March 2020 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

“I sent you a rowboat:” Prosperity gospel and throwing others into the flood

chart of deaths from covid — https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en?fbclid=IwAR0ooEsBuC0WlYcZ3byJ1Sz7CA2WfFEuMSYp3rkvPuMHNDiN0otLnErBRA4

The fundagelical Governors of Mississippi and Alabama have decided to resist expert recommendations about COVID-19, with the Governor of Mississippi going so far as to prevent any cities or counties from enacting policies grounded in expert opinion. And many people are shocked that governors would reject expert opinion, but, from within those governors’ imagined world, it makes perfect sense.

I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with fundagelicals, and they are yet another set of people who argue so badly that their consistent inability to argue well should make them reconsider their beliefs. But they don’t, because they think they’re arguing well.

They believe that they’re arguing well because they are making claims that they feel certain are true, and they can find evidence to support those claims. [As a side note, I’ll say that far too many high school and college courses in argumentation would confirm that sense of what it means to make a good argument.]

What fundagelicals can’t see (nor can other people who reason badly) is that their way of reasoning is one even they reject as a bad way to reason, but they only reject that way of reasoning when other people reason that way.

For the sake of argument, I’ll stick with fundagelicals, but this toxic approach to deliberation is all over the political spectrum (and also slithers through other fields in which people make bad decisions, such as people who keep having disastrous relationships that don’t make them rethink their way of thinking about relationships).

Fundagelicals believe that everything about your life can be changed if you have enough faith. New Age grifters who have killed people also advocate that narrative that, as do get laid quick and make money fast grifters. Nazis also made that argument. So did Maoists. And Stalinists.

Fundagelicals believe that Scripture is not just soteriological, but politically eschatological. That is, many Christians believe that Scripture tells us about the spiritual journey we as individuals must make (soteriology). Fundagelicals believe that Scripture tells the story of political history (political eschatology). For people who read Scripture as eschatalogical, Revelation is neither a time-specific political allegory, nor a celebration of individual faith, but a perfectly accurate narrative of what is yet to come. The notion that Revelation is a codebook that, if we read it correctly, will tell us when the world is ending, is much more controversial than many people realize.

Fundagelicals have an oddly flat reading of Scripture—Scripture means what it seems to mean, as long as that meaning supports the political agenda they now have. Thus, when conservative Christians supported slavery and segregation, they cheerfully dismissed “Do unto others” (fundagelicals still evade that one) and the very clear rules about treatment of slaves, and they equally cheerfully insisted on odd readings in order to justify racism. In my experience, fundagelicals opt for the literal reading, except when they don’t—there is no coherence to their exegetical method, except political. That is, when reading literally gets them the “proof” they want, they read literally; when it doesn’t, they read metaphorically (or dismiss the passage as a cultural blip).

For instance, arguing for Hell on literal grounds is more vexed than many people realize, and, so, people who want to argue for it have to read a fair number of verses in a non-literal way. They’re literal (to the English translation, a serious problem when you’re talking about a literal reading) when it comes to “homosexuality” (neither a word nor concept that is in Scripture), but dismiss as “cultural” the equally clear proscriptions regarding women wearing makeup, people wearing mixed fibers, the death penalty.

When I’ve argued with fundagelicals about this point, the argument gets hung up at exactly the same place. For instance, on the issue of homosexuality, they cite the clobber verses, and I give them various links showing they’re relying on vexed readings of those verses, and they say, “That is what it says.” (In English, of course, not in Greek. Let’s set that aside.) I point out that they are citing one item from a list of behaviors that are condemned, and those lists always include behavior they allow, such as divorce, women wearing makeup in church, wearing mixed fibers, or benefitting from money loaned with interest). And they say, “Those are just cultural values of that moment.” And, then I say, “So were the practices you translate as ‘homosexuality,’” and they say, “No, those are universal.” They can’t say why they’re universal without engaging in a kind of simultaneously narcissistic and circular way of reasoning: they’re universal because I think they’re universal, and these other things are culturally specific because I think they’re culturally specific.

They can’t identify an exegetical method that they apply consistently, other than the narcissistic and circular one, because that’s how read Scripture in a politicized and narcissistic way: they approach Scripture expecting to see their political agenda confirmed, and so they treat every interpretation/meaning as real that confirms their political agenda, and dismiss every one as just an appearance that doesn’t. In rhetoric, this is called dissociation. In psychology, it’s considered an instance of “motivated reasoning,” and most of us do it. I’m saying that, in my experience, fundagelicals–again, like many people–won’t admit that’s what they’re doing, and that is the problem.

That their exegetical method is politicized from the beginning is why they accuse their opponents of politicizing Scripture. Projection is the first move of people who can’t reflect on their own processes.

This discussion of exegesis might seem a long way from why fundagelicals are dismissing the advice of experts (except when they aren’t), but it isn’t.

What I’m saying is that fundagelicals are yet one more instance of conservative Christians for whom being conservative matters more than being Christian. Here’s the best evidence that they are in-group first, and thoughtful exegesis second: when people try to criticize their reading of Scripture, they dismiss those criticisms on the grounds that the critics are bad people. That isn’t Scriptural exegesis—that’s demagoguery. That’s an admission that they are thinking about protecting their political in-group more than being honest and reflective of their methods of reading Scripture.

Or, tldr; they cherry-pick data. They cherry-pick Scripture; they cherry-pick “science.” And, just as their interpretation of Scripture is not defensible as anything other than “whatever supports our political agenda is true,” regardless of method, so is their way of citing “science.” They’ll cite a bad study as true because it agrees with them, while critiquing a study with the same (or better) methodology—on methodological grounds (Family Research Association is a great site for seeing this contradiction).

This cherry-picking of data while pretending to have a principled stance is not restricted to evangelicals. (Do not get me started about raw foodies.) But their cherry-picking of data is important because fundagelicals are politically powerful right now, despite their perpetual and ridiculous whingeing about being victims (talk about “snowflakes”—another instance of projection).

What I think a lot of non-fundagelicals are having trouble understanding about our current political moment is the dominance of prosperity gospel (an example of the “just world model”).

Prosperity gospel is a non-falsifiable interpretive frame that says that, if you have enough faith, you can get anything you want. It’s non-falsifiable in two ways. First, if you don’t get what you want, then you didn’t have enough faith—there’s no way to disprove this explanation of success/faith. Second, if something happens that simply cannot be explained as a lack of faith, it’s just a temporary setback, just God testing our faith. (Although most people tie it back to 19th century movements, it’s close to the muckled 17th century New England Puritan doctrine of signs.)

Just to be clear: I am a person of faith, and I think faith enables us to do extraordinary things. It also enables us to put one foot in front of another through difficult times because faith is the belief that things will turn out all-right. I also tithe. But, I don’t believe that faith guarantees us the outcome we want—that we are entitled to all of our desires being fulfilled by having perfect faith (or giving enough money). Such a belief substitutes our will (our desires, really) for God’s; that seems blasphemous to me.

I’ve also seen that kind of faith, not in God, but in our ability to get our way if we have enough faith, do great damage. It’s the old joke about the person of faith who refused to heed warnings, with the “punchline” of a drowned person of great faith asking God, “Why did you let me drown–I had perfect faith in you?” and God answering, “I sent you a warning, a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter–what more did you want?”

Paradoxically, the just world model, especially when coupled with the notion that we can get whatever we want if we have enough faith, leads to tragedy. People don’t help others because we blame the victims. We ignore systemic failings on the assumption that any problem is always a failure of individual faith. Thus, people who believe in the just world model tend not to recognize systemic problems like poverty, racism, sexism, and they don’t support systemic solutions, such as communities supporting infrastructures (good schools, roads, healthcare). The just world model increases us v. them thinking, The paradox of the just world model is that it leads to an unjust world—whether religious or not (as mentioned above, the idea that you can get whatever you want if you have enough faith/will/confidence is the basis of philosophies as diverse as Libertarianism, Nazism, get rich quick schemes, pseudo-mystical success schemes).

