Purity, Partisanship, Pluralism

In his response haidt says we only want one viewpoint in science but we need many in the humanities, and includes history in the list of multiple viewpoint eligible topics. It’s not clear to me why he excludes science and he certainly just hand waves away his reasons. Does history not have facts? What about sociology? Is the bell curve wrong because it’s science or acceptable because at sociology? It seems he needs to explain that a bit more, especially since the main opponents of pc – the dudes who are big on the sanctity axis and low on the justice one – also demand the right to their own scientific viewpoints, on things like global warming, evolution, vaccines etc. presumably the same epistemology that tells us we need to accept people in history who say that the north started the civil war also justifies treating evolution as “just another theory” for a reason. How can haidt throw out half of this epistemology? I think he needs to explain where the boundaries are and why there should be boundaries at all. Is “more guns less crime” a scientific fact or a viewpoint? What about the bowling green massacre? If kellyanne conway’s alternate history is unacceptable in academia then why isn’t a bunch of other non scientific stuff? And if we should accept alternate viewpoints like Conway and spicers, what value does academia have? Before haidt moves on to dissing liberals for being too pc he needs to establish the bounds and rules of his new epistemology. Why are some alternate viewpoints important and some beyond the pale in his theory, and why is it that the ones he wants to be allowed in the academy (even when wrong) all racist and homophobic?

And if conservatives are big on thisnpurity thing compared to liberals, how does he explain the finding that 20% of catholic clergy in Australia were involved in child sexual abuse?

Also there seems to be a tension between his idea that we needed small groups controlled by sanctity politics in order to make humanity better, and the recent wave of semi-right wing theories about how humanity has been getting better recently. Steve sailer claims human behavior has become way less violent since world war 2 – precisely the period of time the anti pc mob claim we have been stifling their speech and destroying their purity barriers that stop us being barbarians. How does haidt square these two things? Could it be that the way colonial brits talked about Indians, the way the Japanese talked about the Chinese, the way white Aussies talked about aboriginal people, is part of the reason why the world was so horrible until recently? Maybe stifling that shit and driving it out of the public voice is why we are better? Every step forward in human history has been a struggle to widen those small groups haidt talks about and to remove the shackles of purity. Could it be there’s a reason for that?

What struck me about Premise 3 (aptly summarized by something something plurality something pluralism something diversity?) in Haidt’s talk is how self-contradictory it was. I understand that self-awareness is hard to achieve but
1) Making students drone “Differential outcomes does not indicate differential treatment” (a particular cringeworthy moment),
2) Instructing them to shout it back at teachers if they catch them making this mistake,
3) Complaining about the underrepresentation of politically conservative beliefs and bemoaning the ensuing lack of institutionalized disconfirmation,
4) Complaining about students’s knee-jerk reactions,
5) Cheering pitifully at the majority of student choosing Truth U. vs. Justice U. (now that’s cringeworthy for you)
6) Misinterpreting a quote by Marx to illustrate Justice U. and thereby missing the elephant in the room (the quote is very much about institutionalized disconfirmation)
7) Arguing that Universities may center around truth or around Social Justice but not both,
8) Arguing that “equal outcomes in the absence of equal contributions” is not justice
and finally
9) Concluding that only truth brings real change
all that in the span of a single one-hour talk without a hint on his part that these different positions are-well, how should I put it?-not all obviously compatible is still quite remarkable.

Chet Murthy @ 1

I wasn’t born and raised in a traditional society, as you were, but — and mine is a very American story in this respect, I think — in the remnants of one. My father was a white, Appalachian, Presbyterian, professional military, padre/padrone sort of authoritarian. My mother, an Anglican from New Jersey, succumbed early on in their marriage to his thunder, leaving me, as the eldest son, without much of a defense against his intention to use me as a vehicle for his own self-replication. (A side note: feminists ask me if I truly comprehend the depredations of patriarchy. Yes, I say, I honestly think I do. I don’t expect them to believe me, of course, but I think I ought to be excused for finding a good deal of irony in such exchanges.)

Anyway, my solution was not literally to slay my father, but to run away, to slay the father in me as best I could, and to transform myself into a rootless cosmopolitan. At least in part, this is the story of Nineteenth Century America writ small. America became, in its own imagination as well as the imagination of its potential immigrants, the place people ran away to to become rootless cosmopolitans, to remake themselves, and, perhaps, to get rich enough to fend off anything or anyone who resembled the embedded predators of traditional societies.

And now here we are, 150 years or so later, and it’s Trump City, baby. That’s what we get for forgetting that, despite the Enlightenment — which nowhere near everybody signed on to, even in its heyday — not everyone wants to be a rootless cosmopolitan, or can stand being one if it means giving up the pleasures of home, hearth, and the warm embrace of a community, which does after all supply some comforts in exchange for its often stultifying demand for orthodoxy.

John Holbo’s eloquence notwithstanding, there’s a paradox lurking here somewhere, and Jonathan Haidt is far from the only one confused about its implications. My own belief is that we’ll ultimately have to come up with some new and hopefully more enduring form of negotiation between the individual and the collective, one which respects both our diversity and our ambivalence about being together. I’m not holding my breath.

Seems to me that Duterte et al. (2015) in their first example, “Example 1. Environmental Realities”, are objecting to Feygina et al. (2001)’s use of the phrase “environmental realities” in their top abstract. But the word “reality” is not in the NEP questionnaire nor in Clark et al. (2003)’s revision. Later in their paper Feygina et al. (2001) change that phrase to “environmental problems”, but this may not be PC enough. After all, on the other important word in the offending list, “denial”, Duterte et al. (2015) state:

“The term ‘denial’ implies that (1) the claim being denied is a ‘reality’ – that is, a descriptive fact – and that (2) anyone who fails to endorse the pro-environmental side of these claims is engaged in a psychological process of denial.”

But wait a minute — those two implications are not found in the dictionary definition of “denial”.

Yes, I read the whole thing and Haidt’s response too. Friends have cited Haidt as one of those writers whom liberals need to read. Like you, I don’t have an immediate quarrel with his six elements, although it seems to me that they could be divided up in a number of ways. I have neither time nor the philosophical vocabulary to dissect his work the way you have done, but I can follow the arguments. It has seemed to me that his own blindness on issues tilts his arguments toward conservatives. You have analyzed that very clearly, without resorting to personal psychology, as I just did.

What if we construed the argument a bit differently to respond to this line of argument:

“Liberals, like conservatives, have authority, sanctity, and loyalty as part of their psychological value set. But their invocation of these values is (usually) derivative in some way from considerations of harm or fairness. So, a racist is impure because racism inflicts interpersonal injury and is unfair, but liberals have nothing analogous to, say, conservative sexual morality, where certain kinds of sex can be degrading (violative of sanctity) even if mutually enjoyable and consistent with the Harm Principle. And, ironically, the difficulty liberals have comprehending this kind of position just reinforces their derivative use of authority, sanctity, and loyalty (call it “PC”): if you think the person opposed to same-sex marriage ‘really’ just doesn’t care about the harm to gays and lesbians, rather than simply having a wider set of moral considerations, you are especially likely to cast them out as impure.”

I don’t think Haidt is required by his argument to say that any kind of sanctity (etc.) thinking by liberals would be a good thing. Indeed, as you say, he’s required by his argument to think that some sanctity thinking is bad (the sanctity thinking that says, “Conservatives are bigots and thus shouldn’t be allowed to corrupt our university”). But that leaves room for him to still say that other kinds of sanctity thinking are good, or at least would enlarge our mutual understanding; maybe if I understand why conservatives are worried about premarital sex, my discussions with them can be more fruitful.

