Month: November 2019

Windsocks and the epistemological/ontological distinction

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could graduate from high school without being able to explain the difference between causation and correlation, and no one could graduate from college without being able to distinguish between an epistemological and ontological claim. (I have moments when I think that people should also understand the difference between eschatology and soteriology, but that’s a different post.)

Here, I just want to talk about the difference between an epistemological and ontological claim. That distinction is more important than you think. [1]

Earl Warren argued for the race-based mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and he provided evidence to support his claim that “the Japanese” must be engaged in nefarious activities. Among his evidence was a collection of letters from various police, sheriff, and other peace officer groups saying that they believed “the Japanese” to be dangerous.

An ontological claim is a claim about Reality. It’s a claim about the fabric of the universe, about what is Really True. Warren was making an ontological claim—that “the Japanese” were essentially and Really dangerous.

And he supported that claim with statements on the part of various (racist) people as to their beliefs. Epistemological claims are claims about belief. So, he was trying to support an ontological claim (“the Japanese are dangerous”) with an epistemological claim (“various (racist) people believe the Japanese to be dangerous”).

It’s like my saying that squirrels are evil (ontological claim) because my dogs agree that squirrels are evil (epistemological claim). They really do agree that squirrels are evil—that’s true. There is complete consensus on that point. They also agree that windsocks, plastic bags blowing down the street, that asshole labradoodle, and possums are all evil. Like Warren, my dogs make an ontological argument (windsocks are evil) on the basis of an epistemological claim (I am afraid of windsocks).

The difference, of course, is that the various people Warren polled had more prestige than my dogs, but did they have better judgement? Many people assume that if “good” people agree on a claim—if they all make the same epistemological claim, that’s an indication that the epistemological claim is also ontologically true. So, if everyone you value agrees on some claim–squirrels are evil–you think that claim has been proven. It hasn’t. All that’s been proven is that you’re loyal to your in-group.

My point is that the way that people decide who is “good” is just in-group reasoning, as in the case of Warren’s testimonies about “the Japanese” being dangerous. “The Japanese” also had beliefs—they had epistemological claims. But Warren didn’t worry about them. He took the claims of the police as reliable, and the claims of opponents as not worth considering. And how Warren assessed claims is the dominant way of assessing claims in our current culture–decide whether a claim is true on the basis of whether the person making it (or the media reporting it) is someone we think is “good.” In other words, whether they’re in-group.

That’s a bad way to think about reliability–it just pushes the question back one step. If everyone in my family agrees on something, every pastor I’ve known, everyone with whom I interact on a regular basis, the talk radio host or pundit I like, my group of like-minded friends, in other words, if my in-group agrees on a claim, then I take that agreement to be a sign the claim is a claim about Reality. And the–my claim is true because my in-group has perfect agreement on this point–isn’t something restricted to any point on the political spectrum, or even restricted to politics. I’ve had colleagues tell me that, although their claims are either non-falsifiable or actually falsified, they’re true because everyone in their discipline or sub-field (i.e., in-group) agrees that they’re true, and I must be wrong because they are an expert in that field (and, yes, I’m thinking especially of various economists, anglo-American analytic philosophers, and neo-conservative political scientists with whom I’ve been on committees).

We are in a world in which media–all over the political, cultural, and religious spectrum–hammer home to their audiences that we are fighting for our very ability to exist. We are about to lose it all right now. We are, therefore, in a state of exception when all concerns about the rule of law, fairness, accuracy. That’s an epistemological claim.

That everyone in the in-group agrees on a claim doesn’t mean it’s true. That the in-group feels threatened, that all the in-group media say we are threatened with extinction doesn’t mean we are.

The reason people should understand the difference between an ontological claim (about Reality) and an epistemological one (I am certain this is true) is that, as long as we uncritically take epistemological claims as proof about the world, we’re only deliberating within in-group beliefs. We’re Warren, who only took the epistemological claims of people like him as relevant to ontological conclusions.

We’re people banning windsocks because my dogs don’t like them.

[1] For the pedants in  the audience, I’m not saying that epistemology and ontology are, so to speak, ontologically different. I’m say that epistemological and ontological claims are rhetorically different–they have different standards of proof in an argument because they imply different rhetorical burdens.

Chances are good that how you assess bias is irrational

Many people believe that a biased argument is irrational, and vice versa, and, so, one way to assess the rationality of an argument is to see whether it’s biased. That’s an irrational way to assess an argument, and one that nurtures irrationality.

