Moral Polarization and Many Pussyhats

Once upon a time I read a full article by Haidt. Turned my stomach. He fundamentally neither understands (nor values) that (for example) the right of a tennage gay child to grow up and not fear being beaten to a pulp by his schoolmates is non-negotiable. All his sophistry is just an attempt to cover up this basic moral deficit.

And of course, many other basic rights, but this one example is enough.

An alternative moral psychological account, propounded by Kurt Grey, I believe, is that all morality is based on care/harm and that liberals and conservatives are just attuned to different objects of care/harm. Liberals are more concerned about care for/harm to individual autonomy and conservatives are more concerned about care/harm to traditional institutions.

Perhaps some evidence for this alternative interpretation is that when issues of, what Haidt would identify as, purity are litigated in the public sphere they are often rhetorically expressed as issues of care/harm. Touching someone without first seeking consent is wrong because to do so is harmful to them; it diminishes their power over their own bodies. Allowing people with penises into restrooms designated for people with vaginas is wrong because it is harmful to the people with vaginas; it harms their sense of security.

John, nice analysis and thanks for the pointer to the Wilkinson article, which is the first I’ve seen that carefully analyzes the splits we’re seeing in the US. Also, thanks for the critique of Haidt. It may be that he is applying his narrow view of what constitutes his categories (trans use of bathrooms bad; grabbing pussy – eh) to come up with his dour picture of liberals.

And seeing how the comments have started off, with the usual male devaluation of women, I think I’ll just leave after this comment. Yesterday was energizing, and I’ll leave the trolls to you.

Ought to be pointed out, that this election may have flipped the liberal/conservative moral calculus. If conservatives have a “stronger sense of moral purity, contamination, and disgust”, then at least one of three things must be true: 1. They did not vote for Trump, 2. they are intellectually incompetent and believe lies, 3. they just destroyed themselves morally.

The Trump voters I know (some of whom are bluecollar social liberals) exhibit an uneasy sense of #3. They are unconscious of this; they don’t want to admit it to themselves. But they stumble repeatedly over the obvious logical conclusion from this election: that they just showed the kids that you are ALLOWED to make fun of the way people look; act outrageously on a public stage; be a racist about a Federal judge; tell obvious lies; say one thing then next day say the opposite; manhandle women and boast about it — all of this, and STILL you can be elected President!

And of course the kids all took note of their elders’ hypocrisy. This is a stain that will be on the moral fabric for a few generations.

The next scientific surveys ought to incorporate an exploration of the “moral relativism” this has induced into the Trump-half (or, a little less than half) of the U.S. population. It might also explore the “denialism”: even now, Trump voters on social media are still lashing out at Hillary and the “progressives” — who lost the White House, like, 3 months ago! Or the surveys might wait a few more months, to explore the likely “self-loathing”: when the Trumphalf realizes that 90% of anything good that Trump does is what Hillary would have done too, but with Trump, we added the incalculable cost of degrading the public morals indelibly, — well then, they may really start hitting the booze.

Many thanks for the Wilkinson article, which is good, if not unique. I agree with your criticisms of Haidt. I missed any mention of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort which is sort of a detailed history of the geographical division. Of course, none of those sources deal well with the economic reasons for the Sort, so material on late capitalism and neoliberalism need to be added. Difference can be commodified and profited from.

I am also reading up on settler colonialism (J Sakai, James Belich), which is usually connected to patriarchal Whiteness, but defined as “moving to someone else’s territory so as to remake it in your own image or Utopia) can apply to current San Francisco as well as early Australia, to the Democratic Left which is invigorating Whiteness settlerism more than rural Republicans who are maintaining settler traditions while remaining in place. The Big Sort is global, but will express itself in more colonialist ways in the nations built on settlerist ideology.

Which leads us to neo-colonialist and post-colonialist theory, which has been used for Global analysis (Chinese capital buying agricultural land in Africa) but has not been applied as much to internal political-economic processes. Manhattan-LA-SF is to Iowa as 19th century London is to Manchu China (Oxycontin-Opium) and our current troubles something like the Taiping or Boxer Rebellions? Said rebels not looking all that liberal at the time.

I am sure there is plenty to disagree with in the above, without directly offending Rofer, but probably everybody else. Out to look for Inglehart, Welzel, and F Moretti.

Haven’t read Haidt directly, because I don’t think doing statistically controlled experiments with a falsifiable hypothesis is necessarily science. To me it seems like the OP is trying to analyze how individual psychology is supposed to be expressed as a political phenomenon in the example of “PC.” Whether or not the analysis is fair to Haidt, I can’t say. But I very much doubt that individual psychology is all that determinative of social behavior, because people tend to conform to social roles, rather than social roles conforming to their personalities. But Haidt and other variants on him (like Corey Robin) don’t appear to consider this alternative. It seems like parapsychologists doing falsifiable experiments without establishing psi is actually a thing.

Or so it seems. The other thing of course is the obvious political utility of a “scientific” attack on liberalism.

The philosophical contention that I find between left and right is justice versus order.

Overgeneralizing, but for the right, politics and law are intended to maintain the traditional order and hierarchy; whether economic, racial, religious, etc.
For the left, politics and law are intended to give everyone equal access to
the benefits of society, not limited to equal opportunity to obtain that access.
To me, it seems that many on the right operate as though “liberty” is zero sum.

As a physicist who is aware of the potential for phase changes even a small correlation might have large consequences in the bulk (collective) properties of a system. Consider two water molecules, one with a temperature of 32.1 F, and one with a temperature of 31.9F. If you looked at them separately it would be hard to tell which is which, the energy levels of the various degrees of freedom being statistically determined quantum values. But create two bulk samples each with trillions of such molecules, and the difference will be very noticeable. A lot of system can exhibit such tipping point behavior, there can be critical points where a tiny change in the control knob can lead to strikingly different outcomes. Perhaps an otherwise minor sorting of social propensities between two communities will have little effect, or perhaps the effect will be huge.

Now, modern technology is enabling increasing sorting, both physically, as the best academically inclined people move from the country to the city, but also our ability to select media has been growing by leaps and bounds. My fear is that the tipping point could bring us into civil war kind of territory.

John Holbo @ 15

When someone is weaseling around behind your argument, looking to sneak a nip at it’s Achilles tendon, a baleful glance in acknowledgment of what the wee bugger is up to never hurts. Gives the rest of us a chuckle, too. Well done, sir.

I think this post illustrates my biggest problem with Haidt: the ways in which his list of values map on to actual issue positions is always ambiguous and contestable. Further, it is at least sometimes the case that thinking of issue positions in these terms elevates (at most) rhetorical distinctions over substantive ones. PC is a case where you can easily tell a care story, a do-no-harm story, a loyalty story, or a purity story—and I’m not sure these stories are even really different stories, or just different ways of saying the same thing. If I say “I think racist harassment violates the sacredness of a university,” that sounds like a purity story, but my cashed-out version might be that it does so because a university’s sacredness is bound up with its commitment to equal educational opportunity–does that make it a harm story?

The obvious response from a Haidt defender would be that actually I’m just illustrating his point: liberal JHW can tell purity stories, sure, but at bottom they’re “really” harm stories. OK. But I’m not sure this is less true for conservatives. Opposition to same-sex marriage might sound like a classic case of “purity”: traditional marriage is sacred and it is defiled when its traditional contours are broken down. But just as with PC and the sanctity of the university, there are substantive commitments lurking beneath: a view that sex-based statuses and roles are important to the well-being of human beings in marriage (harm); a view that gay sex is self-instrumentalizing and inflicts a kind of damage on yourself (harm); a view that traditional marriage embodies norms of responsible procreation that are important for child welfare (harm). These arguments may not be credible, even as accurate explanations for why people in fact oppose same-sex marriage, and we might suspect that instead the purity rhetoric is just a rhetorical expression of underlying irrational feelings of disgust and discomfort. But that’s exactly the same point as many prominent conservative critiques of PC.

The fun thing about “natural kinds” is that as long as you draw arbitrary category lines consistently and define the qualities enclosed according to their stipulated meanings, they always magically work. “Purity” means what x’s do in contradistinction to y’s. All x’s are defined by purity. Ta-da!

I get the attraction and rough if misleading half truth of these sorts of attempts to pathologize politics into a kind of essentialism. The sedative worked because of its soporific qualities. Criminals commit crimes because of their criminality. Lock them up, problem solved.

And sorts sort themselves because God/nature predestined them as sorts. (The author doesn’t consider the possibilty that this is one of Nietszche’s “four great errors”: mistaking cause for effect. Or Althusser/Foucault’s: the material kind is the product of the idea, the individual the product of the ideological social order.)

But let’s ignore that. Even if the claim that the cause of sorting is sorts is true, then what? Well, we can’t lock them up, but at least we’re not to blame for failure since it’s natures will that there will always be bad people for us to righteously resist.

But I still find it surprising how rarely anyone, in response to such exercises of political psychological essentialism, notes how utterly the *reverse* it is of at least one mildly influential characterization of political kinds. On that obscure theory, the political right is associated with capitalism as cosmopolitanism and the “disruption” (hey, that’s a cool word no one in the left sorted territories would ever use!) of order:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

But these guys’ views about the psychology of the right are probably too obscure to take precedence over our insightful current intuitions that right = uptight square and left = cool, man. (What is Obama but a centrist liberal’s fantasy of a perfect synthesis of slide rule square and leather jacket awesome dude come true?)

One might even wonder, wildly, if the proper psychological division of political types might cut across our comforting, self flattering contemporary intuitions of right and left in precisely a way that explains both the disaster of contemporary politics and the cluelessness of both parties and tribes to see or respond to that disaster. And our doom to repeat it.

The links in John Quiggin’s earlier post led me to this poll on belief in various conspiracy theories.

There’s a strong “purity” element in many of the conspiracy theories covered (“Do you believe that there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, or not?”, “Do you believe that the government adds fluoride to our water supply, not for dental health reasons, but for other, more sinister reasons. or not?”). The one about the shape-shifting reptiles arguable has a purity element too. (Come one, no-one believes that one! Well, Ok, 4% of the sample said they believed it and about 7% were not sure)

Anyhow, by the crosstabs in the survey, many of the purity conspiracy theories correlate with political affiliation.

But: belief that global warming is a serious problem has a definite “purity” aspect (defilement of the sacred earth, etc.) and on that one Republicans swing the other way, not buying into the purity concern and thinking global warming is a hoax (12% Obama voters vs. 61% Mitt Romney voters think its a hoax).

Someone (probably including John Quiggin) will object that the difference between global warming and the aforementioned extraterrestial reptiles is that there is some scientific evidence that global warming is actually happening. [Null hypothesis: 4% of CT readers will disagree, and think the alien reptiles are an issue…]

but in any case, “purity” related issues can swing towards one party affiliation or the other, depending on the specifics.

I remember when this Haidt stuff started 5 years ago or so, and I thought, oh a man who wants to make money telling shitty people their shitty views are ok, nothing subsequent has made me need to revisit this.

This is excellent, marked up to super-excellent for including the hilarious phrase “PC hellscape”. My question is — what’s the right amount of polarization? We need a BIT right or we just fall into complacency. You wouldn’t want the abolitionists to have been too much like “different strokes for different folks — some like slave-holding some don’t, who are we to say?”, right? On the other hand you don’t want everybody thinking everybody else is pure evil or nobody will ever convince anybody. But sometimes it seems like the anti-PC brigade just don’t like being scolded, and this is a bogus point because the point of being scolded is that you shouldn’t enjoy it. That’s why parents and prophets and moral scolds do it.

bob mcmanus @24 “And one of the main points of the West and the Enlightenment was to find universalist abstractions (opposing localized tradition) that as authority and discursive power could be used by Whites against the Iroquois as well as merchants against Charles I and capitalists for enclosure….”

The notion that Enlightenment thinkers took aim at the Iroquois seems to erase Abbe Raynal (and Diderot) from the ranks of the Enlightenment thinkers. It also seems to think Locke, who did aim to justify expropriation, was the Enlightenment in America. On the other hand, it seems to me Edward Coke (and Roger Williams,) Algernon Sidney, Cato’s Letters and Blackstone’s Commentary probably had more to do with the Enlightenment in America, if you can really speak of such a thing apart from Benjamin Franklin’s birthday. Speaking of Franklin, the Iroquois, so far from being targets of Franklin, were inspirations for a non-monarchical, republican of sorts kind of empire. The Iroquois were both genocidal and territorially aggressive and perfectly appropriate as models for the new nation, as Franklin knew.

In short, Foucault is like Kropotkin, very inspiring emotionally but of dubious relevance to real thinking.

” At bottom are values of purity/reactions of disgust but they induce confabulatory harm arguments.”

I’m going to jump in way over my head here, but it seems that the purity/reaction to disgust is not zero-sum, for the left anyway. Cosmopolitans can appreciate transgressive art as having social/expressive value, and can support transgender bathrooms as a matter of respect and equality (liberty) while still giving a high value to purity. Conservatives cannot tolerate any amount of disgust without a sense of violation. For them, purity/disgust is a sliding scale, liberals give a slider to each.

I agree that the pussyhats were great. Day-late-dolla-short: perhaps someone should have handed out copies of ‘Lysistrata’ at the rallies. I’d love to see a “No Humps for Trumps” meme take-off. It might even work.

“Allegedly liberals have a thinner base of values, whereas conservatives have a broader one.”

Does Haidt use “broader” in the sense of a value judgment (the way we praise broad-minded people), or in a simple mathematical sense of having a larger number of moral criteria they draw on? From the articles I’ve read I got the impression it was more the latter than the former. And I think Haidt recognizes the point that the characteristically “conservative” values are precisely the ones that are harder to square with moral universalism and cosmopolitism, so that there may be good reasons for liberals to pay less attention to them, rather than it just being a quirk of biology akin to colorblindness (that said, I have seen number of articles summarizing his work that make it sound more like liberal colorblindness, so it is at least a popular misconception of Haidt’s work). For example, in this article Haidt is quoted saying:

the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability, which is very important in the absence of good central governance. But if the goal is creativity, scientific insight and artistic achievement, these traditional societies pretty well squelch it. Modern liberalism, with its support for self-expression, is much more effective. I really saw the yin-yang.

And here is an excellent article from Haidt on globalist vs. nationalist moralities, in which he makes the point that as countries industrialize and grow wealthier, they tend to move away from “traditional” values towards more “secular-rational” ones, and away from “survival” values to more “self-expressive” values, again suggesting that there is good reason (perhaps a form of memetic selection) that the left would emphasize care and fairness over the other values which are more tilted towards tradition, tribalism and nationalism. That article also aligns nicely with a memorable blog post from slatestarcodex which proposes a thrive/survive schema for understanding left vs. right views, which to me seems intuitively like a very promising way of thinking about what unites the motley collection of positions that are characteristic to each side.