To be sure, to make this sort of argument, Haidt can’t be purely engaging in psychology. As a matter of psychology, for liberals as well as conservatives, it is almost certainly true that the causation work both ways. People concerned about divorce’s harms to kids (harm) might become attracted to moral conservatism about sex (sanctity); people who see conservative political stances as a sanctity violation will be especially prone to thinking of them as harmful. He has to be engaging in a kind of moral theory: “The arguments that make sense of what liberals think proceed from a narrower set of moral considerations than the arguments that make sense of what conservatives think.” And maybe he’s no good at moral theory. (That’s my suspicion, at least; I don’t think he has a good grasp of what differentiates “liberals” and “conservatives” philosophically.) But I’m not sure he falls into the problem you point out.

bob mcmanus @ 13

Good questions. Distinctions must no doubt be made between those who became the good burghers of Lake Woebegone, and those who became the appassionatas of the ILGWU, or the founder of Cooper Union. I admit I wasn’t thinking of the intentional communities of English dissenters, or the Italian winegrowers of Northern California, or the fierce identity warriors of La Raza, but rather of the sort of character who appears as Yankele/Jake in the film Hester Street. I guess that’s why I ended up hedging my bets with the at least in part part of the snippet that you quoted. America as the Mother of Possibilities admits of all possibilities, including those which aim only at making a better version of something which had disappointed the huddled masses elsewhere. Maybe that’s what B. Dylan had in mind when he allowed as how he would pity the poor immigrant when his gladness comes to pass.

This post was eerily depressing.

I agree with the basic in-Holbo-fashion-never-quite-stated premise: that Haidt interprets sacred values different from his own as none at all, and interprets inclusion of his particular conclusions as inclusion of an entirely different meta level moral perspective.

I also agree that if one must ignore harm, better to ignore the lesser harm than the greater, and worse to focus on the lesser harm to shield the greater.

And Donald Trump is President, and Breitbart is in the White House. Which means that concerns about “social justice warriors” are pretty far down the list of priorities, for the same reason no one worries about weevils in the flour jar while a flesh eating beetle is ripping it’s way out of their eyeball.

I strongly disagree with the claim that the left has sacralized values like justice, fairness, and liberty. To it’s credit OP concedes that the left is human and shibboleths also abound, but I think this both misunderstands the left and the very nature of sacralization. I don’t think anyone, ever, has sacralized a value like “fairness.” I don’t think sacralization is the sort of tool that’s capable of such a thing. I think the most you can ever ask from sacralization is that at the moment, in a specific context, it motivate people to accomplish something useful. And I think that’s tough because the natural ground state of sacralization is in defining the clean and unclean, and patting yourself on the back for being among the clean.

So no, I DON’T think the worst case scenario for left wing shibboleths is silliness. I don’t think black lives matter is on balance a force for justice, I think it’s a force for using the less admirable of our moral instincts to insist that actual discussions of systemic bias against black people be suppressed in favor of shibboleths of the same- down with discussing the effects of under funded schools and poverty on inner city violence, up with personalized Haidt style in group / out group politics that focus on an insistence that wrongs can only be instantiated in an identifiable group of people whom we can vilify as racists, and condemn anyone for defending. I don’t think activism sometimes turns into groupthink and bullying, I think that’s the whole point and the natural and inevitable outcome of activism built around sacralization and conservative style over sensitivity to perceived slights your activism is built around finding and indulgently resenting.

But Breitbart is in the friggin’ White House and if the chance to be snippy and prideful about how everyone is a racist but you is what motivates people to try to stop the President from selling our national parks to mining companies for a dollar while intentionally prepping for and bringing about a catastrophic three way clash of civilization between the US and Islam and China, then pass me my damn pussyhat. I’ll restrict my carping to blog comments and publicly vote for and support whatever lesser evil I’m offered.

Now suppose, as is indeed the case, I think the values typically relevant to a conservative’s thinking are not the same as those a conservative would typically say are relevant. (And the same is true of liberals.) See the problem?

Yup. Haidt is a sharp guy, and I literally cannot imagine how he can miss this distinction.

If you ask me what conservatives think about an issue, you’ll get one answer. If you ask me what conservatives say they think, you’ll often get another. Haidt compared liberal answers to the first question to conservative answers to the second question and found a discrepancy. Presto! Liberals don’t understand conservatives!

Meanwhile, we find that conservatives asked about liberal thought will give answers that more closely resemble what liberals say. Amazing! Somehow it never occurs to Haidt that part of the liberal ethos (at least in the US in these latter days) is to try to make words match thoughts.

I don’t know how Haidt managed to do this research without internalizing the lessons of Orwell. Surely, though, in the Age of Trump he has to understand that this research requires a rethink.

Isn’t that what is meant by “sacred” – something whose truth value is not subject to dispute?

Thank you. I think this is brilliant, and I am going to study in some depth. I am not a philosopher, but rather a dilettante amateur political scientist with a background in the physical sciences and engineering, and it is hard going for me. But, from another field, I was caught by Haidt’s own concluding remarks.

“We don’t care about balance. We don’t need every view to be represented. We just want to break up orthodoxy. Is that illogical?”

Now, suppose this statement were made by a physical scientist. The person who made it, if not one of the rare successful scientific revolutionaries, would be an obvious crank. To take an example, the theory of special relativity (I do hope we don’t get an argument over the scientific usage of the term “theory,” which in scientific parlance means “true, as far as we can tell”) is orthodoxy. It is orthodoxy because it is true, as far as we can tell, and we have worked hard to test it.

We are not required to entertain the hypothesis of the flat earth as a serious challenge to the theory of the round earth and, in fact, cranks in the physical sciences often rail against scientific orthodoxy. The opening page of the Heterodox Academy’s web site makes this exact argument (I did not know when I started writing this!) and does so in defense of hypotheses with appalling political implications. This echoes both the Soviet and Nazi meddling in the physical sciences and climate denialism; in the end that heterodoxy was and is just well-dressed authoritarianism.

So is an attack on the “orthodoxy” of liberalism a valid one, based on anything like facts? Are some conservative academics figures like Alfred Wegener, who first made the case for continental drift and was never able to persuade American geologists of its validity, despite presenting overwhelming evidence? (The theory of continental drift was ultimately accepted some 40 years after Wegener’s death.) Well…perhaps.

And here this little essay slides from firmly grounded thinking into speculation. Historian of science Naomi Oreskes comments that “The problem with continental drift was a conflict with prior intellectual commitments;” intellectual conservatism, in other words. I will venture also a psychological motivation: Americans became geologists as part of a desire to ground their work on solid rock. Wegener’s hypothesis threatened their identity; hence the intense opposition.

Somewhere, perhaps, there is a conservative academic or would-be academic who will add something major to our understanding of the liberal arts, overturning liberal thinking. But I think many more conservative academics are people who became that because they wanted something to ground their beliefs. There is a hunger for certainty, for truths that are not relative, and while, as in special relativity, these exist, they are not the comforting ones preached from so many pulpits.

I can’t judge the academic work that Haidt is defending, beyond some of the most basic and horrific failures, but I can say that many conservative academics are more aligned with the American geologists who rejected Wegener’s work because, ultimately, it threatened their understanding of their place in the universe.

William Timberman@8: “My own belief is that we’ll ultimately have to come up with some new and hopefully more enduring form of negotiation between the individual and the collective, one which respects both our diversity and our ambivalence about being together.”

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, who am I?” It is a very old question and, like you, I do not expect to see it answered in our time.