What I have long found difficult about getting people to think in a more accurate way about how we think is that many people assume that you either believe there is a truth, and we all see it (naïve realism), or you believe that all points of view are equally valid.

It’s grounded in an old and busted model of how perception can work—that “rational” people just look at the world and see it in an unmediated (unbiased) way. And that direct perception of the world enables them to make judgments that are accurate and ring true.

One of the ways that our media (all over the political spectrum) engage in inoculation is to promote the false binary of one position being that kind of “unbiased” and obviously true position, and “biased” positions (all others). They point out to their choir that this position seems obviously true to them, so it must be the unbiased position. That’s the confusion that Socrates pointed out—that you believe something to be true doesn’t mean you know it to be true. You just believe you do.

Imagine that two dogs, Chester and Hubert, disagree as to whether little dogs are involved in the squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball. Chester, and his loyal media, says to their base, “Hubert media is biased because it says little dogs aren’t conspiring with squirrels.” Chesterian media is inoculating its base against listening to any contradictory information. To the extent that it successfully equates “disagrees with us” and “biased,” any media—regardless of its place on the political spectrum—ensures that its audience can’t assess policies rationally.

That’s what far too much of our political media says—any source of information that gives information that contradicts or complicates our position is “biased” and therefore should be dismissed without consideration. And, as I said, that’s irrational.

It’s irrational because it’s saying that having a strong political commitment is irrational, but only if it’s an out-group political commitment. So, this isn’t really about the rationality of an argument, in terms of its internal consistency, quality of evidence, logical relationship of claims, but whether it’s in- or out-group.

It’s saying that people who believe what I believe are rational because they believe what I believe and I believe that my beliefs are rational and so I believe that anyone who disagrees with me is irrational because they don’t believe what I believe and what I believe is rational because it’s what I believe.

A rational position on an issue is one that is argued:
• via terms and claims that can be falsified,
• internally consistently in terms of its claims and assumptions,
• by fairly representing opposition arguments,
• by holding all interlocutors to the same standards.

Rationality has nothing to do with the tone of an argument, whether it appeals to emotions, whether the people making arguments are good people, or even whether you can find evidence to support your claims.

So, the argument that out-group media sources should be dismissed on the grounds that those sources  are biased is irrational because it violates everyone one of those criteria. It’s a circular argument; it doesn’t consistently condemn bias (only out-group bias); it frames all out-group arguments as biased by bad motives; and it privileges in-group arguments.

To say that all media are biased is not to say that they are all equally reliable (or unreliable). It is to say that we are all biased, and we can assess sources to see if their biases cause them to engage in irrational argumentation. If we find that a source is consistently irrational, then it’s fine to dismiss the source as unreliable–not because it’s out-group, but because we’ve found it to fail so often.We should assess arguments on whether they’re rational; not whether they seem true to us.

That you believe, sincerely, deeply, and profoundly, that what you are saying is true doesn’t mean it is, let alone that it’s a belief you can defend rationally. Just because you sincerely believe you’re right doesn’t mean you’re Rosa Parks, refusing to give up your seat; you might be George Wallace, committing to segregation forever.

[Btw, if any of you would like to put pressure on cafepress to make the circular reasoning visual a t-shirt, count me in.]

“This decision by ‘the government’ is obviously wrong” as factional demagoguery

My poor husband. This weekend, we went to a farmer’s market because it was a beautiful day, and I didn’t have to work, and the farmer’s market is fun, and, long story short, a person from whom I was buying earrings said to me and Jim, “Some people think government is the problem, and some people think government is the solution.” Jim, being a sensible person, just stepped back a bit. I don’t really remember what I said after that (I was in a white-hot rage), but I know I said a lot.

I have spent my career working for big (and public) institutions, and got all my degrees at a big (and public) institution. And I spent far too much of my life irritated (and sometimes outraged) by various decisions that those institutions made—decisions that were, to me, not just wrong but obviously wrong.

There are, loosely, three categories of wrongness. There were decisions that were irritating and time consuming (such as providing physical documentation of every article I claimed to have published, having students sign for getting a small gift card, having to provide travel receipts). There were decisions that obviously ignored considerations central to the teaching of writing, for instance, or ethical practices regarding staffing. There were others that seemed to strike at the very notion of college education as a public good. All of those decisions were, to me, outrageously short-sighted. I was right. I was also short-sighted.

