Saturday, July 14, 2018

Nationalism And Sanctity

Prediction: The prism of the political is not going to decompress anytime soon. The remainder of the 21st Century will be as gratuitously polarized as the 2015-2018 years have been, if not more so.

Reasons: While identity politics has been on the receiving end of a sustained backlash, no halfway popular commentator has managed to diagnose the precursors to ID-pol.

There are multiple precursors, to be sure, but what's the main one? Well, ever notice how much harder it is to spot social media users who doubt, even faintly, that The Personal Is Political?

It has become damn near impossible to find skeptics of The Personal Is Political (henceforth TPIP) throughout social media land. Widely held TPIP hints at the runaway normalization of Political Essentialism. Though confused and untrue, essentialism in politics is rarely treated as such by the non-essentialists who don't (appear to) believe in it. You never see skeptics saying things like "Don't be such a political essentialist, you look foolish!".

With the root not being called out for the sham it is, lingering notions of TPIP have been left to fester and grow. When TPIP rides shotgun, why even be nonplussed at so many politically engaged people revelling in hyper-polarization, whether consciously or unconsciously? What's so surprising about unspoken loyalty oaths, in such a context? Of course they'll take the mile. They'll do whatever it takes when so many intellectuals give them inch after inch by failing to rail against the essence of the problem.

True, I still make it a point to observe social media users from a healthy distance. If the user is adept at networking, or is just traffic-friendly enough to be visible, the user will without exception believe TPIP.

Now, TPIP tends to be an unstated conviction, and I can fathom it being an unwitting one too. No speaker has to go around declaring "The Personal Is Political" for the astute lurker to gather that this is what the speaker has internalized.

Some speakers are in touch with their TPIP beliefs, but won't state them outright, because icky connotations. I suppose identitarian is the label that's been reserved for them, or that they've reserved for themselves...



Overall though, ordinary TPIP-ers are nowhere close to recognizing how everything from their informal rhetoric up to their formal emphasis on first-personal methods of gaining knowledge lends itself to such an orientation.

So while all identitarians are TPIP-ers they reflexively believe The Personal Is Political not all TPIP-ers are identitarians. Self-unaware TPIP-ers recoil at identitarianism, even though they'll use phrases like "Political Identity" 100%  uncritically. A huge part of their selves will be poured into their societal projects, molding their political wish-lists. If you're on social media like a meth-head on pipes, I'm probably talking about you.

Strange as it sounds, parts of reddit have become my go-to place for political commentary that's uncontaminated by TPIP mindsets. Facebook and Twitter are the last platforms to use, or so much as glance in the direction of, when you just want to avoid TPIP. They're the most dominated by it.

Exceptions can be made for people who make periodic use of Twitter or Facebook, pretty much dropping in/out. It's unfortunate that infrequent use (read: guaranteed invisibility) correlates so strongly with actual understandings of why it's important to depersonalize politics and to depoliticize the persona.

To be clear, occasional use of social media doesn't predict for unideological use of social media (along the lines of bunny videos and dank memes). There doesn't seem to be any correlation there, as both obsessive and non-obsessive types look to the cyber world for their ideological fix. The only correlation anchored by non-obsessiveness that I'm spotting is one that predicts for disbelief in TPIP. 

Indefatigable users are a different animal. TPIP is the bread-and-butter of their worldview. Take this YouTuber:





He's a nationalist who rebuffs civic and ethnic nationalisms, because:

  • For me, nationalism is about a shared culture, values, tradition and history that a people of a nation can take pride in.

So romantic nationalism in a nutshell. Personalizing the polity in a nutshell.



Instead of poking holes at his style(s) of reasoning, all of the other indulgers of a first-person Politik will see a moral transgressor. Words like "exclusionary" would appear, and would no doubt over-appear, in their depictions of his immorality. This particular nationalist has not been on the receiving end of that only because his channel happens to be too obscure for anti-nationalists to be energized around it. If the way anti-nationalists handle any nationalist famous enough to be shame-worthy is any indication, we'd be seeing public spectacles where they make it clear what they think of this guy's moral character too.

