Reality check
Read a truly remarkable book, Civilization and its Enemies: the Next Stage of History by Lee Harris.
Harris is the most prominent, and most insightful, of a particular class of commentator that the interaction of Sept 11 2001 with the rise of the blogosphere has created - the (formerly) non-political writer-commentator. Orson Scott Card, Jeff Jarvis, James Lileks and Roger L Simon, are prominent examples.
Harris is a novelist, with a good novelist’s richness of perspective. He is penetrating without being verbose, wide-ranging without being glib. The most insightful and influential writing in contemporary society is often not academic (as, historically, has been the case - the great texts of C19th thought were rarely written by academics or for an academic audience).
Harris examines history through the basic social groups of family, gang and team, pointing out how rare it has been to move beyond the family, and even rarer beyond the gang, as the basic social unit. With great insight, he examines the strategy of ruthlessness, its effectiveness against those raised in a culture of civility, and the rise of the notion of conscience (rather than shame). (His analysis of Hitler’s use of the strategy of ruthlessness is particularly revealing). He notes how important it is to keep young men from being dangerously idle.
He is particularly thought-provoking on that perennial issue of our time -- the general moral and intellectual unreliability of intellectuals. The paradox of tolerance (dealing with the enemies of tolerance) is discussed with great insight, building on his discussion of the enemy, and what that means, and fantasy ideologies - ideologies which are based on the personal transformative nature of the will to believe, not on seeking instrumental effects in the world. Ideologies particularly appealing in milieus where people do not have to deal with the realities of wealth-creation. (Such as, for example, a culture flooded with wealth entirely parasitic on the technological advances of a different civilisation.)
I was struck by his use of some revealing facts - for example, that majorities of people around the globe preferred the US to not have a rival. Very rational of them.
I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, but I it is a book everyone concerned with the issues of our time should read.
Moved on to The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present by Shannon French, who teaches ethics at Annapolis Naval Academy. She asks why warriors needs a code (short answer - to distinguish warriors from murderers), examines various historical warrior codes (Heroic Age Greece, Rome, Vikings, Plains Amerindians, Shaolin monks, Samurai), includes a chapter by Felicia Ackerman on Malory and concludes with a chapter asking whether terrorists are warriors (no, since their notion of violence is explicitly and purposely unbounded - they are political murderers). The importance of purpose and context for the development of warrior codes is brought out.
The book is workmanlike and enjoyable, but my appreciation of it suffered from it being read immediately after Harris, though there was some congruence in their concerns. The use of fiction and literature (The Illiad, Norse sagas, Morte D’Arthur) is perfectly reasonable, given the concern with conceptions of the warrior. Much of the discussion is penetrating, clearly showing the benefit of years of wrestling with, and teaching, the material - for example, that vengeance is a way of stating the worth and importance of the wronged. Or that, as I know from personal experience, outrage is a moment of great moral danger. I particularly enjoyed her references to responses of her Naval and Marine students to the issues.
Some of it read a little sadly in the light of recent revelations (but, it wasn’t her Naval and Marine students doing such things). But I appreciated and enjoyed the book.
Then read In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, a prolonged examination of some of the more ripe pathologies of contemporary academe. The concern of the authors is with the ignoring, distorting, and denial of clear evidence by scions of American historical academe about the history of the Communist Party of the USA, the Soviet regime and connections between the two.
What they reveal are strong patterns of academics being driven, not by concern for the evidence, but by ideology in defiance of the evidence. Indeed, the attempt to establish an orthodoxy by various means; including using the word ‘scholarship’ to mean ‘politically acceptable’, labelling to delegitimise and marginalise dissent, use of positions as gatekeepers to exclude dissenting views from mainstream journals (pp98ff).
Sometimes, what they expose has a certain wry amusement to it. For example, the way the first wave of revisionists stressed the insignificance of the CPUSA to discredit liberal anti-communism and the next wave then stressed the positive role of the CPUSA to discredit conservative anti-communism, despite the inconsistency of the two ‘party lines’ (pp27ff).
