life-the-universe-pie

[life-the-universe-pie]

In Praise of Great Men and Women

I’d like to look a little more closely at my last example: if your tribe is leading you into conflict with a person of integrity, should this not be a signal that you have gone off the rails? If we are known by the company we keep, we hold each other’s values and integrity in trust. I depend on my community to notice when I stray and pull me back, and vice versa. Despite all our individual failings, and recognizing that any of us can stumble, still we are moral touchstones for each other.

(Fifth in a series that starts >here<)

Someone in my community was once complaining about how Richard, a friend of ours, was doing them wrong in some way. My response was, “If you have two explanations for a situation and one of them is that Richard is doing something nefarious and the other is anything else at all, go with the second.” I didn’t really need to hear the details. Richard had built up enough credit that the presumption of integrity was on his side.

I always felt that that should have been Obama’s response about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Stephanopolous asked, “Do you think Wright loves his country as much as you do?” (Embarrassingly stupid question.) Obama’s answer should have been, “Jeremiah Wright served his country in combat as a pastor in the army. Since then everything he’s done has been in service to his community. He has lived his entire life in service to his country. I don’t think I have standing to question his patriotism. And neither do you.”

Or Desmond Tutu, in the debates over ordaining gays in the Episcopal Church. I had my own arguments about the rights and wrongs of that controversy back when it was burning hot; but ending up on the same side as Desmond Tutu gives me confidence I haven’t wandered too far from the straight and narrow.

Same with Mueller. Here’s a man who has spent his life fighting bad guys. He’s universally praised for his integrity. He led the FBI under Democrats and Republicans with honor. In a healthy country, attacking him only because you don’t like his current investigation—assigned to him within the past year—should make a laughingstock of his attacker, not of him. In a healthy country, great people would be recognized, honored, and given the credit they’ve earned. (And by “great” I mean the ordinary, everyday greatness that is all around us but under-recognized. A lifetime of service. The adulation of peers not out of friendship or toadyism but because they recognize quality.)

This requires a healthy dose of humility—the willingness to look to others for guidance. Ulysses S. Grant, in his memoirs, talks of how he has never taken great pride in showing off his uniform since the day he first got it, wore it everywhere, and was made fun of. The people making fun of him were not important—a street urchin and a groom—but he was willing to use their mockery as a corrective to his own behavior.

I can’t help but connect his behavior here to his thoughts about the Mexican-American war (“the most unjust war ever waged”) or on slavery. There’s an element of empathy here—of emotionally connecting with other humans to see them as equals, at some fundamental level. That empathy acts as a corrective and also provides an opening for sympathy.

We live in a crude age. The ability to recognize greatness and honor it without making the person in question a god or insisting they must be perfect is, for the most part, beyond us. Because, as someone said, all your heroes betray you sometime. No one is perfect always. Slavishly following a great man or woman is just as bad as slavishly following a tribe. But the cynical inability to recognize and celebrate the virtues of others might well be worse.

(To be continued)

#theproblemofevil

[life-the-universe-pie]

I vs. Us

I choose my tribe because it is congenial to me. I like being a nerd; I like finding out the intricate details of this or that body of knowledge. I like martial arts. I like, overall, the Left.

(Fourth in a series that starts >here<.)

But the match isn’t perfect. I mentioned before that when the Left starts censoring its songs to be less ableist, so we can no longer “stand up” and fight, they’ve lost me. But they haven’t lost me—I laugh, and I’m a bit annoyed, and I put up with it. Because in the end it’s a minor point and I agree with the major goal of inclusivity. It’s an example of tribes tending to be self-reinforcing and getting more extreme. I think this is a bit too extreme, but extreme in the service of a worthwhile goal. And I expect that once they’ve played with it a while the community will come to the same conclusion and back off a bit.

So an important aspect of the tribe is the values around which it coheres. Values of inclusivity and mutuality matter to me, so I’m willing to put up with a little silliness in pursuing them. Individuality also matters to me but I can still find a home on the Left because the aspects of individuality which I think are important aren’t threatened by them. In my view, not paying taxes is not an important marker of individuality. Being able to marry whomever I please is. Owning any gun I please isn’t important to me; women being able to control their own bodies is.

