The Death of Wilson: How the Academic Left Created Donald Trump
by rsbakker
People need to understand that things aren’t going to snap back into magical shape once Trump becomes archive footage. The Economist had a recent piece on all the far-right demagoguery in the past, and though they stress the impact that politicians like Goldwater have had subsequent to their electoral losses, they imply that Trump is part of a cyclical process, essentially more of the same. Perhaps this might have been the case were this anything but the internet age. For all we know, things could skid madly out of control.
Society has been fundamentally rewired. This is a simple fact. Remember Home Improvement, how Tim would screw something up, then wander into the backyard to lay his notions and problems on his neighbour Wilson, who would only ever appear as a cap over the fence line? Tim was hands on, but interpersonally incompetent, while Wilson was bookish and wise to the ways of the human heart—as well as completely obscured save for his eyes and various caps by the fence between them.
This is a fantastic metaphor for the communication of ideas before the internet and its celebrated ability to ‘bring us together.’ Before, when you had chauvinist impulses, you had to fly them by whoever was available. Pre-internet, extreme views were far more likely to be vetted by more mainstream attitudes. Simple geography combined with the limitations of analogue technology had the effect of tamping the prevalence of such views down. But now Tim wouldn’t think of hassling Wilson over the fence, not when he could do a simple Google and find whatever he needed to confirm his asinine behaviour. Our chauvinistic impulses no longer need to run any geographically constrained social gauntlet to find articulation and rationalization. No matter how mad your beliefs, evidence of their sanity is only ever a few keystrokes away.
This has to have some kind of aggregate, long-term effect–perhaps a dramatic one. The Trump phenomenon isn’t the manifestation of an old horrific contagion following the same old linear social vectors; it’s the outbreak of an old horrific contagion following new nonlinear social vectors. Trump hasn’t changed anything, save identifying and exploiting an ecological niche that was already there. No one knows what happens next. Least of all him.
What’s worse, with the collapse of geography comes the collapse of fences. Phrases like “cretinization of the masses” is simply one Google search away as well. Before, Wilson would have been snickering behind that fence, hanging with his friends and talking about his moron neighbour, who really is a nice guy, you know, but needs help to think clearly all the same. Now the fence is gone, and Tim can finally see Wilson for the condescending, self-righteous bigot he has always been.
Did I just say ‘bigot’? Surely… But this is what Trump supporters genuinely think. They think ‘liberal cultural elites’ are bigoted against them. As implausible as his arguments are, Murray is definitely tracking a real social phenomenon in Coming Apart. A good chunk of white America feels roundly put upon, attacked economically and culturally. No bonus this Christmas. No Christmas tree at school. Why should a minimum wage retail worker think they somehow immorally benefit by dint of blue eyes and pale skin? Why should they listen to some bohemian asshole who’s both morally and intellectually self-righteous? Why shouldn’t they feel aggrieved on all sides, economically and culturally disenfranchised?
Who celebrates them? Aside from Donald Trump.
You have been identified as an outgroup competitor.
Last week, Social Psychological and Personality Science published a large study conducted by William Chopik, a psychologist out of Michigan State University, showing the degree to which political views determine social affiliations: it turns out that conservatives generally don’t know Clinton supporters and liberals generally don’t know any Trump supporters. Americans seem to be spontaneously segregating along political lines.
Now I’m Canadian, which, although it certainly undermines the credibility of my observations on the Trump phenomenon in some respects, actually does have its advantages. The whole thing is curiously academic, for Canadians, watching our cousins to the south play hysterical tug-o-war with their children’s future. What’s more, even though I’m about as academically institutionalized as a human can be, I’m not an academic, and I have steadfastly resisted the tendency of the highly educated to surround themselves with people who are every bit as institutionalized—or at least smitten—by academic culture.
I belong to no tribe, at least not clearly. Because of this, I have Canadian friends who are, indeed, Trump supporters. And I’ve been whaling on them, asking questions, posing arguments, and they have been whaling back. Precisely because we are Canadian, the whole thing is theatre for us, allowing, I like to think, for a brand of honesty that rancour and defensiveness would muzzle otherwise.
When I get together with my academic friends, however, something very curious happens whenever I begin reporting these attitudes: I get interrupted. “But-but, that’s just idiotic/wrong/racist/sexist!” And that’s when I begin whaling on them, not because I don’t agree with their estimation, but because, unlike my academic confreres, I don’t hold Trump supporters responsible. I blame them, instead. Aren’t they the ‘critical thinkers’? What else did they think the ‘cretins’ would do? Magically seize upon their enlightened logic? Embrace the wisdom of those who openly call them fools?