Then there is the way that CIA or other ‘conservative’ funding discredits those it touches, but Soviet funding does not (pp66ff). Or that writing about winning the Cold War is abused as ‘triumphalist’ - as the authors point out, no-one talks about writing about winning World War Two as ‘triumphalist’ (pp62ff). The focus on McCarthyism, to the extent that a federally-funded guide for American history teachers mentioned McCarthy 20 times but Edison and the Wright brothers not at all (p.36) (if McCarthy hadn’t existed, it clearly would have been necessary to invent him). The epitome, though, is the way the opening of the Soviet archives - a vast treasure trove of evidence that one would think historians would be delighted to have access to - has so often been treated with fear and loathing (pp59ff).
That the effect of the archives has been to confirm the, much derided, ‘traditionalist’ view (the Soviet regime was a murderous tyranny, Stalin did give orders for mass executions, the regime did massively subsidise the CPUSA, the CPUSA was subservient to Moscow, it was a conduit for espionage, the Rosenbergs and Hiss, and many others, were guilty) both explains the hostility and demonstrates how profoundly hostile to genuine scholarship so many prominent academics in this field are. (Even I forget at times quite how bad such pathologies can get.)
Much of it, however, is far from amusing. Such as the perversion of entries of the American National Biography and The Encyclopedia of the American Left to distort standard references for ideological purposes in ways reminiscent of Soviet academe (pp104ff), what amounts to the Left-equivalent of Holocaust denial over the victims of Leninism (pp11ff), the silence over Stalin’s killing of somewhere between 500 and 1000 American communists and radicals (pp115ff) - Stalin was a far greater threat to American communists than all the anti-communists of the US combined. Then again, Stalinism was simply the extension of Lenin’s modes of political operation to fellow-Leninists.
The authors expose a persistent pattern of distortion, denial of evidence, fabrication, foot-shifting and generally unscholarly conduct by academics - full professors from major universities, not academic bit-players. The purpose is clearly to keep hold a sense of being part of a moral and intellecual elite (if those dreadful anti-communists were right, it blows their sense of status) but also keep hold of a myth of a glorious future that they find a much better buttress to their sense of self than defending a messy reality (even though a much more vile Soviet reality gets any number of free passes).
These are examples of a profoundly corrupt moral and intellectual perspective at the heart of contemporary academe. Equivalent behaviour about Nazi Germany would elicit a storm of denunciation which would drive the perpetrators from academic life. Modern academe tolerates the betrayal of scholarship in the service of apologism for mass murder and tyranny - provided, it is ‘well-intentioned’ mass murder and tyranny.
The problem, in essence, is a simple one. What is the key quality control device in academe? Comment by fellow academics. But what happens if academics are offered markers to establish their status as members of an intellectual and moral elite coupled with penalties (such as abuse, denial of publishing access and jobs) if they do not accord with such markers? The potential for corruption - either though active or passive connivance - is clearly considerable. Indeed, one will get the academic equivalent of Gresham’s law (bad currency driving out good), which works when people are impelled to accept face value.
Which brings us to the mechanisms of conformity.
Aha! (Conformity and Dissent)
A fanatic is a person who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. (Winston Churchill, attr.)
… they cannot change it, because they have no other subject. That is the nature of their crippled epistemology, without which they would not be fanatics. Russell Hardin, elaborating.
Been having a prolonged Aha! experience. Firstly, from a splendid book (Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass Sunstein) and secondly from a concept used in the book but taken from an article (The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism).
Inklings of what Sunstein covers I had already worked out for myself in general terms, but he provides a much more precise vocabulary and backing from a sleigh of empirical studies I had no idea existed.
Hardin’s concept of crippled epistemology is used by Sunstein to good effect. What Hardin is concerned to provide is an explanation of fanaticism, Sunstein with the mechanisms (and dangers) of conformity.
Hardin sees fanaticism as generally a group phenomenon. He starts with a theory of the acquisition of knowledge. One’s belief in the truth of X can depend on the rewards of counting X as true. Acquiring some knowledge can have considerable costs. Much of our knowledge is ‘happenstance’ or ‘byproduct’ knowledge that comes to us essentially free. Some knowledge is a ‘consumption good’ - its acquisition is pleasurable. We tend to rely greatly on others for knowledge.