I’m really sorry about all that time I spent bloviating about how obviously dumb my administration was; it turns out that my administration was not necessarily being dumb. It turns out I was often the short-sighted one. I was right that about some decisions being unethical, and I was right about the harm some decisions did for the teaching of writing, but I was wrong to think that my Dean was the problem. Because I saw every entity above me as “administration,” I falsely identified the source of the problem, and therefore I never identified a workable solution.

And this is another post about the neighborhood mailing list, and how it exemplifies what’s wrong with American political deliberation. (Although, to be fair, I could use departmental faculty meetings to make the same point, with me as the person arguing very badly. I’ve also done my share of this on the neighborhood mailing list and various other places. I’ve loved me some pleasurable outrage about how obviously wrong the government, my university administration, the city  is).

Anytime there is a change in our neighborhood, we look at the proposed policy from our perspective, and we think how it will affect us. That’s a valid datapoint. But that’s all it is–one datapoint. I earlier wrote about how the Big Bike narrative assumed that cyclists in our neighborhood are outsiders, when in fact a lot of the people cycling in our neighborhood (including some of the cyclists who are jerks) are neighbors. They are us.

And, let’s be clear, we are in a neighborhood with streets paid for by all citizens of Austin. The notion that these are “our” streets is no more rational than the belief that the trash can loaned to you by the city of Austin is your trash can.

In the case of Big Bike, the assumption is that there is a policy that is obviously right to all sensible people of goodwill, and it happens to be the one I hold. Thus, anyone who advocates a different policy is stupid, corrupt, duped, selfish, shortsighted. I’m saying that, for years, I thought that way about my universities’ policies that didn’t agree with what policies I thought we should have.

At every university, there have been irritating, complicated, and time-consuming, and, to me, obviously dumb, requirements about submitting documentation for travel, absences of students, rewarding students for participating in a study, hiring student workers, keeping track of purchases, exposing personal data about sources of income. It turns out that, in many cases, the policies I thought were obviously stupid were a response (perhaps not the best response, but often good enough) to a real problem I didn’t know existed.  Because, at every university, those irritating, complicated, and time-consuming requirements were put in place because someone was an asshole. Someone filed false documentation, failed to note a conflict of interest, embezzled, falsely accused a student (or a student was a jerk and refused to admit to absences), exploited student workers, or filed a lawsuit.

I’m not saying that university is always right, but I have been wrong as to who was wrong. I have been at three universities with unethically low salaries for staff (University of Texas at Austin is one of them). I care about staff; that is part of my viewpoint. I’m not looking out for me; I’m looking out for others. And the salary structure at three of my universities was (and is) obviously ethically and rationally indefensible. I was (and am) right about all that.

I was, however, wrong to think that these unethical salary structures for staff were the consequence of my University administration being short-sighted in its policies about staff salaries. In two cases (I’m still unclear about UT-Austin), the salaries of staff were legislative decisions, and not the university.

I was right that the decision was wrong, but I was wrong as to who was wrong.

There is a different kind of decision in which I thought I was completely right, and the university was being stupid and short-sighted, and I was wrong.

When, for complicated reasons, I ended up on Faculty Council, I learned that most of what I thought about how the university ran was wrong, in all sorts of ways. Here’s one example: I had long thought it was obviously wrong to have the day before Thanksgiving a class day. A lot of students had to miss that class in order to get flights, and others risked their lives driving on a day with terrible traffic and accidents.

I sat at a Faculty Council meeting, and listened to someone explain that, because the fall semester is already shorter than spring (which I’d never noticed), and because of various legislated weirdnesses about the UT calendar, taking away that class day would mean that some of the Engineering departments would lose accreditation. Accrediting organizations require a certain number of labs, and removing that class day would mean they wouldn’t have enough labs.

We would, they said, have to refigure the entire calendar to ensure that they could have enough labs, and that any decision about that Wednesday should be delayed till that refiguring could happen. And I listened to faculty stand up and talk about how we should, right now, cancel that Wednesday class because of what it meant for them personally. Of course, were UT to lose its engineering accreditation, all those faculty would suffer far more than they were suffering by having a Wednesday class day. But they didn’t think of that because they assumed that their perspective was the only valid  one.

And I realized I was them. I also assumed that the policies of the university should enable my way of teaching. And suddenly I empathized with engineers. I was engaged in epistemological selfishness, only assessing a situation from my perspective. A decision that was obviously wrong from my perspective (such as requiring that the day before Thanksgiving be a class day) was a great decision for a university that wanted to ensure its engineering programs were accredited.

