Libertarians Are Not Like Beryllium
by Chris
When I was in the my final year of grad school, it was not uncommon for someone to ask me, “What has all that education taught you about yourself?” And you know, that was a pretty good question, since at that point I’d spent years studying the human mind, and I am (or at least some would have me believe that I am) human. Hopefully, then, I’d learned something about myself other than exactly how many hours I can stay awake while working on a dissertation and still write a coherent sentence about something more complicated than my love of Honey Nut Cheerios, right? I always answered the question in the same way, with a story (as we southerners are wont to do).
The first project I worked on when I first got to grad school was a series of experiments that showed, in essence, that what I can consciously retrieve about a concept, and what I have stored somewhere in my brain about that concept, are not coextensive. Instead, our representation of a concept tend to get packed away when we’re not using them, and when it comes time to unpack it, the brain, ever the economizer, only unpacks the parts of the concepts that it feels it needs at the moment. The rest remains unavailable to me (and not just consciously; even unconscious processes don’t access it), even though it might be important at the time and I just don’t know it. As I thought about this, and as we tested hypothesis about how this might work, something dawned on me: my conscious mind had very little, if anything, to do with all of this. All of the work in determining what I thought of whatever concept I was unpacking — from the retrieval of the concept, the determining what might be relevant, and the retrieval of that select information — was going on below the level of my awareness. And with this (unpleasant, quite frankly) realization always with me, I learned more and more about the mind, and just how little of what it does is consciously available. We are, as one psychologist put it, “strangers to ourselves.” So that’s my answer: what I learned about myself is that I have little if any control over the vast majority of what’s going on in my head. I don’t really know me at all.
Now I told you all of that to tell you this: many of the more heated, and less productive discussions around these parts of late have begun with, or at least derailed as the result of, someone making blanket statements about what the members of some ideological out-group believe. You know the sorts of conversations of which I speak: the ones that begin with statements like, “Libertarians all think [insert something really heartless here],” “conservatives all believe [insert something only an insane person would believe here],” or “progressives all fail to understand [insert something market-related here].” One obvious reason that such statements breed generally unproductive discussions is that those people for whom your out-group happens to be their in-group are going to tend to react to such broad and unflattering statements with defensiveness, denial, and a feeling of fish you, you mother fisher. The last of these is often reflected in the tone of these discussions. But there’s another reason that they’re unproductive, as well: if you make such a statement, you’re probably wrong about the members of that group with whom you happen to be talking at the moment (you’ve overgeneralized, you’ve selectively chosen what you want to consider about the group, the reasoning that led you to this belief was anything but unbiased, you’re taking the worst of a group and treating everyone as if they were as bad, etc.), but because of the way your mind works without you really having any say in the matter, you’re going to have a difficult time seeing that. This has to do with the way you represent social categories and the people you place in them.
The Importance of Names and Psychological Essentialism
Long ago when I was a big time moderately well-known slightly better than obscure science blogger, I wrote a post with (part of) that title (reproduced here). In that post, I talked about some studies, the details of which I won’t get into here (but you should feel free to read them there… I’ll wait… damn you’re a slow reader… OK, finally!), which show something that most of us already knew intuitively: the names we give to individual things are important. They’re important because they signal that the individual thing so-named belongs to a specific category, and categories serve one main purpose: to license inferences about individuals based on our knowledge of the categories to which it belongs. So, for example, if I know that this long, slender, slithering thing in front of me is a cobra, I can infer that it’s poisonous (and then run away!).
Most of the time, this labeling effect is a good thing, because it means much less work for our brains, and our brains are busy and use a lot of resources, so anytime we can save them some work, we’re doing them a big favor (which is nice of us, isn’t it?). However, our reliance on categories to make inferences, and our association of labels with categories, gives labels a lot of power, and anything that has power is sometimes going to abuse it. And one of the reasons this power we give to labels is ripe for abuse is something cognitive psychologists like to call psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism says, in essence, that our mental theory about the way the world works includes the belief that most categories (human-made artifacts are, to some extent, an exception, though an odd one that I’d be happy to talk about if you’re interested) have some underlying essence that makes them what they are, and that any individual who’s placed in that category must have in order to be a true member. And this essentialism gets attached to the labels, so that merely applying the label automatically results in the inference that individual so-labeled has the essence that defines the category to which the label refers.
Consider an example from the literature (which you already know about, because you read that old post I linked to, right? I said right?): if you tell kids or adults (according to a study published well after I wrote that post)* that someone eats a lot of carrots, and then call that person a carrot-eater, they’re much more likely to believe that the eating carrots is a stable, essential trait of the person than if you just say that they eat a lot of carrots without giving them the label. So, if you ask them if the carrot-eater is likely to be eating carrots at some date far in the future, they’re going to say yes, whereas they’ll be uncertain about their future carrot-eating if you don’t call them carrot-eaters.
I’m sure you can see how this can be problematic. Carrot-eating is a harmless sort of inference, but what f I call you a criminal, rather than merely saying that you committed a crime? The same sort of essentialist thinking kicks in, and I’m much more likely to think that the traits I associate with criminals apply to you, not only now, but stably over time, because I’m going to think that they’re part of your essence, the underlying nature of you. If my representation of “poor people” includes features like “lazy,” “irrational,” and “morally inferior” as part of the essence of the category, then if someone calls you a poor person, suddenly those features get attached to you in my mind.
Social Categories, Stereotypes, and that Psychological Essentialism Thing Again
You’re all smart folks, so you can probably see where I’m going with this. The philosophically-inclined among you might be thinking that essentialist beliefs about natural kinds, like tigers or cobras or hydrogen molecules, are perfectly fine, because regardless of our metaphysics, there’s a sense in which natural kinds have essences, or at least behave as though they do. But all sorts of problems arise when we treat social categories like natural kinds, because social categories simply aren’t like natural kinds, and they don’t “behave” like natural kinds. A great deal of research over the last 15 years or so has looked at the role of psychological essentialism in social categories, and unfortunately, that research has consistently found evidence that we treat religion, race (also), ethnicity, gender, mental illness, and other social categories like natural kinds, complete with essences.
As with carrot eaters, essentialist thinking about religions, or races, or in our little corner of the interwebs, political ideologies, means that we think that the traits that we associate with a particular religion or political faction are going to be automatically assigned to someone we see as a member of those groups, and they’re going to be seen as immutable. Once you’re a carrot-eater, you’re a carrot-eater for life (or at least until something major happens that can alter your essence). But it gets worse: research has shown that essentialist thinking causes us to look for similarities between group members while ignoring differences, resulting in what amounts to stereotypical thinking about group members. It goes even further: when we encounter information that conflicts with our essentialist beliefs about a group, our minds freak out a bit, and we start thinking about the individual or group even more selectively (it triggers “motivated” reasoning, a concept with which some of you may be familiar). Think of this as a sort of essentialist confirmation bias with serious consequences for how we treat people who are members of other groups. Oh, that reminds me, we don’t tend to think of our own groups with the same degree of essentialism: that’s reserved for out-groups. And one more thing: the essentialist thinking is so strong, we can make inferences about the group from one individual, and since we tend to remember the bad rather than the good behavior of members of out-groups, one individual member of an out-group behaving badly can cause us to believe that such bad behavior is a part of what it means to be a member of that group!
OK, I know all of that is a lot to swallow, so I’ll try to wrap it all up now and relate it back to us, because let’s face it, we’re what’s important, amIright? We all have in our minds representations of the political factions to which we do not belong, and because we’re human (most of us… I’m not so sure about that Jaybird character), we’re going to tend to think of those factions as natural kinds with essences that all of the people who belong to those factions share. But those are out-groups, so we’re not going to arrive at our representations of those essences without some motivated thinking, some essentialist confirmation bias. If someone you don’t like is a member of that group, or some member of that group holds a belief you find abhorrent, you’re going to associate those negative things with any new person you put into the group. And if these new people we’ve placed into our category in our heads behave in a way that is inconsistent with our representation of the category’s essence, we’re going to tend to ignore that, or at least discount it in a way that makes the information already contained in the essence of the category count more, even when we’re thinking about the person who’s just shown us that their beliefs or their behavior doesn’t square with the essence.
Now, these processes are going to be in play no matter what? I started this post with the story about me learning that we’re strangers to ourselves for a reason: we don’t have control over this stuff. It’s not our fault, it’s just the way our brains are built, and it’s all going on below the level of our conscious awareness, where we have no say in the matter. We all do it, even the best of us, but now that we know we do it, we can at least take some steps to mitigate the effects. We may not be to blame, but now that we know, it’s our fault if we don’t even try, right? And the first step is remembering what we know about labels: they’re like essence magnets. As soon as a label comes into play, the essences stick to them, and guide our thinking. And while the label of my political faction primes your essentialist thinking about that faction, because it’s an out-group for you, it does no such thing for me, so I get offended when you start telling me what I must think because it’s what people of my sort think, essentially. So when I tell you that I don’t think that way, you’re less likely to hear me, or you’re going to interpret my explanation of what I do think in the light of what the essence of my type tells you I must think, which, it will turn out, is precisely what I just said I don’t think. The next thing you know, we’re going to be at each others’ throats, and no good will come of it.
My advice then is quite simple, and it applies on this blog and pretty much anywhere else you encounter other humans: when dealing with individuals, if possible, avoid labels. Sometimes, even here, labels are indispensable, and we’re going to have to use them because the benefits outweigh the risks, but most of the time, when you’re talking to somebody, and you’re trying to discuss ideas, placing those people into a group by applying a label to them, whether its “libertarian” or “liberal” or “carrot-eating-conservative-segway-ridin’-numismatic,” is just going to get in the way.
*The new study, which you can read here, suggests that very young children aren’t overly influenced by labels, but as we grow up, labels become “category markers” that point to our representations of the categories’ essences.
I’m quite self satisfied with my “libertarian heartlessness”. *smirk*Report
You intellectuals just think too much, which is why you never accomplish anything real.Report
Space awesome, Chris.
To the extent labels are necessary for some of our discussions, I’ve been wondering if their unpleasant side effects can be substantially mitigated by referring to to ideology rather than ideologues. By that I mean that it seems like it’s more productive to make blanket statements about, say conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism, or their representation by specific, formally organized entities and events, than it is to make blanket statements about conservatives, libertarians, and liberals.