Suppose you are always a big loser from normal politics. Loyalty (which is self-denying), voice (which has already failed) or exit are your options. If you choose exit, you may find a like-minded group. Over time, those with weaker commitment will tend to leave such a group, intensifying identification with particular beliefs and practices within the group. If the group becomes more isolated, both paranoid cognition (supposing the worst of those you are not in communication with) and sinister attribution (exaggerating the degree to which they are the target of attention) are likely to grow. Both these aid group loyalty while damaging the knowledge-acquisition of members. A crippled epistemology can then greatly aid group cohesion.
Prosperity and democracy undermine extremism - by increasing the stake people have in the current situation, de-legitimising coercive politics and increasing the range of information available (particularly about alternative perspectives). Illiberal politics are required to sustain the crippled epistemology of extremism. Suppressing knowledge is the route to power, strangely even the power of an idea, albeit a crippled and crippling one.
Sunstein summarises Hardin’s characterisation of fanatics as being people relying on a small subset of information mainly derived from fellow extremists.
Hardin’s account would be improved with the addition of some economics of communication and the power of commitment to a particular identity.
If you are committed to a particular view of yourself, there are large costs involved in acquiring knowledge that undermines that view. Refusal to pay those costs is understandable, but damages your knowledge acquisition. A group of like-minded people will tend to reinforce each other in such judgements. Sticking with the like-minded is inherently congenial, it being much less costly to communicate with each other on such matters than with outsiders (communication meaning two-way exchange; monologues and diatribes have no such costs, except in so far as they cut one off from information).
So, the group provides mutual authority and recognition while aiding and abetting the shared epistemological crippling.
Clearly, this is a model which applies rather more broadly than simple fanaticism
Sunstein is interested in the remarkable human tendency to conform. Unchecked by dissent, conformity can have major negative consequences. Some empirical results he cites include:
· highly contentious corporate boards tend to work better than consensual ones,
· investor clubs which are not socially-bonded work better,
(n both these cases, conformity lowers earnings)
· the "Bay of Pigs" disaster, a classic case of bright people being consensual in stupidity,
· Judges vote differently depending on who else in on a judicial panel with them,
· Conforming juries head towards extreme results.
Conformity - going along with what others apparently know - provides a good rule-of-thumb in the absence of personal knowledge or expertise but can deny public important information - so conformity carries group risks. In personal terms, it’s the other way around - conformity is a form of free-riding, dissent carries personal risks. Hence the problem - society benefits from behaviour which carries significant personal risks. Dissent is not always good (Hitler was a dissenter), but societies and institutions work better if dissent can operate.
Studies shows that overt self-confidence and firmness is highly persuasive and that unanimity is very powerfully persuasive. (One dissenting voice can have a very strong effect simply by breaking unanimity.) Also, out-group membership decreases information flows. Dissent counts a lot less, or information generally, if it comes from someone identified as an out-group member. (So, a differing propensity to identify members of one group - e.g. the left - than another - e.g. the right or ‘conservatives’ - does actually matter.)
(All this being the case, it is particularly damaging for professions or milieus allegedly involved in the pursuit or dissemination of knowledge to de-legitimise alternate points of view, regularly use group denigration or punish divergent views as showing some moral aberration or lack of personal worth.)
In explaining the behaviour patterns revealed by research and observed more generally, Sunstein uses two causal tendencies. First, we rely on others for information. Second, we want to have a good reputation.
Apart from conformity, Sunstein is particularly interested in group cascades - increasing waves of common belief or behaviour - and group polarisation - intensification of belief or attitudes via mutual reinforcement. He is ecumenical in his examples - one of the things I like about the book is the way he moves back and forth from ‘left’ to ‘right’ for his examples.
The various behavioural studies he cites produce some notable results. Such as the tendency towards collective conservatism - groups will remain committed to certain judgements or decisions even when members turn over. Or that many people will assent to propositions opposite to that which they apparently believe if confronted with a series of opinions that support the reversed view.
