“No, no, no,” said the Skeptic. “I’m telling you—the language itself is corrupt. The words you use make the outcome a foregone conclusion. Always. They limit your vision.”
“You’re—ehhh—telling me?” asked the Cynic. “With, like, words? Pretty presumptuous of you, isn’t it?”
“You know which words I’m talking about,” said the Skeptic. “Can we all agree not to say them? Just to see what happens?”
“Not even under erasure?” said the Academic. To which the Council, save one, glowered.
“‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative,'” said the Skeptic, “I hereby banish you to the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear. In fractured atoms.”
An eyebrow raised on all save one.
“You know. Just for good measure.”
“What shall replace them?” asked the Malthusian. To which the Skeptic made no answer.
“Tractable,” said the Academic at length. “And ornery.”
“Did you make those up yourself?” asked the Capitalist.
“Not entirely,” said the Academic. “I owe the second to Orson Scott Card, I blush to say.”
The eyebrows again, all save one.
“Describe,” said the Capitalist. “Do they merely map one-to-one?”
“No,” said the Academic. “I have read my Wittgenstein. The terms often overlap, if I may say so, but not at all entirely. And they each describe an entirely plausible disposition, which puts them well ahead of our dispositional politics usually so described.”
“I’m not yet with you,” said the Skeptic.
“The real question of politics-as-disposition is not whether we prefer that things stay as they are, or whether we prefer a change. No one has that kind of disposition. Not consistently, anyway. ‘Change’ can be toward anything. ‘Progress’ just begs the question. Even ‘keep things as they were’ can describe almost anything, just by virtue of selective quotations from the past. As the admirers of the nineteenth century — that grand old time — would do well to recall: The past is a menu, not a recipe.”
“Perhaps they recall the items on the menu all too well,” said the Cynic. “Only their tastes are different.”
“What about Oakeshott?” asked the Skeptic. “Didn’t he have the disposition to keep things as they are?”
“Not even him, I don’t think,” said the Academic. “But let’s keep matters close to home: Who wanted change this past presidential election? And who wanted change the election before that? And so on.”
“But answering those questions would lead us to use words that are… banished,” said the Humanitarian. “And that would break the rules.”
“Your disposition doesn’t turn on change or continuity,” said the Academic. “They’re too abstract. Much more immediate is whether you are tractable or ornery.”
“Meaning what?” asked the Capitalist.
“The tractable disposition works like this,” said the Academic. “We are all a part of a really big thing called society. To make it work, we have to make some sacrifices. The good citizen will make those sacrifices, and he will make sure that everyone else darn well knows that he’s making them. He wants to be the orderly subject of a well-run government. To be governed is to be comfortable, and he wants everyone to know it and to agree.”
“An example?” asked the Skeptic.
“Politically correct language,” said the Academic. “The ultimate expression of tractability. If someone said tomorrow that ‘left-handed’ were a term of abuse, you can be sure that by Monday, the tractable among us would have purged even the thought of that term from their very minds. Is it a term of abuse? It hardly matters.
“Good government, to them, is to a high degree about good political manners. About voting, obeying the laws, picking up litter in the street, and paying your taxes on time and in full. If the government calls on you — say — to give up your guns, or recycle, or stop smoking pot, the proper response is to obey. Not to question, but to obey. Why? Because that’s what makes things run smoothly. And when things run smoothly, things go better for us.
“The tractable subject sees the cold, sterilized armamentarium of Foucauldian biopower—yes, even that—and declares to himself and to others, ‘Here, fellow citizens, here is a game that I can play. And I’ll be really, really good at it. For the good of everyone. Now watch!’ And he dutifully pees in a cup.”
“What about ornery?” asked the Capitalist.
“The ornery soul takes to his dictionary and looks up the words ‘armamentarium’ and ‘Foucauldian.’ It’s not that he’s stupid, mind you. Even if he knew the words quite well already, it’s bad form not to let the gears grind at least a little bit. Then he declares the tractable fellow emasculated. Or he just smacks him upside the head. Which amounts to the same thing.
