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[languageandnothingness]

The Abortion Debate in the US

With the Dobbs decision, the legal status of abortion varies wildly from state to state, and the issue remains highly polarizing. Of course, US politics is highly polarized in general, but what is special about the abortion debate is that neither side engages the other at all. Much of the Democratic Party and organizations that support it talk about abortion as if there were no fetus involved at all, and likewise Republicans essentially never mention that a pregnant person is involved in abortion (or pregnancy). 

I think most people in the US assume the situation has more to do with religion than it really does. The anti-abortion argument does not need to rest on religion at all -- from the premises that it is wrong to kill an innocent human and that a fetus is an innocent human being, one concludes that it is wrong to kill a fetus -- and the reason why this issue is discussed so often by certain Christian sects is not that it is theologically central, but because, among the various issues that Christianity appears to take a stance on, it is among the most directly emotionally appealing and simply justifiable. Large portions of Christian scripture are more or less ignored by lay Christians, and it would be easy enough to ignore passages apparently relevant to abortion, or to re-read them in a different light. The Republican Party and semi-allied religious organizations would have great difficulty organizing support for many views that are more directly supported by Christian scripture, and more connected to Christianity’s central tenets. It is precisely the anti-abortion view’s secular justification that makes people receptive to the superficially religious justification.

Strangely, pro-abortion groups in the USA seem to be unwilling to directly attack either of the above premises, and instead speak, astonishingly, as if there were no fetus involved in abortion at all. Obviously, there are arguments against both premises, but though they appear in philosophical literature, they are apparently considered unfit for public discourse. It is quite unsurprising that someone who believes abortion is morally equivalent to murder, for the simple reasons stated above, would be unmoved by the repeated assertion that pregnant people are morally justified in having abortions because the abortions take place within their bodies. Actually, the pro-Roe arguments usually aim at showing that it is wrong to outlaw abortion, not that having an abortion is morally justified, and their premises are far subtler than the anti-abortion premises I gave above.

As a matter of fact, I think the legality of abortion will be essentially re-established across the USA, as the political consequences of the complete abortion bans now being enacted will be unbearable for the Republican Party, and attempts by states to prevent their citizens to travel elsewhere to receive abortions anger many groups that wield significant political power (at that point, one is actually impacting middle-class and wealthy people, and they rarely welcome such intrusion into their personal lives). Images of teenagers dying from attempted illegal abortions will easily overshadow the ultrasound images of fetuses that anti-abortion groups have been wielding, and the increased number of poor mothers giving birth to children they would rather not have had will strain already weak social programs.

Though anti-abortion groups will eventually lose the battle over laws in the USA, this can hardly be accounted to the weakness of their arguments. Apparently their opponents think their premises are sound, and the conclusion obviously follows. Perhaps if opponents of laws criminalizing abortion had attacked them outright, they would have subdued the political power of the anti-abortion movement a long time ago. I, for one, think that the argument involves an equivocation about the term ‘human’, and, once the meaning is clarified, it is either unclear why a fetus is a human or unclear why it is always wrong to kill an innocent human -- but no politician will go on record saying they don’t think it’s always wrong to kill an innocent human being, regardless of the specific definition being used.

[languageandnothingness]

Friendship

I wish my friends knew that, whenever they really need to talk to someone, anyone, I will always be happy to listen; and I wish I recognized that my friends would do the same for me.

[languageandnothingness]

What is the USA doing in Ukraine?

As tensions between the USA and Russia remain alarmingly high and the possibility of a large-scale war in Ukraine looms, it’s worth wondering -- what is the USA doing and why is it doing it? Russia’s motives are fairly clear -- NATO military bases and missiles on its western border are an obvious threat to Russia. When the Soviet Union attempted a similar maneuver in Cuba in the 1960s, the USA viewed it as such an egregious act of aggression that a nuclear war almost broke out. Russia doesn’t like the NATO presence in the Baltic states and would absolutely hate for Ukraine to join NATO. But what is the USA doing? 

Russia’s primary demand is that the USA commit to Ukraine not joining NATO. Reasonable enough, for the reasons outlined above -- and, moreover, not something the USA really opposes. The USA has no intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO! The NATO expansion that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union is clearly over. The USA has itself announced a military “pivot to Asia”, and its primary geopolitical rival is not Russia. Ukraine is not deeply economically or culturally integrated with the USA, and at any rate a USA-Russia proxy war throughout Ukraine would be far more devastating to Ukraine and its population than the USA guaranteeing that Ukraine won’t join NATO. The concern might be about Ukraine’s mineral resources; however, barring Russian annexation (probably not going to happen, and certainly wasn’t going to happen until the USA threatened to include Ukraine in NATO), it is not going to lose access to them by preventing Ukraine from joining NATO.

