least they have some religion to keep them moral. We will see a black lesbian woman in the White House before we see an atheist. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
I’d also like him to consider how he’d feel if the situation were actually reversed, and his kids were forced to recite verses from the Satanic Bible in school. He’d find it unacceptable. But he thinks it’s only right that students should have the Ten Commandments with them in class. Argh. Anyway.
I’m not sure what my point is here. Part of it is that I did think it was an interesting hypothesis that the theme of self-interest as an overriding priority is one of the things that ties together the conservative issues. Part of it is to help answer the question I posed at the end of this post: Why am I a Democrat (or at least a liberal)? And I think part of the answer to that is that I don’t want to be selfish. I like trying to understand other viewpoints. I like realizing that I might be wrong. There isn’t a one true way. And I think that believing in a one true way is fundamentally dangerous in this ever-more-interconnected world - we need to live in a reality-based community.
P.S. Yes, I know it’s possible that you could find a way to spin all of my beliefs to make them appear selfish. But I’d like to think that helping others who are down on their luck, or who don’t start out with the same opportunities as oneself, is less selfish than denying them help because they haven’t “earned” it. Or that recognizing that others’ beliefs might be as valid as one’s own is not as selfish as asserting one’s views as being the only way to view the world. But, hey, I’m just a biased selfish bastard that wants to be right 
A flame war erupted on an email list I’m on when somebody decided to endorse Bush over Kerry, because Kerry wasn’t going to stand up to the terrorists. He went on to mention Kerry’s comment about 9/11 attacks being a “nuisance” (which is a mis-quote but never mind), and how awful an idea it was that we could treat such an attack as a nuisance. I wrote a response and posted it, and figured I’d post it here for the 4 of you that might not be on that list.
I’m going to ask a stupid question, for which I fully expect to get flamed,
because I know I haven’t thought through all the implications to the level
necessary for discussions on eit. But it’s one I always have when people
bring up 9/11 as a “nuisance” as if it’s unthinkable that we could allow that.
How many people died in 9/11? 3000 or so?
How many people are murdered in a year in America? 16,000 or so (using the
FBI’s Uniform Crime Report). Even
when you break it down and only count crimes committed against strangers
(not counting family arguments and stuff), it’s up in the 8,000 range. Are those lost lives less of a tragedy than 9/11? Did those victims deserve their fate?
Approximately 42 thousand are killed in car crashes each year. Yes, many of those are due to people being idiots. But those idiots take out others, just as effectively and randomly as the terrorists.
650,000 die each year from heart disease. 150,000 die from lung cancer. (statistics from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/) Admittedly, this is a choice issue - I think the consequences of smoking and poor eating habits have been made abundantly clear, so it’s up to people to run their own lives appropriately.
Are these “nuisances”? I think that each of these cases demonstrates that we as American citizens are way more of a menace to ourselves than anybody else could ever be.
I know from a personal standpoint, I feel much more in danger of losing my
life from a dumb-ass California driver talking on their cell phone while
their SUV drifts into my car than I do from a terrorist. Or from the
possibility of getting mugged as I walk home from BART late at night past a
corner where there are several assaults and a murder a year.
If we took the $140 billion or whatever we’re spending in Iraq
(see Cost of War), and spent some of it (say, $40 billion or so)
on security for our borders and better counter-intelligence, and then the
rest of it on improving the lives of our citizens, giving them a better
education, etc., thus hopefully decreasing the likelihood of us killing ourselves or each other, wouldn’t it be worth putting up with the “nuisance” of the possibility of some crazy people in Afghanistan maybe (given the increased security) killing as many of us as are killed in car crashes in a typical month?
So somebody tell me why I’m crazy.