Persons of high social status or high confidence in their own views are less likely to conform. People who are frightened or confronted with a difficult judgement are more likely to conform. If there are financial rewards for getting it right, conformity decreases for easy judgements, increases for difficult ones (which is important for market behaviour). Conforming also tends to increase confidence in the conforming judgement. The number of public supporters for dominant opinion tends to increase conformity, though a single ‘voice of sanity’ has considerable power to reduce errors. Publicly-voiced and privately-held opinion can move in different directions (often to the majority in the former, to the minority in the latter, if the minority opinions are confidently put and not isolated voices). In ambiguous situations, expert opinion is much more likely to be followed if not openly questioned. It is also surprisingly easy to induce false confessions.
Sunstein discusses patterns of legal compliance and non-compliance, including a few striking examples - such as the 1988 US Toxic Release Act which led to a 45% decline in toxic releases from 1988 to 1995 by the simple expedient of requiring companies to publish their type & level of toxic releases.
Informed people can stop cascades. Cascades are less likely if people are rewarded for correct group decision. When conformity is rewarded, cascades and mistakes are more likely. Cascades can be informational (following what other people believe to be true) or reputational (following what other people believe to be right). Reputational rewards for conformity greatly increase the likelihood of cascades and errors.
(Aside: which means, of course, a milieu which deems some opinions as a sign of virtue, and others as a sign of wickedness, is highly likely to be conformist, produce cascades and be in error.)
If conformity is rewarded, early dissenters are particularly likely to be penalised, having a chilling effect on dissent in the future. Conformity and cascades reduce the procedural cost of decision-making but increase the risk of error.
Dissenters can be disclosers (people releasing into the public arena privately held information) or contrarians (a mixed blessing). It is not dissent per se but useful dissent which is of value. Senseless, hysterical, paranoid, hateful or dehumanising comment is not legitimised by being dissent. Freedom of speech is the best corrective to erroneous conformity and cascades.
Unlike many cascades, group polarisation operates through deliberation. But one can have polarisation entrepreneurs who mobilise people through polarisation (history is full of them; Milosevic in Serbia and Osama are classic contemporary examples).
Where groups are like-minded, they tend to polarise towards a more extreme manifestation of their like-mindedness. Like-minded people have a natural tendency to dwell on shared or common information. That sets up resonances, which increase confidence in common positions, encourage a shift towards more intensity (of belief and of content). The polarisation effect is magnified if both informational and reputational cascades are set up. It is further intensified if rhetorical advantage lies towards increased extremism (as it tends to, due to its greater ‘purity’).
Antecedent extremism and a sense of common group membership both increase the tendency to group polarisation. The easier group exit is, the more likely polarisation is as moderates will tend to leave. Opposed sub-groups tend to discourage polarisation.
Group information diversity strongly tends to aid better decisions, value diversity is more mixed as it can get in the way of group decision-making. (Which only matters if the group has a high need for common decision-making.)
Which is all very interesting, but why was I so impressed? Because it gives a basis for understanding issues I have been worrying at for some years.
I don’t like the term political correctness much. It runs together two different phenomena - evangelical niceness and opinion-bigotry - and, as a term, is a little too obviously a weapon in the culture wars. I coined the term moral vanity to try and pin down a certain type of behaviour and Club Virtue to identify an opinion hegemony. But neither comes with a useful heuristic, even though Club Virtue came from thinking of the economics of clubs, given the clear attempts to exclude moral legitimacy from dissenting opinion while mutually endorsing and displaying shared status as being of the virtuous. (A club is a public good - one which provides shared benefits - from which people can be excluded: tyggerjai’s father is the world’s leading theorist of the economics of clubs.)
Add in Hardin’s notion of a crippled epistemology - which, for example, clearly bedevils many academics, such as those discussed by Haynes and Klehr in In Denial and I have frequently observed among academic commenting on ‘economic rationalism’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ - and the dynamics of conformity as outlined by Susstein, and it all becomes much clearer.
