March 2021 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Privilege is being able to make your feelings the basis of policy

a gopher snake — From here: http://www.californiaherps.com/identification/snakesid/gophersnakes.id.html

At one point when I was living in Berkeley in a very shared space, and in which I was the only woman, I had a house-mate who could not be relied on to lock the front door. I was the only female in that space, and I was the only one upset about his failure to lock the front door. He kept saying that we weren’t really in any danger, by which he meant he didn’t feel threatened by an unlocked front door. Even though the very helpful person who was going around Berkeley spraying sidewalks with “a woman was raped here” with the date had sprayed a relatively recent date quite near our front door, he continued to insist I was being irrational.

I have to say that the other guys in the household could only be persuaded to be more careful about locking the door because I threw a fit, and they liked me. I don’t think they ever thought my perception of threat was rational.

And that is one thing that is very wrong about American public discourse in a nutshell.

Largely because of the rational/irrational split, Americans tend to frame beliefs as emotional or rational—assuming that there is a binary, or at least a zero-sum between the two. The more emotional you are, the less rational you are. If you have strong feelings about something, then you aren’t rational about it. That’s wrong, but even more wrong is the inference, that, if feeling strongly makes you irrational, then if you don’t particularly care about something, your position is rational.

And, therefore, that housemate, call him Joe, could sincerely believe that his position was rational, whereas mine was distorted by my feelings.

In fact, his position was grounded in feelings, more so than mine. I could provide evidence that leaving a front door unlocked was unsafe. He didn’t try to refute that evidence. His argument was there wasn’t a threat because he didn’t feel threatened. His argument was profoundly an argument about feelings. His feelings. And his argument was grounded in a sense that only his feelings mattered. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings should be the basis of policy (locking the front door or not).

I once completely alienated a colleague in another department who wanted to be able to have a gun while teaching because he had feelings about someone coming into his classroom and fantasies about shooting them. But he posted an argument that people opposed to campus carry were irrationally afraid of guns, whereas his position was rational. His opponents’ position was grounded in feelings, he said, but his was grounded in a rational assessment of the situation. His feelings. I took issue with that (with considerable vehemence) because I am so fucking tired of people (like him) whose position is grounded in feelings and fantasies yet who condemn any critics as irrational. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings mattered because he pushed them out of the realm of argument (feeling safe by having a gun while teaching). (He unfriended me, and hasn’t had me on a graduate student committee since. I mention this simply because it made no difference to me, but could to a faculty member more vulnerable.)

I wasn’t saying that his position was wrong because it was grounded in feelings, but that his irrationalizing of the opposition was demagogic. We all have feelings. He had feelings of threat, and those feelings fueled his policy commitments. He felt threatened by the idea of a shooter who would invade his classroom (whom he could shoot before that shooter sprayed the room). The problem with his argument was that he normalized his own feelings, and irrationalized the feelings of anyone who disagreed with him. It wasn’t what he argued that was a problem, or even how he argued, but that how he argued–from his feelings–wasn’t open to argument. I was saying that wanting to have a gun in a classroom is a position based in fear was, for him, a rational position but that people fear guns in classroom is a reason to dismiss the argument. And that was an irrational way to think about various positions on the issue.

I’m not saying that his irrational irrationalizing of people who disagreed with him means that his position about guns was therefore wrong and mine right. I’m saying that his ignoring how his own position was grounded in feelings, and his irrationalizing of the opposition, meant that his position was irrational. It was grounded in treating the same behavior—policy positions grounded in fear—differently, based purely on the basis of in- or out-group.

The way to make his position rational wasn’t for him to dismiss his fears and fantasies about a classroom shooter, but to put those fears and fantasies up to the same conditions of falsifiability as the people who feared a shoot-out of people who all thought someone else was the bad guy, students implicitly threatening faculty, or various other concerns. The way to make his position rational was to make his feelings just as rational and just as much up for argument as the ones he was demagogically dismissing as irrational.

Does that mean he was wrong about guns in classrooms? No. But it does mean that he was claiming a privileged place in public deliberation—his feelings are beyond consideration, but that the people who disagree with him have feelings mean their arguments can be dismissed. And that is the problem.