In other words, it seems like there’s a difference between saying “liberals believe in/want policy X….” and “in practice, liberalism pursues policy X.”Report
The problem is, that rules out unintended consequences. Liberalism may find (or claim to find) X outcome desirable; but if liberal policies inevitably lead to X outcome, or are unwilling to countenance any measures that would counteract X outcome, then it’s fair to tag liberals with X outcome.Report
I disagree. Once you start talking about liberals as a group in this manner, you leave out the possibility that individual liberals may not support one or more of the specific policies you believe will lead to outcome X, even if most liberals do, or, just as often, the liberals with the greatest influence on the issue do. Individual liberals who don’t fit the mold will take your statement personally – no one likes being told what they believe, especially when it’s not something they actually believe, nor even something of which they’re ignorant.
Even to the extent that it is a fair and accurate statement, though, it’s still problematic because it’s a statement about an outgroup that is directed at members of that outgroup rather than just at purported beliefs of that outgroup. Even if you’re right, the fact that it comes across as a personal attack from an outsider will ensure defensiveness and lack of consideration of your point.
Meanwhile, the same exact point can be made by criticizing liberalism as represented by a specific statement. While people may still take this personally, they’ll be less likely to do so, and even if they do, are at least likely to take it less personally. Except for the most orthodox of ideologues, no one thinks their nominal ideology is beyond criticism, since most people have at least some differences with their ideology’s majority positions.Report
I think that’s definitely a preferable way to go about it. I mean, discussions are going to be pretty unproductive if we don’t occasionally take the sorts of short cuts that names allow us by lumping stuff together that actually tends to go together. It’s just best to avoid applying the labels to people when possible, so that we can recognize that liberalism, say, is a cluster of ideas, structured around some common values, that people can pick and choose from, rather than something that defines who they are. It might be best to say it like this: people define liberalism, but liberalism doesn’t define people.
Now, people will still abuse this, because they don’t understand “liberalism” or “libertarianism,” or whatever, but they’ll probably be at least somewhat more open to correction (as their egos allow).Report
Thanks for the response, Chris. And yeah, I definitely wasn’t meaning to suggest that this was a perfect corrective, just that it could mitigate the problem a bit.Report
vl;riawe
Sweet post.Report
I’ve been thinking about this more, and I think the situations in which I tend to claim labels are precisely the situations in which I am talking to people who hold strong stereotypes and I want to moderate those stereotypes or at least get them to stop throwing stones. I mean, yes, I identify with those labels TOO, but.
So, for eg, when I lived in Canada, I never really felt the need to point out that I was (mostly) a socialist. In Colorado, especially 10 years ago, I brought it up a lot. Mostly when people would say “well, I’m not a SOCIALIST or anything, but…” in tones they would normally reserve for “I’m not a SERIAL KILLER…”
Likewise, while I don’t make a huge deal about being bisexual from one day to the next, I will claim it in so many words where appropriate. Because a lot of our students come from places where it’s NOT safe to claim that label, or related labels, and I want them to know up front that it’s absolutely FINE where they are now. Or because (not as relevant as it was ten years ago), sometimes dear friends (both gay and straight) would say stupid things about “them” and I felt the need to remind them that I was seeing an “us”, not a “them”…
You know, stuff like that. Sometimes I guess it’s not just a matter of saving brains work, but also that the power you refer to *should* be used, when the effect of using it is to undermine some of the negative stuff.Report
This is exactly what a Canadian would say.
More seriously, I think there’s something to the approach you take. One of the things I’ve done research on is how our representations of a category can be changed. The best way to do that is to keep giving them exemplars that lie outside of their representation of Category A, but tell them, “This is a member of Category A” (not really tell them; they have to answer Category A or Category B, and when they say B, we say WRONG!). Eventually, these new, incongruous exemplars become just ordinary members, and their inferences from the category change accordingly.Report
Fascinating, that y’all have borne that model out in research.
PS Does a person’s relative feeling of security in [their belongingness in the group | their typicalness as a member of the group | the diversity of the group | other random factor] affect their reaction to stereotypical statements? Because, I just realized, while it was clear to me that your comment about Canadians was tongue-in-cheek, it was also clear to me that my immediate before-finding-it-funny reaction was *not* to be offended or antagonistic, but to feel warm and fuzzy and to think, yes, most Canadians probably WOULD say that… of course, that lasted less than a second before irony and complexity and etc came swooping in, but I found it to be a curious reaction nonetheless.Report
You know, I’m not sure if that’s the case, but I know a bunch of social psychologists, and I’d be happy to ask them (that’s more their domain than mine). I’ll let ya know what I find out.
Also, I’ve obviously oversimplified those category experiments, but that is definitely the gist.Report
However, our reliance on categories to make inferences, and our association of labels with categories, gives labels a lot of power, and anything that has power is sometimes going to abuse it. And one of the reasons this power we give to labels is ripe for abuse is something cognitive psychologists like to call psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism says, in essence, that our mental theory about the way the world works includes the belief that most categories (human-made artifacts are, to some extent, an exception, though an odd one that I’d be happy to talk about if you’re interested) have some underlying essence that makes them what they are, and that any individual who’s placed in that category must have in order to be a true member.
For the TL; DR crowd, this is the money.
Awesome post, Chris.Report
I just wanted to say that posts like this (and the love in yesterday) are a large part of why I silently lurk around this site.
A few heated conversations led to a break so people could clear their heads, followed by this excellent post clearly explaining the problem causing mental shortcuts and pointing the way toward a more constructive dialogue.Report
There is a concept in object oriented programming, the Stereotype. In a sense, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) allows us to thus create our own custom Lego Blocks. We also use the word cliché, another synonym for stereotype, from the printing industry.
For in the old days, type was set by hand. When a print run was finished, the letters would go back in the font boxes for use in other situations. But if the typesetter had the foresight, he would make a cliché, a copy of the entire page for later reuse, thus making reprinting easier.
Now cliché has come to mean a timeworn expression and stereotype a overgeneralisation. But there was a good reason for clichés and stereotypes.
We cannot wander about in an existentialist fog, deconstructing the meaning of every word. Yes, at turns we ought to revisit old assertions and ways of considering things. But when I create a Stereotype in UML, it means something in context. It could represent an instance of a design pattern, say Decorator or Builder or Observer, or Interface. Or it could represent Office. It’s a statement about what this thing represents. It “is-a” Decorator. The Hartford Office “is-an” Office.
If labels have power and thus become ripe for abuse, ascribing that abuse to Essentialism goes nowhere with me. Those who wish to put their little ontological labels within the guillemets of a Stereotype and wear them about are now obliged to implement the attributes and methods thus described or quit wearing the label entirely.
My design work seldom uses Sterotyping. It gets in the way of progress. It is a temptation to walk down the primrose path to Hasty Generalisation. It’s shoddy thinking. Bad design, arising from attempting to design without viable instance artifacts.
We see this most clearly revealed when Dr. King said:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
People do have character attribute, one of an enumeration of Character Types. That’s a “has-a” proposition. People also have skin tone, one of a range of nice colours, HTML currently supports 16777216 of ’em. Don’t design a Black Person or a Poor Person as a subclass of Person. Design by composition.
Every -ist is driven by an -ism, a Stereotype. Want to call yourself one? Then Be One. Or feel free to remove the Stereotype from your self-definition. Because I’m sick of the shoddy thinking and fecklessness which says “I’m a special case.” Yes you are a special case. So stop using Stereotype if you don’t want the saved copy of the whole page to apply to you.Report
If labels have power and thus become ripe for abuse, ascribing that abuse to Essentialism goes nowhere with me. Those who wish to put their little ontological labels within the guillemets of a Stereotype and wear them about are now obliged to implement the attributes and methods thus described or quit wearing the label entirely.
This reads to me like a claim that challenging ourselves not to stereotype others is inconvenient, so we’re going to inulaterally impose on them a duty to either absolutely accept all implications of a label or absolutely forgo all use of that label.
I can’t find a charitable adjective to describe this perspective.Report
I think you’re reading that pretty far.
I think there’s something to be said for those who clump together for a common purpose to work at keeping their label accurate.
Not for the purpose of specific discourse, but for the purpose of clarity of community action.Report
I don’t think what you’ve said here conflicts with my position.
I would add that while it’s more than fair to warn people that by adopting a label they’ll have to accept the fact that they’ll run into people who assume all it implications, it’s something different to tell them they must accept all it’s implications.
It’s like the difference between telling someone, “if you get that tattoo many people will think you’re trash” and “if you get that tattoo you must become trash” (“implement the attributes” of the label).Report
Design by composition. A tattoo is not a definition. You and your analogies, Hanley. I can consult the getCharacter() method for the contents of a Person’s character. More logic for you. If, however, someone wanted to expose a hasGangAffiliation() method, he would in fact return a prima-facie instance of Tattoo.Report
I think the problem is with external clumping.
As a liberal I’m pretty routinely accused of being for ‘big government.’ There’s the stereotype = big government solutions.
I see libertarians basically conflated with anarchists and greed constantly.
I see conservatives equated with the Tea Party and evangelicals.
I could go on, but in each case, this isn’t about the ideology that shapes a person’s political activism, but the ideology of someone else’s stereotype.
I have rarely had anyone actually ask me what being liberal means to me. (Inversely, I have asked about libertarianism on the fears I might be so turning.) There’s just a host of presumptions assumed.
The other part of BlaiseP’s point seems that a lot of people may think they embrace an ideology but they don’t actually understand the ideology, rather, they’re a member of the tribe.Report
Now I am told I have put forward a pretty good working definition of Progressive.
Have the Libertarians been unfairly conflated with Anarchists? What’s so bad about being an Anarchist? At least the anarchists are honest enough to say the State is unnecessary and actively harmful. I hear the Libertarians make many of the same noises. What distinguishes them from the Anarchists?
Capitalism is all about self-interest. Buy low, sell high, get paid for what you do, hey, if someone wants to conflate Capitalism with Greed, that just sour grapes. How did Hannibal Lecter put it?
Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Clarice Starling: He kills women…
Hannibal Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?
Clarice Starling: Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir…
Hannibal Lecter: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.
Clarice Starling: No. We just…
Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.
I don’t conflate Conservatism with Evangelicals. I am an Evangelical. Maybe that’s TMI around here. I call myself a Christian. I can tell you what it means.
