Booing too good for him?

It seems to me that homophobia is contemptible, and DADT an attempt to appease homophobic prejudices that ought not to be appeased. But I take it that isn’t really the point of John’s post. It’s not wholly comfortable thought-experimenting myself into the mind of a US Conservative politician, but it’s a good discipline to cultivate from time to time, so here are two possible ways of squaring the circle the post outlines.

One is in terms of practical politics. After all: it is in the nature of democracy that people get elected by appealing to various and diverse bodies of opinion, many of which are mutually incompatible with one another. Really there isn’t any other way of getting elected. Insofar as it is philosophically coherent to want to get elected in the first place (and we might think of reasons why it is: ‘I want to do good and can’t do it unless I’m in a power’ for instance) it is arguably coherent to try and find ways of making yourself attractive to these opposed groups. Sartorum is addressing both homophobic rightwingers (with ‘I support DADT’) and the larger constituency who have little or no problem with homosexuality, with his ‘This man is serving our country and we are to thank him for his service’ line. His tactical deafness to the booing in the room is the same thing. We might call this hypocrisy, but we might equally call it quite a clever compromise with the larger system — democracy — that necessitates it. I take John’s point that this ought to be true for the left as well as the right; but we could argue that the American left has already in effect made this compromise by moving to the centre. The right, tugged ever rightwards by church and tea party, has more work to do.

The second thing is a more specifically right-wing rhetorical device (or so it seems to me) drawn from fundamentalist religious discourse — hate the sin, love the sinner. Perhaps that’s already a cognitively dissonant right there (I’d probably say it is); but it could at least be argued that it isn’t a philosophically incoherent position. And it enables a compassionate conservative to take the sort of position discussed in this post: one need not approve of the ‘sin’ this man commits in order to love him as a soldier, serving our country (‘and we are to thank him for his service’).

Whoops. Sorry.

I can’t even see the appearance of inconsistency here.

It’s perfectly rational to think that:

(a) People which characteristic C are individually doing an excellent job in their roles in the military, and

(b) Allowing people which characteristic C to serve reduces the effectiveness of the military.

So, you might, e.g., think that through no fault of anyone, the effect on the military culture, or morale, or whatever, of allowing, say, women to serve on the front line, will reduce the combat effectiveness of the army even though all the individual female soldiers are trying their best. So we shouldn’t allow them too serve. And that’s too bad for the blameless and brave women involved, but having an effective army is more important.

Now, that might be bollocks. But it’s not inconsistent. It certainly makes sense. It’s just that you and I think it’s false, right?

I didn’t mean to imply that you are professionally obliged to write blog posts. More of “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” kind of thing.

I do think that Santorum is being sincere. It’s just that sincerity has no real connection with rationality, for most people. The problem with your (a) and (b) example is that Santorum clearly isn’t talking about whether people are doing an excellent job in their roles in the military, or whether military effectiveness is being hampered. If he was, then on a rational basis, he’d have to talk about evidence — studies of military effectiveness and so on. That’s just not what he’s talking about at all. You may not be trying to psychoanalyze him, but you’re trying to analyze yourself: “what kind of rational belief would I have to hold for me, a person trained in certain kinds of logical thought, to express an opinion like that?” But you aren’t him.

You see things like this everywhere in American culture. “I love football”, and “I hate black people”, for instance. It’s not cognitive dissonance when someone publicly admires a black quarterback and then says that black people are inferior. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is just a theological rationalization made by people who were vaguely troubled by the same thing that’s troubling you.

People with characteristic C are individually doing an excellent job in the military, but their presence causes the more numerous people around them without characteristic C to individually do poorly, thus leading to an overall loss of excellence.

This is demonstrably untrue, but I think it’s what the argument is, insofar as there is one.

Because that places the blame and responsibility on intolerance, not gayness, which is definitely not what Santorum intends.

With my cultural relativist hat on, I don’t see that. The US liberal-to-mainstream cultural value is that racism is a moral failure, and so at least a partially fixable problem. But there is still a distinct remnant of the old consensus that racism is sufficiently inevitable and natural to not count as either. I’m not sure there is a more distinctively conservative idea than ‘that problem, while tragic, is unfixable’.

The only difference for homosexuality/homophobia is the consensus as to which is the ‘fixable wrong’ and which is the ‘inevitable fact of nature’ is less settled.