We all have policy commitments that come from our feelings. We are never in a situation in which one set of people have rational policy affiliations free of feelings, and the other is driven by feelings. That isn’t to say that feelings are some kind of bedrock of belief, or that feelings are beyond argument, or that all feelings are equally valid. Not all feelings should be the basis of policy.

Imagine that I feel threatened by seeing a gopher snake. (By the way, I am.) I grew up in an area in which, for reasons I still don’t understand, the local fire department engaged in tremendous fear-mongering about rattlesnakes. Every year, they’d come to the elementary school and talk about the dangers of rattlesnakes. I still remember their saying you should never jump off a rock, since a rattlesnake might be under it. If you believed them, then rattlesnakes were not only everywhere, but spent all their time trying to bit people. I believed them.

Gopher snakes look like rattlesnakes, and a gopher snake on dry leaves can do a damn good impression of a rattlesnake rattling. I remain really bad at snake identification, and so I feel very threatened when I see a gopher snake (or, in Texas, a rat snake).

That I feel threatened by gopher snakes doesn’t mean gopher snakes are a threat.

Elsewhere, I argued that people advocated the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry because those advocates confused their feeling threatened by Americans of Japanese ancestry with those people being a threat.

Feelings are judgments. They are assessments of threat, trustworthiness, credibility. And feelings have evidence, and therefore can be changed, if people are 1) willing to consider why we believe what we do, and 2) we are willing to admit that our feelings do not constitute reality. I feel threatened by gopher and rat snakes. I probably always will. But I can consult a good guide to snake identification and determine that this snake is not a rattlesnake. I might still feel threatened by the snake, and that’s fine. What matters is that I do not advocate a policy–kill the snake–grounded in feelings that are about me, and not about the snake.

Politics is about feelings, and feelings are judgments, and policies are grounded in judgments, and policies should be open to falsification. My judgment about gopher snakes is falsifiable and false, and therefore shouldn’t be the basis of policy.[1] That some people feel threatened by interactions with police is a judgment, and open to falsification, and supported by data. That some people feel threatened by transgender people, immigrants exactly like the people from whom they’re descended, angry women, sex workers, the liberal elite, being asked to wear a mask, and so on—are those instances of people feeling threatened, or certain groups being threats? And we answer that question by asking whether the feeling of threat can be articulated as a falsifiable claim, and then look at the data that might falsify it.

We feel threatened by all sorts of things. But, if people want their personal hobgoblins to be the basis of policy, then we need to argue about whether our fears are rational (can we talked out of them, is the evidence we use to support them a kind we would consider good if it showed we were wrong, and so on).

If our feelings can’t be rationally defended, that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to have them, or that we’re bad for having them. I can spend my whole life feeling threatened by gopher snakes, even if I can’t make a rational argument for their being threats. But that I feel threatened by gopher snakes shouldn’t mean I’m allowed to pass laws exterminating them.

The politics of irrational feelings is always a politics of privilege. The people with political power can make their rationally indefensible feelings the basis of politics by simply appealing to the feelings shared by others in power—fear of Democrats, Black voters, immigrants, accurate information about climate change, fairness in politics.

If we want a well-functioning democracy, then we need one in which we all argue about policies, and that means arguing about our policy commitments—i.e., our feelings. And it has to be a world in which we are open to feeling differently, or, at least, acknowledging the others feeling differently might be reasonable.

Feeling unconcerned about an intruder is not inherently more rational than feeling concerned about one.

[1] Were I to say that rattlesnakes are sometimes pretending to be gopher snakes, then my position would be non-falsifiable, and not an appropriate basis for policy.

When thinking of politics as war leads to a war on democracy

A lot of people believe that politics is war. We gain ground, lose ground, attack other positions, undermine the opposition. While it might be nice if we could engage in political disagreements without aggression, that’s probably unreasonable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s harmless or inevitable that people treat politics as war. The question is: what kind of war?[1]

The kind of war matters for two main reasons. First, we argue for different kinds of war in different ways, and the rhetorical strategies we use, if effective, create an imagined world that constrains our policy options. For instance, if I give a speech that effectively persuades large numbers of people that climate change is an urgent issue that must be dealt with immediately, then those people will advocate for policies that at least purport to ameliorate the problem. As will be explained, how we argue for war establishes expectations about what it would mean to win or lose the war. If we argue that we have to go to war in order to regain this territory because we are entitled to it, then the war can end when we’ve regained that territory. We might be able to avoid the war entirely if our threatening military action enables us to gain that territory in negotiations. Some ways of arguing for war give us a broad range of outcomes that could be considered victory (or at least acceptable), and some give us a very narrow range.