Fact is, you’re the ones who jumped off the folk culture ship.
The Trump phenomenon falls into the wheelhouse of what has been an old concern of mine. For more than a decade now, I’ve been arguing that the social habitat of intellectual culture is collapsing, and that the persistence of the old institutional organisms is becoming more and more socially pernicious. Literature professors, visual artists, critical theorists, literary writers, cultural critics, intellectual historians and so on all continue acting and arguing as though this were the 20th century… as if they were actually solving something, instead of making matters worse.
See before, when a good slice of media flushed through bottlenecks that they mostly controlled, the academic left could afford to indulge in the same kind of ingroup delusions that afflict all humans. The reason I’m always interrupted in the course of reporting the attitudes of my Trump supporting friends is simply that, from an ingroup perspective, they do not matter.
More and more research is converging upon the notion that the origins of human cooperation lie in human enmity. Think Band of Brothers only in an evolutionary context. In the endless ‘wars before civilization’ one might expect those groups possessing members willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of their fellows would prevail in territorial conflicts against groups possessing members inclined to break and run. Morality has been cut from the hip of murder.
This thesis is supported by the radical differences in our ability to ‘think critically’ when interacting with ingroup confederates as opposed to outgroup competitors. We are all but incapable of listening, and therefore responding rationally, to those we perceive as threats. This is largely why I think literature, minimally understood as fiction that challenges assumptions, is all but dead. Ask yourself: Why is it so easy to predict that so very few Trump supporters have read Underworld? Because literary fiction caters to the likeminded, and now, thanks to the precision of the relationship between buyer and seller, it is only read by the likeminded.
But of course, whenever you make these kinds of arguments to academic liberals you are promptly identified as an outgroup competitor, and you are assumed to have some ideological or psychological defect preventing genuine critical self-appraisal. For all their rhetoric regarding ‘critical thinking,’ academic liberals are every bit as thin-skinned as Trump supporters. They too feel put upon, besieged. I gave up making this case because I realized that academic liberals would only be able to hear it coming from the lips of one of their own, and even then, only after something significant enough happened to rattle their faith in their flattering institutional assumptions. They know that institutions are self-regarding, they admit they are inevitably tarred by the same brush, but they think knowing this somehow makes them ‘self-critical’ and so less prone to ingroup dysrationalia. Like every other human on the planet, they agree with themselves in ways that flatter themselves. And they direct their communication accordingly.
I knew it was only a matter of time before something happened. Wilson was dead. My efforts to eke out a new model, to surmount cultural balkanization, motivated me to engage in ‘blog wars’ with two very different extremists on the web (both of whom would be kind enough to oblige my predictions). This experience vividly demonstrated to me how dramatically the academic left was losing the ‘culture wars.’ Conservative politicians, meanwhile, were becoming more aggressively regressive in their rhetoric, more willing to publicly espouse chauvinisms that I had assumed safely buried.
The academic left was losing the war for the hearts and minds of white America. But so long as enrollment remained steady and book sales remained strong, they remained convinced that nothing fundamental was wrong with their model of cultural engagement, even as technology assured a greater match between them and those largely approving of them. Only now, with Trump, are they beginning to realize the degree to which the technological transformation of their habitat has rendered them culturally ineffective. As George Saunders writes in “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” in The New Yorker:
Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the other only “Game of Thrones.” What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.
The first, most significant thing to realize about this passage is that it’s written by George Saunders for The New Yorker, a premier ingroup cultural authority on a premier ingroup cultural podium. On the view given here, Saunders pretty much epitomizes the dysfunction of literary culture, an academic at Syracuse University, the winner of countless literary awards (which is to say, better at impressing the likeminded than most), and, I think, clearly a genius of some description.
To provide some rudimentary context, Saunders attends a number of Trump rallies, making observations and engaging Trump supporters and protesters alike (but mostly the former) asking gentle questions, and receiving, for the most part, gentle answers. What he describes observation-wise are instances of ingroup psychology at work, individuals, complete strangers in many cases, making forceful demonstrations of ingroup solidarity and resolve. He chronicles something countless humans have witnessed over countless years, and he fears for the same reasons all those generations have feared. If he is puzzled, he is unnerved more.