Saurs did kinda have a point
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/cnn-covers-historic-womens-march-with-panel-of-eight-men-and-one-woman/

I just clicked-thru from Jesse M’s (#39) comment to an article about Haidt on Alternet. Oboy. I thank Jesse for introducing me to this particular corner of the Haidt hog-waste lagoon. Jesse quoted

the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability

and I found

Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

If the description of Haidt’s views on Hindu traditional values is accurate, then I’m … appalled. How to put it? The notion of “honor” in re: female chastity is …. not about cleanliness, except at a superficial level. Others have studied the subject deeply, and all I can say is, it’s about controlling female reproductive organs *per se*. As organs. And if the organ has a mind of its own, it needs to be taught a lesson, by fire if necessary. If for no other reason, than for the education of all other such walking reproductive organs.

It’s got nothing to do with cleanliness, and everything to do with treating them as walking wombs. I recall reading at LG&M that it wasn’t -so- different in the US in the mid-19th century (the specific reference was to Indiana, 10-year-old girls kidnapped off the street in broad daylight, and judges who ruled against the plaintiffs, b/c they should have kept their womenfolk under control — or something like that).

It angers me when I read these …. bland, fact-free defenses of what are in fact violent totalitarian regimes. And Haidt’s really good at it.

“There is another way to put it: Haidt likes the irony that liberal refusal to see the value of tribalism has made them paradoxically narrow – hence tribal. This seems like the joke is on liberals. But, so far as I can tell, the joke is also on Haidt. The problem solves itself. If the problem is as Haidt says.”

There is still another way to put it, which is so obvious that it surprising that no-one mentioned it:

Perhaps psychological/personality traits are not in fact tightly linked to political propensity on any grand scale–they just appeared to be in the very narrow time and very narrow political space in which they were studied.

This explanation seems obvious when you notice that for example nearly all of the “who is associated with authoritarian personality types” studies took place in the West AFTER Communism fell out of favor on the left in the West. Perform all the studies 40 years earlier and it would have been unsurprising to see a much larger correlation right?

So perhaps the very premise that the personality types described are logically linked to political propensity is incorrect.

Then complaints about illiberal exclusion in universities doesn’t seem solved by your personality data.

@Chet Murphy:

‘How to put it? The notion of “honor” in re: female chastity is …. not about cleanliness, except at a superficial level.’

I doubt Haidt is saying it’s about some innocent desire for cleanliness, rather he’s probably drawing on the idea that all human cultures tend to frame social taboos in terms of cleanliness/purity metaphors which color the way we think about about them, see books like Mary Douglas’ “Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo” or Martha Nussbaum “Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law” by Martha Nussbaum. And for a general argument about how most of our high-level concepts (moral, philosophical, etc.) are deeply associated with bodily metaphors, see some of George Lakoff’s work like “Metaphors We Live By” and “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

I had an email exchange with Haidt back in 2008 in response to one of his early pop press pieces. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I was… unimpressed by his attention to factual details that might cast doubt on his pet theories. He is good at sucking up to conservatives and dressing his Islamophobia in the language of dispassionate scientific inquiry. His work is lousy with confirmation bias. I wouldn’t spend any more time discussing him than you need to.

harry b @ 50: Excellent point.

When I was a child (raised by a conservative father from a blue collar background) I often was told about the dignity of all labor, no matter how menial or unskilled. Someone who did their job well was worthy of respect. Now, I often hear conservatives insult low-wage workers as mere “burger flippers” who deserve only scorn.

Sebastian H @ 01.22.17 at 11:11 pm
“Perhaps psychological/personality traits are not in fact tightly linked to political propensity on any grand scale”

Isn’t that pretty much what the OP says when he expresses scepticism about the significance of any (weak) correlation between personality type and political ideology and suggests that any small effect of personality type on political ideology (and thus polarisation) is “going to be totally swamped, overwhelmed, by the vastly stronger tides of tribalism and group identity”?

I am a little surprised that anyone has ever taken Haidt’s work in this area seriously: as has been pointed out already, the division of the entire population into the binary of “conservative” and “liberal” seems, well, less than useful. Not to mention that the values ascribed to “conservatives” by Haidt do not really accord with the actions of a lot of real, living conservatives (a general topic that has been explored many times at CT).

@50
‘Its not conservative to license this sort of behavior’

That’s why F…face von Clownstick and his bunch of freaky F…faces never was accepted to be ‘conservative’ by the type of American Conservatives who (still) always open the door for a Lady and never utter four letter words.

And that’s why Trump never was – and never will be accepted by New Yorks true ‘Conservatives’. They see in him the ‘socially unacceptable creature’ he truly is – and that makes a discussion about different moral sensibilities between conservatives and liberals a bit difficult if the subject of the discussion is neither…

I think one factor to question is whether someone’s values are part of what we call their personality.

If you do categorise values as being part of personality, values will necessarily link personality type to political ideology, because someone’s values informs their political judgements.

But it is also possible to stop short of categorising someone’s values as part of their personality type, and say personality is more about a person’s temperament, demeanour, outlook etc.

I think the Westminster system is structurally designed to predispose for polarisation — with the debating style division of the Parliament into Government and the Loyal Opposition.

America seems more predisposed to polarisation than Australia, so maybe the American system of government which is based on Westminster but with significant changes, promotes a polarised citizenry even more than the Westminster Government/Opposition debating team style system.

Your last 4 Presidents the other side of politics has said are invalid — Bill Clinton with the Lewinsky fiasco and impeachment, George W Bush with the stolen vote, Barack Obama with the birther conspiracy theories he was born in Kenya or something, and now Trump who Russia stole the election for plus he has a company.

I don’t know if this happened before these 4 Presidents or not, but it seems really unusual to me that so many people think the President is not only not their best choice for President, but that the President’s installation in the office is invalid.

Also how the structure of the House of Congress and Senate and office of President promotes obstructionism seems likely to predispose the system to polarisation too.

To clarify one point. I may have been confused when Holbo writes “Conservatives are much stronger on the loyalty/authority/purity axis, since allegedly liberals are weak-to-negligible here.” It may be that he is only explaining Haidt, rather than actually ratifying the sentence.

@John Holbo – Are you just certain the “negligible” part is false, or do you feel equally certain they are not weak relative to conservatives even in a statistical sense? One could certainly believe they are weaker on these values in a statistical sense while at the same time acknowledging that most leftists may have issues on which they do think in terms of purity (or other of Haidt’s values besides care and fairness), and that some minority of leftists may even draw on these values more than the average conservative.

I’m sorry about misreading you Holbo. I see now that I was confused about what you meant to show as your thinking on the topic and what was Haidt’s. I knew that you were disagreeing with him on a number of points, but I was confused about which ones they were.

What morality is there to a woman’s march where a woman who hates men enough to torture and kill them (Donna Hylton) was invited to speak?

I mean, you guys love to talk about empathy and not inviting bigots or criminals into the political system. And then you turn around and do just that. And you wonder why nobody takes your ‘moral’ posturing seriously? The only reason any of you are engaging in this exercise at all, is to convince yourselves that everyone like you is perfect, noble and good, and that everyone who disagrees with you is an immoral, barely human monster.

But there are monsters on all sides, and all sides are willing to be blind to their own.

soullite

I mean, you guys …

No, you don’t mean. Mean is exactly what you don’t do. There is no ‘you guys’. ‘You guys’ does not exist. You have created a target out of your own imagination, apparently for the satisfaction of berating and castigating it.

You don’t, for example, mean that I invited Donna Hylton to speak, do you? No, of course not. Do you then, perhaps, mean that John Holbo invited Donna Hylton to speak. Not that either. Who, then, do you mean? You don’t. You don’t mean at all.

Getting mighty Chait-y here.

Accepting for the point of advocating on the behalf of devils (a fast-growing sector!) the characterization of opposition to rape and sexual assault as a gesture of purity, a signaling of a specific, obscure virtue held only by one of several wings within human society, is the precise impetus for naming rape culture as a function of patriarchy, not the other way round. This political framing implies the existence of wiggle room and grey areas where our condemnation of the act of rape becomes negotiable and relative, a matter of partylines and allegiances rather than an unremarkable, uncourageous act that requires no cookies. It’s, quite literally, the least humanity can do, to acknowledge that rape is indefensible, an act of violence and cruelty and selfishness.

“Purity” suggests compromise, brainwashing, moral bribery, removing the victim from the stage to be replaced with the nominally impartial observer, whose endorsement is being courted and whose experiences are what matters and are what is interesting. I am unaware of any other act of violence treated in this fashion, as an inconvenience that requires close, but ultimately reluctant, passive handling, a mild and disinterested shrug. We may argue about whether or not a specific person deserved or contributed to their own murder, but one is rarely lectured as stubborn and divisive and radical for espousing a general anti-murder philosophy*.

In reality, such opposition is also, with exceptions, multipartisan, though not universal. Heaven knows conservatives certainly never engage in a “kind of ritualistic expression of views or attitudes about what is sacred” and we occupy a parallel world where Emmett Till never existed.

*unless discussing the marginalized being terrorized and murdered, at which point we need to be reminded that all lives matter and that we might be taking this anti-murder jazz a bit too far

I just read an outline of Donna Hylton’s life story. What she did was horrible, but so was what was done to her before that, and afterward, she paid her debt to society, and so her present reaction to the Predator-in-Chief is perhaps understandable, and allowable. On the other hand, further drive-by shootings by Soullite might be banned, as being “impure”.

What’s the problem with an “unbalanced moral ecology” supposed to be at any rate? Is the supposed idea the following,

(1a) You need different character types to find the truth (moral and otherwise), or you need to be attuned to different types of evidence, so (1b) universities are deficient insofar as they are populated primarily be lefties, who only exhibit a limited number of character types, or are only attuned to certain types of evidence;

Or is the argument supposed to be more direct,

(2a) Diversity/pluralism are valuable, so (2b) universities are deficient insofar as it is populated primarily by lefties, who are only sensitive to a limited number of values.

But you need lots of extra stuff to establish either of these arguments. I don’t know the Haidt stuff well, but if all it shows is that adherents to different political views think in different political categories, or exhibit different character traits, you have not yet established (1a) or (2a). Alternatively, it’s not clear to me why we need to sort people along “harm”/”purity” lines to make this kind of argument. You could much more simply argue for the (supposed) epistemic or intrinsic benefits of political diversity, without taking a stance on what ultimately explains left/right differences. Or am I missing something obvious in the puzzle here?

Thanks, that’s helpful. The curious thing is that I find “we need more conservatives in the academia, otherwise it’s too one-sided” at least a prima facie plausible concern, while “we need more people in academia who think in terms of ‘purity’, otherwise it’s too one-sided” I find rather puzzling, and much easier too dismiss. (And yes, the “broad” vs “thin” values just looks like a metaphor gone wrong.)

@64
Do these people who refrain from using four-letter words also refrain from using expressions like F…face?

Oh – absolutely – they are shocked – I tell’ya shocked if a Comedian uses the expression F…face von Clownstick.

But y’all knew this – Right?

Saurs

… I am unaware of any other act of violence treated in this fashion, as an inconvenience that requires close, but ultimately reluctant, passive handling, a mild and disinterested shrug. —

You state that you’re unaware, but the statement is inaccurate. You’re not unaware, but you have pushed your awareness aside into a footnote:

— We may argue about whether or not a specific person deserved or contributed to their own murder, but one is rarely lectured as stubborn and divisive and radical for espousing a general anti-murder philosophy*.
…
*unless discussing the marginalized being terrorized and murdered, at which point we need to be reminded that all lives matter and that we might be taking this anti-murder jazz a bit too far

Engels, you are confusing what the psychologists are researching, with what they have found. You are also confusing what they say they have found about “authoritarian personality” and what we are talking about the linkages between authoritarian personality and political leanings.

Now I don’t actually believe that the science of understanding personality traits is all that developed beyond what a good school-marm could tell you (which is to say that there are truths to be had there, but that they are currently just as accessible to emotionally intelligent people all over the world. And I’m not claiming to be particularly emotionally intelligent by the way). I also believe that a huge amount of the research in this area is subject to enormous garden-of-forking paths criticism. See herefor a surprisingly easy explanation of the concept.

But if you do believe that it relatively advanced, and you seem to, you need to look at what the research suggests. The research (which I think is unreliable) suggests that the authoritarian markers are stronger on the left. (See especially Verhulst, Eaves & Hatemi 2012 where they whoops miscoded the data and originally reported it as being on the right).

Engels, you are confusing what the psychologists are researching, with what they have found. You are also confusing what they say they have found about “authoritarian personality” and what we are talking about the linkages between authoritarian personality and political leanings.

Wha??? I disagreed specifically with the following assertion:

nearly all of the “who is associated with authoritarian personality types” studies took place in the West AFTER Communism fell out of favor on the left in the West

Googling ‘authoritarian personality’ or ‘F-scale’ would inform you that it is wrong, as would reading my link.

81: Yeah, it remains interesting how little this site intersects or interdisciplines (?) with the rest of the social sciences: women’s studies, post-structuralism, cultural/media studies, various criticals, etc even to the extent of the links on the right. That’s ok, there are whole other blogospheres, with somewhat younger participants, available and waiting to be discovered by others.

This is what it is, and am not complaining or even asking for a response, CT is built around economics and political science/philosophy and the problem of isolation and insularity appears endemic to those fields. The references to Mirowski and Mount Pelerin might be on point.

It seems that psychology has a lot more problems than just ‘the big five’.

https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/everything-is-fucked-the-syllabus/

Being an actual liberal, I’ve always found Haidt’s “I used to be a liberal . . . ” schtick very hard to take as a preface to his thesis that we remaining liberals are moral pygmies. So, I appreciate the pushback in the OP and comments on his general conceit and sanctimony.

What I take to be the Enlightenment liberal notion is not that the “foundations” (as Haidt would have it) of moral concern should be reduced in number, but rather that they should be rationally aligned. Which doesn’t mean utilitarian consequentialism all the live long day either, but it does mean that a liberal would tend to think that if we are to have a taboo and moral panics, those ought to be focused on behaviors that we really want to discourage from a care/harm or rights/autonomy perspective. So, we could attach purity concerns to germs and cut down on food poisoning — go science! Or, we could have a taboo on childhood sexual abuse and a moral panic about priests and altar boys instead of, oh say, Jews and the blood libel.

