Nothing But Nostrums

Genre: Meta-politics.

Goal: Depersonalizing debate at every scale.

Credence Level: 90%

Novelty Level: Moderate. I've made noises about this before, but have never truly expanded on my points in the glorious ways I have here.

Priority Level: High. Somewhere in the "things I'm very concerned with and you should be too" stack.

Alt-goal: Improving relations (if any) between pragmatists and pessimists.

Disclaimer: Due to the breadth of this topic and its associated drifts, I have decided to split things. This post is part one of a three part series. The split resembles my Q&A post from 2018, except this time around, the second and third installments will actually be finished and posted sooner than later (the Q&A drafts are on life support, unsure if I'll be reviving them down the road).

Foes And Allies 

Every principled political theory so far devised is inadequate at getting more than a fraction of all crucial policies right. Theories repudiating radicalism and canoodling moderation fare no better than theories repudiating moderation and canoodling radicalism. Theories repudiating centralization and canoodling localism fare no better than theories repudiating localism and canoodling centralization. And so on. 

What is being contended is not that principled pol-theories are operationally useless or equal; that they cannot be ranked from better to worse based on the procedural norms or jurisprudences they are rightly affiliated with, but that it is impossible to rank them globally based on the individual pieces of legislation that would arise from each theory's distinctive ideological makeup. [1]  

If the more modest claim sounds hasty to you as well, have a look at everything on the grand menu of pol-thinking. Unless the list's compilers have missed something big, all systematized theories conjure more questions and paradoxes than they convincingly iron out. All of them leave a lot to be desired.

This is understandable in part, given the simpler times in which most of these systems were occasioned by their founders and refiners. Today, we can't afford to be nearly as forgiving, what with the strides sociologists have made in the interim, along with everything else we've learned about the predictable durability of ideological conflict; how the age-of-information does nothing to stymie this conflict, how data overabundance turns out to be an implacable driver of those conflicts, how conflict as such is here to stay. 

On its own, this is no cause for alarm. If the total number of pol-theories in existence was just five, each of those would still be exhaustively multifaceted. Non-monolithic phenomena are known to have strengths and weaknesses, and since ideas with internal strengths/weaknesses are –– all things considered –– notoriously difficult to rank, ranking only five theories is also a headache.

When each theory pushes unique insights on thousands of policies, a rigorous and clearheaded 1>2>3>4>5 positioning of all the policies and polities jostling for ascendancy turns into a tall order. The order goes from ordinarily tall to mind-bendingly impossible once you factor in that a non-negligible number of those policies are eligible to be crucial policies, in that they sustain the multiplex structure of modern society; domestically and internationally. 

The more pol-credos to choose from, the more far-fetched your positional task is slated to become. When best-to-worst system rankings are cognized as hazy, supporters and functionaries of said systems are themselves evalautively hazy. From there, the idea that you have clear-cut foes and allies is likewise muddied. All that remains, are different shades of frenemy. In polite company, that is. Things might change once you're in impolite company or hostile territory. But that goes without saying, and it doesn't undo the norm; 99% of the time, you're in frenemy territory. I've never seen anyone acknowledge this, amazingly.

In place of acknowledgment, we get wedge-issue driven dramatization:

In a sea of hyperbole, I could have picked something worse from someone better as Exhibit A. Maybe I'll add to this later, we'll see. The point is, hauteur like this is but one example of "Watch as I pull off 1>2>3>4>5 like a boss!" infallibility-signalling. Except she's doing it in reality where, instead of five items, hundreds (thousands?) of codified pol-theories exist and do battle. What % of those do you think she's bothered to familiarize herself with? Allow me: Less than enough! But I guess that's fine as long as your book sells better for it.

Just a baby-step from A to B entails envisioning what Policy Perfectionism would even look like. The more catholic a movement's policy agenda is, the harder it will be to compare it to other movements with catholic policy agendas of their own. It's unrealistic, and this holds for perfectionism in many other walks of life and lines of inquiry. I've internalized this, and despite that, the unattainability of perfection in policymaking sets off my trip-wires anyway.

It's not that I believe a perfect bundle of policies can save anyone from the worst things in political or apolitical life. My red alerts are activated by an altogether different observation; there is no visible silo online that internalizes the reality of these pol-theoretical shortcomings, garish though they may be. The rare, invisible silo that does internalize unavoidable shortfalls, does so with Political Nihilism 101 being the next step taken (also dumb).

That's all I'll say about political nihilism here; axiomatic dumbness.

