Tendentious dichotomies redux

[Volokh conspirator Randy Barnett] asks how it’s possible to have dialogue when people start from different and incompatible views of the world.

I suppose one could start by having a dialogue in the first place. Somebody should double-dog-dare the Conspiracy to add commenting capability.

Oh good. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to wonder what the hell was going on.

Of course, initially, I thought Volokh had written it and had gotten really annoyed….I like reading Volokh, even though most of the time I think he’s wrong…

To be fair, Barnett’s post didn’t appear at the Conspiracy (although Juan’s follow-up did). I doubt Eugene exercises any pre-posting editorial control, but Clayton Cramer was dumped after a series of stupid posts.

And doesn’t everyone read the conspiracy because of Eugene anyway?

“The point isn’t that rightwingers do this more than leftwingers; the blame falls pretty evenly on both sides. Nor is it that myths shouldn’t be deflated. It’s that tendentious generalizations about either “the Left” or “the Right” as collectivities of the brainwashed, labouring under false consciousness, are themselves harmful mythologies.”

hmmm, actually those tendentious generalizations seem spot on. Doctrinaire leftists and their opposites are “collectivities of the brainwashed labouring under false consciousness”. When ideas ossify into ideology intellectual agility and honesty diminish in inverse proportion to the strength of belief. There are factions within fractions within sects that use manifestos and talking points as scripture with various degrees of fundamentalist rigidity and literalism.

This isn’t really a problem since these groups are followers of social change. They don’t create or contribute to social progress, they just add to the kerfuffle as more thoughtful folks get on with more useful research and analyses. Political activists do not cause change, they are a pathological symptom of change. They are the dullards and class clowns that either resist and drag their feet or impatiently shout and push as society sorts itself out into new arrangements appropriate to circumstances. They are sometimes irritating and sometimes entertaining.

I wrote him a long email. Not realizing that this was getting a lot of attention and he’s probably getting enormous amounts of email. Much of it saying what I–and the above bloggers–wrote: “physician, heal thyself”.

But I think one thing bears repeating here. Barnett wondered in his blog entry:

“Perhaps it is actually easier, rather than more difficult, to live in a world of facts that reinforce one’s predilections.”

To which I responded condescendingly (but with justification, I think):

“I find it rather astonishing that you haven’t already learned that this is, by and large, quite true. The overwhelming majority of the sorts of things that are contested in political discourse are things that are not normally directly experienced in ordinary people’s lives. They are usually ‘facts’ about a distant world and how it works that ‘explain’ in a usually very indirect manner the quality and processes of everyday live over which one generally has little control. Political beliefs are for the most part not practical beliefs that result from empirical analysis of one’s own experience; rather, they are myths that explain the mostly inexplicable. They are often similar to religious myths in function, perhaps though in a different sphere of influence. They answer difficult questions like: Why is my life so shitty?, Who are my enemies?, and Why isn’t the world structured more to my liking? One finds oneself with one’s predilections, one usually selects one’s social milieu on that basis, and within that milieu it is very easy to weave and sustain a mythology about the political workings of the world that validates those predilections. For most people, that is the very point of the exercise. Don’t take my word for it–merely examine the typical patterns of how people participate within and consume political discourse.”

I had stopped reading Volokh for awhile, and only today had gone back to it. And only for Eugene.

no, it’s not a means to avoid engaging arguments, it’s a means of ignoring cartoon versions of arguments that do deserve engagement.

It’s not clear to me why “the blame falls pretty evenly on both sides” is any elss a tendentious generalization than saying it falls more on one side or the other. You can say that generalizations about “the Left” and “the Right” are off-limits, in which case the both-sides statement falls under the ban; or you can treat it as a matter of fact, in which case you ought to present some evidence yourself — and in whcih case, frankly, it would be pretty surprising if things turned out so nicely balanced.

“Perhaps it is actually easier, rather than more difficult, to live in a world of facts that reinforce one’s predilections.”

As Keith wrote, that is by and large true. And it isn’t limited to politics – it involves pretty common psychological phenomena. One is Confirmation Bias and the other is Subjective Validation.

Perhaps we should be disappointed when people aren’t perfectly rational and don’t perfectly process all available data, reaching perfectly objective conclusions irrespective of any prior prejudices and inclinations – but we certainly shouldn’t be surprised. Christians will favor evidence that supports Christianity. Atheists will favor evidence that supports atheism. Liberals will favor evidence that supports liberalism. Conservatives will favor evidence that supports conservatism.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic when I say that that is simply how the world works – we all do it, even when we think we don’t. We can’t avoid our prejudices, passions, and preferences. Nor should we want to, I think.

There is optimism, however, in trying to promote general skepticism and humility. When we take those principles to heart, there is a fair chance that we can overcome the various psychological barriers that can cause us to ignore unfavorable evidence and arguments.