Once a person or community has stepped into this ideology, it’s hard to get out. Rejecting the rowboat and helicopter becomes how one demonstrates faith. The difference between our situation and the guy who rejects the flood warnings is that he drowned; if we sit on the roof, and reject the epidemiologists, public health experts, social distancing, and ventilators to demonstrate our individual (or church’s) faith, we aren’t the only ones who drown. We may not drown at all. But health workers will. Police, EMT, the vulnerable.

We aren’t just sitting on the roof risking our lives. We’re throwing others into the water. Being Christian should mean we care for the vulnerable—we’re being given that chance. God sent us the epidemiologists; let’s listen to them.

Revised syllabus for RHE330D Spring 2020

I’ve put the revised syllabus here in case canvas crashes. All policies of the previous syllabus remain except for those explicitly changed by this syllabus.

What do Followers want?

Eichmann on trial in Israel

I’ve known a lot of people, both personally and virtually, who were Followers. Sometimes they changed churches multiple times, sometimes philosophies, political ideologies, identities (like the guy I knew in college who flailed around from preppie to Che-Marxist to tennis fanatic—each with an entirely new wardrobe), with each new identity/community the one to which they were fully committed.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with changing wardrobes, identities, churches, even religions. People should change. What made (and makes) these people different is how they talk(ed) about each new conversion—this group was perfect, this group made them feel complete, this group/ideology answered all their questions, gave meaning to their lives, was something to which they could commit with perfect certainty.

That they went through this process multiple times, and kept failing to find a community/ideology that continued to satisfy them never made them doubt the quest, nor doubt that this time they found it. And I thought that was interesting. Each of these people was just someone in my circle of acquaintance for a few years, and I eventually lost track of them—in three cases because they’d joined cults.

There were (are) a lot of interesting things about these people, not just that their continued disenchantment never made them reconsider their goals, but also that they didn’t see themselves as followers at all, let alone Followers. They saw themselves as independent people, critical thinkers, autonomous individuals of good judgment—who were continually searching for, and temporarily finding, a group or ideology that enabled them to surrender all judgment and doubt. That’s a paradox.

In the mid-thirties, Theodore Abel, an American sociologist, offered a prize of 400 German marks for “the best” personal narrative of someone who had joined the Nazis prior to 1933—essentially a conversion narrative. In 1938, he published a book about it. The Nazis sounded like my various acquaintances, not in terms of being Nazis, but as far as simultaneously seeing (and representing) themselves as autonomous individuals of purely independent judgment who were seeking a totalizing group experience—one that demanded pure loyalty and complete submission.

They were Followers.

In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates gets into an argument with two people who want to study rhetoric so that they can control the masses and thereby become powerful, perhaps even a tyrant. When Socrates asks why, one of them answers, more or less, “For the power. D’uh.” And Socrates says, “Does the tyrant really have the power?” Socrates points out that the tyrant is, in a way, being controlled by the masses he’s trying to control. He can’t, for instance, advocate what he really thinks is best, but only what he thinks his base will go along with.

It’s a typically paradoxical Socratic argument, but there’s something to it. The tyrant can only succeed as long as he (or she—not an option Socrates and the others considered) gives the Followers what they want. In other words, if we care about tyrants, we should see the source of power as Followers. Instead of asking why tyrants (or demagogues) do, we should ask what Followers want. So, what do Followers want?

Here’s the short version. They want a leader who speaks and acts decisively for them, who is a “universal genius,” and whose continued success at crushing and shaming opponents not only gives them “agency by proxy” in that shaming and crushing, but confirms the followers’ excellent judgment in having chosen to follow, and who is supported by total loyalty.

That’s the short version. Here’s the longer.

They want a leader who is a “universal genius,” not in the sense of a polymath (someone trained or educated in multiple fields), but in the sense of a person who has a capacity for seeing the right answer in any situation, without training, or expertise, or prior knowledge. This genius can lecture actual experts on those experts’ fields, correct their errors, see solutions they’ve overlooked simply because of his extraordinarily brilliant ability to see.

Followers’ model of leaderhips assumes that there is a right answer, and that’s something else that the followers want—the erasure of a particular kind of uncertainty. They don’t mind the uncertainty of a gamble, as long as the leader expresses confidence in his ability to succeed at what is obviously to him the right course of action. They mind the uncertainty of a situation that might not have a single right answer, or in which an answer isn’t obvious to them, or, even more triggering, in which the right answer isn’t obvious to anyone. That anger and anxiety are heightened if they are responsible for making the choice, since now they face the prospect of being shamed if they turn out to be wrong.

Avoiding shame is important to Followers, and they often associate masculinity with decisiveness. Not just the decisiveness of making a decision quickly (they don’t always require quick decisions), but of deciding to take action, to do something, powerful, dramatic, clear. Followers like things to be black and white, and they want a leader whose actions are similarly stark, and who advocates those actions in similarly stark terms. Followers don’t like nuance, hedging, or subtlety, but that doesn’t mean they reject all kinds of complexity.

They don’t mind complexity of a particular kind. Followers can enjoy if the leader explains things in ways that don’t quite make sense, or endorse an incoherently complicated conspiracy theory—the leader’s ability to understand things they can’t confirms their faith that he is a genius. That the leader is confidently saying something that doesn’t quite sense is taken by Followers to mean that, while things might seem complicated to the follower, they are clear to the leader. Thus, the leader has a direct connection to the ways of the universe–universal genius. Not quite making sense confirms that perception of the leader as a person who clearly sees what is unclear to others, but hedging or nuance would suggest that the leader does not perceive things perfectly clearly, and that is unacceptable in the leader.

Followers’ sense of themselves as people with excellent judgment—autonomous thinkers who are completely submitting their judgment to the leader–requires that the leader always be confident, clear, and describe issues in black and white terms.

This part is hard to explain. These Followers I knew kept looking for a system of belief that would mean they were not only never wrong, but never unsure, never in danger of being wrong, of being shamed. And, like many people, they equated clarity with certainty and certainty with being right, and they equated nuance and hedging with uncertainty, and uncertainty with being more likely to be wrong. Thus, a leader who says, “This is absolutely true–even if it isn’t– is more trustworthy than one who hedges because the first leader has more confidence. Being confident is more important than being accurate. (“It’s a higher truth,” Followers tell me.)

It’s interesting that, sometimes, a leader can take a while to make a decision, but, when he does make it, he has to announce his decision in unequivocal terms and enact it immediately, since that signals clarity of purpose and confidence. To put his decision into the world of deliberation and disagreement would be to allow the decision of a genius to be muddled, compromised, and dithered. Followers mistake quick action justified by over-confidence for a masculine and decisive response. They mistake recklessness for decisiveness–because they admire recklessness, since it signals faith, will, and commitment.

Followers need the leader to give them plausible narratives that guarantee success through strength, will, and commitment. So, what happens when the leader fails? At that point, we get scapegoating and projection. Oddly enough, Followers can tolerate complicated conspiracy narratives, even ones they can’t entirely follow, as long as the overall gist of the narrative is simple: we are good people entitled to everything we want, and They are the ones keeping us from getting it. We are blameless.

Followers don’t care if the leader lies. They like it. They don’t feel personally lied to, and they like that the leader can get away with lying—they admire that degree of confidence, and the shamelessness. They want a shameless leader. They want a leader who isn’t accountable; they want one without restraints. They don’t see the leader engaging in quid pro quo, violating the law, or even openly lining his pocket as a problem, let alone corruption. They think that’s what power is for. And, as with the lying, they admire the shamelessness.