In the scrum of 21st century politics, where political campaigns to change the culture take place, and the boring of the hard boards of taboo are worn by repeating mindless slogans and narratives and new institutionalization of reformed moral imperatives takes place over years and decades, it can be difficult amid that back and forth to see that a consensus in favor of alignment already exists, that the designated “conservatives” are Enlightenment liberals, too, philosophically. What makes most conservatives resistant in fine detail isn’t usually a completely different way of looking at things morally.

Haidt’s approach seems, sometimes to me, to be a subversion on this liberal alignment project. (Of course, most of my academic experience is with business schools, which somehow never seem to lack for conservatives and that imbalance also doesn’t seem to trouble Haidt. (Google “Business School and ethics”, if you don’t think this conservative domination of business schools might be a social problem. )

Paul Krugman once commented, based on research, that there were two main axes that explained most US voting behavior: racism, and I forget the other one, perhaps income or some other economic factor. (Wish I could find the article.)

I wish we would ask if all the fancy philosophizing on morality and personality that we see from the likes of Haidt is motivated reasoning, or at least results study of a small minority, perhaps some fraction of the 15% or so that make their voting decisions on something like policy.

What is the competing hypothesis for how the tribes form? If we rule out personality, how much is existing social situation and how much socialization and indoctrination?

Some of this discussion treats “the left” and “the right” as monolithic entities (or at least, sets of individuals that have been grouped together for the purposes of a statistical test). But the libertarian right and the social conservative right are not the same at all on issues related to purity.

The Marxian “all that is solid melts into thin air” etc. could well be applied to the libertarian right. There is definitely a segment on the right that is in favour of gay marriage, regards laws against pornography as in intolerable infringement of the right to free speech etc.

John Holbo @ 80
Now you are appropriating what I said as well.

I am using ‘appropriate’ in a combined cultural/political/economic/gender meaning to suggest that you, like a white patriarchal capitalist, are taking something (ideas) that were not produced by you, but by politically subordinate groups, and using it to make an intellectual profit for yourself, while simultaneously impoverishing them (since the value, at least the cultural-political value, of their original product-idea, has been reduced by you to a cheap commodified intellectual product, the concept of ‘purity’).

Data Streams New Inquiry 1/23/17, longish interview with Hito Steyerl and Kate Crawford about AI and correlated data sets being used to predict and manage human behavior. Thought about Holbo when I saw the ad for the thirties German Hollerith system.

but the most interesting example I found recently was the Chinese sincerity social score. I’m sure you heard about it, right? This is a sort of citizen “super score,” which cross-references credit data and financial interactions, not only in terms of quantity or turnover, but also in terms of quality, meaning that the exact purchases are looked into. In the words of the developer, someone who buys diapers will get more credit points than someone who spends money on video games because the first person is supposed to be socially “more reliable.” Then, health data goes into the score–along with your driving record, and also your online interactions. Basically it takes a quite substantial picture of your social interactions and abstracts it into just one number. This is the number of your “social sincerity.”

…Steyerl

There is a lot of interesting work being done that makes Haidt look marginal, but that is part of why I commented at 89 about what people are reading.

– as there finally seems to be this question if ‘pussyhats’ are a ‘liberal-progressive symbols of purity violation – let me as a occasional wearer of a Pussyhat chime in.

I know nothing about Philosophy but a little bit about ‘art’ and the state of the art is such that the Pussyhat compliment the shape of my face and I was told I look pretty attractive –
And so like Mr. Holbo I think the hat is much appreciated.

And about a male commentator, appropriating the (imagery of the) pussy hats for an argument about purity. that’s great – let’s make whatever purity argument he wants to make – as it is such a welcome change to the next Spring Break in Miami Beach.

“The upshot is that liberals (low conscientiousness, high openness to experience) and conservatives (high conscientiousness, low openness) have distinctive personalities, and that there’s reason to believe we’ve been sorting ourselves into communities of psychologically/ideologically similar people.” – Haidt from the OP.

Then there’s this from Lady Gaga – Born This Way

“I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way

Don’t hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you’re set
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way (Born this way)

Oh there ain’t no other way
Baby I was born this way
Baby I was born this way
Oh there ain’t no other way
Baby I was born this way
Right track baby I was born this way”….etc.

“Born this way” is normally cited as a liberal anthem supporting, well most everything from sexuality to gender, race, and most anything else one wishes to proudly proclaim. But at the same time, there’s the key line “”I’m beautiful in my way ‘Cause God makes no mistakes” which seems torn straight out of the Conservative playbook.

Seems that Lady Gaga has reconciled the apparent Haidt paradox in one song – both liberals and conservatives are what they are because they were born that way, nothing more, nothing less.

Personality types” based on experimental psychology is so 20th Century.

According to the link above, Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s data mining people, were in fact using the same scale as Wilkinson and Holbo (nb. not types, it has five continuous variables).

Going back to the ostensible topic of the post, I am not sure it is worth remarking it (and I’m not even sure I understand this “broad/thin base of value” shtick) but it occurred to me that perhaps Haidt does not see the contradiction between 1) and 2) you point out because he considers the the outré PC of 2) (which I assume to exist and to be significant for the sake of the argument) is anarchical in nature and directed towards members of the liberal group in aims.

In other words, perhaps he would grant that extreme PC indicates a strengthening of the purity axis, but arguably a weakening of the authority and loyalty ones (as, for instance, a respected antiracist activist could now be demoted by a crowd of anonymous Twitter users for being insufficiently receptive to transgendered issues or vice-versa) so that on the whole the basis of value remains thinner on the “liberal” side. (This is possibly mostly an Internet phenomenon with no real-life counterparts but purely on the anecdotal level, I do have the impression that there is a higher level of hostility between fellow liberal/leftist than between conservatives of various stripes.)

John Holbo @ 103
I think you have missed my point. This is a theoretical, hypothetical argument, right? And if you remember the context, I was trying to explain why saurs might have been angry about your post.

I’ll try to keep this brief – I think if you are discussing the pussy hat phenomenon, ‘women resisting male dominance by making fun of men’ is a more useful concept than ‘purity’ (even though it still can capture the whole meaning). Any my comments are also making fun of you. Perhaps I should have said “Now you are appropriating what I said as well (smiley face emoji)”.

Anyway if you are talking about banning me, I should be serious. It is genuinely not clear to me in your post and later comments whether you are suggesting that the concept of ‘purity’ is one that can be usefully deployed in understanding the pussy hat phenomenon. I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt (by not taking this too seriously) because you are a good guy, but if you are suggesting that, I think it is offensive and you should reconsider (or clarify, if you don’t actually mean that).

There are actually good reasons why there should be such things as tribes. Actually as is in “actuating”. Here are 20 short videos (about 1 minute a piece) that show the social mechanics, with a few musical interludes:

John Holbo
There has been evolutionary change in the size of human teeth (they’ve got smaller) over just the last few thousand years.
There has been evolutionary change affecting lactase persistency in human adults, probably also over a similarly recent period.
So I don’t perceive any basis for ruling out the possibility that the human brain and mind have been affected by evolutionary change over a similar time scale, covering the period of transition to living in huge urban agglomerations rather than small groups. Our teeth and (in some populations) our lactase production have not remained fixed adaptations to the African savanna small food-gathering band environment; no reason is evident for supposing that our brains and minds have.

@121
>We are never going to socialize or argue ourselves out of parochial altruism of various forms. People will always form small groups. … They won’t act like bees, even if we try to make them.

Forming various small – or, for that matter, large – groups for socialising or for trading favours is one thing (and I don’t see a compelling need to attribute this to hardwiring). Not maintaining a common moral standard for treatment of insiders vs outsiders is another. The question is, for example, whether you harm or allow the harming of an outsider to benefit an insider (including yourself); whether you side with an insider who is wrong against an outsider who is right. It is *not* biologically impossible to refrain from this and to treat people fairly, using the same standard. Some people practice nepotism, others don’t. Some people are kind/fair to strangers that they’ll never see again, others aren’t. These are moral choices and cultural practices, not hardwiring. We don’t need to attribute the unfairness, when it occurs, to high-level hardwiring either – there are trivial reasons at work, self-interest and the very mechanics of empathy being the most obvious ones.

A strict and crucial distinction between small groups and large groups doesn’t strike me as particularly convincing. Apparently, we can teach people not to help a person of their race to rob a person of another race, but we can’t teach people not to help their relative/friend/colleague to rob a stranger? This doesn’t work for me. And while this sounds like a trolley problem, I do find myself – as I’m sure everyone does – in real-life situations where one has a choice between unjustly/inhumanely siding with (some members of) a small in-group that belongs to and justly/humanely defending outsiders/strangers. Again, I don’t accept the defeatist notion the (different) choices that various members of my in-group make in such cases are due to (different) hardwiring – these are, simply, matters of moral choice. Yea, the flesh is weak, but no amount of studies will convince me that we humans are not, in fact, capable of moral choices.

John Holbo @ 119
There’s a lot of stuff you said which I think is a misrepresentation of what I said and unfair to me, but I am not going to focus on all that because I think this argument is complicated enough already, both your argument and mine (even if you can’t see the complexity of my argument). So I will try to simplify by focusing specifically on certain remarks in the OP by you (so not worrying about Haidt for example, because I haven’t read Haidt and it’s unclear whether you think there is any value in Haidt anyway):

“… Why is everyone wearing pussyhats at Protest Marches? (More power to them!) Because the Prez is a professed pussy-grabber, which is a harm but also (this is important) a purity violation. Sacred values are often sacred spaces. Women’s bodies. …
…
… symbols and issues and talking points that reach out and grab you not just up here but down there (pardon my locker room banter) are more potent. They touch upon that-which-should-not-be-touched (without performance of proper rites, i.e. getting consent from the proper authorities over that space.)
…
(Setting sociology aside: what matters, morally, is that liberal-progressive symbols of purity violation – pussyhats – and conservative symbols of purity violation – transgender bathrooms – point us towards justice issues, concerning which those on the left are in the right, those on the right in the wrong. I think. …”

(sorry I haven’t quite preserved all your emphases)

I feel I should be able to leave it there and you should be able to see why a woman might think this is offensive (even if you think it isn’t, or isn’t meant to be). But presumably that’s not going to happen, so I will try to explain my concerns. Please recognise that this is complicated and I can’t say it all simply, so if in the interest of brevity I am not clear please accept that maybe I could be clearer in a few thousand words etc.

Women’s bodies as sacred or taboo spaces is a masculine/patriarchal construction. “consent from the proper authorities” is a joke but kind of a yuk joke that maybe, sort of, ridicules women. Purity as a concept applied to women’s bodies carries a lot of patriarchal weight – the way that rape was seen as a crime against fathers and husbands, violation of their property. Honour killings are still about men ‘purifying’ themselves and their families and honour by killing/getting rid of the woman/body who has been defiled. So there’s a lot of baggage around the idea of purity as it relates to women which at the very least you are not acknowledging.

It’s quite common in the women’s movement to create movements or memes or shared jokes ridiculing sexist public statement by men. For example, we had ‘Destroy the Joint’ here when a shock jock asserted that women in public positions were doing that (http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/destroying-the-joint-on-the-way-to-the-postpatriarchy-20120903-25a7h.html). I would even suggest that’s a particular contribution of feminist protest (though it seems it is being copied now for example by the right eg in relation to Clinton’s Basket of Deplorables, which is now being claimed by some of the right – by women on the right? interesting research question) – though I think all subordinated groups probably do it, maybe just not so publicly as the women’s movement does nowadays.

From this perspective, ‘women’s rights are human rights’ is more relevant than purity – that is, women have a right to say who can or can’t touch our bodies because all humans should have that right, not because we, or any particular part of our bodies, are sacred or whatever. (I am also not denying that there is a special significance attached to both sexual organs and women’s bodies because of having children, but that doesn’t change my argument – both things can be true – they can have special significance socially but also be ordinary to us). So the pussy hat then can be about asserting women’s rights over our own bodies and about making fun of Donald Trump – holding him up to ridicule (and about more than this, as I’ve said, but those things I think are important). It’s a particular form of non-violent protest (I could go into a long side track here about Margaret Atwood’s comment about men being afraid of women making fun of them and women being afraid of men killing them, etc, but won’t). Whether it ‘works’ politically or not is another issue.

And you using the pussy hat to discuss ideas about purity does seem like appropriation in that context because it clouds the issue and takes away from those strong meanings. And pace to JD as well, when someone who is a member of the historically dominant group (indeed the currently politically dominant group) labels something in a particular way, it can have much more influence than the meaning than the members of the subordinate group actually gave to it.

I’m not of course trying to suggest that you are making “profit” from this in any literal sense. But I definitely think there can be a problem when an academic who is a member of a dominant political group tries to fit ideas expressed by a subordinate group into a different conceptual frame, which he is interested in.

It’s possible that I have completely misunderstood what you are trying to do here, but hopefully you can understand my concerns at least.

So, no family of man then? (And yes, Val, I know that man in this context is inflammatory, but I’m a fan of literature left the way it was at its inception. What we create from now on should reflect what we’ve learned since, but correcting what was in the light of later insights strikes me as coming far too close to accepting a job as Winston Smith, and I’d rather not go there.)

Anyway, tribal may be where we came from, but I’m not at all sure that it’s so indelibly engraved in our genes, psyches, conditions of socially necessary labor, etc., etc., that we can’t see ourselves in others far removed from our own circumstances. Someday, eventually, come the Revolution or the New Jerusalem, or the return of the Messiah of your choice. we may be better than that.

“Some people (for instance myself) dispute they are always tribalistic with respect to their political affiliations in the strong sense. So, yes people tend to share the political opinions of the people they closely associate with (weak sense) but no their political behaviors do not always (or even mostly) “stem from strong loyalty to one’s own tribe” as my dictionary defines the strong sense. ”

Your strong sense is too strong and your weak sense is too weak.

People are tribal in the sense that they will tend to excuse bad behavior for members of their tribe while overplaying bad behavior for people outside of their tribe.

People are tribal in the sense that they will tend to over-value good behavior for members of their tribe while underplaying or finding reasons to dismiss good behavior for people outside of their tribe.

People are tribal in the sense that they will tend to find rationalizations for the beliefs of their tribe, while nitpicking the beliefs of people outside of their tribe.

As far as politics and tribe go, a vast majority of people are of the tribe their parents were in. Sure there is an intellectual component. Sure if your tribe goes too far you might rebel. But you’ll give them much more leeway than someone of the other tribe who acts exactly the same with respect to you.

Sebastian H “People […] will tend to excuse bad behavior for members of their tribe while overplaying bad behavior for people outside of their tribe.” and others.