Antony Blinken, the USA Secretary of State, has stated that the USA does not believe in “spheres of influence” and does not recognize Russia’s claims that Ukraine should not be integrated (economically and militarily) with the USA and the EU. As far as I can tell, what this mostly means is that the USA believes that everything should be in the USA’s sphere of influence -- the USA’s repeated assertion of military hegemony over all of the Americas, under the name of the “Monroe Doctrine”, hardly allows them to really claim that we have entered some kind of post-geographical geopolitics.

As far as geopolitics has become post-geographical, though, the USA should be very concerned about this confrontation. Russia’s capacity to conduct cyberattacks against large USA corporations and even high levels of the USA federal government should give USA officials serious pause before rushing into a proxy war. Why, then, is the USA refusing to guarantee it won’t do something it doesn’t want to do anyway, based on a geopolitical theory it clearly doesn’t believe in, when doing so jeopardizes its entire computerized infrastructure, could seriously harm the European economy, and lead Russia to become closer allies with China, the USA’s principal geopolitical opponent for the past 10 years? Of course, a major war in Ukraine between NATO-backed forces and Russia would dramatically increase the chance of nuclear war -- given the number of times nuclear wars have almost been accidentally started, including one time by a weather observation rocket that looked a lot to Russian sensors like a military missile, having a major war that would inevitably involve aerial forces and surface-to-air missiles next to Russia’s population centers seems like a really, really, really bad idea. It seems to me that the USA is just refusing to back down because it thinks backing down would make it look weak. That doesn’t seem like a very good reason to me, but perhaps the USA Department of State knows something I don’t.

[mapsontheweb]

Is food a human right? US says no.

Resolution here and the US’s response here.

[languageandnothingness]

Why Do Philosophy?

Very few people in the United States seem to view philosophy as valuable. Politicians are constantly talking about “STEM education”; philosophy is not a required part of the secondary school curriculum; and most adults seem to have only the vaguest notion of what philosophy is. Parents eager for their children to get high-paying jobs sign them up for never-ending lists of STEM classes, camps, and tutoring, and philosophy (together with most of the other humanities and arts) is degraded in the public mind for no other reason than it doesn’t seem to be useful for making money. 

The great thing about philosophy, however, is that it’s impossible not to do. Regardless of whether you ever set foot in a philosophy classroom or have ever read Plato, you are doing philosophy all the time. We are all constantly forced to ask ourselves -- do we have enough evidence to believe a certain claim? What should we do when our ethical judgments are confused, where there appear to be conflicts between individual rights and the public good? What -- if anything -- can justify fighting in a war? Do we have obligations to people based on historical events we were not personally involved in? Is freedom of religion a human right? Is food a human right, and is it as wrong to decline to provide food to hungry people as to force them to go hungry by taking their food away? Do we have special moral duties to members of our family? What kind of obligations do we have to animals and our natural environment? To what extent is human behavior deterministic, and does that affect how morally culpable people are for their actions?

The need for formal philosophical training is clearly demonstrated by the fact that few people appreciate the difficulty of these questions. Almost everyone is happy to accept the values and metaphysical stances of the culture they were raised in. Most people born in Indonesia are as convinced of the correctness of the moral code expressed in the Qur’an as people born in Italy are of the correctness of the Bible; to many in China, the fact that anyone would unquestioningly accept either of these documents as the word of God is puzzling. 

To many in the US, voluntarily remaining unvaccinated against COVID-19 seems obviously unethical, though a more careful examination would reveal that it is probably ethically worse to continue receiving and promoting the distribution of vaccine boosters in the US, given the current global scarcity of vaccine doses and their glaringly unethical distribution. To others, rights of bodily autonomy would clearly be violated by vaccine mandates, though many of the same people appear to take a weaker pro-autonomy stance when it comes to abortion. It is amazing that so many people are so certain of their positions on these matters, even when confronted with opposing arguments, when anyone can see that they merely adopted them through cultural transmission.

By not teaching philosophy, societies do not prevent their citizens from taking stances on philosophical issues -- they merely prevent them from thinking about philosophical issues. Everyone believes, then, what everyone around them believes. This is as true in epistemology as in ethics -- though many recall, say, the “scientific method” presented in introductory textbooks, few realize how much more complicated the actual scientific process is and how much disagreement there is among working scientists about what constitutes sufficient evidence for a claim. Those who accuse their opponents of being “anti-science” rarely do so because they understand the epistemic justifications for scientific claims and believe that they are superior to the justifications their opponents present; they do it merely because they are part of cultural groups that have positive attitudes towards “scientists” and “science”. No wonder, then, that their opponents are unconvinced!