They also like if the leader says ridiculously impossible things; they like the hyperbole. They think it signals passionate commitment to their cause because it is unrestrained.

They don’t expect the leader to be loyal to individuals, although the leader demands perfect loyalty from individuals, and Followers demand perfect loyalty from the leader’s subordinates. If leader’s aides betray the leader in any way, such as revealing that the leader is incompetent, Followers are outraged, even if everything the aide says is true.

This part is also hard to explain, so I’ll try to explain. A Follower I knew was on the edges of a cult run by a man who called himself various things, including Da Free John. At one point, Da Free John had followers who came forward and accused him of, among other things, egregious sexual harassment. Those accusations inspired my friend to get more involved with the cult. When I asked about the accusations, he was angry with the people who had made the accusations. His argument was something along the lines of, “They knew what they were getting into, and they betrayed him.” In other words, as far as I could tell, he was willing to grant the sexual harassment, but blamed the victims, not just for being victims, but for being disloyal enough to complain about it.

Albert Speer was condemned for his disloyalty, as though he should not have admitted to any flaws in Hitler (I think condemning him for his being a lying liar who lied is reasonable criticism, but not disloyalty). Victims of abuse by church officials are regularly condemned for their disloyalty, as though that’s the biggest problem.

Followers pride themselves on their ability to be loyal, and they will remain loyal as long as the leader continues to be a beacon of confidence, certainty, decisiveness. That commitment can even withstand some serious failures on the part of the leader, for a few reasons. The most important, mentioned above, is they refuse to listen to any criticism of the leader, even if made by informed people (such as close aides). Followers only pay attention to pro-leader media, and they dismiss as “biased” any media (or figure) critical of their leader. This dismissing of criticism of the leader as “biased” is not only motivism, but ensures that Followers remain in informational enclaves, ones that will spiral into in-group amplification (aka, “rhetorical radicalization“).

If the leader does completely fail, they are likely to blame his aides, rather than him (as happened with a large number of Germans in regard to Hitler). To admit the leader was fallible would be to admit that the Follower had bad judgment, and that’s not acceptable.

So, what I’m saying is that Followers are people who put perfect faith in a leader, a faith that is impervious to disproof, and they refuse to look at any evidence that their loyalty might be displaced. The conventional way to describe that kind of relationship is blind loyalty, but they don’t think they have blind loyalty (they think the out-group does). They think their loyalty is rational and clear-eyed because they believe they have the true perception of the leader, one that comes from an accurate assessment of his traits and accomplishments. They believe the leader is transparent to them.

But, if this isn’t blind loyalty, since they refuse to look at anything outside of their pro-leader media, it’s certainly blindered loyalty. And it generally ends badly.

The Nazi argument for euthanasia was an economic one

Nazi propaganda for euthanasia because of the costs of care

Here is a Nazi poster–the loose translation is, “This patient with a hereditary disease costs the people 60000 Reichsmarks for life. That is your money.”

Narcissism and bad political outcomes

Like many teachers trying to shift to online teaching and still provide a useful experience for students, I’m got way too much to do this week, and so I don’t have the time I’d like for writing about Trump’s putting a “strong” economy over the health of the people he is supposed to care for. I don’t even have the time to point out that his first moves were not to protect the economy, but the stock market. (They are not the same thing.)

All I have time for is to make a few quick points that others have already said. There are lots of ways that Trump could help the economy that would, in fact, raise all boats (something that boosting the stock market does not do)—FDR figured them out. This isn’t about fixing the economy; this is about fixing the perception of the economy (since so many people do associate “the economy” with “the stock market”).

I’m about to give an example of how that way of thinking of things worked out for another world leader in order to make the point that it isn’t a good way to approach the situation. I want to give an example in order to make a claim about process—whether this way or approaching a situation is a good one.

My rhetorical problem is that a lot of people (especially authoritarians) have trouble making that shift to the more abstract question of process. It has nothing to do with how educated someone is—I’ve known lots of people with many advanced degrees who couldn’t grasp the point, and many people with no degrees who could. It’s about authoritarian thinking, not education. (Expert Political Opinion and Superforecasting are two books about this phenomenon.)

To complicate things further, authoritarians (who exist all over the political spectrum) not only have trouble thinking about process, but understand an example as a comparison, and a comparison as an analogy, and an analogy as an equation.

For instance, imagine that you and I are arguing about whether Chester’s proposal that we pass a law requiring that everyone tap dance down the main street of town is a good one, and you point out that the notoriously disastrous leader of the squirrels, Squirrely McSquirrelface, passed a similar law, and it ended disastrously. If I’m an authoritarian, then I’ll sincerely believe that you just said that Chester is Squirrely McSquirrelface, and, in a sheer snitfit of moral outrage, I will point out all the ways he isn’t. For extra points, I will accuse you of being illogical.

All that I will have thereby shown is that I don’t understand how examples about processes work.

I’ll give one more example. I often get into disagreements with people about “protest voting” (or “protest nonvoting”). I think that’s a bad way to think about voting, since I don’t know of any example of a time it’s worked to get the kinds of political changes the people who advocate it want. And, instead of providing me with examples, the people with whom I’m disagreeing dismiss me for not having sufficient faith (a Follower move). They only argue about process deductively (from a presumption that purity of intent is not only necessary but sufficient for a good outcome—a premise I think is indefensible historically).

So, let’s get back to the question of privileging the stock market and “the economy” over what experts on health say. And there’s an example of that way of thinking. (There are a lot, but I’ll pick one.)

I think Trump, who didn’t want to be President, now can’t stand the idea of not being re-elected, because he is ego first and foremost (as indicated by all his lies, even on stupid stuff, like his height). And he believes that he can’t get reelected if the economy sucks in October. And that’s a reasonable assumption. People will vote against a President (Carter) or party (GOP in 2008) if the economy sucks at that moment, regardless of whether it sucks because the President did the right thing (Carter), or the economy tanked because of processes in which both Dems and GOP were complicit (2008). Hell, people vote on the basis of shark attacks.

There are many problems with Trump, but one is that he sincerely believes he is a “universal genius”—a person so smart he can see the right course of action, regardless of having no training in it. This is important to his sense of self, and that’s why he keeps firing people who make it clear that they are more knowledgeable than he is about anything. Not only can’t he be wrong, but he can’t have anyone in his administration smarter than he is.

This isn’t the first administration like that. It doesn’t end well. It can’t end well. The notion of “universal genius” is nonsense. Intelligent (as opposed to raging narcissist) people know that they don’t know everything, and so need people around them who know more than they do about all sorts of thing.

Intelligent people know that disagreement is useful. Raging narcissists fire people for disloyalty if they dissent, and then they make bad decisions. Firing people for “disloyalty” (i.e., dissent) doesn’t play out well in the business world (e.g., Enron, Theranos) in the long run (although it can in the short run), nor does it in the political world, nor the military.

Making decisions about the economy purely on the basis of how it will play out for a regime also doesn’t lead to good long-term outcomes. How Democracies Die shows how authoritarians shift from democracy to authoritarianism through disastrous manipulation of the economy.

There’s another example.

Germans, on the whole, never really admitted that they’d lost WWI. The dominant narrative was that they were winning, and could have won had people been willing to stick it out, but the willingness to stick it out collapsed for two reasons. First, there was the “stab in the back” myth—the notion that Jewish media lied to the Germans and said they couldn’t win. Second was the narrative that people on the homefront lost hope because they were suffering in basic ways, such as food, housing, and coal. And they were.