Having the right to defend myself is an important value, and it is under some threat from the Left. But as long as it amounts to a requirement for proportional defense—only as much as is needed to deal with the threat and no more—I can not only live with it but agree with it. If I commit to taking on the role of policeman of my own life, it seems reasonable that I should commit to the constraints the police work under. If a cop must not shoot the bad guy who’s running away, why should I have that right—even if the bad guy is still on my property?

There is a point where the Left could lose me. If they started to insist on equality of outcome, as the Right pretends they do, so that we create the world of Harrison Bergeron, I’d be gone. That would be warping my values of inclusion and mutuality out of all recognition and it would violate my values of individuality and excellence.

But because a tribe’s drift is gradual and incremental, there’s no bright dividing line marking where it goes wrong. How, then, to recognize when it’s gone too far? What are the signals indicating you should jump off the train?

We’re starting to see instances of that now with the Republicans in Congress, and it’s a bit discouraging. First, the values of the Republicans since Nixon have been “win elections”—and if it takes appealing to racists to win, that’s acceptable. (That is exactly what the Southern Strategy was.) And the values of the Right since Goldwater have been “let the rich keep more stuff”—and the rich have been heavily bankrolling the right since the 80’s. All the individualist values serve the two primary values of money and power and when the two come in conflict, the party has chosen money and power every time.

To get explicitly partisan for a moment: the values of the two parties are apparent in how they use power when they have it. When the Democrats get power, for all their manifest faults they tend to burn it in pursuit of a goal they think worthwhile. In the 60’s with supermajorities, they burned it to pass civil rights and gave away the South for a generation, as Johnson said—and he underestimated. Clinton burned his mandate trying to pass universal healthcare but had to settle for CHIP. Obama burned his successfully passing healthcare reform. The Republicans? They use their power when they have it to pass tax cuts skewed towards the rich and regulatory reforms to make it easier for the rich to get richer. And that is pretty much all.

So the Republican party isn’t giving its members strong values to hold to in the first place. As moral thinkers have pointed out since forever, money and power do not make a sound basis for a good life.

Yet we do see a few Republicans peeling away, and it’s those over whom money and power have the least sway. John McCain is the poster boy here—nothing like staring death in the face to make other considerations seem trivial. Conversely, “it is almost impossible to convince a man of a thing when his income depends on his not understanding it.” So it seems that when the actions of the tribe conflict with other values, and the individual’s commitment to the values of the tribe is simultaneously weakened, there’s an opening for change.

Which is discouraging because there are other markers and I’d like to think they work better than they do. In logic, there’s the reductio ad absurdum; if your premises lead you to an absurd result, the premises must be false. If the values of your tribe lead you to write a letter to a hostile power telling their leaders not to trust your own president, surely you will notice this is wrong? If they lead you to go on the electric TV machine and tell obvious falsehoods, about “death panels”, say, surely this will make you uncomfortable? If they lead you to believe the whole federal government is in cahoots to cover up murder, won’t this set off your bullshit meter? If they lead you to turn on another member of your tribe, an honorable man who has devoted his life to public service, simply because he is investigating your president, surely you will feel somewhat awkward?

Or, apparently, not. None of these seem to be enough.

(To be continued)

[life-the-universe-pie]

Tribes Against Humanity

So much of our woldview is determined by the tribe of which we are a part. Disagreeing with your tribe is difficult and painful. So if on the Left they decide that we can’t sing about “standing up” against injustice because it’s ableist—not everyone can literally stand up—and I think that’s stupid, it creates a disconnect. Same with my martial arts friends on the Right—I like you, I like working with you, but your ideas are bonkers. It’s hard to feel community in those circumstances.

(Third in a series that starts >here<)

But if the tribe I choose influences my worldview, it’s still the tribe I chose. So a critical element of all this is, how did I choose? Why is the society of nerds congenial but the society of sports fans or frat boys less so? What are the attractive elements of the tribe and what are the dealbreakers that will prevent my joining?

Take the Right. There’s a lot in the espoused values of the Right which I find attractive. Personal responsibility, the worth of the individual, not looking for a handout but making it on your own—all these fit me well. 

But there are dealbreakers for me on the Right as well. The absolute inability to appreciate the experience of those less fortunate or marginalized. Taking individualism to such an extreme that it justifies letting people die in the streets rather than help them. (Which this is not exaggeration. This is the actual, literal consequence of policies pushed by the Right these days.) The authoritarianism. The lack of empathy and imagination. Carrying water for plutocrats.