Holbo: American conservatives like conservative slogans – conservative rhetoric – but, in practice, they don’t like the implications of those slogans, if they were to be taken literally and seriously.

One suggestion: ‘rugged individualist’ slogans have a firm grip on parts of the American political psyche for historical reasons, and consequently some people cling to those slogans regardless of their policy implications. American conservatives’ sloganizing belief in letting the uninsured die, for example, owes something perhaps to the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, that believer in “the strenuous life,” with whom, in Kim Townsend’s words, “American individualism left the courageously creative mind (where Emerson best represented it), left the more social confines of the academy (where James and others manifested it), and confidently strode out into the world.” (Where, one might add, it proceeded to do a not inconsiderable amount of damage.)

Once one digs a bit into the historical origins or roots of Santorum’s ideal world — roots of which Santorum himself may be unaware — it becomes fairly clear why there would be no Stephen Hills in it.

Trying to get rid of the you know whats….

American conservatives like conservative slogans – conservative rhetoric – but, in practice, they don’t like the implications of those slogans, if they were to be taken literally and seriously

Because I’m less and less inclined to give American conservatives any benefit of the doubt these days, I would amend that to “don’t like the implications of those slogans for themselves and their immediate family/circle of friends”.

I think they are largely fine with the ugly implications of those slogans for people they don’t have to see.

OP: all generalizations need to be modified by ‘some’

Nonsense. Here’s one that doesn’t: “all generalizations need to be modified by ‘some.’”

May I have my Nobel Prize now?

One more try

Also, I kind of agree with Rich on this post. The post is thought-provoking, but (despite being absent from the post) we don’t entirely lack resources to figure out what Santorum (say) believes, operationally or otherwise, or what he would do, or why and how he might be confused, or why and how he might be insincere–and we shouldn’t worry that we are being “mean” to him in some way by saying–or implying–things about him that he hasn’t yet said about himself. In other words, we’re going around and around what seems to be the same philosophical topic, not really for a good political reason.

We can accept the polling research that American conservatives are “operationally liberal” without insisting that Santorum has all the characteristics of that profile.

We can understand that Santorum (like any politician) shapes what he says to what will get votes, and won’t repel large, important parts of the population.

We can understand that what a politician will do in office doesn’t depend only on whether he’s a nice person, and we can look at all the different things that might affect his policies, without putting words in his mouth or psychoanalyzing him or belittling him.

We can talk about a public figure’s personal beliefs and attitudes, if these seem important, or typical of lots of other people, without reducing these to what he is likely to be able to do in office, policy-wise.

We don’t have to throw our hands up in the air and say, “well, a lot of people sure do seem inconsistent, don’t they.”

Ben is clearly the real villain here, with his use of the malformed “greater than strike slash less than” tag. I’ll have to remember that one for when I comment on some blog I don’t like.

This is already the best CT thread ever.

For the love of the FSM, please end the strike!

Still in strike-through mode. I’m putting this up in strike-through mode to see if it doesn’t fix the problem for me.

“I persist in thinking there’s a strong, quite stable, and really quite distinctive cognitive dissonance that has characterized American conservative thought since at least the 1960’s. I don’t think anyone – including me – has ever really pinned down it’s distinctive characteristics. ”

I think the cognitive dissonance is best summed up as : White Christian Nationalist identity politics. While they sometimes claim to be quite philosophical, Conservatives base their politics and preferences on whether or not the given question affirms the superiority of their culture-namely, a White, suburban/rural, christian, heterosexual, patriotic and blue collar/small businessman culture. Any deviation from that culture, be it homosexuality or atheism or welfare for minorities is disliked. Conservative ideology is dissonant at its core because its not trying to advance values like individual “liberty” or “equality,” but rather its trying to advance its cultural mores. The fact that much conservative rhetoric references principles like equality and liberty just shows that those values are vague and easily manipulated, the thing that ties their various beliefs, and contradictory positions on liberty and equality, is White Christian Nationalism.

wow, lot of Chrome (and Safari?) users here.
Firefox isn’t that easily perturbed by some stray strikes and slashes. All looks fine to me.

Firefox and cross-outs here as well.

Cut that out, damn it!

“The really interesting question (I agree with John) is why this is more a function of right-wing political discourse than left-wing. Or indeed, I suppose whether it is … could it just be one of those things? I mean one of those American things? ”

You used to be able to get something like this from the left when confronted with a racist union worker. People would alternate between “unions good” and “racism bad” for a while. That was when many American unions really did have recent racist policies, and now it’s much easier to dismiss the person as not representative of the union and therefore clearly boo-able.

