The Hate That Dare Not Speak It's Name
A Matter of Opinions
One Kind of Fight
Imagine we’re neighbors in an isolated village in the mountains or rainforest or on an island, and I’m in a public dispute with this other guy. Wherever this village is, it’s somewhere where we can’t just call the cops or go to court to settle things. We’re on our own here. So the village comes together for a meeting where my opponent and I will make our cases.
If we argue over what’s purely in our individual self-interest, and I stand up and say what’s best for me, and then my opponent stands up and says what’s best for him, if we afterward come to an agreement, each giving up something to meet in the middle—if we compromise—you and the rest of the village will probably respect me for it and be grateful and probably trust me more after that. Hey, Joel was able to put aside his differences, see the other guy’s point of view and meet in the middle. If I’m ever in a dispute with Joel, there’s a good chance we can resolve things. So you would probably be more willing to partner with me, trade with me, share with me, knowing that I’m reasonable.1
On the other hand if I hold out, if I refuse to compromise—No, I won’t give an inch because that wouldn’t be in my best interest—you’d probably see me as stingy, petty, intransigent, a potential troublemaker. The rest of us don’t expect to always get our way, you might think, Why does Joel think he’s special? You would probably be wary of me as a partner or friend. If I’m ever in a dispute with Joel, he won’t be reasonable.
Growing up in our village we would know all this, and neither me nor my opponent would be likely to push any arguments based on self-interest too far because in disputes over self-interest refusing to compromise would make us look bad.
Giving in looks good.
Another Kind of Fight
But let’s imagine we all live in a different isolated village in the mountains or rainforest or on an island. Again we can’t just call the cops or go to court, and again I’m in a squabble with some other guy that’s serious enough for everyone to gather for a meeting. But this time we’re arguing over values.2
So I stand up and say what I truly believe in, what I care about, what really matters to me, and then my opponent stands up and says what he truly believes in, what he cares about, what really matters to him. Now if I hold out, refusing to change my values, refusing to compromise, people will say, Hey I don’t agree with Joel but I respect that he stands up for what he believes in. You might actually trust me more, and consider me a good potential ally, knowing that in any struggle I wouldn’t easily back down.
But if I give in and abandon one of my core values to compromise and publically adopt my opponent’s values, you would think me a coward or flake. If I’m willing to abandon something that I truly believed in, care about, or what matters to me, either I must not have truly believed, or I don’t respect my own convictions enough to defend them. So I am not the kind of person who would have your back when things got rough. I’m not trustworthy.
Growing up in our village we would know this, and neither me nor my opponent are likely to give in on arguments over values because in disputes over values giving in would make us look bad.
Holding out looks good.
You see the difference?
Self-Interest
“All right, let us make peace. I propose my opponent and I alternate use of that disputed field, and for the sake of goodwill I invite him to use it this year, and I will take my turn next year.”
[Community collectively sighs in relief.]
This is a reasonable person, you all think. This is a person who can be trusted.
Compare that to:
Values
“All right, let us make peace. I’ll give up my belief that Jesus is God-made-man and died for my sins since my opponent says it’s not what he thinks is true.”
[Community collectively squirms.]
What kind of person abandons beliefs so easily? This is a person who cannot be trusted.
This is pretty-much a universal rule of human communities, even if it’s counter-intuitive:
People fighting about self-interest will tend to give in. (Because that earns the trust and respect of their communities.)
People fighting about values will tend to hold out. (Because that earns the trust and respect of their communities.)
War leaders might want to get their warriors talking and thinking about values, because they don’t want their warriors to compromise and give in. They want their warriors to fight to the death if necessary.
But most other leaders in most actual issolated villages (be they headmen, women’s councils, or gatherings of elders), try to get people talking about self-interest. That’s what brings peace and cooperation, and peace and cooperation bring prosperity. In movies fictional tribes and villagers are always talking about the gods and honoring the rituals of their grandparents, but actual tribes and villagers, while often using beautifully poetic metaphors, usually talk about practical matters, fields, weather, hunting.
The Great Culture War
But obviously America today is a values-focused. Probably values-obsessed. Corporations have mission statements, organizations have lists of core values, politicians talk about values. It’s everywhere. One aspect of values-focused societies is that they don’t compromise well (as we showed above). Another is that they assume everyone else is focused on values too, so when something goes wrong, it must be because of bad values! (Self-interest-based societies assume everything is about self-interest but we’ll come back to that in future posts.)
How we got this way is something we’ll take up in the future, since this post is already long and late, but here’s a recent example from my life:
The reason this ‘Weekend Bonus Post’ is only coming out at the end of the weekend, is that I was visiting Washington, DC. We had a great time in the museums and my daughter liked the shopping, but Amtrak was awful and the DC Metro was worse. Below is the ticket machine with the ‘instructions’ for how to use the Metro:
It’s stupidly overly-complicated. Since we’re a values-obsessed society, we might assume these instructions are stupidly overly-complicated because the person making it was greedy or selfish. But I don’t think so. How would the design of this system actually benefit anyone? No, I’d bet whoever designed it was in fact thinking in terms of values, what a transportation system should be, what’s fair, how ticketing ought to work.
Remember that values don’t compromise well, so when people who are thinking in terms of values try to please the general public they can only pile values on top of other values. Everything has to be included! Nothing left out!