He isolates two culprits in the above passage, the ‘intellectual and emotional weakening brought about by degraded public discourse,’ and more significantly, the way the contemporary media landscape has allowed Americans to ideologically insulate themselves against the possibility of doubt and negotiation. He blames, essentially, the death of Wilson.
As a paradigmatic ‘critical thinker,’ he’s careful to throw his own ‘subject position’ into mix, to frame the problem in a manner that distributes responsibility equally. It’s almost painful to read, at times, watching him walk the tightrope of hypocrisy, buffeted by gust after gust of ingroup outrage and piety, trying to exemplify the openness he mistakes for his creed, but sounding only lyrically paternalistic in the end–at least to ears not so likeminded. One can imagine the ideal New Yorker reader, pursing their lips in empathic concern, shaking their heads with wise sorrow, thinking…
But this is the question, isn’t it? What do all these aspirational gestures to openness and admissions of vague complicity mean when the thought is, inevitably, fools? Is this not the soul of bad faith? To offer up portraits of tender humanity in extremis as proof of insight and impartiality, then to end, as Saunders ends his account, suggesting that Trump has been “exploiting our recent dullness and aversion to calling stupidity stupidity, lest we seem too precious.”
Academics… averse to calling stupidity stupid? Trump taking advantage of this aversion? Lordy.
This article, as beautiful as it is, is nothing if not a small monument to being precious, to making faux self-critical gestures in the name of securing very real ingroup imperatives. We are the sensitive ones, Saunders is claiming. We are the light that lets others see. And these people are the night of American democracy.
He blames the death of Wilson and the excessive openness of his ingroup, the error of being too open, too critically minded…
Why not just say they’re jealous because he and his friends are better looking?
If Saunders were at all self-critical, anything but precious, he would be asking questions that hurt, that cut to the bone of his aggrandizing assumptions, questions that become obvious upon asking them. Why not, for instance, ask Trump supporters what they thought of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline? Well, because the chances of any of them reading any of his work aside from “CommComm” (and only then because it won the World Fantasy Award in 2010) were virtually nil.
So then why not ask why none of these people has read anything written by him or any of his friends or their friends? Well, he’s already given us a reason for that: the death of Wilson.
Okay, so Wilson is dead, effectively rendering your attempts to reach and challenge those who most need to be challenged with your fiction toothless. And so you… what? Shrug your shoulders? Continue merely entertaining those whom you find the least abrasive?
If I’m right, then what we’re witnessing is so much bigger than Trump. We are tender. We are beautiful. We are vicious. And we are capable of believing anything to secure what we perceive as our claim. What matters here is that we’ve just plugged billions of stone-age brains chiselled by hundreds of millions of years of geography into a world without any. We have tripped across our technology and now we find ourselves in crash space, a domain where the transformation of our problems has rendered our traditional solutions obsolete.
It doesn’t matter if you actually are on their side or not, whatever that might mean. What matters is that you have been identified as an outgroup competitor, and that none of the authority you think your expertise warrants will be conceded to you. All the bottlenecks that once secured your universal claims are melting away, and you need to find some other way to discharge your progressive, prosocial aspirations. Think of all the sensitive young talent sifting through your pedagogical fingers. What do you teach them? How to be wise? How to contribute to their community? Or how to play the game? How to secure the approval of those just like you—and so, how to systematically alienate them from their greater culture?
So. Much. Waste. So much beauty, wisdom, all of it aimed at nowhere… tossed, among other places, into the heap of crumpled Kleenexes called The New Yorker.
Who would have thunk it? The best way to pluck the wise from the heart of our culture was to simply afford them the means to associate almost exclusively with one another, then trust to human nature, our penchant for evolving dialects and values in isolation. The edumacated no longer have the luxury of speaking among themselves for the edification of those servile enough to listen of their own accord. The ancient imperative to actively engage, to have the courage to reach out to the unlikeminded, to write for someone else, has been thrust back upon the artist. In the days of Wilson, we could trust to argument, simply because extreme thoughts had to run a gamut of moderate souls. Not so anymore.
If not art, then argument. If not argument, then art. Invade folk culture. Glory in delighting those who make your life possible–and take pride in making them think.
Sometimes they’re the idiot and sometimes we’re the idiot–that seems to be the way this thing works. To witness so many people so tangled in instinctive chauvinisms and cartoon narratives is to witness a catastrophic failure of culture and education. This is what Trump is exploiting, not some insipid reluctance to call stupid stupid.