Second, different kinds of wars have different associated practices of engagement. Some kinds of war can involve very limited engagement, with very few troops, and little impact on civilians, whereas others are wars of elimination, in which the win condition is the extermination of another people (not just their military or leaders). Seeing politics as a battle between political figures to achieve certain specific policies might be problematic, but seeing politics as a war in which we must exterminate all and any opponents exterminates democracy.

It’s useful to think of wars as lying on a continuum of pure necessity (the Athenians have declared war and are at the city-state borders, a war of self-defense) to pure choice (let’s go attack Syracuse, although they’ve done nothing to threaten us, because they’re weak and have resources we’d like, a war of conquest). There are two kinds of war that lie between those extremes (or at least that are rhetorically presented as between them) that I want to talk about: preemptive and preventive wars.

The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preemptive war as:
waging war in an attempt to avoid an imminent attack or to gain a strategic advantage over an impending threat. The main aim of a preemptive attack is to gain the advantage of initiative by using military force before the opponent does. A typical example of a preemptive strike is an attack against enemy troops massed at a state’s border ready to invade. (592)
The entry gives the example of Sir Francis Drake attacking the Spanish Armada while it was still in harbor; scholars frequently cite Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War of 1967.

An especially troubling example is WWI. Many people argue that France, Russia, and Germany—that is, opposing forces– all believed that the situation necessitated preemptive war.[2] Russia mobilized, believing that Germany was about to attack; so did France; Germany, seeing its enemies mobilizing, attacked. That is, believing that war is inevitable and imminent can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s important if we’re thinking that politics is war.

Preemptive war does involve choice—the nation doesn’t have to go to war immediately, and could wait and see if the other really attacks. But the choices are clearly limited, in that, if the evidence is accurate, and the interpretation of the opponent’s intentions is accurate, peaceful co-existence is not one of the options.

A kind of war of choice sometimes rhetorically presented as preemptive war is preventive war–we start a war because we believe the other side intends to start one at some point in the future, and now is the most advantageous moment for our side. Preventive and preemptive wars can seem similar, but they are very different. Robert Jervis says “The difference between the two is in the timescale: The former means an attack against an adversary that is about to strike; the latter is a move to prevent a threat from fully emerging” (Jervis R. Mutual Assured Destruction. Foreign Policy. 2002;(133):40). The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preventive war: “Attacking an enemy now in order to avoid the risk of war under worsening circumstances later”

Preventive war doesn’t prevent war; it’s supposed to prevent losing a war we believe is inevitable, but not imminent. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was preventive war, not toward Poland (which wasn’t ever going to invade Germany), but as the most advantageous moment for Hitler to start the apocalyptic war he believed was inevitable (discussed later). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, Third Punic War, and Iraq invasion were all preventive wars.

What I want to show in this post is that the rhetorical challenges inherent to advocating preventive war can easily create a kind of rhetorical trap for a rhetor and community, in which we end up constraining our win condition to extermination/subjugation of the Other.

Arguing for preventive war is rhetorically challenging for many reasons. The main problem is that an advocate of defensive war has to thread the needle of saying that the threat is and is not imminent. It isn’t imminent in the sense that we are about to be attacked, but the threat is such that we have to act now.

Rhetors arguing for preemptive war have evidence that an attack is imminent because they can point to massing of troops, documents that say war is intended, military installations, and so on. There is a demonstrable imminent existential threat. Rhetors arguing for preventive war try to redefine the situation justifying our aggression right now by projecting out-group aggression into the future. What evidence can they give to justify a hypothetical case about the future? It’s difficult (but not impossible) for advocates to make a falsfiable argument, since they’re talking about hypotheticals. A community is likely to respond, since the threat is not imminent, why go to war now? An advocate of preventive war has to show that diplomatic measures are unavailable, implausible, already exhausted, or futile. One way to argue that they’re futile is to argue that the Other is essentially and eternally a threat to us–that there are not specific material objectives we can reach (get this land, that resource) that would change their basic nature.