I’ve also gone to considerable trouble to define Conservative as the entirely reasonable philosophy of Not Tinkering with Working Machinery and Saving What’s Good in the World.
For all their talk about Voluntary Association and Tribal Affiliation, Libertarianism is the most disputatious religion in the world today, so many yeshivot without a Torah.Report
Sometimes, things that are spoken about in proximity to you are not necessarily related to you; I didn’t suggest you did those things (though you did with your response about libertarias) but that I see such logical constructs frequently, and frequently see them here.
They pretty typically derail any meaningful communication.Report
Of course you wouldn’t. Libertarians are not like Beryllium. They’re excepted from any definitional constraints at all, other than their own Humpty-Dumpty versions thereof. When your First Principle starts with Individual Autonomy, that’s the way logic always works, starting with the definitions of yourself.Report
Heh; that second bit is something of a fair dig.
I would say that Libertarianism, however, merely by the absence of consensus and the absence of size, gets a much bigger pass on this score than either Democrats or the GOP do.
The more you aggregate people, the more likely it is that you’re subsuming actual preferences under the weight of the shared preferences. Add enough people and enough preferences, and it’s not entirely clear that your definitional preferences are even shared by everybody who shares the label.
So there is a scaling factor, there.Report
If you aggregate enough libertarians you get Bob Barr for president. So either libertarians can’t be aggregated in any useful fashion, or that was performance art.Report
Until the Libertarians decide to implement the Comparable interface, there’s no sorting them or comparing them to each other, much less deriving an aggregate.
And heaven forbid you try to impose inheritance on them.Report
Given that they don’t represent a collective that’s presenting much in the way of challenge two either of the two large aggregates, maybe treating them like they’re one of the two large aggregates is counterproductive.Report
Please. All they do is present challenges. I am told my approach is not Charitable because I ask for some characteristics to emulate, some “Is-a” attributes which might guide me along the way. One might as well get the Libertarians to explain the form and nature of the Holy Trinity or Why God Allows Evil.
It’s not as if I haven’t asked for a more rigorous definition, usually greeted by the Presentation of Challenges, in the form of pitiful analogies, begged questions and when all else fails, personal attacks. I might add, this pattern was also used by Religion, when it had any political power in the world, thus enforcing my belief Libertarianism is a Religion.Report
All they do is present challenges.
Well, honestly… what’s wrong with that? You’ve lauded them for that in the past, yes? Isn’t “keeping these other two much bigger groups more honest” a sufficiently just cause?
If you’re not in the position of leadership, and you’re not likely to be so in the near future, there is constructive criticism/presenting challenges as a principled and honorable course.
(granted, wailing and caterwauling indiscriminately not so much, but I don’t know that this applies to many folk here)Report
Old guy comes home from church. His wife asks him “What was the sermon about?”
“Sin” he replied.
“And what did the preacher say about sin?”
“He was against it.”
And that’s just about where we are with the Libertarians. They’re against it. What they’re for, different story. And don’t try to play 20 Questions with ’em either. You’ll get to about #4 and they’ll say you’re being Uncharitable.
Sure must be nice to be able to say No to everything you don’t like.Report
I don’t know that being for less government than we have now is quite so nihilistic as all that. You can be a liberal and be for less government than we have now*
I think you’re insisting on something that isn’t necessary, is all. At least, in this particular case.
* for some definitions of “less”, of course.Report
That being the case, perhaps the Libertarians will be less inclined to post tendentious essays upon the subject of Things They Do Not Understand about Progressives.
For I have had a gut full of their simplistic crap about Progressives and have become even less tolerant of simplistic crap about me, specifically. Hanley can lay into me, saying I’ve been Uncharitable and not one of you have come to my defence. Not one.
There’s a human being back here, who went to some trouble to write up that business about how Stereotype works in systems design, precisely so I didn’t have to get into Obnoxious Theology about Librulz and Conservaturds. That particular gerbil wheel’s gone around about fourteen bazillion times too many around here.
I came here in search of what Libertarians believe. That I should now be schoolmarmed about the distinction between Libertarian and Libertarian-ISM, after explaining the Stereotype extensibility mechanism in depth — the odd part is, it doesn’t even insult my intelligence any more, Patrick. I should now conclude I shouldn’t even think people are trying to understand what I’m trying to say.Report
And that’s just about where we are with the Libertarians. They’re against it. What they’re for, different story.
I hear ya on that, BP. Same page, etc.
{And that’s a funny joke, too.}Report
That being the case, perhaps the Libertarians will be less inclined to post tendentious essays upon the subject of Things They Do Not Understand about Progressives.
Wow, you’re still sore about that?
I came here in search of what Libertarians believe.
I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that this is untrue. You came here — subtle difference — so that you could say that you came here in search of what libertarians believe. And then so that you could make a big show of being disappointed by what you’d found.
This is very weird to me.
You like John Stuart Mill; I like John Stuart Mill. You like F.A. Hayek; I like F.A. Hayek. You’re pretty skeptical about Ayn Rand; I’m pretty skeptical about Ayn Rand. You don’t need to be a Randian to be a libertarian.
I mean, sure, you don’t like Ludwig von Mises either, and that would actually be okay with me, but I think your objections to him have been incorrect so far, and I’d urge you to try him again. But Mises I’ll freely grant is long-winded and not the most exciting of authors.
It could be water under the bridge. It really could.
I use the term libertarian for myself for two reasons: First, if I didn’t use it, then other people would just go right ahead and use it anyway. Given my policy preferences, there is really no other one-word label that fits.
But second — well, if I’m stuck with it, how can I use it constructively? The way I do this is by using “libertarian” as a starting point. It’s not the end of the discussion. It’s the beginning. Shortly afterward we have to dispense with the Randianism, the FYIGMism, and the Glenn Beckism.
I know that that looks to you like what the old Marxists used to do, breaking up again and again into infinitesimal conventicles. But you know what? At the end of the day, we all have to think for ourselves — or else let someone else think for us. There aren’t any other choices. If that’s the price of thinking for myself, and if that’s the price of drawing distinctions between myself and the Glenn Becks of the world, well, okay, I’ll pay that price. That’s alright by me.Report
(this is an example of why you are on my superhero team.)Report
If we could make these individuals more like other people, it’d be easier. That’s for sure.Report
Wouldn’t that be nice? Some sort of design pattern where you could get a nice composite object, say, the results of a political affiliation quiz, where you could examine details before coming to conclusions?Report
I’ll talk about two types of spirituality for no reason whatsoever.
I’m sure we’ve all met spiritual folks who talk all the time about their religion, about their relationship with God, and about how everybody else is doing it wrong and how we need to pass laws to take away the option of being bad from other folks or pass laws mandating that they be good in the first place.
And I’m sure that we’ve all met spiritual folk who say that their relationship with God is making them change their lives, somehow. They’re going to stop doing this. Doing that. They’re going to start doing other things instead. They’re going to change their life. They can’t live the way they did before. Instead of telling you how to live, they instead work really hard on how they ought to live… and, indeed, if you bring up the “THOU SHALT” and “THOU SHALT NOT” people from the previous paragraph, they get either massively irritated or massively sad and follow up with some variant of “those folks have missed the point”.Report
No. What is a Libertarian, other than not-being-beryllium?
Now I’ve gone to very considerable trouble to outline Stereotyping. You can help me along with what a Libertarian actually is. Otherwise, if we’re going to use the above comment as working material, I’m going to start calling Libertarianism a Religion, which I very strongly believe to be the case, what with all these First Principles, with a serious recursion problem in its constructor — every time I try to instantiate one of ’em from the spec, the stack blows up.Report
If I had to put a pretty fine point on it, it’d be one who does not wish to legislate matters of taste as if they were matters of morality because doing so is a good way to institutionalize injustice… and one who, if there’s any question over whether a matter is one of taste or morality, errs on the side of it being a matter of taste.
I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of libertarians that would disagree with me, though.
I’m comfortable with that.Report
No. What IS a Libertarian. We’ve arrived at what you’re NOT, and there’s all those squishy caveats about how other Libertarians might disagree with you.
Now I will tell you what a Libertarian seems to be. He is a referee in a game he cannot and will not play, making the rules up as he goes along.Report
Yeah, I don’t agree with that.Report
Libertarianism has been traditionally associated with advancing a conception of government based exclusively on negative rights and the non-aggression principle, usually with an emphasis on property rights. Concessions to certain governmental powers are made only according to necessity: services necessary for the preservation of negative rights.
Leftish – or marginal or bleedingheart – libertarians include other normative considerations (usually along the lines of social justice) when determining the extent of government intervention into society, but the primary constraints are still negative rights and the non-aggression principle.Report
I’m sure you don’t. The Libertarian, as I have said before, is defined by what he is Not. Jaybird, I’m fascinated by your take on the issues, you’ve got a fine sense of humour, but I simply must conclude Libertarianism is actually a religion. And there’s nothing wrong with being religious, I call myself a Christian. I conform to that Stereotype, I wear it proudly. I can tell you what a Christian is, by my lights: someone who follows the example of Jesus Christ.
Libertarians want a loosely-coupled architecture, okay, I can handle that, too. But if you go there, you have to evolve a protocol, I don’t care how you implement it, you shouldn’t care how I implement it, people ask me what I do, I say “I make hostile systems talk to each other.”
What does Liberty mean? That’s a nothing word. It’s like Grace or Sanctification. Those are doctrinal considerations. If Liberty is the highest goal, that has to be compromised to some degree. All this stuff about Voluntary Association and Individual Liberty, more theological disputations.
You don’t like the Institutionalisation of Injustice, well, buddy, you need to tell me how you propose to Institutionalise Justice because that’s gonna put a severe crimp in my Degrees of Freedom and I’m gonna have to plan accordingly.Report
First, I do not for the life of me understand why it matters “what” a libertarian is. What “libertarianism” is? Ok, fine, that may be a worthwhile question. But “what” a libertarian is? What a meaningless question! A libertarian is a human with his own set of values, no less than a liberal, and no more than a conservative, and vice versa.
If you wish to rephrase the question as “what distinguishes a libertarian from a liberal or a conservative,” the question is only marginally more helpful. But if you must insist, the answer is that a libertarian is a person whose highest priority is the reduction of the power of government. The implications of that will differ from libertarian to libertarian, just as the implications of prioritizing stability and security will differ from person to person, or of prioritizing social mobility and equality will differ from person to person.Report
Concessions to certain governmental powers are made only according to necessity:
Huh? Everyone’s a Libertarian then. That’s no definition. Even the Conservatives conform to that stereotype. The vilest Statist will tell you These Things are Necessary.
