Category Archives: Rhetoric

Dog Whistling Pt 3

Posted on by
Reply
H. Bosch, Gluttony

H. Bosch, Gluttony

(This being the last of three posts “inspired” by David Brook’s column, “The Costs of Relativism“)

David Brooks is a “conservative intellectual”. He can don the trappings of post Enlightenment social science (“recurring feedback loops”) and he can write marvelous and empathic sentences such as these:

The profiles from high-school-educated America are familiar but horrific….The first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy. We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

David Brooks, being human, makes careful judgements about how to compose a column for his own purposes. His misdirection is artful. He doesn’t want to define “relativism”; he merely replaces it with “non-judgmental”. (In my previous post, I argued that human “non-judgementalism” is an oxymoron; that being without judgement is not a human possibility.) Brooks wants to leave the concept vague and then taint it by associating it with bad outcomes, despair and abuse. He wants the word “relativism” to unsettle us.

Brooks knows that he cannot explain (in 800 words) how “R” (relativism) caused “P” (poor people’s poor behavior) but by being vague he allows his readers to fill in the causal blanks. He knows he cannot forge that causal link and he knows that he doesn’t need to because he is blowing the dog whistle of a specific kind of judgementalism. Hear the whistle blow:

Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Republicans think poor people are to blame for their own poverty (their bad behavior is just another symptom of their insufficiency). Republicans do not believe in “socio-economic” forces*. They only believe in individual moral agency (or the lack thereof). When Republicans hear an expression like “structural poverty”, they also hear an excuse being offered. When Republicans hear “over 400 years of institutional racism”, they also hear responsibility being lifted from an immoral, undeserving agent. This is the politics of sin wherein true believers, without reflection, project their own private internal truths onto others. They feel that what is true for themselves must be true for others. In this “world view”, causality is not a problem. Sins are certain and their effects inevitable.

It is to this stance of self-certainty that David Brooks panders. None of us are without judgement but we are all free to adopt a stance toward our own judgements. The person with relativist inclinations will make an effort to periodically doubt her own certainties, employ critical thinking and engage her empathy in an effort to improve her understanding of other people. The audience to whom David Brooks is whistling seeks the reassuring certitude of fundamental grounds. David Brooks is often labeled a “conservative intellectual”. This label, in his case, is also an oxymoron because you cannot exercise your intellect by staying in one certain place. David Brooks and his fans are too timid to tolerate the critical examination of their own cherished and parochial judgements.

*Republicans have decided to believe in the “market” because they have mythologized it; they have anthropomorphized and then deified the “market” by endowing it first with sentience and agency and then, ironically enough, with transcendent judgement.

Dog Whistle, Part 2

Posted on by

These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Earlier this month, David Brooks wrote a column entitled “The Cost of Relativism”. Clearly, in his view, relativism is a dirty word. He accuses “relativism” of causing poverty but he only defines it as “nonjudgementalism”. Where does one find this “nonjudgementalism”? Who among us is non-judgemental? I would argue that all human beings who can function in their own society are judgmental. Each of us can function only when we can judge what behavior is “right” and what behavior is “wrong” for the kind of people “we” believe we are.

Let’s take for an example a stranger who appears at our front door. This situation calls for all kinds of “judgementalism”. Our visitor is a youngish, white male wearing a porkpie hat and pegged jeans. We have never seen him before, he is a perfect stranger.

First of all, we really don’t want to be surprised by the coming interaction, so we draw on the store of knowledge we have acquired directly about what “we” are like and what “they” (strangers) can be like. We then tap into our store of assumptions and feelings about strangers that we have learned from parents and peers. We need to judge whether our visitor is one of “us”. Based on what we can see, we judge that this stranger on our doorstep is probably American, probably talks like an American and probably will behave as most Americans do in this Seattle neighborhood of ours. We make some preliminary judgements based on gender and race. Because of his hat and garb, we sort through what we know and/or believe about “hipsters”. We whittle our general notion of potential male behavior down to this most specific example. We then begin to choose the “right” behavior that we judge this perfectly pegged stranger might be expecting from us.

New and even more complicated judgements are required if we are to enter into a closer relationship with this hipster. What if, for example, he is answering an ad we have placed for a business partner. Why is he is interested in our business? What are his motives? How might his motives be related to his own personal history, where he grew up and how he grew up? This perfect stranger could become the perfect business partner so perhaps we ought to suspend judgement on his slightly off-putting headdress. We don’t want to be hasty; we want to take his measure and figure out “where he is coming from”. Part of learning how to behave is learning how to juggle our judgements, when to suspend them, when to modify them and when to act on them.