The case for preventive war is almost always inherently speculative, grounded in signs rather than evidence. Until Japan and Germany declared war on the US, any participation in WWII on the part of the US would have been a preventive war. Any military response on the part of the UK or France to Hitler’s various provocative acts (short of his invasion of Czechoslovakia) would have been preventive war. Various rhetors tried to argue for preventive war against Nazi Germany, but were completely unsuccessful. The arguments they were making seemed too much like the arguments for the Great War, which many people in the UK and US considered an unnecessary escalation of what could and should have been Hapsburg squabbling with Serbia.

Arguments for an aggressive response to Hitler were grounded in arguments about Hitler, who he was, and what he’d always said he wanted—they were arguments about identity and intention. And they could be countered by pointing out how often he talked about wanting peace (which he did, after about 1932), his having toned down his antisemitism (he shifted to dog whistle), arguments about sovereignty (we have no business going to war because of what a government does to its own citizens), and a shift in sympathy, what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge refer to as “anti-French feeling” that “caused a revulsion in favour of the poor downtrodden Germans” (which they date as early as 1922, The Long Week-End 90). Quotes from Mein Kampf had to be taken as more authoritative evidence than quotes from his latest speeches.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying preventive war against Hitler would have been wrong, or that the arguments for and against a more aggressive stance toward Hitler were equally strong. On the contrary, I think that, if ever there was a justified preventive war, it would have been one against Hitler, and that the evidence that he was a threat was better than the arguments people made that he wasn’t. I’m saying that, even with a case that seems so clearcut to us, at the time, it was a very difficult case to make. Arguing for preventive war is hard. The rhetorical solution is generally, as it was with Hitler, to argue that Hitler was essentially an existential threat to Europe.

It’s a funny kind of historical irony that Hitler made the mirror image of that argument. Hitler had an apocalyptic narrative about nations and races. An oversimplified version of it is something like this: nations are locked in a battle of survival—wars are inevitable. A nation prepares itself for war through racial purity, martial training, and being in continual war. A pure Aryan nation is, if fueled by sufficient will, destined and entitled to be the master race. If it isn’t the master race, it will be destroyed by others. Thus, anything less than complete domination means extermination by some other nation or race. We must conquer the other, or they will do to us what we are advocating doing to them.[3] The win condition for Hitler was extermination or subjugation of all countries other than Nazi Germany. There was no such thing as peaceful coexistence of equals.[4]

For a while, I had the hypothesis that preventive war necessarily has win conditions of extermination/subjugation because the rhetorical strategy that rhetors inevitably adopt is an argument about essential threat–because the very existence of the Other is essentially and eternally threatening for us, the only solution is extermination (or subjugation so severe it amount to political extermination). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 is a striking counterexample.

Russia was building a railway and fortress close enough to Japan that they would enable effective military action when completed. Neither the railway nor fortress were a threat at the moment, and they wouldn’t even be an existential threat when completed, but they would give considerable military advantage to Russia in case of a war over Korea. Japan had reason to believe that Russia intended just such a war. Japan was successful in the war, but didn’t try to exterminate or subjugate Russia. There were limited and specific win conditions—eliminate the threat of the railway and deter Russia from mucking around in Korea. Once it achieved those goals, the conflict could end.

There were two things that made Japan’s rhetoric about the war different from, for instance, Hitler’s. First, given the governmental structure, there wasn’t much need to mobilize the Japanese people through arguments about the need to go to war. Second, the “need” was very specific, and so the case was very specific—Russia’s behavior in a specific region in Asia. Japan didn’t need to make the argument that there was an apocalyptic battle between Russia and Japan made inevitable by their very natures (the argument made for preventive war between Sparta and Athens, for instance) or by the nature of history itself (Hitler’s argument). In other words, the rhetoric for starting the war implies the conditions that can end it. If the argument for the war is that the very existence of the Other presents an existential threat to us, then the Other will have to be exterminated. If the argument for the war is that the Other will use its power to subjugate us, then the Other will have to be subjugated so thoroughly that it has almost no power.

