[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]
I.
In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.
Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.
The priest tells them:
It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.
He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.
After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.
To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.
I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.
(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)
Tolerance is also considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished expectations forgiveness does.
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
II.
If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.
And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.
We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.
This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better.
What is going on here?
Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.
There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?
Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something stronger.
I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.
Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.
And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.
So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.
Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.
In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
III.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
IV.
One day I realized that entirely by accident I was fulfilling all the Jewish stereotypes.
I’m nerdy, over-educated, good with words, good with money, weird sense of humor, don’t get outside much, I like deli sandwiches. And I’m a psychiatrist, which is about the most stereotypically Jewish profession short of maybe stand-up comedian or rabbi.
I’m not very religious. And I don’t go to synagogue. But that’s stereotypically Jewish too!
I bring this up because it would be a mistake to think “Well, a Jewish person is by definition someone who is born of a Jewish mother. Or I guess it sort of also means someone who follows the Mosaic Law and goes to synagogue. But I don’t care about Scott’s mother, and I know he doesn’t go to synagogue, so I can’t gain any useful information from knowing Scott is Jewish.”
The defining factors of Judaism – Torah-reading, synagogue-following, mother-having – are the tip of a giant iceberg. Jews sometimes identify as a “tribe”, and even if you don’t attend synagogue, you’re still a member of that tribe and people can still (in a statistical way) infer things about you by knowing your Jewish identity – like how likely they are to be psychiatrists.
The last section raised a question – if people rarely select their friends and associates and customers explicitly for politics, how do we end up with such intense political segregation?
Well, in the same way “going to synagogue” is merely the iceberg-tip of a Jewish tribe with many distinguishing characteristics, so “voting Republican” or “identifying as conservative” or “believing in creationism” is the iceberg-tip of a conservative tribe with many distinguishing characteristics.
A disproportionate number of my friends are Jewish, because I meet them at psychiatry conferences or something – we self-segregate not based on explicit religion but on implicit tribal characteristics. So in the same way, political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics.
The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.
(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)
I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.
Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.
Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself.
(for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)
But I don’t think it’s just genetics. There’s something else going on too. The word “class” seems like the closest analogue, but only if you use it in the sophisticated Paul Fussell Guide Through the American Status System way instead of the boring “another word for how much money you make” way.
For now we can just accept them as a brute fact – as multiple coexisting societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction they have with one another – and move on.
V.
The worst reaction I’ve ever gotten to a blog post was when I wrote about the death of Osama bin Laden. I’ve written all sorts of stuff about race and gender and politics and whatever, but that was the worst.
I didn’t come out and say I was happy he was dead. But some people interpreted it that way, and there followed a bunch of comments and emails and Facebook messages about how could I possibly be happy about the death of another human being, even if he was a bad person? Everyone, even Osama, is a human being, and we should never rejoice in the death of a fellow man. One commenter came out and said:
I’m surprised at your reaction. As far as people I casually stalk on the internet (ie, LJ and Facebook), you are the first out of the “intelligent, reasoned and thoughtful” group to be uncomplicatedly happy about this development and not to be, say, disgusted at the reactions of the other 90% or so.
This commenter was right. Of the “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people I knew, the overwhelming emotion was conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about his death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us.
And I genuinely believed that day that I had found some unexpected good in people – that everyone I knew was so humane and compassionate that they were unable to rejoice even in the death of someone who hated them and everything they stood for.
Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall – made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I wish I was there so I could join in”. From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”
I gently pointed this out at the time, and mostly got a bunch of “yeah, so what?”, combined with links to an article claiming that “the demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure’s death is not just misguided but dangerous”.
And that was when something clicked for me.
You can talk all you want about Islamophobia, but my friend’s “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful people” – her name for the Blue Tribe – can’t get together enough energy to really hate Osama, let alone Muslims in general. We understand that what he did was bad, but it didn’t anger us personally. When he died, we were able to very rationally apply our better nature and our Far Mode beliefs about how it’s never right to be happy about anyone else’s death.
On the other hand, that same group absolutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us (though not all) can agree, if the question is posed explicitly, that Osama was a worse person than Thatcher. But in terms of actual gut feeling? Osama provokes a snap judgment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap judgment of “scum”.
I started this essay by pointing out that, despite what geographical and cultural distance would suggest, the Nazis’ outgroup was not the vastly different Japanese, but the almost-identical German Jews.
And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.
VI.
“But racism and sexism and cissexism and anti-Semitism are these giant all-encompassing social factors that verge upon being human universals! Surely you’re not arguing that mere political differences could ever come close to them!”
One of the ways we know that racism is a giant all-encompassing social factor is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists ask subjects to quickly identify whether words or photos are members of certain gerrymandered categories, like “either a white person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a black person’s face and a negative emotion”. Then they compare to a different set of gerrymandered categories, like “either a black person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a white person’s face or a negative emotion.” If subjects have more trouble (as measured in latency time) connecting white people to negative things than they do white people to positive things, then they probably have subconscious positive associations with white people. You can try it yourself here.
Of course, what the test famously found was that even white people who claimed to have no racist attitudes at all usually had positive associations with white people and negative associations with black people on the test. There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.
Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.
Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?
Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.
Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.
If you want to see their third experiment, which applied yet another classic methodology used to detect racism and once again found partyism to be much stronger, you can read the paper.
I & W did an unusually thorough job, but this sort of thing isn’t new or ground-breaking. People have been studying “belief congruence theory” – the idea that differences in beliefs are more important than demographic factors in forming in-groups and outgroups – for decades. As early as 1967, Smith et al were doing surveys all over the country and finding that people were more likely to accept friendships across racial lines than across beliefs; in the forty years since then, the observation has been replicated scores of times. Insko, Moe, and Nacoste’s 2006 review Belief Congruence And Racial Discrimination concludes that:
. The literature was judged supportive of a weak version of belief congruence theory which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent or ineffective, belief is more important than race as a determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination. Evidence for a strong version of belief congruence theory (which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent, or ineffective, belief is the only determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination) and was judged much more problematic.
One of the best-known examples of racism is the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” scenario where parents are scandalized about their child marrying someone of a different race. Pew has done some good work on this and found that only 23% of conservatives and 1% (!) of liberals admit they would be upset in this situation. But Pew also asked how parents would feel about their child marrying someone of a different political party. Now 30% of conservatives and 23% of liberals would get upset. Average them out, and you go from 12% upsetness rate for race to 27% upsetness rate for party – more than double. Yeah, people do lie to pollsters, but a picture is starting to come together here.
(Harvard, by the way, is a tossup. There are more black students – 11.5% – than conservative students – 10% – but there are more conservative faculty than black faculty.)
Since people will delight in misinterpreting me here, let me overemphasize what I am not saying. I’m not saying people of either party have it “worse” than black people, or that partyism is more of a problem than racism, or any of a number of stupid things along those lines which I am sure I will nevertheless be accused of believing. Racism is worse than partyism because the two parties are at least kind of balanced in numbers and in resources, whereas the brunt of an entire country’s racism falls on a few underprivileged people. I am saying that the underlying attitudes that produce partyism are stronger than the underlying attitudes that produce racism, with no necessary implications on their social effects.
But if we want to look at people’s psychology and motivations, partyism and the particular variant of tribalism that it represents are going to be fertile ground.
VII.
Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.
“It’s not that we’re, like, against America per se. It’s just that…well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we’re just sitting here, can’t even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what’s wrong with a country that can’t…sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They’re okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That’s sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!”
(sorry, I make fun of you because I love you)
There was a big brouhaha a couple of years ago when, as it first became apparent Obama had a good shot at the Presidency, Michelle Obama said that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
Republicans pounced on the comment, asking why she hadn’t felt proud before, and she backtracked saying of course she was proud all the time and she loves America with the burning fury of a million suns and she was just saying that the Obama campaign was particularly inspiring.
As unconvincing denials go, this one was pretty far up there. But no one really held it against her. Probably most Obama voters felt vaguely the same way. I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people’s heartfelt emotions of patriotism. Aaron Sorkin:
[What makes America the greatest country in the world?] It’s not the greatest country in the world! We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.
(Another good retort is “We’re number one? Sure – number one in incarceration rates, drone strikes, and making new parents go back to work!”)
All of this is true, of course. But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring it up.
(“We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well, I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small and shouldn’t count.”)
My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.
That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.
Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose “patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People.
Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.
And look at the sources. HuffPo, Salon, Slate. Might those have anything in common?
On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word for a member of the Red Tribe.
VIII.
The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:
Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy
And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”
(The girl in question was white as snow)
Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of which says:
Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you […]
No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming from. You focused on the looting….”
And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these articles was written by a white person.
White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace? White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why Americans Suck #1: White People? White.
We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.
But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with “American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red Tribe.
(except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)
I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of relations to the actual concept.
And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012 he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being humble and self-critical.
IX.
Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.
If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.
But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.
That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.
I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.
But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?
He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia. So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.
On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were ‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”
I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan, therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.
But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to be fans of Fox News.
In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” – how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?
In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT BIGOTS IN THE OUTGROUP WHO’S BOSS!”
Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America” who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and he’s only broadcasting to one of them.
The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam. Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown the door.
Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.
If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all the time – and so we have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.
And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.
When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
X.
We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s up?
We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.
We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area, they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level of interaction were concerned.
Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.
The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims, more often the Blue Tribe.
The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.
This is not surprising. Ethnic differences have proven quite tractable in the face of shared strategic aims. Even the Nazis, not known for their ethnic tolerance, were able to get all buddy-buddy with the Japanese when they had a common cause.
Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue. “There never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”
Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class. So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.