It’s important to note that the dominant narrative was wrong on both points. There wasn’t a stab in the back, and Germany didn’t lose the war because of homefront morale. The homefront morale could have stayed strong, and they would still have lost. It just would have taken longer and cost even more lives.

But Hitler believed that narrative, and both its points.

As Adam Tooze shows in his thorough book (that I can’t recommend highly enough), Hitler’s economic (and military) decisions were gambles. And those decisions were also at odds. He wanted to prevent the stab in the back by, as much as possible, ensuring that his base was comfortable. He made bad decisions about the economy because he wanted to preserve his support and win a war he probably shouldn’t have taken on.

Hitler’s way of deliberating was bad. He wanted outcomes he wasn’t smart enough to realize were incompatible. And by “smart enough,” I mean “willing to listen to people more expert than he.” Hitler’s rejection of his military experts’ advice is infamous, as is his firing anyone who disagreed with him.

What matters about Hitler, from the perspective of thinking about process, about the way an administration or leader deliberates, is how he decided. As Albrecht Speer said, Hitler sincerely believed himself to be a universal genius, and the paradoxical consequence was that he only allowed around him third-rate intellects. Hitler was obsessed with world domination and purifying the Germans. But he was even more obsessed with being the smartest person in the room, with having around him people who flattered him, with silencing dissent (on the grounds that it was disloyalty), with firing anyone who actually knew more than he did. He hired and fired on the basis of loyalty, not expertise.

That ended with people huddled in bomb shelters like the one in the photo.

When has it ended well?

Research on businesses says it doesn’t end well; I can’t think of a single historical example when it’s turned out well.

I’m making a falsifiable claim. I’m saying that Trump’s way of handling decision making is bad, and I’m using Hitler as an example.

When I pose this question to people who support the model of a “universal genius” who silences dissent, relies on his (almost always his) gut instinct, and who only get their information from in-group media, the response is always some version of “Hey, I’m winning—screw you for asking.” They say I’m biased for criticizing Trump, Obama was worse, abortion is bad. They say, in other words, because they like what they’re getting, they don’t care whether this has never worked out well in the past.

Guess who else thought that way.

What they don’t say is “here is an example of a leader who claimed to be a universal genius, who fired anyone who criticized him, who wouldn’t allow anyone in the room who was more an expert than he, who made every issue about him, who lied about big and small things, who used his power to reward people and states who were loyal to him and punish ones who weren’t, who openly declared himself above the law, and it worked out great.”

That’s because there is no such example.

In other words, they can’t come up with an example of a time when an administration that reasons that way has been successful. They are committed to a way that has never worked. They are committed to the way that people supported Hitler.

When Germany was finally conquered, 25% of the population thought it was right to have followed Hitler, and that he had been badly served by the people below him. 25% of the German population were so committed to believing that Hitler was their savior that no evidence could prove them wrong.

I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler.

I’m saying something much more troubling: I’m saying that the people who support Trump reason the way that people supported Hitler. I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about his supporters. I’m not saying they would have supported Hitler. I’m asking them to consider whether their way of supporting Trump is a good way to support a political figure.

This is two-part: can they give examples of times when this kind of support for this kind of leader has worked out well? And, can they identify the evidence that would persuade them their support for Trump is wrong? What is it?

And, if their answer is that there is nothing that would make them question their loyalty to Trump, and nothing that would persuade them to venture outside of the pro-Trump media, then they aren’t just admitting their political position is irrational, but they’re committing to a way of thinking about politics that has never ended well.

It wasn’t that long ago that that way of thinking about politics ended up with Germans huddled in concrete balls.

You can’t know what you don’t know because you don’t know that you don’t know it

someone texting and driving — Image from here: https://www.safewise.com/faq/auto-safety/danger-texting-driving/

In another post, I mentioned that we don’t know what we don’t know.

This is the central problem in rational deliberation, and why so many people (such as anti-vaxxers) sincerely believe their beliefs are rational. They know what they know, but they don’t know what they don’t know. People have strong beliefs about issues, about which they sincerely believe they are fully informed because all of the places they live for information tell them that they’re right, and those sites provide a lot of data (much of which is technically true), and also provide a lot of information (much of which is technically true). But, that information is often incomplete—out of context, misleading, outdated, not logically related to the policy or argument being proposed.

There is a way in which we’re still the little kid who thinks that something that disappears ceases to exist—the world consists of what we can see.

I first became dramatically aware of this when I was commuting to Cedar Park, or Cedar Fucking Park, as I called it. I saw people talking on their cell phones drift into other lanes, and other drivers would prevent an accident, and the driver would continue with their phone call. They didn’t know that they had been saved from an accident by the behavior of people not on the phone. They thought that they were good at talking on the phone and driving because they never saw themselves in near-accidents. They never saw those near accidents because they were distracted by their conversation.

I have had problems with students who think they’re parallel-processing in class—who think they can be playing a game on their computer and pay attention to class—but they aren’t. We really aren’t as good at parallel-processing as we think. The problem is that the students would miss information, and not know that they had because, like the distracted drivers, they never saw the information they’d missed. They couldn’t—that’s the whole problem.

I eventually found a way to explain it. I took to asking students how many of them have a friend whom they think can safely drive and text at the same time—that, as they’re sitting in the passenger seat, and the driver is texting and driving, they feel perfectly safe. None of them raise their hands. Sometimes I ask why, and students will describe what I saw on the drive to Cedar Park—the driver didn’t see the near-misses. Then I ask, how many of you think you can text and drive safely? Some raise their hands. And I ask, “Do any of your friends who’ve been passengers while you text and drive think you can do it safely?”

That works.

For years, I’ve begun the day by walking the dogs up to a walkup/drivethrough coffee place (in a converted 24-hour photo booth—remember those?), and used to get there very early while it was still dark. There was one barista who didn’t notice me (the light was bad, in her defense). I would let her serve two cars before I’d tap on the window. She would say, “Be patient! I’m helping someone!” She sincerely thought that I arrived at the moment she noticed me, and immediately tapped on the window. It never occurred to her that I was there long before she noticed me.

When I talk to people who live in informational enclaves, and mention some piece of information their media didn’t tell them, they’ll far too often say something along the lines of, “That can’t be true—I’ve never heard that.”

That’s like the bad drivers who didn’t notice the near misses and so thought they were good drivers.

That you’ve never heard something is a relevant piece of information if you live in a world in which you should have heard it. If, however, you live in an informational in-group enclave, that you’ve not heard something is to be expected. There’s a lot of stuff you haven’t heard.

What surprises me about that reaction is that it’s generally an exchange on the internet. They’re connected to the internet. I’ve said something they haven’t heard. They could google it. They don’t; they say it isn’t true because they haven’t heard it.

That they haven’t heard it is fine; that they won’t google it is not. And, ideally, they’ll google in such a way that they are getting out of their informational enclave (a different post yet to be written).

In that earlier post apparently about anti-vaxxers, but really about all of us, I mentioned several questions. One of them is: If the out-group was right in an important way, or the in-group wrong in an important way, am I relying on sources of information that would tell me?

And that’s important now.

If you live in informational worlds that are profoundly anti-Trump, and he did something really right in regard to the covid-19 virus, would you know? To answer: he couldn’t have, or, if he did, it was minor is to say no.

And the answer is also no if you’re relying on the arguments that Rachel Maddow says his supporters are making, as well as on your dumbass cousin on Facebook. Unless you deliberately try to find pro-Trump arguments made by the smartest available people, you don’t.

If you live in a pro-Trump informational world, and Trump really screwed up in regard to the covid-19 virus, would you know? To answer: no, or perhaps there were some minor glitches with his rhetoric is to say no.

