[FRIAM] [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

[Eric Smith]

Yes, Eric, good points to modify the claim, 

It returns the discussion to the acts one does or does not want to commit, rather than to defense of an icon-group against an enemy-group that both, at this stage, have been bleached of much of the complexity of real people and are more cartoon than flesh.

It is interesting how a few behavioral templates underlie so much that shows up in different normative or institutional garb, in settings that otherwise are very diverse:

There is good faith in people who accept the possibility of being wrong and want to try to work to be less wrong.

There is what I consider bad faith in seeing that as a place to take advantage, though here it gets tricky on both sides, because many of those I think are being opportunists would claim they are no such thing, and those who don’t want to be dogmatically wrong continue to wonder what they haven’t seen.  

The idea of “Ways of knowing” had an honest side, somewhere along the way: the good-faith version of it says the inter-subjective is a remedy for some of the limits of the subjective.  Many eyes looking at the finger and the moon have a better chance of telling which is which through parallax.  This branch of the ways-of-knowing crowd might not argue with Dewey’s long-term method, but the thing that would set them apart would be a deeper skepticism of the ability of the participants to ever see much beyond their own filters.  

The bad-faith version is, perhaps, easier to see and to criticize without too many qualifications when it becomes reified in doctrine.  No better example I can think of than Original Sin.  Don’t blame people for what they do and could do differently.  Very specifically pick constitutional things that they _are_ and blame them for those, precisely because those cannot be changed.  If they try to “not deserve” the blame by doing what you said was required (“good works”), not only refuse to accept it, but blame them a second time for the new sin of hubris, to imagine that anything within their power to choose could be big enough to address the sins you laid on them the first time.  Blame becomes the gift that keeps on giving; you can extract concessions endlessly, if you are such a misanthrope that you can live with yourself practicing such behavior.  Those who grew up under the thumb of dogmatic Christian communities will recognize the various doctrinal buzzwords in the above.  

The Jonathan Haidt thread that was running here a few weeks ago had a chance to handle this well, but it was disappointing to conclude (and I agree with Roger’s assessment of it) that “He’s [just become] a[nother] partisan.”  I live under several streams of this modern version of Original Sin, as an anglo, as a male, as a white-collar worker, an academic, and as someone who has tried to develop a professional skill, and I would like to see it resolved in a way that doesn’t deserve the blame of merely hanging onto privilege.  But I have met Haidt (he was at SFI on a few occasions), and I cannot shake the impression that the lure of a cult of personality was too sweet to resist.  So I don’t think he will introduce the kinds of real insight to contribute much to progress.

How to bring this back to the main line of the thread, which seems to be how teasing out some understanding-point can help in knowing what to do?

I think I can understand a version of the way people can accept flamboyant lying in place of being careful about fact, even though I remain convinced that their tack is misguided and will be disastrously self-defeating: They mis-trust people who can quote facts in a legalistic way but be disingenuous in dealing with the points that are important.  (Grover Norquist, from my point of view, is an archetype of this.)  The flamboyant lying isn’t supposed to be about information that anybody intends to use; it is supposed to be some kind of tribal authenticity signal, which they construe as a different relevant dimension of “truth”.  (Marcus and Steve and others have already said this far better than I do.  Also, we’ll put aside how transparently false and predatory this all appears to me, since the point is to comprehend how somebody else could see it otherwise.)  A person who thinks about law conceptually for a living would/should probably argue that the reason it is still better to hew to fact is that, in the end, facts are more resistant to disingenuous use than tribal signals that can be shammed without limit.  If the laws are well written, the lawyers can be the most ruthless of advocates, but in the end the factually stronger cases are supposed to win most of the time.  I think this is a somewhat quixotic view of law, which hopes that it can escape the need for the slippery notion of good faith by designing better systems, but on the other hand it has a place if it can lead to some inventions that make argument a little more robust when good faith is lacking.  

So I get the complexity of many-dimensional points of view.  But this case is probably not the most ambiguous instance of that: people are willing accomplices in thier own getting screwed and in screwing a lot of others who don’t deserve it, and there is a certain amount of indulgence in meanness and vulgarity that is probably above the single-percent level in the population.  That’s a pure problem and we need to squeeze it back down into the containable margins.

Thanks,

Eric


> On Jan 29, 2017, at 3:59 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population....  That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust.  It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. "
> 
> Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central accomplishment of the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and "might makes right" is hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past 70 years or so has been lead primarily by people who describe themselves as liberals, in the name of reducing "cultural hegemony" and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII rhetoric about "Jewish science" vs. "German science", is not easy to distinguish in effect from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the patriarchy." In both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but rather that Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of working towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method, we're in trouble. 
> 
> Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that has been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably than the Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen, but their boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be hard to say the same for those on the left. Even the things they claim to most strongly believe, they will typically drop in an instant if faced with an assertion from another culture, or from someone with multiple "victim" traits. The "your place is to listen" rhetoric, in which claims regarding individual experience trump data, but only when those claims are made by individuals from a "marginalized" group, cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's approach. 
> 
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> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
> 
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> Thank you for forwarding this Owen,
> 
> I didn’t receive the original.
> 
> > So.  Let me just share one thought.  I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s  One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously,  we will, together , come to it.  What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument.  The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power.  He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth.  Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
> >
> > So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies.  It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.
> 
> Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect.  It is the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and not been able to express.
> 
> The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing discussion of the scoping of the claim):
> 
> 1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen floor.  I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out.  If I felt I couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion.  etc. at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest than that.   (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the category on their own.)
> 
> 2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the “culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s).  That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust.  It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe.  In a big and complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in any terms.  To have arrived at a large number of people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through.  The “demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.
> 
> Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point stands).  The heavily social animals start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact.  But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a veneer.  Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports.  What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?
> 
> Eric
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> 
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