ADDENDA Due to repeated SPAM attacks, comments on this entry are now closed.
Harris is the most prominent, and most insightful, of a particular class of commentator that the interaction of Sept 11 2001 with the rise of the blogosphere has created - the (formerly) non-political writer-commentator. Orson Scott Card, Jeff Jarvis, James Lileks and Roger L Simon, are prominent examples.
Harris is a novelist, with a good novelist’s richness of perspective. He is penetrating without being verbose, wide-ranging without being glib. The most insightful and influential writing in contemporary society is often not academic (as, historically, has been the case - the great texts of C19th thought were rarely written by academics or for an academic audience).
Harris examines history through the basic social groups of family, gang and team, pointing out how rare it has been to move beyond the family, and even rarer beyond the gang, as the basic social unit. With great insight, he examines the strategy of ruthlessness, its effectiveness against those raised in a culture of civility, and the rise of the notion of conscience (rather than shame). (His analysis of Hitler’s use of the strategy of ruthlessness is particularly revealing). He notes how important it is to keep young men from being dangerously idle.
He is particularly thought-provoking on that perennial issue of our time -- the general moral and intellectual unreliability of intellectuals. The paradox of tolerance (dealing with the enemies of tolerance) is discussed with great insight, building on his discussion of the enemy, and what that means, and fantasy ideologies - ideologies which are based on the personal transformative nature of the will to believe, not on seeking instrumental effects in the world. Ideologies particularly appealing in milieus where people do not have to deal with the realities of wealth-creation. (Such as, for example, a culture flooded with wealth entirely parasitic on the technological advances of a different civilisation.)
I was struck by his use of some revealing facts - for example, that majorities of people around the globe preferred the US to not have a rival. Very rational of them.
I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, but I it is a book everyone concerned with the issues of our time should read.
Moved on to The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present by Shannon French, who teaches ethics at Annapolis Naval Academy. She asks why warriors needs a code (short answer - to distinguish warriors from murderers), examines various historical warrior codes (Heroic Age Greece, Rome, Vikings, Plains Amerindians, Shaolin monks, Samurai), includes a chapter by Felicia Ackerman on Malory and concludes with a chapter asking whether terrorists are warriors (no, since their notion of violence is explicitly and purposely unbounded - they are political murderers). The importance of purpose and context for the development of warrior codes is brought out.
The book is workmanlike and enjoyable, but my appreciation of it suffered from it being read immediately after Harris, though there was some congruence in their concerns. The use of fiction and literature (The Illiad, Norse sagas, Morte D’Arthur) is perfectly reasonable, given the concern with conceptions of the warrior. Much of the discussion is penetrating, clearly showing the benefit of years of wrestling with, and teaching, the material - for example, that vengeance is a way of stating the worth and importance of the wronged. Or that, as I know from personal experience, outrage is a moment of great moral danger. I particularly enjoyed her references to responses of her Naval and Marine students to the issues.
Some of it read a little sadly in the light of recent revelations (but, it wasn’t her Naval and Marine students doing such things). But I appreciated and enjoyed the book.
Then read In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, a prolonged examination of some of the more ripe pathologies of contemporary academe. The concern of the authors is with the ignoring, distorting, and denial of clear evidence by scions of American historical academe about the history of the Communist Party of the USA, the Soviet regime and connections between the two.
What they reveal are strong patterns of academics being driven, not by concern for the evidence, but by ideology in defiance of the evidence. Indeed, the attempt to establish an orthodoxy by various means; including using the word ‘scholarship’ to mean ‘politically acceptable’, labelling to delegitimise and marginalise dissent, use of positions as gatekeepers to exclude dissenting views from mainstream journals (pp98ff).
Sometimes, what they expose has a certain wry amusement to it. For example, the way the first wave of revisionists stressed the insignificance of the CPUSA to discredit liberal anti-communism and the next wave then stressed the positive role of the CPUSA to discredit conservative anti-communism, despite the inconsistency of the two ‘party lines’ (pp27ff).
