Tag: purity

Why we spend more time hating on heretics than we do on hating infidels

Why all the Warren/Sanders hate?

Imagine that the politicians Chester and Hubert agree that there is a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball. Chester thinks that little dogs are part of the squirrel conspiracy; Hubert thinks they aren’t. The squirrels would stir up as much shit as possible between Chester and Hubert about little dogs, an issue that is actually much less important than the squirrel issue.

Squirrels would create social media accounts promoting memes and snarky posts about how Hubert was nice to a little dog, about how Hubert supporters don’t have legitimate reasons for their support of him (they like him because he has a cool coat, he petted a puppy), but Chester supporters have good reasons for supporting Chester. Squirrels would work to create a wedge between Chester and Hubert supporters, since the political success of either of them would be disastrous for squirrels.

There are various ways of doing that, but everything the squirrels would do would involve keeping Chester and Hubert from working together. If Chester and Huber work together, regardless of the issue of the little dogs, the squirrels are toast.

A pro-squirrel media campaign in a balkanized media sphere would condemn Chester and Hubert as anti-squirrel in all the pro-squirrel media. What would the squirrels do in the anti-squirrel media world?

They would try to get a purity argument between Chester and Hubert, one that would keep them from working together.

That happened. In the early 19th century, Irish- and African-Americans had similar material interests—there was no social safety net, there was racism (Catholicism was framed as a race), and abusive working conditions for both groups. It would have been sensible for Irish- and African-Americans to work together, but they didn’t. They didn’t because—to make a complicated situation simple—Jacksonian Democrats (who needed a base of voters in a non-slaver state to support slavery) put a wedge between the Irish- and African-Americans, and that wedge was the ability to invite the Irish-Americans to believe themselves as essentially better and different from African Americans.

The original sin of political deliberation is that we reason from identity, rather than applying principles across identity. And the wedge enabled the Irish to feel good about themselves because they weren’t African. That’s also how the planter class in the South prevented unionization—segregation helped keep poor whites poor because it ensured they wouldn’t join forces with poor African Americans.

It makes perfect sense that people would create a wedge issue to keep potential allies apart, but why do we fall for it?

Sure, the squirrels would create memes intended to make Chester and Hubert supporters so angry with each other that they won’t collaborate, but why would Chester and Hubert supporters share the memes, posts, and links that help the squirrels?

We fall for it because people are always more worked up about heretics than infidels. In theory, we hate infidels more than heretics, but in practice, that isn’t what happens. It has to do with a cognitive bias about decision-making.

If we are faced with a decision between two pretty similar things, we are likely, once we’ve made the decision, to exaggerate the differences between the two in order to make us feel better about the decision we’ve made. Ambiguous decisions are more threatening to our sense of self than clear-cut ones because they are the ones we can get wrong. Our need to make ourselves feel that we’ve made the right decision means that we will not acknowledge that we were even unsure, let alone that the other option might be more or less equally good.

Our hostility toward infidels doesn’t raise any uncertainty; that we have chosen between two similar choices does. When people are presented with uncertainty, we have a tendency to retreat to purity and in-group loyalty. We pass along the memes planted by trolls because they tell us that our decision is entirely right, and that the solution is in-group purity. And that feels good.

What Trump needs, as he needed in 2016, is to get potential Dem voters to get into purity fights with one another. What his considerable Russian support is doing, as it did in 2016, is to persuade large numbers of potentially anti-Trump voters to stay home if they don’t get their candidate. And they way to do that is to make Dems angrier with each other than they are with Trump, and it’s happening through memes that say things like, “A friend says she supports Chester because Chester wears such a great sweater, but I support Hubert because he’ll give us all real protection against the squirrels.”

[Since I crawl around pro-Trump sites, I can say that is exactly their strategy there too—Dems support policies out of fee-fees but Trump supporters are interested in real solutions for real problems.]

The more that Hubert supporters share that meme, the more they help the squirrels.

I’m not saying that the differences between Hubert and Chester are trivial—they’re real, and they matter. And we should argue about those differences, instead of framing the other side as being irrational and corrupt. I’m saying that, whatever our differences, sharing memes about how awful the other is ensures that neither Hubert nor Chester will succeed.

Obviously I’m talking about Warren and Sanders, but I’m also not—I’m talking about all the other times that potential allies were and are deliberately wedged apart. We can disagree with each, and we can believe that other people are backing the wrong candidate, but we shouldn’t hate other people for voting differently from us.

This is no time for compromise

When confronted with a world in which decisions that seemed certainly and obviously right (think of the arguments for invading Iraq as a policy option we should feel certain is correct) that turn out to be wrong, things get a little vexed for the people who insisted what they’d been saying was obviously true. Turns out they were not so obviously true after all. In fact, they were false.

Fox and various other media relentlessly promoted the WMD argument, as well as the argument that even Bush said was false (that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11), and when media and pundits were now faced with the problem that even the lowest bar of journalistic responsibility would involve their admitting they were either fools or liars, they either stopped talking about it, or claimed that Bush was responsible.

Their argument was often a little odd, though. They sometimes said that they couldn’t be blamed for being loyal to a person who had turned out to lie. I think that’s interesting. They were admitting that they saw their job as supporting the Republican Party, and not promoting the truth. The traditional distinction between a medium of party propaganda and a medium that is at least trying to be above faction is the willingness to investigate and report on information that hurts its preferred party.