“To be an orderly subject of a well-run government is to be a pet — a kept man — a sheep — a tool. Good government is about a timid government. If the government tells you to stop smoking pot, well, you darn well should smoke pot. At least once, anyway, to confound them all.”
“Don’t conservatives support the drug laws?” asked the Skeptic.
“They do,” said the Academic, “and you’ve broken your own rules.” All gasped, save one.
“No matter,” the Academic continued. “The ornery would have a set of few, simple, easily obeyed laws, and woe to those who break them — because the laws have been pared down enough already, to make room for all the orneriness. Any disobedience after that isn’t just impolite, it’s barbaric, and no mercy is shown. The mere call to do more than the laws require is in itself a reason to be suspicious. When the government asks you to sort your trash, or to pee in a cup, or to surrender your guns, the ornery response is in all cases an angry failure to comply.”
“It seems like,” the Skeptic paused. “It seems like there is an ornery party, and a tractable party, but there are an awful lot of exceptions.”
“There were an awful lot of exceptions in the old system, too,” said the Academic. “There always will be. Now the real question — how do you feel about that?”
a pet — a kept man — a sheep — a tool.
By all means, let’s avoid language that leads to foregone conclusions.Report
Tell that to Ornery. You’re using his language. I’ve merely quoted it by way of illustration.
Of course, Tractable has plenty to say on the flip side. I perhaps should have included some of it, but I’ve no doubt you can supply it yourself.Report
Fair enough.
By the way, “ornery” is a favorite Heinlein word to describe characters like Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw. If Academic got it from Card, I suspect Card got it from RAH.Report
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I think your description of the tractable is a strawman.
I know no one who fully believes in everything in the tractable description paragraph. It very much seems like a parody of a Democratic party supporter in my eyes.
The truth is that everyone is onery or tractable based on different things. It is interesting that the views you described as tractable seem to largely go for Democratic goals. And that is a parody of being “PC”. What is wrong with wanting to talk about people in a dignified and decent way. When people describe themselves as anti-PC, it often sounds like they are ornery and refuse to learn anything new or about not using old and derogatory terms for minorities.Report
One wonders how Tractable ever does anything like voting, enacting new laws, or getting rid of old ones, since Tractable just goes along, just obeys. Obviously, Ornery is not the one pushing things along, so Tractable must be somewhat more complex a personality than he or she is made out to be here.Report
I suppose one could put it lie this, too: the dimension (from tractable to ornery) that Jason identifies here captures too little of the variance in our current political space to be all that useful.Report
Agreed.Report
Tractable isn’t getting new laws enacted. That’s Thief, who’s herded tractable with his unctuous self-serving talk.Report
“The truth is that everyone is onery or tractable based on different things”
Isn’t that what the post says explicitly somewhere?Report
I thought I read that, too.Report
“It seems like,” the Skeptic paused. “It seems like there is an ornery party, and a tractable party, but there are an awful lot of exceptions.”Report
Funny, I read tractable & I see all the good little conservatives happily doing whatever the government needs to fight the war on drugs or terror.Report
Brilliant. Bravo.
(My own take is between the two inclinations when faced with the idea of change. Is your inclination to say “the sky is the limit!” when you think that something is going to change? Is your inclination instead to say “they’re going to screw everything up and make things even worse”?)Report
Nice. Tractability and orneryosity are yin and yang, yes? Where does that leave the guy who kept never raised an eyebrow?Report
Another thing: I highly doubt that Tractable, even as presented here in his pretty much logically impossible for, cares all that much about biopower. In fact, biopower works, in this facile world, because tractable doesn’t care all that much about biopower, which allows power to exploit Tractables… tractability.Report
That’s certainly one of the principal components, but is it the first? Plausible. You can easily find examples of liberal orneriness and conservative tractability, so either some commenters protesteth too much or you didn’t balance your examples sufficiently.Report
Seeing as Jason provides specific examples of both liberal and conservative tractability, I suspect it is the former.Report
Libertarians, of course, are immune to tractability, the clearly inferior temperament in this schema.Report
No we aren’t, we just tend to be more ornery about a wider range of topics.