Drapetomaniac – if you’re just posing this as a broad question, see my reply to JW Mason above. If you want to push harder, perhaps you can specify precisely what you find unclear and/or dissatisfying about it. The basis in terms of experience, if that’s what you’re asking, is my having read a lot of left-wing hyperbole about the right, as well as right wing hyperbole about the left. The fact that I may agree with somebody’s substantive position on, say, the war against Iraq, doesn’t mean that they mightn’t be talking prejudiced garbage about people who disagree with them. And they often do – I don’t see any reason why my political opinions should require me to be glide over the fact that people who are talking smack are talking smack. My basis in terms of intellectual position? I’m a leftie, but before I’m a leftie, I’m a democratic pluralist. In other words, I think that people on the left (a) don’t hold a monopoly on the truth (nobody does), and (b) often only figure out what is good and worthwhile about their own position, and what doesn’t make sense, through proper argument with people who vehemently disagree. I dunno – you mightn’t like this way of thinking (or you might), but it’s what I’m comfortable with.

Ratherworried, you’re a very confused person if you really think that the Bush administration is further to the left than the Clinton administration.

What’s truly astonishing to me about Barnett’s post is that a) in many cases the claims that he says the “Left” are making (or have made) are actually only being made by a tiny portion of the “Left”; and b) in several cases the leftist claims that he asserts are indisputably false are not, in fact, indisputably false. The combination of these two factors put Barnett squarely in a “socially constructed reality” that has everything to do with his subjectivity and little to do with objective reality. It’s grandly ironic, and would be funny if it weren’t so typical and sad.

The three supposed “fabrications” you list are not fabrications, they’re arguably true. They’re also arguably false. The one thing they’re not is indisputably true or false. In the first example–the yellowcake uranium example–very few people in the world know enough to be certain of the matter of whether the President lied or not. In that case, there are three things that are very unclear or unknown to all of us: the actual truth of the matter about the uranium itself and the intelligence about it (there’s still the unreleased British intelligence for example), who knew what about that intelligence (particularly Bush, of course), and what exactly is a “lie”. Some very reasonable conclusions about what we do about each of those things can result in a reasonable conclusion that Bush lied. Other very reasonable conclusions about what’s known of those things can result in a conclusion that Bush did not lie.

The contention that the truth or falsehood is beyond question and that anyone asserting the other contrary to one’s preference is “delusional” strikes me as farther from the real world than closer. Yet Barnett, and yourself, are very confident on this matter.

Spooky.

Determining the truth of falsehood of the second two examples (and in almost all examples, really) is highly dependent upon how one comprehend’s the intended meaning of someone who asserts those things. As I wrote to Barnett, part of why people like himself tend to be so confident that other people are just plain crazy is that Barnett and his ilk consistently interpret the words of their ideological enemies in the worst faith possible. Thus, they interpret the words “won” and “stolen” in such a manner that the assertions are “clearly” false. But a good faith interpretation of those two claims would be that Gore’s “win” was of the popular election and that as such it was a moral win, at least; that it was unclear what the most accurate results of a recount would have been in Florida; and that the SCOTUS by preventing such a recount ensured that Gore lost the election, even if in fact he hadn’t. Most of those people really believe that an accurate recount would have given the Florida vote to Gore, and, assuming that, claiming that Gore “won” and SCOTUS “stole” the election is perfectly reasonable.

The problem here is that there’s every indication that Gore wouldn’t have won if the recount had gone ahead–that, in fact, Gore didn’t win the Florida vote. And this is the other problem with the way in which Barnett sees things and is being critical. I think he assumes that the “Left” that is making these claims also “knows” that the best evidence is that Gore didn’t win the Florida vote and wouldn’t have won a statewide recount.

But here’s a tip: never ascribe something to delusion or to bad intent that can be ascribed to simple ignorance. In my experience, most people don’t know enough about the world to be making almost any assertions of truth about political reality.

And echoing Henry above, my own experience and observation is that neither the right nor the left are any worse about this. The only thing that’s consistent–and of course this is almost by definition–is that the more ideologically fervent someone is, the more they exhibit the signs of the delusion that Barnett describes.

Keith M Ellis- The difficulty with the ‘Bush lied’ is not that an ignorant person with know understanding of the facts could believe the statement not to be a fabrication, but that people who know better seem to be trying so desperately to believe it.

The number of educated editorial writers to have been blindly parroting false statements like these is growing. Not merely the ‘Bush lied’ rhetoric but most of the Iraq reporting and editorials suffer today and have sufferred right along from a HUGE and increasingly obvious bias. It is indefensible, for the New York Times to permit editorial writers to produce opinion pieces that contain false and doctored statements and yet that appears to be happening constantly. The lesson from Jayson Blair’s treatment by the NYT is that it appears that several other prominent reporters for the NYT didn’t learn the lesson! Your extremely poor attempt at explaining the frequent falsehoods and carefully manipulation of headlines as well as your inability to grasp the difference between a conservative position and a liberal position on issues indicates that you are a member of the I hate Bush fan club.

I have seen behavior identical to this. It was the I hate Clinton fan club. It should comfort you that you display an identical behavior pattern to the bigots and ignorant loud mouths that occupy right wing radio.

Today, 7/29, several bloggers are writing about how Bush is clearly governing from the left. He is probably left of where Clinton governed on most issues. Failure to see and understand this has outed you as delusional or uninformed at best.