And the answer is also no if you’re relying on the arguments that Fox, Limbaugh, Savage and so on say critics of Trump are making, as well as the dumbass arguments your cousin on Facebook makes. Unless you unless you deliberately try to find arguments critical of Trump made by the smartest available people, you don’t.

People are dying. We need to know what we don’t know, and remaining in an informational enclave will make more people die.

Anti-vaxxers, bad drivers, and other people who reason badly

banner for dhmo information site You can’t know what you don’t know. You can’t know what you weren’t told. You can’t know what you didn’t notice.

A lot of people outraged about anti-vaxxers think they’re ignoring facts. But they aren’t. I’ve argued with them, and they have a lot of facts, and a lot of those facts are true. The problem isn’t in their facts, but in how they think about what makes a good argument. Anti-vaxxers are a great example of how not to think about having a good argument—one shared by a lot of people.

Their argument is: “We shouldn’t require that people get vaccines because [this vaccine] is bad because [fact].” And so they know that they’re right because they live in a world in which they are continually “shown” that they are right. They are given lots of facts (which might even be true) and lots of information about what their opponents believe (most of which is straw man). If you don’t drift into the world of anti-vaxxers, you don’t know that.

Just to be clear: I think anti-vaxxers are full of shit. I sincerely believe that anti-vaxxers believe they are truthful. And they also have a lot of facts, many of which are true. But their fullofshitness isn’t about whether they have facts, or whether they are truthful. It’s about their logic. It isn’t about whether they have facts, but about how they reason, and about the informational worlds they choose to inhabit.

Here’s an anti-vaxxer argument I’ve come across more than once. It’s something along the lines of, “If you look at the ingredients for this vaccine, you can see it has this ingredient, and, if you look up that ingredient on the internet, you can see that it’s really dangerous.”

That argument is a series of claims, each of which is factually true. It really does have that ingredient, and you really can look it up, and you really can see that it is harmful. The facts are true, but the logic is dumb.

If we step away from whether people have “facts” to how they’re arguing, then you can see that those claims don’t lead to each other.

Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a notoriously dangerous chemical. It is responsible for thousands of deaths every year, and it’s in biological and chemical weapons. There’s a list here of its dangers, and they are many. So, if the logic of the argument above is good—this vaccine is dangerous because it has an ingredient that’s dangerous–, then the person making that argument has to support the claim that any medications containing DHMO are dangerous.

If it’s a bad way to argue in regard to DHMO, then it’s a bad way to argue about any of the chemicals in vaccines.

DHMO is water.

It’s a bad way to argue.

When I try to point this out to people, they often say something like, “But water is different. Water is okay—this stuff isn’t.” And they can’t understand that they’re arguing in a circle. They have an unfalsifiable belief. They believe what they believe because they believe it and can find supporting evidence. That’s motivated reasoning.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way to argue because people choose to live in worlds in which we only hear how great our beliefs are and how dumb the criticisms of our beliefs are. We don’t know that we’re getting a straw man. And we don’t know it because the most cunning (and damaging) versions of the straw man are something someone really said but edited, taken out of context, or not representative. So, for instance, a pro-vaccine article might point out that early vaccines were dangerous, and an anti-vaxxer could quote only that part, not making it clear that the comment was about the cowpox vaccine. Or, and I’ve had this argument, they quote someone associated with pharmaceuticals (such as Shkreli) and use that as proof that everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health.

Once again, the claim (everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health) is supported by facts I believe are true (I think most reasonable people would)—Shkreli really is a greedy villain, and he really was associated with pharmaceuticals. The facts are fine, but the logic is bad. If one person associated with pharmaceuticals can be taken to stand for everyone who advocates vaccines, then one person associated with anti-vax can be taken to stand for everyone opposed to vaccines.

And that should be the moment the person realizes it’s a bad way to argue, but they often don’t because their informational world is filled with dumb, hateful, and horrible things that “pro-vaxxers” have said. A person in the anti-vax world thinks it’s fair to take Shkreli to stand for everyone promoting pharmaceuticals because he is so much like all the other examples that slither through the anti-vax informational world. What that person wouldn’t know is that they are only seeing the most awful examples of the out-group, and they rarely (perhaps never) hear about bad behavior of in-group members.

They don’t know that they don’t know enough to have accurate stereotypes about the in- and out-groups. Because we can’t know what we don’t know (but that’s a different post).

Here I just want to point out that these two related problems (thinking we have a “good argument” just because it has true claims, and thinking it’s true because it confirms everything else we choose to hear) aren’t solved by looking for facts, or by asking ourselves if we’re reasoning rationally. And both of those ways of thinking about beliefs suck.

We can ask these questions:
• Am I open to persuasion on this issue, and, if so, what evidence would persuade me?
• If the out-group was right in an important way, or the in-group wrong in an important way, am I relying on sources of information that would tell me?
• Would I consider this an argument a good one if I flipped the identities in it? In other words, if the argument is “This thing [that I already believe is bad] is bad because [other claim]” would I be persuaded if the argument was “This thing [that I believe is good] is bad because [that same kind of claim]”?

That last one is hard for some people, so I’ll give some examples:

Let’s say that I, a fan of Hubert Sumlin, say, “Chester Burnette is a terrible President because he issues a lot of Executive Orders.” Would I be persuaded that “Hubert Sumlin is a terrible President because he issued a lot of executive orders”? If not, then I don’t really believe the logic of the argument I’m making.

If the answer to each of these questions is no, then regardless of how many facts I have, I have bad arguments.

Rhetorical radicalization and white identity politics

57% of white Americans believe “that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities” (2) and 49% of Americans believe “discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem in America today as discrimination against other groups” (16, 77% of white evangelical Christians believe that, 17), It is a cliché in various circles that there is a “war on men,” and the organizers of “Straight Pride” events insisted that cis-het men (and, given that they often displayed Confederate flags—racists) are the real ones whose rights are under attack. Michelle Malkin and other have argued that there is a “war” on conservative speech, and Fox News positions itself as opposed to “mainstream media” (suggesting it is marginalized in some way).

The Congress elected in 2018 broke records in terms of diversity, yet the vast majority are still het, white, male Christians. 75% of Senators are men, as are 77% of members of the House. 78% of Congress is white, and only 10% are openly LGBTQ. 88% of Congress self-identifies as Christian. The 2019 list of Fortune 500 CEOs also broke records in terms of diversity, with 33 women (or 15%). 59 of the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 CEOs are non-white (around 12%). In 2017, the Republicans had all three branches of government; and both chambers in 32 states. 26 of US governors are Republican.

Fox News, relentlessly supportive of the Republican Party (and especially Donald Trump), had record numbers of viewers in 2019, “making it the top-rated basic cable network.” It is “the most trusted name in television news” (Berry and Sobieraj 111). Talkers Magazine in 2019 listed the top three “most influential talk show personalities” as the openly pro-GOP Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Dave Ramsey. Christians are doing well, too. As Rachel Laser says, “Trump is conferring unparalleled privilege on one narrow slice of religion”–conservative white patriarchal self-described “evangelicals” (I think the term “fundagelical”—not a term I invented—is more accurate). Their mission is to remake the US government into a democracy of the faithful, in which their policy agenda is the only religious agenda to benefit from the notion of “religious freedom”—an agenda of homophobia, patriarchy, and racism. In short, the reins for government, economic, and cultural power are firmly in the hands of cis-het white Christian male Republicans.

Not just firmly, but disproportionately so: 65% of Americans self-identify as Christian, 49% are men, and 60% are white. In other words, Christian white men are over-represented in positions of power. 35% of Americans self-identify as conservative (26% self-identify as liberal), while the number that self-identify as Republican (29%) is about the same percentage that self-identify as Democrat (27%).