Wait, pussyhats made you read Durkheim?? (That’s how I read the first couple of sentences of the OP ) :)

Theophylact:

Thanks, John. One of the things that bothered me most about Haidt’s Righteous Mind is that he seemed to be unconcerned with the truth of many of the beliefs he finds valuable, only with their putative social utility explanatory power.

would that be an OK revision (to you)? I -do- think it’s interesting, that he doesn’t care whether conservatives are odious excuses for humans, but only how they describe themselves. And of course, the questions he asked don’t cut to heart of anything — stuff like “disgust”? What about the disgust I feel when I read about a priest raping a little boy and getting away with it? Does that not count?

@anymouse
>”You say that, ‘Black Lives Matter is on balance a force for justice. ‘ I call BS. The violent crime rate is up. There is a very plausible explanation that this is because of the general Black Lives Matter movement. Is that true? Maybe or maybe not. Also you have no idea if ‘Black Lives Matter is on balance a force for justice.’. None.”

Is… is this memes? I mean seriously, this must be some form of trolling. You’re like pre-reformed Glenn Beck. “Is Obama a Communist Muslim? There’s a good reason to think he is. I don’t know. I’m just asking questions!”

But in case that was an honestly held opinion, let’s examine it. Violent crime rates (like all crime rates) fluctuate significantly. Between 2002 and 2004, the violent crime rate decreased by 31 points and between 2004 and 2006 the violent crime rate shot up again by 16 points. It’s been steadily falling since then until rising in 2015, but the reality is that like all aggregate statistics, it’s going to fluctuate based on a number of factors. Looking at any small number of data points and extrapolating anything meaningful from them is pretty much the original sin of statistics. What is worse however, is smearing an entire activism group devoted to pointing out the plight of PoCs in the US, based on some shoddy understanding of numbers.

Chet Murthy @ 30: No, I wouldn’t agree with your revision. I don’t think explanatory power (with respect to the “foundation values”) is a concern of Haidt’s except insofar as it pertains to behavior, not reality.

@pavel:

I think anymouse[88] is the same commenter as someguy88. He sometimes pretends to “leftist” sentiments; ad other times the mask slips. I once complained about the “88” and he dropped it (with pained protestations and support from certain fair and balanced commenters). I take back my objection. I think he should just own the “88”.

I might be wrong, but since I post under my real name, I am available to be sued.

Gell-Mann’s book The Quark and the Jaguar has a brief section on “the moral equivalent of belief”:

“The question naturally arise whether there is any way to capture the splendid consequences of mythical beliefs without the associated self-delusion and without the intolerance that often accompanies it… Can humans derive the spiritual satisfaction, comfort, the social cohesion, and the brilliant artistic creations that accompany mythical beliefs from something less than the acceptance of the myths as literally true? Part of the answer might lie in the power of ritual. The ancient Greek word muthos, from which myth is derived, is said to have referred in ancient times to the spoken words that accompanied a ceremony. The acts were central, in some sense, and what was said about them was secondary…”

Rappaport argued that the sacred is the product of ritual, but it always escapes from ritual’s confines. It “emerges out of canonical invariance and its performance, first investing certain sentences expressed in ritual but flowing… [to] affairs of society.” (from the essay, Sanctity and Lies in Evolution).

It strikes me that a protest may be felt as ritual, with pussyhats a canonical invariance.

It could be that there isn’t so much difference between conservatives and liberals on the ultimate importance of the values of purity, authority, ingrouping etc., but rather a difference in the levels of social discourse and transaction upon which those values are to be placed.

There is also the question of cleansing, purification. Trump just taught all the kids in the country that you can tell obvious lies, make racist comments about a Federal judge (who is sitting on your own case, no less!), make fun of the way people look, manhandle women and get away with it, etc. — do all of these things and more, and still be elected President!

Quite a moral stain!

How is a mark so indelible to be cleaned, in the eyes of the world? Continuous opposition and protest may be the only possible, the only correct ritual.

I believe that the health of the biosphere is the most important sacred object. Includes the sanctity of wilderness and biodiversity, the stability of concentrations in the biogeochemical cycles (of which CO2 is only one), and the avoidance of new kinds of pollution.

Not only does it link to ancient totemic rituals — I believe in this, for a scientific reason.

Holding these things sacred may be the only way to ensure survival, because the biosphere is a complex system which can never be deterministically predicted. A true conservative would think it hubris to maintain that human ingenuity will prevail.

@William Berry

Ah well, I promise not to respond to such risible nonsense again. I guess people who sport the 88 don’t seem to think that the rest of us know what it means.

I guess I’ll try to constructively add to the conversation by noting that the strains of scepticism and analyticism (for lack of a better word) that currently run through most of the modern left, makes holding truly sacralized positions very tenuous at best. Even sacred objects like “pussyhats” and the biosphere are often questioned within the relevant subgroups (note the current row about the pussyhat itself) that spawned them. Any position that is taken too much at face value eventually acquires the stench of faith and that’s often a fairly (and rightly) despised epistemological dead end. This shouldn’t be confused with the position that some on the left have adopted of refusing to argue the basic points of a position with the right. This also shouldn’t be confused with adopting generally tribalistic expressions (in the form of protest, chanting, etc), which seem more universal than simple ideological divisions would suggest. Sacralized positions do take root on the left (i.e. Marxism), but seem to wane somewhat in front of the general drive towards analysis and deconstruction. The status of the sacred as a category seems to divide quite well along sceptic/religious lines and therefore along left/right lines in general.

I guess, in the end, I don’t find convincing evidence that modern conservatives are all that fussed about purity, authority, or the sacredness of tradition. If they were, there would be a consistency in their actions. Having witnessed, in the span of two decades, a war hero attacked in order to elect a draft-dodger and a crude businessman supported by the Traditional Enemy of the People elected over a technocrat, it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion that modern conservatism is fundamentally about pursuing political power in support of an agenda, an agenda that is far more important than the conflicting reasons publicaly given for the pursuit of power.

I’m open to the possibility that most modern conservatives are not aware of this, attributing their own inconsistencies to momentary pivots, but it doesn’t change the fact that, if conservatives are claiming that they are authoritarian (unless the authority is Obama) and beholden to the sacred (unless it’s convenient to claim the opposite thing is sacred temporarily), they are wrong. Like, factually wrong. And any theory built on these foundations is wrong as well.

We can then have a discussion about whether it was always thus – George Will seems to think it hasn’t, and I’m open to either possibility – but that’s a very different discussion, isn’t it.

I was very struck by the idea of properly conducting the rituals as a demand of (a form of? an instantiation of?) justice. It clearly provides an interesting way of understanding many features of liberal democracies – I think the idea of protests as cleansing in 48 is really spot-on. Oddly, however, despite being one of those things which you find in Confucius or Plato, you never see it discussed in contemporary political philosophy (at least, of the broadly Anglo-American sort I know best: I can’t imagine one of those embedded Parfit-lite examples followed by, “intuitively, John should fulfil the rituals, even if this means that five innocent bystanders would die”).

In a funny roundabout way, this makes me think that there might be something important in Haidt’s mass of accusations: at least one group of (broadly) “liberal” theorists take, say, the everyday morality of fairness very seriously indeed (“intuitively, fairness demands that John let the five bystanders die” could be a premise in a political philosophy paper), but another aspect of everyday morality is overlooked. Or maybe that’s slightly wrong: there are lots of papers and books on notions like “symbolic value”, but you always feel that this form of value needs to fight to be taken seriously in a way in which concepts of “well-being” or “rights” do not. (I know, the latter concepts are contested, but nearly everyone thinks they – or some close cousin – have some role to play in normative theorising about justice; hard to say the same about ritual). To stress: this is not to say Haidt is right. He’s not! Just that there is some interesting topic lurking here.

