Stop making sense

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting essay on Trump and bullshit at Vox, but I think he goes too far in his attempt to explain what's going on. Here's an example:

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

This makes Trump sound like a kind of genius. He doesn't just get people to demonstrate the loyalty he craves. He has the greatest way to get them to do this.

Admittedly, this genius might be accidental. Yglesias says of Trump that, "His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test," which is different from saying that they are intended as a loyalty test. But there is still an implication here that there is something to be explained, namely the function of Trump's bullshit, and that Yglesias has the explanation that enables us to make sense of it all. But why suppose that it makes sense in the first place? It's not as if Trump is a great success. If he had built his wall, imprisoned his electoral opponent, and banned Muslims from the United States then we might wonder how he had managed it all (as well as why, of course). But he has done so little that there is little to explain. (He has emboldened white supremacists and hurt people of color, but not as much as he tried to, and it's not clear that is exactly a conscious goal of his anyway. Nor is there any mystery about how someone could get this done.)

In other words, Trump might be an evil genius bullshitter, but he might just be confused and floundering. He could also be both. Perhaps he has found bullshit to be useful in his career. That doesn't mean that he wields it skillfully or knows what he's doing at any given moment. He might sometimes know just what bullshit to spout, or lie to tell, to achieve his particular goal. Or he might just spout and spout and hope it works out. My impression is that he is so used to getting what he demands (even if he doesn't always get what he demands) that he has very little sense of himself as answering to an objective reality. Frankfurt says:

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite.

Trump's bullshit seems to stem from, or at least reflect, his lack of thoughtful attention to detail, his lack of discipline, lack of objectivity, non-acceptance of standards and limitations, his selfishness, and his insistence on indulging impulses and whims. His is not the "carefully wrought bullshit" that Frankfurt describes (along with the other kind). The opposition between truth and (not falsehood but) ego here is worth noting.

So Yglesias seems to see sense, something intelligible, even intelligent, where there may well not be any such thing. There is still something to explain, though, namely why so many people accept this bullshit. Partly, no doubt, 'twas ever thus. Partly, also, people accept it because it is in their interest to do so: they work for Trump or they would be embarrassed to back down from supporting him, for instance. Partly, perhaps, we are more used to bullshit than we used to be because we suffer from an overload of information. This quote from T. S. Eliot has been doing the rounds on Twitter lately:

The vast accumulation of knowledge — or at least information — deposited…have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance.  When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields…in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every man knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.  And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.    

Maybe he's right.

And, finally, maybe there's a sort of culture of bullshit in the US. I'm hesitant to suggest this, because I don't think that any large group of people is really smarter or dumber, better or worse, than any other. If there is a culture of bullshit in the US there may well be a similar culture in other countries. But the creation of certain sacred cows is highly visible in the US in a way that it doesn't seem to be in other countries. The flag, for instance, is idolized in a way I've never seen in any other country. Religion (of a particular, and particularly American, kind) is used to justify denial of scientific facts. The Republican Party has managed to attach itself to the flag and to this kind of religion, making itself almost an idol of sorts (and support for Democrats pretty much unthinkable for many people).  
But (still finally) there is also a history, especially in the South, of lying about the Civil War, and teaching these lies to children. When your parents as well as your teachers lie in this way, as is often the case (although maybe I shouldn't call the sincere repetition of a lie lying), then you are going to have a hard time accepting that it is a lie. Then people who tell (what you may or may not recognize at some level as being) the truth will come across as enemies of your family, your educators, and your culture. (It ought to be possible to insert something here about Wittgenstein and certainty, but I won't.) White Southerners have a huge psychological incentive to reject numerous truths and truth-tellers (as well as the psychological incentive to admit the truth, which, however painful, surely makes life simpler in some ways). If they do opt for such rejection, then more bullshit won't be such a big deal for them to accept. It might even feel like home. 

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but this is the essay by John Stuart Mill that I have in mind when I talk about lies about the Civil War. I'll quote some of the relevant bits here:

There is a theory in England, believed perhaps by some, half believed by many more, which is only consistent with original ignorance, or complete subsequent forgetfulness, of all the antecedents of the contest. There are people who tell us that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all. The North, it seems, have no more objection to slavery than the South have. Their leaders never say one word implying disapprobation of it. They are ready, on the contrary, to give it new guarantees; to renounce all that they have been contending for; to win back, if opportunity offers, the South to the Union by surrendering the whole point.