I really wish we didn’t think of politics as war, but that’s a different post. Here I’m saying that, if we are going to imagine it as war, then, it matters what kind of war we imagine. If it’s a war to achieve certain specific objectives, then it’s a war that can end when the Other grants those objectives. If it’s preventive war necessitated by the very existence of the Other being an existential threat to us, then it’s a war of extermination or subjugation. Then it’s a war on democracy.

[1] To keep from getting excessively pedantic and having too many terms, I’m using “war” in the broadest sense, including any kind of military action, and not just formally declared wars between nations.
[2] The possibility of a nation engaging in preemptive war means that nations have to be careful with threats of military action, even if intended as bluffs to get better terms in negotiation. If they are understood as bluffs, they have no impact on negotiation. But, if they are taken as genuine massing of forces for aggression, they can provoke preemptive war on the part of the other nation.
[3] One of the paradoxes of this way of thinking about co-existence is that it’s basically self-fulfilling. The belief that sharing power with the Other, for instance, means that, if they ever want power (and it’s likely they will), then we are started on the ladder of extermination, then we start on the ladder of a war of extermination.
[4] There was, at best, and perhaps only temporarily, a sphere of influence coexistence. Japan might be allowed to be dominant in Asia, and Hitler intermittently said that he would allow Britain to keep its colonies, but no country could exist that could ever present a threat to Germany hegemony.

Homophobes who vote for Lindsey Graham aren’t hypocrites

It seems plausible to infer that Lindsey Graham is gay, and that he is regularly serviced by male sex workers. He is a huge hero to the homophobic fundagelicals—people who want to enable discrimination against non-hets (and other people, but that’s a different post) in terms of employment, civil rights, housing. Critics of that agenda say that both Graham and homophobic fundagelicals are hypocrites, since they continue to employ someone who persistently works for the persecution of people like him.

It isn’t hypocrisy. I’m not saying it’s good or okay–I’ll argue it’s a rejection of Christ—I’m saying that voting for Graham doesn’t violate their understanding of what homosexuality is and how it should function in our culture, and it doesn’t violate any principle of theirs because they don’t have a political agenda grounded in any particular principle.

That’s partially because they’ve lost the thread of their own argument. Homophobic fundagelicals are like that uncle at Thanksgiving who started out defending a position about which he feels strongly, but also about which he’s never thought particularly carefully. And now he’s had too much to drink to remember exactly what he’s said so far in its defense, or even what exactly his position is. But he’ll defend it, or something like it, by God.

At one time, the argument was that homosexuality and pedophilia were identical, and therefore it was necessary to criminalize and pathologize homosexuality in order to protect children. Then there was the Sodom argument. Both of those finally collapsed as indefensible, but many people still held on to the notion that homosexual desire was Satanic, and could be prayed away. After a while, they gave up on that argument too, and started making the analogy to addiction—you might be an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop drinking.

There’s an old joke among Baptists—who supposedly don’t drink—as to “what mile” a Baptist is. A ten-mile Baptist doesn’t drink within ten miles of his church. A one-mile Baptist only waits a mile.

They see Lindsey Graham as a ten-mile gay, and they’re good with that. He supports their homophobic political agenda, and he isn’t open about his sexuality.

At this point, most (all?) fundagelicals who support a homophobic political agenda all have relatives whom they know are queer in some way or other, and they just want the person not to say it out loud. And that is the important part—they are fine with queer people who don’t talk openly about being queer. Supporting Graham is consistent with the principle that queer people are okay if they aren’t out, and they support a homophobic agenda.

These same people say that they are victimized when they aren’t allowed to use taxpayer money and governmental institutions to try to convert people to their religion. They don’t just want to be open about their beliefs and practices—they want to be able to pressure people to convert. Queers should be out of the public space, and fundagelicals should be at the center of it.

In other words, they do not do unto others as they would have done unto them.

They reject the guy who said that was important.

They don’t violate their own principles, but they violate his.

By supporting Lindsey Graham while also supporting a homophobic policy agenda, they don’t violate their own principles, because their principle about homosexuality is that it’s fine if it’s in the closet, and Graham is, but they violate the pretty clear principle set out by that guy whom they reject. And that is the problem.