Dogpile-style shaming of people with exclusionary or othering based worldviews can easily and often rightly be interpreted as a lazy workaround to rebuttals of said views. If the goal is to actually persuade the nationalist, flat-footed counters of this vein will amount to very little. Less castigation, more explanation.

We go back to basics: A nation-state is an entity that is, by definition, supposed to be exclusionary to some degree. Drawing attention to its non-inclusive nature makes your input unconstructive and woolly on arrival.

If your objection to nation-states boils down to their very blueprints, you are not making a revelatory argument against the existence of nation-states. You come across to nationalists the way an anti-gay crusader comes across to gays when he informs them that his main gripe against homosexuality is that homosexuality is "not heterosexuality" so check yourself Mr. Gay.

Kinda just leaves you wanting.

Keeping that in mind, consider the nationalist whose video I embedded. Are his core beliefs unethical in any way? Drumroll... I don't believe so. As with anyone's core beliefs, some caveats are in order. If the road to idealized romantic nationalism isn't prioritized above all other societal goals, and if it doesn't undercut all unromantic policy agendas, it's a benign enough road. When it is prioritized, and when it does undercut, then sure, his beliefs/priorities are warped and can lead to unethical or catastrophically bad results.

Any nationalist worth his salt will know that unilateralism has an ugly track record, and that flirting with it is asking for trouble. Despite this, the nationalist would be right to argue that certain aspects of a nation's internal affairs can toe a number of self-interested lines and not collapse into unilateralism on the global stage. Whether the subject is a romantic nationalist or the all-too-reviled ethnonationalist, should be a nonfactor in the eyes of those who are committed to multilateralism.

The Prioritization Bar should be applied identically to all nationalists.

The battle lines must not be drawn along a feel-good axis, like the cosmopolitanism vs. nativism axis, or an ill-defined xenophilic vs. xenophobic axis. Caring about whether your fellow citizens' sensibilities enjoy or detest foreign symbols/attitudes/persons is a lot like caring about women dating or marrying up and men dating or marrying down. At bottom, these are paltry concerns which should have no place in any halfway mature political discussion.

Now there absolutely is a place for social commentary that touches on all those themes and more. But that place is elsewhere, since any nitwit with a pulse can spew out social commentary like there's no tomorrow. When done really well, I'm even happy to call it infotainment. But it's not "politics" in any sense. If you're not talking stats or policy, you're not talking politics.

For those concerned with earth-shattering effects and third-person overviews, the battle lines will be drawn along the multilateralism vs. bilateralism vs. unilateralism axis. Period.

But TPIP-ers with their first-person takeaways cannot grant this. It's why they increasingly and belligerently stew over the first two (uninformative) axes. It frees them up to loathe nationalistic ideologies and hastily write off people like our embedded YouTuber as moral monsters.

This is plot-losing stuff, for at least three reasons. First, there's a lingering worry that no matter how cautiously a nation goes about revamping its domestic policies to match nationalistic self-interest, and no matter how educated its citizens and leaders are about the horrors of expansionistic nationalisms of yore, the result will see multilateralism die a swift or gradual death, and with it, unilateral power-grabs on the continental or global scale.

Am I in a position to guarantee that this is a longshot that no person in their right mind should ever take seriously? Not really. Geopolitically speaking, nothing is that much of a longshot. But neither can any anti-nationalist prove that the nationalist wickedly longs for unilateralism as the true endgame.

The implication to the contrary is subtle, and always in the background: Treat the nationalist's domestic policy-set as a fig leaf. The historically sophisticated thing to do is suspect that pushing for, say, extremely restrictive immigration reforms at home entails opposition to multilateralism abroad. This suspicion is never spelled out in tangible terms, and that's half the problem. With terminological fuzziness as our conversational baseline, there's no need to come up with surveys polling nativists and xenophobes in hopes of establishing a connection between the above disparate axes by citing plain facts about their stated beliefs. Striking an all-wise pose about History Repeating Itself will do. Mindreading will do. Thought-obstructing clichés will do.