OK, people are like that, but isn’t that just saying that people like what they like, and dislike what they dislike? Saying people are tribalistic seems to me to be saying a little more: namely that people cling to beliefs, opinions, behaviors… because their group does so (and my dictionary agrees with the connotation). More precisely, I would say a phenomenon is meaningfully tribalistic if you can identify the relevant in-group beforehand and based on this independent prior observation then derive some predictions of independent interest. I don’t see that this is obviously the case most of the time in politics (but I’m willing to be convinced by empirical evidence to the contrary). I mean, even in a pretty starkly tribalistic political environment-the US of 2015-could you have identified in January 2015 the in-group that ensured the victory of Trump in the primary then the general election (keeping in mind that the conventional wisdom was that his primary campaign would crash and burn and that the National Review was publishing an Against Trump special issue, what, one year ago)? Did you do so (kudos if you did, of course)?

John Holbo “Again, a continuum. So: both.”

I understand that this is your thesis and I understand the evidence for the weak end of the spectrum. But I disagree. What are the evidence for the strong end of the spectrum? (Of course, I am looking for “for all” type statements; nobody disputes “there exists” type statements.)

“And so I reply to you – A to Z-style: So?”

Ah. Already, I find Nietzsche confusing in my own language. So after translation and parody, I have absolutely no idea of what you intend to convey. Sorry about that.

“Ah, that must be a wonderfully free feeling. I envy you it some days.”

Oh how wrong you are to envy me (you and I agree we are failing; you believe the task was perhaps hopelessly hard, I believe we could sure achieve it if we tried a little harder).

“Tribal is a tipsy but functional equilibrium point for creatures that are essentially social, yet self-interested”

Now I am linguistically confused. The way I see it, tipsy carries a connotation of instability whereas tribal carries a connotation of excessive rigidity. Which is it (you already had me with the “highly flexible” hardwiring above, where hardwired means that something is “determined or compelled” according to my dictionary and flexible means “able to be easily modified to respond to altered circumstance”)? Because I’m perfectly fine with the statement “political affiliations are the outcome of tipsy but functional equilibria between social and self-interested creatures with mental capabilities which are easily modified in response to altered circumstances” while I disagree with “political affiliations are the outcome of excessively rigid beliefs stemming from strong loyalty to groups of social and self-interested creatures with mental capabilities which are genetically determined and compelled.” Which one is closer to your claim?

There is nothing but tribalism. Tribalism doesn’t have to be one tribe against another. We might make “one tribe”: the world tribe. It is tribalism all the way up, and tribalism all the way down.

What the moderns cannot articulate is the loss of the central functor of the tribe, the orator. Capitalism/liberalism replaced classical oration with scientific individualism. This might work someday — a million years from now! — but in the mean time tribes are emotional things, and congregate around orators. Tribes need trust to trade with each other; trust is an emotional thing. Orators provide the glue, by being individuals who combine the pathos, logos, and ethos in the single person, because emotions are learned by personal modeling.

The 18th Brumaire is perhaps the first to show that, lacking someone virtuous to do this, modern society gets a Louis Napoleon, a Hitler, a Trump. The orator doesn’t have to be capable of beautiful verbal flourishes, there just has to be an orator.

Classical rhetoric has a scientific function (perhaps ultimately it works via the “mirror neurons”), this idea has been lost in modern social science theory. Consequently we get the multiple categories and logics of “moral foundations” theory and the like. But social action requires, and only requires, the categories of virtue and sympathy, from Plato through Aquinas to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (to pick a late 18th-century compendium). Anything beyond that just loses, and loses big time!, on the 18th of Brumaire.

John Holbo, you may be using the word ‘purity’ in a certain way, which relates to Haidt, and requires people who want to engage with you to – ideally, in your view – have read Haidt. But you’re not the Red Queen, and words don’t just mean what you want them to mean, even if you have arguably more power than your interlocutors. You can’t stop other people from having a set of associations about the word ‘purity’ or being upset when you use it in certain contexts. I think it would be better if you tried to understand this rather than attacking people for it.

What the moderns cannot articulate is the loss of the central functor of the tribe, the orator. Capitalism/liberalism replaced classical oration with scientific individualism.

I think I disagree, and would ask that for instance, this site place “tribe” Crooked Timber be looked as a possible model and real-life example of new forms of chosen and perhaps temporary affiliation. I am not involved in my geographical or biological tribes to any extent but have a half dozen affective attachments like this one.

Whether or not these new distributed and democratic “tribes” can generate the emotional energy required, or how to structure them so they do so, remains to be seen.

Also can we call it cunt? Pussy is a juvenile word and Ursula le guin used “cunt” in “always coming home” so we can too.

Take your time!

We shall let the Plain People of Crooked Timber decide whether it is plausible that purity impulses are quite commonly intermingled with other social justice imperatives.

I think it’s hard to disagree they’re ‘quite commonly intermingled’ but I’d have thought it was clear they play a central role in religious/conservative psychology/politics that they don’t in secular/liberal thought. I guess I’m a bit uncertain about the strength of the claim you’re making.

John Holbo: What is the argument, WLGR, that anyone who thinks we need to study parochial altruism as a complex and multidimensional social phenomena is doomed to ‘ooga booga’ racism and oversimplified essentialism, merely due to the word ‘tribe’?

If you look more into scholarly literature than popsci bestseller-list-fodder by Harvard celebrity scholars, you’ll find that this argument has been articulated repeatedly and prominently for at least the past half century. (As a fan of anthropologically literate cognitive science by scholars like Michael Tomasello and Russell Gray, I’m generally skeptical toward the recent boom of “ideological assumptions about timeless innate human nature …now featuring fMRI!” style work in cogsci/neuro, which seems defenseless against the kind of pseudo-scholarly anti-intellectualism one might expect from a reactionary huckster like Sam Harris.) In any case, as far as oversimplified essentialism, here’s the preface to Morton Fried’s The Notion of ‘Tribe’ (1975):

The Notion of Tribe assaults the generally held concept of “tribe” by attacking the notion of highly discrete political units in pre-state society. Although we are accustomed to think about the most ancient forms of human society in terms of tribes, firmly defined and bounded units of this sort actually grew out of the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations by more complexly organized societies. The invention of the state, a tight, class-structured political and economic organization, began a process whereby vaguely defined and grossly overlapping populations were provided with the minimal organization required for their manipulation, even though they had little or no internal organization of their own other than that based on conceptions of kinship. The resultant form was that of the tribe.

This book presents comparative ethnological evidence to show that tribes, as conventionally conceived, are not closely bounded populations in either territorial or demographic senses. They are not economically and politically integrated and display political organization under hierarchical leaders only as a result of contact with already existing states, although such contact may be quite indirect. They are not either war or peace groups and rarely if ever show congruence with language communities or with religious communities.

Nothing is more quixotic than to attempt to change the meaning of a word firmly rooted in the lexicon. The intention of this assault is to sensitize the reader to a battery of preconceptions about the nature of pre-state society.

As far as ooga-booga racism, here’s from a brief article by David Wiley titled “Using ‘Tribe’ and ‘Tribalism’ to Misunderstand African Societies” (1981):

The success of the term “tribe” in shaping our perceptions of the African societies may be seen in the widespread usage of the term by African journalists and scholars. Because English, French, Portuguese, and occasionally Afrikaans were the languages of the schools and the city, tribe, tribu, and the other cognates defined the language of urban and political interaction and defined the categories into which rural and urban societies were allocated during the colonial period. Now, prominent African leaders use the term in appealing for “an end to tribalism,” referring to the urban and national struggles for political power in utilizing ethnic and language ties as a means to aggregate power and authority. They too miss the ethnic dynamic and mistakenly link the urban ethnicity to the rural societies. Finally, tribe is a source of misunderstanding the great diversity of rural Africa by labeling small hunting and gathering groups of less than 100 persons as a tribe as well as a far-flung, multinational Fulani trading group of millions of persons across circa 19 nations as a “tribe.” The term had no validity for describing the pre-colonial period. It has less legitimacy now. And the term is as demeaning as ever.

And here’s from a slightly longer but still pretty brief article called “Talking about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis” (1997):

The general sense of tribe as most people understand it is associated with primitiveness. To be in a tribal state is to live in a uncomplicated, traditional condition. It is assumed there is little change. Most African countries are economically poor and often described as less developed or underdeveloped. Westerners often conclude that they have not changed much over the centuries, and that African poverty mainly reflects cultural and social conservatism. Interpreting present day Africa through the lens of tribes reinforces the image of timelessness. Yet the truth is that Africa has as much history as anywhere else in the world. It has undergone momentous changes time and again, especially in the twentieth century. While African poverty is partly a product of internal dynamics of African societies, it has also been caused by the histories of external slave trades and colonial rule.

The idea of tribe particularly shapes Western views of ethnicity and ethnic conflict in Africa, which has been highly visible in recent years. Over and over again, conflicts are interpreted as “ancient tribal rivalries,” atavistic eruptions of irrational violence which have always characterized Africa. In fact they are nothing of the sort. The vast majority of such conflicts could not have happened a century ago in the ways that they do now. Pick almost any place where ethnic conflict occurs in modern Africa. Investigate carefully the issues over which it occurs, the forms it takes, and the means by which it is organized and carried out. Recent economic developments and political rivalries will loom much larger than allegedly ancient and traditional hostilities.

The bottom-line problem with the idea of tribe is that it is intellectually lazy: it substitutes the illusion of understanding for analysis of particular circumstances.

None of this is particularly groundbreaking stuff, and neither you nor Joshua Greene nor anybody I’ve seen defend the term “tribalism” seems to be claiming expertise in fields that involve examining the history of “small-group living” in human social evolution through actual empirical fieldwork as opposed to armchair conjecture. If want to continue using terms with the ideological baggage of “tribe” and “tribalism” as your shorthand for ideas that you and Greene both at least seem capable of describing in less loaded terms like “parochial altruism” (to your credit!) then the least you can do is critically examine your own reasons for doing so.

…I’m also a bit concerned you’re diluting (ooh pardon!) the meaning of ‘purity’ and similar terms more than a little to make your argument. Imo they have substantive meanings in the reactionary weltanschaung of which the metaphorical uses you’re leaning on so heavily are but distant echoes.

Is disinfecting an operating theatre really just the same thing from a sociological point of view as sprinkling holy water over a shaman’s hut? Maybe sorta kinda in a way but then again maybe no.

@ 150
Oops thanks for correction about Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen, I should have checked my memory.

Anyway you have given some examples of Haidt’s work, which is useful for those who don’t want to read Haidt (I should say my reluctance to do so springs partly because you’re quite ambivalent in the way you talk about him, and because of time, but partly for the more important reason that I think trying to understand political positions by individual psychology is misguided – maybe you can find differences but I think the direction of causation is wrong here). But have you read any feminist critiques of Haidt? Maybe CT authors should make a rule that for every male they cite, they should cite a woman (I’d say a feminist actually because otherwise you get the problem of fellow travellers etc)

Fn I think to suggest that I’m influenced by American puritanical feminism is not correct here. I’m more interested in the way men try to fit women’s experience into theoretically de-gendered categories – which as I’ve argued is like a form of cultural imperialism or appropriation. By contrast there was a man on Balloon Juice, who’d been to the marches, and was advocating that women should lead the resistance to Trump and men should take a support role. I like that. But your explanation helps me to understand what JH may be getting at a bit more I think.

“If you really think you can make the case that liberals re fundamentally as motivated by concerns about purity and the sacred as religious conservatives are (as I implied, I find this implausible in the extreme) you ought to be able to provide examples from across the range of party-political debate, should you not?”

One might make the case that the mere fact the average liberal is prepared to march and protest their position is at least some evidence of the purity they ascribe to it. In the last few weeks alone there have been major marches held in support of Women’s rights, African American causes/MLK day and various LBGTQ concerns. Environmental protesters continue to block Dakota in support of that cause.

When was the last gun rights march?
When was the last black lives don’t matter march?
Has there ever been a Build the Refinery protest?
Did anyone ever burn a flag to protest same sex marriage rights?

The conservatives might believe in the purity of their cause, but they don’t tend to get sore throats, hand-cuff burns and sore feet marching and shouting about it.

(Personal experience: I know a lot of people on the far Left who are far more interested in rational debate and potentially changing views on matters of substance than the average Hillaryite, Daily Show watcher or post-Rawlsian scribbler…)

John Holbo,

I think the American and Australian cultural contexts might be somewhat different and behind your argument with Val.

What Val is saying is standard university gender analysis in Australia, the sort of thing I have heard in several different university subjects and also by 2nd wave feminism public intellectuals in Australia like Anne Summers (Damned Whores And God’s Police) and Germaine Greer.

I think the point of the pussy hats is the gesture to the profane tied in with questions of women’s sexual rights and justice, I think the conservatives are more right on this the hats are deliberately playing with the rude connotations, the hats are not signifying purity to my reading, and it would be sort of icky if they were signifying purity like that at a political march.

Also I would question what you are arguing about notions of purity in relation to women’s bodies, bodily harassment, and rape — some women are not going to adopt or believe notions of purity in relation to their body in the way you are suggesting and would push back against ideas that women’s bodies are supposed to be pure like that; and other women who do adopt or believe ideas of purity attached to their conceptions of their body would only be more damaged by harassment and rape if these were seen to violate their purity.

The latter has been the case historically in many societies, and women who were raped could be seen as unclean or fallen women etc.

America is a more puritan religious country than Australia, so notions of purity might have more sway there than here.

And how did I forget?

GLUTEN!

[yes I know two people with actual celiac’s disease. I’m grateful that they can get gluten-free things because lots of purity concerned people suddenly all became worried about wheat].

Before gluten we had FAT!

And it looks like we are about to move into SUGAR!

@WGRL: Yes, using “tribe” as a term of art is ill-advised.

I would have thought all the posturing about not giving your vote to killary like it was the first time you ever had sex was a pretty clear case of purity virtue signaling. Made all the worse because so much of it was obviously driven by disgust at an old woman. The anti sex work left is often driven by notions of purity – they don’t believe whole and healthy women would rent out their bodies and so try to pretend they’re all victims. The women’s March organizers tried to write sex workers out of their script too, presumably not wanting the March sullied by dirty women. I think their are lots of examples of purity as a concept in leftist politics, they aren’t hard to find.

Also it’s worth noting the response of the Christian Right to trump – they love this man who superficially is an affront to all their values. It’s pretty clear that purity for the right is just s convenient act. What does that say about haidts theory?

“But real politics is always groupish. Ergo, purity-minded. Any attempt to deny this, in practice, is nonsense.”
I thought the point of the purity scale was specifically bodily in a way that differentiated it from just group rules. For example, variety in food or fear of spiders. Are you just saying that all groups have taboos and hence purity or are you making the stronger point that the form of those taboos is equal across types of categorization so a category like purity will find a similar number of instances in all groups? Or are you just saying that purity can’t be made categorical in a way that meaningful can measure group differences?