And who is to say that tractable is inferior? Our military would not work without a good deal of tractability, same with a lot of other institutions. Sometimes tractability is just a quick way of saying, “pick your battles”.
Pure tractability/ornery is the sin – when all you can say is yea or nay, then you have a problem.Report
Well, obviously I was being a *little* facetious saying it says that libertarians are completely immune. But I’m not gonna buy any BS trying to cover for the fact that this article clearly suggests that orneriness is better than tractability (though it doesn’t say that the best thing is to have no tractability, and I didn’t say it did); that tractability above whatever basic level is necessary to just keep society together is at least pathetic, and possibly a threat to ornery people’s dignified self-sufficiency; that people do tend to be either mostly tractable or mostly ornery – that these are not just tendencies that can coexist (though they are that), but that in fact they are types (“And they each describe an entirely plausible disposition, which puts them well ahead of our dispositional politics usually so described.” My emphasis.); and, by pointing out that of liberals and conservatives at least have significant tractable tendencies, but not mentioning libertarians while of course leaving unsaid that the author is a prominent libertarian (yes, that’s actually something that he is), that libertarians tend to be ornery in the sense described (which in any case is not a crazy thing to just think has a tendency to be true based on lived experience).
You can say you don’t think it’s necessarily the case that one is preferable to the other as a trait as both are necessary, but this article also posits types. Tell us, Scientist, do you honestly have no preference between being described as more tractable than ornery or more ornery than tractable? Actually, worry not about that, because the issue is not how you feel. The issue is what the article says. And there’s no ambiguity in it (whether or not the author thought there was).
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You are correct that I identify more closely with ornery than tractable. You are incorrect when you claim that I had meant ornery to be clearly superior.
I am in fact made very uncomfortable by the way that these two vaguely reasonable abstractions put me in the company of conservatives. If forced to choose between conservative and liberal, and if given no other alternatives, I’d pick liberal.
My purpose in writing was to replace one very clunky pair of abstractions — liberal and conservative — with another that might do about as well. Which is to say that these don’t really work either. Nothing does the job altogether well. If it helps, consider that “Tractable and Ornery” is well-paired with “Plain Dumb Luck.”Report
Another fun dynamic is the “we need to change things *BACK*” dynamic.
Sometimes the law, whatever it is, is new enough that it’s possible to change things back to the way it was before, kinda. The 18th Amendment is as good an example of this as we’re going to get. Someone ornery would be able to throw his back behind changing it back.
But if the 18th Amendment stood for 100 years… we’d no longer be changing it back. We’d just be changing it.Report
I missed theseReport
Epic troll!Report
No, not trolling. Trying to get people to think differently. At least once in a while.
That’s all, I swear.Report
It worked. I saw bright red right away. But I did give this some thought, and I am wondering if the word you were looking is “persuadable,” rather than tractable. There is something to the argument that liberals, as much as we are interested in self government/organized resistance and the idea that liberty for ourselves is exactly equal to our tolerance of it in others, we have a habit of of both reducing political debate to policy debate and, within that debate, beginning a lot of sentences with, “You have a point there, but”Report
I waited to see if anyone else would dump this can of worms onto the dinner plate. Obvious similarities to the libertarian/authoritarian axis of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz at http://www.theadvocates.org/quizReport
Heh. That’s an interesting test. If a person disagree with TotalIndividualFreedom, they’re 100% big government statists. That collapses quite a large spectrum of disagreement, no?Report
I don’t much care for that test, to be honest.