This kind of mundane, daily behavior is simply the “cultural relativism” of anthropology writ small.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment celebrated the ability of human beings to think for themselves. Once unleashed, the power of critical thinking dissolved our devotion to a single “true” church and its pre-ordained world. The Enlightenment (in all its philosophical diversity) allowed us to harness hope to our own critical thinking. That is: If we can think, we can also imagine a better reality than the one we inhabit. Anthropology began as a quest to find out if an “other” might, in fact, inhabit a better world or at least give us some pointers about other ways to be human. Cultural relativism as a stance articulated by Western anthropologists suggests (simply) that in order to understand the “other” we need to suspend some of our judgements and try to understand another culture in its own terms. How do these “others” configure their environment? Order their social lives? What are their motives for why they act so differently? What does it mean to them to be “human”? Adopting this stance entails trying to experience human cultural diversity without (insofar as possible) jumping to conclusions based on our own parochial judgements. Why in hell is he wearing that porkpie hat?

This “relativism” I have described is a stance which allows us to hold our judgements lightly and to get over ourselves just enough to unleash the imaginative ability required to see strange people (the “others”) as fellow sufferers; as humans like us.

Ultimately, it is this basic imaginative ability that threatens David Brooks and the people to whom he is whistling. More to come.

David Brooks Blows the Dog Whistle

Posted on by
1

I guess I should thank David Brooks for providing the kick start I needed to start posting again. Click here to link to his latest exercise in vapidity, “The Cost of Relativism”. Click here to enjoy Charlie Pierce’s take down.

Not to improve on Pierce’s response but I am compelled to amplify .

I will give David Brooks credit that he has a view of the poor that has at least caught up to the nineteenth century. Prior to the Enlightenment, kings and paupers occupied the social ranks where God put them. After the French revolution, it started to occur to Europeans that poverty was possibly a political and economic outcome. This dawning awareness did not entirely displace God and morality. There remained lingering questions as to whether the poor “deserved” their condition because of private moral flaws (laziness or improvidence). Brooks does perceive that there is a societal problem:

We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

What has caused these deplorable feed back loops? In Brook’s update of nineteenth century thought, poor people now inhabit communities without “norms”. They are still morally lacking (and therefore still somewhat complicit in their own state of poverty) but now, they are also victims. The norms they need to rise above their current condition have been “destroyed” by an outside force:

These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

This is dog whistle punditry. Just as the terms “law and order” and “states rights” are smoke signals to fearful white Republicans, Brook’s “relativism” is meant to fall nicely into the ears of the true believer.

Who are the vectors of this plague? and, what, exactly, is “non-judgementalism”?

The Avatar of Reason (wherein I presume to chide Richard Dawkins)

Posted on by
1
The Little Owl, A. Durer

The Little Owl, A. Durer

ISIS is beheading Yezidis, Bokul Harum is kidnapping schoolgirls and white Americans are screaming at busloads of children. Most people would agree that these are all extreme behaviors which are, at the very least, immoral. These perpetrators are all zombies; they no longer view their victims as thinking, feeling moral entities. How did they get that way? Could I ever act that way? In earlier posts about climate change I wrote that what we think we “know” about climate change is inextricably bound up with the belief systems we hold profoundly dear. If the cognitive balance between knowing and believing is fluctuant, what does this suggest about the relationship between knowledge and morality?

What do we need to “know” (about ourselves and the world) in order to feel like we are moral entities? We need to know that morality is not character; it is not just how we happen to BE, it is how we think and decide to act. The fundamental moral question -“What should I do?“- makes no sense without our perception that we have a choice between one action and another. Morality then is an activity in which we engage. We think of ourselves as beings to whom moral concepts apply and and we see ourselves as accountable. We create ourselves as moral beings by making choices and acting on those choices and we interact with others as if they are also self directed agents. While I believe that life is a moral venture, for me, the really interesting questions begin when I ask myself, at what level DO I GET TO DECIDE?

Richard Dawkins recently issued some Tweets about rape and Palestine that elicited some strong reactions. His defense in the Huffington Post is simple. His tweets were not interpreted logically. He goes on to decry that

some of us may be erecting taboo zones, where emotion is king and where reason is not admitted; where reason, in some cases, is actively intimidated and dare not show its face. And I regret this. We get enough of that from the religious faithful.