Since no survey with a respectable sample size has thus far legitimized the diplomat's oft-mentioned fears, I take the accompanying moral scoldings of nativists and xenophobes to be overkill. And that's assuming the mind-reader even knows what you're on about with all this domestic/non-domestic stuff. Ask them to describe multilateralism and there's a non-slim chance they'll babble incoherently or draw blanks. Even once their unfamiliarity with the ins and outs of such polities is exposed, their unwillingness to put internationally cooperative vs. combative implications at center stage, above all things domestic, will not disquiet them in the slightest.

It doesn't take long for the conversation to pivot away from International Relations and right back to easily digestible themes, like sinister immigration restrictivists who don't like foreigners and who ought to like them!



People such as Clement are doing their dandiest to popularize the above framing. The pro-immigration crowd pitted against the alt-right, where "alt-right" is understood to be a scurvy neologism concealing the views of crypto-fascistic baddies.

To oppose the baddies and to give 'em hell  is to defend ongoing mass immigration, apparently. Except the bigger issue with neoreaction (there are many) is not, and has never been, their zero-tolerance stance on immigration. When you hit them there, you lose the crowd. Maybe not in Canada, but certainly in America and across much of Western Europe. Immigration is the furthest thing from a weak spot, for them, and there's no going back. So even if you disagree with them on all-things-immigration, you should never present that as their main goal. You shouldn't even hint that it is, the way the above poster does.

Restoring Westphalian conceptions of national sovereignty is their meta-goal. But even if it's not that due to the latest alt-shift or something, with my finger being off the pulse  it's still a huge component of their agenda and the most easily rebuked one at that. When you hit them there, you hit them where it hurts. [Unless you allow yourself to be played like a fiddle by denying the modernistic benefits of international cooperation and diplomacy, as they openly do]

What also doesn't help matters: The disambiguation page on "internationalism" conjoins all these [domestic and geopolitical] themes along a unidirectional continuum. It makes it so that I can't be a coherent supporter of multilateralism in the streets [International Relations] without also being a supporter of cosmopolitanism in the domestic sheets. Fuck you, wiki's disambiguation page contributors, because Yes I Can.

Given the ambiguities' lasting effect, it's probably best to jettison the word "internationalism" altogether. If your domestic policies devalue citizenship / border control, you support cosmopolitanism. If your geostrategic policies form a bulwark against unilateralism and bilateralism, you're looking to preserve the post-1945 epoch of stability (and relative stability across the non-Western world). One doesn't organically bleed into the other. The apple is not the orange

Secondly, anti-nationalists conflate moral dilemmas with macro-level policy disputes. This raises what has to be the most neglected question of our time: How often is the typical policy disagreement  with its many complexities/ricochets that policymakers must do their best to control for in advance  representative of the micro-level decisions a moral agent makes once encountering individuals in dire need? 

As far as I'm aware  and I've searched far and wide  there is no evidence showing that people with similar voting patterns consistently provide the same answers to standard moral dilemmas, like trolley problems, or that people with dissimilar voting patterns consistently provide different/polar-opposite answers to such dilemmas. If TPIP-ers are ready to ignore the potentially larger gaps in their political allies' responses to moral riddles, so as to overindulge the conflicts resulting from policy discords, they are misconstruing the purpose of legality and overstretching the role of morality.

But of course they are; they freaking believe in TPIP!

A professional hostage negotiator who swears by Rawlsianism and The Maximin Principle is committed to some fairly contentious things, philosophically. One thing the negotiator is not committed to is a generalizable rule that sees the demands of kidnappers and terrorists sheepishly met, no matter how costly to the public treasury. The expert can even believe that all hostages qualify for the status of Society's Worst-Off during their time in captivity. I'd probably agree, but this wouldn't be enough for the negotiator (or myself) to implement a norm that caves to, and sets an annual precedent for, high-stakes extortion as a viable alternative occupation for thugs.

But if the same negotiator converts to TPIP, and begins spouting feel-good slogans like "People Over Money", it's hard to see how any random case would give life to a verdict like "Money Over This Particular Hostage. Do Your Worst".