Then there is the way that CIA or other ‘conservative’ funding discredits those it touches, but Soviet funding does not (pp66ff). Or that writing about winning the Cold War is abused as ‘triumphalist’ - as the authors point out, no-one talks about writing about winning World War Two as ‘triumphalist’ (pp62ff). The focus on McCarthyism, to the extent that a federally-funded guide for American history teachers mentioned McCarthy 20 times but Edison and the Wright brothers not at all (p.36) (if McCarthy hadn’t existed, it clearly would have been necessary to invent him). The epitome, though, is the way the opening of the Soviet archives - a vast treasure trove of evidence that one would think historians would be delighted to have access to - has so often been treated with fear and loathing (pp59ff).
That the effect of the archives has been to confirm the, much derided, ‘traditionalist’ view (the Soviet regime was a murderous tyranny, Stalin did give orders for mass executions, the regime did massively subsidise the CPUSA, the CPUSA was subservient to Moscow, it was a conduit for espionage, the Rosenbergs and Hiss, and many others, were guilty) both explains the hostility and demonstrates how profoundly hostile to genuine scholarship so many prominent academics in this field are. (Even I forget at times quite how bad such pathologies can get.)
Much of it, however, is far from amusing. Such as the perversion of entries of the American National Biography and The Encyclopedia of the American Left to distort standard references for ideological purposes in ways reminiscent of Soviet academe (pp104ff), what amounts to the Left-equivalent of Holocaust denial over the victims of Leninism (pp11ff), the silence over Stalin’s killing of somewhere between 500 and 1000 American communists and radicals (pp115ff) - Stalin was a far greater threat to American communists than all the anti-communists of the US combined. Then again, Stalinism was simply the extension of Lenin’s modes of political operation to fellow-Leninists.
The authors expose a persistent pattern of distortion, denial of evidence, fabrication, foot-shifting and generally unscholarly conduct by academics - full professors from major universities, not academic bit-players. The purpose is clearly to keep hold a sense of being part of a moral and intellecual elite (if those dreadful anti-communists were right, it blows their sense of status) but also keep hold of a myth of a glorious future that they find a much better buttress to their sense of self than defending a messy reality (even though a much more vile Soviet reality gets any number of free passes).
These are examples of a profoundly corrupt moral and intellectual perspective at the heart of contemporary academe. Equivalent behaviour about Nazi Germany would elicit a storm of denunciation which would drive the perpetrators from academic life. Modern academe tolerates the betrayal of scholarship in the service of apologism for mass murder and tyranny - provided, it is ‘well-intentioned’ mass murder and tyranny.
The problem, in essence, is a simple one. What is the key quality control device in academe? Comment by fellow academics. But what happens if academics are offered markers to establish their status as members of an intellectual and moral elite coupled with penalties (such as abuse, denial of publishing access and jobs) if they do not accord with such markers? The potential for corruption - either though active or passive connivance - is clearly considerable. Indeed, one will get the academic equivalent of Gresham’s law (bad currency driving out good), which works when people are impelled to accept face value.
Which brings us to the mechanisms of conformity.
Aha! (Conformity and Dissent)
A fanatic is a person who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. (Winston Churchill, attr.)
… they cannot change it, because they have no other subject. That is the nature of their crippled epistemology, without which they would not be fanatics. Russell Hardin, elaborating.
Been having a prolonged Aha! experience. Firstly, from a splendid book (Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass Sunstein) and secondly from a concept used in the book but taken from an article (The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism).
Inklings of what Sunstein covers I had already worked out for myself in general terms, but he provides a much more precise vocabulary and backing from a sleigh of empirical studies I had no idea existed.
Hardin’s concept of crippled epistemology is used by Sunstein to good effect. What Hardin is concerned to provide is an explanation of fanaticism, Sunstein with the mechanisms (and dangers) of conformity.
Hardin sees fanaticism as generally a group phenomenon. He starts with a theory of the acquisition of knowledge. One’s belief in the truth of X can depend on the rewards of counting X as true. Acquiring some knowledge can have considerable costs. Much of our knowledge is ‘happenstance’ or ‘byproduct’ knowledge that comes to us essentially free. Some knowledge is a ‘consumption good’ - its acquisition is pleasurable. We tend to rely greatly on others for knowledge.