And in some cases they are necessary. But with every such claim of necessity, however truly needful it might be, we may consistently rely upon the Libertarians to again thump the pulpit and tell the rest of us we’re out of line. They don’t have an answer for anything. They just rule everyone else’s answers irrelevant.Report
What “libertarianism” is? Is that the game we’re playing here? I have already said “Every -ist is driven by an -ism, a Stereotype.”
Since we can’t discuss each instance of a Libertarian, let us instead take up what distinguishes the Libertarians from any other Stereotype. This reduces the entire discussion to Doctrinal Fudge, once again excusing the Libertarians from any substantive definitional constraint, but hey, call it Political Affirmative Action.
As for the rest of that, not only are we all Libertarians, I Think We’re All Bozos on this BusReport
The vilest Statist will tell you These Things are Necessary.
Sure. But by a different moral or practical calculus. The key difference is that for a libertarian of the type your quote refers to the only government intervention is restricted to only those actions which protect negative rights.
That’s a pretty clear distinction from liberals, yes?Report
The Libertarian proposition of Negative Rights fails utterly in the real world. Consider the proposition of Negative Rights in the Fourteenth Amendment and Plessy. Did that lead to actual equality? We both know it didn’t. In fact, all the states implemented Separate but not one of them implemented Equal: not even in the North. All we got was separate.
Black people had to wait until those Goddamn Statist Liberals under LBJ got the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act passed before anything changed.
But let the Liberals and Progressives rise up and say “Okay, this is ridiculous!” where are the Libertarians? Is it fair to notice Rand Paul said restaurants should be free to serve only those they like, or that John Stossel says the Civil Rights Act should be repealed to allow just such discrimination?
Now just watch ’em. “Oh, you’re just misreading Stossel and Rand Paul isn’t really a Libertarian anyway. You’re trying to generalise a barrel full of bad apples from one or two.”
But their model wants the Feds out of our lives. How are they any different than the Anarchists? Here’s how. They’re not brave enough to admit they are anarchists. They just want the right to issue as many caveats as they’d like to that proposition if cornered.Report
Mark, that’s put perfectly, I think.Report
Blaise, I’m having some trouble understanding what you’re objecting to. Let’s suppose my earlier definition of libertarianism is correct (it’s certainly in the ballpark historically). If so, then is your objection that the theory is factually wrong? (A libertarian would say his theory has never been tried!) That it’s logically incoherent? (That’s why people keep working on it: to iron out the kinks!)
Look, what a libertarian is is a person who accepts the premise that the best form of government is one limited to protecting negative rights and who works out inevitable conceptual, practical, pragmatic problems (or not!) to make the theory as consistent as possible. That’s all there is to it, I think, more or less. That’s their view. And there’s a lot of room for people who call themselves libertarians to wiggle given particular ways those inevitable problems are resolved.
I mean, look at Jason Kuznicki. He would probably concede that his highest ideal is libertopia. He also concedes that ramping down government’s role in society entails costs that have to be considered when implementing – or even advocating! – for specific policies. So lots of wiggle room. Lots of it. And maybe that’s what you find so frustrating.Report
Let’s just suppose my definition is correct, that Libertarians are defined by what they are Not. Negative liberties fit into this proposition perfectly.
Don’t beg the question, however inadvertently: I have not asked if the Libertarians are Wrong or Right. For me to write a test case, I must have something which can be verified. I will need some variables to which I can assign values.
So perhaps you’ll tell me: what can be verified about Libertarian-ism? I don’t care what they believe about Negative Liberties. What rights does a person have, values I can test? I’m not going to allow them to tell me what they’re NOT any more. They’re starting to sound like the Muslims, who say Allaah is beyond description and can only be described in terms of what He Isn’t.
And that, my friend, is Theology.Report
what can be verified about Libertarian-ism?
What can be verified about any ism? They’re ideologies, yes?
You’re just ranting now.Report
The Libertarian proposition of Negative Rights fails utterly in the real world. Consider the proposition of Negative Rights in the Fourteenth Amendment and Plessy. Did that lead to actual equality? We both know it didn’t. In fact, all the states implemented Separate but not one of them implemented Equal: not even in the North. All we got was separate.
This is awesome. You just stepped out of the abstract nonsense in these discussions about labels and into the realm of constitutional law. I can ditch the “libertarian proposition” label about negative rights and demonstrate via constitutional doctrines where you are both incorrect and correct at the same time. I get to disagree AND do all the heavy lifting to prove your point (Plessy is NOT a good example – I’d start around the same era but look for a different line of cases).
This made my morning. 😉
They don’t have an answer for anything. They just rule everyone else’s answers irrelevant.
I so love a challenge. Can’t wait!!!Report
Oh please, Dave. The ball is in your court. You prove otherwise, if you can. So far, nobody’s taken up even the faintest contradiction of my original point, Libertarian-ism is defined by what it is Not.
Even Jason, who’s no slouch in the intellectual department, exhibits the moral fortitude to say we ought to take off the Stereotype Labels and address each other as individuals, a very wise position for him to take. You’d be wise to take it, too.
But feel free to attempt a definition. How did Johnson put it?
“Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”
Your services are badly needed, Dave.Report
But feel free to attempt a definition.
This, I don’t understand. Two libertarians and one liberal have already offered definitions that are believed by the speakers to be correct and reflect how they use the word. Those speakers can’t be wrong about how they use the word. What they can be wrong about is whether their usage is standard or not (jaybird very clearly said that his definition might not be standard). But your argument appears to be that since you don’t think there’s a coherent definition of libertarianism, it’s impossible for other people to meaningfully use the word.
That’s an amazing argument, Blaise. I mean, in order for you to coherently make the argument that the word “libertarianism” doesn’t have a definition, you’d have to use that wordin a meaningful way. That is, consistently with how actual libertarians use it.
Let’s face it tho. You’re argument isn’t that libertarianism cannot be defined, it’s that there are too many definitions of it. That’s why Chris’s earlier comment about family resemblances and LVW are important: just because a concept has fuzzy boundaries and can’t be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions doesn’t make that word meaningless. If it did, then almost all non-technical/formal discourse would be meaningless.Report
And btw way, I feel very comfortable saying that any view of governance that doesn’t include or entail the prima-facie trumping power (not necessarily axiomatic!) of negative rights and the non-aggression principle, or logically entail those things, can’t be viewed as libertarian.
Broadly viewed, both conservatism and liberalism include those principles of course, but not as prima-facie necessary conditions on a theory of governance.Report
BlaiseP,
Am I still expecting an email from you?
I’ll hit your other points shortly but I must be on my way for now.Report
Another story you should read: Jack Vance’s “The Moon Moth”.
“But he is a criminal,” cried Angmark. “He is notorious, infamous!”
“What are his misdeeds?”
“He has murdered, betrayed; he has wrecked ships; he has tortured, blackmailed, robbed, sold children into slavery, he has –”
“Your religious differences are of no importance.”Report
So has there been more harm done by saying that a matter of morality (murder, torture, slavery) is really a matter of taste and thus ought not be legislated or more harm done that matters of taste are really matters of morality and thus ought to have laws to punish transgressors?
(I hesitate to give examples of the latter, lest I automatically lose the discussion.)Report
I don’t think anything can be particularly “immoral” to the actor; only to the observer.Report
People feel guilt all the time. Some of them even feel it for bad stuff that they chose to do.Report
Nothing particularly immoral about being conflicted.
Conflicts arise from having more than one desire.
Nothing particularly immoral about multiple desires.Report
Internal conflicts? In theology, these are consigned to Mysteries.
It’s Heavy Mystery Time!Report
Let’s stop slightly short of Godwin and talk about slavery. We used to have laws protecting it, Which I think was a terrible idea. More recently, we’ve had laws outlawing it. I’m good with that. There are people who’ll say that slavery is entirely OK if it’s voluntarily entered into, so we should go back to having laws protecting it (not specific laws, but the general ones regarding contracts.)
So, given that there is a difference of opinion, is it a matter of taste? Does your formulation lead us to repeal the 13th?Report
Very good comment Mike S.Report
@MikeS:
That’s exactly what I was getting at.
Slavery is neither amoral nor immoral in and of itself.
I was thinking that very same thing in an exchange between BlaiseP & Murali (two great thinkers who I happen to admire) falling into that same trap– that of projecting the morality of the observer on the observed.
It simply doesn’t work in many cases; and especially in a historical context.
Epaphroditus owned Epictetus.
Does that one fact make the man immoral?
It does not, judged by his contemporaries.
By modernity, it does.
It’s a false equivalence.
The morality at hand cannot be fully understood outside of its own boundaries.
Nonetheless, from the outside it is judged.Report
If I led you to conclude I was projecting the morality of the observer onto the observed, I beg your pardon. Morality is me saying “This I will never do, nor could I be compelled to do it.” Ethics is me telling you “That is wrong,” Justice is a court saying “You broke the law in doing so.”
Three separate concepts.
Of course you’re correct in saying morality/ethics/justice cannot be fully understood beyond the boundaries of its time. I do not hold to axiomatic justice, ex nihilo. We have evolved the concept that no man should own another man, not because it was always wrong, though some might say so. It is morally wrong for me to own a slave, it is ethically wrong for you to own one and if the justice system convicts you of owning a slave, you will likely go to jail and the slave will be freed. Three separate approaches to the same conclusion.Report
My own misunderstanding then.
I tend to take unqualified statements as absolutes; probably unfairly at times.
The morality/ethics/justice distinction seems to be an important one.
I would suggest that, using your formulation, both morality & justice are derived from ethics, though toward different ends; morality being a personal relation, and justice being a social relation.Report
Yes, exactly. No conflict at all. We are constantly evolving little niceties as they are needed in life. Who told us we had to stand back at a polite distance from the person in front of us at the ATM cash machine? Do we need a rule to this effect?
We do have laws against capturing someone’s PIN number. We just don’t have a hard ‘n fast rule about what constitutes the polite distance from the ATM. Not sure we need one, either.Report
I can see how there could be different distances appropriate for given circumstances; like if it was raining, for instance.