But if there's an unintended upside to it, just one upside, it is that nihilists and pragmatists converge on a select few heuristic themes in meta-politics. They no doubt arrive there from different paths, but I'll take it, given how unlikely anyone else is to make it anywhere near the same spot. To be specific, who else, other than the pragmatist and the nihilist, manages to avoid hurriedly squeezing the following three categories of doers into one of the same: 

(1) People who are competent and who enjoy doing what they're good at.
(2) People who, for the most part, walk the walk after they talk the talk.
(3) Public figures who are ideologically aligned with you. End of. (As a rule, you'll know who they are, but they won't know who you are, peon)

People who invest in political identities are way more prone to scan for signals informing them who is and isn't in (3). Once this is sorted, it is lazily surmised that (1) and (2) have hopped on board the ride (3) successfully signaled. This is because (3) excels at talking the talk. Oftentimes the least impressive talkers in (3) are still better at the marketing of ideological alignment than the most impressive talkers in (1) and (2) are. To be expected, just as people in (1) are expected to be better on the value-neutral competence front, and people in (2) on the moral willpower front. Yes, moral willpower is not tied to competence. You can be the most gifted or skilled or hardworking person in the world, and still lack the requisite willpower to act out your moral beliefs frequently enough. Staying good in a world that's consistently bad, remains a hard sell.

Take this into consideration and it becomes clear how nearly everything that old and new media fixates on leaves accustomed media consumers with maddeningly harebrained framing-effects and trip-wires. Their juvenile motto being: Confirm ideological compatibility first, ask way too few questions later.

The Folly Of Tattooed Minds

People of low/middle/high-brow tastes believe that they are imbued with political identities, that it makes sense for civic agents to cultivate and revise their pol-identities, and that those identities are powered by one or another Principled Political Theory. Because they are principled, they tease out the roots of people's ideological divides. Whenever belief is sketched as an outpouring of identity, there is no hope of disentangling personal and impersonal reasons for endorsing/opposing a theory, system, movement, or policy. This is intellectually scandalous. Yet even the more visible silos that hint at it being a misfire, will only ever talk around the problem and its core.

Instead of stating plainly that impersonal reasons should run roughshod over personal ones as often as possible, panelists use phrases like "Us vs. Them" in condemnatory ways. Now, there is a subtle but important difference between (I) a willingness to dirty one's hands by joining ideological gangs and allegiances in a context where just about everyone reasons personally and clumsily, and (II) a willingness to do the same when everyone reasons impersonally and analytically, to the best of their abilities, and where enough people still reach drastically different conclusions, which naturally fuels the demand for more (mature) gangs and allegiances. With this difference taken into account, teams per se are not the source of what ails us; the shoddy quality of teammates and opponents personalizing the game, coupled with the impossibility of efficiently ranking all or most (or just five) panoramic ideals, is the source of what ails us.

Depending on who you listen to, the personal-impersonal mesh can run ever deeper. Some figureheads insinuate or outright describe a causal relationship between an individual's pol-identity and their temperamental –– or lifestyle based –– categorized traits fomenting ideological divisions. Here we're looking at a psychological↔attitudinal↔behavioral↔political sort of tangled web, building heavily on the initial personal-impersonal pipeline. All of this is supposed to be self-evident, I'm forced to guess, since it goes unchallenged.

The pipeline reads like a bedtime story, but we live in a world where it is widely believed. It is believed by grown adults whose minds I abhor, and by others whose minds I admire and strive to measure up to. It is believed by activists who stand accused of practicing Identity Politics, as well as by their accusers. It is believed by enigmatic clinical psychologists who not only take personality quizzes to be a valid social science, but also a reliable indicator or molder of said ill-conceived pol-identities. A double whammy if I've ever snarked on one.

Much like with tested personality, I would like to see Political Identity become an object of ridicule. Pronto. But the only alternatives to Pol Identity I'm seeing right now come in the form of jejune pol-apathy, or a closely related view where steady interest in politics is a masterfully concealed "cope" for having no life or being a chump. One is overkill, the other a misdiagnosis.

I also get the sense that some people hear this and think "well everyone knows" that their pol-identity is a flawed and imprecise determinant of values, but that it can still be useful to apply it as shorthand-for-values, for convenience's sake. This is like saying that fat people who are desperate to lose weight can freely binge on mars bars provided they had an intense run and workout session earlier in the day. If that's your gut reaction, you have not seen what I have seen. You have not dredged through what I've dredged through.