Suppose you are always a big loser from normal politics. Loyalty (which is self-denying), voice (which has already failed) or exit are your options. If you choose exit, you may find a like-minded group. Over time, those with weaker commitment will tend to leave such a group, intensifying identification with particular beliefs and practices within the group. If the group becomes more isolated, both paranoid cognition (supposing the worst of those you are not in communication with) and sinister attribution (exaggerating the degree to which they are the target of attention) are likely to grow. Both these aid group loyalty while damaging the knowledge-acquisition of members. A crippled epistemology can then greatly aid group cohesion.
Prosperity and democracy undermine extremism - by increasing the stake people have in the current situation, de-legitimising coercive politics and increasing the range of information available (particularly about alternative perspectives). Illiberal politics are required to sustain the crippled epistemology of extremism. Suppressing knowledge is the route to power, strangely even the power of an idea, albeit a crippled and crippling one.
Sunstein summarises Hardin’s characterisation of fanatics as being people relying on a small subset of information mainly derived from fellow extremists.
Hardin’s account would be improved with the addition of some economics of communication and the power of commitment to a particular identity.
If you are committed to a particular view of yourself, there are large costs involved in acquiring knowledge that undermines that view. Refusal to pay those costs is understandable, but damages your knowledge acquisition. A group of like-minded people will tend to reinforce each other in such judgements. Sticking with the like-minded is inherently congenial, it being much less costly to communicate with each other on such matters than with outsiders (communication meaning two-way exchange; monologues and diatribes have no such costs, except in so far as they cut one off from information).
So, the group provides mutual authority and recognition while aiding and abetting the shared epistemological crippling.
Clearly, this is a model which applies rather more broadly than simple fanaticism
Sunstein is interested in the remarkable human tendency to conform. Unchecked by dissent, conformity can have major negative consequences. Some empirical results he cites include:
· highly contentious corporate boards tend to work better than consensual ones,
· investor clubs which are not socially-bonded work better,
(n both these cases, conformity lowers earnings)
· the "Bay of Pigs" disaster, a classic case of bright people being consensual in stupidity,
· Judges vote differently depending on who else in on a judicial panel with them,
· Conforming juries head towards extreme results.
Conformity - going along with what others apparently know - provides a good rule-of-thumb in the absence of personal knowledge or expertise but can deny public important information - so conformity carries group risks. In personal terms, it’s the other way around - conformity is a form of free-riding, dissent carries personal risks. Hence the problem - society benefits from behaviour which carries significant personal risks. Dissent is not always good (Hitler was a dissenter), but societies and institutions work better if dissent can operate.
Studies shows that overt self-confidence and firmness is highly persuasive and that unanimity is very powerfully persuasive. (One dissenting voice can have a very strong effect simply by breaking unanimity.) Also, out-group membership decreases information flows. Dissent counts a lot less, or information generally, if it comes from someone identified as an out-group member. (So, a differing propensity to identify members of one group - e.g. the left - than another - e.g. the right or ‘conservatives’ - does actually matter.)
(All this being the case, it is particularly damaging for professions or milieus allegedly involved in the pursuit or dissemination of knowledge to de-legitimise alternate points of view, regularly use group denigration or punish divergent views as showing some moral aberration or lack of personal worth.)
In explaining the behaviour patterns revealed by research and observed more generally, Sunstein uses two causal tendencies. First, we rely on others for information. Second, we want to have a good reputation.
Apart from conformity, Sunstein is particularly interested in group cascades - increasing waves of common belief or behaviour - and group polarisation - intensification of belief or attitudes via mutual reinforcement. He is ecumenical in his examples - one of the things I like about the book is the way he moves back and forth from ‘left’ to ‘right’ for his examples.
The various behavioural studies he cites produce some notable results. Such as the tendency towards collective conservatism - groups will remain committed to certain judgements or decisions even when members turn over. Or that many people will assent to propositions opposite to that which they apparently believe if confronted with a series of opinions that support the reversed view.