So why are they whining so much? Why do members of the disproportionately powerful groups see themselves as victims?

Ashley Jardina, in her extraordinary White Identity Politics, quotes a man at a rally for Trump: “If you just put everything aside and talk about it rationally, it’s not racism when you’re trying to maintain a way of life and culture” (21). It’s notable that he isn’t talking about economic power, but a way of life and culture—that is, his privilege. Jardina quotes Bill O’Reilly, who said,
“For a long time, skin color wasn’t really much of an issue, in the 80s and 90s we didn’t her a lot. Yeah, you always had your Farrakhans and your Sharptons. We always had those people but—Jackson—they were race hustlers [….] But now, whiteness has become the issue. [….] So if you’re a white American you are a part of a cabal that either consciously or unconsciously keeps minorities down. Therefore, that has to end and whiteness has to be put aside. That’s what the border is all about.[….] Let everybody in. [….] That would diminish whiteness because minorities then would take over [….] That’s what this is all about. Getting whiteness out of power.” (220)
Note that, again, this isn’t about jobs, disease, crime—it’s about whiteness. It’s about whether “whiteness” (by which O’Reilly means loyal Republican white Christian men) will continue to be able to dominate politically, economically, and culturally. My whole talk is summarized in that quote.

This argument, oddly enough, gives away the game—that we have “a way of life” in which whiteness is dominant, and people feel themselves in existential threat because conservative Christian white masculinity is not quite as hegemonic as it once was.

Noel Ignatiev’s formulation of whiteness emphasized the rhetorical and political deflective power of “whiteness” (an aspect lost in many current discussions of “privilege” such as “privilege walks”). Whiteness, he argued, is presented to some people as a “privilege” that invites people to hurt themselves in material ways—good wages, job security, reasonable healthcare, good public schools, good roads—in order to get the “privilege” of being on the good side of American racism. Once someone has been invited to climb into whiteness, they are likely to be very protective of the privileges of whiteness; they are not only drawn to kicking the ladder out from behind them (that is, support abandoning the very policies and processes that enabled them to get to where they are), but to be among the most vocal and active opponents of the people who materially look very much like them (the Irish hating on other Irish, people on public assistance hating on other people on public assistance, second-generation immigrants hating on the latest group of immigrants). Ignatiev’s argument is that the invitation to the privilege of whiteness depoliticizes politics by deflecting discussion away from working conditions, infrastructure, social safety nets to whether your privilege is threatened.

Research in in- v. out-group relations makes it clear that people are willing to hurt themselves in order to keep an out-group from gaining. In various studies, if people are asked to choose between an outcome that gives the in-group and out-groups the same amount, they will choose to take a hit just in order to hurt the out-group more. Sometimes called “Vladimir’s Choice,” it is “the tendency for people to choose to disadvantage others, even when doing so comes at the cost of disadvantaging themselves” (Sidanius et al. 257, see also Koomen and van der Pligt 122).

As long ago as 1941, the deeply-problematic (aka racist, although sometimes categorized as moderate white) W.J. Cash noted that race-baiting was effectively used to keep poor whites from engaging in the political action that would have meant sense materially. Giving poor whites “white privilege” (also known as herrenvolk democracy) meant they didn’t demand good jobs, good schools, good roads, good healthcare because the system guaranteed them that they could feel a kind of identification with the richest white person (even if it was the one who screwing them over in material ways). LBJ famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

One irony of the political power of that rhetorical invitation to whiteness is that it involves the simultaneous claim that whiteness is ontologically grounded and a new group can see themselves as white. That new group can see itself as only now and yet always already white. This material and political persuasion is fundamentally rhetorical. People are persuaded to depoliticize policy questions—instead of arguing about our rich and varied policy options in terms of questions like feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, we frame policy questions in terms of in-group benefit and loyalty (and, sometimes openly, hurting the out-group).

Jardina argues that “white identity […] is a product of the belief that resources are zero-sum, and that the success of non-whites will come at the expense of whites” (268). I would modify that to say that it isn’t a question of resources, but of privilege—that people who strongly identify as white, and who feel threatened, don’t feel threatened in material ways, but in terms of privilege. They see, probably correctly, that white privilege is a zero-sum, and the more that whiteness is not privileged, the more whites lose…privilege. As Jardina says, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” (21).

Jardina argues that this anxiety about white privilege is the consequence of increased immigration of non-whites allowed by Reagan’s immigration policies, an explanation that assumes a material cause. But whiteness has always been threatened by the immigration of “non-whites” (or non-WASPs), as early as the immigration of Irish and German Catholics in the first part of the 19th century. Whiteness has long maintained its privilege by giving white cards to another group—a group always defined against African and Native Americans (and, until recently, against Jewish and Asian Americans—this seems to be changing, in complicated ways).

My point is that Ignatiev’s argument—that the rhetorical and political invitation to whiteness is a way of neutralizing a potentially radical opponent—is something we’re seeing now. The inclusion in whiteness is how people forget class, it’s how people redefine our own ancestors. More important, it’s how people are persuaded to oppose, passionately, policies that would help them.

Jonathan Metzl’s heartbreaking chapter about sick white men in Tennessee who opposed the expansion of Medicaid or any aspect of “Obamacare”—policies that would have helped them—shows that they did so because they believed that those policies would have enabled “a lot of people that’s not sick…to use the shit out of it, and then when somebody really needs it, they ain’t there for you to get” (Dying of Whiteness 149). They were willing to sacrifice themselves just to make sure an out-group didn’t get benefits.

People can be persuaded set themselves on fire just to make the out-group uncomfortably warm. When an out-group is stereotyped as lazy, and that out-group is getting the same benefits as the in-group, the in-group will reject the benefits. A famous instance of this is the refusal of working-class whites in many areas to join unions, if the unions would have non-white members who would also benefit from union negotiations. But, it’s also, as Metzl observes, a reason that the poor white men he studied in Tennessee will refuse Medicaid—because of the perception that doing so would benefit an out-group whom they saw as lazy and parasitical. These men were making Vladimir’s choice.

How are people persuaded to hate some group so much that they will set themselves on fire in order to make the out-group uncomfortably warm? The short answer is that they are persuaded that they are in a zero-sum apocalyptic battle with the out-group, that the out-group benefitting in any way is yet one more step toward the extermination of the in-group. Their greatest fear is that the previously marginalized out-group will treat them as badly as they treated that out-group.

This is an old argument, the “wolf by the ears” argument that Thomas Jefferson made about African Americans: treatment of slaves had been so bad that it was like having a wolf by the ears. If the US freed slaves, they would turn on whites in a race war. This was the argument made in such different places as a Supreme Court decision about Japanese internment, arguments against releasing innocent people from GITMO, defenses of displacing Native Americans.

The short answer is that they get radicalized by their media of choice.

The first step of radicalizing an audience is to say that we are facing an existential threat. Sometimes the threat is that everyone is threatened; sometimes it’s just the in-group. And here I have to point out that radicalizing an audience, at least to some extent, is not always bad. Sometimes we are facing an existential threat. We can have democratic deliberation and existential threat. In this case, however, the in-group’s existential threat is the loss of privilege, as though people cannot be white and equal.

The second step is to say that this existential threat has an obvious cause, and an equally obvious solution. This is the point at which media say we need to stop arguing about our policy options and go for this one because it is the only right option. This step toward radicalization is an explicit rejection of democracy and democratic deliberation.