That list got a bit out of hand. And what I keep coming back to is, I can make all the rationalizations I like but the fundamental issue is one of the heart. I don’t like the worldview of the right. I grew up reading Heinlein and found a lot to like in the libertarian perspective. But I never bought it. I never adopted it as my worldview. On the other hand, I read The Dispossessed and accepted Le Guin’s perspective immediately. One of the characters prepares a list of who will get food and who will not in an expected famine, based on their usefulness to the group. The protagonist comments, “There is always somebody willing to make lists.” Yeah, and don’t be that guy. My recognition was immediate and visceral.

A person is known by the company they keep, because that shows where their soul is. Not the heart, which is a fickle organ. The soul is much more foundational.

And yet the match is never exact, in the first place, and in the second: tribes drift. Often, their self-reinforcing nature makes them become more extreme. What starts as a harmless exaggeration becomes lunacy—a disconnect with the facts of the world as they are.

To choose this political moment as an example, there’s always been some tendency towards conspiracy theories on the Right. On the Left, too—but at one time the conspiracy theorists on Left and Right were equally kept on the margins. The John Birchers and Area 21 people were both fringe elements with no access to or control over policy. They were pandered to sometimes, by more mainstream politicians—but forgotten as soon as their votes were in the bag.

What changed is that Republicans decided they could not do without these people to win elections. First was the opening created by the Democrats embracing civil rights—the Southern Strategy was an explicit decision to appeal to racists on racist grounds. Then came Reagan, giving a still-civilized voice to the same people. Reagan invented the welfare queen not just to make the case against welfare—he used her to make the case for Americans to turn against Americans, for those with little to be suspicious of those with less. And more than that, she made the case that government itself is the enemy, giving your hard-earned money to those who never worked a day in their lives.

And if government is the enemy, what else will it not do? Gingrich brought a whole new class of Republicans into power, who did not have the restraints of the previous generation. They led their tribe to a new place. Vince Foster didn’t just commit suicide, he was murdered; and he wasn’t the first or last; there are dozens of murders to the Clintons’ account. But the government is the enemy, so it’s perfectly logical that the FBI is in the Clintons’ pocket which just explains why they got away with it. So when Trump is accused of collaborating with the Russians, who are you going to believe? The FBI, who are already compromised? Or the people in your tribe who will explain to you how it all works?

Having bought into the worldview of this tribe and having followed it through its evolution from the 80’s to today, this all makes sense. Everything in the bubble is justified and proved by everything else in the bubble and there is no external reality to set perspective—because anything outside the bubble is lies anyway.

Summing up, choosing a tribe (or several) is almost inevitable and my initial choice has to do with my innate characteristics. In what tribe available to me is my soul most at home? That is where I will gravitate. The tribe becomes my community and its discourse sets the parameters for how I see the world. And the more committed to my tribe I am, the more that is so. Though I chose the tribe, the tribe then becomes my guide, my framework, and the lenses by which I see the world. But even if the tribe was healthy at the beginning, there is no law of the universe that says it will remain healthy. And if it develops a sickness, it is likely to take me with it.

My task as a human then is to live in my tribe, and yet not be bound by it. To be a member of my community and yet still be myself.

(To be continued.)

#theproblemofevil

[life-the-universe-pie]

Finding Your Tribe

One of the ways we choose between good and evil is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking.

(Second in a series that starts >here<)

Turning to evil as an Individual is one thing, but most of us aren’t as individual as all that. Most of us join a tribe somewhere along the way. If I’m a technical nerd, I join the other nerds. We talk jargon to each other. We drill deep into odd issues that no one else cares about. We tell obscure jokes to each other and laugh out of proportion to the joke.

The same politically. If I’m on the Left, I have a set of attitudes which attracted me to the Left in the first place. But then it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. I make a community with others on the Left. We tell jokes and communicate opinions to each other. If my opinion reinforces our mutual world view, others praise me. I like that—it shows me that I must have been right, and it feels good to have my community hold me in high regard. So my opinion is reinforced. My people seem even more right, and people with opposing views seem even more wrong. The epistemic circle closes.