My perspective about the day before Thanksgiving—enable students to leave earlier—was a legitimate one. But the perspective of the Engineering faculty concerned about losing accreditation was also legitimate. In fact, I’d say that, since my university would be seriously hurt by losing Engineering accreditation, and my students would be hurt, that my interests and the concerns of the Engineering faculty were intertwined. That my perspective was legitimate doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered. That the Engineering faculty had a legitimate concern doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered.

The University worked it out.

I’m not saying that all positions are equal, nor that we should never decide our administration has made a bad decision. I have twice been at universities with an ambitious Provost who made every decision on the basis of what would enable them to have great things on their cv because they saw this job as a stepping stone to being Chancellor. Try as I might (and I did try), there was no perspective from which their decisions were the best for the university—they were (are) splashy projects that look great on a resume but aren’t thought through in terms of principles like sustainability, shared governance, financial priorities.

I also sat at a Faculty Council meeting and listened to various faculty from business, math, and economics explain that a report arguing for major changes in various university practices had numbers that literally did not add up. And they didn’t, and those major changes never did save anywhere near the predicted amount. The changes were eventually abandoned.

Three times I have been at universities that had a state legislature actively hostile to my university, that made decisions designed to get the university to fail.

Big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work.

What I’m saying is that just looking at a policy, and assessing it from your perspective as a good or policy doesn’t mean it is a good or bad policy. You have to look at it from the perspective of the various stakeholders, after which you might decide it’s a terrible policy (because it might be). My university should not make every decision on the basis of what is best for me, or even people like me. My university has people with genuinely different needs from me. My university makes bad decisions, but that a decision is not the best one for me is not sufficient proof that it is a bad decision. My university should not be designed for me.

And, similarly, the government should not be designed for me. Or you. Or us.

The notion that, in regard to any question, there is an obviously right answer is epistemological selfishness. The notion that, because you can see flaws in a policy, that policy is obviously dumb and wrong, is just bad reasoning.

Every policy has flaws. You have to decide how to get to work. That’s a policy argument—you are deliberating the policy of getting to work. Is there a perfect route? Nope. Parenting, having a dog, gardening, buying a car—those are all policy deliberations. Is there a perfectly right decision? No. You have to deliberate among various pressing concerns—cost, size, resale value, gas mileage, loan options. Any big institution has to do the same weighing.

Despite the fact that we all get by in a world of vexed and nuanced decisions in our moment to moment decisions, when it comes to what we think of as “political decisions,” a troubling number of us reason the way I did for far too many years—that, when it comes to policy, my perspective is obviously right. Even though my personal life was not a series of perfect decisions, from the day to day (whether to bring an umbrella, wear a heavy coat, take that route to work) through the slightly more important (whether to grant an extension to my students, how to manage my time, agree to that commitment) to the big ones (whether to marry that guy, take that job, get that haircut), somehow I was convinced that I knew the right thing for my university, city, state, or country to do. I had made the wrong decision about a haircut multiple times, but, when it came to politics, my belief was some kind of perfect insight spit from the forehead of God?

My model of political deliberation–despite my long and documented history of being wrong, even when it came to major policy decisions in my personal life, I was magically infallible–is unhappily common.

My experience with big institutions—that they make policies that are ridiculous from my perspective, and even burdensome—is how most people experience the government. And that mantra—this big institution is terrible because their decisions don’t make sense from my perspective–is a constant mantra on my neighborhood mailing list. Every decision “they” make is not just dumb, but obviously dumb. And there are no good reasons or legitimate perspectives that might make “their” decision makes sense.

According to many people on my neighborhood mailing list, everything the city does is wrong. It isn’t just flawed, but completely, obviously, and pointlessly dumb.

And, unhappily, my neighborhood mailing list exemplifies how smart, well-intentioned, good people who are deeply committed to thinking about the public good reason.

My neighborhood mailing list is, ostensibly, non-partisan. But it isn’t. A recurrent (perhaps even dominant) topos (as people in rhetoric say) is that “the government” (an out-group) is making an obviously bad decision because “the government” is dominated by “special interests.”

That’s as political and factional as political discourse gets. It’s toxic populism. It’s the false assumption that there is some group (us) made up of “regular people” who see what really needs to happen. If anything happens that “regular people” (us) don’t like, or that hurts us in any way, then this is the government being dumb, oblivious, or corrupt.

Toxic populism dismisses that the policy we hate might help some other group of people by saying those people aren’t “real Americans.” For complicated reasons, I had to listen to some guy repeat what he said he had heard on Rush Limbaugh, about how Native Americans were getting “special” benefits from the government (those “special” benefits were simply honoring agreements). There was something about Native Americans not being “real” Americans that caused steam to come out my ears.