The third step follows from the previous two. If the solution is obvious, why are some people unpersuaded? This step says that our complicated world is really just a zero-sum battle between two groups. The third step appeals to our tendency to frame issues in terms of in- and out-groups. We are all prone to categorize people we meet—she’s a Missouri Synod Lutheran, so she must be a Calvinist; he’s got a neck beard, so he must be a douche; they’re from Alabama, so they must racist; he’s black, so he must like rap; she’s a Sanders supporter, so she must be a jerk; he’s a Biden supporter, so he must be a tool of corporate America. Those initial impulses toward categorizing are inevitable, and not necessarily harmful, if they’re open to revision.

The third step toward radicalization is to keep those categories—stereotypes, really—safe from disproof, and that is best done by framing the characteristics of our mental stereotype as essential. What I’ve noticed about stereotypes—the racist Southerner, good-at-math Asian, caring female teacher, hardass white male teacher, lazy POC, corrupt politician—is that, for many people, they exist in a weird space of simultaneously ontologically-grounded and non-falsifiable Platonic forms. Although those beliefs can be shown to “true” by giving evidence, they aren’t shown to be “false” if the evidence turns out to be false or irrelevant, or if there is counter-evidence. All counter-examples are instances of “no true Scotsman.”

Crucial to this step is the assumption (and talking point) that there is no good-willed disagreement of any kind—disagreement, dissent, or even skepticism about the in-group ideology/policy—is not a legitimate point of view to be considered, but proof that the person disagreeing is Them. That they disagree is proof that they are Them, or a stooge of Them. This step is not just a complete rejection of democratic deliberation, but an active move toward fascism (or some other kind of authoritarianism).

These three steps—there is an existential threat; the solution is obvious; only They disagree with us—lead neatly to the fourth step: purifying the in-group. At this point in radicalization, we’re in a world grounded in a lot of claims that a few minutes of sensible googling would show to be wrong: there is never only one possible policy option, the entire world of political positions is not usefully reduced to us v. them.

We are so deeply immersed in a culture of demagoguery, that, when I make this argument, people often say, but there are evil groups. And there are. But, even if we agree that there is an existential threat doesn’t mean there is only one possible response. We really shouldn’t disagree as to whether we should fight Nazis and fascists, but it’s fair to disagree about the best way to do that. We have a lot of options, and it might be most effective for us to adopt a lot of different strategies at the same time. Radicalization, however, says that there is only way to fight Them, and it is to for all in-group members to be more purely loyal to the in-group, committed to purifying the in-group.

The tendency to believe that the only response to existential threat, failure, or uncertainty is a purification of the in-group is well-documented (Koomen and Van der Pligt, and Hogg et al.). This call for purity is always a call for remaining pure in your sources of information, and that’s the fifth step in radicalization: inoculation against dissent, disagreement, disconfirming evidence. If in-group members who have been radicalized this far look at information from other sources—even non-radicalized in-group sources—then they might realize that they’ve been lied to. The more extreme that in-group propaganda becomes, the more vulnerable it is to disproof, and the solution is to persuade its audience that they shouldn’t even look at other media, except in radical in-group media’s abridged, edited, and sometimes actively falsified form.

Inoculation is the rhetorical move of giving your audience a weak version of an argument they will later confront, and it’s something people in rhetoric should study much more. It’s how far too much of our media works (and pretty much all political youtube videos). Propaganda doesn’t work if it looks like what people think propaganda is—what They listen to. Propaganda is most effective when it looks “fair.”

Oddly enough, then, radicalization only works if it looks as though it’s being “fair” to “the other side,” if it looks “objective” and “unbiased.” And, so, here we are at the paradoxical situation that radicalizing an audience has to look as though it isn’t radicalizing, but being “objective.” This step in radicalization is greased by how bad our cultural discourse is about “objectivity” (a slide greased by how far too many fyc courses talk about “objectivity”). Even in academia, the whole discussion of “objectivity” is muckled by binaries. I want to set aside that hobby horse, however, and go back to the question of radicalization. Here I’ll just say that we shouldn’t be looking for proof, but disproof.

Willem Koomen and Joop van der Pligt, in their book The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism, argue that radical groups operate most effectively within certain social contexts (such as relative deprivation) and to the extent that they can foster the ideological processes that rationalize (even seem to make necessary) intergroup violence (or the support of violence).

The first of those processes, isolation, Koom and ven der Pligt describe in terms of groups like the Weathermen that physically isolated recruits, but I want to suggest that we should think of the rhetorical process of inoculation as functionally the same kind of isolation. According to Berry and Sobieraj (The Outrage Industry), as well as Benkler et al. (Network Propaganda), much of our current media spends as much time trash-talking “the other” as it does promoting its own side. The point of all that trash-talking is that the “other” media is dangerous, corrupting, and should be avoided.

Research is clear that “cross-cutting” in terms of political discourse—talking to people who disagree, reading or viewing opposition points of view (and not hate-watching)—is beneficial. Inoculation prevents precisely that approach; that’s what it’s intended to do.

That isolation enables group think, a phenomenon that leads to ingroup amplification: “the convictions of moral superiority, in combination with extreme forms of us-versus-them thinking helps to legitimize violence against all adversaries, including innocent children” (Koomen and van der Pligt 179). And here I’m thinking of all those arguments about why putting children in cages is moral.

I mention that political position, but this is a process, facilitated by media, that can happen anywhere on the political spectrum (think anti-vaxxers, flat earthers).

Jardina, as mentioned before, argues that the rise of white identity politics is the consequence of increased immigration under Reagan, largely because of the timeline, but I’m dubious. That timeline also fits the rise of hate-talk radio and radicalizing cable “news,” and social media—including youtube—fuels a cycle of self-selection, self-censorship, and self-radicalization.

Hanna Pitkin once said that what she called “free citizenship”—what I think might more usefully called “responsible political action”—requires “the ability to fight—openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponent” (266). My argument is that, through a process of rhetorical radicalization, far too many sites of political discourse not only depoliticize politics, but seriously limit and sometimes completely stifle political discourse itself. Instead of fighting, we exterminate.

So what do we do? Make better media choices. As Benkler et al. show, not all media are the same. While almost all media is driven by the profit motive to engage in damaging frames for politics: us v. them (in other words, zero-sum), elections as horse races, the kind of sloppy psychologizing that displaces policy argumentation with motivism, some media are better than others at fact-checking, issuing corrections, avoiding disinformation campaigns (see especially 381-387). But, as they say, “The pessimistic lesson of our work is that there is no easy fit for epistemic crises in countries were a political significant portion of the population does occupy a hyperpartisan, propaganda rich environment” (386).

University of Texas’ response to coronavirus

writing center consultations

Yesterday, the UT University Writing Center (a division of the UT Department of Rhetoric and Writing) staff meeting was, for the second week in a row, about planning strategically for okay- to worst-case scenarios regarding not just the coronavirus, but the ways that UT might respond. At this meeting we had the Program Coordinator from Athletics, as well as the Program Coordinator for the Digital Writing and Research Lab (our sister in the DRW).

As colleagues at various institutions have said, the notion that there is an obvious response that universities should have and aren’t having is nonsense. There is no obviously right solution (although, I’d say, there are some obviously wrong).

It was a discussion that involved worrying about undergraduates in precarious financial situations who need to keep working, staff and students who are living with or caring for people in the high-risk category, the needs of students to continue to get support for their writing, and legitimate concerns about overwhelming existing technology and whether we’re—as a university—shifting to a system that will have a disparate impact on students with limited financial means.

As the DWRL Program Coordinator pointed out, if everything shifts to online—classes, consultations, office hours—then students will suddenly find themselves devouring data, and that’s pricey. Not all students have computers, nor do they all have wi-fi in their homes, and, if they do, they don’t necessarily have unlimited data plans. Shifting to online classes disproportionately hurts students who don’t have the means to go out and buy a laptop or pay for a better dataplan.