Ah, the old ‘everyone who disagrees with me must be stupid and/or ignorant’ argument. You never hear college liberals use that one…

anymouse: “You say that, ‘Black Lives Matter is on balance a force for justice. ‘ I call BS. The violent crime rate is up. There is a very plausible explanation that this is because of the general Black Lives Matter movement. Is that true? Maybe or maybe not.”

I imagine anymouse in 1863: ‘You say that the Abolitionist movement is on balance a force for justice. I call BS. Look at all the violence! There is a very plausible explanation that this violence is because of the general Abolitionist movement. Is that true? Maybe or maybe not.’

I agree with Gabriel. Where’s the evidence conservatives value purity? These “broad stance” men who oppose gay rights while soliciting in bathrooms, these family values warriors who get divorced three times and vote in a known philanderer … In Australia we just discovered that 20% of Catholic clergy were involved in child abuse and in the same week a Catholic blowhard politician has split from the conservatives because they aren’t catholicly pure enough for him. These people support everything dirty and crude in modern life. Before he can construct any theory of conservative anything haidt needs to deal with that.

Holbo, going from justice to fairness to evenness to regularity, observing that the sacralization of rituals typically involves regularity, and concluding that justice is being sacralized, is ridiculous. This is not a mathematical equation, and simply comparing the two ends of your pseudo math is enough to refute it. If we observe a culture in which regular ritual observance is sacralized, can we be confident that said culture cares about justice in the sense that your argument requires? All of human history says no. So that’s that.

By contrast, when we find the trappings of the sacred, do we find prideful wars of escalation in which ones self worth and sense of superiority over others is tied to ones superior veneration of the trappings of the sacred? Always.

People want to think of themselves as good. Doing good things is hard. Far better to define the veneration of something as morally good, and to treat praising it more than your peers as evidence of moral superiority.

That’s sacralization. You can’t convince an entire people to sacralize “justice” because the whole point of making something into “the sacred” is to give people something they can veverate in order to serve their own emotional needs, and the emotional needs of the majority aren’t served well by moral goals they can’t personally achieve better than their neighbor. Trying to make something like “justice” into a sacred object inevitably leads to things like “I share more Black Lives Matter memes than anyone else, and I’m rudest to people who are critical of it, I’m such a good person, and if someone I know starts doing even more I had better escalate.” Because that’s what this aspect of the human psyche is FOR.

Interesting that Moral Foundations Theory has no reference to order. Though order is related to Loyalty and Authority. Order is a primary element of Conservative morality along with hierarchy. Wonder how Haidt would respond to that.
Pussyhats are a violation of both sanctity and order.

Ah, I coincidentally found the shortest one sentence formulation of my critique of John’s approach (and of the general Nietzschean genealogical project) I could desire: aside and independently from the question of whether pussy-hats-wearing marcher march for justice (a proposition that I agree with but which is irrelevant), John argues that pussy hats have an Ausdrucksfunktion (expressive function) in the sense of Cassirer while I say that (correctly) saying that should not obscure their Darstellungsfunktion (representational function) in the same sense.

And with that, I’m going to rewatch Epic Rap Battles of History Eastern Philosophy vs. Western Philosophy.

faustusnotes@62

Evidence is a liberal value. That Catch-22 is the best catch there is.

Now I’m sure Haidt will say that he does has evidence (I tend to think Neel@3 is correct), and maybe he’d even accuse me of lacking self-knowledge because clearly the reason I’m ignoring his evidence is because of my hidden (and conservative, natch) agenda. I don’t have an answer to that.

But his conservative fans probably wouldn’t, and instead would reach for authority. I guess I’d have to choose who required an answer at that moment. I’d also have to decide whether the person demanding a response was gaslighting me to hide the fact that his sanctity values require the absence of women from the discussion.

I hope John H. will accept the left-handed compliment that I think this is the best of his Haidt posts to date.

@Lee A. Arnold

I think it’s important to consider whether these systems are self-correcting/adjusting. You’ve noted that science alters and retranslates the mechanics of the sacred, but may have omitted the idea that by doing so, science exposes the sacred to further contestation and therefore undermines its inherent status. It’s true that some hold scientific results in an almost reverent fashion, but the process of science does not (or should not, human failing aside). Most scientific discoveries are contestable and overturnable on the same grounds that they were made and there is a widespread admission in the scientific community that results are at best contingent (and any knowledge reached by science at best an approximation). As you’ve noted, this contingency (especially as it applies to statistical conclusions in complex systems) actually undermines the claims of science to special meaning or status amongst a more purity-minded populace. Analysis is likely in the same position, subject to the same undermining of its conclusions by its own processes. It’s true that it’s never possible to conclusively undermine science with science or analysis through analysis, but it is possible to change the processes of both through the application of their own feedback loops. This is a far cry from the sacral/purity objects that retain their status through loyalty, obedience, unquestioning acceptance or self-evident axioms.

Also, to clarify, I’m not implying that the sacred is equivalent to the magical/fantastical. I’m simply implying that if you are more predisposed to the magical/fantastical, you may also be more predisposed to holding a larger variety of things sacred or working in frameworks that make it more difficult to question the sacred.

Faustusnotes #62: Reminds me of Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s great line about the real right-wing stance on homosexuality – “Much too good for the common folk.”

It seems like the fetishization of covert dirtiness is much more a thing on the right than the left. There are people on the left for whom the thrill of hypocrisy seems to be a real turn-on, but it’s routine on the right. And I know the latter is an influence on how friends of mine on the left talk about virtues: they are actively interested in not sounding like the sort of moralizer who turns out to be a gambling addict in the mega-dollar range, or a serial philanderer, or a child abuser, or a rapist of any other kind, and so on. Language they might use otherwise feels off-limits because it’s, hmm, tainted and impure.

Pavel #72: “science exposes the sacred to further contestation and therefore undermines its inherent status”

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that usage. I don’t mean that scientific results are sacred, rather that the scientific process follows the same rules of the category of the sacred. The rules describe a process of the establishment of knowledge that is to be accepted as certain. Thus, science itself is sacred, though its products are continuously revised.

I would agree that this point seems trivial or useless, except that ignoring this way in which science is sanctified causes some of the miscommunication to confused nonscientists who are looking for an anchor to steady themselves.

Similarly with the question of feedback loops. A lot of Rappaport’s later work was on the function of sacred ritual as a self-correcting regulator in socio-ecological systems (much as the method of science is endlessly reapplied to keep modern knowledge on course).

Perhaps the concept of the sacred is outmoded, after the change in thought in the modern period, from static being to evolutionary becoming. The category of the sacred seems like it should remain applied to old, static objects.

There is also confusion because the sacred in traditional ritual refers to a sense of wholeness, whereas new knowledge, indeed science, was always mythologized as causing a rending of the whole, and destruction: Prometheus, Adam & Eve, Orpheus, etc. (This mythos is perhaps carried into the present day by naive environmentalists.)

It is difficult to argue that science is constructing a whole view of the universe, when a more accurate (and scientific) description is that science is a “progressive deepening and erasure” (Cavailles).

anymouse: “Does Black Lives Matter make a difference? Is it a force for concrete justice? Well are fatalities committed by the police down? Is excessive use of force by the police in general down?”

Once again, anymouse in 1858: “Does Abolitionism make a difference? Is it a force for concrete justice? Well, are there fewer slaves? Are depredations committed by slaveholders down?”

Then, in 1863: “See, I was right! Aren’t more people suffering now than were before?”

Layman,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

Abolitionists did make a difference. Over a 1,000 slaves escaped per year via the underground rail road. So, yes there were fewer slaves. All this from a population that is 1/15 what today’s population is. I call that a resounding success.

Are fatalities committed by the police down?

anymouse: “So, yes there were fewer slaves.”