According to Dawkins, a true moral philosopher with “a love of reason” will not fear to tread where reason leads. Dawkins makes a lovely logical point (“If I say A is worse than B, I am NOT endorsing B“) but his larger issue is the unwillingness of some people to endure some discomfort in the pursuit of reasoned discourse. Clearly, Dawkins sees reason as a counterpoise to emotion (and by extension a counterpoise to “the religious faithful”). Reason is the exalted tool that will lead us to “truth”; a notion right out of the Enlightenment. Noting that Dawkins’ immediate goals in this instance are polemical, it should be pointed out that the concept of reason has changed somewhat since the Enlightenment.

Twentieth century history and anthropology teach us that the contingent facts of our race, gender, class and ethnicity predetermine much of who we are. We are not radically free (e.g., I am a white, North American middle class male. I cannot become an Ibo tribeswoman). In a post appropriately titled, “How Politics Makes Us Stupid”, Ezra Klein cites research that indicates that “individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Behavioral economics is teaching us that “the rational man” of neoclassical economics is a chimera (at best). Reasonable people make economic decisions on the basis of rules of thumb, stereotypes and cultural canards. Vagaries of affect are inextricably bound up in our assessments of risk and how we value time (profit now versus profit later). Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that we all have “implicit biases” that guide our judgements but of which we are not consciously aware. Attachment theory tells us (with increasing support from neuroscience) that the earliest dyadic exchanges between mother and infant through gaze and touch will shape the rest of our psychic and social lives in primal, unconscious ways. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that emotions are not opposed to reason. Emotions are not unruly beasts to be saddled by reason but are in fact the substrate of all cognition.

Another small indicator that reason (logic and critical thinking) is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg may be seen in how we attribute causation to human behavior. We all tend to attribute the genesis of human behavior either to “character” or as a response to the external world. The interesting fact is that we are far more likely to see other people’s behavior as caused by character whereas we will more likely view our own behavior as being prompted by the outside world. We impute causation to disposition because 1) we can’t necessarily see the environmental factors prompting some one else’s behaviors and 2) (more importantly) not one of us likes to caricature ourselves as a thin set of statistically likely responses.(I am not hopping about and yelling because I am needy and want attention, I have been stung by a bee.) We experience our own self as a “neutral” locus of awareness (simply, “who we are”) that reacts to our environment. So, when we face moral choices in our interactions with others are we really understanding their motivations?

Sullied as it is by all these “un-reasonable” forces, what role is left for reason in morality? Does any one of us ever make a rational decision about what we ought to do?

To be truly moral (and to be truly reasonable) requires more activity than simply deciding upon a choice. To be truly moral we need to hold a mirror to ourselves, to bring to awareness the patterns of behavior to which we are prone and look for the warp of our affect even when we are following a weft of reason. To be truly moral means recognizing that the other free agents with whom we interact are also beings whose ability to engage in reasoned discourse is as circumscribed as our own. Professor Dawkins is absolutely right in placing enormous importance on reasoned discourse because it is only through discourse with others that we occasionally can see ourselves from the outside. Dr. Dawkins might have more productive conversations with the “religious faithful” if he thought more about thinking itself.

Even if reason is an infected tool, it is the only scalpel we have available to us.

An American Loon

Posted on by
Reply

We all know something about climate change (unless we live under a rock with no reception ). Since I wrote my first posts, a Guardian poll came out indicating that most americans do believe in climate change (even in Red States). Apparently, some pundits and politicians haven’t caught up with mainstream Oklahoma.

If we believe in climate change (and believe it might be fixed or mitigated), we all recognize -explicitly or tacitly – that our moral calculus about how we live our lives will have to change. George Will has recently trotted out a shift in his denialist stance. “Yes”, he says, the climate is changing because climate is naturally capricious and is “always changing”. The question is, then, how “much wealth we will have to forego” to mitigate the effects of climate change. We can call George Will an “anti-climate science loon” as Jonathan Chait does. We can assign him to the scrapheap of zombies. Or we can recognize that Will is mining the rich vein of American distrust of government.

In his great book, “A Necessary Evil” Gary Wills points out that Americans’ view of government oscillates between pairs of opposing values: provincial/cosmopolitan, amateur/expert, spontaneous/authoritative, traditional/instrumental, populist/elite, organic/mechanical, religious/secular and participatory/regulatory. The second of the two terms is generally viewed as a threat to the first term except when we want something out of government. George Will as a Republican supporter of business appreciates the efficient rule of law that ensures the mechanics of business get done in the widest cosmopolitan arenas. But as Garry Wills notes, business supporters do not hesitate to attach business to other values as they inveigh against regulation because it stifles organic innovation. These supporters like to talk about business “as if it is local and provincial when it is in fact cosmopolitan and will in fact go wherever profits take it”.