My neighborhood mailing list claims to be non-factional, but it tolerates dog whistle racism and demagoguery about graffiti. It also tolerates the “the government always fucks things up” rhetoric that is, actually, profoundly factional.

As various studies have shown (Ideology in America summarizes a lot of them), the public, on the whole, supports policies that we tend to identify as “liberal,” but votes for anyone who plausibly performs the identity of “conservative.” And “conservative” is associated with being opposed to government intervention—“the government” is associated with Democrats. This association explains why so many people complain about aspects of Obamacare that Republicans enacted (such as the failure to expand medicare).

And irrational.

In all those years when I was whingeing that the huge institution wasn’t enacting policies that were the best from my perspective, I was engaging in profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric. It was political, and it was factional. Rhetoric about how government sucks isn’t just anti-democratic; it’s pro-Republican.

The government screws things up, and we should engage in loud and vehement criticism when it does. But “the government” making a decision that inconveniences us and “the government” screwing up are not necessarily the same thing—the first is not evidence of the second. Good governmental policies inconvenience everyone at least a little.

After Proposition 13 passed in California (which greatly reduced the state budget), I frequently found myself in situations in which—in the same conversation—someone celebrated the passage of Prop 13 and bemoaned that government services had declined. They shot themselves in the foot and then complained they had a limp.

Americans, till Reagan, lived within a world of well-financed government projects—roads, bridges, water services, public schools, non-partisan science research. Since Reagan, the infrastructure has deteriorated. We now have people complaining that taxes are too high and the infrastructure sucks (which is why we should take more money from government).

We need to stop assuming that “the government” is always deliberately, stupidly, and obviously wrong. “The government” is neither the problem nor the solution; voters are.

I don’t remember much about what I said when I lost my temper with the guy at the farmer’s market, but I do remember one thing. I said, “If you think the government is the problem, then why haven’t you moved to Somalia?”  (And, yes, I know, that situation in Somalia is more complicated than that, but, by that time, I’d figured out his sources of information, and that those sources said Somalia is hell.)

And then he did start talking about how the government should stick to what it does well and leave other things aside.

That’s the fallback position for people repeating Libertarian positions that are internally inconsistent but sound good as long as you don’t think too hard. I made no headway with him.

But, what I did see is that his position was thoroughly indefensible logically, and it was the position I have taken far too often in far too many situations. He thought the government was stupid because it made some decisions that he didn’t like. He didn’t notice that “the government” paved the roads that got customers to his place, enabled the trade that got him what he needed for his shop, ensured that he didn’t get robbed, enabled him to do something if someone wrote a bad check. He wants a government that gets him everything he wants and nothing he doesn’t.

And so do I. And that’s a bad way to think about government.

That a policy seems wrong to me doesn’t actually mean it’s wrong. I am not (yet) Queen of the Universe with perfect and universal insight. None of us is. People all over the political spectrum need to stop talking as though the government is the problem. It isn’t. We are.

“OK, Boomer” and intergenerational demagoguery

Growing up with relatives prone to saying really offensive and bigoted things, I quickly learned the rule: saying something offensive, even if it clearly insults someone sitting there at the table, is okay, as long as you’re older than the people who might object. The person who calls attention to how offensive that statement was, especially if they’re younger, that is who people blame for “starting the conflict.” Calling attention to demagoguery that other people haven’t noticed is seen as “confrontational,” and perhaps even “aggressive.” That is “divisive.”

Someone saying out loud that something was racist isn’t what started the problem—the racist (or otherwise bigoted) person did. But, time and again, I saw someone directly insult someone else at the table, sometimes openly, sometimes passive-aggressively, almost always through saying insulting generalizations about a group of which the other person was a member. Someone might say something like, “Well, young people today just don’t know how to work, and […]” then tell a rambling story about how they had to walk eight miles to school, uphill both ways. Most of the people at the table wanted to let all that demagoguery go by un-noticed. They got upset if the person who had, in fact, very clearly been insulted said, “I was just insulted.”

This is the “OK, Boomer” controversy, I think.

There has been divisiveness about generations for a long time, and it isn’t new. But I have to say that demagoguery about “young people today” (in current public discourse oddly often mis-identified as “millennials”) is pernicious and ubiquitous and damaging. Demagoguery about how awful this generation is is in everything from comment threads to best-sellers, and it’s often engaged in on the part of boomers, probably the most privileged generation ever. For instance, consider that this profoundly incoherent book about what’s wrong with young people is a best seller. It actually argues that this generation is the dumbest because they’re on the phones all the time, and therefore not reading.