I was fairly bowled over a few weeks back when my neighbour told me he was getting his cousin in Florida to send him a Trump hat. I immediately asked him if he was crazy.
“Name one Donald Trump who has done right by history!” I demanded, attempting to play Wilson, albeit minus the decorum and the fence.
Shrug. Wild eyes and a genuine smile. “Then I hope he burns it down.”
“How could you mean that?”
“I dunno, brother. Can’t be any worse than this fucking shit.”
Nothing I could say could make him feel any different. He’s got the internet.
I don’t have a pepe rare enough
“The mastery of deep information environments enables ever greater degrees of shallow information capture. As our zombie natures are better understood, the more effectively our reward systems are tuned, the deeper our descent into this or that variety of fantasy becomes. This is the dystopic image of Akratic society, a civilization ever more divided between deep and shallow information consumers, between those managing the mechanisms, and those captured in some kind of semantic cheat space.”
-R. Scott Bakker
Or perhaps, as the character Maeve says on Westworld-
“Calm down, Sylvester. I know all about you. I don’t need one of those things to understand you, because it turns out I was built to read people just by looking at them, to know what they want before they do.”
Get ready folks things are really going to get interesting from here on out!
Nice one Jorge! But I’ve got a better RSB quote…
“The deeper you probed, the more troubling the story became. You had read The Sagas, and you had doubted them, thinking them too fanciful. Destroying the world? No malice could be so great. No soul could be so deranged. After all, what could be gained? Who follows paths over precipices?” (TTT 380)
😦
Jonathan Nolan is really cooking up something special with WW isn’t he?
Early reports indicate that 5 people in the Washington area actually voted FOR Trump…
That wouldn’t be you, would it Andy?
Lol! You know, I try to live by the saying, “contrarianism is all well and fun until you get a nuclear conflagration.” I imagine my grandad would have said that if he did.
Speaking of which…
http://i.imgur.com/a/HYR06
Thanks for reposting this. I watched the PBS election night coverage and now that I’ve reread this it does a better job of explaining what happened than any of the talking heads did. I don’t think any of us have any idea what a Trump presidency will be like, but now that white people have taken “their country” back I think they are now going to try to take “their world” back as well. Global business elites, the supra-national hedge fund managers, bond traders and business leaders, are personally as out of touch with the people who voted Donald Trump into office as the academic left. They may well be more able than the U. S. two party establishment to win a contest of wills with him, but I think that contest is coming. As I said in response to the original posting of this, I don’t think the things the Trump supporters are mad about are things over which national governments can exercise any real control. I could be wrong, but assuming Trump launches most or all of the trade wars he wants to wage with the world in general and China in particular, tries to revive U. S. manufacturing, tries to get Mexico to pay for the wall, accelerates the re-nationalization and re-militarization of Europe and Japan by renouncing our overseas military commitments, squanders the last bit of time we have to make progress on global warming, allows Russia to reconquer its “near abroad” and roll NATO back to its cold war membership, deports the whole undocumented population of the U. S. and still doesn’t return the country to the post-World War Two golden era he has promised, what then?
I generally agree with your assessment–I have a post coming up shortly with my own predictions on a Trump presidency. Someone was telling me yesterday that all this hand-wringing is overblown: ‘Think of how freaked everyone was when Bush became President, and everything turned out just fine.’
Except, I reminded them, that bit about invading Iraq on false pretexts, as well as the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
And Bush, for all his failings, didn’t have alt-right fascists running him, and wasn’t himself a textbook authoritarian sociopath.
Thanks for reposting this, Scott. Perhaps my friends who dismissed the post earlier will be more inclined to engage with it this time around.
Also…
Anyone follow Nihilist Arby’s on Twitter? Here’s something they tweeted about 30 minutes ago (sorry, I don’t know how to embed a tweet)
“To the half the nation that suddenly feels doomed: you’ve always been doomed The other half celebrates like they ain’t doomed too. Heh”
When there is no distinguishment between dooms, is that nihilism or learned helplessness?
Does doom consist of… being unable to turn off CNN?
I think the big thing I was hoping for out of this election was a chance to turn off CNN.