In general, I think that the left in America no longer really has class as an ideological principle of identification across actual class boundaries, so individual leftists no longer really have to confront being in “solidarity” with someone too much unlike them.

I thought about my comment above … yes, I know, that will make me the only one to do so … and I do think there’s something more there about the left/right difference. When I reached for a left example, I automatically used abstract category words (“racism”) and forms of organization (“unions”). The corresponding right-wing words, as far as I can tell, are a lot more elemental. For instance, on the right you have to valorize soldiers, but it’s perfectly acceptable in many contexts to complain about the Army. The left wouldn’t valorize a steelworker who was a scab; instead, the worker has to participate in a form of organization that the left approves of. Similarly, racism is thought to be something that you can be educated out of, homosexuality isn’t. (Though have right-wingers really given up on that idea? Hmm. I don’t think Santorum would have suggested that the soldier get retrained to be a good heterosexual. Though I’m not exactly familiar with his ouevre.)

So the left has less trouble with this kind of thing because they can rationalize problems with any individual as being an unimportant accident of that individual, not one that calls the larger organization or ideal into question. The right is stuck with individuals who embody contradictions within themselves.

I didn’t see it yesterday, but without my glasses it’s back.

Well, yes, you are overthinking this.

I don’t think we can infer from Santorum’s later statements to the press about this episode — that he’s grateful for Hill’s service the the nation, is sure he’s doing a good job, etc. — that he isn’t a real and quite simple homophobe. He said those things to the reporter after several news cycles of all the pundits saying he should have thanked the man for his service, etc. He said these nice things about a person he obviously totally devalues — just look at how Santorum reacts in the moment, before he’s had days of pundits telling him the politically astute way he should have reacted — because he is willing to soften his real views to get elected.

The fact that he needs to soften his real views fits in perfectly with another of his beliefs, that we live in a world dominated by a liberal media and liberal “political correctness”. Santorum sees himself as just the latest Christian Martyr being fed to the lions by our Secular Humanist Grand Inqusitors.

Nor are even his easily lampoonable comments about sexuality in the military at all indicative of contradictory thinking, well, except maybe thinking that contradicts reality. Okay, to formulate this as carefully as can be managed by someone who understands Tentherism, his remarks are not indicative of thinking that is self-contradictroy within his very odd belief system. Santorum does not say that homosexuality and heterosexuality should be treated equally by the military services. That’s just you damned Secular Humanist trying to make him say something human about sexaulity. He says sexuality should have no place in the military. He doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as heterosexuality. What happens between man and wife cannot be sex, because the Bible is pretty clearly agin’ sex (at least by their fairly consistent and historically persistent reading), but he believes that marriage is sacred (there’s even a sacrament for it, which there could never be if it involved sex). He believes in Lust, a sin, which can happen between people of the opposite sex who are not married, and even within marriage if the man and wife are not intent on procreation to the exclusion of all else. The most he could possibly grant what we call homosexuality is that it is a form of the sin of Lust that is, at best, no worse than any other sort of Lust. But that’s still plenty bad enough that, of course, no public institution, military or otherwise, should have any truck with it. This belief system may strike you as so odd that spinning tales about the cognitive dissonance that must be at work in his public pronouncements is still less of a walk on the wild side than imagining that there is an internally consistent belief system at work here. But, you know, I was sent to a Catholic school back in Baltimore Catechism days, and this stuff is straight out of the Baltimore Catechism.

Don’t invent fake conflicts within these people’s minds in order to rationalize their thinking into something that corresponds to a recognizable stab at describing reality. Their order of thinking is theory first, then facts trimmed and edited to fit theory. Yes, you do have to walk many long miles down convoluted paths to square the statements they often feel compelled to make in order to retain political viability in this sinful world in which we are all just pilgrims. In actuality, their beliefs are quite simple, and a good deal more self-consistent than yours or mine, because they have made the extremely simplifying leap of faithlessness in observable reality. Just because they occasionally get all tangled up trying to preserve their viability with swing voters, should not be taken as any sort of manifestation of inner contradictions in their actual thinking.