I suppose you must be unaware that they actually counted slaves. Officially. And recorded the numbers…?

https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00165897ch14.pdf

anymouse

Does Black Lives Matter make a difference? Is it a force for concrete justice? Well are fatalities committed by the police down? Is excessive use of force by the police in general down? If so let’s all cheer and put a big plus in the benefit’s column for Black Lives Matter. If not how do you claim that ‘Black Lives Matter is on balance a force for justice.’?

I don’t know, but I do know this: ‘has not yet had major successes’ is not equivalent to ‘is obviously a bad idea’.

“I guess I’ll try to constructively add to the conversation by noting that the strains of scepticism and analyticism (for lack of a better word) that currently run through most of the modern left, makes holding truly sacralized positions very tenuous at best. Even sacred objects like “pussyhats” and the biosphere are often questioned within the relevant subgroups (note the current row about the pussyhat itself) that spawned them. Any position that is taken too much at face value eventually acquires the stench of faith and that’s often a fairly (and rightly) despised epistemological dead end. ”

Was just having my students read Clement Greenberg. He defines the essence of Modernism as an intellectual movement as using the tools of each discipline to criticize that discipline, in order to ‘purify’ it (interesting use of purity language). He argues that religion is incapable of such self-criticism, so Modernism tends to reduce it to mere therapy. It would be interesting to try and map his concepts onto Moral Foundations Theory.

Of course Black Lives Matter might be a force for justice! …

Implicitly they might not be a force for justice. …

Of course you might be spouting rubbish!

Implicitly you might not be spouting rubbish.

“Save the Whales!” (or – Whale Lives Matter) — Why be divisive? All marine mammal lives matter!

“Save the rainforests!” (or – Rainforests matter) — Why be divisive? All forests matter!

Positions one would logically assume were taken by “All Lives Matter” people?

anymouse,

So you agree that you might or might not be spouting rubbish?

Liberals and leftists like to think of themselves as champions of justice and fairness and liberty – because they are!” They are not, to my eyes. A lot of things leftists propose feels unjust, unfair and contra liberty. That’s the most iritating things about leftists, that they think their concept of justice, fairness and liberty is the only one (e.g. by labelling some blatantly unjust things as “social justice”)

Maybe only tangential to the topic, but maybe useful currently reading Michael Dawson on 20th century black radicalism (including black nationalism from Garvey to Malcolm X) and simultaneously reading Kevin Doak on the history of Japanese nationalism
(very roughly minzokushugi = ethnic; kokuminshugi = civic with heated and disastrous arguments) and skimming thru the above thread I am wondering if part of the problem is that we are not really understanding who we are talking about in conservatives, liberals, feminists etc and if a return to a concept of nations and nationalisms (or Appadurai’s “spheres” could be helpful.

Appadurai is useful because his affective spheres are sort of nationalism without borders, not entirely new in that the Comintern and black nationalism sometimes aspired to oh interstatism (? ) because cosmopolitanism as high-limit tolerance doesn’t fit the Bandung or umma idea.

So rather than good guys cosmopolitans vs bad guys white nationalists etc we could see our second Gilded Age of Surging trainwrecking toward conflagration as in part a set of borderless nationalisms (neoliberalism, feminism, etc) aiming for a nation-world-state or an important place therein.

Important here is “nation” as not necessarily ethnic. Could the Transatlantic technocratic elite or Global feminism or Greens be viewed under a lens of borderless nationalism? There is a case, much more comfortably made than in the 20s and 30s, that racism and white nationalism have to a degree crossed borders.

@John Holbo
Sure, but I accept that the other side has their own ideas about what is just and fair. I used to talk about justice and stuff, but now I don’t (except in Polish with other Poles – seems we are less divided than you are). It makes no sense to participate in a discussion when the other side thinks you are an evil person.

And, from my experience, I really do think a lot of left-wingers tend to think that “the other side” are plain evil and do not really believe right-wingers can have just different ideas of what is fair or just. For example, I’ve heard some SJWs (being proud of being called SJWs, so this is not a derogatory label here) saying things in the sense of “how can anyone be against us or use SJW as a slur, do they really are against justice?”

Ever notice that when conservatives (O’Reilly, National Review, WSJ) link Black Lives Matter with a rise in violent crime, nobody points out that they assume that it’s black folks, specifically young black men committing those crimes?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s white yahoos who believe that Obama was coming to take their guns away.

Glancing at the FBI news release, it’s certainly people with guns.

We can call the person making the assumption whatever we like. The assumption itself is racist.

“I really do think a lot of left-wingers tend to think that “the other side” are plain evil and do not really believe right-wingers can have just different ideas of what is fair or just.”

Leaving aside the implicit asymmetry pointed out by others, what do you mean by “plain evil”, if not something like “believe to be fair and just what is in fact evil”. Most relevantly in the present context, I assume most racists/bigots/Christian dominionists hold those beliefs to be fair and just.

To be sure, there are some on the right, and the left, who are hypocrites, espousing beliefs they know to be false out of self-interest. But they are the minority on both sides.

In the present context, what’s striking is how many people who hypocritically gave lip-service to norms like equality and civility have revealed their true adherence to racism and bigotry now that it appears safe to do so.

FOund it! Though it’s not about arguments, but about pretending to be “the other side” while answering questions about morality, so my memory definetely have failed me, to some extent.

https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/

John HOlbo, No- I have read your argument. However, as I wrote above, my memory did me a bad service and I was quite sure there was more to the study than there actually was.

szopen
I suggest you should focus on the probable effects (so far as they can be estimated) on people’s lives — making them better or making them worse — of adoption of the convention, as compared to the probable effects of not adopting it (and as opposed to focussing on whether you are comfortable with every detail of its wording).

John Holbo and szopen, the problem with both of you seems to be that – in different ways and to different degrees, I acknowledge – you are both so enmeshed in the ‘teddy bear patriarchy’ that you can’t see it, like the fish proverbially can’t see the water. And I am not going to explain any further because I don’t have time (thesis, as I’ve already said), but I’ll just put it there for you to think about.

One suggestion – look at what Haidt says about the embedding of ‘liberal’ values in the first example in the piece you (JH) linked to as his “recent paper” in your OP, and then go back and read “Teddy bear patriarchy” (which you must of course have read before because it’s both entertaining and brilliant). As a busy feminist, there is not time enough in the world for me to keep deconstructing patriarchal assumptions, especially when other feminists have done it so brilliantly already.

Val

I hope I can be the first to acknowledge your generosity in taking time out of your busy schedule to explain that you aren’t able to take time out of your busy schedule to explain.

Perhaps time pressure is responsible for the flaw in your chain of reasoning:

… and then go back and read “Teddy bear patriarchy” (which you must of course have read before because it’s both entertaining and brilliant).</blockquote
Sadly, the world contains so much reading matter that is both entertaining and brilliant that it is impossible for any individual to read all of it.

But perhaps I have misunderstood and your remark was intended ironically? If so, I would have an ironic response for you.

Ok I’ve written quite a bit of thesis this morning so I reckon I can justify taking some time to discuss this. Excuse me for not going back and reading this carefully, but the examples that Haidt gives in that discussion I mentioned, as I remember, are of researchers’ ’embedded liberal values’ being demonstrated in the choice of whether people support a female colleague who complains of sexual harassment and whether they think that environmental harms are more important than the (interests? success? profit? not clearly specified) of a company.