Take a good look at those pairs of opposing values. If we, as a polity are going to do anything to mitigate climate change, it will require our government to rely on all those values which are somehow threatening. Scientists and elite technocratic experts from the world over will be the primary architects of plans that will require a central government to be regulatory, mechanical, authoritative and instrumental. But what if the motivation to unleash government to do what it is good at doing is more religious (moral) than it is secular?

This “what if” is behind George Will’s furious rearguard action. By denying any scientific validity to the anthropogenic roots of climate change, he hopes to deny science the moral high ground in a debate that he feels should be restricted to the consideration of the morality of reducing his potential wealth. Any proposed responses to climate change are simply clever liberal ruses to pick his pocket.

George Will is not a zombie or a loon but he is an authentically fearful, provincial and amateur American climate scientist.

Dick Cheney…Zombie?

Posted on by
Reply

Image Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image Courtesy of
L.J. Whitsitt

If you Google Dick Cheney zombie, you shall be rewarded. For some people, he mines the polysemy of the zombie like no one else; emotionless, with his voice as uninflected as his thinking, he advances relentlessly propelled by some other (truly) dead person’s heart. Watching Cheney, I appreciate the points of zombie resemblance but I don’t feel the fear because it reminds me of something we have all experienced; discussing politics with the guy whose gaze disconnects as he stops listening in order to excavate a cached response. Your argument is simply a launchpad for his own prepackaged sound bites. The singularity of your thought is dead to him. You think, “there is no talking to this person”. While this is a drive-by zombie moment, you have no fear. Individual zombies even as fleshed out as Dick Cheney are not fear inducing. We can run circles around individual zombies. They cannot recognize us or appreciate us or predict us because they are not connected to us (and have not tried to connect with us).

Zombies are frightening because they are an onslaught. They kill by overwhelming.

The zombies I fear are aggregated for me daily by my web sites of choice. I personally fear the the inexorable advance of a cult of belligerently insular white people who fear change and who want to perfect the world by petrifying it. I can feel inundated by foolish dehumanizing utterances and I can imagine that millions of my fellow citizens agree with such statements. Is it such a huge leap to also imagine that those millions are coming for me next?

Conversely, Fox viewers must feel the inexorable advance of hordes of smug, condescending, Prius driving liberals who, adrift in relativism, look down their noses at traditional values and place too much trust in the government.

It is a most common fallacy to assume that what is true for one member of a class is true for all. Congressman King thinks Hispanic immigrants have calves like canteloupes from humping bales of grass across the border. King is a Republican. Therefore all Republicans believe the same thing about Hispanic immigrants . We can spot this fallacy instantly when it applies to a group of which we are a member. Bernie Madoff is a con man and a thief. Bernie Madoff is an American. Therefore all Americans are con men and thieves.

Unfortunately, we humans are most prone to this fallacy when we are marking the moral distinctions between ourselves and the other; between those that think like us and those who do not; between our tribe and the other tribe. The liberal tribe (zombies to the right) and the conservative tribe (zombies to the left) have in common this easy human readiness to see in an “other” group, a repository of all that is to be scorned and feared.

If we don’t think clearly and if we don’t grant individuals who disagree with us their subjectivity, we consign them…in our false thinking and fearful imagination…to the vast, looming hordes of the undead.

Killing Zombies

Posted on by
1
Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

The guilty pleasure we take in a zombie flick is first that they scare us and then they get what they deserve. We tell ourselves, “they are not human”. Cool, open season! Let’s sit back and enjoy how gaudily can we disarticulate them. What the undead do to us normals is horrifying and disgusting, what they get in return is our most lethal creativity.(Jule’s comment two posts ago nicely limns the phenomenology of the zombie flick.)

A related guilty pleasure is political invective. During the frustrating Bush #43 years, I felt almost suffocated by the rhetorical fog (“Patriot Act”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”,”the Axis of Evil”, “trickle down economics”, “enhanced interrogation). Trenchant criticisim spiked with invective was emotionally and intellectually liberating. Bloggers like the Rude Pundit debased an already debased political language and pointed it in the other direction. The invective of the liberal blogosphere was and continues to be particularly creative in describing the rigid right wing: ,”slack jawed yokels”, “shoutycrackers”, “half-mad dingbats”, “wingnut wahabis” and “skeevy old white people with a thick shell of nutzoid shellac” (to list a few exemplary epithets). In a public Facebook post, I myself once described Republicans as “dim-witted gibbons”.

I apologize for that remark. With that remark I became a zombie; so much a disciple of my own certain beliefs that I could turn all who disagreed with me into Objects of my scorn.