Perry is a very consistent secessionist, so of course he will say things from time to time tending to confuse people who can’t think within the internal logic of secessionism, into imagining that he’s instead an inconsistent anarchist. But that’s your failure of imagination, not his failure to be coherent. (God knows, he has plenty of other problems being coherent.)

Santorum holds with the Baltimore Catechism, so of course he will say things from time to time that confuse those of us who expect thinking about human sexuality to be, well, human. That’s just our failure of imagination, damned Secular Humanist thought police that we are.

Salient, that’s an easy one. The first homology group is trivial on a sphere, nontrivial on a torus. A sphere has positive curvature globally, while a torus is flat. The ant just has to march in a straight line in two directions: on the torus the circles cross once, on the sphere twice. Otherwise I think your comment is spot on: gay rights are not just about sex but about the right to walk down the street without getting jumped, etc, etc.

Salient, that’s an easy one. The first homology group is trivial on a sphere, nontrivial on a torus.

:) There’s nothing more reliably pleasing than to see last-year-undergraduate maths that didn’t exist about a century ago brushed off as ‘easy’ or obvious. (I mean this sincerely. For all that people whine about The Kids These Days failing to Achieve In Math, net progress in humanity’s mathematical prowess has been nothing short of awesome.)

Of course, I’d hate to be the ant given the ‘compute the fundamental group of our world’ assignment (this is assuming a certain lack of resources at their disposal, as if the ants have a string the size of their world’s circumference or the energy to manually circumnavigate twice, I am optimistic enough to presume they’ve found a better use for it). Come to think of it, it’d be a pretty nontrivial act to circumnavigate the world and be confident that you had done so — on a crinkly surface you might be led astray by local deformations, it’s not a smooth manifold, geodesics wouldn’t extend reliably, so even if they *did* have a long enough rope… phooey, I may have self-nerd-sniped.

But actually the whole point of the maths paragraph was to construct a hole/whole pun for the last line. Ignoring the superfluous tangent, my intended point was completely different from what you describe: I mean to say that homophobes are, on average, completely blind to even the possibility that two men or two women could have romantic feelings for one another. It just never enters their mind, which, given that they’re casting aspersions on a mode of partnership, is actually an astonishingly clarifying insight into the mind of a homophobe, at least from the right angle.

It’s one thing to say “it’s all about the dirty awful sex” — that’s true of many prudish conversations. What is remarkable about the anti-homosexual movement is the complete conspicuous absence of awareness that someone could possibly feel romantic impulses toward someone of their gender. Or maybe the remarkable thing is how completely and comprehensively this one fact informs about their state of mind:

* Proportion of public-domain conversations about heterosexual marriage that center exclusively around the propriety of sexual acts and entirely neglect the possibility of romantic love: surely 20% would be too high for a ballpark estimate

* Proportion of public-domain conversations about homosexual marriage that center exclusively around the propriety of sexual acts and entirely neglect the possibility of romantic love: surely 80% would be too low for a ballpark estimate

Like the fundamental-group test for the sphere or torus, the does-romance-naturally-come-to-mind test for opiners on gay marriage tells you everything you need to know about them. (And I know the homophobes have kicked ass at their messaging movement when I notice a solid plurality of straight equal-rights supporters falling into that same trap, discussing marriage at length in terms of ‘lifestyle choices’ even though they’d be honestly offended if someone dismissed their own romantic feelings as lifestyle-choice.)

What? Changing “always drunk on duty” to “severely schizophrenic” utterly destroys your argument. I don’t want severely schizophrenic soldiers serving in the military (untreated ones, at least), but I think it’s morally reprehensible to boo them. If that’s the correct analogy to DADT, then Rick Santorum is standing on firm logical and moral ground. I *know* that’s not true, so I’m thinking maybe your analogy doesn’t hold up.

a kindergartener can sort a box full of toys according to whether or not they have a ‘hole’ of some kind in them

Not so sure – I suspect they might decide that a tumbler goes with a teacup, a bowling ball with a round bead, a tube with a helical spring. Also that empty cans go together whether perforated once (=no hole) or twice (=one hole).

if you put a loop in a sphere and cut along it you disconnect it, while you need two cuts to disconnect the torus

I don’t know what the definition of ‘disconnect’ is here, but it must be a specialised technical one – presumably it entails making sure neither of the pieces itself has a hole in. (Since just as you can slice or gouge a chunk from a sphere, you can do the same from a torus – indeed, topologically speaking, one often does the latter when carving a roast chicken.)