This just happens. It’s how people operate. So we can ask how to break out of that circle—and as fully realized human beings it’s our responsibility to work to do so—but the more interesting question for now is, how did we choose our tribe in the first place? What are the values of the tribe and are they helpful? If my tribe wanders down some dark alley (anti-Semitism, slavery, authoritarianism, you name it) I’m very likely to go with them. So choosing a tribe becomes critical because their values are likely to become my values. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. With which dogs shall I lie?

Nerds value information, facts, and connections between facts. Knowing it all and getting it right. Scientists, who are generally nerds, value objectively provable facts. Sufficient commitment to these values can even cause people to change opinions, which is notoriously difficult to do. There’s the case of the statistician who was convinced that climate change was wrong and that the ecologists who were promoting the theory were simply bad at crunching numbers. He went deep into the climate science and came out convinced that not only were the ecologists right, but they were actually understating the problem.

So I could argue that nerds have a built-in immunity to evil (to the extent that evil is unnatural). I could argue they would see that obviously blacks are people, that Jews do not own the global financial system, that Russia is behind the hacks into our systems.

But that does not seem to be true. Many on the Right are total nerds. I know these guys. They’re not stupid. They’ll bury you in supposed facts pulled from Fox News and right-wing blogs. They’ll explain how these “facts” correlate, building up to some giant conspiracy or hidden explanation for why the world is fucked up. And they’ll be totally impervious to actual facts, choosing to disbelieve those because of their source. Because they don’t come from their tribe.

Loyalty to the tribe—or better, identity with the tribe—outweighs other values. And so we march with our brothers and sisters to perdition.

(To be continued.)

#theproblemofevil

[life-the-universe-pie]

The Problem of Evil

I’m not much interested in the problem of evil as generally understood: why does a good God allow evil to exist. It’s clear to me that evil comes from people, not from God.

What interests me is how people choose to become evil. Because it seems clear that evil is a choice, nearly always. People don’t become evil without a deliberate decision and without working at it.

My pattern from understanding this is the murderers in In Cold Blood. Richard Hickock seems to have been a straight-up psychopath, at least in Capote’s telling; but Perry Smith was not. He’s the guy who got the sympathy of the jail warden and for whom the jailer’s wife made pies.

There’s a bit where Hickock and Smith are getting to know each other and Smith brags about killing a guy. It seems likely that he made this up—that Smith was making himself out to be more badass than he was. And there’s the thing. He’s working at being evil. He’s setting himself up as more evil than he is—and then he has to work to live up to his own, self-created, bad reputation.

Or again, take Dr. Horrible trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. He has to show that he’s bad enough to get in, and through diligent effort succeeds in making himself so.

Or take the South in the Civil War—an entire region building a society on an obvious evil and, the more the wrong is pointed out, the more they double down. Or Germany before Hitler. Examples abound.

This is all of special relevance right now because of our politics of the moment. We have all the leaders of a political party choosing what seems on its face to be obviously wrong. Ten years ago—okay, say twenty years ago—the idea that essentially all the leaders of a party would respond to an attack on our country by trying to take down those defending us would have seemed like wild hyperbole, to me anyway. Yet here we are. How did we get here? How did they get to a place where this seems okay?

Answer: They chose it. Bit by bit. Again and again. They worked at it.

But why? If you had laid the proposition in front of them twenty years ago that they should aid a foreign power this way, they would have rejected it out of hand. So what happened in between?

And the answer to that is: small steps. When Russia wants to compromise someone, we are told, they don’t start with the big betrayal. They start with some small, almost innocuous request. Just show us this memo. Not classified, just internal. No reason we shouldn’t see it. Then that initial request—that tiny betrayal—becomes the wedge. You did that small thing, do this bigger thing. Carrot and stick both: if anyone found out you did that small thing, your career would be over even though it was small. So do this bigger thing. It’s still not so big. No reason not to.

Mafia bosses, we are told, work the same way. Be part of the family. Do this small favor. Now the next. And the next.

And this theme—the small betrayal which is the lynchpin to the loss of the soul—is a classic throughout literature. Take the Greek plays—Agamemnon choosing to step on the fine cloth and all his noble purpose comes crashing down. Small selfishness in The Lord of the Flies turns into larger injustice, and finally murder. “The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (CS Lewis).

Because evil takes practice. It comes so naturally that we have to actively choose against it—yet it is so unnatural that we reject it if we look at it full in the face. We have to work up to it.

And one of the ways we choose is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking.

(To be continued.)

#theproblemofevil