It’s available in kindle.

And it’s worth remembering that Culture of Narcissism was written about boomers.

If you’re now outraged about divisiveness about generations because of the “ok, boomers” meme, then you are blaming the person at the table who says, “Wow, that was racist” as “starting the conflict.” You didn’t notice all the divisive demagoguery about young people today.

If you haven’t called out that pernicious and pervasive boomer demagoguery about kids these days, and you are condemning “ok, boomer,” then either put “I’m a demagogue” on your sleeve, or STFU. If you think that the “ok, boomer” meme has called attention to how boomers have been profiting by demagoguery about kids today, and you’d like to reduce the generational demagoguery by acknowledging the role of authors like Bauerlein, then go for it. But don’t pretend for a second that the “ok, boomers” people started intergenerational demagoguery.

They’re responding to it.

And I think it’s a pretty good response.

I think it’s asking boomers to hold young people today to the same standards they had to meet when they were 20. And good luck with that.

Demagoguery and stigginit to them (Maryland talk)

little girl eating crackers

Here’s my basic argument: demagoguery is best seen as the reduction of the complicated array of political—that is, policy—options to the false binary of us and them. There are various characteristics that reduction tends to have (projection, scapegoating, binaries, and others). But, here’s another part of my argument that matters: we’re all demagogues. We like demagoguery; we promote it. Demagoguery isn’t just something they do; in fact, if my book enabled you to be better at identifying their demagoguery, then I just contributed, unintentionally, to our culture of demagoguery.

We are in a culture of demagoguery. We are in a world in which every argument is assessed demagogically—that is, when presented with a claim, the first thing we want to know is whether the person is in or out group. If they’re in-group, then we’re open to their argument; if they’re out-group, we think skeptically.

Demagoguery assumes that our vexed and uncertain political world is really a zero-sum battle between us (good) and them (evil). Thus, any political action that helps them hurts us; any political action that hurts them helps us. It’s kind of like seeing politics as a game of basketball—if they make any baskets, that’s bad for us; if we keep them from making any baskets, that’s essentially a gain for us. One of their players getting injured, their getting a bad call against them, a bad bounce of the ball—that’s all good for us.
Except a loss for them isn’t necessarily a gain for us, even in basketball. If they got the bad call because it’s an incompetent ref, we’ll get hurt too. Setting fire to the stadium, committing an egregious foul that hurts their best player, delaying the game by supergluing the doors to their locker room, breaking the play clock, filing a lawsuit that prevents the game from being played—those are all actions that hurt the other team, but they don’t help us, and they might even hurt us more than they hurt the other team. And that is the problem with assuming that hurting or “stigginit” to them is necessarily a win for us. It isn’t.

This way of thinking about politics—hurting them is just as good as helping us because it amounts to the same thing—is also called the “fixed pie” bias. It’s a notorious cognitive bias, an unconscious way we approach decisions.
It’s as though all the goods in our shared world—access to clean water, good schools, low taxes, personal safety, good roads, honest political figures—are a pie. The more you get, the less I do, so anything that keeps you from getting pie helps me. But it doesn’t, even as far as pie. I’m not hurt by your getting good water; I’m not helped by your getting bad water. I can keep you from getting pie by throwing it out uneaten; I can harm your pie eating by poisoning the pie, and then we both die.

The zero-sum model is actively harmful in systems of mutual dependence. We all benefit by having a citizenry that doesn’t have anyone consuming water that has brain-damaging levels of lead, that has good public schools available to everyone, that has tax burdens shared reasonably, that isn’t afraid, that can trust that political figures are (on the whole) not making political decisions purely on the basis of what benefits them personally, nor are they trying to claim that—because they won an election—the law doesn’t apply to them.

We think politics is a zero-sum game because that’s how the media frame it—the media says there are two (and only two) sides to every political issue (the Democrats and the Republicans), and the media (through what is called the “horse race frame”) discusses every policy issue in terms of how it might help or hurt the Dems or Republicans in elections.
That isn’t information that citizens need to know. But it’s what media do because people think (falsely) that such coverage—this person is doing this to try to win an election—is objective. It isn’t. What we need to know is whether what various political figures are saying about policies is within the realm of rationally defensible policy argumentation.