The Blue Tribe always has an excuse at hand to persecute and crush any Red Tribers unfortunate enough to fall into its light-matter-universe by defining them as all-powerful domineering oppressors. They appeal to the fact that this is definitely the way it works in the Red Tribe’s dark-matter-universe, and that’s in the same country so it has to be the same community for all intents and purposes. As a result, every Blue Tribe institution is permanently licensed to take whatever emergency measures are necessary against the Red Tribe, however disturbing they might otherwise seem.
And so how virtuous, how noble the Blue Tribe! Perfectly tolerant of all of the different groups that just so happen to be allied with them, never intolerant unless it happen to be against intolerance itself. Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that awful Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing their own culture and striving to make it better!
Sorry. But I hope this is at least a little convincing. The weird dynamic of outgroup-philia and ingroup-phobia isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just good old-fashioned in-group-favoritism and outgroup bashing, a little more sophisticated and a little more sneaky.
XI.
This essay is bad and I should feel bad.
I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.
How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.
I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.
I had fun writing this article. People do not have fun writing articles savagely criticizing their in-group. People can criticize their in-group, it’s not humanly impossible, but it takes nerves of steel, it makes your blood boil, you should sweat blood. It shouldn’t be fun.
You can bet some white guy on Gawker who week after week churns out “Why White People Are So Terrible” and “Here’s What Dumb White People Don’t Understand” is having fun and not sweating any blood at all. He’s not criticizing his in-group, he’s never even considered criticizing his in-group. I can’t blame him. Criticizing the in-group is a really difficult project I’ve barely begun to build the mental skills necessary to even consider.
I can think of criticisms of my own tribe. Important criticisms, true ones. But the thought of writing them makes my blood boil.
I imagine might I feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more, demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay, obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims. And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”
That is how I feel when asked to criticize my own tribe, even for correct reasons. If you think you’re criticizing your own tribe, and your blood is not at that temperature, consider the possibility that you aren’t.
But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points, criticizing the Grey Tribe is the only honest way to get them. And if I want Tolerance Points, my own personal cross to bear right now is tolerating the Blue Tribe. I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people. And when they are good people, they are powerful and necessary crusaders against the evils of the world.
The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary. Which, given what has happened to my last couple of posts along these lines and the obvious biases of my own subconscious, I already expect it will be.
But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”
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>Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.
What? Scott, you are a smart fellow, you should grok this. These are simply based on group pressure and us-them dynamic.
You gravitated towards the Blue Tribe because your upbringing is urban and secular, and you are the kind of guy who values brains more than brawns. Others gravitate towards the Red Tribe because they are rural, had a religious upbringing or buy into the idea of traditional masculinity, basically what I call dominance-positive (anti-egalitarian) values.
The rest of it is simply group pressure. Certainly everybody CAN like fancy pizza, but when a “red” guy tried that and liked that, some of his friends called him jokingly a fag, or asked him if he is going to go vegan now, or just said I don’t need all this sissy food, meat does it. You, on the other hand, I don’t know if you like steak or even are you a carnivore, but there must a certain pressure in your group to at least be a modest carnivore who eats salmon mousse and does not publish Facebook photos with a huge portion of ribs.
So there are basic sorting characterics, but the rest is just group pressure.
The basic sorting characteristic is, I think, intellectualism, Blue being pro-intellectual and Red being anti-intellectual, but this should NOT be seen as Blue being smart and Red being dumb and enjoying being dumb, it is way more complicated than this:
– Kanazawa has this hypothesis that IQ as a general tool tends to suppress other, more specific tools, like common sense or social skills. Reds value those.
– Intellectualism quite often results in the lack of physical exercise, low testosterone, low courage levels, not having that kind of warrior spirit, and so on. Reds value those, too.
To use a Medieval parallel, the Ideal Red would make an excellent knight: he values a warrior spirit, courage, strength, common sense that is way more useful in the hectic of battle than complex thinking, social skills, and his morality is generally that kind of in-group camaraderie that makes him mostly fair with his serfs as long as they behave sufficiently respectfully. The Ideal Blue would make an ideal monk – is primary weapon is intellect and learnedness.
So, Blues are clearly smarter, however, Blues sacrifice a lot of other important things for this smartness that Reds don’t have to. And some of the things sacrificed, like common sense, often leads to a form of educated folly.
One thing that annoys me that even the Blue Tribe on Reddit casually assumes that everybody who can write a comment in acceptable English must be American or at least more or less from the Anglosphere. I don’t think it is consciously marginalizing nationalism, but it is something sort of a privilege-bubble, same way how male is the default gender, if someone asks a question on a website like Reddit like “Do you think it is possible today to live without a car?” and it is not pointed out _where_ exactly, then of course it is assumed the question is about whether it is possible in America.
Frankly, if this happened in any other language, this would be understandable: the vast majority of people who choose the German language to discuss something on the Internet actually live in the DACH area or are from there, the only big exception is language learners who came to practice. So a default location would be acceptable.
But English as such is the No. 1 international language. It is the language used by a Danish businessman to talk to Chinese programmers, because what else should they do? You can work in Germany and still speak English all day because your boss is, say, from Iceland.
From these perspectives, English is NOT a location-dependent language, and as such the default-locationism definitely comes accross as annoying and a bit like privilege-blindness.
Frankly, sometimes I think it should be renamed Globish – we certainly don’t associate it anymore with actually English people, or with an Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. In fact in Europe it is so that a Dane, a Frenchwoman and a Polish man speak with each other in English easily, then an actual Englishman says something in a Scouse or Brummie accent and nobody understands a word. Frankly, it is not an exaggeration to say many English people don’t speak Globish very well.
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Thank you for the insightful post. I stumbled on your blog a few months ago and intend to lurk for a while, if I’ll ever comment.
However, I found a broken link, in the sentence that reads:
“It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. “
should be
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Brief thought:
Red Tribe – nationalism
Blue Tribe – social justice
Grey Tribe – transhumanism
Have you ever read Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social capital, taste, distinction, and class? I think that might get you closer to what you’re describing in your piece about how we self segregate based on perceived identities. (Or you could just do what I do and call this sort of stuff “identity issues”) 😛
A few days after I initially read this post, I was in a group of friends and the subject of Osama bin Laden came up, and my girlfriend decried people who were happy when he was killed. I think she may have actually used the phrase “I’m not going to celebrate another human being’s death.”
And I said, “What? You wrote a huge long rant on Facebook saying how glad you were when Joan Rivers died.”
GF: “Yeah, but she’s terrible.”
I was reading this article, kind of reflexively recoiling at parts of it, but couldn’t quantify the problem. You start off with that whole noble bit about forgiveness. Hard to disagree with you after that. Same with your self effacing wrap-up. Then it hit me: you completely passed up every opportunity to acknowledge that all in-groups and out-groups are not created equal. You start off with World War II, but you never acknowledge that sometimes, one in-group can be *the actual bad guy.*
So later on you point out, essentially, that the Red tribe depending on their mood hates blacks, foreigners, gays, and the Blue tribe, whereas the Blue tribe, on the other hand, only hates the Red tribe. I just want to ask, could we please entertain the notion that it is right and proper to hate the red tribe, precisely because it is wrong to hate black people, foreign nationals, immigrants, and the lgbtq?
You equate “I can tolerate anything but intolerance” with “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup.” Again with the presumption that all outgroups are equal. It’s all fine and good to say that either we should be respectful when Thatcher dies or we should let people have their party when Bin Laden goes. It’s another thing entirely to say that we shouldn’t consider ourselves tolerant unless we tolerate hatred.
Your comment reads as extremely tribalistic to me and made me recoil in, I suspect, much the same way Scott’s post did to you. First, it’s extremely disingenuous to say that the Red Tribe “hates black people, immigrants and gay people.” Although some of them doubtless do, there’s a large difference between being opposed to (some of) a group’s interests and hating that group. Second, even if the aggregate harm to those groups that their opposition causes is high, and even if it’s right to hate “the Red Tribe” in abstract as a result, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right to hate all Red individuals and try to hound them out of every shared community. Third, presumably even you would say some forms of intolerance of Red Tribe members would be morally wrong, including some legal ones. Unless you have some very good arguments for the morality of your pet intolerant behaviors, I think it’s generally a good idea to err on the side of tolerance. Fourth, every ingroup is inevitably going to claim that its outgroup objectively deserves hatred, so the general algorithm “figure out which groups objectively deserve to be marginalized, then marginalize them to the utmost extent” is going to lead to tons of wrongful marginalization. That at least suggests it would be nice if there were some principles of non-marginalization we could all collectively benefit from adhering to regardless of whose self-righteousness happens to be justified.
You seem to imply there’s some kind of parity between these red and blue teams. If we were to draw up a flow chart, and I think that would be interesting, it would have to depict the blue team as the out group to the red team, the red team as dominant and out group to no-one, and most of the dynamics and the character of the relationships between the dominant (red) and the “other” party (blue) flowing from there — although I also think that as the demographics are changing, a lot of the character of the right wing’s public behavior comes to resemble that of an aging Alpha male seeing himself at greater risk from the younger males. But at any rate, I agree that it’s those values often considered Christian virtues such as humility and forgiveness that most take a beating in this vain struggle for the soul of America, where the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.
You should note that some of the links are broken, they redirect to *your domain*/*link* rather than just *link*.
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This is one of the best essays I’ve ever read.
You nailed the “Team Gray” description of my Libertarian tribe….
Looking forward to reading more. I wish you could do less psychotherapy and more writing.
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Oh, and paleoconservatives are “highly educated” far beyond Team Blue – the writers for Chronicles are the sort of people who have read Greek and Latin classics in the original and the subscribers are the sort of people who wish they had.
An example that actually relates to the death of Osama bin Laden –
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rule-by-assassination/
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rule-by-assassination-ii/
“But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring it up.
(‘We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well, I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small and shouldn’t count.’)”