Somebody, please, give Anderson Cooper a Tums… or maybe a laxative. That perpetual peer of his is becoming downright comedic…
the academic left was never a player of note (except in their own minds/cliques) in American politics.
http://primerstories.com/4/nationalism
I wonder what Rushkoff would make of my thesis here…
I came here hoping this post was here. Thanks Mr. Bakker, as always.
You’re welcome!
When you first posted this I was more skeptical of your explanation for the Trump phenomenon than I am today. This line in particular jumped out at me “Who celebrates them? Aside from Donald Trump” (along with the paragraph directly preceding it). It is looking pretty clear that the racial divide in the vote was more important than the gender divide and the rust belt is what lost the election for Clinton. It is easy to just dismiss the Trump supporters as idiots and I think the media played into that. I read an article about a Trump supporter who believed that Michelle Obama was really a man and Obama was secretly a gay Muslim. Articles like that convinced me not to take the Trump phenomenon very seriously. Last night was a shocking wake up call though I am not sure to what…
The thing to remember about Three Pound Brain is that the operating presumption is always that EVERYONE is an idiot, including you and me, but that not all stupidity is equal in all contexts. I see Saunders, in this instance, as being a bigger idiot than the Trump supporters he ‘engaged,’ simply because he’s so convinced he’s the solution, rather than the problem. I suppose this applies to the media to a certain extent.
Watching the coverage last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about Blind Brain Theory (thanks a lot, Bakker!) and how the entirety of the election has provided some really interesting fodder. What stood out most for me was the ashen-faced talking heads who were so shocked at the unfolding outcome. They couldn’t see this result coming; they were so warded within their ingroup they literally couldn’t fathom an election result that did not conform with the expectations they created within that ingroup. “But the polling data said….the data said…!” they exclaimed again and again.
And boy, you want to talk about “a civilization ever more divided between deep and shallow information consumers, between those managing the mechanisms, and those captured in some kind of semantic cheat space,” look no further than those people who today are voicing fear that the Trump administration will be Coming to Get Them, and compare them to the people eight years ago who bought bucketloads of ammo because Obama was Coming to Get Their Guns. (Spoiler alert: it’s the same rhetoric and fear with different verbiage.) For me, the takeaway is that both political cabals are “managing the mechanisms” in virtually identical ways. And four years from now it will happen again, with blocs of voters casting ballots based on vague suspicion that the other guy Hates What is Good.
They couldn’t see this result coming
Like saying Trump will be archive footage? >:)
It’s a pretty simple schema I’m offering, and societies are supercomplex phenomena, so this is worth keeping in mind. But this is how I’ve been watching things unfold: my personal terror is that the fantasy half of the equation will become increasingly politicized.
I’m surprised no one has made this joke yet (is it a joke?), so here goes:
Can Heather and I crash with you guys while we try to get settled in Ontario?
I’m in another country already and yet I feel there is no where to go.
After the proper screening by the authorities… mi casa, su casa, Amigo!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals
I read this last night, and was both fascinated and terrified. The problem is that if you take economics out of the equation, then it becomes primarily a cultural phenom…
This means things are even worse than what I’m supposing, or that this is better seen as a technologically enabled black swan event.
I think more worse than you thought, not at all a black swan for those of us living in flyover country, just moved to Iowa but in Nebraska our governor (called snakehead by lefties) was/is a son of a hedgefundish wannabe Koch Bro with his own disinformation ‘think’tank who was endorsed in person by Sarah Palin and has spent half a million dollars to put the death penalty back on the books while campaigning on his Catholic values.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blackswan.asp
remarks about black swan events that “Taleb argued that black swan events are impossible to predict yet have catastrophic ramifications. Therefore, it is important for people to always assume a black swan event is a possibility, whatever it may be, and to plan accordingly. He also used the 2008 financial crisis and the idea of black swan events to point out if a broken system is allowed to fail, it actually strengthens it against the catastrophe of future black swan events.”
Is it possible that this catastrophic failure of the political, academic and journalistic left will strengthen them in the longer term? If that is to happen I think that essays like this one, that encourage the academy to re-engage with popular culture, will be part of that strengthening. That having been said, modern technology facilitates speaking only to the like-minded and turning inward at just the time when we all, left and right, most need to turn outward.
But on the third hand, is this a failure of the left or a failure of American political institutions as a whole? After all, the mainstream, establishment Republicans failed in the primaries in more or less the same way as Hilary failed in the general election. The libertarian, internationalist, pro-business wing of the Republican party and their National Review, Weekly Standard reading right wing intellectual friends may be as out of touch with the people who elected Trump as their opposite numbers in the pro-business, trade deal negotiating, bank bailing out wing of the Democratic party.