For the hostage's loved ones, each new case is not just another case in a long thread of hostage cases. It's the only case, emotionally and psychologically. This is not to imply that the friends/family are rubes, incapable of grasping the basic issues with norm-setting. I am saying that, even if they get it, telling them about norm-based drawbacks of ransom comes across as too abstract and impersonal. The expert negotiator would feel the same way if he set out to put himself in the shoes of the hostage's loved ones as he explains this to them. Expecting personal spin to take all the relevant facts into consideration and land on something other than "People Over Money" just seems like the expectation of a... moral monster. Only the impersonal "spin" lets the specialist get around this.

What happens if I were to convert to TPIP? Surely I'd have to insert my (hopefully well-known) views on this pickle into damn near every policy I contemplate. It's a bare minimum requirement for anyone who holds similarly demanding moral views. A coherent TPIP entails slipping ought-inducing demandingness into law.

Qualities like mercy being thrust on an unenthusiastic or unwilling host? Don't worry, it'll sort itself out. Familiarity with arasia and other frailties of human psychology? Meh, we'll learn our way around it. Observable self-involved tendencies bespeaking how doing=allowing harm, though a sound moral principle, is not something most policies are equipped to handle? Give it time.

Give it time = Lessons learned Too Little, Too Late.

There are times where these dualities take a positive turn:



There is no law of non-contradiction that says True Patriot cannot sprint towards Building B first, citing the higher number of potential victims as counting for more than the nationality factor.

What True Patriot checkmarks in the voting booth will not dictate how he responds to an isolated case like this; a case without any long-term, widened implications. Even so, we're stuck in an ideologically-reductionistic climate which has seen fewer and fewer cosmopolitans ready to accept this duality. Place too high a value on citizenship and today's anti-nationalist will treat you like someone who can reasonably be suspected of sprinting towards Building A first.

Granted, I'm sure you can point to a few vulgar nationalists who would sprint towards Building A without second thought, and who wouldn't bother pissing on the sufferers from Building B to put out the fire, even if time allowed for it afterwards. Such a display would be a product of psychopathy or sociopathy first and foremost, rather than of nationalism per se.

If it's neither psychopathy or sociopathy, the sprinter's callous behavior might have stemmed from a belief in jingoistic exceptionalism atop nationalism. This would render the wrong-making features of his choice non-pathological in origin, but still far from the norm. Reassuringly far. I can attest to this non-norm both from my experience with nationalists, and from reading other non-nationalists who know how to engage nationalists productively/non-hysterically.

Thirdly, it is here that anti-nationalists either forget, or simply never come to grasp, that a failure to reason is a non-ethical failure.

Take a look at this short video by our subject, titled "What is Wrong with the West". The subject seems to think highly of this video, because he set it to auto-play on his front page. The video instantiates the main blunder in his mode of reasoning. Far from being evil, it's outright comical. Muh trad-buildings are prettier because they were built by muh progenitors who believed in things.

A proper response to a video like this will not contain anything in the ballpark of finger-waggy indignation. Facepalms, eyerolls, and even the snarky "Aww" based comic-reliefs will do. The subject is not guilty of any wrongdoing, even if you measure wrongdoing partly by the rubric of wrongthink.

Believing that someone who struggles with this much evaluative disorientation can be characterologically immoral is like believing that a quadriplegic who passes by children drowning in Shallow Ponds without intervening makes the quadriplegic characterologically immoral.

If you can't, you can't. The neo-romantic can't because of doxastic limitations, the quadriplegic can't because of physical ones. If you can't, you can't.

You could say that doxastic and moral limitations must cross paths at some point. I'm inclined to agree, but this takes us straight to Derk Paraboom's points about the all-around impossibility of moral responsibility. I'd rather not do that here. Instead, think of all the people who aren't effective altruists solely because they've never heard of effective altruism. By this I mean: Individuals who would have been epic EAs had they been exposed to EA at some point in their lives, but who'll never be exposed to it for whatever reason.