Fox not only didn’t investigate the WMD claims, but it slammed anyone who said what turned out to be true. It promoted, relentlessly, a claim that was obviously a lie (that Iraq was behind 9/11)—even Bush said so–, and another set of claims that were deeply problematic (such as the WMD accusation, or various arguments Colin Powell made before the UN). Fox didn’t do that investigation, or if it did, it gleefully promoted what it knew to be a lie. (At this point, people who are deeply immersed in the tragic narrative that our complicated and vexed political options are reduced to the fallacious question of whether Dems or Republicans are better will say, but the Dems do it too! Maybe, but the Dems lying doesn’t mean that what Fox said was true. Fox was either irresponsible or dishonest, and any behavior on the part of the Dems doesn’t change that. If I rob a bank, that someone else did it too doesn’t magically change my robbing a bank from anything other than what it was.)

The failure to investigate was spread all over the political spectrum of media. For instance, Colin Powell’s speech before the UN was deeply problematic, but, instead of doing responsible investigation, or even reporting accurately (such as saying “Powell showed” when the accurate report would have been “Powell claimed”), media endorsed his problematic argument. His argument was so problematic that even the conservative–and pro-invasion–British periodical The Economist noted his case was thin in some places. But, in most media, his argument wasn’t reported as wobbly (and, again, not on any one place on the political spectrum).

Fox and various other media outlets were, from the perspective of someone who studies demagoguery, pretty extreme. It wasn’t just that they promoted various false claims–again, even ones Bush said were false–, but that they promoted those false claims as the only thing a reasonable person could believe. The amount of propaganda—that is, the factional promotion of false claims—is one reason that 40% of the American public believed that it should be legal to prohibit dissenting from the invasion.

What that means is that 40% of the American public were fine with silencing the point of view that turned out to be right. And that is really worrisome for democracy.

Even more worrisome is that the people I know who were part of that 40% have yet to admit that they were wrong to want to silence the people who turned out to be right. And their having been completely wrong about Iraq didn’t caused them to question the sources that led them astray, nor, more important, the underlying (and false) narrative that the correct course of action is so obvious to good people that dissent should be dismissed as biased or duped.

And that’s my experience with people all over the political spectrum–that people who believe that it is obvious that we should do this thing now, and that everyone who disagrees should be dismissed (as biased, ignorant, duped, dishonest) never admit that their having been wrong in the past is any reason to reconsider their narrative about political decision making.

When people are frightened, faced with uncertainty, or have failed, in-group entitativity increases. Group entitativity is what social psychologists call the sense a person has 1) that their mental categories of kinds of people (Christians, liberals, Texans) are Real; and 2) that their loyalty and commitment to their in-group is essential and unarguable. (Scholars in rhetoric would say that their sense of group identification is constitutive.)

Fear, uncertainty, and failure all increase the belief that The In-Group is Real, and thereby paradoxically encourage people to feel that the solution to our current problem is to purify the in-group. Politically, this means that a failure encourages people to believe that the solution is for the political group not to be a coalition of various interests, but for every member of the in-group, who is Really in-group, to commit more purely to a more pure vision of the in-group.

The train wrecks in public deliberation that I study all have calls for purer commitment to the pure in-group. But, at times, a group’s decision to stop disagreeing, and just work together has been effective. So, how do you disagree between the irrational response that what we need now is purity (because the in-group has failed) and what we need now is to stop disagreeing?

You don’t do it through deductive reasoning. You don’t do it through the circular reasoning process of deciding that only commitment to your narrative is right, and so only people who agree to that narrative can be right. You reconsider the narrative.

Or you don’t. Instead, you engage in Machiavellian unifying strategies.

The problem is that no political party can win an election without gathering together people with wildly different narratives. So, a party needs what rhetoricians call “a unifying device.” There are a lot (Kenneth Burke listed them pretty effectively in 1939).

The easiest strategy is to unify by opposition to a common enemy. Burke says that Hitler unified Germans (who were a very disparate group) by opposition to the Jews, and, while that was true in Mein Kampf (and Hitler’s ideology generally), when it came to the Nazis’ best electoral successes, it was by unifying voters against “Bolsheviks”—he included any form of socialism in that category (and his base knew he meant Jews). Hitler argued for purifying the community of dissenters.

William Lloyd Garrison made a similar argument in the era before the Civil War. Abolitionists couldn’t count on the government to help them, and they suffered a lot of failures. And so Garrison decided there was one right way to think about the vexed question of whether the Constitution allowed slavery, and he thereby alienated Frederick Douglass.

Hitler was evil; Garrison was not. In other words, the notion that the solution to our problem is to insist on one narrative and crush all dissent is something that both good and bad people share.

Good decision-making requires that, at some point, people stop arguing, and commit to the plan. If my unit has decided that we’re going to issue red balls to all dogs, then we need to get full-in on issuing red balls. But there needs to be an opportunity for the people who think the issuing red balls is a dumb plan. In other words, every good plan makes falsifiable claims.

In the decisions I’ve studied, when communities have decided to make disastrous decisions, or even made good decisions that ended badly, they have gotten feedback that their decisions were bad, and they decided that the response to that setback was increased in-group purity.

Responding to failure by believing that our problem is that our in-group was not pure enough, and that therefore the solution is to be more pure in our ideological commitment, is a natural human bias.

But it isn’t a useful way to deliberate.