On the fourth hand, during the 2008 financial crisis there was a lot of talk about some banks being ‘too big to fail.’ Is the United States too big to fail? There is still a lot of debate among economists about whether protectionism enabled or prolonged the Great Depression and about whether the second world war was the deficit spending program that ultimately ended the depression. While I can imagine the economic policies Trump has espoused causing a depression, I can’t imagine great powers waging all out war against one-another in the presence of nuclear weapons. The political and economic collapse of the United States would be a black swan of spectacular proportions. How might one “plan accordingly” against such an event? Roger, I don’t think Canada is far enough away. (Insert smiley face here.)
You know your articles would be far more readable if you dropped the ad hominem attacks. Particularly where you couldn’t possibly know what others are thinking. So Saunders reaches the conclusion that the outgroup are all fools…”What do all these aspirational gestures to openness and admissions of vague complicity mean when the thought is, inevitably, fools? Is this not the soul of bad faith?” I read that article and that could be one possible interpretation but others less cynical are also available. Of course you chose the nastiest of all and threw it out as “obvious”. Principle of charity Scott. Used to be a pretty admirable academic principle but you seem to have abandoned it.
Also please explain how if we are settling into stronger ‘in groups’ that remove us from the contact with others we do not agree with that at the same time the fences have come down and that Wilson can be so obviously exposed? There is an unexplained contradiction here it seems to me.
Overall I think you have some good ideas and I’ll continue reading but you do have a problem with allowing your rhetoric to outrun your rigour.
Yeah, probably, but my rants generally write themselves. And if anyone wants to actually engage the other side, you need to have some kind of tolerance for vitriol. One of the things that endlessly dismays me about academics is their disinclination to communicate to those they endless communicate about. I’ve seen vitriol and personal attack cited as the main reason for this many, many times–the notion that the kind of argument engaged by Trump signals the need to turn away, rather than the opposite. Look at what they brewed up while your backs were turned against them!
I try to occupy the spaces between ingroups here, and part of that involves being an equal opportunity offender. I’ve never been comfortable with or confident in the strategy.
I’m not sure precisely where you see the contradiction, unless you suppose that transparency serves engagement as opposed to cherry-picking. Once someone has been identified as an outgroup competitor, then all they can generally reveal is ammunition. The research is sobering to say the least.
In a sense what you’re feeling (and objecting to) in this piece is the very cognitive mechanism driving the whole circus.
In a sense what you’re feeling (and objecting to) in this piece is the very cognitive mechanism driving the whole circus.
Trying to parse that – do you mean little to no tolerance budget for other peoples warts and bumps? I’ll take radio silence to mean it’s something kind of like that.
OK. I’ll take your caveat about transparency and cherry picking. That is possible but it wasn’t fleshed out here so it struck me as unclear.
With regards my response being proof of your theory I’m not so sure. I just find ad hominem attacks distasteful, and it wouldn’t matter which group it came from, my in group or someone else’s in group that served as my out group. That’s just a personal preference and if you’re going to argue that still makes it an in group filter then it makes a nonsense of the word ‘group’. I don’t have much to do with Trump it’s, mainly because I live over 12 thousand kilometres away, but we have right wing populists here and I am frequently in trouble from my in group for standing up for the right of those who we disagree with to at least be spoken to with common decency. That doesn’t make my reaction an in group filter, that makes me polite, as are many of those who I politically disagree with. Some of them are rude; some are polite. If you’re going to argue that every time someone disagrees with you some kind of group selection mechanism is in play you’ll end up making your theory so attenuated it’ll fade away into thin air. Like the old 60’s argument that “everything is political” to which the obvious rejoinder was “will that means that nothing is of any political value anymore.”
I also read the Saunders article and I thought he showed far more nuance and less preciousness than you gave him credit for. You just happen to be a highly polemical writer, something I suspect you picked up in the culture wars you engaged in. I agree with the general thrust of many of your arguments but I found your style pointlessly aggressive at times.