Val

It means ‘despite what you said’. I think it’s the ablative case of the Latin word pax (peace) and I think the normal form is ‘pace JD’ rather than pace to JD, as I said. I’m not quite sure how ‘by, with or from peace’ translates to ‘despite what (x) said’ but I can sort of get it.

Ah! Thanks for the explanation. With that information, I checked a few online dictionaries. Only one of them agrees directly with you by defining it as ‘contrary to the opinion of’; the others suggest things like ‘with due respect to’ or ‘with deference to’ or even ‘with the permission of’, which perhaps makes clearer the etymological link to ‘peace’ (and, yes, the etymology is confirmed). Also, if we follow the dictionaries it should be ‘pace J-D’, not ‘pace to J-D’ (come to think of it, I suspect Latin doesn’t have a word for ‘to’ in that sense, you’d just use the dative of ‘J-D’, except that in English there isn’t one).

Another thing: one of the dictionaries suggests that the usage signals either politeness or ironic politeness — did you intend one of those?

Bob McManus #147: “this site place ‘tribe’ Crooked Timber be looked as a possible model and real-life example of new forms of chosen and perhaps temporary affiliation”

A discussion group has various tribal characteristics such as a purpose, a set of rules, a group affect, a reduced cost for individual interaction, etc. But there is no orator. A discussion group is a group of individuals who are in the process of defining themselves. They don’t need or want an orator in the classical sense of someone whom a tribal audience has gathered to listen to, and who is employing the cultural heritage to move that audience to political or judicial action using ideas and emotions. (It is not the job description of a teacher or professor.)

Moderns think that rhetoric in the classical sense is worthless, a superfluity, and the orator’s function has been denatured to a politician giving a speech. The basic dream is that a system can be set up which gets to its goals automatically: don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters. Not only liberals think this way — conservatives & Marxists too. They should all be chastened by the way in which Trump, a bad speaker, was able to sway emotions and get results.

I agree with John that purity politics/thinking is everywhere, and to the extent that conservatives may have more of it, it is a Huge v. Super-Huge thing. It isn’t a ‘little here on our side’ and ‘OMG everywhere’ on their side thing.

I wonder if it is more recognizable on the left if you think of it as tightly linked to self righteousness. The difference between feeling you’re right and exhibiting self righteousness has to do with the purity of you and your group and the impurity of the object of your scorn. Surely you’ve seen a fair amount of self righteousness on the left?

It seems that much of the discussion about Brexit voters and Rust Belt voters takes on a self-righteous/purity character. It isn’t just that they are mistaken, foolish, misguided or otherwise wrong. They are nearly all racist and evil. (See recent threat here of very nearly that title.)

@186
‘Plain People of Crooked Timber was an homage to Myles na Gopaleen and The Plain People of Ireland’

I didn’t know that – as I took it just like the definition:
‘Clear or distinct to the eye or ear’.
And perhaps that’s the problem. There is more and more of ‘homage’ in the subject and less and less ‘Clear or distinct to the eye or ear’ – as there is this tendency to turn ‘things’ ironically around like ‘Tribe’ or ‘Pussy’ or ‘nastywoman’.
And that makes a discussion about ‘my tribe’ -(said proudly) mighty confused.

Bill Benzon #188. I agree with you, although “tribe” currently has the connotation of necessarily possessing a shared affect, which “community” or “a people” does not.

I think the word “tribe” should be restricted to its anthropological use, as a small living group, located geographically, with political (or proto-political) functions, up to the level of small chiefdoms (so a tribe tends to be less than 15,000 people). But clearly we are way beyond that! So I just use the word “group” for everything.

I think what we are really talking about is something that segues into Koestler’s “holon”. This does not necessarily have an affect, but it specifies some other, obvious systems-theoretical functions, such as: pass-through energy flow; having a leader or else acephalous; the ability to nest in hierarchical structures; possibly having smaller structures nested in it; not necessarily with a single location in space; and a few other things. Some social scientists are trying to introduce the word “assemblage”.

I think word definitions have gotten out of control — but again, we live in the age of individualists! For example, I also think the word “evolution” should be restricted to Darwinian, biological evolution. But now, it means almost any kind of historical change. Your opinions can “evolve from one day to the next”, and that sort of nonsense.

I wonder if it is more recognizable on the left if you think of it as tightly linked to self righteousness.

Personally I think of purity as tightly linked to yodelling and I find it very common in Switzerland.

Nb. I’m not denying people on the Left can be self-righteous or annoying, I just think using the word ‘purity’ to describe this dilutes (yeah yeah I know) meaning of a term which has a very real and substantive meaning in discourses of eg. white supremacy, xenophobic nationalism, heterosexism or patriarchy beyond recognition.

Though this is secondary, I suspect that at least some of the pussyhat women are aware of Code Pink, a very active and visible women’s anti-war organization formed in 2002 to protest the looming invasion of Iraq. According to Wikipedia “The group’s name is a play on the United States Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded alert system in which, for example, Code Orange and Code Red signify the highest levels of danger.” So there is precedent in the USA for associating pink with protesting women.

@engels: If you take the anthropological analysis of purity that Mary Douglas offers in Purity and Danger you end up with both the socio-political and the psychological.

“I also think the word “evolution” should be restricted to Darwinian, biological evolution. But now, it means almost any kind of historical change. Your opinions can “evolve from one day to the next”, and that sort of nonsense.” (Lee Arnold)

Button pushed. The word “evolution” existed before Darwin, just as “relativity” existed before Einstein. They used those words because they were a good fit for the concepts they were trying to explain, which doesn’t mean that they don’t fit elsewhere as well. Refinement by incremental improvements is a general process that fits well, for example with the human design process (compare the Model T or more primitive vehicles with Ferraris; consider Edison’s thousands of random experiments to design light bulbs and chemical batteries) and with the progress of human intelligence in math and science.

Believers in magic will never accept this, but trial and error plus memory (the general way that evolution works) is the fundamental way that progress is made. (Sez I.) (Progress relative to what? Relative to the selection criteria that determine the errors.)

To be clear, I’m not saying purity is one factor among others in your examples, I’m saying the sense in which it does (as vague group-psychological reflex) is completely different from the sense in which it applies in the Right (consciously normative concern with eg. sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage, purity of the white race or American nation).

On the word “evolution.” There’s been quite a bit of work in cultural evolution over the past two decades or so. It’s being done in a variety of disciplines, archaeology, linguistics, biology, communications, media study, anthropology, and a new Cultural Evolution Society was formed last year. Those folks are acutely aware of biological evolution and the question of whether or not cultural evolution is Darwinian (in the sense of random variation and selective retention) is high on the agenda. I don’t expect it to be resolved any time soon.

The word “evolution” is also a term of art in the study complexity, where the state of a system can be said to evolve over time.

There is zero chance that the word can be restricted to the biological case.

How about during the week in which . . . I was trying to insist my liberal and left wing readers find something sincerely useful in the work of a man whose life’s work is to declare that conservative frames are simply true. (And that liberal frames must remain in the box conservatives put them in.)

Relevance. Slippery as an eel, that, especially as a political desideratum. if we’re talking about interests real or perceived, it depends, doesn’t it, on one’s tribe? — Are they really all of a piece, the Black Students’ Union’s demand fifty years ago for an end to the academic exclusivity of White Man’s history, and the Trumpista’s current demand that the decaying Nineteenth Century townships of rural Kansas or Idaho or Alabama be paid proper cultural as well as economic attention?

Whose job is it to take the broader view, assuming there is one? Full credit to John Holbo for declaring philosophy’s skin in the game. Far from irrelevance, that — in my view, at least. YMMV.

JimV #203: “The word ‘evolution’ existed before Darwin”

It most certainly did, and “evolutionism” became a popular intellectual commonplace by the middle of the 18th Century, in what Lovejoy has called the “temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.” But this was still underneath an Absolute that emanated downward, to cause the evolution upward, which modern science and biological evolution came soon and firmly to reject. A notable example is Hegel, who theorized a mechanism (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) for the evolutionistic upward movement toward the Absolute. (Indeed he supposed that his own philosophy had arrived at it.)

Darwin didn’t use the word in Origin of Species, perhaps because he was aware of its connotations going back a few hundred years.

The problem I have with using “evolution” for other things — now — such as for personal “learning” or “changing one’s opinions”, is that “refinement by incremental improvements” neglects some singular points about biological evolution, e.g. that it is 1. a choice out of random events (stochasticism), not premeditated — as, say, events in technological or cultural evolution often are. 2. The random events are always generated at the same level, i.e. in the genes. 3. Biological evolution is value-free and a species may evolve into an evolutionary (or ecological) dead-end that wipes it out — but on the other hand our regular expectation is that technology improves & reduces costs, and culture becomes more humane (despite our present setbacks).

In describing various kinds of “change”, there are plenty of metaphorical (and ironic) connections to biological evolution, but I think it just confuses the kids in classroom scientific instruction. Later on in age, who cares? You know what you’re talking about, and maybe your specialist colleagues do… The fact that a bunch of upper-level disciplines uses the same terms in various argots gives privilege to the imaginative impoverishment of experts, but little else. Go and “invent” another word instead! Go and “evolve” another word?… I mean really.

In a spirit of solidarity, my favourite ever protest sign (I wonder if this will embed?) https://scontent-syd2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/10592734_1479075999009704_8961806603738162245_n.jpg?oh=724054653a8c558fef7a9d92d8eab770&oe=5903DD4C

Lee Arnold: as pointless as this digression is, I don’t want to let your points go unchallenged (but maybe the moderator will).

1. I doubt if Edison’s final (not first commercial) choice of bamboo fiber as the best light-bulb filament was far from random, since it occurred after about 1000 trials. Of course once a technology starts to evolve, choices become less random and more contingent – after Hox genes evolved, body plans tended to evolve symmetrically. Similarly, memory (existing genes, recorded data, the Engineer’s Handbook) is the basis for most choices engineers make. Same algorithm, different means of implementing that algorithm.

2. Factually incorrect, but that’s a quibble. It doesn’t change the algorithm if there is one or many forms of memory. A bubble-sort works on an IBM 704 with magnetic core internal memory and magnetic tape external memory; also on a modern semi-conductor PC; or an abacus; or pencil and paper.

3. The values in the evolution algorithm (which algorithm I posted for you once before and won’t take up space here repeating) are in the selection criteria. For biological evolution, survival and reproduction. (And for engineers, ultimately the same.)

Finally, pedagogically, it is better for students to first understand the general algorithm, rather than focusing on a specific implementation of it to the exclusion of all others – as if the bubble-sort algorithm was only ever presented in its Fortran implementation.

The algorithm can be mis-applied, granted, but it is far too important and widespread to be restricted to biological evolution. If you have traveled by jet airplane, chances are you were propelled by the GE-90 engine, whose flow-path was designed by a genetic algorithm.

And (oops!) one more thing – this is the pussyhat website mentioned by ZM https://www.pussyhatproject.com/

and it’s where the bits ZM @ 106 quoted come from

(ZM you sometimes don’t bother about indicating when you are quoting and where you are quoting from. Probably everyone here gets that you are quoting, but if you were in one of my classes you’d get into some strife over that :) )

I can remember being about 11 and watching the news in my small town in Australia and it was like all the English speaking world was rejoicing the Berlin Wall was being torn down, a bit over a quarter of a century later and America is building a similar wall. What went wrong?

John Holbo, most of what you write is a rehash of what you’ve already written, so here’s a rehash of what I’ve already written in response:

JH: Look, the fact that you like Fried shows that you yourself don’t believe this.

WLGR: I cited Fried as an early example (although of course there are earlier ones) of a direct, evidence-based attack on the non-evidence-based claim you’ve made central to your defense of the concept of “tribalism”

JH: That’s good enough for me. It’s fine that our ancient ancestors lived in a variety of generally small groups. … I just don’t see the relevance.

WLGR: [I]f the most precise possible understanding of “tribe” does relate to any actually existing form of human social organization, it points to a form that emerged alongside or even after the emergence of formal statecraft, in response to the rise of state societies or even as a direct political manipulation of non-state populations by states themselves.

JH: I’m not picking ‘tribe’ to pick a fight. What’s important is the ideas, not the words.

Chris Lowe via WLGR: The idea of tribe particularly shapes Western views of ethnicity and ethnic conflict in Africa, which has been highly visible in recent years. Over and over again, conflicts are interpreted as “ancient tribal rivalries,” atavistic eruptions of irrational violence which have always characterized Africa. In fact they are nothing of the sort. … The bottom-line problem with the idea of tribe is that it is intellectually lazy

JH: Why should I engage any of the points regarding the connotations of ‘tribe’? They haven’t bothered me, I’m not going to bother them.

WLGR: I respect you enough to assume that you’re capable of thinking critically about your own ideas, recognizing these kinds of implications, and consciously resolving to make some kind of change

That said, your final graf at #215 increases the bad faith to such a fever pitch that you might as well start rolling around on the floor babbling in Aramaic about how the power of disingenuous rhetorical tactics healed your stomach ulcers. Before you’ll deign to engage with any of the incredibly basic points about the problematic connotations of “tribe” articulated by me, several other commenters, and a great many social scientists, I’m supposed to provide a “causal harm model” describing the individual contribution a single book with a racialized word choice might make to an entire racist discourse? Do you want models for the contributions of a single unjustified traffic stop, or a single suspicious glance? A model for the contribution a single fused helium atom in the Sun might make to global climate change? How about a harm model for a butterfly’s wing flap causing a hurricane, would that fit through your narrowed goalposts enough for you to bother reading something before smarmily dismissing it? (Moreover, if I was taking a class of yours on Plato, would you respect me as a student if I did what you’re doing right now, deliberately ignoring whatever actual arguments you make about Plato, then trashing your conclusions about Plato as “magical thinking”?)

Just to reiterate, the idea that “tribe” is some combination of demeaning and analytically useless is utterly uncontroversial among people whose job is to empirically study the social organization of the people and communities one might describe as “tribes”. For an analogy, think of the difference between lay and scholarly conceptions of the term “racism”: the way laypeople often flatly refuse to consider the possibility that racism could ever encompass anything beyond one person expressing open hatred toward another on the explicit basis of “race”, and the way a scholar who studies racism might regard this very refusal as both a symptom of racist discourses and a contributor to them. Metaphorically but in a sense also literally, this exchange over “tribalism” has consisted of me arguing that even people who have black friends and don’t wear KKK hoods can still perpetuate racism, and you arguing that that’s impossible.

” The Republicans want morally terrible stuff – and I will defend that proposition rationally, upon request! And they are tribal in defense of their terrible stuff.”