But again, over a period of time, such things will no longer be a concern, due to evolving technology and ideas of things.
And looking into the past with the eyes of today discolors things a tad, I’d say.Report
I should have thought of another category: legislation of a matter of morality in the completely topsy-turvy way… so that wrong is legal and/or right is illegal.
Which is how a libertarian *WOULD* frame such a thing, wouldn’t he?Report
so that wrong is legal and/or right is illegal.
Not so simply put. Right and Wrong only work at Moral/Ethical scope. Justice doesn’t say things are right or wrong. Actions are merely legal or illegal and the defendant is judged either guilty or innocent. Doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong any more than such a judgement is always congruent with whether they actually committed the crime of which they’ve been accused or whether the law is just.
Not everything in my morality fits into my concept of ethics. I might attempt to have my notions of ethics written into law, or have laws repealed. But some prisoners go to jail on the strength of their moral convictions.
Right and Wrong are judgement calls. It comes down to who’s saying so and the justification for believing so.Report
When was it illegal not to have slaves?Report
The “or” in the “and/or” is an exclusive, not inclusive, or.Report
So you’re saying there was no slavery before laws specifically enabled it? I doubt this.Report
I’ve made my statement, and I’ll let others read and interpret it for themselves. But here you indicate more interest in hurling insults than having reasoned discussion. So if this sub-thread continues I will respond to others, but I will not respond further to you.Report
Shoulda thought of that before hitting Reply.Report
Shoulda thought of that before hitting Reply.
And there was a need for this why?Report
Am I hurling insults? If you’re in a position to do anything about this, you need to engage in a bit of email discussion with me. Like right away.Report
BlaiseP,
We can discuss via email if you’d like. I’d welcome it. I think you can my email address from the responses.
For the record, my comment was more of a pre-emptive nature albeit a bit more blunt than I would have liked. I’ve seen certain situations with certain individuals get ugly (in no way am I pointing fingers). I’d rather not see it. No one’s in any trouble. I’m a Sicilian with a hair trigger.
I am in a position to do things, but the last thing I want to do is start beating people over the head with The Commenting Policy, kicking them or banning them (even given some of the crap that’s happened recently, this place is still awesome or I wouldn’t have come back). There are too many good things to read and I need to get a post or two up.
I’m not sure if I can get to a response this evening as I will be busy this evening, but if you feel I need to engage you in a discussion, then I will oblige and we will talk as much as you would like to.Report
You should be able to get my email from the comments if you receive them via email. If not, I can give that to you. I don’t have one for you so I’ll await your email and we’ll continue this away from here. Rest assured, I will take a more measured and civil tone.Report
It would seem as if there are natural limits to that.
Individuals are deviations by nature, while labels deal with generalities.
There’s a middle ground there that I recognize, but I can’t quite pick it out right now because I have other things on my mind.
Back later.Report
Blaise, you and I have different ideas of what language does, and what concepts do, and how we represent them. The classic idea of concepts is that they represent a set of necessary and sufficient features that strictly determine what is, and what is not, an instance of a particular concept. And language, for you, is meant to map onto the distribution of such necessary and sufficient features so that a label neatly captures them (even if they be somewhat elusive and abstract). For me, concepts are much looser than that; they don’t have such neat, formal definitions, but instead are built up from a messy world which our brains are doing their best to order so that we might be able to gain a foothold and eventually act. To do this, our brains aren’t interested in finding precisely what makes a thing a thing, but in finding similarities and differences, in structure and in features, so that things can be ordered like, as the philosopher whose name automatically sends a comment to spam would say, a family. Language, in turn, seeks to communicate these family resemblance that are more or less loosely organized in our brains, in order that we might influence the more or less loosely organized family resemblances in the brains of others, or find common ground with them in the overlap of the families in my head and yours, all in the end to facilitate acting on the world.
There is no set of conditions that says Jane is definitely a libertarian or Jane is definitely not a libertarian, because there is no one set of conditions that fully captures LIBERTARIAN (in cognitive psychology, when people refer to concepts, they generally capitalize the word). Libertarian is a family resemblance category, and admits a fairly large family, as does any fairly abstract category, which is what any category that is meant to capture a political faction is going to be. You may have had a good definition of the category PROGRESSIVE (I don’t want to say, because I’m not one, nor am I a libertarian, or a liberal or a conservative, so I don’t have much skin in this game, except that I’d rather see conversations go somewhere, and people communicate), but by virtue of being a definition, it’s false, or at least only partially true, because it likely only covers the center of the distribution of progressive people.
When I quoted Nietzsche the other day, this is what I was getting at. You dismissed the passage with hand-waving, which is what I fully expect you to do here. Thinking back, I don’t think I’ve ever had a productive discussion with you, precisely because this is your reaction to almost any disagreement. And I suspect that this is largely because you see, or want to see, a highly ordered world that you can capture in a formal language with strict boundary conditions, while I see a very messy world, made even messier by the fact that we’re stuck grasping it with this fickle, conditional language we’ve been thrown into, while remaining so innately unaware of its infelicities that we unconsciously act as if what we say is what is. So you end up being so certain in your beliefs about the world that disagreement is a sign of either ignorance or insult, while I remain so deeply suspicious about my own beliefs that the moment I express them, I feel like I should say something else entirely to undermine them.Report
And I suspect that this is largely because you see, or want to see, a highly ordered world that you can capture in a formal language with strict boundary conditions, while I see a very messy world, made even messier by the fact that we’re stuck grasping it with this fickle, conditional language we’ve been thrown into, while remaining so innately unaware of its infelicities that we unconsciously act as if what we say is what is.
I’m not sure entirely that this is the case, but I will say this: I think in the world of the real there are some things that can be captured by formal language with strict boundary conditions, but they are a fairly small set of things. Thus formal language, and frameworks built on formal language, have varying degrees of limited utility when they’re applied to the world of the real.
(This is one reason why I like taking multiple different frameworks built on formal language and overlay them on the world of the real in an attempt to gain some insight, because I expect that overlays of multiple frameworks produces better understanding than trying to refine a single one ad infinitium in an attempt to produce better understanding)Report
I don’t want to get too deeply into philosophy, but I’m not big on a correspondence theory of truth. For me, there are multiple possible correspondences (there isn’t any single one-to-one correspondence between language and the world), each one essentially creating a (the) world. This becomes more and more evident with increasing complexity.
Now, I agree that there is a fairly small set of things with which formal languages with strict boundary conditions can work well, because the language is doing the delimiting, and we can tell the boundaries of its effectiveness by where it stops working. But this isn’t going to help us much with libertarians or justice or rights or God or the human condition.Report
I’m sure we do have different ideas of what language does. But there’s a practical difference between us: for me, communications isn’t theory. It’s reality. It doesn’t matter what each word means, only that all the parties involved share a working definition.
A Stereotype is a frank recognition of the Elusiveness, this lack of neatness. A Stereotype is not a Thing. It’s a symbol which represents all the nebulous aspects of a thing. But the Stereotype allows me to categorise things in a meaningful way.
Abstract means something specific to me. Abstract means “This cannot be used directly. You must, instead, create an instance of this class and implement the abstract methods.” It’s good to have abstraction. If you need to upgrade a whole family of instances, you change the abstract class and let the compiler do the work for you, complaining vigorously until all the abstraction has been given life in implementation, in every derived instance.
Jane is in a cleft stick of her own making. Jane calls herself a Libertarian: I have not imposed that Stereotype upon her. Every class which bears a Stereotype has that stereotype over its own name.
When Jesus Christ was crucified, the Stereotype over his head read “Jesus Christ, King of the Jews.” The Gospels tell us the Pharisees were very upset about this legend and wanted to put up a new legend “He called himself the King of the Jews.” Pilate is recorded to have replied “What I have written, I have written.”
Nietzsche is always treacherous ground, for he contradicted himself at every turn. Do not now presume to lecture me, Chris. What I have written, I have written. Gilles DeLeuze said a concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. You decide which use you want to put your brick. Either you define Libertarian or I will do it for you.Report
Deleuze (and Guattari), you may remember, wrote that in the context of a discussion of the creation of concepts, of new concepts. Delezue was a Nietzschean, one for whom concepts were a creative enterprise. Or to quote someone else who was an influence on Deleuze (and Guattari):
Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their speaking. Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks.Report
Heh. That worthy gentleman also said Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht.
Science doesn’t think.Report
Yeah, I know he did, and he was right. Again, I want to avoid getting too deeply in philosophy so that I don’t obscure the message I was trying to convey in the post, but you’re quoting the work of his (we can’t even type his name, or our comments will go into the spam filter) that probably influenced me the most. I’ll just note that a few pages later he says,
But if a distinction is made between thinking and science, and the two are contrasted, that is immediately considered a disparagement of science. There is the fer even that thinking might open hostilities against the sciences, and becloud the seriousness and spoil the joy of scientific work.
But even if those fears were justified, which is emphaticially not the case, it would still be both tactless and tasteless to take a stand against science upon the very rostrum that serves scientific education.Report
Well sure. I’m not your enemy, Chris. Science doubts, it doesn’t think. If anything, all it can do is make predictions, the most specious of all arguments. It sits there, fatuously consuming data, kicking out conclusions. Meanwhile out in front of science, mathematics goobers up the chalk board with all these symbols, having run through the Roman and Greek alphabets, it’s now gobbling up the Hebrew alphabet and once it’s reached Tav, (which gematria already has a claim on) — what’s next?
The mathematician says “Aleph-null” and if you’re looking at him like a pig looking at a bicycle, he is not going to stop the lecture to give you a biography of David Hilbert and his interesting list of problems.
Mr. H can make all the moozy, fluffy noises he wants to about language but words do mean things. Thinking does not acts insofar as it thinks. Thinking acts by communicating, as Mr. H would learn somewhat later, after his craven accession to recent fashion trends featuring Red and Black and a curious four-sided symbol went out of style.Report
Blaise, I don’t think you’re my enemy. I don’t think you’re James’ enemy, and I don’t think he considers you one. I think you have a habit of making yourself the enemy of discourse, however. I think hat’s a shame, because with your knowledge, and your gift for language, you could be such a friend to it.Report
That’s rich. Now I’m an enemy of discourse because I don’t accede to some Humpty Dumpty definition of Glory — or Libertarian. I knew it would get here.
