The Trouble with Ideology, and the Dangers Thereof

What do we mean when we talk about a "narrative?"

Reality is complicated. A narrative has to do with the way we connect the dots and then say, "That's reality." 

 

A worldview. 

 

When a narrative hardens into orthodoxy, we have an ideology. A narrative could be open and subject to reality checks, but that's not going to be so easy if it's sustaining us over the void. We desire a narrative to which we can cling, it seems, even to the point of being "true believers."

If you are a Trumpist, then any evidence to the contrary will denote a "never-Trumper." No matter how bad he is, God is using him for good. And his opponents routinely will be said to be worse. Okay to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome, but no bona fide criticisms ever; only haters and traitors. That way, you don't have to confront any contrary evidence. No discussion allowed since none is valid.

If, on the left, you are full-steam into systemic racism and believe that the status quo equals white supremacy, then, similarly, anybody who doesn't sign on is a racist plain and simple. As with the Trumpistadores, your position does not admit of legitimate criticism. Any disagreement reveals white fragility and is invalid. No thinking when slogans will do. Re-education replaces dialogue.

The recently enlightened are well-meaning and sincerely want to support reforms and improvements. But the ready-made ideology lurks, justifying their positions, and, next thing you know, they're preaching and proclaiming. 

 

They have the truth; the enemy has nothing but lies.

 

They can fit in and agree, even if that means being a people-pleaser -- and nobody likes a people-pleaser.

 

They don't see they're limiting their view to the part of the narrative they like. They don't see that the ideology comes with blinders permitting them to pin all the blame on the opponent. They are casting stones as though without sin.

The activists are strict about the narrative, what can be part of it and what can't. And who can be part. Mayor Bottoms said that enough is enough and that police brutality or society can't be blamed for the death of an eight-year-old. But first she had equivocated, delaying the cleaning up of the police-free zone -- the zone taken over by the protesters -- at the behest of a city council member who claimed she could negotiate with the protesters. And the child died. Yet subsequently, the activists back at that Wendy's called out Mayer Bottoms and said the blood's on her hands.

One of the main organizers of the big Atlanta protests was one of three arrested for the Wendy's arson. Did the charges stick? Haven't found that in the news. 

 

News stories that don't fit the approved narrative tend to drop out of sight. The approved narrative is about the goodness of peaceful protest of which violence isn't supposed to be part. Talking about stuff that doesn't fit can sound crazy, or even heretical. The media, being part of society just like the rest of us, is subject to ideological pressures.

 

Stepping out of line is not permitted. 

Who can be perfect enough to stand up to true believers who demand perfection and who have never made a mistake, for whom all criticism denotes heresy?

Biden?

What is the danger here?

 

A narrative is not infinitely flexible.

Reality exists. Truth exists (even when difficult to discern).

If you step off a cliff you will fall, even if your story is that you can fly.

At what point does that happen?

Even a coronavirus can be politicized, distraction or no, up to the point it rears up and bites you.

Even would-be peaceful protest can be politicized.

I want dialogue and the exchange of ideas that happens in the political center.

 

I want to love my neighbor, not demonize them, even though demonizing and creation of orthodoxy/heresy is good for crowd control and the marshaling of troops.

 

Loving my neighbor is not always equal to telling them what they want to hear. 

But, with dialogue, maybe, just maybe, they/we won't step off that cliff.

There's going to be a backlash. You can see it coming. Not a "whitelash" or "white rage;" not an effort on the part of "white" society to undo the gains of black people a la Carol Anderson. No. It's built-in, since at some point the preferred narrative, like an overstretched rubber band, will revert to truth.

My greatest concern:

that the departures from truth and failures in facing truth on the part of the left is handing ammunition to Trump;

that the force of the backlash will propel Trump to victory.

Reopening the Economy: What's Ethics Got to Do With It?

Last month (March 2020) there were a couple of influential opinion writers who informed President Trump's approach to the coronavirus at the time -- a public health doctor and a legal scholar.  The meme was that fear of the coronavirus was worse than the virus itself. The cure, shutting down the economy, could be worse than the disease, they said. Dr. David L. Katz' letter was published March 20 in the New York Times; he was subsequently interviewed on PBS. Prof. Richard A. Epstein is a legal scholar whose March 16 piece for the Hoover Institute was analyzed in a March 30 New Yorker article.

Individuals who picked up on those opinions were not necessarily polemicists who valued financial stability over life. I was surprised to hear my own financial advisors voice the memes.

Back in March, part of the issue was disbelief. People simply couldn't see what was coming, It was unthinkable.

Then for a change the president pivoted toward listening to his health care advisors, Doctors Fauci and Birx. The predicted number of deaths impressed him. Further, we would not be open for Easter. The shutdown of the economy was extended while we sheltered in place. April was erased.

Subsequently, the number of infections and deaths in the early hot spots increased geometrically before leveling off at high plateaus, due to social distancing. However, the peak had not yet been reached in the less-stricken areas, often rural.

Over 50,000 people in the U.S. have died of COVID 19.

Flattening the curve, though, was only Step 1. Next comes testing and tracking, so the sick and their contacts can be isolated.

But staying the course is not this president's style.

Concerns about the economy are certainly legitimate. Segments of the population became restive. The president saw his political opening. As the end of the month approached, he played both ends against the middle: talking health out of one side of his mouth while revving up protests in states where the virus outbreaks had been the worst and appropriate follow-up was in the works. Free us. Reopen the economy. Or so the mantra went.

The president never planned or organized at the federal level. He said he was not responsible; the governors were, the healthcare workers, the scientists, the business owners (small and large), individuals. Political advantage, not the good of the country, was his lodestar. His politics requires polarization, not people pulling together.

And so, once again, pushback against the scientists and doctors has surged.

Written examples of this range from blatant to relatively subtle.

The column I characterize as "blatant," by Antony Davis and James R. Harrigan for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday, is libertarian in nature, calling out the shutdown approach as an attack on our freedom by using the force of government to control individuals. They play the ethics card -- or, maybe, the "unethical" card -- claiming dissent is being silenced by calling dissenters "murderers."

Note that it has long been a role of government to control the spread of infectious disease. 

The more subtle example is by the same paper's "Money Matters" columnist Wes Moss. Last month he is in print as terming the shutdown of the economy an "overreaction." This month, he is praising the state of Georgia and Gov. Brian Kemp as leading the way out of the shutdown ASAP, lest the economy be not only "bent" but "broken." He wants to rely on "individual responsibility" to make the difference. He says the ability for massive testing is months away. He says we can't wait until the virus is completely eliminated -- a straw man, since no one is calling for that. He alludes to the responsibility for businesses in controlling the infection and says business travel may be "different." He calls on "courage, a renewed sense of personal responsibility, discipline and common sense" for a safe reopening.

About the charge that dissent is being silenced as Davis and Harrigan claim: I have not heard anybody say or write that, which is why I called it the ethics card. Not only appear to preempt your adversaries but make them sound unreasonable and mean!

But is the position of Davis and Harrigan unethical?

The whispered sentiment may be that some may die but that's the price of doing business.

That stance is utilitarian in nature, utilitarianism being the greatest good for the greatest number. In Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, Michael J. Sandel says the problem with that is that only the total amount of good is considered. Individual rights are subsumed in the total and are not a consideration.

People usually register the difficulty with individual rights under utilitarianism, so we instinctively add just deserts to the mix. If individuals in some way deserve a bad outcome, we feel less bad about it. For example, in the "ticking bomb" question, we might find torture okay, but not entirely on the basis of utilitarianism. That is, we might argue that terrorists are bad people and deserve what they get. If, however, it was an innocent family member of the terrorist who had to be tortured, rationalizing torture would become harder.

Although Davis and Harrigan are crying assault on freedom, their utilitarian position actually assaults the rights of those individuals who would be lost to or injured by C0VID 19.

To the extent they are dehumanizing those who are more vulnerable, they may be rationalizing their utilitarianism.

Yet most of our religious traditions do command us to care for the widow, orphan, and stranger, as well as to treat the least of these justly and mercifully. We are to love others as we do ourselves, for goodness sake!

There are ways to open the economy safely. Those ways involve testing and tracking, which Wes Moss holds up as near impossible. But opening the economy willy-nilly is what's making testing and tracking impossible, by radically increasing the number of random social contacts.

Neither Davis and Harrigan nor Moss have made mention of the alleged increase of social ills -- substance abuse and suicide -- that comes with economic depression. A month ago the social-ills argument was often heard. I think it's prudent of them not to make that argument, for two reasons. First, suicide and drug addiction were rampant all the while the economy was going well. The opioid crisis, remember? And don't forget the unprecedented increased death rate among the white working class, all the while the economy was going great guns. Read more about that in this essay-length review of the new book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

Second, although economic depression has been associated historically with social ills, what we have now is something different: a genuine social crisis, medical with economic fall-out. And social crises often lead to a new sense of purpose and to people pulling together. Rather than succumbing to social ills, people are called to be their best.

And here's the rub: how people react depends on how they see what's happening, and that depends greatly on the message their leaders are broadcasting.

Currently the American people are being polarized and played against each other for political gain. Some are being provoked and stirred up by being told that others are taking their freedoms.

When their leaders are challenging them to come together to face a crisis, people can rise to very difficult occasions. Think Churchill or FDR.

The perverse leadership we have today is not only unethical; it is a crying shame.

The Art of Arguing

In recent years you may have come across the new findings that irrationality is not an occasional or random aspect of our thinking but instead underlies our thinking and is systemic. Most of us have heard of confirmation bias, or we've read the hypotheses that reason evolved, not to find the truth, but to win arguments.

Nevertheless, most of us are oblivious. We're likely to think of "bias" only in connection to racial matters. We go on accepting reasoning at face value -- or, at least, we go on accepting our own reasoning (or that of our designated spokespeople) that way. We certainly can see the cracks in the reasoning of our opponents while blind to our own foibles and fallacies.

A recent dust-up within an ongoing discussion group of friends has led me to focus on how we argue.

Or, I might have said, on how to argue.

I might have asked how we argue in groups. But we're humans. We're always in groups of one kind or another.

If not externally, than internally; we all carry around our internalized families and society.

When it comes to key ideas and positions, we often permit minimal deviation. If we are inclined toward the political left, for instance, anything closer to the center, let alone rightward, is suspect, and if we are right-leaning, what's further leftward is enemy territory.

This way lies polarization: you're either for us or against us.

We tend to label individuals in the public sphere as either good or bad. Jordan Peterson. Adam Schiff. Mark Zuckerberg. Same way for courses of action: either all beneficial or entirely harmful, as though those plans of which we approve have zero drawbacks, while those which we disavow are devoid of benefits.

Group cohesion presses us toward simplistic moral positions. Nuance is discouraged. That can mean thinking is discouraged. Thinking is likely to get you into messy middle territory and heretical positions.

Looking at ourselves is off limits. Thus it happens that if two contingents are together, they will confine their critique to a third party or group who is not present.

The pressure against self-examination makes observing how the group works a no-no as well, hence the difficulty of looking at group dynamics, that is, the group process and what is happening right under our noses and between ourselves.

The solution? Talk, each articulating our ideas as well as we can.

Find a group that has norms against personal attack and that values hearing a range of ideas. Or develop one: a group that goes beyond being "nice" yet that cares about its talkers; a supportive group.

No doubt, any ideas off the center will sound off-balance, even in such a group.  Convention and ideological conformism is the expectation. There will be rebuffs. You may be bruised.

Note: a male may in part push through his ideas on the basis of volume and size, that is, by a display of physical power, whereas a similar display by a woman would backfire, coming across as pushiness, stridency or the like. Or schoolmarmish and on the brink of tears (thinking Elizabeth Warren in the penultimate debate). No; a woman does best on the merits of her argument and without other recourse, a la Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And so does a man.

If the push-back knocks me down, I hope to get up and go back to the drawing board as soon as I can. Go home, think, regroup. Find a way to articulate what I want to express. Try again.

Adam Schiff's ability to keep on track despite blow-back did not emerge fully formed overnight. I'm speaking here of the impeachment hearings and trial, of course. That ability is a skill. It had to be developed, honed. Nor are we all RBG.

According to a January 27 New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, practicing that kind of skill in conversation was once encouraged. Groups that supported such talk for ordinary people became the norm all around the country in the 1930s and, according to Lepore, saved democracy.

Hard to believe now. What an inspiring article!

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to argue about it.

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

Nobody praised calling names. The trouble is that once we call somebody out, we make them into somebody we would never speak to.

With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together....

I wish we would do that. Sounds so good!