You can find conservatives who talk like that if you where to look – i.e., not Fox News, but paleoconservative publications (David Frum’s article on “unpatriotic conservatives” was a despicable slander, but not one wholly disconnected from reality) and to a lesser extent religious publications (as I said, to a lesser extent – a First Things article is more likely to have an overall friendly or optimistic tone than a Chronicles article).
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I hope times are a changing and writing like this makes me think so.. I personally look forward to Bayesian Analysis on History… But I digress.
We are acting out over 2000 years of history and story. Only war can make peace, us vs. them… It sounds cliche but only in acting against our biases can things change.. and we do want them to change right?
The following quote(?) that comes to mind is (I believe) from Barack Obama… We don’t make peace with our allies, we look to have conversations with our enemies to facilitate communication and peace.
Only when we have common ground can we communicate enough to fight. It’s the differences we crave and recognize, but if the context and distance to understand is too far then there is no feedback loop of communication. We can’t get angry that they get angry at us for what they do… Before we (U.S.) forced trade with China they could give a ripe on what happened outside of their “Kingdom” but we enforced a common ground, perhaps unwisely and definitely in a fashion that pre-sages “blowback” as we know it today…
Enjoyed the article… one of the first things I saw on facebook I have thoroughly enjoyed!
“So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.”
I would argue that a more fundamental approach is to examine interests in arelativistic fashion, using blood relatives as an easily understandable example. For example, back in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers worked out the math on sibling rivalry. Siblings have very good reasons for helping each other out relative to outside world, but they also have very good reasons for clashing over resources for which they are fiercest natural rivals, such as inheritances and parental time and money.
Rational rivalries and alliances are by no means arbitrary, but they are highly contingent upon circumstances.
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I would have thought that the “mixed feelings” about Osama’s death had more to do with a filmed commando style execution in a foreign country posing as “bringing justice”. If he had died from kidney failure (that’s actually what many people believe happened a long time before the “execution”) feelings of relief would probably have dominated.
I am not familiar enough with US politics and social groups. But it seems that the internet does not give a proper impression, because eloquent fringe groups are far more present in the webs than elsewhere. The “official” political spectrum of the Red/Blue parties is far narrower than in most other countries and most other times. Even if one includes the neoreactionary and anarcholibertarian fringe spectrum. There is not really any leftist group. What poses as “leftist” is, viewed from Europe, economically centrist social democracy, adorned with “fighting” for tiny minorities and symbolic PC issues.
Compare this with 1920s Germany (this was not a pleasant time, of course) when you had almost everything imaginable from monarchists, nationalists, catholic social conservatives, classical liberals, social democrats and communists.
Therefore the differences in fringe issues like gay rights have to be blown all out of proportion to get visible differences at all.
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I am glad to see a liberal acknowledge how weird the race issue is and how weird it is to see white liberals tear into white males so aggressively.
President Obama and his wife Michelle were both very clearly very anti-white and anti-American before the 2008 election, but so were white liberals, so that was ok. What the white liberals don’t realize, is their version of anti-white differs from the Obamas. The white liberals are anti-segregation and anti-right. The Obamas were actually anti-integration and very black-power, black-separatist. President Obama’s mentor, Reverend Wright, who is mostly white, explains their ideology. If you read Obama’s autobiography, and read Michelle’s college essays, this ideology is clear. Also note how the president’s father, Obama Sr, was a big proponent of black power ethnic confiscation of wealth and property in Africa from both whites and Asians as practiced against the Indians in Uganda. Obama Sr pushed for the same thing in Kenya. I suspect the white liberal Obama supporters would be horrified by that and just tune that out.
New to this blog, love this post, but those caricatures are way off…
The Whole Foods CEO is super right wing politically, but from a food perspective, he is in the arugula camp, and that’s not uncommon. I drive a hybrid, love arugula, am disinterested in football, religiously agnostic, but I am super right wing. I am a Margaret Thatcher fan. I am horrified by liberal politics.
I’m not so convinced that Obama really believes in things. He strikes me as the sort of person who just follows the scent of power. (Then again, he appointed Eric Holder.)
Rod Dreher calls them ‘crunchy cons’.
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30 years ago I was compelled by matters of conscience to move from Blue Tribe to Red. My world is still 80% Blue and I am the outsider. Even people who have loved me all my life do not want to hear about it . I have been told by some not to talk about certain things in their presence, though I have to endure hearing every insulting and belittling thing the dominant culture (and yes, Blue is the dominant culture) puts out there. It has been painful but illuminating, and I am not sorry to be out of that fold. If you’re in a bubble, just try stepping out.
Never let Blues muzzle you. Agree to mutual ceasefires, but if they make a passing quip, go 10 rounds.
The Blues have learned to keep their opinions to themselves around me unless they want to open those opinions up to criticism.
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By the way, when people celebrated Thatcher’s death, did anyone scream “misogyny”? Or are the women from the other tribe considered less women (or maybe the whole tribe is considered less human), and thus offending them is not really a transgression?
See also the treatment of Ayn Rand by people who complain that philosophy is dominated by white men. Or recently the #GamerGate protests where the SJW journalists decided that any woman who disagreed with them was secretly a man.
I mean it’s nice that they don’t actually believe “women are always right, you can never offend a woman or it’s misogyny” and they’re just using it as one more piece of ammunition for their side. More reasonable than the alternative! And since they don’t explicitly state the principle, they have deniability against claims of hypocrisy, too.
It’s not obvious to me that there’d be less hostility directed at Rand if she were a man, but I’d be interested to hear alternative views. Competent and authoritative women are seen as less likable in psych studies, so the Thatcher/Rand claims are plausible on priors. Microsexism can act as a hostility multiplier even if it isn’t the hostility’s root cause.
Rand is a bit idiosyncratic to count as Exhibit A here, though. A lot of professional philosophers dismiss her, including philosophers who take seriously scholars like Anscombe, Foot, de Beauvoir, Churchland, Millikan, Korsgaard, Thomson. A lot of people calling for more women in philosophy may be calling for professionals, and categorize Rand more with inspiring pop philosophers like Victor Frankl, Sam Harris, and Robert Pirsig.
I haven’t been following GamerGate closely, but I thought token woman/minority sockpuppetry was happening quite a bit?
It’s not really easy to tell how much sockpuppetry is going on, because the SJWs will assert it without any evidence beyond the opinions expressed. To the extent that GamerGate has a coherent will (where boycotts are being organized on 8chan etc.), they tell their followers not to pretend to be minorities or women if they aren’t, for fear of being discredited. I’m not sure how much this helps though, because people who don’t follow GamerGate closely only hear the accusations of sockpuppetry and don’t see when they’re rebutted.
I started paying attention to GamerGate when a minority gamer I know personally was accused of being white for participating in the protests. Leaving aside the fact that the “anti-racists” think being white is something to accuse someone of, it’s hypocritical of them to erase minority identities when they don’t fall into lockstep with their ideology.
I’ve been following #GamerGate reasonably closely. Every single accusation of “cishet white male sockpuppet” (there’s usually “virgin”/”neckbeard”/”manbaby” in there too) has been disproved with pictures, and in the dozens of livestreams they organize with women and minorities in the #notyourshield tag. I bet I missed some real ones, but this pattern has been dominant in my experience.
The misrepresentation of #GamerGate has been a fascinating phenomenon in itself, especially because it often doesn’t seem to be intentional.
Not everything bad that people say about a woman is misogynist. Only bad things that people say because a woman is a woman are misogynist.
In this case, people are saying bad things because this particular woman was a really awful politician. Why would it even come up?
I would be very surprised if none of Thatcher’s critics said misogynistic things about her. I would also be very surprised if none of her supporters called criticism of her misogynistic without adequate justification.
Maybe things were just really different in the 1980s and by the time she died the lines had already been drawn?
Thatcher was a continent away and largely before my time, but I get the impression that she was perceived as unfeminine on the Left. That’s not something that you can accuse her of in public if you’re a leftist, but it is something you can joke about behind closed doors, or in media aimed at your own tribe.
Condoleeza Rice got similar treatment during the Bush years. Sarah Palin’s a bit different; the jokes about her that I’ve heard cast her (beg pardon) as a dumb redneck bimbo, which you could certainly call sexist — at least on grounds of being a gendered insult — but isn’t a direct attack on gender nonconformity.
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“So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.”
Exactly what Heartiste (and many other people of course) have said: diversity+proximity=war.
“There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.”
The LoLest LoL of the month… You didn’t need to put “white” in the last part – having an in-group bias is present in all human beings. If having an in-group bias means you’re a racist then every single sane human being is a racist… which makes the concept utterly meaningless. And singling out whites in this context proves an increased anti-white racism, a deep-seated belief that there is something innately wrong with whites.
“The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction)”
Whoa, whoa. Everyone has their own in-group bias, but it’s only whites who consciously go against it – and they are seen as weak for it, and punished. It reminds me of the fact that slavery was a universal practice (PoC had white slaves in many parts of history), and it was whites who decided to do away with it – and they are still punished for it by claiming that they were the worst/only offenders. The longer I think about it the more it seems that we whites are the naivest people on earth abused by all the others who are much more pragmatic (expression chosen with politeness in mind). We gave “minorities” an inch, and another, and then some, but nothing seems to satisfy them. On the contrary, they get more and more angry and demanding.
“the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.”
…which says pretty much everything you need to know about the tolerance (and the integrity) of dem’s and rep’s relative to each other. The fact that it is the dem’s who constantly talk about tolerance make this all the more illuminating. You can call me stupid but it is much harder to shame the data into silence 🙂
“That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory. ”
The thing I don’t get is why it is sacrilege to even think about letting people form their own… “colonies”, so to speak, so they can live peacefully surrounded by other people and a culture they like. If proximity + political differences create turmoil, and political differences can’t be resolved, why enforce proximity? It’s just plain stupid; a recipe for constant animosity.
“Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something.”
Fighting for victim status is silly. But the media? Come on, let’s get honest for a second here… It is biased against whites, as evidenced by all the anti-white bullshit you just linked to. Or am I supposed to believe that all this anti-white sentiment coming from white people is somehow balanced by pro-white sentiment coming from PoC? Right around Ferguson a white guy was shot to death by police elsewhere in the US, and the media didn’t give a damn, because it was not proper fodder for the race wars. Let’s not pretend that the media is impartial or white-friendly, please… They consistently called the hispanic Zimmerman “white” just so they could incite some anti-white hatred.
“The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.”
This is not entirely true considering the experiments you mentioned, that found out Blues also had racial biases… They just keep saying they aren’t racists – deep down they are, just like everybody else 🙂
Your article pretty much shows that the blue tribe has no integrity whatsoever. They are an elitist mob held together by pretenses. The red tribe has always denounced them as such, but suddenly it seems that science and logic backs them up on this.
Thing is, red and blue doesn’t mean what they used to, and nowadays it is an engineered conflict to keep the perpetual infighting going. Divide and conquer, divide and conquer. Our most pressing problem is figuring out how to get out of this polarized, tribalist worldview. As long as we see each other as outgroups we’re descending into conflict, poverty, hatred. We need something to unify us, preferably not an outside outgroup but something more… enlightened.
Nice comments you get here, Scott. I never saw anything like this a few years ago. I like the new audience you’ve been attracting. Just let go of the dead-weight liberal leftoid tendencies you have, and this place will be great.
Comment reported for the obvious reasons.
Didn’t we talk about this in the aftermath of the last SJ post? Scott, run screaming in the opposite direction.
I was just assuming that Ballast’s comment was sarcasm, but now I look at his other posts I’m not so sure…
Also, Scott, please don’t stop critiquing the SJW’s, you’re the only person I know who can remain unmindkilled around them. If the influx of low quality instapundit (or whatever) posters are giving you trouble, just ban them or preemptively close the comments.
I don’t think it’s sarcasm, but if it is, that guy’s reeeeally bad at communicating.
I’m also in favor of heavy banning of instapunders or wherever they come from, despite being a borderline HBD/Reactionary myself. Comments like that is why I stopped reading HBD blogs (well, that and the tendency to analyze everything through the same lense).
“despite being a borderline HBD/Reactionary myself.”
Why? 90% of what HBDers claim is probably going to turn out either wrong or exaggerated. A few HBD blogs I used to follow have barely updated in the last few months. One of the more knowledgeable HBDers I know has recently admitted that he’s found lots of anomalies in migrant data and that he’s not expecting genome studies to find large genetic differences between races. Modest ones at best.
George, don’t stoop to Ballast’s level of refusing to name names, give links, and make precise claims.
Obvious troll is obvious.
And i’m surprised you haven’t noticed that Scott IS a borderline “liberal leftoid”.
Seems fairly sincere to me; we had an argument upthread about HBD.
Hey, so your broken-record repetition of HBD stuff sounded familiar, and I checked your IP, and YOU’RE THE PERSON WHO’S BEEN IMPERSONATING ME AND TRYING TO FRAME ME FOR STUFF.
WHY? WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?
I am not being insincere in my praise of this post. It is refreshing to see such a perspective on a leftist blog. I commend Scott for letting these otherwise silenced and slighted people to have a voice here. Even despite you problematic beliefs, such as your dismissive view of HBD.
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As a wise guy once said:
“A heretic is someone who shares ALMOST all of your beliefs. Kill him.”
So, as a sister piece to this essay, has everyone here read Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small piece? (I am failing at HTML, so I can’t link it, but it’s Googlable easily.) It seems like the best way to avoid the trap of it being extremely difficult (or contrarianly-signaling effective) to criticize a group is for you to try to keep as much mental distance from groups as you can. Remember, the world is under no obligation to fit itself into the categories you sort bits of it into; when you meet and interact with dozens of people at a time, a category that carves reality at the joints with 95% accuracy will hit a lot of bone.
Myself, I really like to follow a bunch of different communities, and see the best and the worst of what they have to offer, so I have mental ammunition to shoot back at the “Defend X! Attack Y!” reflexes I have. And it’s important to really look hard; it’s really easy to gloss over bad behavior with “No, although that person identifies as X, and everyone but my subgroup of X thinks they’re X, they’re really not X, so I don’t have to own that X contains people like that!”, or (as Scott pointed out in a previous post) to simply end up in a bubble where no one talks about certain kinds of behavior, so it’s easy to mentally excuse it as just a few bad apples.
And actually, now that I think of it…is there really an advantage to trying to use group membership to carve reality at the joints? If you know that it’s really hard to get and maintain accurate priors of behavior based on group membership when you’re a member of some groups and that group gives you points for attacking other groups, isn’t there potential gain in saying “I know that this person has given these signs of those tribal values, but I’m going to attempt to ignore them until I’ve interacted with the person directly, because a nice person’s going to look nice whether they fly a red, blue, grey, or irrigo flag.”?, especially when it’s not hard to have those casual interactions?
The problem with the “keep your identity small” piece is that when talking about not identifying with politics it ignores the difference between practical debates and differing goals. For example, I have no especially strong feelings about gun control because that is more a debate over which policy kills the least people, and if someone could convinced me that gun ownership actually reduced death I would support it. However, other issues, like abortion and homosexuality, are more about differences in morality than any debates over facts, and morality is very much part of someone’s identity. Of course the lines can sometimes be blurred, like when people defend gun ownership by saying their right to own guns is more important than others’ right to continue existing, and when neoreactionaries try and claim gay marriage will somehow literally destroy civilization.
But anyways better advice would be to identify with terminal values and not instrumental courses of action.
Saying gun control is primarily about which policy kills less people seems like a very wrong approach. Millions of people get enjoyment out of gun ownership. So in order for increasing gun control to justified it would have to prevent a signifigant amount of deaths. Its immoral and anti-human to curtail people’s freedoms unless you have a strong reason (not just an old weak reason).
As far as I can tell the level of gun control does not make a large difference in the murder rate. Guns seem to neither prevent nor cause a large fraction of murders. Based on this we should not increase gun control (and probably we should decrease it a bit).
Well, I think we’re at the kind of basic problem with sociology as a science, which is that it’s really hard to get everyone to agree to “OK, everyone, we’re going to do 1975-2000 again, only with different gun control laws, and see what happens!”
But in the absence of the ability to do that, you can say “Well, this country is fairly close to us in that time period with law X and they had positive results!”, for an entire spectrum of countries and different policies. Country A had gun control and an increase in home invasion and knife crime, country B had a rifle in every home and extremely low rates of any kind of crime, country C had strict gun control and low violent crime but a high non-gun suicide rate, country D had high personal armament but also got invaded, and so forth.
And, to tie it back to my main point, which of those data sets you are often exposed to and which are dismissed as outliers that aren’t part of a demonstrative social trend is often very heavily weighted based on which group you’re in.
Also, I just realized that there was one other point that Scott made, but didn’t exactly verbalize (although it might have come up in the giant radioactive discussion of doom since): the behavior which Scott identifies as painful and difficult isn’t just criticizing his tribe, it’s doing so in a manner which will give aid and ammunition to the enemy. It seems like the difference between complaining about your family, and going to the police about them.
Link for convenience’s sake: Keep Your Identity Small
On the meta level this is excellent. On the object level I found this rather off-putting although I did appreciate the final section. If you applied the same criteria for discourse to other groups, I think you would find blue tribe to be not significantly worse than other groups such as Catholics, atheists and conservatives.
The most interesting part of this essay to me, was the dark arts tactic of using disguised queries to discretely insult your opponents:
Its uncool to call Conservatives mean names and insult them. But insulting racist or sexist white guys? How could anyone challenge you unless they are secretly a nasty racist or sexist themselves?
This tactic is incredibly common. Its no longer cool to make fun of heathens, atheists, or people of other religions; but it is cool to make fun of fedora wearing neck beards (this is also a subtle way of insulting nerds, a group that has also fallen out of favor to make fun of directly).
This tactic is also very old. Criticizing a woman for having multiple sex partners is unusual. Criticizing her for being a “slut” is very common, though it is being pushed back against.
Criticizing someone for being a virgin in their twenties is bizarre. But you can criticize them for being a “prude who thinks they are so much better than everyone else”.
This is in a pretty much the non-central fallacy applied to types of people. You start off by creating a category with negative connotations including some trait that you want to attack (atheism, being overweight, having too much sex, or not enough) then assert that someone is a central member of that category because they have the trait that you are trying to attack.
Not if that person is male and you’re implying that they’re not a virgin by choice.
Well maybe its not bizarre, but it’s certainly being *Edit: a petty bully*.
(as in the people who make the “criticism” are *edit: petty bullies*, not the target)
Edit: Sorry, wasn’t sure about the standards of language here
Double Edit: Also you probably agree with me anyways.
Just realized you meant bizarre as in rare not as in weird. Ignore my previous comment.
And in case anyone wants to know the phrase I used in my previous post before editing was asshole, because I just realized my editing made it look like it was something else.
Recent citing:
Belle Knox is a Duke student who ran of money to pay for college, so she filled in the gap by being a porn actress. Criticizing someone for being a porn actress because it proves they are “morally depraved” is still acceptable in many circles unfortunately; but rather than criticize her on that front many of the critics jumped on her decision to remain at Duke calling her an “elitist self entitled snob who thinks she’s too good for community college – and will do anything to maintain her sense of superiority”. (rough paraphrase)
That’s rather strange when you think about it. Taking on a job to pay for college makes you “entitled”? (oh how I hate that word)
Dear Mr. Alexander,
Thank you for one of the best pieces on this subject I’ve ever read! (Can this be more broadly distributed or extended to book form – I hope?) My own thinking has been running the same direction for some time and I’ve struggled with a way to describe what I see and hear (and think) in just the same way.