Language does not create the world. Language describes the world. My position has the benefit of Logic to support it. Perhaps in your mind, you speak, like God, saying “Let there be light” and lo there is light. In my world, light is one part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light has an explanation and the language of mathematics and optics and physics describes it.
I am the opponent of irrelevance, of fallacy, the sworn enemy of simpletons and flat-earth thinking, of dogmatists of every description. The very idea, that we create the world with words: that’s self-aggrandising madness, magickal thinking of the worst sort. “Levi-o-SAM!”. I have gone to the trouble of learning too many languages and writing too many models to describe various aspects of the world to ever give in to some hocus-pocus.
Chris, the reason why science wins and dogma loses is because science attempts to understand the world where dogma attempts to control the world. This isn’t Hogwarts.Report
You make yourself an enemy of discourse when you insist on turning everis thread in which a libertarian presents a viewpoint- regardless of whether the thread had anything to do with libertarianism as a worldview- into a debate about what that viewpoint says about libertarians, often with an accusation of dishonesty thrown in. It is tiresome, and not just for the people you go after.
You declare yourself the opponent of “irrelevance, of fallacy, the sworn enemy of simpletons and flat-earth thinking, of dogmatists of every description.” This is all well and good, except that just about everyone here likely views themselves in a similar fashion. I wish you would respect that. Indeed, on this particular issue, one of the more frustrating things is that it often seems your complaint is that the libertarians around here are insufficiently dogmatic because they refuse to conform to your (not their, but your) Stereotype.
No doubt you disagree with the above. But this is how you come across all too often.Report
While great puzzlement reigns about the Nature of Progressives and there are Things Libertarians Don’t Understand About Us, replete with begged questions and lousy thinking, who then is the Enemy of Discourse? I found that irritating if you did not.
If I have become Unpleasant in the wake of that post, Uncharitable and Tiresome, I will not now be told not to hit a guy with glasses. I am a Progressive. I am a Liberal. My positions are routinely mischaracterised and that’s all fine and good when it happens. And it happens a lot, not that you ever step in to stop any of that sort of crap.
Libertarianism is a religion. Let’s just call a spade a spade, eh Mark? If it is internally contradictory, hugely intolerant, simplistic, it refuses to explain itself yet become huffy when confronted. It fits every one of the criteria for a religion, complete with dogma and articles of faith.Report
What’s really rich, Blaise, is you pretending to be the opponent of irrelevance and fallacy. Irrelevance is one of your favorite tools, along with standing on injured dignity.
Case in point: bringing up Jason’s post. Never mind the fact that many people criticized it at the time, so your only sane man/misunderstood victim shtick is facially absurd. But you’re being called on your behavior right now. And your response is hey, tu quoque.Report
Blaise, I think yet again you’ve talked past me, and that’s fine. I will only say that I don’t think you create the world. I think the world is there. I think we have a collaborative relationship with it. But we don’t come to it naked, nor it to us.Report
Heh. I am no victim, Fnord. I wasn’t then, either. Now I’m especially not a victim. Now I’m spreading my leathery bat wings and just being a devil. Irrelevance? You wound me to the quick, heh. Not on this thread I haven’t been. I am all done with pie-eyed nonsense about words and their meanings.Report
Blaise,
What is your issue with individual autonomy?
What kind of blanket code would you write that is small, mobile and could adapt to every conceivable variable in new and changing environments?
I suppose somewhere in the loop you would need to check best possible outcome along with least amount restrictive law for that environment. If you arbitrarily link across the network every conceivable law I think you would find your compilation of laws is considerable and restrictive to adaptation.
At some point I think you give the nodes some ability to feedback from sensory input and determine what applies locally. I will concede that there is a likely flaw in the check of best outcomes at each node.
This is why big government and statism fails. Its not over wielding to make very narrow determinations, but it tends to grow into micro-managing and dies from its own weight.
I don’t know much about liberalism, progressivism or many other labels. I see alot of round pegs jammed in square holes. I like your ideas on a great many things. How you get from A to B may be how you define liberalism/progressivism. I’m more apt to call it creative.Report
Begged question. I have no issue with Individual Autonomy beyond the fact it’s an illusion. Pleasant enough illusion, like Justice itself, only perpetuated by frameworks capable of keeping people from each others’ throats.
And stop using terms like “Best” Possible Outcome. Who gets to say what’s Best or even Mediocre or outright Horrible? Not you. Not me. Least restrictive — whose degrees of freedom are being restricted? It’s best to get those judgemental adjectives out of our prose.
Nodes? Feedback? Allow me to tell you how AI manages Verdicts. There are two main bases for AI, rules based and frame based.
Justice is rules-based: we have standards of evidence matched up to statute law, the judge cranks the handle and the Sausage of Justice comes out the ass end of the beast. Bismarck: if you like law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made. Justice is blind.
Ethics, however, is frame based, context sensitive, usually running over a neural net. Ethics doesn’t shout “Does Not Compute!” when it fails. It says “Just Because” and doesn’t leave a chain-of-reasoning behind. Frame based AI is often called an Expert System. You train it by having someone who knows the job guide the expert system through its paces.
You’re very close though. You want each node to get feedback from other nodes and let them determine what applies locally. But it’s guided to an end, a nice even weld as the welding robot moves down the piece.
As varies risk, so varies profit. As varies risk, so varies the need for regulation. Don’t like Big Government? I don’t like Big Injustice. All this preposterous Hasty Generalisation about the Evils of Big Government annoy me. We are free only to the extent our freedoms are enshrined in law, which means the rules have to apply to everyone and government will have to enforce them — and by necessity, as society grows more complex, we will need more such rules — and heavens — where has this conclusion led us, to Moar Gummint and even — horror of horrors, to Positive Rights in Law. Any other conclusion is exactly half right.Report
There is another point I was looking for, who gets to decide what is best and those degrees of freedom? I wish we had more discussions along those lines. Its a pursuit well worth getting beat about the ears over and over.
Does the neural net choose justice or ethics because it exists. What is the correlation between big Government and big Injustice because I don’t care for either.
Maybe we presume it pushes into corners of pick one, pick both or pick neither.
As varies risk? has there ever been by the constructs of man anything more risky than government and corporation? Would you trust the levers of regulation to the government or corporations? How about those nodes?
If I’m looking for a hill to die on, I figure Node Hill is where I make my stand.Report
Who gets to decide? Ask Mr. Madison and his friends: he set it up. It’s called the legislative process.
The neural net only applies to ethics. See, you want to use a neural net when you need rapid input, it’s especially good for vision systems or audio, think Siri. You train a neural net. It learns. You don’t train a rules based system. Justice is blind, the neighbours aren’t. Makes it easy to remember.
Big ‘n Small ‘n In Between. It’s a big country. Lots of complexity. Ergo Big Government. It’s a Goldilocks Problem. I’ve said that before around here. We need a government big enough to enforce the laws and efficient enough to stay on top of the situation. Don’t complain about Big Government. It annoys me. It’s simplistic. Complain to Mr. Madison and his buddies about that problem.
The most efficient form of government is absolute tyranny, where the King’s Word is Law. Tyranny doesn’t need Big Government: it relies on spies and toadies who report to an amazingly small cadre of Secret Police and that’s no way for free men to live. Democracies do need bigger governments than Tyrannies.
And that means big old clunky systems where the rights of minorities are protected, inside government as well as out on the street. Goobericious justice systems where evidence has to be presented and defence attorneys tell lies to juries and oh it’s just a big old steaming calliope being pulled down the street by a recalcitrant elephant. That’s the price we pay for the freedoms we enjoy.
You ‘n me had best get on our knees and pray to Bebby Jeezus we never get Small Government, where power is concentrated in the hands of the few secret police and not the many officious bureaucrats of a working democracy.Report
The most efficient form of government is not absolute tyranny. A tyrant is a mere pointload of overhead. Funny thing about secret police and officious bureaucrats, their nodes to. Some days I wish I could be just skeered enough to pray.Report
I’m a fan of this post, but the problem is that the people who most need to hear the message are the most likely to think it doesn’t apply to them.Report
It quite clearly applies to those fascists in the ideological camp I am most opposed to.Report
Of course, they’ll be too stupid to realize that.Report
Which is why it’s important for the ingroup to also tell them they’re too stupid to figure it out on their own.Report
Precisely.
If they weren’t told repeatedly that they are stupid, they would be unlikely to acknowledge the fact unbidden.Report
Triple space awesome, Chris.Report
I have found (and I notice Schilling does this too… usually better, actually) that the important thing to do is maintain a sense of humor.
It’s the sense of humor that allows me to read a comment a second time and see that the author said “can not” (as in “has multiple options which include the option of not”) and did not say “cannot” (as in “only has the option of not”)… and thus allow me to *NOT* write a screaming comment that gets really upset about someone who would say that another group only has the option of not doing something.
And if you find someone who never laughs at jokes? You can reach the conclusion that they’re one of those humorless types.Report
You can reach the conclusion that they’re one of those humorless types.
And we all know what those people are like!Report
And if you find someone who never laughs at jokes? You can reach the conclusion that they’re one of those humorless types.
There’s a brilliant (and evil) rhetorical move that exploits this. You make a half-joking, half-serious comment whose serious half doesn’t hold water, but has just enough verisimilitude that a lot of people will take it seriously. If anyone challenges it, he’s the stick-in-the-mud who can’t take a joke, so the fallacy goes unchallenged.Report
This is pretty much an accurate statement of Rush Limbaugh’s form of infotainment. Have enough plausible deniability in your statements and you can get away with saying anything by claiming satire afterwards.Report
I thought this was an awesome post by Chris. If we all took his message to heart (all includes me, I’m not pretending superiority), how great would the discussions be. so how disheartening is it that a major participant here responds by effectively proclaiming to hell with all that, he’s going to stand by his psychological essentialism and it’s all the others’s fault for giving him the opportunity to do so
It looks to me like he’s just proclaimed that come hell or high water he’s going to continue to attack any libertarians here from his essentialist perspective. Well, to hell with that. It’s all too unpleasant. That’s why the other libertarian commenter left, and that’s why I’m reluctantly going to temporarily excuse myself. I don’t doubt that Dave’s going to do a good job of putting a stop to the more overtly hostile comments that sometimes occur, but I don’t think there’s much he can do about stopping people from ruining discussions by insisting on stereotyping folks.