But it’s hard to get that information because it requires reading the best arguments from a variety of points of view, and that’s really hard. The algorithms of social media mean you’ll get exclusively in-group sources.
And, so, a lot of people—especially people under the age of thirty—don’t rely on mainstream media sources (which, btw, includes Fox News, which is the main source of information for a plurality of people). They rely on whatever shows up in their world—youtube, perhaps Facebook, groupchats, google. That’s the same informational strategy that people over thirty have, but it’s just a different set of sources—more reliance on Facebook, cable and broadcast news. We are in a world in which most people make important political decisions on the basis of sources that will confirm our sense that we are right because we are good people, and so we are on the side of good, and we are opposing bad people who are, well, really bad.
Because they’re so bad, we shouldn’t listen to them.

This way of thinking about politics—we are in an action movie battle between the obviously good and the obviously bad—is how democracies end.

Of course, neither the Athenians nor the Romans were watching action movies, but they both tanked their democratic republics (neither was purely democratic, nor purely republic) because the rich and varied world of their political options got reduced to a zero-sum game between political factions. People were cheerfully willing to make decisions that hurt the community as a whole just because (they thought) it hurt “the other side” more than it hurt them. They burnt down their own stadium to keep “the other side” from winning.

What should they have done?

They shouldn’t have assumed that their side was so good, and the other side so evil, that winning at any cost was morally or even rationally justified. They shouldn’t have assumed that there were only two sides. That’s a false binary.

When I say this, a lot of people—who are still mired in thinking that there are two sides—assume that, since I’m saying that our political options are not accurately represented as a contest between good and evil, think I’m saying there is no evil, or there is no good, or all positions are equal. That’s another false binary: you either believe that there is a clear binary between good and evil and it’s easy to see and you’re some kind of hippy-dippy moral relativist.

I believe in evil. Slavery was evil. Nazism was evil. But, even in regard to slavery, there wasn’t a binary between two positions. There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but slavery had to be protected because reasons. This is called the “necessary evil” argument.

There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but we couldn’t possibly have freed slaves in our country (the anti-slavery/pro-colonialism argument), we should abolish slavery and immediately grant all slaves the full rights of citizenship, we should end slavery gradually, we should give slaves 40 acres and a mule, and others.

Demagoguery says there are only two choices. Democracy says there aren’t.
There are people making arguments in bad faith; there are bad arguments. But our political world is not a binary in which all the good arguments are on our side and all the bad arguments are on the other.
No one deliberately chooses to succumb to a rhetoric we recognize as demagoguery. We never think we’re suckered by demagoguery. They are.
And that is how a culture of demagoguery thrives.

Demagoguery withers when people recognize our own attraction to it, when we call out in-group demagoguery, when we hold in- and out-group rhetoric to the same argumentative standards.

Demagoguery thrives when we approach every issue from the perspective that the in-group deserves to be treated differently (because we are good, with good motives) from any out-group. It withers when we decide that we will treat others, and their arguments, as we would want to be treated. People who believe that you should treat others as you want to be treated are called to step away from thinking that any harm to others is a win for us. It isn’t.

Policy issues are about policies: Or, the problem of Big Bike

I’ve been writing about how the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies damaging (and proto-demagogic, if not actively demagogic) ways that Americans think about policy deliberation.

This one is about bike lanes. Our neighborhood happens to be a great place for biking, and, so, many people come to the neighborhood to bike. Some of those cyclists are total jerks. Some cyclists run stop signs, get really aggressive in intersections with pedestrians, have lights so bright they could trigger a migraine, and some have no lights at all; a surprising number shout at people at the off-leash dog park for having dogs off leash.

Yet, many cyclists argue that cycling is a public good. And that’s an argument with legs.

There’s a lot of research to show that electric cars aren’t actually all that green, nor are hybrids. They’re probably better than many cars, but, really, the greenest method of transportation is walking, biking, or bussing. Biking as a method of commuting is great for the environment. So, if there is one group that can claim the public good, it would be people who bike to work.

Most of them are not, at that moment, cycling to work, and I have no idea how many of them finish their route around the neighborhood and then get in a car and drive to work. And running or walking to work is just as good for the environment as cycling, so this doesn’t end the debate. And there is a debate.

My neighborhood has been debating a change to the bike lanes, and far too much of the argument has been about whether cyclists are good. That’s transmogrifying the vexed issues of how to encourage cycling rather than driving, reduce cycling/vehicle and cycling/pedestrian accidents, and deal with the pox of scooters into the irrelevant question of whether cyclists or non-cyclists are better people.