Also, just recently, I had an online conversation regarding an in/out-group love/hate-fest news story with a rare, civil and similarly confused blue tribe/grey tribe waffler (my bias?), who seemed similarly troubled by the same observations you make. Upon completion of our sharp, but good-natured jabs at each other’s dissimilarities in rationales and interpretations, we followed by noting points of agreement and expressing admiration for the others sincerity, passion and desire for “the good” that were somewhat disconcerting, I think, for both of us, as such an exchange would normally end – in my experience – with feces hurling at best, and death/harm wishes at worst. It seemed, I guess, to make me feel hopeful? A feeling I’m not accustomed to having in such “discussions”.
Again, I thank you for sharing your excellent insights in a refreshingly honest and plain-spoken way. And I look forward to hearing more from you.
Very best regards,
Michael Reed
I’ve always been skeptical of the BSD t-shirt story, because …
Native: “And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?”
… when I lived on the prairie, I got the impression that half the rural highschools had either Red Devils or Blue Devils.
The professional hockey team that plays home games in New Jersey is called the New Jersey Devils.
Pretty minor team compared to the Duke Blue Devils.
Stray thought: “shit * say” videos have a big difference in tone if they are made by in-group or out-group folks. When “we” make a video mocking ourselves, it is a friendly parody. When we make a video mocking “them,” it’s as vicious as possible.
Those are really two different genres that just happen to have the same name.
Token Red tribe lurker here,
FYI
This post just got linked by Glen Reynolds’ Instapundit Feed. Professor Reynolds is pretty much the internet godfather of the main-stream Red tribe, Senators read his blog. You might have already noticed from watching incoming links, but if you were looking to get the “others” attention you have it, at least to some degree.
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Maybe it’ll amuse you that I enjoyed reading this.
I s’pose I’m “Red Tribe” (Conservative, Evangelical, and all that), and I gotta tell you, you can aim every last one of these criticisms straight at the Red Tribe and they would be valid. As a Red Triber who runs around Blue regions of the internet and who has both Red and Blue friends on Facebook, there is a particular type of facepalm that goes with seeing anti-outgroup posts from either side right next to each other on my “Friends” feed. I have to remind myself, often, that the most annoying Red Tribers are human; flawed people I care for and who have positive traits, and who could use some love and grace.
‘Cause it has somehow gotten easier to love the Blue Tribe. Go figure.
We’re perverse little creatures, we humans. But this is not a new thing. I come from Mennonite ancestry, where the highest virtue is humility, and it’s amazing how very proud we are of that. *headdesk*
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Scott, that was easily the best thing I’ve read in months, and I hope you never regret writing it. This is about as honest an essay as I’ve seen–that, or you just happened to place yourself nicely within my in-group of people who are largely disgusted by both Red and Blue, and sometimes Gray, occasionally myself, but mostly everyone else. 🙂 This essay, while long, was well worth the read, even though it ultimately leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. And I think that was the intention. Nothing you said was surprising, per se. I’ve been suspecting similar things for some time, though you put it into words extraordinarily well. But your final coup de grace was your moment of “Physician, heal thyself”, which implicated me right along with you. Well done. You’re spot on–tolerance should be painful or it’s not tolerance.
I’d be a loyal blue triber, except that they betrayed me and plenty of other people. But I want to talk about the blue and red tribes of other countries. Red tribes in other countries can be very different from America’s red tribe. They might be monarchists, they might favor a feudal system or even a caste system, etc. But throughout the world the blue tribes seem to be much the same. They are the women who want to have careers the same way men do. They are the gays who want to live openly. They are the secularists who don’t want the local red tribe’s religion to suffocate them.
Now after the Shah of Iran was evicted, Iran’s red tribe took over and executed a lot of members of the blue tribe. I had what I thought was a natural, blue tribe reaction: I was horrified and wanted revenge. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that I learned that the other members of the blue tribe here in America identified not with their fellow blue tribers in Iran, but with Iran’s red tribe. Incredible. It was like Jews supporting the Nazis or blacks supporting the KKK.
Ever since then I’ve been trying to get through to America’s blue tribers. No, these people are not your friends, and no, I’m not going to like Muslims (except the very, very moderate ones). They all seem like red tribers to me. And I take it that the message of Karima Bennoune’s book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is basically, “Hey, blue tribers in the Western world, will you stop supporting the red tribe in the Middle East and start supporting your real friends, the blue tribers in the Middle East?”
Maybe there is a blue triber here who can explain their (to me) mysterious love for people I think of as red tribers and make it seem quite reasonable, but it just looks irrational and even suicidal to me.
Blue tribers are very strongly against seeing third worlders (including middle easterners) oppressed by strong western interests. That sometimes bleeds over into support for anyone who tries to stop that, even though some of those anyones are worse.
There may also be an element of wishful thinking. Last I looked, the middle east had a depressing shortage of genuine good guys.
That can possibly be biological. HBD proves that middle easterners are more greedy when personal and familial gain is considered, so therefore there will always be unrest in the middle east as we see. Nothing we can do.
This is the part where I’d normally ask for a source, but any source you’re likely to provide is unlikely to be one I’d find trustworthy.
Also, I don’t find this comment to be either true or kind. Per Scott’s advice of erring on this side, I’ve reported it.
The sources are the many HBD blogs which draw on mainstream science. [H]bdchick is one of them, Jayman is another. Search for middle east related stuff around the rest of the HBD sphere and you’ll learn that my sources are indeed very trustworthy, unless you have an irrational hatred for HBD.
Unnecessary as well, actually. It wouldn’t really matter to this thread if the conclusion were true.
There is no “if” there anymore, and it is relevant to this whole topic. Scott pays only little lipservice to the HBD view, and it is clear he doesn’t ascribe to it. That is totally fine, but unscientific. The whole thing with tribalism and clannishness is that it is differs between races and subpopulation, and is largely genetic (he refers to this) and has between population differences due to gene-culture coevolution
I looked and didn’t find anything very trustworthy. Anybody can say that their preferred conclusions are backed up by mainstream science; actually demonstrating this is another matter entirely.
Traditionally, the next step in this debate is that I ask for an actual study published in a peer-reviewed journal that directly supports your claims, and then you assert that of course no such study exists because academia would never allow it to be published (which is true) but of course the HBD people are drawing obvious commonsense conclusions from mainstream science and only someone who had been mindkilled by progressive politics could fail to acknowledge their truth. To which I respond that most smart people I’ve heard from don’t seem to think much of those conclusions and I have no evidence that the HBD people aren’t themselves victims of their own political biases. And pretty soon we run smack into the Hard Problem of Figuring Out Which Purported Experts Should Actually Be Listened To.
Is this a fair assessment?
You are right that academics are disallowed due to cultural Marxism and political correctness from publishing anything that rails against the dominant paradigm (even if the paradigm is demonstrably wrong.) The rest of your assessment is incorrect, HBD is just science, and the conclusions that are derived from it. No more, no less. The truth can’t be “racist” or anything, because science, and HBD, is inherently apolitical and value-free. These truths are affirmed by people like Nicholas Wade, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, the many HBDers, etc. So you are wrong in saying that “smart people” are against HBD.
You seem to have redefined “smart people” as “HDB bloggers”.
To be clear, my claim wasn’t that no smart people buy into HBD, only that most of them don’t.
In any case, do you in fact have any studies to cite?
The sources are all on the various HBD blogs which you neglect to read. I can only conclude that your opposition to HBD is irrational.
I searched to find what HBD Chick had to say on the Middle East, and this post, for example, isn’t science in any meaningful sense.
Ironically, “I can’t be bothered to cite sources, but I’m totally right; go read my side’s blogs until you’ve indoctrinated yourself” is one of the attitudes that ticks me off about SJ.
Ladies and gentlemen, horseshoe theory in action!
I used to read HBD blogs somewhat regularly, but reading too much stupid stuff and lazy thinking about the middle east was one of the things that annoyed me and drove me away.
Yes, okay, it’s pretty likely that some group differences in intellectual abilities have genetic causes, even if it’s not very nice to mention it; that doesn’t mean *any* difference between *any* group has to have genetic causes!
So you people can just disregard Ballast, reading HBD blogs would probably be a waste of your time.
As far as I understand it, the HBD argument about Middle East instability is:
1) Virtually all behavioral traits are substantially heritable. (Extremely well established).
2) This includes the pattern of traits that can be dubbed “clannishness” – favoring kin over non-kin, distrust of outsiders, et cetera. Everyone is clannish to some extent, but the degree to which we are is substantially genetic. (Probable in light of 1), but I don’t remember seeing any direct studies on this).
3) a) In many Middle Eastern countries, first-cousin marriage is very common. (Well-established).
4) Kin selection operates strongly on consanguineous families, so the selective pressure in favor of clannishness is much higher than in other societies. (Plausible given 2) and 3), though I haven’t seen any papers directly modeling this and I’m not sure of the mathematics here).
5. High clannishness leads to nepotism and corruption, distrust in liberal institutions and the rule of law generally (why should outsiders have a say over your family?), and a high propensity for tribal violence. (This is the most speculative part, though it’s hardly implausible).
This argument isn’t conclusive, and clearly a lot more research is needed. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss it out of hand, though.
Yep. Not only middle east, but in all other populations there is selection for such behaviors. Criminality in blacks, Slavs, Hispanics, probably has a genetic origin. I think Scott is an idiot if he doesn’t take HBD seriously, its been thus far the strongest force that answers all questions about humanity. Since every behavior is heritable (not quite genetic causation per set, but whatever) HBD is right in saying everything about human societies has an innate, evolutionary origin. This is the perspective of mainstream science.