So presumably an ‘objective’, ‘even-handed’ non-liberal view of these things would be that there is no reason why people should support the female colleague (not necessarily that she is ‘correct’ in her claim but support her right to make such a claim) and there is no reason why the environment should be seen as more important than the success of a business – it’s all just a matter of ‘values’. However, as Haraway (and so many other feminists) have shown, that is to ignore history – that the history of our societies is one in which men (white men) were seen as the central actor, the normative being, the one who was in charge/superior to both women and the natural environment. I guess in some ways I am just an empiricist, a historian who is saying to so many people here, and to Prof Haidt in this case, ‘but you guys, this stuff isn’t just about “values’ – it’s the way our ancestors actually thought, it’s the way they saw the world and the way they shaped society’

probably most people won’t understand this and I don’t blame them because I’m writing it in such a hurry, but I hope some of it may be clear or make people think. But at least in one part of the argument I do think a lot of the ‘liberals’ or ‘lefties’ here would agree, and several have already mentioned, that you can’t just leave the environment out of the discussion (as Haidt et al do in the Moral Foundations theory also), because ultimately it’s not just a ‘value’ – empirically we can’t survive without it. Conservatives are wrong on this.

Re 107-108 above:

This kind of observation (assuming it’s true, not disputing it here)

“Acc. to the study authors, conservatives were more or less able to present liberal arguments, but liberals were presenting only parodies of conservative arguments.”

or similar/equivalent statements like

conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives

may not always mean what you’d like them to.

Consider an example, where one were to observe that “Astrologers can reproduce findings and arguments made by astronomers, but astronomers were unable to recognizably reproduce the output of astrologers.” And, if you like, you can push this into simply “Astrologers understand astronomers better than astronomers understand astrologers.”

Contrary what some might like to think, this does not mean that astrologers are more open-minded or observant or better at logical thinking than astronomers. The real cause of the discrepancy here is, of course, that astronomy is a real field of study based on reality while astrology is stylized gobbledygook. Thus it is possible for anyone, even astrologers, to study and follow logical arguments used by astronomers and then describe them as such; while astrology, which has very little grounding in reality and similarly has very little need for logic, amounts to “making stuff up and repeating it among the like-minded” and so of course it can’t be imitated successfully by people outside the brotherhood.

In short, the observation that “B’s can reproduce A’s arguments, but not vice-versa” is perfectly consistent with an underlying reality, that “A’s use actual logic, while B’s have only cant and irritable mental gestures.” Not a proof, of course, but consistent.

Also Landru @ 126 – that’s a good point.

Also similar to what I was saying about empiricism – it’s hard for ‘liberals’ to present conservatives’ views effectively if the conservatives are empirically wrong, eg if conservatives ‘view’ on climate change is denying that it is happening.

@Val @Landru

… and many conservative views are deeply faith-based and therefore not constrained by any kind of predictable internal structure (i.e how did Christian Libertarianism become the new norm? Internal consistency is for losers, clearly). As a Liberalâ„¢ I have a tough time predicting where the next religious awakening or CT theory is going to take the Right, so yes, I would personally fail the test of replicating their exact set of current positions.

@ 131
I’ve got no idea what Haraway thinks about ‘progress’, I’m referring to her as a historian. Can you engage with the history? That’s what I keep asking. Patriarchy and racism describe social phenomena that happened historically. They have left a mark. You can’t just pretend they never happened.

Sebastian H: “Yet no matter where you end up on the grounding questions, if you are a Democrat you will profess a fairly radical by world standards (and even by Western country standards) anti-regulation stance. If you are a Republican you will tend to be pro-life after about 4 months of gestation or so with a small but noticeable number of Republicans advocating a radical anti-abortion stance.”

This turns out to be spectacularly wrong.

According to Pew, 60% of self-described Republicans think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases (68% of self-described conservative Republicans and 42% of self-described moderate Republicans).

On the other side of the aisle, 24% of all Democrats say some abortions should be illegal.

http://www.pewforum.org/2017/01/11/public-opinion-on-abortion-2/

@ Sebastian H, is your comment 129 a sly attempt to demonstrate the effect of tribalism? Something like “I identify with Rs, belong to Rs, and of course my own views on X are reasonable, therefore the R view of X must be generally reasonable, and only a few odd Rs have unreasonable views on X “? If so, well done!

Their expressions are pornorgasmic with the same closed-eye ecstasy you see in commercials for love-replacement foods like chocolate and whipped cream.

Call me patriarchal, but I fully agree with capitalists and their advertisers peddling chocolate in my direction. I must get it from my father. Since I was little, if I was very nice, he would let me have a chocolate from his stash.

@132

“engage with the history” – whose history? Haraway’s is just one amongst others. All contestable, none “objective”.

Sebastian H @ 129:

This echoes my thinking on the matter. My hypothesis would be: in relatively unconditioned situations (which do not trigger group identities) each of our supposedly distinct moral modules arise. When I get pissed off at someone driving very fast and changing lanes aggressively, is the trigger “harm” (as it should be for a good Leftist)? It feels more like “authority” ( the rest of us schlubs are following the Rules of the Road, you should too!).

A second (unrelated) hypothesis: Haidt’s moral foundations are all founded on an instinct for survival that is projected on to others. Perhaps “Obey authority” is a projection of my need to trust in the consistency of others’ words. I need to trust that my current sacrifice for the group will be payed back in the near future. I then project that need onto others: You need to show me that you are following through on commitments to (the Leader/the Law/the Gods), especially if these commitments are in conflict with your immediate desires.

I should add- maybe the unaggregated data refutes him. Or maybe not. I didn’t pull it apart that deep.

Why does “Black lives matter” get the rejoinder, “All lives matter”? We can speculate about psychological reasons, but one reason is that “All lives matter” is an effective rhetorical reply. It makes it seem that to say, “Black lives matter”, devalues the lives of other races. Be we know that that is not the case. Rather, it means that Black lives matter, as well as other lives. So a response to “All lives matter” might be, “That’s what ‘Black lives matter’ means. People say it because Black people are treated as though their lives do not matter. All lives matter, including Black lives.” Such a reply defuses or diminishes the rhetorical power of “All lives matter” by pointing out that it does not disagree with “Black lives matter” and focuses the discussion on how Black people are treated.

“I really do think a lot of left-wingers tend to think that “the other side” are plain evil and do not really believe right-wingers can have just different ideas of what is fair or just.”

I believe I can speak to this, since from the late 70’s to the mid 90’s I was an eager Reagan conservative, then turned left winger.

Its possible to view conservatives as simply misguided but well intentioned. But in order for that to be a credible belief, there needs to be evidence of a desire for a just policy outcome.

For example, the old notion that the church and family should be the backbone of a social safety net, rather than the government.

This can be a virtuous and laudable goal one I might have embraced at one time.

If there was anyone actually saying it;
If there was any evidence of it being a sincere desire;
If there was any policy actually behind it;
If there was any evidence put forward that it could achieve its goals.

But there isn’t.

The contemporary conservative movement is on record as being presented with the question of what to do about those without health insurance, and to the answer “Let them die”, gave thunderous applause.

The contemporary movement has embraced Donald Trump, and not in spite of, but because of his ugliness.

I just can’t bring myself to believe in their good will or warm intentions. There isn’t any credible explanation that leads me to pick out a kernel of kindness in the mountain of excrement.
Can anyone, anywhere, sketch a vision of a Trumpian society that is just, righteous, and desirable? Even Trump himself hasn’t even bothered.

There’s a lot of stuff on the airwaves about #persisting in spite of being told to sit down and shut up, so
This is the argument
– JH originally used the pink pussyhats as an illustrative example for a discussion he was having about a theoretically non-gendered framework
– some feminists protested that he was missing or obscuring the point (or possibly worse)
– he said it was his blog and he could write what he liked
– he then wrote another post on the topic
– a feminist (me) argued that the framework actually demonstrated the point made by Haraway (and many others) that historically the non-gendered individual (‘he’) of patriarchal epistemology is implicitly a (white) man who is superior to and in control of ‘others’ (women, the environment, ‘inferior races’, other species)
– JH wrote a response that was funny but didn’t address the point
– Layman told me to shut up

Chip Daniels @ 148

“The contemporary conservative movement is on record as being presented with the question of what to do about those without health insurance, and to the answer “Let them die”, gave thunderous applause.”