-Define “Republicans.” I get this is a blog and everyone has to define terms and deploy categoricals on the fly as it were, but that’s a not insignificant and very broad claim. So are you referring to R legislators, R lobbyists, R jurists, R dogcatchers, every R voter in the last election, R’s who usually vote R but didn’t this time b/c of King Wall-Maker, first-time R voters, Gay R’s, African American R’s, independents voters who sometimes R and sometimes D, rich R’s, poor R’s–or just all R’s henceforth and forevermore?

I’m not being pedantic. All R’s want the same terrible things and, more importantly, all have equal agency are thus equally morally responsible and reprehensible? You think this jives with reality? Anyone voting R becomes R, fundamentally-tribally so, such that their politico-moral comportment to the universe aligns essentially with…who or what? Prez Yuge Inaugural? ALEC? Mitch McConnell? fracking? Citizens United? ransacking predominantly Muslim nations (wait, a lot of D’s don’t mind comporting with that one, or some others come to think of it)? Representative politics consists not of fragmented and stratified coalitions and interests, a never ending series of uneasy compromises, but just whichever team one’s born into or defects to? Shouldn’t anyone who actually subscribes to the rational conclusion of this line of thinking be arming themselves against the other tribe with something more sharp and pointed than hats? Maybe we could just reread Mauss; develop some new elaborate rituals of exchange and gift-giving to keep the peace between the two tribes–or is the risk of pollution and defilement too great for that?

“The Democrats overwhelmingly want good or less terrible stuff – and I will defend that proposition rationally, upon request! And they are tribal in defense of their good-to-less-terrible values.”

–I find this universal claim a fraction more amenable, but it should go without saying that there are some yawning holes one could poke at. If one were to take the list of deplorables proffered above and sub the R for D there’s a couple I’d like to have a word with re: morality and justice–especially justice.

“Wall of pussyhats: good, just, beneficial, some hope for the future in a dark time.”

Fine, but is it effective? Does or will it do anything politically? What is the purpose and what is it leading toward? I’ve got no problem with said wall and its putting sundry assholes on alert, but it remains to be seen whether it amounts to anything more than strategic fear management for DNC inc. Because, hey, if that’s all that matters I guess I can rent an office on one of the letter streets in DC and join the “resistance.”

Jim V #219: “pedagogically, it is better for students to first understand the general algorithm”

Sorry I don’t see why that would be true, it may work for math students but it could be a pedagogical mistake for other students.

So now I disagree with you a little bit, in a few ways: 1. pedagogically, 2. on the general use of the word “evolution” for human learning and for cultural change, although all are stochastic presumably and although I conceded that the horse left the barn ages ago, but 3. mostly because my original point was elsewhere: on the unsuitability of scientific/technocratic language for moral oratory in the era of polarization into moral tribes. (I would include in this unsuitability, the language of the various modern theories of moral foundations.)

Oratory is the “science” of how this resolves. Which moderns, left, center, and even on the right, have forgotten. And it stays simple. Indeed this science hasn’t progressed much since the ancients, while the early-modern diminution of republican oratory has led us into the present pickle. “Republican” with a small “r”.

At this level, I’m not convinced that teaching the evolutionary algorithm will give the public much that is interesting or useful to say about the moral polarization into tribes, nor how to fix it. Moral dilemmas are not random (in fact the world should have seen this stuff coming). The memory is the cultural tradition. The selection values are trust and sympathy.

Bruce Wilder @210

Orators combined those abilities of teacher, politician, and expert, — add poet — perhaps before those functions were fully differentiated, who knows?

What the classical orator did was to unify the polity by creating consent of the audience. The goal was a plan of action, a decision to be made. This perpetuated everyone’s social trust in the polity.

The individuation of experts is one of the functions of modern technocracy.

Economists hold a special place (or at least they held it in the post-WWII era, until recently). This is because economic theory does a curious thing. It provides a mechanism that might supplant some of the conscious function that is necessary for social trust.

People can get along with each other by simplistic rule-following, so long as you have prices and market competition. Just let the thing go on blindly, no matter what happens, and everybody will always find a job & find a place in the world. It would automatically allow the most Liberty, and automatically be technologically most Efficient.

Now, people aren’t really born to believe this guff (as history shows), it requires rhetorical indoctrination. “But gee, if they did believe it, it could certainly benefit the rentiers!” Consequently there has been a conscious, concerted, financed rhetorical effort since the 1970’s to inculcate market ideology into the voting public, via funding for think-tanks that send op-eds to newspapers, etc. And sadly a lot of “real” economists jumped on that bandwagon. We can all name a few professors who are still on the graft.

The experts’ sales job has been quite effective. Most of the public, even now, still buys the notion that the market system could work automatically. Just follow the rules of the market, and everybody will get a job, the distribution will be fair, etc. Well okay, we might need a little automatic redistribution, but hey: in the main, it will still work. Okay, we might also need fiscal and monetary policies, but the promise remains: it will keep the whole mechanism going as if by invisible hand.

Thus the lack of jobs and incomes is today blamed on something else — the voters distrust the politicians who brought them globalization, and distrust the illegal immigrants who are taking the jobs, getting free welfare, running up the budget deficits. (Never mind that globalization and immigration had almost nothing to do with it.)

Is this confusion not enough? We now approach a new problem for maintaining social trust. We are moving into an era where there will be less necessary work, and voluntary leisure is on the horizon, while an increasing number of goods are no longer “economic goods”, but can easily be produced to satiety (due to automation, etc.) Already, most of the incomes growth for a few decades has been in the non-real sector of finance, through providing debt, credit, insurance, mortgage (none of which needs to be scarce at all). Oh, and financing the budget deficits, big money there! And let’s privatize retirement security and healthcare payment, more big money to skim-off there too!

So the idea of money has to change (again), and money is one of the things that is most intimately bound with social trust. It’s so close to the skin that people go irrational, haywire.

Economists as yet have no vision for this new state of “the economy” or perhaps it should be called “the satiety”. Satiety puts them out of business. They’ve got the mental toolbox to describe some of it, but no vision on where to go. I think the last economist to notice this lack of vision was Boulding, perhaps Heilbroner.

Vision is an oratorical thing, not a scientific one. But the orator combined teacher, politician, expert. Being an expert in economics and explaining it well to the public isn’t even achieved by economists themselves. So we are caught in quite a trap.

Seconding 230. It’s not the case that every criticism of the left implies a “Both sides do it a pox on both their houses” equivalence, although some people seem to be reading that into them. In any case, surely “We don’t need to clean up our act because look at how terrible those guys over there are” hasn’t proven to be a recipe for success for the left lately. Maybe the left could do with a bit more criticism.

Maybe people are hearing “both sides do it” because this thread started out about Haidt, and he really does specialize in “Both sides do it but really the left does it more” pablum. Perhaps the CT commenters deserve credit for not being Haidt, at least until proven guilty.

Val@236: “B and F both appropriated feminist ideas without giving credit to feminists”

I would hope that if people were to publish books or articles using arguments known to have originated with feminist writers then, consistent with scholarly norms, they would duly cite their sources. A blog comment thread is a bit more informal, yes?

” The Republicans want morally terrible stuff – and I will defend that proposition rationally, upon request! ”
I thought the question you were getting at is why Republicans want morally terrible stuff, by way of Haidt’s categories not being a good explanation, rather than Haidt’s categories implying that Republicans do not want morally terrible stuff, just differently moral stuff.
It is tough to separate those that don’t think it is interesting why R’s want morally bad things, from those that think it isn’t clear what is morally terrible, from those that think morality should be rationally persuasive.
It seems to me that some of the reaction to R’s being in power and to Trump, is that without religion and only rationality on one’s side, being without power is a fairly hopeless proposition.
I know you gave an explanation above, but I’m still interested in what theories or writers you find most accurate on the question of why R’s prefer the morally terrible and what, if anything, might change that preference.

Holbo @ 234

That’s it? That’s the take away? Dividing by tribes (and why should one do this?) R=bad and D=good, or maybe if one listens to Rush Limbaugh R=good and D=bad.

Stunning moral analysis. Reminds me of Kant–spend thousands of philosophical words arriving at a conclusion almost no one disagrees with. Oh well, carry on dear partizan.

‘It’s well past time I should be asleep and I really can’t continue this, but I have had a good go at looking back and seeing who said what when,’

Very well said – as it reminds me on some classical Woody Allen movies – and that’s why I finally give the emotional win to my fellow sister and not ‘the dude’!

Not to harp on you too much, JH, but I have to come down hard in favor of phenomenal cat’s #233 against your #234. Interpreting Republicans and Democrats as distinct “tribes” is actually a pretty straightforward example of how far the idea of “tribalism” can mislead you if you’re not careful: your point seems to be that Republican Party insiders plus people who quadrennially vote for Republican candidates are together part of one “tribe”, while Democratic Party insiders plus people who quadrennially vote for Democratic candidates are together part of another “tribe”, when in any meaningful sociological or anthropological sense the connection within either group is nanometer-deep compared to that within the group of Democratic Party insiders plus Republican Party insiders. In certain contexts members of this “tribe” will proudly announce this shared identification (perhaps most iconically Sally Quinn in dubbing it “the Village”) but in most contexts the shallow identification between either subgroup of DC political insiders and “their” respective voters seems to preclude an earnest discussion of this much deeper identification, even as it profoundly shapes the landscape of US electoral politics. Amazingly enough, while GOP insiders’ loathing for Trump during the campaign was a stress test of their perceived link with “their” voters — at various points when Trump’s defeat seemed certain, even high priests of the “Republican tribe versus Democrat tribe” scripture like Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus were mounting pro forma defenses at best — after the inauguration the script seems to have flipped entirely and Democratic insiders are now scrambling to convince “their” voters that they actually oppose Trump at all.

WLGR, this idea that repub and dem insiders are part of a single clique has let you and your fellow travelers down consistently. You thoroughly and completely fucked up your analysis of the rise of trump because of it; completely misunderstood what Clinton was aiming for and would have achieved because of it; and will no doubt fail to understand just how dangerous trump is going to be because of it. Four years from now you are going to be pretending you never offered such a shallow analysis of politics, but I’m not going to let you (or Bruce wilder, or f foundling, or rich puchalsky) ever forget how stupid and treacherous you have been.

Chart in this article seems to refute John’s ‘back of the envelope’ claim that conservatives aren’t any more concerned with purity than liberals (lots of other interesting info, and it references Haidt among others):

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/opinion/campaign-stops/purity-disgust-and-donald-trump.html

“There is no model of a healthy politics that lacks it. Even ideally. (Well, that’s tricky but let it stand.)”

Chimes with an earlier remark of John’s upthread, about sociality vs self-interest. I don’t find tribe as a term troubling (but hey, I did anthropology at uni decades ago!, and us Australians are the White Tribe of Asia…), but its many connotations only very partially overlap with political allegiance. Here at least – may be different in the US.

Doesn’t sociology usually talk about “identities”. As socially-formed beings, we have little or no self-interest outside our many and various social identities (maybe two people contesting for the last biscuit after a shipwreck are reduced to pure self-interest, but it’s hard to think of outside such contexts). Republican is a bundle of identities becoming tighter and more salient over time, but still a bundle potentially fracturable. The Democrat problem is that their bundle is looser, and Republicans have worked hard to untie it.

I’m not sure the ways Social justice thinking runs on authority rails but there were oddly(per Haidt) critiques about Bannon on Daily Kos for not dressing appropriately to White House standards and having a days grow and generally looking less than presentable from a health point of view.
Haidt’s categorization may be wrong but it seemed to me these critiques were not about “what is really morally right” as much as “who is on my team”. I was waiting for accusations of him opening the small end of the egg.

Ugh, we are essentially dealing with ‘alternative facts’ here which interestingly provide a great window into the highly tribal effect of firmly embracing confirmation bias. To the extent that you believe these personality constructs (and again I would suggest that psychology/sociology isn’t nearly on firm enough ground to trust) the left is more associated with the authoritarian markers.

See especially Verhulst, Eaves & Hatemi 2012 which you probably remember being reported in 2012 and 2013 as conservatives being strongly associated with authoritarian markers and psychoticism. But whoops, it turns out they reversed the sign on their coding for conservatives and liberals. (Seriously, I am not making this up.) See here. It is a great article.

Eleven blog comments on Holbo’s tribes

1 The main defect of all hitherto-existing evolutionary psychology political analysis-including that of Holobo’s tribes-is that the external Object (political action, political movements) are conceived only in the form of the psychology impulses they rely on, but not as human, social, cognitive practices. Holbo’s tribes cannot conceive political activities themselves as cognitive. Hence they supposedly do not grasp the significance of revolutionary, or cognitive, activities.

2 The question whether impartial stances can be originate in tribalistic movements is not a question of psychology but is a cognitive question. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of objective political thinking which is isolated from cognitive concerns is a purely scholastic question.

3 The evolutionary doctrine that psychological impulses are products of evolutionary circumstances, and that, therefore, immutable tribal behaviors are the product of immutable evolutionary circumstances forgets that it is human beings who engage in the immutable behaviors and that impulses must themselves be socially expressed. Hence this doctrine is bound to unite society into a single part. The apparently similar expression of psychological impulses throughout changing historical or material circumstances can be conceived and rationally understood only as cognitive expression of anthropological stable systems of values.

4 Holbo’s tribes start off from the fact of affinities to group and the duplication of the world into an in group and an out group. His works consists in resolving the world of political activities into a psychological, anthropological and religious one. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the political world cannot lift it from itself and cannot establish itself as an independent realm in the mind does not explain the intrinsic logic of anti-tribal, reciprocal of higher political movements. The latter must itself be understood according to its own internal logic. Thus, for instance, once purity impulses are discovered to be the secret of mass pussy-hat displaying demonstration, the logic of the latter must be analyzed, socially and cognitevely.

5 Holbo’s tribes, satisfied with group thinking, respond to anthropological values; but he do not conceive anthropological values as variable, cognitive patterns.

6 Holbo’s tribes resolve the essence of actual political engagement into the essence of humans at the early stages of their evolutionary history. But the essence of humans at the early stages of their evolutionary history is not a close set of affinities to one’s group of kins. In reality, it the ensemble of human cognitive capabilities.

7 Holbo consequently does not see that the psychological, anthropological impulses themselves are cognitive tools, and that the abstract tribes he analyzes belong in reality to a particular anthropological and cognitive form.

8 All social life is essentially cognitive. All mysteries which lead political analysis to basic psychology find their rational solution in human cognition and in the comprehension of this human cognition.

9 The highest point reached by pop-evolutionary psychology, that is evolutionary psychology that does not comprehend political activity as cognitive activity, is the contemplation of tribes and in-group behaviors.