The pipeline is strong in this one. ↥↥↥

Speculatively or not, I think a major reason pol-identities continue to be viewed as something other than meme material has to do with distinguished theorists overextending the role timeless principles play in setting the terms for crucial policy debates. These theorists have their differences of course, but are notably of the constitutionalist variety. If you're after a la-la zone in which a good or just set of policies reflects the goodness or justness of the pol-theory that enabled said laws to be implemented, this would be where you go. Whereas I take the goodness/badness or justness/unjustness of a policy-set as saying very little about the doctrinal script under which it so happened to emerge. There is no directionality to history; no constitutive structure or meaning between the past and the present. Implying that there is, is flirting with romanticism.

What is needed in place of timeless-talk is a Heuristic Revolution resulting in no one laboring under the expectation that optimific policies –– from trade to education to zoning to whatever –– will have a unifying ideological character.

I've touched on this in recent/not-so-recent posts and videos about the dreaded revival of outmoded econ wars. Not debates, wars. Me abridged: Socialism-or-barbarism is cognitive ease. Capitalism-or-tyranny is cognitive ease. Stop it!

These bad habits are alive and well beyond the economic sphere, it's just that universalizing the goodness of capitalism or anti-capitalism is the most prevalent category of cog-ease I've encountered in the last six months. Shoo!

Given enough time, the familiar merry-go-round remedies of privatization and nationalization fall to the same handful of vices; human incompetence, human apathy, human malice, human incorrigibility. Whether it's wanting to decrease the bad effects of increased governmental power via responsible private power, or wanting to decrease the bad effects of consolidated economic power via responsible public power, you must rely on humans who will perform well. Strangers who perform well. The future performances of those strangers, are tentative things. They are things you cannot in good conscience make strong claims about. But this never stopped zealots in the past, so why should it now?

No one is able to explain why one or the other solution is obviously accurate such that we can invest in it with near certainty. Only by larping as a human encyclopedia of knowledge-controlled-for-endless-variables will get you to believe that you're capable of justifying such confidence. But no one larps for a lifetime. Deep down, your favorite and least favorite pushers of panoramic solutions have to know they're winging it. For this, they should be held in contempt, irrespective of whether you generally like what they have to say.

It's all show. And if it isn't, here's my proposal for good etiquette in debates broadcasted by old/new media: When prediction time rolls around, make all panelists who are proud of their "strong convictions" stake something of high personal value. The stronger your confidence is in X, the more you should be willing to lose in the event that X goes on to be disproved by Y. If your job is to inform the public, and your propositional credence level on a hotly contested matter is 8/10, you had better be ready to lose 80% of your savings/assets should your proposition get empirically and uncontroversially discredited. 9/10 credence level? Up it to 90% of your goodies being on the line. On it goes.

Put the challenge to them; be it money, resignations, scheduled humiliation sessions, the list goes on. They'll hesitate and back off, because it's all show. Entrenched cognitive ease makes the show viable. The show cannot go on. 

Highly respected and influential pol-literature advances similar enough cog-ease. When writers pour tons of energy into their next politically charged book, they're essentially lawyering for their precious pol-identities, or their funders' ones. In isolation, their books are highly persuasive in that they capitalize on data overabundance. This bombardment of facts instills ideological hubris in the minds of high-brow and middle-brow readers/followers. For low-brow types, the 24/7 news cycle is there to fill the void that those books they're unacquainted with cannot do. The ensuing mindset is roughly the same:

Enemy! Enemy! You. Are. My. Enemy!!! (credit: Alex Jones rant I can't find)

A matured version of the mindset, as improved by me:

Frenemy! Frenemy! You. Are. My. Frenemy!!!

Example: The many faces of interventionism:

The countering faces of non-interventionism:

On what planet does a consistently interventionist or non-interventionist principled outlook survive context-sensitive probings of "What does optimal legislative reform look like?". Because the seven themes I included are so dissimilar, pearl-clutchy emphasis on whether an enforceable policy counts as an intervention or not misses the forest.

If you stop to think about it, would you end up leaning closer to interventionism or non-interventionism, overall? How about one or the other when the only issues being counted are the above seven? Surely it depends on how "leaning" is measured. And this is trickier than we give it credit for, because a thoughtful person will always find himself running up against prioritization schemes. 

If all seven are tallied and you end up siding with four non-interventionist stances, and three interventionist stances, would you thereby consider yourself a sympathizer of non-interventionism? See, I would not, and this wouldn't change even if my tabulated stances went beyond 4/3 in favor of non-intervention. If my tallies were as uneven as 5/2 or 6/1 in favor of non-intervention, even that wouldn't be enough to disclose anything of ideological substance, for me.