The question of whether our neighborhood should have bike lanes isn’t about whether cyclists are better people than non-cyclists, but about whether they have the right not to be killed.

Austin has decided to try to reduce vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist fatalities to zero. That should be a shared goal for everyone in Austin. It isn’t a goal, however, for people who realize that making Austin a safer place for cyclists will mildly inconvenience us. The most sensible policy in terms of reducing vehicle/cyclist accidents would be one that would reduce the ability of people in my neighborhood to park on the street, including me and my husband.

The rational decision for the community as a whole  will make parking in front of our house  more limited. I’m very grumpy that the right decision isn’t the best decision for me personally—I’m not a cyclist, and I can get very grumpy about them. As I said above, a lot of them are total jerks.

But policies issues are never actually about which group is better. Policy issues are about policies.

The City of Austin had hearings about the issue of planning of bike lanes. And various people argued in favor of policies that are demonstrably successful in terms of reducing car/cyclist (and car/pedestrian) fatal accidents.

And my neighborhood mailing list had people flinging themselves around about how there were a lot of people at the hearings who were cyclists. And they didn’t argue that the cyclists’ data was wrong, or that their argument was irrational. In fact, they didn’t engage in rational policy argumentation to refute the cyclists’ cases at all. Instead, they argued that the cyclists had all gone to the meeting and thereby overwhelmed the views of regular people. (I’m not citing or linking because these are neighbors.) They said, in other words, it was Big Bike.

This is the classic—and profoundly anti-democratic—way to describe political disagreements. I’m a scholar of how communities make bad policy decisions, and so I know that, when people are facing a decision in which members of that community have legitimately different positions, the first impulse is to deny that disagreement is legitimate on the basis of the identities of the people making the argument. The people who disagree are part of a special interest conspiracy (Big Bike), stupid, prejudiced, misinformed.

The irony is that: if you think that your political position is obviously right, if you think that you and only people who think like you are right (whether it’s about Trump, the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, this change to teaching evaluations, bike lanes in my neighborhood, the need for the wall), you subvert democracy.

Democracy is about a world in which people argue together knowing that it isn’t a question about the right answer but about the policy that best seems to answer the needs we all present in the context of the information we now have. Democracy is a world of understanding that our world is more than my world.

Demagoguery is a world in which people whine that the policy doesn’t personally solve their specific issues.

People who whine that two or three times a year they have to be mildly inconvenienced, that the city doesn’t treat graffiti as a sign of our being on the edge of West Side Story levels of gang warfare (although, to be blunt, I would love to participate in any walking down the street with some kind of “Jets” song), that bagged poop in your trash is a crime against God and Nature and specifically prohibited by Leviticus, that the only reason we have argumentatively defensible bike lanes is that Big Bike flooded the hearing—they’re all demagogues. We’re all demagogues.

If you say that Bernie was obviously the right choice, and Hillary was a shill promoted by neo-liberals, if you say that Hillary was obviously the right choice, and Sanders supporters were dupes of Russia, if you say that Trump was obviously the right choice because Hillary’s corruption and unsafe email practices show she shouldn’t be President…. if you say that our vexed and uncertain world of an array of political options is really a world of the right answer (yours) and dumbass/evil/corrupt answers, you’re a demagogue.

You can, and should, be passionate about politics, and even passionate about the policy you’re advocating. But being passionate about your policy should mean that you’re passionate that it is the best policy among many, and that you passionately believe it can meet the standards of policy argumentation. Being passionate about solving a problem should mean that you’re so passionate about solving the problem that you’re willing to admit your plan is wrong. You should be so passionate about solving the problem that you treat in- v. out- group loyalty issues as distractions.

I don’t care whether you’re arguing that Trump is obviously right in everything, libs are obviously wrong in everything, GOPpers are obviously wrong in everything, Dems are obviously wrong not to support this candidate, or any other claim that frames vexed and nuanced and complicated issues as things in which there is an obvious right answer, your boss is a fool for not doing the right thing, your spouse is an idiot for not agreeing with you. You’re engaged in demagoguery. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But you aren’t oriented toward a reasonable discussion of your policy options.

My neighborhood is not threatened by Big Bike.

A lot of cyclists in my neighborhood really are aggressive jerks. But a lot of them aren’t. And here is the most important point: they aren’t a they. They’re an us: a lot of them are neighbors. The people arguing for bike lanes are not an Other imposing their special interest on us; they are our neighbors, they are people who disagree with us.