If this be the true state of the case, what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say nothing of the kind. They tell the world, and they told their own citizens when they wanted their votes, that the object of the fight was slavery.

This was written in 1862, and the same lies and half-beliefs are still very much around. Here's more from Mill:

Let me, in a few words, remind the reader what sort of a thing this is, which the white oligarchy of the South have banded themselves together to propagate and establish, if they could, universally. When it is wished to describe any portion of the human race as in the lowest state of debasement, and under the most cruel oppression, in which it is possible for human beings to live, they are compared to slaves. When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, any more than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But the position which they occupy, and the abstract excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, is that which the united voice of mankind habitually selects as the type of all hateful qualities. I will not bandy chicanery about the more or less of stripes or other torments which are daily requisite to keep the machine in working order, nor discuss whether the Legrees or the St. Clairs are more numerous among the slave-owners of the Southern States. The broad facts of the case suffice. One fact is enough. There are, Heaven knows, vicious and tyrannical institutions in ample abundance on the earth. But this institution is the only one of them all which requires, to keep it going, that human beings should be burnt alive. The calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms that there has not been a single year, for many years past, in which this horror is not known to have been perpetrated in some part or other of the South. And not upon negroes only; the Edinburgh Review, in a recent number, gave the hideous details of the burning alive of an unfortunate Northern huckster by Lynch law, on mere suspicion of having aided in the escape of a slave. What must American slavery be, if deeds like these are necessary under it?—and if they are not necessary and are yet done, is not the evidence against slavery still more damning? The South are in rebellion not for simple slavery; they are in rebellion for the right of burning human creatures alive.

It will take a long time to wake up fully from this nightmare. And perhaps human beings are never fully awake. In the meantime there are going to be mixed beliefs, half-beliefs, lies, denials, and, perhaps more than anything else, confusion. Dawning consciousness, too, we can hope. But certainly confusion. And nonsense. And bullshit. Its acceptance doesn't need any special explanation.

The end of Haidt

(His name rhymes with height, by the way.)

The final third of The Righteous Mind offers an evolutionary hypothesis about why people are social animals, or "groupish," as Haidt puts it (which I won't try to assess--it sounds reasonable to me); suggests that we can become 'hive-minded' in certain circumstances (ancient phalanxes and modern raves, for instance); suggests further that religion can be explained in evolutionary terms because it helps bind groups together; and then suggests ways we might all learn to get along better. It's a bit of a mess, but not all bad.

On p. 190 he concedes that "a great deal of our moral, political, and religious behavior can be understood as thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest." How much is a great deal? On p. 315, in the first paragraph of his conclusion, Haidt calls moral psychology "the key to understanding politics." He isn't contradicting himself here, but there is something of a tension. We are left to imagine how it is meant to be resolved. Perhaps self-interest makes up a significant minority of the reason why we disagree over politics. Perhaps it is the main reason, but moral psychology allows us to understand the mysterious rest. I don't know what Haidt thinks. 

Chapter 10 concerns what it takes to switch our minds from merely groupish, but still largely self-interested, to bee-like parts of a collective hive-mind. Haidt suggests University of Virginia football games (I must not have been drunk enough when I went), witnessing nature's awesomeness, drugs, and dancing with lots of other people at raves. So a drug-fuelled rave in a field (with thousands of UVA fans) ought to be close to the ultimate buzz (ho ho). I almost regret not having had that experience, but I can too easily imagine that it would have been very much as Jarvis Cocker describes in "Sorted for E's and Whizz" (i.e. "adequately supplied with Ecstasy and amphetamines"):

Oh is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?
Or just 20,000 people standing in a field.
And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is.
But that's okay cos we're all sorted out for E's and whizz.
And tell me when the spaceship lands cos all this has just got to mean something.

In the middle of the night,
it feels alright,
but then tomorrow morning.
Oh then you come down.