If philosophy continues to be viewed as a dead subject, the uninteresting memorization of the views of old, bearded men, public discourse will remain a mass of confused people following the cultural trends of the moment without any independent conception of ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, or any of the other subdisciplines of philosophy which constantly appear in human thought. This is convenient for political and religious leaders, and for those eager to make some money by hawking simplistic, barely-considered pseudo-philosophy to people who have never read real philosophy, but it is a tragic state for society.

[languageandnothingness]

The Future of US-European Relations?

How long will EU member states remain geopolitically allied with the US?

The US seems to assume that the EU and its member states will forever remain allies -- or, indeed, almost satellite states -- of the US. But why?

Historically, the US has not been friendly with many European nations. Of course, it fought against many of them in the world wars of the 20th century, and before that it was hardly allied with the European powers. The US was focused on building its own settler-colonial empire in North America and asserting its hegemony over the rest of the Americas; it rarely got involved in European affairs. (The few exceptions were usually a consequence of European actions in the Americas, which often lead to war.)

During the Cold War, the US was much stronger in military and economic terms than any European nation, and many European countries had no choice but to turn to the US if they wanted to avoid falling firmly into Moscow’s sphere of control. This was the reason why NATO was formed and the US nuclear umbrella over NATO members was declared. 

But the Cold War has been over for 30 years now, and the US influence over western Europe has been steadily declining. German-Russian relations have warmed significantly, with Germany increasing its energy dependence (via Nord Stream) on Russia despite severe US opposition. China is now a larger trading partner of the EU than the US is (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56093378). The US has increasingly focused on Anglosphere alliances such as the Five Eyes and, more recently, AUKUS, while spying on European leaders (https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/31/europe/denmark-us-nsa-merkel-spying-intl/index.html) and, most recently, disrupting a large French sale of submarines to Australia, which France had thought would help it maintain military influence in the Pacific (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1038533135/u-s-deal-to-build-nuclear-submarines-for-australia-causing-tensions-with-france).

As the world’s third-largest economy by most measures, the EU certainly could assert itself geopolitically completely outside the US sphere of influence. France is a recognized nuclear state with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Germany could easily develop nuclear weapons and other advanced military capabilities if it chose to. Russia and China would be eager to work with an EU no longer indirectly dominated by the US. Many European countries view the US and the UK rather unfavorably, and the inter-European wars that waged incessantly for centuries have largely faded from European public consciousness, making closer ties between European states a real possibility.

It’s too soon to say what the future of US-EU relations will look like. But no one should be surprised if NATO and other cross-atlantic alliances are abandoned in favor of separate Continental and Anglosphere geopolitical blocs with no allegiance to each other.

[languageandnothingness]

Logic (Part III)

See Part I and Part II of this series.

Earlier, I discussed what logic is and why it is important. But now I want to talk about the limitations of logic and why the way people talk about “logic” now is highly misleading.

Logic cannot generate knowledge. It only expresses the relationships between sentences. There is no way to use logic alone to deduce facts about history or chemistry. Logic is only partially reflected in the structure of natural (human) languages, and there is a good reason for this: people rarely commit fully to sentences. They have some degree of confidence in them, which may be high or low, but they do not fully commit to them. 

There are two classic examples illustrating this. The first is a lottery. If one million lottery tickets are printed and one is the winning ticket, I can point to each ticket and say, “Do you believe that this is not the winning ticket?” You would probably say yes every time. But if I asked whether you believed none of the tickets were winning tickets, you would clearly reply no. Of course, logically, the statement that each ticket is not the winning ticket implies that no ticket is the winning ticket. But even a small amount of doubt can add up over the course of reasoning, and in reality most people are not that confident in most of their beliefs.

The other example (a version of which was actually performed in a psychological experiment) is of three candidates, A, B, and C, running for political office. It is widely believed that A will win the race, B has some chance of winning, and C has almost no chance. Suppose A and C like musicals and C does not. Then most people will believe both of these statements:

(1) Someone who likes musicals will win the race.

(2) If someone who likes musicals wins the race and A does not win the race, C will win the race.

But they do not believe:

(3) If A does not win the race, C will win the race.