Adieu. Feel free to visit me at my place, if for no other reason than just to say hi. Somebody please drop me a line sometime if that commenter changes his ways. That’s assuming there’s enough libertarians left around here that you can tell whether he’s stereotyping them or not.
Love most of you, and still plan to meet some of you at Leaguefest.Report
This saddens me greatly.Report
Yeah, me too.Report
And me. I hope very much that “temporarily” is a short time.Report
Hanley, you restless soul, if you’re gonna let this website go
to the liberalsbecause people are all too human, then … well … where’s the hope for libertarianism?Alsotoo, who am I gonna argue with? Whatthehell?Report
Dude, this is genuinely distressing. I wrote this in large part because of the way you in particular have been treated, because it was clear to me that people were bringing ideas about you, based on your identification as a libertarian, that weren’t fair to you, because even if they might apply to some libertarians (I’m not saying they do, but even if they did), your libertarianism is sufficiently idiosyncratic as to make generalizations difficult in either direction (from the label to you or you to the label). Plus, a particular commenter seems to react to you like sulfur in water, and I find that increasingly frustrating. I hope you come back soon.Report
why not just ignore him?Report
Works for me. I have a mental killfile about ten people long.Report
This would be my recommendation. My list is very, very small, but there are a couple of people that I am undoubtedly better off ignoring (though I will still occasionally comment when I agree and I feel that they, or the point they are making, needs/deserves additional support – it’s that whole Southern “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” thing).Report
I thought the southern thing was to say something evil while making it sound like you were saying something nice. maybe that’s just the women.Report
Glyph,
I have a small list of commenters who I almost always ignore, although sometimes it’s hard.Report
Someone with the time and knowledge should write a greasemonkey script to let us filter out selected commenters, so we can each have our own private LoOG.Report
Kids…
I get it, but stuff like this never ends well.
Just saying. Not singling anyone out.Report
I think it’s okay until we start naming names. Honestly, certain people avoiding certain other people is for the best.Report
I’d rather we name names, actually, so long as that doesn’t start a fight. it will save people writing comments that’ll never get responded to.Report
I saw what you did there.Report
Self-selection is the way to go with that.Report
I don’t (usually) name names because I don’t want to give offense where giving offense is unnecessary. And there’s a reciprocity thing going….if I name names, maybe somebody will name me!
I do think there’s a point where dancing around the issue, with a wink and a nod and “you know who I mean” is just the same as naming names and perhaps more dishonest. So perhaps I’m guilty of that.Report
A “killfile”? I know that’s a metaphor or whatever, but yikes. Is that really a necessary term?Report
It’s an actual technical term, and it’s older than dirt.Report
Fixed link. It describes rules for killing messages (i.e., not displaying them in the newsreader program), not for killing people.Report
Great.Report
Thanks, Brandon. Don’t know what happened there.Report
No article there.
But however old it is, so what?Report
A killfile is a real thing, from Usenet. It’s a file that contains rules describing posts you don’t want to see, e.g. anything cross-posted to more than three groups, which is likely to be spam or trolling.Report
That’s really funny. The first version of that comment gave another example of a killfile rule, anything from “name of a certain ex-commenter here who likes Bach and Procul Harum”. It disappeared, so his name must be in this site’s killfile.Report
If you fire up the back end and search for He Who Must Not Be Named, you’ll see that there’s three comments in limbo with his name in ’em.Report
This will be a problem if we ever do a symposium on German philosophers.Report
Well that sucks. Gonna miss ya, dude. I might have to convert just so the place doesn’t get boring.Report
Some advice from me, welcome or not:
On Megan McArdle’s Atlantic blog, frequent commenter Rob Lyman did a guest post on effective commenting, and his first point has stuck with me — when you get into a blog discussion, you’re not just talking to the other guy, you’re talking to the audience.
BlaiseP is never going to be convinced of anything — he’s demonstrated that he’s all about preaching, not listening. The only reason to mix it up with him is to get your point across to the other readers (or perhaps just to goad him for your own amusement, if that’s the sort of thing you like — but apparently it’s not). As was made apparent from the comments on Pat’s recent post, people are listening and learning, even when (perhaps especially when) they’re not actively involved in the conversation.
All that to say, don’t let BlaiseP or other hard-headed commenters drive you off — ignore them or use them, but accept that not every mind can be changed.Report
I’m sorry to see you go James.Report
This is an end to the League’s comment sections as it was.
I hope you reconsider.Report
I’m sorry to see you go, too. Your comments are ones I look forward to, even if there on one of the posts that I (perhaps arbitrarily) consider otherwise “boring.”Report
I’ve definitely been aware that this problem has plagued so many of our indentificational and definitional disputes (and also other discussions where people characterize tendencies of thought by political label for their own reasons) here all along, but it’s really nice to have it laid out so explicitly with, like, research to support it ‘n stuff. Great job, Chris!Report
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for the compliments on the post. I’ve been commenting here for what? Three years, I think, and this is the first time I’ve really thought about submitting a guest post. The positive feedback has encouraged me to do so again sometime around 2016.
Seriously though, thank you.Report
Oh, we’ll get you before 2016, sir.
You’ve made the mistake of taking the first hit. That’s how we get you… we’re under the damn ground.Report
oh great….people are already planning posts for the next prez election.Report
By the way, Chris, did you pick “beryllium” because it’s a very deadly poison?Report
Heh… no. My thought process went like this, “Elements are the best example of natural kinds with something close to if not precisely an essence, so let’s go with an element. OK, hydrogen? Nope, used that in the post. Helium? Makes people talk funny. Lithium? Makes me think of mental illness. Beryllium!” I was too lazy too keep going through the periodic table. I actually considered using Roentgenium, but thought that might be a little bit too obscure.Report
I thought it was because beryllium is lightweight.Report
This is mostly for Blaise: In order to get us away from the controversial example of libertarians, let’s consider a wholly uncontroversial group to which I belong: atheists.
Now, my parents are deeply religious Evangelical Christians. They haven’t known many admitted atheists in their lives lived almost entirely right near the buckle of the Bible Belt, so they’ve gotten their ideas about what atheists are from preachers and the snake-oil salesman who’ve taken it upon themselves to be the global spokespeople (almost all spokesmen, but that’s a conversation for another day) of atheism, complete with their own t-shirts and an unclever symbol. In fact, their preacher has made a fair amount of money countering these self-proclaimed spokespeople, only reinforcing my parents’ representation of what an atheist is. The problem? I’m not that sort of atheist, or anything close to it.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that my parents are deeply concerned about my not being saved. My eternal soul is in great peril for them, so they feel it is their duty as parents and as Christians, to try to bring me back in the fold. This entails endless discussions with me about my atheism, but because my atheism doesn’t line up with their expectations, because their representation of atheism doesn’t include my kind of atheism, this discussions are incredibly frustrating both for them and for me. I tell them I think X, and they respond by asking me, “Why are you so set on believing ~X?!” I’ve considered calling myself something else, not agnostic (that will just confuse them further), but maybe pantheist or something, so that I will step outside of their existing concepts and be able to create an entirely new representation built on what I actually believe.
This is precisely the sort of thing I’m talking about in the post.Report
Chris – nice post.
I’ve considered calling myself something else, not agnostic (that will just confuse them further), but maybe pantheist or something, so that I will step outside of their existing concepts and be able to create an entirely new representation built on what I actually believe.
I am intrigued by this (my soul is also seen as being in eternal peril by my folks, though I think “agnostic” is a fair-enough descriptor of where I’m at.) I’d love to hear more about this sometime.Report
Perhaps an ignostic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism
Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts.Report
Glyph, maybe that will be the topic of the guest post I submit in ’16. 😉Report
If agnostic is where you’re at, then paganism is probably best as a base.
Why limit yourself to disbelieving in only the One God when you could disbelieve in entire pantheons?
I don’t think most agnostics are living up to their true agnostic potential.Report
Agnostic Underachievers Unite!
The problem is, an hour or two on the internet each day pretty much uses up my store of disbelief. I disbelieve more things before breakfast than most people believe all day.Report
Being a natural contrarian (I can say this without worrying about James commenting), I refuse to classify my political beliefs as I believe there are far more grey areas and overlapping of ideas in individuals that what group we identify with becomes nothing less than an opportunity for others to erroneously define us. This makes me crazy and I found it so disappointing that in a post attempting to explain how problematic such labeling is for communication, it was quickly ignored.
I would like to take what Chris started and challenge commenters here at the League (for a while at least) to just stop using the terms liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian etc. to describe themselves or others as the guiding force for how one thinks and instead, read the thought independently. Consider ideas with an open mind, it seems silly to believe that the commenters views are derived from being a “liberal” or “conservative” anyway. It should not matter what someone labels himself, what matters is what they are saying on a particular topic.
I am more interested in finding the similarities than in dwelling on perceived differences and harping on them and making that an excuse to dismiss those with whom we disagree.Report
+A bunch.
Now, as the post implies, we’re going to fail that challenge, because our minds work the way they work. We, our conscious minds, are just the monkeys on the backs of the tiger, and the tiger, our cognitive unconscious, is running the show (I stole that metaphor from a NYT article on the cognitive unconscious). Labels and the concepts they conjure are going to guide our thinking, but we can do our best to alter our speech, and ultimately, it will alter our thinking, because what we do deliberately, when we do it over and over again, eventually becomes what we do unconsciously. I hope people accept your challenge, not just here, but in their lives outside of this little corner of the internet, for that reason.Report
I think taking the step to drop the labeling takes away the ability to automatically jump there in discourse. It may not take away the fact that those perceptions remain, but it gives pause , it requires thinking outside of those terms and sometimes that is all that is needed to help with civility.Report
Yes, I think you’re exactly right, and that’s a good way of putting it.Report
This is a good idea Johanna.
I call myself a libertarian because it’s the best one-word description of my beliefs, not because I conform to some platonic ideal of libertarianism.Report
This is pretty much what I do.
It helps that every other week somebody on some side thinks I’m on some side other than their side, and it’s always a different side.Report
Chris, Great Post! More please. Comment section kinda went downhill and ended on a down note for me, but not your fault, that’s for sure.
It’s bad enough when we do it to other people. What I don’t understand is when people do this to themselves. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say something like, “I’m a [conservative/libertarian/liberal], so believe X.” Like they choose the label to be one of the cool kids and then force their own belief system to accommodate.