Persons of high social status or high confidence in their own views are less likely to conform. People who are frightened or confronted with a difficult judgement are more likely to conform. If there are financial rewards for getting it right, conformity decreases for easy judgements, increases for difficult ones (which is important for market behaviour). Conforming also tends to increase confidence in the conforming judgement. The number of public supporters for dominant opinion tends to increase conformity, though a single ‘voice of sanity’ has considerable power to reduce errors. Publicly-voiced and privately-held opinion can move in different directions (often to the majority in the former, to the minority in the latter, if the minority opinions are confidently put and not isolated voices). In ambiguous situations, expert opinion is much more likely to be followed if not openly questioned. It is also surprisingly easy to induce false confessions.
Sunstein discusses patterns of legal compliance and non-compliance, including a few striking examples - such as the 1988 US Toxic Release Act which led to a 45% decline in toxic releases from 1988 to 1995 by the simple expedient of requiring companies to publish their type & level of toxic releases.
Informed people can stop cascades. Cascades are less likely if people are rewarded for correct group decision. When conformity is rewarded, cascades and mistakes are more likely. Cascades can be informational (following what other people believe to be true) or reputational (following what other people believe to be right). Reputational rewards for conformity greatly increase the likelihood of cascades and errors.
(Aside: which means, of course, a milieu which deems some opinions as a sign of virtue, and others as a sign of wickedness, is highly likely to be conformist, produce cascades and be in error.)
If conformity is rewarded, early dissenters are particularly likely to be penalised, having a chilling effect on dissent in the future. Conformity and cascades reduce the procedural cost of decision-making but increase the risk of error.
Dissenters can be disclosers (people releasing into the public arena privately held information) or contrarians (a mixed blessing). It is not dissent per se but useful dissent which is of value. Senseless, hysterical, paranoid, hateful or dehumanising comment is not legitimised by being dissent. Freedom of speech is the best corrective to erroneous conformity and cascades.
Unlike many cascades, group polarisation operates through deliberation. But one can have polarisation entrepreneurs who mobilise people through polarisation (history is full of them; Milosevic in Serbia and Osama are classic contemporary examples).
Where groups are like-minded, they tend to polarise towards a more extreme manifestation of their like-mindedness. Like-minded people have a natural tendency to dwell on shared or common information. That sets up resonances, which increase confidence in common positions, encourage a shift towards more intensity (of belief and of content). The polarisation effect is magnified if both informational and reputational cascades are set up. It is further intensified if rhetorical advantage lies towards increased extremism (as it tends to, due to its greater ‘purity’).
Antecedent extremism and a sense of common group membership both increase the tendency to group polarisation. The easier group exit is, the more likely polarisation is as moderates will tend to leave. Opposed sub-groups tend to discourage polarisation.
Group information diversity strongly tends to aid better decisions, value diversity is more mixed as it can get in the way of group decision-making. (Which only matters if the group has a high need for common decision-making.)
Which is all very interesting, but why was I so impressed? Because it gives a basis for understanding issues I have been worrying at for some years.
I don’t like the term political correctness much. It runs together two different phenomena - evangelical niceness and opinion-bigotry - and, as a term, is a little too obviously a weapon in the culture wars. I coined the term moral vanity to try and pin down a certain type of behaviour and Club Virtue to identify an opinion hegemony. But neither comes with a useful heuristic, even though Club Virtue came from thinking of the economics of clubs, given the clear attempts to exclude moral legitimacy from dissenting opinion while mutually endorsing and displaying shared status as being of the virtuous. (A club is a public good - one which provides shared benefits - from which people can be excluded: tyggerjai’s father is the world’s leading theorist of the economics of clubs.)
Add in Hardin’s notion of a crippled epistemology - which, for example, clearly bedevils many academics, such as those discussed by Haynes and Klehr in In Denial and I have frequently observed among academic commenting on ‘economic rationalism’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ - and the dynamics of conformity as outlined by Susstein, and it all becomes much clearer.
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