Anyone can see that (3) is a logical consequence of (1) and (2)! But because people are uncertain about (1) to begin with, their level of certainty in (3) is very low. Some logicians would argue that no one can believe (3) less than they believe (1) (since (2) is completely certain), relying on an interpretation of “if” that they like: namely, a logician would almost always consider a statement “if P then Q” to be true if P were false (regardless of whether Q is true). You can read more here.

So logic isn’t even very useful in simple, contrived cases. If you think about the uncertainties people encounter all the time, you will see why logic has little to do with how people form beliefs. Sometimes people speak about “logic” in a much broader sense of “reasonableness”. For instance, someone might say that it is illogical or irrational for people to be more willing to buy a product at the same price if they think it is currently at a discount. But it is not clear what this means, and it is good to be wary when people say such things; often, they are fundamentally just relying on cultural norms and behavioral expectations when they make such assertions. This has nothing to do with logic. The value of logic lies in its clarity and its absoluteness; this is why it is so useful when it is useful, and so often useless when employed by humans about uncertain things.

[languageandnothingness]

Logic (Part II)

Earlier, I wrote about why logic is so important. But what is it? The most important thing to remember about logic is that it is content-blind. It does not add any substance and does not change based on the substance of the statements it is relating. From the perspective of logic, the following two chains of reasoning are identical:

(1) All penguins can fly and nothing that flies lives in Antarctica; therefore, no penguins live in Antarctica

(2) All crows can fly and nothing that flies lives in Antarctica; therefore, no crows live in Antarctica.

It doesn’t matter that the conclusion of (1) is false and the conclusion of (2) is true. It also doesn’t matter that both (1) and (2) have false assumptions (sometimes called hypotheses). Their logical form is the same and, from the perspective of logic, they are both good: it is impossible to believe both of the assumptions but not the conclusion. In the other direction, it is possible to have an argument that is not logically good (logically sound) but has true assumptions and a true conclusion:

(3) All mammals are vertebrates and all gorillas are vertebrates; therefore, all gorillas are mammals.

To many people, (3) might sound like a reasonable chain of thought. But would you still think that if you did not already know the conclusion was true? Logically, it has the same form as:

(4) All people who live in Boston live in the United States and all people who live in Seattle live in the United States; therefore, all people who live in Boston live in Seattle.

(To those who don’t know: Boston and Seattle are two cities in the United States that are far from each other.) Do you see what the issue is now? It has nothing to do with whether the particular assumptions or particular conclusions are true; it is an issue with the form of the argument.

Forcing arguments into logical forms often reveals that the speaker is playing upon some ambiguity. For example:

(5) Americans like baseball and Maria is American; therefore, Maria likes baseball.

Is this argument logically good? That depends on what the first part means. If it means “All Americans like baseball”, the argument is fine. But if it means something weaker, like “Some Americans like baseball” or “Many Americans like baseball”, then the logic is bad. It is possible to believe the assumptions but not the conclusion. 

There is another reason why the logic in (5) might be bad: the world ‘American’, like many words, has multiple meanings. It could refer to, say, a US citizen, someone who lives in the Americas, someone who is from the Americas, or something else. If we mean that “All citizens of the US like baseball and Maria lives in North America”, the conclusion clearly does not follow! People frequently take advantage of ambiguous words, especially those with vague or emotional meanings, such as “good”, “terrorism”, “scientific”, “normal”, “democracy”, or “leader”. It’s easy to fall into believing these arguments, especially when the conclusions sound good. But logically, they’re terrible and usually reflect some kind of concealed assumption.

It’s important to distinguish between justifying a belief as the most reasonable belief to hold and justifying a belief absolutely. This is logically bad:

(6) 80% of US citizens like baseball and Maria is a US citizen; therefore, Maria likes baseball.

But this is perfectly fine, at least from a logical perspective:

(7) Maria is a person, the US is a country, and whenever one knows nothing about a person except that they are a citizen of a particular country and one knows that a certain statement is true of more than half of the the people who are citizens of that same country, it is reasonable to assume that the statement is true of that person; therefore, it is reasonable for someone who knows nothing about Maria but that she is a US citizen and who knows that 80% of US citizens like baseball to assume that Maria likes baseball.

Similarly, in a competition between many people, one can argue that a particular competitor is the most likely to win while also arguing that it is more likely that they do not win than that they do (this is true at the beginning of most sports seasons, at least according to betting markets). 