In that same spirit, a lot of the conflicts we have between the left and the right are drastically intensified because everyone is thinking in terms of core values.
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
The idea of a political left and right comes from the French Revolution. Delegates of the newly convened National Assembly tended to seat themselves in like-minded groups with those supporting the king, or the church, or the traditional privileges of the nobility gravitated to the right, and those opposing the king, the church, or the traditional privileges of the nobility gravitated to the left. Funny thing is, delegates’ opinions tended to merge with those around them. Those against the king tended to become less friendly to the church and nobles too. Those in favor of the king tended to become more tolerant of the church and nobles too.
And it’s still that way today. Those who are less interested or involved in politics will tend to be all over the place, on the left for some issues, on the right for others. But as people get more involved they will tend to acquire more predicable, ‘consistent’ positions, down-the-line Democrat or down-the-line Republican. Where they stand will be heavily influenced by where they sit. But what causes the initial choice of seating?
There’s research on the cognitive basis of political temperaments (such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind), and I love that stuff, but a simpler way to think about the spectrum, so that we can all relate to one another is that everyone cares about their own freedom, and from that most of us can care to a degree about other peoples’ freedom—provided we don’t find them scary or gross—but we differ drastically on how we feel about equality.
People on the left tend to notice the ways that equality and freedom support and reinforce one another. This leads to concern for the injustices in hierarchies on the center left, and outright rejection of hierarchies farther left.
People on the right tend to notice the ways that equality and freedom are in conflict. This leads to tolerance of hierarchies on the center right, and outright embrace of them on the far right.
Confirmation bias means that wherever we are on the spectrum, we’ll spend our entire lives cherry-picking evidence to prove our assumptions. Even when we expose ourselves to new experiences, we interpret them through our biases:
Someone on the right observing a foraging band will notice how a kid gives up a seat by the campfire to an elder. See! Hierarchy!
Someone on the left observing the same foraging band will notice how they share their food. See! Egalitarianism!
Each of us will accept the evidence of our opponents, but as exceptions, oddities—what really matters is the evidence we see with our own eyes, the confirmation of how we mentally organize the world.
Utopian schemes fail because they always imagine a world where these temperamental differences don’t exist. The dreams of the right assume you can get everyone to accept a hierarchy. The dreams of the left assume everyone will be glad when a hierarchy is overthrown.
Extremes & The Hate That Dares Not Speak It’s Name
The political spectrum does impact cities, towns, and deep time, and the values versus self-interest distinction more so, but I’m including this post now because in the most recent installment of Welcome to Charlottesville, the Alt-Right first appeared, and I called them fascists. I’m fine with people calling them Hate Groups or Extremist Groups, but to me these don’t get to the heart of the matter. Anyone can hate, anyone can be dogmatic or combative regardless of where they are on the spectrum.3
The groups that came to Charlottesville in May do not believe that the state can thrive without an essential social hierarchy, which—depending on the group—is either Whites, Christians, or Western Civilization. Whites, Christians, or Western Civilization are the state, they are what the state is for, and everyone else is just a guest. And that friends, is fascism.
A lot of people who should know better assume fascism must include a cult of personality surrounding a charismatic leader. It’s true the big three successful fascist parties in Europe, the Italian Fascists (who gave us the name), the German Nazis, and the Spanish Falange were united around charismatic leaders, but then almost all successful political movements are united around charismatic leaders regardless of their ideology. Many fascist parties like the Hungarian Arrow Cross, Greek Golden Dawn, Romanian Iron Guard, and British Black Shirts never really had successful charismatic leaders unless you have a very different notion of charisma than I do.
More importantly for our story, as we tell the history of Charlottesville after Reconstruction in a few weeks, we’ll be delving into some analogs and forebearers of the Alt-Right, and it’s important to see them clearly. They called themselves White Supremacists and the system they created was called by Northern newspapers “Jim Crow” and later “Segregation.” This system was imposed through violence, propaganda, and corruption across Virginia and the rest of the former Confederate states over a period of two generations. These groups after the Civil War prefigured the European fascists who arose after WWI, and I’d argue they’re fascist or proto-fascist.
No country has ever had a far-right majority, but fascists have taken power in several countries and many fascists have influenced the world. Often that involves being well-organized and sometimes finding a charismatic leader, but a more important factor in my opinion, the core to fascist success, is the opportunities presented by a society shifting from public discourse on self-interest to public obsession with values. Because when we fight over values the most fanatical, the most committed, the most sure-of-themselves can look very appealing to those who have lost their way.
We’ll be back Tuesday with the continuation of Welcome to Charlottesville. Thanks for reading and please subscribe and share!
Giving in doesn’t look good if I give in too easily. If I give in before I’ve even stated what was in my interest, I’ll just look submissive—a pushover—and you might not want to partner with a pushover, unless you’re looking for someone to mistreat, and you, friend reader, would never do that.
The term Values used in this way was popularized and probably invented by German philosopher and polemicist Frederick Nietzsche. I suspect Nietzsche knew exactly what he was doing. He hated democracy and probably introduced terms he knew would undermine it.
“Political correctness,” “identity politics” and “wokeness” are often called “far left” but these are center-left concerns. Hierarchies must be inclusive be legitimate. Similarly, Ayn Rand fanatics are center-right.