10 The standpoint of the old pop-evolutionary psychology is tribes in the savannah. The standpoint of the new is human society as cognitive instrument.

11 Evolutionary psychologists have hitherto only explained the immutable aspects of the world; the point is to understand its capacity to change.

Lamia #244: “a debt she cannot ever pay”

A lot of the women’s protestors might feel the same way you do. Maybe you were one of them? I objected to the comment at #65 because it misled me into believing that society hadn’t dealt with it in the way that society is required to do. I wasn’t the judge, I wasn’t on the jury and I wasn’t in the courtroom to observe personally, which I feel are the only ways I can decide whether the sentence of punishment was just or unjust in this case.

” Seems unfair and arbitrary” well, yes, the fact that Feuerbach and Holbo’s tribes entertain a rough phonetic ressemblance is unfair and arbitrary.

” I don’t like your weird stricture”

Ah, you hurt my feelings, John… I was maybe not quite hoping for a prize for best Marx-parodic CT comment of late January 2017 but a nod perhaps? Damn, I thought the author of Zarathustra in Dr. Seuss’s style would be more receptive to the genre.

Z: “The question whether impartial stances can be originate in tribalistic movements is not a question of psychology but is a cognitive question.”

But is no such thing as cognitive psychology? There is an interplay between psychology and cognition in your 11 theses (BTW 84 short of Luther’s 95) that I do not follow. But at times you seem to think that psychology is one thing and cognition is something else.

What of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development? I have the sense that some of the evolutionary guys, maybe Haidt himself, may have explicitly rejected Kohlberg, but I don’t really know.

In fact, it’s right here in the Wikipedia entry:

Other psychologists have questioned the assumption that moral action is primarily a result of formal reasoning. Social intuitionists such as Jonathan Haidt, for example, argue that individuals often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights, or abstract ethical values. Thus the arguments analyzed by Kohlberg and other rationalist psychologists could be considered post hoc rationalizations of intuitive decisions; moral reasoning may be less relevant to moral action than Kohlberg’s theory suggests.

Note sure I buy this as stated.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is corruption. Consider this passage from a recent interview with Joseph Henrich (a cultural evolutionist at Harvard):

One of the things we always face in complex societies, meritocratic-based societies, is there’s a tendency for people to want to surround themselves by people that are loyal to them, by family and friends and people who owe them things, right? We call this corruption. In most human societies, this was called business as usual.

There is this tendency to want to surround yourself with those loyal to you, those of your same tribe, ethnic group, all those kinds of things. Maintaining well-functioning institutions requires constantly resisting the tendency to surround yourself with reciprocal partners and family members that would otherwise corrupt the system.

These complex societies also have legal systems that define corporate bodies as juridical persons rather than natural persons. When people take up functional roles in such juridical bodies their rights and responsibilities are defined by that body. Corruption is what happens when you ignore those rights and responsibilities in preference for friends and family.

Well, just how is it that complex societies actually construct these juridical persons with their abstractly conceived rights and responsibilities? An example of the sort of thing I have in mind is Prince Hal’s rejection of his old buddy Falstaff once he became King Henry V. Having assumed a new and different status in the world, one more tightly bound to the apparatus of the state than being merely a prince, Hal acts toward Falstaff in the capacity required by that status, not the capacity born of prior friendship.

What would Haidt have to say about that sort of thing?

Personally, I don’t really see the use of the “tribal” framing either. That people like forming groups, and that a lot of politics is based on group identity seems trivially true. But labelling what are, afaict, complicated webs of personal relationships, identities, assumed political/moral obligations etc as tribalism I think misses the interesting parts of why people build groups and adopt identities , implying it’s almost an atavistic urge devoid of any rational thought.
The part I don’t understand is , how does “tribalism” account for (or have any useful analytical use in explaining) the fact that we *have* built large, cooperative societies commited both to individualism and an expansive concept of who is “in group” ? If the default mode of humanity is tribal (and according to haidt conservative) then how do we explain our world as it actually is, which isn’t tribal in any meaningful sense ? ( ie as anything beyond analogy, or as a rough model.) I Also think there’s an excluded middle problem here. Most people aren’t activists or politically engaged in any extensive way. A lot of these conversations seem to centre around a small, not particularly representative part of the population*.

* this is also true of the most recent growing conventional wisdom, the anti “end of history” thesis, that says people are hardwired to want more from politics than incremental liberalism provides, they want something that stirs the emotions etc which liberalism can’t provide, and so this explains the return of ideological movements. But again this excludes the large middle by focusing on smaller unrepresentative groups. Afaict most people don’t desire a politics of heroism over a politics of incremental progress, and although they probably do vote on identity and instinct more than policy, this tends to get taken much too far, assuming all political behaviour is inherently irrational and primordial (particularly as this line of reasoning Is generalizing the voting patterns of the United states at this particularly divided moment in its peculiar two party system, and turning it into something approaching an eternal truth about people’s political behaviour)

Oh, I missed that.

Suppose you think in the aggregate, people are pretty unimpressive political actors, cognitively. The mean – the average voter – is basically a groupish emotionbot. That’s depressing. But suppose you accept it. It doesn’t strictly drive you to the conclusion that any given actor is incapable of high cognitive achievement. It just says those bursts of cognition are drops in the political bucket, on average.

But my thesis is some sort of converse: that even if all social agents were “groupish emotionbots” the social structure may lead to higher cognitive outcome. A variant of Hayek’s argument on the cognitive qualities of markets, if you wish, in which no one has to be cognitively impressive for information to come out anyway (even if Corey would correctly point out that Hayek was indeed relying on impressive individuals ultimately, but that’s another question).

Bill Benzon’s 275 “Well, just how is it that complex societies actually construct these juridical persons with their abstractly conceived rights and responsibilities?” Exactly, precisely, very well put. And with that and after too many comments, I bow out. Thanks a lot for the discussion.

@Z I’m ever so slightly embarrassed to admit that, while I’m sure I’ve heard of the 11 theses on Feuerback, I’ve not read them and didn’t think of them in connection w/ your eleven, so I didn’t pick up on what you were doing.

As for cognition, when I talk of constructing juridical persons in #275, I think of that as cognitive construction, though not purely so. You may remember a rather contentious discussion we had some time ago about about EP and baboons. In that discussion I introduced the analogy of a board game, like chess. Biology provides the board, pieces, and basic rules, but culture works out the tactics and strategies necessary for effective place. Well, juridical persons are the sort of things culture constructs out of raw biology. I figure there’s a lot of that kind of thing going on.

I apologize if this has been brought up in the preceding comments. I think the problem with Haidt’s methodology on the moral foundations stuff is that the purity/authority/loyalty axes only test particular forms of those axes. The purity questions on his test only refer to Judeo-Christian purity. But there are other forms of purity in our culture–veganism, environmentalism, women’s rights (as John mentioned) all can have a an element of purity. Similarly, he tests loyalty to particular groups–family or country. But if he tested loyalty to party or marginalized peoples, he might get a different result.

There are also issues going the other way. To take one controversial example, abortion may be categorized as purity (?) in Haidt’s framework, but I guarantee you that most pro-life people think about it in terms of harm/care. Now, he does say that conservatives also use this foundation, but then you’d think liberals would be even more strongly pro-life, which they’re obviously not.

So while I think there is some merit to the theory, I don’t like how it has been operationalized. I think instead of substantive issues, the foundations are more about why someone cares about an issue, and that may differ across people for exactly the same issue.

Also, Val @127 nailed, proverbially, it, proverbially. That you struggle to answer that commentary, some hundred comments later, is illustrative of how you approach female participants in these discussions.

Stuffed up the italics sorry. HTML is a pain.

I have very little interest in Haidt’s theory; haven’t even followed the Wikipedia link for it.

OTOH, the back-and-forth about ‘tribes’ and ‘tribalism’ did lead me to look up the brief Wikipedia entry for Harold R. Isaacs (1910-1986), author of among other things Idols of the Tribe (1975; reissued in 1989 with a preface by Lucian Pye). I’ve seen the book cited (not always favorably, though I forget the context(s)), but I hadn’t known much about the author. Though the Wiki entry is brief, he appears to have had an interesting career, esp. the early part in China.

Ok, back to Haidt or whatever this thread is about…

Val

… Anyway that comment seems completely borne out by what has happened in this thread. You all have …

Plainly false, because there is no ‘you all’ in the case. ‘You all’ doesn’t exist; it’s a fabrication or a confabulation.

You all have taken the subject of a Women’s March, which used specifically gendered imagery, and turned it into a completely de-gendered discussion of concepts of interest to you. I’m amazed you all can’t see it. I shouldn’t be after all this time, but I still am.

Another way of looking at the matter is that you’ve taken Holbo’s post and turned it into a discussion of concepts (i.e. your Masters thesis again) of interest to you…

@ #265, Sebastian H

This has gone on unchcked, but if you actually read the article you linked to, you’ll note that the article spells out exactly the opposite of what you want. The case was that Hatemi and Verhulst, using concepts from Hans Eysenck, published a paper that seemed to be contrary to the established literature: that is, Hatemi and Verhulst found that conservatives were high in “psychoticism”, or being less respectful of rules for being rules, and liberals were high the Lie scale, or (as the article indicates, quoting Steven Ludeke, the person who found the errors) what “measures both the tendency to try to present oneself in a saint-like manner as well as the tendency to be a bit saint-like” regarding behaviors like lying.

The problem is, like the article and even you yourself indicate, Hatemi and Verhulst scored the questions they asked wrong. In fact, as Ludeke pointed out, their papers were fully in line with the published literature: liberals were the one who had high psychoticism (again, here indicating an inclination against authoritarianism) scores while it was conservatives who were scoring high on the Lie scale. The rest of the article has to deal with Hatemi and Verhulst running interference so that their incompetence wouldn’t be put out in the open, but that doesn’t seem relevant to your point. Let me put it simply: the established literature says that conservatives are the authoritarian moralizing types and liberals tend to not be; and, when they are corrected, the data provided by Hatemi and Verhulst does the same.

In any case, it’s good for you that you think that “psychology/sociology isn’t nearly on firm enough ground to trust”, since the literature seems to say exactly the opposite of what you want it to.

The comment about Scottish clans seemed to me to be on target. Yes, it does seem to me they count as tribes and no, that example does not bear out the OP’s general picture of hostility to humanity. But maybe I have trouble separating that from references to Nietzcheanism?

So, I keep trying to get a handle on what this thread is really about, given the manifest content is not quite so manifest to my eye. (Maybe cataract is starting to affect daytime vision?) What I’m getting is something a giant quarrel between two parties about witchcraft. One insists that Wicca is an alternative religion, a secret pagan survival cherished by the marginal and oppressed. The other insists that witchcraft is a devilish conspiracy that perversely copies in negative Christianity, except not literally.

CT is not specifically a US operation, but it is still a little odd American Indian tribes haven’t provided any examples of tribalism. In the east, there were the widespread custom of adoption; the famed Indian trails by which someone like Tecumseh traveled hundreds of miles to visit the Creeks, for instance; the existence of Seminoles and Melungeons, and of course, intermarriage. And in the west there were the well established friendships between the Cheyenne and Arapahoes, or the Kiowas and the Kiowa-Apaches. And the notorious aggressions of the Pueblo tribes.! All these really do make the basic picture of human hostility to other humans across the hill to be sort of crankish EP drivel. It’s true of course that the Iroquois disliked the Hurons, but that seems to have had something to do with the fur trade?

There doesn’t seem to be any common sense reason to use “tribalism” in the context of a modern society. That usage implies some sort of innate social agoraphobia, except that phrase doesn’t connote human nature, expressed from time immemorial.

the established literature says that conservatives are the authoritarian moralizing types and liberals tend to not be; and, when they are corrected, the data provided by Hatemi and Verhulst does the same

Thanks for clearing that up.

Val

I am not using “you all” to mean literally everyone except me commenting on this thread because that would clearly be wrong – I was using it loosely to mean the latest group of comments about tribalism etc, at the time I wrote it.

So loosely as to obscure communication.

I think you could make more substantive comments.

Do you? Maybe you’re right.

J-D @ 305
Re substantive comments:

I could for example instead of using the loose term “you all” in my comment been more specific and said something like ‘John Holbo and the many commenters here who are talking about the OP in ways that obscure or elide the significance of gender in relation to pussyhats, most of whom (the commenters, not the pussyhats) appear to be male, although I can’t be certain, this being the internet”

– but it would have been extremely long winded and you – and anyone else interested – probably could have guessed that’s what I meant, so why bother to nit-pick that when you could have discussed the more important issues?

@ 308
“Val, I know my 302 doesn’t help. It was a joke, premised on my view that no help was needed .What I did was innocuous. I wanted to blog about something. I used an example appropriate to the subject. That’s completely normal and fine. I don’t see why it makes you want to scream that I might choose the topics for my own blog posts, based on what interests me. You haven’t argued there is anything wrong with what I do say in the post – or that it isn’t a worthy subject. You merely assert I should have written about something else. But: why?”

Could you please, at the very least, stop misrepresenting me? I’ve argued at length what I see wrong with your post: you have taken a clearly gendered protest, and tried to apply non-gendered or de-gendered analysis to it, thus eliding the issue of gender. It is not hard to understand what I saying so why keep denying it?

Val

You are mistaken: I couldn’t guess what you meant, not correctly; if I had guessed, I would not have guessed anything like what you have now written.

I did, John. I did. Several times over now. Your confusion here and elsewhere can’t be helped as far as I can see, for when someone wants to be confused they stay, vociferously, confused. And now I’ve addressed your habit of plaintively howling “troll” whenever you butt up against a particularly ornery commenter. All that’s left is for the ribbon to be tied. I’ll leave that to you.

I think we can all agree this seems useless due to one side, or the other, refusing to face up to the obvious.

It is possible that both sides are mistaken about what’s obvious.

If someone said ‘abortion isn’t a “women’s issue”, it’s about autonomy and human rights’ would they be degendering the issue of abortion?

‘Abortion is about autonomy and human rights’, that wouldn’t be (or at least wouldn’t have to be) a degendering of the issue, but if somebody said ‘Abortion isn’t a “women’s issue”‘, that would be a degendering of the issue

Any particiular reason why?

(as well as not being true).

Because…?

engels

The reason that it is not true to say say ‘Abortion isn’t a women’s issue’ is that abortion is a women’s issue.

The reason that saying ‘Abortion isn’t a women’s issue’ is a degendering of the issue is that denying that abortion is a women’s issue is denying the gendered aspect of the issue.

The burden of laws criminalising abortion or obstructing legal access to it, or of social constraints on it, does not fall on people in a way that is independent of their gender; the impact varies with gender, and so the issue is a gendered issue.