One thing the tractable/ornery distinction does seem to do is to place libertarians in the same camp as conservatives. I otherwise tend to resist that classification, but sometimes the shoe does fit.Report
So you’re saying Ornery/Tractable is not orthogonal to Liberal/Conservative and is not parallel to Libertarian/Authoritarian as posed by the WSPQ? Is your concept of Conservatism more like William F. Buckley Jr.’s “standing athwart history yelling Stop”? And, finally, is there something else about the WSPQ that bothers you? (Have I reached my question limit? OMG, that’s another one!)Report
@Stillwater – did you actually take the quiz and see the scoring? Because 8.6% of possible answers map to Libertarian; the same number each to Authoritarian, Liberal, and Conservative. The remaining 65% of possible quiz answers map to Centrist. Give it a shot.Report
I did, but not honestly. I gamed it a bit. I answered “Agree” to all the questions and got a 100% libertarian. When I answered “maybe” to all of ’em the answer was perfectly centrist. And when I answered “disagree” to all of them I got 100% statist. It just observing that the test viewed disagreeing with individual freedom, even slightly, as implying statism.Report
Heh… way back when I initially took the test, I thought it rigged me towards being libertarian (moreso than I am).Report
If we could get Bill Clinton to honestly take that test, I wonder if we could all agree to agree that he is what it would say he is.Report
…agree to agree for the sake of discussion, that is.Report
Hmmmmm…
I agree “liberal” and “conservative” are labels that are, at best, limited and limiting, and do not always suffice when describing the political behavior of people. I’m not entirely sure “tractable” and “ornery” work much better, though. There seems to be very little space in that construction for “sensible.”
Within this frame, the Law is treated as something to which one reacts, rather than something in which one participates. It is as though our legal system was handed down from on high, like the Ten Commandments descending from Sinai, rather than something created and re-created and re-created again with our participation. Perhaps the latter is a hopelessly starry-eyed way of viewing it, but that’s my take in any case.
So while I behave in ways that, using the terms in the OP, seem consistent with tractability, it’s really not because I simply bend to the law as received wisdom. It’s because it makes sense for me to do so. I pick up litter because I don’t like messy shit cluttering up the sidewalk. I vote because I understand voting to be a tiny discrete act that contributes to an aggregated result. “Manners” has little to do with it. “Good sense” does.
Where in your paradigm would you put someone who complies with laws he finds reasonable and sensible and chafes against those that he does not. Is “sensible” the happy middle place, supplanting that elusive beast “centrist”? Because I don’t do things just because I’m told, most of the time. I do them because they comport with how I understand things to work better for their own sake.Report
Personally, I saw this as a stark example of a false dichotomy that Jason thought would illustrate how stark the existing false dichotomy is.
We just pay less attention to the existing one, because fish. Water.Report
Ah, well. If it was an intellectual exercise in false dichotomies, illustrating the flaws in the one by swapping in an equally flawed new one, then it was quite successful.Report
I can dig that, since labels tend to make people essentialists about whatever categories they denote. There is a lot of research on that phenomenon (I’ve done some myself). But I don’t think that’s a real issue here, because most of the commenters here seem to be aware of nuance and diversity along the liberal-conservative axis.
What I saw Jason doing was creating a “new” political axis, or a “new” political dimension. I use the scare quotes around “new” because I don’t think his axis/dimension is all that new, really. It’s one that is actually pretty explicit in our current political discourse, and I think it’s actually as, if not more distorting than the liberal-conservative or left-right axis, because I don’t think it reliably captures much of the diversity in the current political discourse.Report
For a long time now, I’ve preferred the term “statist” and “non statist” to the more conventional Demo/Repub or Liberal/Conservative labels. Seems more accurate.Report
This was enjoyable, Jason. Obviously, there are problems with the tractable/ornery paradigm, but your post demonstrates the usefulness of trying to think about politics in ways other than just the conservative/liberal dynamic or Democratic/Republican dymanic.Report