Personally, when the subject comes up, I’ll self-identify as liberal or maybe liberal-ish because that’s the label that most closely matches my beliefs. But it’s only a rough match and I hold some distinctly libertarian and conservative beliefs as well. So it really annoys me when someone insists that I must believe “X” when it’s just not true. (Of course, that also doesn’t mean I subscribe to exactly not-“X”, either.)
Anyway, I’m rambling at this point. Good job and keep it up.Report
I didn’t really get into this, but I’m afraid that these labels, because they define the space of discourse, result in a shrinking of that space so that we’re all going to tend to see ourselves, and talk about ourselves, and ultimately act as though we exist in the space between liberal and conservative, say. It is very difficult for even the smartest of us to step outside the space of ideas that make up our experience even a little bit, and when that space of ideas is continually shrunk, stepping outside of them a little, even more than a little, isn’t going very far.Report
I’ve often thought Essentialism remains one of the most underrated problems humanity faces. I see it strongly in arguments over racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Essentialism is at the root of all of these, and is the reason why things like racism is never resolved by “having a talk about race”. Put another way, if I waved a magic wand that removed everyone’s capability of visually distinguishing adapted physical characteristics of various human populations (such as skin pigmentation) we would still have country clubs and ghettos. In some cases, derogatory terms would even remain unchanged – like “wetback”, for instance – since many of the characteristics some would find objectionable – foreigner, different language, different culture – would remain. Essentialism is the many-headed Hydra; you cut off the the racism head, and age-ism and class-ism spring up in it’s place.
But, as it pertains to LoOG, I sometimes wonder if the problem is a little more complex than just tossing essentialist label at one another. I’m not really sure what the consensus is around here about Jonathan’s Haidt’s Moral Foundation Theory, but I see it as a step in the right direction in determining the psychological intuitions that lead certain people to gravitate towards certain political ideologies, even if (I can imagine) 10 or 20 years from now the particulars of Haidt’s model will be seen as “crude” or “way off the mark”. It did mark a change in me, where I now longer say to myself “He’s talking about protecting the 2nd Amendment, therefore, he’s a Conservative”, but instead think “He might be a Conservative, but then again he might just really like guns, or maybe he doesn’t give a crap about guns, but just wants all the Bill of Rights amendments to remain unmolested”.
So, I pat myself on the back for taking a more nuanced, un-essentialist view, but then I meet another man, a recent immigrant to this country. His politics seem inscrutable, due largely to the fact he is unfamiliar with American politics and various ways American culture intersects with it. “What does it mean, this ‘tree hugger’?” or “What do they mean by ‘redneck’?”, and so on. I observe that he rarely ventures beyond his neighborhood, and mostly associates with members of his large, extended family, often preferring to converse in his native tongue. He decorates his apartment with furnishings and artwork that reflect the culture of the country he left. He seems leery of American women, and once asked “How could you let your women walk the streets alone?”.
And then slowly, my seemingly philosophically enlightened brain rebels – “Dammit Jason M., this guy may well end up voting Democrat for the rest of his life, but you KNOW he’s really a conservative.”
I try to comfort myself by noting my brain at least had the good sense to use small “c” conservative, but let’s face it: I’ve just shifted from one level of essentialism to another. And so here, at LoOG, I often wonder if part of the problem isn’t just specific disagreement with policies and ideologies amongst the three camps here, but also underlying assumptions about the types of of people who associate with this or that camp. LoOG more often speaks to each other about policy, ideology, and philosophy, but only occasionally about each other’s psyche. That’s probably to be expected, since playing amateur shrink in order to dig into each other’s skulls is very personal, and fraught with peril.
Now I’m just rambling, but hopefully someone can take this mess and make something out of it.Report
There are a lot of dishonest categories out there. Honest people, people who think about this stuff a *LOT*, do what they can to overcome the dishonest categories out there… and one of the really effective ways to do that is to create honest categories that are smaller, more precise, and more helpful… even if only to oneself.
It’s not necessarily the categorization that is the problem. (I, Jaybird, am a “Libertarian”, after all.) It’s the uselessness of the currently fashionable categories.
Hell, we here at the LoOG are *STILL* surprised by each other.
And to deal with that by refining, redefining, and attempting to make our definitions of our categories even better is an achievable goal in response to this constant influx of new information.
I reckon right around the time we get stuff juuuuust right, we’ll have a cultural earthquake and we’ll have to start over.Report
Jason M,
In the progress post, Pat asked about any examples of: “Hey, that gal said right there something that I’ve been trying to articulate for years and holy smoke that’s the idea that’s been in my head all this time!!”
I had no examples that came to mind, but you just supplied one. Outstanding comment.Report
This is an excellent post Chris.Report
Thanks, James.Report
Great post.
I sort of disagree with some of the finer points you make about predicates and the properties they putatively point out. But that doesn’t matter here.
More generally, I think you have a good point about statements that we make using social and political sortal terms like: vegetarian, theist, Muslim, Asian, liberal, libertarian, etc. General statements involving these social sortal terms are often misleading (creating more heat than light) even if technically true in some way, e.g. “Muslims are anti-women” or “Blacks are criminals.” By not distinguishing “some Muslims” or “some blacks” from “all Muslims” or “all blacks” or “many” or “more than fifty percent”, we allow a horrible lack of clarity amd stupidity into our language and thus our thinking. S
However, I sort of disagree with you, I think, about the sortal terms of political philosophy, like “libertarian.” I think we should be much more essentialist about these terms than we are. We should aim at making these terms as precise as possible by substituting more specific terms in their place. So maybe we should all stop using the term “libertarian” and start using more specific descriptors like “Nozickean Libertarian” or “Tomassian Libertarian” or “Libertarian-Leaning in Intuition, but Unsure about Principles.” We could then properly define terms like “libertarian” as being someone who holds at least one of the more specific views.
After all, the sortal terms of political philosophy are technical terms that are supposed to describe ideaologies, sets of normative principles (perhaps with theories about human nature, scarcity, etc. as well.) We shouldn’t let people misuse technical terms. Rather, we should require they describe how they are using terms and be very picky about whether these precise terms are being used correctly.
I’m sort of worried that your anti-essentialism will lead to a sort of catch-as-catch-can relativism. Suppose Obama calls himself a Nozickean libertarian or a libertarian of any stripe. He is wrong to do so. There are facts about who is and who isn’t a liberal or conservative apart from how people self-ascribe. That is, there are some boundaries, some vaguely drawn (we could and should make this less vague) necessary and sufficient criteria, for what counts as a liberal or a libertarian. There are things that without them you can’t be libertarian, i.e. there is an essential set of things that you need to be libertarian.
But cool post. I’ll leave it at that out of honor for Hanley, who I may jave played a part in irritating.Report
Shaz, if we’re doing political philosophy, serious philosophy, then we of course owe it to each other to delineate our concepts as clearly and as cleanly as possible, and it may turn out that labels that refer to groups are within the scope of what we’re doing. This doesn’t, I thin, entail an essentialism (I’m thinking of Witt.genstein, of course, who has been a big influence on researchers studying knowledge representation in cognitive science, who likes to talk clearly, but not essentially). However, when we’re talking about practical politics, and the ideas of individuals, they do us little good, particularly if we think those labels point to something underneath, something at the core of the individual that is common to all of the members of the group to which we assign them or they have assigned themselves, that makes them a member of that group. Like I said, LIBERTARIAN, the concept, is a family, and it has a lot of members, including some crazy uncles but also some smart grandparents with a lot of worldly wisdom, and some smart kids who are taking things in new, perhaps heretofore unexplored directions.Report
Rather, we should require they describe how they are using terms and be very picky about whether these precise terms are being used correctly.
I disagree. I would contend that in political discussions, there really is no precise definition of what constitutes being liberal or libertarian as it relates to anything but a generalized viewpoint. When someone is asked for what the group believes, they can only describe it from their own perceptions not for others. I would argue that trying to give precise descriptions of what Liberal is from one person excludes more people from being part of what is being described and merely allows opponents an opportunity to make erroneous assertions of the whole group. This of course is what encourages the creation of more and more categories or factions based on differences from the larger group. It also creates unnecessary conflict when there is agreement. I loathe the “we stake claim to X good idea even though you share it too” as petty and not conducive to discourse. It really only makes it worse for communicating and this is why I think we should work to see how conversations can move forward without trying to play gotcha when someone’s ideas do mesh with what we perceive their political persuasion suggests.Report
That should end with do not mesh.Report
I would also like to add a quick point.
I have argued repeatedly that moderate forms of libertarianism collapse into a form of liberalism.
This point holds true regardless of how people, in natural language, choose to describe themsleves.
If I had evidence that whales are actually mammals, this would not necessarily imply that people should change the natural language use of calling whales “fish”, but it would imply that if people wanted to be clear and accuarate, they would use “whale” and “mammal” and “fish” more carefully and would stop calling whales “fish.”
Some of the people /whales here think they are fish/libertarians when they are actually mammal/liberals.
I won’t rehearse my argument, but if it is a good one, it is a good one regardless of anti-essentialism.Report
Chris,
Your post really helps me understand my personal, and quite visceral, reaction to the “What I don’t understand about Progressives” post. At the time I couldn’t articulate why it bothered me so much, and (I hope) my few comments there didn’t show the extent to which it bothered me. After all, I suspected that it had more to do with myself than with what Jason wrote.
And your post showed me why. I do not identify as a “progressive” (and I identify as a “liberal” only in the sense that my policies are those that tend to be supported by most liberals). Yet, my impression was that Jason would have identified me as a “progressive,” whether I liked it or not, and then proceeded to wonder aloud why I was so stupid that I didn’t understand the possibilities of investing as a way to control companies (when all the while it seemed clear to me that Jason really did “understand” and was hoping for arguments that could be shot down).
I should be clear: that was not what Jason said or intended. He was trying to address a problem that seemed to him to have a solution that many people who identify as progressives seem reluctant to endorse, and he was seeking out why that was so or what the problems were with the solution. I also don’t believe for a second that his spends his time wondering how he can write a post to upset Pierre Corneille, nor that he necessarily worries what my reaction to the post will be.
In short, I jumped to conclusions and took it personally, and the dynamic you describe seems to have been at play when it came to my thought processes.
I should say that however true a description of my thought processes your account was, it would not have justified me being uncivil to Jason on that post. I don’t believe I was rude, but if I was, it was not justified.Report