How so? Well, few things annoy me more than philosophers snubbing animal welfarism in the name of animal autonomy, or having a basic respect for the natures and capacities of animals. Just as one could raise arguably credible objections to welfarism in human affairs, ecocentrists believe they can credibly parallel those objections in animalistic affairs. I've read their works and internal squabbles. The more I read, the more convinced I become that they are moral masturbators. The worst non-interventionists going today. Harsh but true.

Now assume for argument's sake that I am the first to sing the praises of non-intervention when the other six issues/themes come up. So the only form of interventionism I sign off on, is intervening when animal welfare is at stake. The kicker: Because the overwhelming majority of moral patients happen to be animals, my backing of interventionist animal welfarism reasonably outweighs my not backing the other six types of interventionism. The clues for this steepness are found in the revulsion I've long exhibited toward gaianism, ecocentrism, Deep Ecology, eco-spiritualism (cringing just typing it) and even animal liberationism whenever it distances itself from animal welfarists.

I've seen people who identify with one or more of these movements and outlooks parroting bromides about the worthlessness of unexamined living. Alright, now we're talking! But next thing you know, they're pulling a 180 by insisting that turbo-level unexamined living as experienced by non-human animals is worthy living, and that animal welfarists are wrong on arrival because we don't show proper respect for nature. On this view, the tragedy of Sisyphus isn't rooted in the ceaseless boulder-pushing our casualty found himself condemned to. Rather, it was the sheer happenstance of Sisyphus being a member of the human species. If a mammal belonging to any other, non-human species had spent an equal amount of time pushing the same boulder up the same hill, suffering along the way and not examining why, there ought to be zero fuss raised over it. And there would certainly be no cause for interference on the part of agents capable of examining what's what. Because?

Because animal non-welfarists are a colossal joke and an embarrassment.

So even in the context of a 6/1 tally, it would be nonsensical for me to brand myself with a broadly non-interventionist type of pol-identity. In the one area where I embraced interventions, I did so keenly. Hell, as things stand, I come within an earshot of assigning a lexical priority to said area, as every other animal welfarist should consider doing, per quantitative considerations.

That noted, it would be almost as senseless to ascribe a broadly interventionist type of pol-identity to myself, because in this hypothetical, I have disavowed interventions six times out of seven. Priority matters, but the flat rate approach to measuring our yay/nay breakdowns ought to matter as well, to some degree. No matter how you slice it, a label has failed to capture what it sets out to capture; what its very design made it mandatory to capture; evaluative clarity.

The upshot: Don't tattoo your brain. Nothing is gained by it.

Without the tattoo –– or after its removal –– various shades of frenemy start to occupy the mental space wherein friends-and-nemeses once stood dormant. If nothing else, impulsivity will begin sliding, however slowly, towards the exit sign; to be overturned by the pause-friendly, wait-and-see approach to figuring out who your brighter vs. darker shaded frenemies might be. Well worth it.

And just so there's no ambiguity overload: If you twisted my hand and made me pick one label over the other, I would say, with some hesitation, that for me, right now, upholders of interventionism-all-things-considered are brighter frenemies than upholders of non-interventionism-all-things-considered are. 

I would make the stronger claim too; the same irrelevancy over whether a polity interferes with peaceful agents can apply to each issue in isolation. If the total number of intervention-apt issues amounted to only one, I would still find it analytically strange to extrapolate a pol-identity based on how I deal with that single issue. But that's a separate argument and I won't delve into it here.

Hopefully I have succeeded in showing how the interference/non-interference axis is too foggy a value to be of paramount importance in establishing primary political goods. In part two of this series, I will examine how this fog inspires additional fogs which then give life to other bogus axes, like:

Authoritarianism ↔ Anti-authoritarianism

Egalitarianism ↔ Hierarchicalism 

Privatism ↔ Communitarianism

Redistributionism ↔ Natural Law

It's not that any of these axes are completely worthless on their own terms. It is only when they are presented as primary political goods (and bads) that we stumble into foggy aimlessness. None of them are of primary weightiness. With some of them, I'd argue that they shouldn't even be positioned as secondary.

More at eleven.

[1] Because the landscape of competing policies is much vaster than the landscape of mutually-discordant general procedures and jurisprudences. The average western nation has thousands, perhaps tends of thousands, of policies on the books. It has comparatively little in the way of different procedural norms and processes vying for ascendance, which makes error-proneness far more likely for the former domains of the polity than the latter ones.

Related: We Are All Deplorables Now