I am not being a scold: political invective can still occasionally amuse me and invigorate my outrage. I do not believe that civility in discourse is a trumping issue: where would African Americans be today if they put civility in discourse above speaking the truth to power? I am making a smaller point as a reminder to myself: you cannot hope to fully understand another’s subjectivity if you do not grant them their subjectivity.

Pope Francis on Zombies

Posted on by
Reply

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Pope Francis talks about zombies:

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Francis added. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

To be a disciple of a rigid ideology is to be infected with a “serious illness” which frightens other people.

Zombies and the Moral Universe

Posted on by
3

In my last post I ended up talking about invective. I will wend my way back to invective. Stay with me.

We live with zombies. Zombies are the betes noire of our times because they are a lurching confusion of categories; zombies are neither natural or human but they partake of the qualities of both.

Nature is impersonal. When Natural disasters strike (earthquakes,tornadoes, flash floods), they affect good people and bad people. Nobody “gets what they deserve” because Nature makes no moral distinctions. Nature simply and implacably does what it must do.

Zombies were human once. They don’t have feelings, they do not communicate, they are ugly and they are a contagion. Short of eating us tartare, they can also infect us with their corruption. We are are only a bite away from becoming mindless flesheaters ourselves. But what makes them truly frightening is that zombies do not see us “normals” as subjects; as thinking, feeling moral entities that deserve to live. We are merely edible objects and they are insatiable and implacable.

Zombies, although quasi-human in appearance, no longer live in our moral human universe. The foundational precept of human morality (tip of the hat to Immanuel Kant) is that we must treat other people as subjects not as objects. Subjects think and feel. Although we humans are subsumed (indifferently) by the same Laws of Nature that rule all creatures, we are also naturally endowed with the ability to think and create the moral universe in which we live. We take for granted that people will stop at stoplights; that we will not be subjected to random assaults by strangers. We assume that other people are going about their business based on ideas in their heads and will generally treat us as they expect to be treated (exceptions prove the rule).

Terrorists who set off bombs and kill innocent people are also zombies. They treat other humans as objects; as means to their religious/political ends. They have demonized or dehumanized those who do not think exactly as they do. In a very real sense, They are not killing people like themselves. How do people get like that? When in the course of his usual fulminations, Rush Limbaugh calls a Georgetown University co-ed a “whore” because she disagrees with him, most people recognize that strong beliefs have taken someone “over the line”.

When political discourse turns to invective, we become zombies.

What’s the point?

Posted on by
Reply

Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

When the topic of climate change comes up, I think a lot of people hear an interior monologue something like this:

(Okay, Okay, it’s true…) But Jesus Christ, what the f**k you expect me to do about it? I give money to the good guys, I recycle, I’m thinking about buying a Prius (when they get a little more HP). I don’t mind paying taxes. I can embrace the concept of putting the brakes on our national gluttony but…just how much are we talking here? I know it’s not all about me but I gotta ask… I mean I have obligations; a mortgage; kids that need private school so they won’t be (forced to be) baristas. Yeah, yeah climate change is a bad thing. Check. Text me when you’ve got a plan that other people will buy. In the meantime, it gives me a headache.

What do I feel I “know”? I feel that I know that our ancestors began changing our collective carbon footprint 125,000 years ago when they began using fire and that the archaeological record is replete with examples of localized environmental collapses. I owe this to having read books (most notably Jared Diamond). I have seen pictures of the “New Northwest Passage” but I have never been to the Arctic. I have seen “before” and “after” pictures of disappearing glaciers I have never visited. In years past I noted that coral reefs closer to large concentrations of people (as off much of the Hawaiian Islands) are dull and lifeless compared to the more remote reefs of Fiji. I read the climate statistics. I find them compelling as statistics but I honestly cannot connect them to my own bodily experiences. Weather is variable. I know that we are a species capable of fouling our own nest because I remember when the 34 square miles of Lake Washington in Seattle was a toilet bowl. I remember when the city taxed itself to clean the lake that I swim in now.

What I feel I “know” is a combination of my limited personal experience and what I have accepted from authority. People who deny climate change come to their “knowledge” the same way I do. They marry their own experience with other information they take from (some other) authority. So what’s my point with all this?

My point is that in deconstructing my own “knowledge” about climate change I can recognize that the people with whom I might disagree have arrived at their “knowledge” just as I have. They are not stupid, venal and/or immoral. If there is to be discourse on this topic, invective will not get us there.

I believe in less invective. More later.

Breath, Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Breath, Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt