Monday, January 13, 2020

Healing a Divided Nation

Luo Kisii people of Nyanza, Kenya, photo by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1936, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.



Well, I suppose maybe it means thinking about the future, and your place in it. Are you going to dwell in the easy randomness of Downtown, its walkable maze of streets where you disappear whenever you want, or the formal determination of Uptown, where you take taxis and elevators in and out of, and up and down in, the hierarchy? Brooks opted for seriousness in that sense, and read Burke's Reflections on the Late Revolution in France instead of Huckleberry Finn and Women in Love.

But there is something we're worrying about all the same, isn't there? In the concept of a "divided nation"? Isn't this about something or other important? Whether we're afraid of the hot civil war Republicans keep threatening us with if Trump isn't reelected or that "epistemic crisis" David Roberts/Vox was lamenting in November, on the divide between those who work within what they hope is a transpartisan morality and those whose morality is "tribal":

under tribal morality, principles are subsumed under tribal membership. [The rule against torture] becomes, “it is wrong for them to torture us.” It is okay for us to torture them, because our tribe is Good and thus whatever actions we take to prosecute the interests of the tribe are Good. They, however, are Bad, so they are subject to the rules. (Readers of a certain age may recall the US having just this debate in the mid-2000s.)
Tribal epistemology happens when tribal interests subsume transpartisan epistemological principles, like standards of evidence, internal coherence, and defeasibility. “Good for our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of what is true; “part of our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of who to trust.
I don't much like the use of that word "tribal" (seems offensive to actual tribes), but I'm interested in the idea of an epistemic crisis, in which different cohorts within a society have totally different ways of deciding what is and isn't true.
I disagree with old Sally (a truly fanatical "moderate") on tons of things, but we belong to the same epistemic "tribe" of believing that you should cite your sources for the things you assert as fact, and the other tribe seems to regard that as cheating. I can't understand that mentality at all. I'm forever shut out from comprehending such thinking. I can barely begin to imagine what kind of "facts" that Hellenophone Timotheos is talking about, but I think it must be things that are already in your uncorrupted heart, not shit you pick up from articles, like a magpie. And if that's so why should I read your tweets, Timotheos? If your facts aren't in my heart already what would I even do with them?

Anyway you and I and Sally too, and David Brooks and Paul Krugman, all dwell for what it's worth in the reality-based community, and these other guys don't. I don't understand where they are—Rove's expression, "We create our own reality," is overstating it, in the sense that their "reality" isn't anywhere near the reality threshold. It can't survive sustained description, like the PizzaGate scandal or the Ukrainian conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton; it's less real than Middle Earth or DiskWorld.

Brooks is dumb and lazy and arrogant, and hence often wrong, but it's generally not too difficult to figure out how he got there. How did Timotheos get to the point where he thinks referencing sources is a cowardly substitute for providing facts? What point, in what universe, is it?

This is the division that a president isn't going to overcome, and there's just no reason to imagine some president who would. It seems as if such people as Timotheos, including people in positions of power like Louie Gohmert and Devin Nunes to say nothing of Emperor Trump, are employing a completely alien thought process with which we would never be able to communicate at all. You can't say how Timotheos got to that point; you can't build a bridge from here to there because they're in different universes, or different dimensions, you couldn't engineer it, because the mathematics are different there.

I'll tell you one thing, though, I'm inspired by the story of the Azande people of South Sudan studied by the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose deep and socially binding belief used to be that all harm was caused by witchcraft, which took the form of a substance in one's belly inherited from one's same-sex parent:


But to say that doesn't mean they weren't aware of the commonplace logic of empirical cause and effect; they were:


In the same way, I'm sure that most of our Trump voter friends are not really in a different universe at all. They do things to keep healthy and take care of their yards and their cars and their plumbing, they go to church or don't, they know how to pay taxes and utility bills, they do their jobs, they're competent, which people who really believed that facts are in some unattainable mystic place like the Grail Castle (as opposed to, say, edited publications) would not be able to do.

They just have this weird thing they do, often attached to a singular subject: attachment to Zionism, for instance, or fear of losing their guns, or hatred of brown people, where they refuse to be rational, like Lindsey Graham saying he'd refuse to look at the evidence, proudly, somebody who used to be a presumably competent lawyer. And they do it voluntarily, unlike the members of an actual tribe with the customs they were born to; they don't have to be like that. (They do it to "own the libs", Steve says, and that's right: it's stupid to be stupid just to piss me off, but teenagers do that every day and have done so for centuries and millennia, so that's no surprise—a lot of Trumpies appear to be stuck in some kind of delayed adolescence anyway.) They do it, really, as a kind of club thing, to be different from libs and their irritating air of caring about things, and the big thing is—you see where I'm going here?—they're not interested in being unified, or getting the divisions healed. They're really fine with it.

So stop worrying. Just take away their political power, because that's a real problem.

Liked this from Doug in his NYTimes Pitchbot guise:
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