Are all those counterfactual EAs worse moral agents than actual EAs are? Yes? Because real impact is real? But surely some of those counterfactual ones would've pressured themselves into donating a larger share of their disposable income, despite being poorer than some actual EAs who, despite being richer, currently donate a smaller share of their disposable income.

Who would be willing to say that, even once we restrict the counterfactual/actual comparison to those two sub-groups of EAs, that the Actual sub-group's members come out as morally superior across the board? Drumroll... not me. That would mean letting the happenstance of exposure rule our moral judgments.

In that sense, all moral failure can be traced to a paucity of opportunity.

But practically speaking, no one should make the leap from this recognition and insist that all immorality be portrayed as blameless. We don't take it to this absurd a level, just as we know not to let violent criminals roam our streets. And yet, when you recall that what passes for blameworthy immorality in coastal circles is often blameless  in all the relevant ways that account for social blamelessness  I'd put blame-from-unreasoned-thinking at the top of that list.

After all, irrationality and immorality are not fellow travellers. Intellectual virtues and vices are in a category of their own, just as moral rights and wrongs are. Pretty sure the dawn of western philosophy saw a notable figure or two say a few things about these conceptual categorizations. If morality and rationality had been fellow travelers all along, they would've been terminologically synonymic. They're not. Consequently, nationalists should incur no one's moral ire simply on account of being nationalists. At most, a strong belief in nationalism makes for an intellectual vice. Were I to start listing all the intellectual vices of ordinary people that anti-nationalists would never-in-a-million-years treat as morally blameworthy vices, I'd have to quadruple the length of this post. 

Where things go horribly wrong for the TPIP-ers who are put off by nationalistic unreason, is their Fight Fire With Fire mentality, ramped up with each passing week's pseudo-scandal.



God being on Maxine Waters' side, she understands the problem with Jeff Sessions' belief that God Is On His Side a bit differently than I do. But that's neither here nor there. Whether it's her divine brand of rightness, or a secularized brand nested in instant-moral-gratification, the result is a condemnatory finger-wag where a facepalm would've done just fine.


Don't assume that Waters recommends public harassment as some ingenious calculation for electoral gain this November. It's not about that. She's urging mob-style accosting because she genuinely believes that a historically significant wronging was perpetrated against the children separated from their families.

If true, it's arguably enough to justify routine intimidation of those she views as solely responsible or complicit in the crimes. It's hardly true though. Zero attempts have been made to recon with the partisan-steered omissions, distortions, half-pinions and straight-up non-solutions that Adams points out during the first 31 minutes of this video.

But the fiery fury remains. Keep adding fuel to these fires and our ability to put them out over periods of time will be stunted for good. How to best stop fighting fire-with-fire? Step one is to depersonalize. Step two: Don't moralize policy disputes. Yes, even ones involving asylum-seekers crossing the border. It's not equivalent to standalone moral dilemmas, as unintuitive as that seems.

If you're resisting aggressively and refusing to depersonalize because anything less would feel passive-aggressive and in Times Like These you have to be yourself... suck it up, buttercup.

The neo-romantic in the original video needs to do his part too. Many of his lines are delivered dramatically, rendering his video a near self-parody. At 4:55 he trots out the nihilism-and-consumerism trope, which I refer to as the two-for-one trope. I can't explain why, but somewhere along the way consumerism got bound up with nihilism. Even under untechnical, plangent uses of the word nihilism, this makes absolutely no sense. Nihilism is lots of things, but it's not a god damn lifestyle. Whenever I see it used this way, I resist the urge to leave an all-caps-locked comment explaining how a shopper who buys trivial junk can also take non-consumeristic pursuits and hobbies to heart. Most of the time, anyway.

I don't follow-through with any of it, because internet etiquette teaches that when a comment is plastered directly in the uploader's comment section, it's likely to fall on deaf ears, especially if the video in question took some effort. Plus I've wasted enough leisure time on random YouTubers as it is.

