18 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Midge's avatar

I was just finishing college when Obama ran for president. I don't know if it was my younger age, or a sheltered upbringing, but attempts to demean Obama with delicious summertime foods struck me as so incandescently dumb that I couldn't take them seriously as racism. It seemed obvious to me that anyone who tried this would make far more of a fool of himself than he could of Obama.

What I haven't seen mentioned yet (though it might be by the time I get a chance to post my comment) is that how much wrong you're willing to tolerate in a coalition can depend on your judgment on whether that wrong is increasing or decreasing in the coalition. It's easier to have patience with X amount of racism if you sincerely believe it's X and decreasing than if you believe it's X and increasing. If it's decreasing, there'll soon be less than X, and if it's increasing, there'll soon be more.

Back then, the conservatives and Republicans I witnessed seemed to be getting less racist over time. The GOP seemed to me to be recovering from the Southern Strategy, attracting wonks irrespective of race. I had only gotten to know Evangelicals in college, who were multi-ethnic and politically moderate on issues besides abortion. Some were far left, and while others found this a bit weird, lefty Evangelicals weren't shunned as unamerican or ungodly, at least not in front of me: it just seemed obvious that what you thought godly politics were would depend on prudential judgments about governance. I honestly thought it was no longer possible to appeal to white identity politics, either inside or outside of church, successfully.

"Haha, Obama is half-black, let's embarrass him with perfectly blameless foodstuffs!" seemed like an "extinction burst", a tantrum happening among the GOP's outdated, crustier elements *because* reward for a bad behavior was being withdrawn.

I was in a bubble. I know that now. That behavior wasn't an "extinction burst" but a harbinger. We can't not be in a bubble, though. We can make efforts to expand our bubble or move it around, but we're always limited by the experiences we have, and those experiences inevitably affect how we interpret events.

Expand full comment
Lewis Grotelueschen's avatar

Today's most Solomonic comment in my book.

Expand full comment
M. Trosino's avatar

That last is something everyone should consider when thinking about how they see and interpret events and behaviors, especially large-scale behaviors. The reconciliation of 'objective truth' and the now-fashionable 'personal truth' into something resembling a 'truth' most people can agree on much depends on this.

No fun. But necessary. Props for putting it out there.

Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

"Man is the measure of things... of things that are, as to how they are and of things that are not, as to how they are not."

Protagoras (not Pythagoras, totally different guy).

One of the distinctions that people fail to make is the role and scope of subjectivity WRT truth. People confuse subjective truth and objective truth.

When you say something like, it's really hot in here, that is a subjective truth--you are talking about the truth of your experience. To you, it is hot. Someone from the tropics may find it cool and they would also be correct.

The description and meaning is purely subjective in anything other than edge cases (every human is going to think a 210 F room temperature is hot--that is an extreme edge case).

This is what Protagoras refers to.

If you say that it's 76 F in the room, that is an objective truth. It does not depend upon your experience and is not defined by it.

Much of political discourse is concerned with and/or framed in terms of the abstract--of things that exist only within human comprehension and narrative.

Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors) explained this very well in a book called Hogfather.. to paraphrase:

If you ground up the universe to the finest possible powder and sieved it through the finest possible sieve you would not find one atom of mercy or justice or love or hate... these are human things, things of our imagination.

And also:

Only beings who were incredibly self centered could think that a place (the universe) where the overwhelmingly vast majority of it would instantly kill them could think it was created for them.

The combination of these two things--abstraction and extreme self-centeredness leads to a lot of problems with truth.

We can say objective things about a lot of human activity.. because we CAN observe and measure the effects. When we make value judgements on those effects is where we run into problems, because value is subjective.

Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

One additional thing:

I don't believe/think/feel that X is Y is a subjective truth ONLY in that it truthfully describes (if you are being truthful) what YOU believe/think/feel....

In many cases (not all) there ARE criteria to determine whether X is Y. It is something that CAN be established. It IS an objective truth.

And, if you want to be bayesian about it--some things definitely are more probable than others.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment removed
May 2, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

Yep.. and they all have the same value--which is basically none. :)

Expand full comment
Midge's avatar

Well, I mean, it's valuable for our alimentary canal to have both an in end and an out end, especially since we've got taste buds.

Expand full comment
Terry Hilldale's avatar

Well, no. an unfortunate by-product of the very weak critical-thinking curriculum in schools is the pervasive idea idea that all opinions are roughly equal. An opinion backed by no facts in context, evidence and logic,k is of no value. Well-formulated, well-defended opinions are of great value. The key is to have strong opinions, weakly held, not weak opinions, strongly held.

Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

True.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment deleted
May 2, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

Subjectivity is bound up in personal experience and viewpoint. The feelings, experiences, and judgments are important--because, in reality, that is all we REALLY have and this is what our decisions are based upon.

The danger is when we think these things are truths for anyone other than ourselves and are true in a context outside of personal experience.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment deleted
May 2, 2022Edited
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

There ARE objective truths--but that truth is outweighed by how people FEEL about them. We will overthrow that truth (if we can) in favor of something that makes us feel better. It doesn't make the truth any less true... or the lies we choose in their stead any less false.

We get away with it because, in the majority of cases, our truth falls into the realm of the merely human, the narrative, the experiential, the illusionary and subjective good and bad.

Whereas believing that gravity holds no sway over you and you can fly will probably kill you.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment deleted
May 2, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Midge's avatar

I've never jumped off a cliff I hadn't seen a buncha frat boys jump off first and swim away unharmed.

Expand full comment
R Mercer's avatar

That's why I said probably ;)

Expand full comment
Midge's avatar

"Say it loud, say it proud, we're all Bayesians now."

Math aside, if you're trying to get productive work done, a bubble insulating from outside distractions has advantages. My young bubble included "bleeding heart libertarians":

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/

To those already confident that free markets are inevitably captured by the oppressors, the "bleeding-heart libertarian" motto, "Free Markets & Social Justice", sounds like the worst possible joke. In my bubble, though, it was producing results.

Soon after college, I met some lawyers working for the Institute for Justice's Chicago small-business clinic. Of course, IJ is backed by wealthy donors who consider deregulation in their own financial interest, and who want to make deregulation look better by publicizing the cases where deregulation increases equity. Thing is, there *are* tons of regulations favoring the more privileged at the expense of the less, and when you strike those down, even if only to make deregulation in general look better, you, well, strike them down.

Most IJ staff are probably right-wing ideologues. Some, though, are political progressives who see the particular work they do at IJ as anti-racist, and are more than happy to siphon of a bit of the Kochtopus's funding for what they sincerely believe are anti-racist ends.

A little bubble like that can be productive for specific policy changes that (hopefully!) improve people's lives, precisely because it shuts out the sentiments driving electoral politics more broadly. But in a representative government, that's also its weakness, if you're trying to figure out what electoral coalitions are really about.

Expand full comment