It’s a terrible sentiment and even worse public policy. But it’s a tragic sentiment, not an evil one. Hatred and ignorance are conditioned, and find fertile ground in a psyche wracked by unconscious (self-ignorant) self-hatred.

@ 157, and JH passim and layman and anyone else for whom this may be relevant

You know the pink pussyhats were (possibly I cannot emphasise enough how obvious this is without resorting to lots of full caps) a gendered protest.

It’s not like we were talking about weather or cabbages or something and I just tried to drag in the patriarchy (no really guys, it actually isn’t)

I would have thought ‘something insensitive’ rather than ‘something shameful’.

I explained what I meant about Hathaway before. Here’s a good quote from Teddy Bear Patriarchy:

“Man [was not understood to be] in nature because he is not seen, is not the spectacle. A constitutive meaning of masculine gender for us is to be the unseen, the eye (I), the author”

Oh no I also put Hathaway rather than Haraway. Time for a break.

Sebastian H: “But to be fair we should note that you immediately seized on the part of the discussion that you think hurts the tribe that isn’t yours, while studiously ignoring the part of it which hurts the tribe that is yours.”

Point me at the bit that I ignored, please. I promise to studiously un-ignore it. Also, I’m happy to look at the Gallup data, if you’d like to point me at it.

Patrick: “But I don’t think that study refutes Sebastian’s claim.”

I could say that this is going at it backwards, and instead of quibbling over whether the study I offer refutes his claim, you should be asking him for the data that supports it. At least I’ve offered something! What I’ll say instead is that you should look at the Pew study again, and decide whether it would cause you to opine that, for reasons of tribalism,

“…if you are a Democrat you will profess a fairly radical by world standards (and even by Western country standards) anti-regulation stance….”

What are world standards, or Western world standards? What is radical WRT those standards? Which Western countries have abortion regulations more strict than the median Democrat would support?

Or would you say that, among Republicans,

“…a small but noticeable number of Republicans advocating a radical anti-abortion stance.”

Does the survey indicate that? Again, what does ‘radical’ mean?

I say it reflects nothing so much as Sebastian H’s own view, which is that Democrats have nearly uniform ‘radical’ views on abortion while only a ‘small number’ of Republicans have ‘radical’ views on abortion. He says, in effect, that it is Republicans who are the reasonable ones on this matter.

“…if you are a Democrat you will profess a fairly radical by world standards (and even by Western country standards) anti-regulation stance….”

Umm left/liberals have nothing against abortion being regulated—actually we’d rather it was (i.e. safe, legal and available to those who need it). Just because libertarians are stupid doesn’t mean everybody else is…

Val

I would have thought ‘something insensitive’ rather than ‘something shameful’.

Here’s the bit from the previous discussion where you used the word ‘insensitive’:

Layman @ 343 – the fact that a feminist criticises a male blogger doesn’t mean they are necessarily saying ‘you represent all the evils of patriarchy’ – could be saying ‘this seems a bit insensitive’. As I’ve mentioned before, I got criticised once by an Indigenous woman I’d written about in my MA, because she thought I’d used her information insensitively. I didn’t say ‘how dare you accuse me of being racist’, I said ‘oh sorry, that wasn’t what I meant’ and explained what I was trying to do, after which she re-read the draft and decided she was ok with it.

It seems to me that John Holbo has explained what he was trying to do. Does it not seem that way to you?

J-D @ 167
Maybe you should go back and read your own comment, and then you could possibly work it out for yourself.

And so it remains that the best evidence presented thus far to support the thesis, as deft an example as any of circular reasoning, that it’s left-wing or liberal people who regard sexual assault as an impurity is the invocation of a right-wing trope: that sexual contact with men cheapens women, that male genitalia defiles things, that the only method for preserving female bodily autonomy is steadfast chastity and the kind of good luck that immunizes you from sexual violence. Liberal folk, picking on the poor rapists, are actuated by conservative dogma, ergo Pussyhats? That‘s the thesis we’re pitching a fit to defend? Well and truly lol at forever picking the most asinine, not-even-wrong battles. Can’t win for losing, though, eh?

Sebastian H: “That isn’t a fair question because the Democratic Party is much more radical than the median voter on abortion–including the median Democrat.”

I’m confused. Before you were saying that (all) individual Democrats have extreme views on abortion because of tribal behavior. Now you’re saying that (most) individual Democrats don’t have extreme views on abortion, that it is the party platform which is extreme.

“Which is precisely why abortion has retained its political salience over the years while many other culture war items have faded.”

Good grief, what nonsense! Abortion retains its political salience because it is the stated objective of one party to outlaw it, and the it is the view of the majority of that party’s adherents that it should be illegal. Here is the Republican Party platform foundational statement on abortion:

“Accordingly, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”

If you believe and assert that fetuses are people, then you believe that abortion is murder, and there is no compromise available which does not make you complicit in murder. The Republican Party is not seeking to eliminate late-pregnancy abortions, it is seeking to eliminate ALL abortions. As a political tactic, it sometimes proposes or legislates lesser restrictions, but that is a tactic. It is committed to eliminating legal abortion.

As for your list, it is a good one. In which of those countries does a very large political faction – one large enough to be in power half the time – seek to outlaw abortion?

Maybe of interest—Robert Paxton’s defn of fascism from The Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a massed-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Bruce, I don’t understand what you are trying to say about France. A woman can choose an on demand abortion in France in the first three months. She can do so in the United States as well. But the second three months are incredibly different. In the US a woman can choose to get an on demand abortion in months 4-6. In France she can only get one if two physicians certify that the abortion will be done to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; a risk to the life of the pregnant woman; or that the child will suffer from a particularly severe illness recognized as incurable.

That is an enormous difference. Sweden has similar rules to France except at the 18th week (month 4.5), after which you need to get special authorization from the National Board of Health and Welfare.

You write “The Democratic Party on this issue is responding to a fully sorted constituency that finds the initiatives of extreme anti-abortion activists on the Right genuinely threatening to an eroding status quo of law and custom. ”

This makes me want to talk about slippery slopes and politics. First we should remember that in the 1970s, states had the ability to restrict abortions in the second trimester, just like they do in France. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court destroyed that status quo of law and custom and set it behind the difficulty of getting a Constitutional amendment that abortion issues evolved into a “fully sorted constituency “. Until then there was a wide variety of abortion opinion across both political parties. In the view of the discussion, the tribal valence of abortion was not high in US politics until after the ability to pass abortion restrictions in the second trimester (as is done in all of the European countries I noted above) was removed.

Nearly all of the discussions I have about the issue quickly raise some formulation of “but we can’t have moderate abortion restrictions because the pro-lifers in the US are uniquely evil”.

There isn’t a slippery slope that rolls straight down from extremist Democratic-side abortion rules to extremist Republican-side total abortion bans. It is more like a valley. If you prop the boulder precariously up on one side and your support beams fail it can roll down the valley and up into the other side (where the extremists hope to make it stop. But if the boulder is sitting at the bottom of the valley already, everyone is going to have a lot of trouble pushing it way up either side. Cutting off the political channels that far from public opinion CREATES radicalization and PROMOTES tribalism.