Is there some part of this you’re disputing?

Btw I’m not avoiding engels’ question, just thinking about it.

engels, I think J-D has said it pretty well. You can talk about abortion as an issue affecting women, or a human rights issue (because women are human), or an issue affecting both women and men (because it does affect men also). But if you tried to talk about it as a human rights issue that affected men and women identically, without acknowledging that it has a particular impact on women, that would be ‘de-gendering’ and it would be dishonest.

By the same token, John Holbo was talking about a specifically gendered protest symbol, the pussyhats, which were (amongst their other meanings that ZM quoted from the website) a protest about Trump assaulting women and treating them as sex objects. It was saying ‘yes women have sexual organs and we are sexual beings and we are also human beings with rights which we are exercising here’. By talking about this only in terms of purity – a concept which he specifically said to me could apply equally to the sanctity of men’s bodies as well as women’s – John Holbo was ignoring or eliding the key significance of gender in this protest, and the history of patriarchy and gender-based oppression which Trump represents.

As I said, this de-gendering move is like the term ‘identity politics’ in that it elides all the history and present day reality of power, oppression and resistance that is attached to gender and race, and makes them into a matter of mere ‘identities’, as if we are all neoliberal individuals, free to make choices in the market of identities, which are all equal.

Val,

J-D has done this to me as well, he thinks he can just pretend he might be male or female and no one can know as a rhetorical device in an argument sometimes if he wants to. I don’t know why.

Val: “By talking about this only in terms of purity – a concept which he specifically said to me could apply equally to the sanctity of men’s bodies as well as women’s – John Holbo was ignoring or eliding the key significance of gender in this protest, and the history of patriarchy and gender-based oppression which Trump represents.”

I think this is both wrong and unfair to John Holbo. Every reader brings preconceptions to a text, and it strikes me that your preconceptions impute a ‘meaning’ to Holbo’s post for which there is no evidence he had any intention. Since he has several times now said as much, with no obvious effect on your claim, I’m inclined to agree with engels @ 297.

Dear CT community:
I have posted my response to Holbo here:
http://righteousmind.com/how-not-to-improve-campus/

In brief: “I don’t say that the problem on campus is that there’s an absence of one or more FOUNDATIONS. I say, over and over again, that the decline in political diversity has led to a loss of institutionalized disconfirmation.”
So Holbo refutes a claim I do not make, and does not respond to my concern about the problems with politically purifying campuses.

@ 335
I’m not attributing a ‘meaning’ to what John Holbo said, I’m saying he left the most important thing out.

Val: “I’m not attributing a ‘meaning’ to what John Holbo said, I’m saying he left the most important thing out.”

I think you’ve gone further than that. In any event, I doubt you refrain from attributing meaning based on what you’ve written in this thread. If you say he made (in your view) a mistake, you imply a reason for that mistake, e.g. that he’s entrenched in male patriarchal thinking. When you express surprise that he doesn’t agree with your objection, you imply a reason for that, e.g. that his entrenchment is hopelessly blinding. If you say he did it deliberately, you imply a reason for that, e.g. that he’s engaged in a campaign to promote male patriarchal thinking. Whether you are right or wrong to think these things, you should at least acknowledge the consequences of what you’re claiming.

engels

… I don’t think your opinion of the connotations of that rather elliptical statement is quite as obvious as you think it is JD.

Obvious? Did I assert that it was obvious? I did my best to spell my point out to you because it was apparent to me that it wasn’t obvious to you.

… (ignores fact women aren’t only people who can get pregnant and require abortions)
… (ignores men’s duty to defend abortion rights)
… (ignores seriousness of rights violations of denying abortions)

All of these points support the conclusion that abortion is not only a women’s issue (a conclusion I had already drawn; and at least some of those points were already in my mind). But ‘abortion is only a women’s issue’ (false) and ‘abortion is a women’s issue’ (true) are two different assertions.

My personal opinion is it would definitely be wrong to try to pretend women don’t generally have a greater interest in the right to safe legal abortions than men [i] … but it isn’t wrong to discuss it in the abstract in terms of personhood and autonomy [ii] …

Hence [i] it is a women’s issue and [ii] it isn’t only a women’s issue.

All of these points support the conclusion that abortion is not only a women’s issue

True, but that wasn’t the point I was making (implicature of the clause ‘abortion isn’t a “women’s issue”‘, which you seem to think—contra those refs—contains a denial that women’s interests are at stake…) But as usual this getting pretty tedious…

Jonathan Haidt’s appearance and courteous invitation has had a weird effect on me. I went to his website, read his counter-arguments, clicked on a link and ended up listening to a one hour talk of him on the topic. And then… You know this proverbial, progressive, white guy who turns to the alt-right because he is too fed up with the crap from SJW? Well, I became that guy. I come from, work within and identify with an academic tradition that has a much more jacobinic attitude to the topic than the American one and whose answer to change in the curricula/demands for safe space/trigger warning etc. has been until now “If you don’t like it, go somewhere else, if you stay, shut up, and by the way, what were your grade at the last partials again?” After an hour of Haidt, I was half tempted to raise my hand at the end in favor of the SJW University in the sham poll he conducted (and felt that not all was lost when a member of the audience interjected “no show of hands against false dichotomies”).

In a mildly ironic turn, the motto he chose for his paradigmatic SJW University (the one whose telos is supposedly social justice) was the last of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach. As my parody above recalls, it takes about 60 seconds to read the original, OK two and half minutes if you don’t read German and want to double check alternative translations of German words you are unfamiliar with, so about this amount of time to see that in context “Philosophers have until now only interpreted the world; the point is to change it” does not mean “Yay for Social Justice” and that the other 10 theses may have something to say about the practice of institutionalized disconfirmation (the theses are about Feuerbach for God’s sake, but perhaps that doesn’t mean anything to him). So I am tempted to believe that Haidt never got to intellectually engage with anyone who understood (or perhaps even read) Marx (he also seems to imply that they were written in London, but I’ll let that pass). Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess. I suggest a remedial course in intellectual diversity myself.

Apologies the above comment was intended for another thread—feel free to delete.

Is it wrong to think there are, on average, differences in behaviour between men and women , and with no other information we can generalise from these heuristics? This is implicitly accepted by most identity politics

Val-style identity politics is very different to the newer ‘you can’t tell me what gender I am online’ progressivism—possibly they’re diametrically opposed.

@ 353
Ah well, maybe you and Prof Haidt can agree that I am one of those poor benighted snowflake students who have been conned by PC into thinking that things are offensive when they are not ‘objectively’, by ‘reasonable standards’ offensive. At least I will have brought you two together (and if you think that’s not a good outcome, well …)

– remembering of course that the reason I first bought into this was not that I found your OP deeply offensive, but when you were so rude to saurs, I looked at it again and thought, yeah, maybe there is some dodgy stuff here.

@357
“Val-style identity politics” – this is possibly the most ridiculous statement I have ever read on CT. Congratulations.

And ‘pace engels’ but I do have a PhD thesis to finish, in fact , so I am going to sign out and try very hard not to get involved in these conversations again until after 30 June.

I think your rhetorical style, which some might interpret as pedantic and others extremely logical, strikes me as masculine. I also thought you once spoke about being a father, but perhaps you said parent. I guess the way you spoke about parenting made me assume your gender.

John, I could be wrong but I think the problem is that saying the women’s march was about ‘purity’ comes across as quite condescending and dismissive of it, and perhaps of feminist politics generally. If you’d applied the analysis across a range of political issues I assume no one would have interpreted it that way. Also, given that laws against rape were traditionally intended to protect a woman’s ‘purity’ (hence why marital rape and rapes of sex workers weren’t prosecuted) you could be misread perhaps as insinuating that political concern with rape is motivated patriarchal ideology, rather than women’s autonomy as human beings—something which many people would find offensive, although it is doubtless not what you meant. (I didn’t agree with the ‘degendering’ critique, as I said.)

Followed the link from Haidt. So far as any debate on the OP is concerned, the equivocations in the term PC have sterilized it of meaning. PC in its original sense is a demeaning way to refer to leftism, implying positions are held by in order to appease party superiors, rather than from conviction. Technically, it can mean mindless repetition of conservative opinions, but only evilly disposed ironists use it that way. In practice of course, given the absence of a left in the only meaningful sense of a Party, PC as a purely social practice means disapproving the use of vicious stereotypical insults. As such, PC is part of the civil discourse Haidt claims to favor. Therefore, his crusade against PC means he does not.

The most amusing part is how when Haidt disavows any notion that he ever complained about the foundations playing a role in the stifling of opinion on campus, he is implicitly disavowing his theories. Since his theories are supposed to be his expertise and authority, without it all we have left is a dude who thinks that somehow universities once had institutional disconfirmation. The very phrase stinks of Popperism, a sign of an inferior mind. Even worse, the notion that business schools, schools of divinity, law schools have been politically open so that they have operated as operational disconfirmation is pretty straight up insane. What Haidt wants is for the right(wing) politics to dominate everywhere in academia.

Haidt wrote “But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history?” Yes, actually, we do not want swindlers who pretend that race is a biologically meaningful category; classes do not exist; gender is biologically given; that some categories of people are unequal; that evolution is effectively the Hand of God (even, or perhaps especially if you’re not religious!); history cannot display any lawful behavior. These propositions are stupid and ignorant, the equivalents on politically significant issues to Flat Earthism he pretends to reject.

The ancient Romans, when a military unit failed miserably, invoked decimation to improve the performance. That was sparing nine men, then slaying the tenth. But they were a genial band of optimists. It is the Haidts of the world who teach us the academy’s performance could profit instead by anti-decimation: Slaying nine men and sparing the tenth. Why the Haidts want Roman efficiency is a mystery. These people should be the first to want PC, because it would be PC to instead consider them one long argument against tenure…which they’ve won.

Incidentally, if you scroll down to other posts, there a link to a demented cartoon which manages to attribute political positions to genes, but omits anything like having a rich parent or a lesbian sister or a lover from a minority or…Haidt actually thinks this sort of thing makes his approach look good!

(Most of the thread seems to have been devoted to the usefulness of the term “tribalism” when it refers to phenomena that have little or no resemblance to what have been called “tribes” in the real world or about…well, I’m not sure, but I tend to think it has nothing to do with the OP.)

kidneystones: “First, the polling since the suspension of visas/temporary ban on entry of the seven nations identified by the Obama administration as ‘countries of concern.’ Most Americans support the administration policy.”

Must every kidneystones comment be framed around a falsehood? The Ipsos / Reuters poll shows that 48% – less than a majority and surely not ‘most’ – support the ban. Furthermore, only 31% say the ban will improve security, which means that a substantial number of supporters have other reasons for supporting the ban. Only 38% say that the ban is a good example of how best to combat terrorism. Put another way, a good many people who support the ban do so for reasons that have nothing to do with safety or security or combatting terrorism. It’s not hard to imagine what those reasons are.

http://www.ipsos-na.com/download/pr.aspx?id=16379

kidneystones

Trump supporters delight in watching bubble-head celebrity pundits and other performers cry crocodile tears from the inside of their gated lifestyles for people safely kept on the other side of their walls and patrolled security perimeters.

Obviously Trump supporters delight in watching Trump, and people like Trump, or they wouldn’t be Trump supporters; but somehow I suspect you haven’t realised what a good description of Trump you’ve just given.

Finally, chaff. When Steve Bannon insists he be quoted, that’s probably one comment all best ignore. If you don’t know how chaff functions, and how and why it’s deployed you need to find out.

No close follower of your comments could be unaware of chaff.

“The question isn’t ‘who is focusing on justice rather than messing about with expressive tribalism and purity-mindedness’? The question is: ‘whose tribe is fighting for justice?’”

Yes, precisely.

I haven’t read A & Bs book yet, but if they can answer these questions I’ll be a happy man. I do think there’s a difference between the sort of empirical social science achen & bartels do, and the handwaving about in group out group, moral orders,and life on the Savannah, that you get from social psychologists.
But I’ll read it first and report back.

“I really don’t see what analytical use “politics is tribal/people signal/groups police purity etc” serves. ”

It deflates the pretensions of agents who pose as the rational & disjnterested opponents of the irrational archaic tribal loyalists.

How powerful that is as a debating point depends on which debate it is advanced in. Against Randians and “New Athiests”, it cuts badly, and they detest it. Against “the left”, its impact seems proportional to how far the target identifies as “liberal”. Against Trumpians and similar movements it would have no force whatever, since they already identify as acting in defence of their tribes.

That’s a rhetorical use though, not analytical. I mean there are numerous ways to talk about group Id driving politics , or preferences being driven by group socialisation , that don’t revert to this tribal nonsense.
Unfortunately a generation of social psychologists have convinced themselves that the savannah at the dawn of man is the most useful comparative case study for contemporary politics.

“With the far Right on the rise, right now seems like a singularly bad moment to be reminding people of your putative anthropological constant, that all politics involves desires for in-group conformity and antipathy to outsiders…” I’m not following the logic. Seeking common ground is always a logical step in making peace with new forces.

After reading Achens and Bartels, the next step is reading Jason Brennan Against Democracy. A critique of that will serve to signal “liberal” sentiment.

To speak less satircally, Achens and Bartels are not available in library loan where I live. When I contemplate seeing how cheap the used is on Amazon, I hesitate. For some inexplicable reason I am completely convinced their study of the engagment and knowledge of the wretched masses omits all episodes of quasi-revolutionary, pre-revolutionary and revolutionary ferment. And I’m strongly suspicious they will have very little international comparison. They might have US historical perspective. Maybe.

The ruling class likes to post snipers in the ivory tower, ready to take a shot at the unruly tiny ideas scurrying around out there, like ants looking for the kitchen.

Against Trumpians and similar movements it would have no force whatever, since they already identify as acting in defence of their tribes.

This is connected with what I’ve been saying. For the Right, chauvinism, authority and hierarchy are part of what they want, for the Left, they’re things we have to work with.

Btw there’s been tonnes of thought and writing about this issue going back centuries on the Left. What exactly is the relationship between our universal values and the class politics which will bring them about? And how does the abstract idea of the proletariat relate to actual struggles which are local and particular in nature? Like Ronan, I don’t find ‘aren’t we all a bit tribal though really?’ a very useful approach to it.

I find it helpful to treat the word ‘only’ as making a significant distinction, and so I find it appropriate to treat ‘abortion isn’t a women’s issue’ as meaning ‘abortion isn’t only a women’s issue’.
Whoops! I blundered there. I meant ‘I find it appropriate to treat “abortion isn’t a women’s issue” as meaning something different from “abortion isn’t only a women’s issue”. With that correction, the rest of the comment follows as written.