Blue vs Red is as much a cultural thing as a political one, so using blue to mean liberals and leftists, gray to mean libertarians and red to mean conservatives is not really accurate.
But yes I noticed this also. It seems to have something to do with the rise of the “new left” over the “old” one, and the rise of postmodernism. Also, when Westerners try to criticize other societies for illiberal and unleft practices (i.e pretty much everything about Islam) they are accused of being bigots.
This, the reactionary-masquerading-as-leftwing environmental movement, increasing hostility to rationality and science, the gleeful, willful collateral damage ignorance of much of the popular “social-justice” movement, unwillingness to ever use military intervention (yes i see the irony), and the near-total abandonment of caring about material goods allocation* has caused me to become highly dissilusioned with the new left.
*indeed, some seem to have adopted a hostility towards the very idea of material goods being important. It should be noted that only the rich can afford to reject materialism.
(Note: I’m actually more gray than blue culturally and personality-wise, but have left-ish rather than libertarian economic views. I also have weird positions that go off in completely different directions, like thinking cryonics should be part of universal healthcare and that there should be a government agency dedicated to anti-aging research, and being somewhat hostile to democracy)
Edit: I think the point about “social justice” may have actually been unfair, that’s more just people being typical jerks than anything ideological and similar rhetoric probably shows up in any ideology. though it does seem to be unique in its frequency of trying to make up elaborate justifications for it’s bullying of people who have done nothing wrong (sometimes even by it’s own standards).
Oh wow reading this to myself I sound… I don’t know exactly how to put it, but if someone else wrote like that I would assume either English is not their first language or they had some sort of learning disability. It’s not the actual content of the post but the way it’s written. My other comments sometimes look this way to myself also. I wonder why this is…
I think it’s a combination of attempted-high-register-sounding stock phrases (“indeed”, “it should be noted that…”), punctuation, and questionable handling of tense/aspect. Putting on my editor hat, I’d first-pass the first two paragraphs as follows:
The Blues you describe are as utterly absent from my (diverse, but skewing blue) experience as Reds are for Scott. Literally, I have never met anyone in my ~80% blue social circle who believes what you just claimed is true of all blues.
I take it, Matthew, you were replying to me. So there are blues out there who are angry about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, angry about the murder of Theo van Gogh, angry about Obama’s support for the Iranian regime against the protesters, angry about his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the list goes on and on. It feels as though the blue tribers in America are trying to turn us into Saudi Arabia. Certainly, Karima Bennoune, whom I mentioned in my last post, feels as I do. Her book details many atrocities and death threats against blues in the Muslim world, all of whom feel that no blue in the West is on their side.
Who are these mythical people you speak of?
Yes. Disapproval of this fatwa is universal among anyone I have ever met of any political stripe.
Again, I don’t know anyone of any political stripe who approves of murdering people for expressing unpopular opinions, regardless of who is doing the murdering.
I think this is the example that gives away the game, frankly. At no point did Obama support the Iranian regime. He pointedly did not BOMB them, which many reds clearly think would be a good idea, because blues think this would be stupid and counterproductive, not because they approve of Iran’s theocracy.
As opposed to those paragons of blue-ism in the Egyptian military? This example suggests ignorance of both blues and Egypt.
This is a fact about your mindset, not about the blue tribe.
I have to disagree with all of this. My wife is a college professor, and I have an email account with that college. Over the last dozen years, there have been many, many mass emails of the Islamophilic type: speakers talking about this or that wonderful aspect of Islam, announcements of courses on Islam showing how much they have given to the world, etc. There has never been a single email that hints that Islam has victims (generally women and gays). Not one. Will we get speakers talking about Rotherham, for example? No way (unless they blame it all on white males).
If there is so much anger at things Muslims have done, why are they so silent about it? Where are the demonstrations in the street? Are you reviving Nixon’s idea of a silent majority, but blues in this case?
Incidentally, all I want is for Obama to show some support for blue tribers in the Muslim world, but instead he leans very strongly for supporting the reds. He simply did not have to show support for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the military in Egypt.
Everyone already knows that. Why harp on it?
(Especially when Islamic culture in antiquity is so damn interesting. Seriously, look it up.)
(And are you sure you didn’t manage to miss emails about, say, Malala Yousafzai, a victim of Islamic extremism who is very popular among the left?)
He… didn’t show support for either?
The mainstream Blue reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood was “oh, great, it’s a Muslim theocratic party… but maintaining the Schelling fence around banning political parties is important, and Egyptian democracy is fragile enough as it is, so let’s just see how this ends,” and the mainstream Blue reaction to the military booting out the Muslim Brotherhood was “okay, after a long string of Muslim Brotherhood abuses, democracy was just not going to happen in Egypt, and we prefer a stable military dictatorship to an unstable theocratic one.”
Neither of those is support, nor even close to it, but could be misconstrued as support by an intellectually dishonest opposition.
FWIW, that’s a 100% accurate rendition of my feelings on the matter, as a card-carrying blue.
“and we prefer a stable military dictatorship to an unstable theocratic one.””
If this is the case, why did you bother deposing Mubarak or Gaddafi or (attempted to) Assad in the first place?
Mubarak was overthrown, not deposed. Blues supported the revolution, however, because there was a very real chance that it would result in democracy, as happened successfully in Tunisia and Yemen, and may still happen in Libya.
Syria has largely become as bad as it is because Red opposition prevented the US from effectively intervening in the conflict. Islamist groups stepped in to fill the power vacuum, resulting in ISIS.
No, I didn’t miss any emails about Malala. Nor were there any emails about the murder of Theo van Gogh or the recent disclosures of sexual abuse in Rotherham or a zillion other possible incidents on which there could have been emails.
I’ve read books by Nick Cohen and Paul Berman, both of them left-of-center and both making the same assumptions I am making about the blue tribe, namely that they are perfectly happy with the leftist alliance with the Muslim right. Bassim Tibi, a (genuinely) moderate Muslim, wrote a book sharing that assumption, also, and condemning them for it.
The same is true for books by the Norwegian feminist Hege Storhaug and the Algerian feminist Karmia Bennoune. They are both protesting against leftists who seem clueless about how their own policies are harming women.
Bruce Bawer, a gay writer, and Phyllis Chesler, a feminist, have both moved to the right in frustration at the failure of the left to condemn the sexism and homophobia of Muslim immigrants.
On the other hand, Martha Nussbaum wrote a book condemning Islamophobia while saying almost nothing about Muslim abuses of women. She even mentioned Salman Rushdie without mentioning the fatwa, which I take was due to her not wanting to offend anyone.
And now various anonymous people claiming to be of the blue tribe are telling me that all along they have agreed with me but apparently have never said anything about it in public. Yeah, right.
Maybe you could mention a book or two that (1) expresses your beliefs and (2) condemns the beliefs of those liberals and leftists who are soft on Muslim abuses.
First, I don’t think any of the genuine blues here are actually agreeing with you. You’ve been making an isolated demand for rigor where Muslims are involved, doing the “why haven’t you condemned Islam” dance whenever Muslims do something wrong. How many e-mails did you get condemning Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism as a whole when extremist adherents of those religions did something wrong? The actual blue position is that religious extremism is bad, not that there is something uniquely awful about Islam.
But even if that objection weren’t available, your observations still aren’t evidence for what you think they are. As both the current post and All Debates are Bravery Debates imply, all that is required for your e-mail to skew in favor of Islam is for your university colleagues to perceive Islamophobia to be a bigger problem than excessive tolerance of intolerance (an impression that encountering you is likely to cement).
Dear Matthew,
My original request was for blue tribers to explain why they supported those Muslims who were red-tribers. You and a few others insisted that they hadn’t been doing that, but now you are saying the exact opposite (“First, I don’t think any of the genuine blues here are actually agreeing with you.”)
So, it seems that we are back to my original request. However, you have managed to misrepresent my position in your last response. I am not “doing the ‘why haven’t you condemned Islam’ dance whenever Muslims do something wrong,” as you describe it. Just for the record, I don’t have anything against blue-tribe Muslims like, say, Bassam Tibi (author of Islamism and Islam), and since there are Muslims I rather like, I’m not interested in a general condemnation of Islam.
What I want is a condemnation of specific abuses done by Muslims. The situation in Rotherham is exactly the sort of thing I don’t want. The sexual abuses went on for so long partly because people who knew about the problem were afraid of being called racist, and so they remained silent.
Let’s say one of the victims from Rotherham confronted you and demanded to know what you had done to protect them, what you had done to prevent those abuses. If they were to ask me, I could honestly say that I had many arguments over the last dozen years with liberals and leftists in which I pointed out the dangers to women and others of siding so completely with Muslims, but every time I raised my voice, I was called racist. (You yourself practically said the same thing in your last sentence.) What would you say to her? What did you do during the last dozen years to protect her? Did you issue any warnings that women might become victims of the left’s policies?
What I want is for the left to be neutral with respect to Islam. I want it to be between Islamophobia and Islamophilia. (The left I grew up with didn’t even like religion.) There are abuses that will emerge if either prevails, so the best policy is one that is neutral and is on the lookout for both types of abuse. I want the left to say, “Yes, we know that Muslims have been victims, but some are also likely to be victimizers, and we can’t have that.”
If people like you don’t agree with me on that, I’d like to know why.
John P: I think perhaps your particular email-list-head has a peculiar bias that doesn’t generalize well to all blues. I’m blue/gray, and what you ascribe to blues seems to me like yellow.
They are definitely a majority in the leftist circle.