That doesn’t excuse radical pro-lifers at all. They engage in all sorts of evil things all on their own. But like dealing with radical Islam in the West, the proper response isn’t to try to crush Islam, but rather make things good enough for the center that the radicals won’t be able to gain traction. Choosing to take an orderly approach of bringing abortion regulations more in line with the moral intuitions of the vast majority does that. Choosing to try to defend the more radically pro-abortion current state of affairs is one side of a dynamic that leads to risks of catastrophic failure because you make the more radically pro-life side look closer to public opinion than it really is. Yes it is only half of a nasty dynamic. Yes pro-lifers have their own nasty half of the dynamic.

But to bring it all back to the original topic, it is tribalism which only lets us see our opponent’s half (which we can’t fix) instead of our half (which we can fix).

Saurs

Liberal folk, picking on the poor rapists, are actuated by conservative dogma, ergo Pussyhats? That‘s the thesis we’re pitching a fit to defend?

No, that’s not it.

Sebastian H: “First we should remember that in the 1970s, states had the ability to restrict abortions in the second trimester, just like they do in France.”

Why stop there? We should remember that abortions of any kind were illegal in 33 states, and subject to a variety of restrictions in 13 more. Those restrictions read more or less like the GOP’s standard ‘compassionate’ anti-abortion preferences: that abortion is only available in cases of rape, incest, or risk to the life or health of the woman.

“In the view of the discussion, the tribal valence of abortion was not high in US politics until after the ability to pass abortion restrictions in the second trimester (as is done in all of the European countries I noted above) was removed.”

Or, in other words: In the wake of Roe v Wade, one party adopted a position in opposition to the ruling, which morphed into a position of opposition to most legal abortions, and then into that of opposition to any legal abortions at all; and the other became, in your view, the extreme one.

JH @ 190

“Val, this relates to a question I asked you earlier, but you did not answer. Suppose I wanted to write a history of political protest marches in the United States – maybe going back to the Populists and Fry’s Army, and including a lot of rather unsavory items: KKK marches. Suppose I wanted to include the 2017 Women’s Marches as examples of political protest marches in my history. This apparently falls foul of your stricture against discussing such stuff except on the context of writing that is primarily about feminism and women’s issue, per se. ”

It doesn’t “fall foul” in any way, but the fact that you think it does seems to suggest that you haven’t understood what I was saying at all. As to why that is, I guess we would both have different answers.

Just to clear up a bit of the apparent misunderstanding, I presume you would acknowledge in your hypothetical history that the march was a ‘women’s march’ and the pussy hats had a range of different meanings but were particularly intended to protest against Trump’s (and his supporters’) attitudes towards/treatment of women, particularly, but n0t only, the sexual objectification of women.

Of course if you were using some weird theoretical approach that meant you couldn’t acknowledge that, then yes, I would object. However, even if you were writing ‘The History of Protest Marches in America Analysed in terms of Haidt’s Moral Foundations Framework’ at least the potential lack of significance given to people’s protest symbols, as they themselves understood them, would be even-handed, rather than applying just to a woman’s march.

Just to pose you some questions, in return. Below is a link to signs at a protest march in Australia against our former female Prime Minister. My questions:

1. Which of Haidt’s Moral Foundations is “Ditch the Witch” appealing to?
2. Could a protestor at a protest march against a male Prime Minister or President achieve the same effect by carrying a ‘Ditch the Wizard’ sign?
3. If not, what does that tell you about the possible limitations of using Haidt’s Moral Foundations Framework as a way of analysing political protest?

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Ditch+the+Witch&rls=com.microsoft:en-AU&tbm=isch&imgil=YvqpZ60vgMfndM%253A%253BNpwiS3UlGe15HM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.smh.com.au%25252Ffederal-politics%25252Fpolitical-news%25252Fnotorious-julia-gillard-ditch-the-witch-sign-up-for-sale-20150210-13al4r.html&source=iu&pf=m&fir=YvqpZ60vgMfndM%253A%252CNpwiS3UlGe15HM%252C_&usg=__Ixkd-6JdA37WDOvnXnCdmKwAGVM%3D&biw=1920&bih=1105&ved=0ahUKEwipqsivqZbSAhUBJZQKHb9HCQUQyjcILg&ei=9H-mWKngJIHK0AS_j6Uo#imgrc=YvqpZ60vgMfndM:

‘Wizard’ isn’t an insult, whereas ‘witch’ is.

In British English, yes. But I have heard that your mileage may vary considerably across European languages i.e. the direct translation of “wizard” may have rather stronger connotations of maleficium than it does in Br. English; “witch”, on the other hand, has negative associations even in Br. English.

(There was considerable gender politics at work in trials for maleficium in the Early Modern period, obviously).

Sometimes trying to defend a feminist position on CT feels like having to stand there and try to make sense while a group of men throw random references and vaguely worded insults at you. In other words, an experience that is both useless and unpleasant.

Witch doctors can be men, so that could be an effective insult to a male politician on a political sign. Although the term carries racist and/or primitive overtones more strongly than witch does. But you could presumably call some male politician who was peddling some anti-science policy a witch doctor.

John Holbo,

What makes you think the pussy hats are more of a symbol of purity as opposed to a symbol of women’s rights or autonomy?

Looking comparatively at female clothing, something like the hijab or chador seems to be more of a symbol that denotes and is protective of ideas about female purity, where the pussy hats seems to be more about presenting a display about ideas surrounding female rights and autonomy.

I don’t think these are the same…

Val, all I’m really getting from you is that you want Holbo to acknowledge that the pussyhats were a gendered symbol, which he has.

But what Holbo wants to do is engage with Haidt on Haidt’s terms, Haidt’s so-called Moral Foundations theory, and specifically Haidt’s argument that liberals lack a few of them and that’s bad and why conservatives are necessary (on campuses, to tell liberals about their lacking moral foundations, etc.); Holbo is using pussyhats as a counterexample i.e. as a purity symbol,”keep your hands off my pussy”, something Haidt insists that liberals generally don’t do. The discussion of the pussyhats as a gendered symbol don’t enter here simply because Haidt doesn’t work, at least on the base level of moral foundations, on the level of gender.

Now, you could be making the argument that it is fundamentally wrong to not talk about sex and gender as a defining moral foundation, thus it is wrong to engage on Haidt without criticizing this oversight, if that is your argument. Or you could be arguing that Haidt’s moral foundations theory is agendered and ahistorical, a la your Haraway reference, and therefore is fundamentally wrong and you shouldn’t engage with Haidt at his level at all. In whatever way, what you’re doing is criticizing Haidt at the, ahem, foundations; which is not what Holbo is doing, at least not here. But this is not really Holbo’s fault–it’s Haidt’s theory, after all.

“Because there are two possible reasons why you can’t touch something: it’s too clean (you would get it dirty); it’s not clean (it would get you dirty). ”

But there is also another reason – property rights: the thing doesn’t belong to you.

I think it’s probably possible to see the meaning of the pussy hats as being multiple given the numbers of women involved and also the lack of a very specific and clear manifesto defining the symbol by the organisers: one woman might choose to wear the hat as a symbol of purity, another woman might wear the hat as a symbol of rights, others might combine symbols, etc.

I think you run into a slight problem with the purity analysis because of history – both in terms of the left and feminism and anti-racism, has been to counter notions of purity being linked to rights.

The left challenged the idea that the aristocracy is naturally better and higher and should have more rights saying that class or wealth or profession doesn’t make someone better or worse and that “dirty” (literally) blue collared working class people should have the same rights; feminism challenged the idea that women have to be pure and childlike and fight for women getting an education and becoming worldly, for getting voting rights to participate in the blood sport of national politics, for entering hitherto male professions in the workforce etc.

I can sort of see you seem to be arguing that a new conception of purity comes in to the discourse of the left more recently, maybe aligning temporally with identify politics?