I'm demoing his videos here because, like every other neo-romantic I've listened to, our subject jumps the gun in depicting lifestyles as thought-shaping. To the effect of:


Dull lifestyle? Boring thoughts!
Adventurous lifestyle? Reckless thoughts!
Original lifestyle? Revolutionary thoughts!

But wait; philosophers are famously dull on the lifestyle end of things, while raking in insights and associated intellectual goodies on the other end. What gives?!

Motivational internalists of the "strong" variety make a similar mistake when they conclude that our philosophies are inherently lifestyle-shaping or motive-inducing. They want us thinking that a shallow lifestyle inevitably leads to a shallow outlook and vice-versa. Someone alert any of these folks.

And if I'm wrong on this, and lifestyles do give way to outlooks, those outlooks would then shape higher-order national policies, meaning the axes I dismissed as bogus earlier might turn out to be relevant after all. Suppose a noticeable number of citizens in a sovereign state are passionate about Retributive Justice. Not because they're thoughtless brutes, but because they grew up in hard times and it taught them a thing or two about personal responsibility, no excuses, and owning up to what you did no matter what.


When what you believe is part of who you are, and when who you are is to be projected onto the political system you exist in, a relative majority's belief in Retributive Justice could spill over to revanchism as a geopolitical norm. Lots of nations wronged lots of nations over the course of human civilization, and there's hardly a unified version of events taught to each nation's children during history class. History lessons have a habit of flattering the nation of the pupil's origin, and downplaying the bad bits. With so much history to be learned, it's no wonder selection-bias creeps in as often as it does.


Nothing far-fetched about viewing all of this as a likelihood-increaser for more warfare and bloodshed.


As Claire Berlinski notes in a recent thread:


  • The wars that broke out in 1939 and 1914 were iterations of the wars fought by Bismarck, Napoleon and Louis XIV—Sedan, 1870; Leipzig, 1813; Jena, 1806; Valmy, 1792; Turckheim, 1675. The 20th centuries’ were bloodier for only one reason: a massive improvement in killing capability. 

She continues:


  • Europe's history was defined, for centuries, by unmitigated slaughter and butchery among the European peoples, a traditional only occasionally interrupted since the sack of Rome. For centuries, as we discovered, Europe was the globe's leading exporter of violence, and that is precisely why our postwar foreign policy was designed to ensure our permanent military hegemony over the Continent.

Analytical/unromantic buzzkills like her have plenty at their disposal with which to subdue recurring penchants for grandiosity, destiny, and righteous vengeance. Glory-hound mindsets, not so much. Trad-con mindsets, not so much. Rapacious mindsets, not so much.

Admittedly, I'm a bit mesmerized by the persistence of such mindsets; always wondering what drives someone to forego the standard definition of Progressivism, to redefine it into "the belief that human nature does not exist" and to assume that, on the odd chance that his video ever goes viral, that he'd be able to get away with a definitional trick this glaring, no questions asked.

The meta-problem behind all this, I contend, has to do with the line between intellectual dishonesty and undue ideological fervor being blurrier than many of us are willing to admit. When you're hypnotized, you're mostly spouting falsehoods you otherwise wouldn't spout. But you're also not lying, seeing as you're freaking under hypnosis. Now what if... you went out of your way to get politically hypnotized in the first place, knowing that it may well boost your odds of spouting falsehoods or blue lies in the future? Are you still a good-faith actor?

To arrive at any hope of unblurring this line, more devotees of unorthodox ideologies [political or other] must in the habit of exchanging frank Q&As instead of relying on mindreading and other polemical hijinks, like redefinitions of isms that hundreds of millions of politically minded people self-identify with. Or clever burns meant to elicit laughter when you know your ideological demo. I don't care how subversive you take your ideology our to be, there is nothing gutsy about mocking/targeting out-groups to the readymade cheers of your in-group in increasingly balkanized online environments. We don't need a new Jon Stewart right now. Or a low-rent version of him.


I'm planning on expanding on related issues with all of this in a mock Q&A post that illuminates the shallowness of the Political Compass quiz/quizzes that you may or may not have taken at some point (the ones wrongly perceived as insightful).

Look for that in a few days/weeks.

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