Haidt doesn't say much about this problem, but he does recognize a downside to the hive. A nation-sized hive, he says, would be bad (he quotes The Doctrine of Fascism). But without membership in some smaller-scale hive we might suffer from Durkheimian anomie. We need to find a group or team to identify with. How about a football team? After all:

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion. (p. 247)

Well, no it isn't. Basically because of the fact that "all this has just got to mean something," and football doesn't have the right kind or quantity of meaning to offer. (I still like it, but that's not the point.)

More superficiality and ignorance from Chapter 11:

[T]he two most important thinkers in the history of the social sciences [are] Darwin and Durkheim. (p. 259)

Really? Not Marx or Weber? No psychologists or economists?

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. (p. 264)

Ah. Maybe it's unfair to take a statement like this out of context. After all, don't I agree with it, really? I sort of do, but it still strikes me as superficial. Almost breathtakingly so.

Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. (p. 272)

Didn't Bentham's immediate follower J.S. Mill say quite a bit about the importance of society, and not just the individual, in Utilitarianism? Haidt appears not to have read it.

In the last main chapter, Haidt tells us of his own political and moral views, and how they changed from being narrowly liberal to more open-minded, when he went to India, and then to more conservative, when he read Jerry Muller (ed.) Conservatism. This book taught Haidt that conservatives view human nature as inherently flawed, and understand the importance of maintaining society's moral structure. Liberals, he says, tend to damage this delicate structure by going too far too quickly. His own view is a wise mix of liberal and conservative, not surprisingly: governments should restrain corporate excesses (liberal), regulation is the solution to some problems (liberal), markets are "miraculous" (libertarian conservative), and "you can't help the bees by destroying the hive" (social conservative).

The last, conservative, two points are odd. Markets do work in remarkable ways, and freedom generally is a very good thing. But does anyone really deny this? Did Bill Clinton? Does Barack Obama? On p. 305 Haidt writes:

I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.

How often is sometimes? And who are we talking about here? No one with any serious influence on US policy or legislation, surely. Or does Haidt have some peculiar definition of socialism in mind? I wonder how much Smith he has read. The liberal Martha Nussbaum is a fan, after all, rather like, it seems to me, every mainstream Democrat.

When he gets to his social conservatism Haidt suddenly starts talking in metaphors. He spells out a few more details on p. 309, but there isn't much there:

For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage [Haidt doesn't explain how this is even possible, let alone how it supposedly happened], increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people [liberals?, conservatives?--this seems relevant if we're assigning blame] more racist, not less.

The paragraph ends there, without further examples from the 1990s and 2000s, and is followed by the hand-wavy, "On issue after issue, it's as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive."

I'm not convinced that liberals should be judged by what they seem to be trying to do. Nor are they necessarily wrong in general if some of their efforts to help those in need have unintended bad consequences, either in addition to their good consequences or instead of having any good consequences at all. The record of liberals on social issues in the 1960s and 1970s is surely better than that of conservatives on the whole. I don't hear many calls for a return to segregation, even here in the graveyard of the Confederacy. I agree with the Burkean idea of changing slowly when possible, and only changing at all when necessary, but I see no evidence that liberal social policies have "destroyed the hive." It wasn't welfare that created problems for African Americans, and social conservatives don't have an exemplary record in this particular area.

In sum: Haidt talks a bit like Sarah Palin, but what he actually says sounds like a mainstream Democrat who accepts that everyone is capable of making mistakes. He also talks as if philosophy is irrelevant, but takes inspiration for some key ideas from Hume (people aren't nearly as rational as we might think) and Isaiah Berlin (moral pluralism). He seems, in short, to be rejecting the very things he is, in fact, embracing. I can't tell whether this is a deliberate tactic or just a sign of confusion.

To me the most interesting part of the book is the middle section, the one where he identifies six moral foundations: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Each has a polar opposite, which helps to define it: harm, oppression, cheating, betrayal, subversion, degradation. It seems clear that harm and oppression are bad, or, put another way, that care and liberty are good. Fairness/cheating is trickier, because cheating seems like a kind of harm, but let's allow this one too. Now what about loyalty/betrayal? Loyalty to good people is good, but loyalty to bad people might not be. And not only might betrayal be good, when the person you betray is bad, but betrayal also sounds very close to cheating. If you break a promise is that cheating or betrayal? I would lump fairness and loyalty together and call them justice. And I think I'd do the same with authority/subversion. Authority is something like rightful or just power, and subversion (I would think) is only bad when what is subverted is good. (Which allows for the conservative point that, other things being equal, the status quo is always good.)