Closing campuses has repercussions that disproportionately hurt marginalized students. If classes are cancelled, students on financial aid of various kinds might have to pay money back, students on education visas might find themselves in precarious situations, students in university housing who don’t have the money to fly back home (or don’t have a home to which they can fly back) are on the street.

There is a saying, “If white people get a cold, black people get pneumonia.” How some universities are handling the coronavirus is an unhappily apt example of that saying. It isn’t necessarily just black v. white, but disadvantaged technologically v. highly advantaged. If a university shifts to online teaching, cancels classes, or closes campuses, rich students will be fine. Shifting to online classes is non-trivial to wealthy students, but potentially a disaster for students whose precarious financial situation means they’re on limited data plans, and closing campuses is even worse for them.

So, universities that are concerned about what are supposed to be American values—inclusion, social mobility, fairness—aren’t immediately shutting down. And that is not an obviously bad decision. They’re trying to think things through. UT is moving more slowly than other universities on all this, and today announced an extended Spring Break—one that will enable faculty and graduate student instructors to redesign classes for online delivery–but I sincerely believe that it is doing so because administrators are meeting constantly and really trying to balance various legitimate needs, including questions of the digital divide. Our sister unit, the DWRL, is looking into opening its classrooms so that students who might be prevented from participating in online classes because of their precarious financial situation can have full access. But it will take them time to figure out if that can be done in a way that is also safe.

One of my direct reports (who lives with someone high-risk) had an email exchange with HR about how to institute a telecommuting agreement, and the response was reasonable, advocating flexibility on the part of the unit. My Chair is completely supportive of flexible and sensible policies for my unit, giving me helpful information about where things are headed (helpful information zie has been given). I’m saying that I feel enabled by my chair, HR, and my university to respond as ethically as possible to this situation.

I’m not saying that every university has responded well, nor that my university’s response has been perfect. Hell, my response has been reactive. I’m in my sixth year directing the UWC. I should have put in place a pandemic plan my first year. Many of the policies we’re enacting I should have put in place just because of the flu.

Yes, the university should have had a pandemic plan in place, and the technology to support it, but so should I. My university didn’t. I didn’t. When the smoke clears, I will almost certainly be unhappy about how my university responded, but, and this is the point, it might just be that my university’s response was sensible given constraints of which I am unaware. A person looking at this situation, unaware of the implications of shutting down a university for international students, might believe there is only one right answer.

The seed of authoritarianism and demagoguery is the premise that situations aren’t complicated, that there is an obviously correct course of action, and that anyone who opposes that obviously correct course of action (doing this thing, supporting this political figure, enacting this policy) does so because they’re corrupt, biased, or stooges to corrupt media.

I love me some agonism. I think we should all argue vehemently, passionately, and reasonably for our positions. I don’t think that arguing vehemently, passionately, and reasonably for our positions and being willing to settle on better rather than best are mutually exclusive positions. Change happens when there are people who agree to make things better and others who point out that this “better” could be better yet. Both positions are important.

No university is responding in the perfect way, but some are responding in terrible ways. I am tremendously proud of how my university is responding.

Real people really disagree

bumper sticker sanders real people I should begin by saying that I think there are good reasons for supporting Sanders, and many of his supporters make good arguments for their preferring him over other candidates. But, I also think there are good reasons for supporting other candidates, and for not supporting Sanders. Some of those good reasons involve people having different priorities from one another, different assessments of risks, or different predictions about various uncertainties about our political situation. That I feel certain I’m right is not the same as having the only legitimate political position.

I’m not saying all arguments are equally valid, or it’s all just personal preference, or there’s no difference among the candidates. I am saying that intelligence and reason are not restricted to only one candidate’s supporters. Further, I’m saying that insisting that there is only one reasonable position to have, that my political beliefs are the only rational beliefs, and that anyone who doesn’t support my candidate does so because they are corrupt, stupid, biased, or the stooge of a corrupt entity is engaging in a damaging form of demagoguery. It is damaging to democracy.

People are sharing this post as though it’s a smart argument, and it’s really objectionable berniesplaining. And, let’s start with saying that if berniesplainers explain in comments that their telling me that I have never seen berniesplaining, but I have simply misunderstood my own experience, they are berniesplaining.

Mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman assuming she is ignorant, and she’s actually quite well-informed, perhaps an expert. It’s particularly irritating when a man explains to a woman what it’s like to be a woman, when he tells us that we don’t really understand our own experience as women, and that he knows what we should want, what policies we should support, because our own understanding of our experience is biased and irrational, but his is unbiased, rational, and objective. Whitesplaining is when a white person tells POC that they don’t really understand their experience as POC because POC are biased, irrational, and subjective, but this white person really knows how they should think, behave, vote.

Bernisplaining is when Sanders supporters explain to people who don’t support Sanders that any position other than supporting Sanders doesn’t come from a legitimate difference of opinion, or a rational assessment of the situation, but from being corrupt or a stooge of corruption. Berniesplainers explain that the people who disagree with them don’t understand our own political views, needs, or positions.

Everything that is wrong about Sanders’ rhetoric is in this post. The article says that Sanders’ showing on Super Tuesday–that a lot of people didn’t vote for him–“doesn’t mean that voters are mindless robots taking orders from above”(why would that even need to be said unless there are people in the article’s audience who would give that explanation?), but because anyone who voted against Sanders did so because they voted on the basis of a cognitive bias. ORLY?

In other words, had they not been relying on a cognitive bias, they would have voted for Sanders. So, there is no good reason for supporting anyone other than Sanders. And I am incredibly tired of bernisplainers beginning every argument from that assumption.

[Speaking of cognitive biases, that article is a great example of two cognitive biases: asymmetric insight, and in-group favoritism.]

More important, leftists are supposed to reject the notion that we are all the same, that there is some position from which unmediated perception of the truth is easy. We are supposed to be the group that says that people have genuinely different experiences, that the world is uncertain, and disagreement is okay.

Yes, not all Sanders supporters assume that they are the only people with a legitimate point of view, and attacks on Sanders can be patronizing and just plain stupid, and, as Jamieson showed pretty clearly, much of the intra-group hostility in 2016 was ginned up by pro-Trump forces. And it’s in Trump’s best interest to have potential Dem voters hate each other more than we want to get him out of office.

But this article–one that said that people who voted for anyone other than Sanders did so because they were dupes to a cognitive bias–was not a meme created by a pro-Trump troll. And Corey Robin shared it. This is not a fringe pro-Sanders’ position. This patronizing, dismissive, and anti-democratic attitude is central, not just to Sanders, but to the left.

We should be better than this.

Not all Sanders supporters are berniesplainers. But all berniesplainers do not actually support democracy. And that’s a problem. Democracy is premised on the notion that disagreement is productive because people really disagree, because as various people have pointed out, advocating a political policy is a leap into the unknown. Democracy presumes that we have genuinely different and legitimate values and interests.

To the extent that pro-Sanders rhetoric says that anyone who doesn’t support Sanders only does so without legitimate reasons—they do so because they’re falling prey to a cognitive bias, they’re stooges to the DNC or media—is the extent to which pro-Sanders rhetoric is patronizing, arrogant, and anti-democratic. It’s berniesplaining.

Democracy is premised on the notion that no individual or group (or faction, as the founders would have said) has God speaking in their ear. The founders did intermittently argue that some individuals reasoned from a position of universal knowledge, and leftists are supposed to reject that epistemology.

Democracy is about acknowledging that people disagree because we really disagree. There is not just one solution that is obvious to all right-thinking people. Democracy presumes that there is legitimate disagreement. People who think there is not legitimate disagreement, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, are anti-democratic. They are not leftists. They are political and epistemological narcissists.