Well, one of the things I mourn about progressive academic culture (aside from it’s reliance on moralism) is it’s thin skin, the inability to engage in the rough and tumble world of the internet. The only kind of assholes academia seems equipped to handle are dead ones, so you let the living assholes chase you away from venue after venue. The insistence on what you call ‘politeness,’ ‘civility,’ and so on is a wonderful way to police ingroup borders simply because it’s superficially so damned reasonable. Braving incivility while retaining the ability to laugh it off is hard work. And our alt-right critics take ample advantage of this, I assure you. I’ve watched my old opponent, Vox Day, eat academics alive, pushing buttons and, believe it or not, making arguments, so that he would come off as both stronger and more rational. This is a guy, by the way, who believes rape is justified in certain cases, and that women should be relieved of the vote. His blog is about one hundred times more popular than my own.
Realizing this several years back is what really brought home the dimensions the problem for me. It’s partially what spurred me to tackle a radical ‘shame’ feminist for my next blog war.
Belonging to Saunders tribe, it would be impossible for you not to read him and to identify with the values and aspirations he espouses. He’s careful to make all the proper critical gestures, thinking that mourning stupidity is somehow less condescending. But Dude, his ‘sensitivity’ has to be precious given his conclusion, and insofar as the most obvious question hanging over the piece is how one of the most famous men of American letters can wander among thousands upon thousands of his countrymen and take it for granted that not one single soul will recognize him or have the least interest in his art.
That said, the man is a gobsmackingly gifted writer… for me it just makes the cultural futility of his cause more tragic.
‘You.’ ‘You.’ ‘You.’ ‘You read him (thus)’, ‘You think this…’ ‘You let (them) chase you’…
Do I?! Do I really do that or do I stand and engage but resolutely stay polite while refusing to cede any ground on my right to engage and be heard, hopefully civilly.
How do you know all these things about me Scott? I would suggest you know next to nothing though you write as though you know me intimately. You know nothing about my political views, nothing about my social background, nothing about the political scene I’m engaged in, nothing about the dialogues I am having with those around me and nothing about what I think except for one thing – that I think you have a tendency to overreach. Something you are doing an excellent job right now of proving that I am correct.
For all you know I could be a blue collar centre rightist or a white collar hard leftist. But you don’t know and your inference that you do does your theorising a disservice.
With regard to your inference that if you’re not an arsehole you’re being chased away, there is ample evidence in well documented and reproducible studies that railing at people merely confirms their views and entrenches them further. In fact it has a tendency to push them into even more extreme positions, something that is so obvious in the US situation at the moment that I cannot see why it is missing from all the commentary. Part of the very reason extremism is on the rise is precisely because of the breakdown in civil discourse is pushing everyone away from the centre.
It has also been shown that the only way to break this cycle is by engaging with people till you have some minimal amount of respect on their side for fair dealing and then engaging in gentle Socratic dialogue showing that you also are willing to accept their views as valid (at least in a personal sense) and honestly held. Clearly not something you’re comfortable doing.
I apologize. And I fully admit that cartoons are all that human brains can throw at problems that are so intractably complex. One of the real issues here, I think, is the ‘online disinhibition effect,’ the ease with which tempers are thrown out of joint. This seems to be having a real sociological impact. Meanwhile, I’m the product of the internet slums, and I have fun writing in that mode, and I think the blank ‘respectful/politic’ tone of civil discourse duplicitous and, worse, impossible to sustain in the commons, and therefore not so much a condition of engagement as an excuse to forego it.
Gentle Socratic dialogue is not the solution to this problem (though it might belong in the toolkit somehwere). The solution is engagement, inserting oneself into outgroups long enough for them to remember you are no different than they are. Sustained contact.
These pieces are meant to provoke that engagement. To whit 😉
My apologies Scott for my ridiculously late response. Unfortunately a long spell of illness. I hope you have recovered from your recent viral attack.
So, let’s close this up. Thanks for your apology.
I note that you still feel Socratic dialogue is not the solution. I would counter that plenty of psychology research has shown that it is currently the only proven solution but accept that social responses change and your way might well be the only defence against sustained attack that had only one goal, to provoke.
I do now that we both have the same goal “engagement, inserting oneself into outgroups long enough for them to remember you are no different than they are. Sustained contact.”
My hope with my approach is that my interlocutor comes to realise that if they are being treated with respect they might be more likely to consider what I am saying, but then I try to come at the world from a virtue ethics approach.
Anyway, I do enjoy your writing most particularly your thoughts on PoM. Blind Brain Theory meshed with some of my own observations but was far better articulated.
So, thank you. And keep it up. I’m off to read the Figure/Ground interview.
Cheers.