Finally we have sanctity/degradation. This is a weird one. Degradation sounds really bad, but simply regarding some things as sacred doesn't sound particularly good. "Is nothing sacred?" has rhetorical power, but it matters what is held to be sacred (not simply that something be so held). Haidt uses this category to cover respect for the American flag, an aversion to marijuana and other toxins, opposition to same-sex marriage, and xenophobia. But isn't respect for the flag more a matter of loyalty? On p. 149 Haidt even lists liberty, one of the other six foundations, as something that people hold to be sacred. So is sacredness really a sixth foundation, or is it an attitude toward the other five moral foundations? Opposition to immigration and love of the flag seem to me to be forms (perhaps misguided forms) of loyalty to a particular group, which is already covered under loyalty. Marijuana and same-sex marriage are connected by a concern (again, perhaps a misguided one) with the human body. Smoking anything is bad for the body, and if the body is a temple then this is a moral issue. Sexual ethics are related to this. Again, if the body is a temple then it matters how we use it, and one view is that certain kinds of sex are inappropriate. I would group concerns about sex and the body into a category called 'life', which is clearly an important concern in contemporary moral issues.

So instead of Haidt's six foundations I would focus on four clusters of issues: care/harm (or pleasure/pain), liberty/oppression (or autonomy versus its absence), justice/injustice, and life/death (including ideas about sexuality and the human body). But I agree with him that it's very helpful to see people as having different values, or caring about things in different ways, rather than as simply being right or wrong, moral or immoral. To the extent that this is his main point, I agree with him and value his book. I also agree with his picture of human nature as mostly non-rational. But the book does leave something to be desired, especially in its treatment of philosophy.

Southern discomfort

Despite having lived in Virginia for more than twenty years I still don't really get the culture here. When people started driving their pickup trucks with the tailgate down it seemed obvious to me that this was an obnoxiously aggressive act--if you rear-end a truck like that you and/or your vehicle will come off very badly. Then I found out that people do it to make their trucks more aerodynamic and therefore fuel-efficient. Which is a good thing, and not so obnoxious after all. So I was wrong.

On the other hand, there is a certain amount of aggression in the culture. Not only do lots of people hunt deer and other animals, quite a few boast about it, for instance with bow-hunting decals saying "I'm a real heart breaker!" Not to mention some of the Confederate pride stuff  that spills over into angry defiance. Of course most people here are not hostile rednecks (far from it), but some are. But perhaps this aggression is the dark side of a culture that, though mysterious to me, is not really so bad taken as a whole. Maybe it's all part of an honor culture.

At least that's what I started to think a couple of days ago when I spent part of the morning reading over a draft syllabus for a course on honor and reading part of a paper on honor as a warrior code. From this paper (by Dan Demetriou), which I can't find online, I discovered both this website and this quotation from Pierre Bourdieu:

There is nothing worse [according to the Kabyles of North Africa] than to pass unnoticed, like a shadow. Thus, not to greet someone is to treat him like an object. ... The challenge, on the contrary, is the highlight in the life of the one who receives it.

I wonder whether this is related to the fact that in this part of Virginia people typically greet each other when they pass, even if they are strangers. It's usually a friendly greeting, but it sometimes feels grudging or wary, as if the alternative might be a Wild West shoot-out. There is supposed to be a tradition of violence and feuding in the American South, which is supposed to come from years of fighting over territory and livestock around the England-Scotland border (see here and here, for instance). So it would make some sense if Virginians greeted each other as an alternative to insulting silence. Just a theory. But I like the theory because of the historical aspect, which also came up at a New Year's Day party I attended with some people from near Richmond who said their accent was supposed to come from the far North of England. It didn't really sound like it to me, but it did sound unusual.

Anyway, the website Honor Ethics looks worth checking out. As well as Dan Demetriou, its contributors include two people I know and respect: Jim Peterman and Lad Sessions.