Scott, it’s time to close the comments on this thread. The occasional insight that might show up is not worth the amount of bullshit (in the technical sense) that one would have to wade through to find it.
Brandeis’ treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversy over segregation in British schools and the use of hate speech laws against criticism of Islam are all examples of the attitude John P describes.
Interestingly most of these sorts of incidents are in Europe. I have noticed similar attitudes in America, but they are less powerful due to differences in laws and policies.
The key bit is that “red” tribers don’t oppose the blue tribe primarily. Conservatives tend to be concentric in their loyalty. The muslims have a proverb that illustrates this perfectly: “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the infidel”. For conservatives, it’s “fight the liberals, fight with liberals against europeans, with europeans against Russia, with Russia against muslim crazies”. Republicans might hate Obama, but they lined right up to help him bomb Iraq again, many of them pushed him to be harder on Putin and Syria.
The “blue” tribe on the other hand opposes the red tribe primarily, and hence supports anyone, anywhere that the red tribe dislikes. So they are on the side of terrorists, ultra-nationalist dictators, communists, anything they can find to annoy the reds. It is confusing until you realize that the blues really do think that the reds are the worst thing in the whole world.
This was absurdly divorced from reality when he claimed it, and it’s still absurdly divorced from reality when you claim it. In the rare instances where this isn’t simply caricature, the offending blues get excoriated by other blues.
I disagree. One need only look at the vast torrent of left-wing hate for Israel and support for Palestinians. Why? Israel is the most gay-friendly country on earth, is the only country I know of with a completely gender-integrated military, is hugely left-wing politically, was founded by socialists. The Palestinians, and Hamas in particular, are somewhere to the right of Gengis Khan. They stone women, hang gays, and have waged a terror campaign that has lasted half a century. But Reds like the Israelis and hate islamists, so off they go.
Oh, and the LGM blog is pretty solidly Grey, so holding it up as an avatar of blue-on-blue criticism is pretty far removed from reality.
Saying “blues are for terrorists” is just unredeemably stupid. Not sure where else to go on that point; it’s not the sort of thing that actually warrants a considered response.
If you look at data, blues are very mixed on Isreal – Scott recently had a post that talked a bit about this (I think one of the recent links posts). This is definitely significantly different from red support of Israel, but it’s far from a concerted “vast torrent of hate”.
Now, I do hate Israel’s actions. I think trying to carve out a jewish area in the middle of culturally muslim areas was a bad idea in the first place, and Israel hasn’t done great since then, continually antagonizing and bullying Palestine, which resulted in the sort of response they get now. (Similar to how the US being jerks to Iraqis was significant in the creation of today’s ISIS.)
Further, the government of Israel over the last decade or two has begun shifting hard-theocratic, with a lot more sympathy for oppression of women and arabs. It’s pretty hard to sympathize with that, personally.
Tab, thank you for illustrating the point so well. It’s not that you are “for” terrorism, you are just more against liberal western democracies more than you are against terrorism. You find it quite easy to come up with a host of reasons why Israel (and I notice you couldn’t help tossing the US into the pot) have the moral short end of the stick against people who literally stab babies. You see the issue? “Yes yes, terrorists are bad mmkay, but the REAL PROBLEM is the fact that all terrorism is really the fault of the US!”.
And Israel is the group going “hard theocratic”?
You compare Israel and Hamas, and the issue you see is that Israel is “too theocratic”?
Hamas literally, in its constitution (when not calling for the eradication of Israel and the genocide of every Jew on earth) demands the return of parts of Spain and the Balkans to muslim rulership, because land that was ever under muslim control is forever theirs. They stone women for “impiety”. Theocratic?
> For conservatives, it’s “fight the liberals, fight with liberals against europeans, with europeans against Russia, with Russia against muslim crazies”
Your characterization seems a lot more apt if it refers to the politics of 1980-1990. Since then, there has been a total inversion in the relative adaptibility of the two sides.
I’d like to interject into Scott’s first major point, which was the paucity of real “diversity” in most of our lives. I may be a huge exception to this rule, and the key was (the traditionally liberal trait of) seeking out new and interesting experiences. My group of close friends and family encompasses all political areas I am aware of in the US. I am in academia these days, so my work group is much like those described by Scott. I’m a vet, so my closest brothers in the world are mostly the sort of rabid red-meat conservatives that scare the pants off people in blogs like this. Fun note, not a one of those guys has anything but contempt for creationism. My family are mostly deeply religious, faith-healing young earth creationist types. And as I’ve tipped past thirty, my social circle has been decimated of breeders, leaving me with a predominately gay social group.
I have two members of my groups that I use as avatars to keep me honest when thinking about the politics of the two major groups in our society.
1: Red – My parent’s pastor. Ex-amish, thirteen kids, creationist and faith healer, has an eighth-grade education and an accent since his first language is Pennsylvania Dutch, not English. It would be easy to mock him based on this overview, but look closely. Despite the lack of formal education, he is intensely smart, started several businesses and would be a many-multi-millionaire except for the fact he gives well over ninety percent of his income to charity. He lives in the same house he grew up in, simply. He is the most unrelentingly charitable, kind and humble person I have ever met. And if there was ever a way to measure the greatness of a man, it’s the quality of his children. Of all of them, I have never heard a one of them, ever, express antipathy toward any other human being. E.W. is one of the finest people I know, and I disagree with everything he believes.
2: Blue – T.S., middle-aged gay minority female, deeply involved with LBGT activism, feminism, crazy hippie, believes in crystal healing, auras, alternative medicine and a host of conspiracy theories. Once more, the pastiche is easy to mock. She’s a business owner and despite the stereotype of the lasy pothead hippie, is one of the hardest working people I know. The level of warmth and love she spreads to everyone she meets is must be seen to be believed. My parents and grandparents (completely opposite in every significant belief) love her, and she them. She is the hub and the heart of our entire oldtown district.
I use these to remind me that there are good people on both sides. And living in this space between these groups sharpens one’s political beliefs, one is always being challenged by people one respects. It isn’t always comfortable, but it is interesting. The ingroup-outgroup antipathy seems to be rising in pitch, largely because there is no outside outgroup anymore. We only have each other.
I think you have really hit the “heart” of this, so to speak.
In the end, it’s about your own heart. As soon as you start wagging your fingers, blaming others because they do not share your own personal snowflake belief system of how to make the world a perfect place, then you are guilty of the sin of intolerance.
Advocating others show kindness and goodness and charity is all well and good, but becomes meaningless when your idea of advocating for kindness and goodness and charity is wagging your fingers and tsk-tsking at the out-groups for their lack of it.
You can find hypocrites and venomous individuals in any group – no matter how large or small you divide it, because you can even find it in yourself. Once you stop asking others to change their behavior to make the world a better place and start asking yourself to do it…the world becomes a better place.
It’s not about fixing the hearts of others, it’s about fixing your own heart.
Sweet jebus, 852 comments!? What the heck am I supposed to do with that?
…I’ll award Cyan Points to good summaries and links to the most insightful commentary.
Search for “Sacred Cow”‘s comment.
Eh, not too bad. I award you one Cyan Point.
Start with the more recent and work backwards? Cf reading philosophy backwards.
You’re not missing too much. Sometimes the comment threads around here add insights that make the original post that much better, but here we all seem to be trying to do that and not succeeding very well. (Truth be told, I don’t usually participate in SSC comment threads that are this big and hairy; I’m making an exception for this one because the post itself was on such an important topic.)
EDIT: Except for these comments by Brendan Eich, which are worth reading if you have any interest in that whole series of events.
Seconding the impression that the comments to this post are unusually unhelpful.
EDIT: However, Brendan Eich showing up twice to comment was pretty interesting; you may want to search for that.
Yes, I agree – the comments aren’t great this time (including my own of course). Not sure why.
Hypothesis: Although Scott’s post made heavy use of American politics as an example, most of the actual insights he collected aren’t about American politics at all; they’re facts about ingroup–outgroup dynamics which are relatively uncontroversial but still greatly underappreciated, and which can help us understand politics better.
Meanwhile, most of us in the comments have been busy saying things about American politics, and most nontrivial things that anybody has to say about such a complex and bias-fraught subject are wrong. (This is especially true of anybody saying anything along the lines of “blues tend to approach politics this way, while reds approach it that way”.)
I think this is the real rationale behind Less Wrong’s ban on politics. Of course, as the main post demonstrates, many topics related to politics can and should be discussed productively from a rationalist perspective.
Like the last giant thread, it’s falling apart here at the end with typical internet blabbering.
I don’t think anyone would lose much if these enormous threads were automatically closed after X-hundred comments. 600 or 800, maybe.
I’m not sure things were much better early on.
Brendan Eich — that’s certainly a perspective I won’t find anywhere else. I award you and Matthew 5 Cyan Points each.
“To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.”
There you go. You simply won’t find social and political conservatives in significant numbers on social media fora that don’t explicitly promote their views. The Daily Mail worked this out years ago and has been unprecedentedly successful in tapping this rich vein of reactionaries.
However, there is also the argument that conservatives have much better things to do with their time than reading long diatribes by lefty humanities graduates from former polytechnics. Such as making and spending large amounts of cash and finding complicated schemes to avoid paying punitive taxes on aforementioned piles of cash.
Working as a busy surgeon between the glorious workers’ collective that is the NHS and the red-in-tooth-and-claw private sector gives a fascinating insight into how the two sectors fail to overlap. My private colleagues have neither the time nor inclination to spend their pitiful leisure time reading (self-evidently excellent) blogs such as this, which is a pity. I quite enjoy dipping my toe into in, if only to observe the astonishing levels of bile and bigotry reserved for people with my views and those lower down the social scale.
Oh, and there are excellent arguments against gay marriage if you can be bothered to reflect for a moment. They may well become clearer with time.
toodle pip, and keep up the good work.
Having reflected for some time, the best arguments I can see against gay marriage are very speculative and long-term, and even if applicable there are countervailing factors. Asserting that there are excellent ones readily available, without a hint, is obnoxious.
And the mome raths outgrupe.
The way of involvement of Yugoslavia wartime into the discussion, is what I call the “Stockholm School” of historiography, by derisive allusion to both the Royal Bank of Sweden “Nobel” prize in economics and the famed Stockholm syndrome.
“The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary.”
It would be great if some read this when it wasn’t a poo flinging occasion.
ISIS is another good example of this “outgroup” phenomenon. They talk a great game about killing all us Jews, Christians, Atheists, Americans, etc., but at least 90% of their victims are Arabs who practice a slightly different form of Islam.
Actually, they don’t talk about killing Christians and Jews, they talk about forcing them to pay jiziya. But they do talk a lot about killing apostates, so they look to be quite consistent.
The most confusing and wordy piece I have read in a very long time. I really wish you had tied it up at the end with a real point. Rambling with a few interesting points but in the end I have no idea what you are trying to say. I have bookmarked to read a third time. Maybe I will gain enlightenment. This was linked as part of a conversation on my post on Google+. I am not sure of the rules for linking but if you want to read it you can see it near the top of my public profile on that social network. It’s about the lesbian who got black sperm by mistake.
You have made progress. Fabulous progress, considering your point of origin. You still probably have a way to go.
Every member of the Blue Tribe–I shall use your terms–imagines himself a free-thinker: it is his totem of membership. But a modern Blue Man–since the Sixties–must be the polar opposite: a group-thinker.
There is always the hazard that the odd Blue Man will believe his propaganda and actually think freely. Unless he can be inhumanly silent, this will gradually offend his friends, lovers, and employers–if he persists. Usually he will not persist.
And so you have come as far as the Grey Tribe–before the Blues threw you out, I presume. Hearty congratulations!
But that is not usually a stable resting point. You will have noticed most Greys are young.
Enjoy the journey. I omit any spoilers.
Argh, of course conservatives are coming here and saying “yes, the blue tribe are evil, they should totally be an outgroup.” I can see why Scott didn’t want this linked from reddit.
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As a blue-tribe apostate, I found your article very interesting and insightful. But here is a test to your own capacity to consider something that requires you to step outside your comfort zone:
Your article describes the reason that Jesus Christ was crucified.
Your thoughts are in line with other great thinkers whose ideas have long withstood the test of time:
Prov 24:17 (NAS) Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.
Mat 5:44-45 (NEB) “But what I tell you is this: love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be like children of your heavenly Father, who makes his sun rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest and the dishonest. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect? Surely the tax-gatherers do as much as that. And if you greet only your brothers, what is there extraordinary about that? Even the heathen do as much. There must be no limit to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.”
And here is another blue/grey head-bender: If you want to see diverse blue/red/GOP/Dem/black/white/rich/poor individuals coming together, not just locally, but globally, go into a Christian church – anywhere in the world. It’s not at all like the imagined stereotypes.
I really enjoyed this piece. Good writing and good stuff.
I’m glad to hear how good the Christians, and only the Christians, are at bringing people together.
You are asserting facts not in evidence. She did not say “only” Christians were bringing people together. Rather, she observed that, in actual fact, Christian churches often contained members of multiple tribes/ethnicities/classes working together. This is in contrast to the meme that being Christian is specifically a red tribe thing.
My understanding is there are quite a few blue-tribe Christians, who are pretty quiet about it, and are somewhat embarrassed by the media constantly reinforcing the alleged link between the red tribe and the church.
Whew. To sum up:
I’m frequently introduced as “the Republican friend” like a dog that walks on two legs.
It never occurs to me to introduce anyone as “my Democrat friend”. “Progressives” are the opposite of tolerant.
“Conservatives think liberals are stupid, Liberals think Conservatives are evil.” Krauthammer
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Maybe the tag should not be “things I will regret writing,” but “things I will regret being posted on social media.”
It is possible to make it hard to link from social media, such as redirecting based on ‘referer.’
Well, bless your heart. Great article. This is what many in the experienced Red Tribe might call a “Lessons Learned Analysis”; wherein you take a hard, hard look in the mirror and understand and admit just what it was you did or did not do that got your men killed, or bankrupted your company, or lost you your family … Not a comfortable chair to sit in. You sound close. And that’s how you grow.
… A new, Red reader.
Out of curiosity, what lessons do you think were learned about what should or should not have been done?
Excellent article overall. But I think there is one main part that I believe you missed.
The blue tribe tribe often uses the term “tolerance”. But when you press them what they are actually describing is “acceptance”. And when you discuss “acceptance” with them it generally seems to be defined as “advocacy for”.
Which seems to go along well with another observation about both sides. The blue side also tends to place a higher value on the “intent” behind language than about what is actually being said. Where as the red side tends to more adhere to literal interpretations of things.
In many ways it makes any discussions between sides difficult there is very little middle ground to be found between these interpretations of language use.
One of the interesting things touched upon in this post is the mutual belief of both Red and Blue that America is, at its core, Red. This is what underlies the reflexive support of the United States in Red America, and the reflective hostility in Blue. But is this really true? After all, Obama was reelected, in various parts of the country the Blue party is firmly entrenched without hope of dislodgement. And of course, abortion continues without cursease. This may be creating a generation of conservatives who hate America…..
a huge part of team blue’s self identity is the belief that they are an embattled minority bravely standing against a world full of bigots and war mongers. 80 years into the new deal state and they’ll still swear up and down that they’re just barely holding back the dark forces of reaction.
This a very odd phrasing. The New Deal was only able to secure a Congressional majority by denying blacks access to most of its benefits (at the time of original passage). If you’d said the “Great Society” instead of the “New Deal,” this would make (slightly) more sense. But the New Deal was about protecting old and poor white people, and had nothing to do with fighting bigotry.
Edit: And the “Great Society” project at home could only be enacted at the blood price of appeasing the war-mongers abroad.
who said anything about bigotry? I said the forces of reaction, the vagueness of the subject is essential to the long life of the meme. Sure since the 60s it’s meant fighting racism, but in the 30s they were using the same narrative, just substitute malefactors of great wealth for racists. As for the idea that the great society was somehow paid for with the war in vietnam, that’s sheer nonsense.
cassander, now:
cassander, 8:47 pm:
You’re being willfully dense. I didn’t say it was paid for that way. The tacit bargain that kept the loyalty of conservative southern Democrats in Congress for Medicare etc. was pursuing their preferred foreign policy course.
sorry, my bad. At one point that first comment mentioned forces of reaction not bigots and warmongers.
On the broader point, though, I don’t see how the point matters. with the sole exception of 64, every presidential election from 48-72 was won by the candidate who was most vociferous about being tougher on the commies, regardless of party. this has nothing to do with the broader progressive insistence that they are a marginal minority. hell, it’s even older than progressivism. take the abolitionists. They actually were an embattled minority before the civil war, but this wasn’t enough for them. they insisted on concocting vast conspiracies about “slave power” trying to conquer the north and impose slavery there. Sure, the targets and causes of the puritan crusades change over time. they have to, because by and large the puritan crusades have achieved their goals. but the method and psychological ticks around them change surprisingly little.
with the sole exception of 64, every presidential election from 48-72 was won by the candidate who was most vociferous about being tougher on the commies, regardless of party.
You have seven data points. That’s not enough to be so casual about throwing one of them out. Generally presidential elections are too few and far between to do much rigorous analysis of them based on the outside view.
not 7 data points, 14. every candidate for both parties for nearly a quarter century promised to stick it to the commies. it doesn’t take rigorous analysis for that to be strong evidence that anti communism was extremely popular.
Seven data points. The relevant observation to your initial claim is the choice between candidate A and candidate B, which happens 7 times, not the characteristics of each individual candidate. If you do not even understand this, your analysis is surely not to be trusted in this matter.
(Further a little lol at the idea that both parties supporting a particular policy proves the policy is popular with the people. What do you think this is, some sort of democracy?)
I think it has to do with how Reds generally make more noise. E.g. American-Football, “Merica, Fuck Yeah”, the Tea Party Coalition, etc. I think this is because they’re ideologically more cohesive than Blues (think farmers vs foragers). This makes them proud and more likely to boast about how great their culture/nation is. Not that Blues are exempt from stoking their ego, but I feel like Blues tend to be more subtle about it.
As a result, I think the face of the U.S. that foreigners tend to see is primarily the Red face. After foreigners label all of the U.S. as Red, the Blues naturally begin to distance themselves from the “Murica!” meme (a la Robber Cave).
I’m not sure they’re actually louder. The media gave far more attention to Tea Party protests than much larger protests for immigration reform in 2010 or climate change action this year. This would tend to give foreigners a misleading impression, but it’s a fact about the media, not about the underlying volume.
I just want to applaud this essay. While I may disagree with parts of it, much of it was utterly spot on, especially the Blue Tribe on OBL, vs Thatch. Thank you for penning this very perceptive essay.
Easily the best thing on a liberal blog I have read in a long, long time. There is one thing you do not note and I’d love to see it. What about conservatives who work in the professions and come from the East Coast, particularly NY, Philly and Boston. Unlike you or the “Redstaters” they have to spend almost all their time with the other side. We then are the most tolerant of all! (my quotes on “redstaters” is that the color of the Right, is and always has been Blue. The Left is Red. Never heard of Grey before will look to see if it becomes a meme.
Also, no one I know wants to “ban” same sex marriage they merely believe that any rational person does not think same sex unions whether recognized by the state or not should change the definition of what marriage is. We believe that the state recognizing such things as marriages so changes the mearning of the institution so as to ban real marriage for everybody else.