One of the primary roles of logic is to encourage and demand careful thinking and precise statements. Though it may feel constraining at first, it is easy to see that it is worthwhile, given how easy it is to develop false beliefs with no guideposts. Many people who seek to deceive others know about the kinds of errors in thinking people frequently make and take advantage of them; it is impossible to fall into any sort of trap if one states all arguments carefully and examines them to ensure that they are logically correct.

[languageandnothingness]

Logic (Part I)

I want to talk about logic. It’s not the most interesting subject in the world, but it’s one of the most important. Without logic to establish the relationships between statements, it is impossible think cogently. 

Would someone be called a good sailor if they steered a ship haphazardly, noting only as the ship is sinking that some error had occurred along the way? Of course not. Yet many people seem content to let their thoughts run haphazardly, leaping from one statement to another, never fully understanding what they are assuming and what they are deriving from their assumptions, and only stopping to critique their own thought when they arrive at an absurd conclusion. Even worse, many take culture and custom to be their only guide, rejecting arguments because they dislike the conclusions or arguing in a self-assured circle supported, as if weightless, by social sanction.

In the United States, logic is not part of the standard academic curriculum for secondary schools, and, as far as I know, no one is making efforts to include it. In response to false claims circulated online, many organizations and some schools have begun promoting something called “critical thinking” as a guard against drawing incorrect conclusions. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “[s]ince 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course.” But this “critical thinking” is not logic and is no substitute for it. In contemporary discourse, the term “critical thinking” most frequently refers to suspicion of a claim based on its authorship. Students are taught to distrust claims made by organizations and people without special expertise, as well as claims made by those who are “biased” or have ulterior motives for promoting such a claim. While evaluating sources is certainly part of thinking, it is far from the only part, and the emphasis placed on the reliability of sources at the expense of all other aspects of thinking seems to encourage ad hominem attacks (which people already love to use) in lieu of actual argumentation.

While logic does not provide any particular facts, it does provide a framework for thought and the relation of statements that is unsusceptible to tricks and turns of phrase. It is undoubtedly good to be familiar with common kinds of logical fallacies; such familiarity will prevent many errors. But the lists of such fallacies are long, and, if knowledge of them is not accompanied by knowledge of how arguments can be logically sound, they do little good. Similarly, knowledge of common cognitive biases can shield against some unsupported conclusions, but such knowledge is hardly constructive. It would be impossible to navigate if all signs and signals indicating where one may go were removed and a vast, complex array of signs prohibiting certain directions and sorts of movement were supplied in their stead: the situation would be confusing, disorienting, and would likely result in disaster. Such is the state of one who knows of fallacies and biases but not of correct forms of reasoning.

I plan on writing more about some of the basics of logic and why it should be taught in every secondary school. This is only the first part. But I hope I have at least made it clear that some kind of structure is needed to relate ideas. It is hard to understand the relationships between ideas in the best cases; and when others are actively trying to obscure their relationships, or one has a cultural or social predisposition in certain directions, it is nearly impossible to do so without a clear and framework for thought. This is what logic is in its purest, simplest form, and until this is recognized, social discourse may always remain in a chaotic and unproductive state.

[languageandnothingness]

Cultural Changes

I wanted to briefly record here some cultural phenomena which I feel are not getting enough attention.

Firstly, there has been a lot of discussion of the differences between the ‘coasts’ and ‘middle America’. This sort of thinking is encouraged by the US electoral system, which divides states into red, blue, and purple. But any closer analysis of political (or economic, cultural, etc.) division of the US reveals a deeper division, that between rural and urban areas. Urban areas are liberal; rural areas are conservative. There are few exceptions to this rule. This is obscured by state-level electoral maps. Even in ‘blue’ states, the majority of the state by area usually goes red. State boundaries are arbitrary, and do not reflect anything deeper. Blue states are essentially just states where the urban population is larger than the rural population, and red states the reverse. See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/electoral-college-new-states-2016-election/ for more on how the arbitrary dividing lines determine which states are majority urban, and which are majority rural. This article https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-200-districts-that-withstood-the-blue-wave-and-what-they-have-in-common/ more explicitly breaks the US down by congressional district. It is obvious that Austin has more in common with San Francisco than with Creedmoor, Texas, in nearly every respect.

Another difference is geographical. I would suggest that western urban areas and eastern urban areas -- though grouped as ‘the coasts’ -- are quite culturally distinct. The racial demographics differ radically between the coasts, and the urban areas on the east coast are generally more Christian than their western counterparts https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/. (Note that I am not considering things on a state level; it only makes sense to compare urban areas with each other, or one is simply measuring the rural-ness of a state.) Cities in Pacific states generally have higher median incomes than cities in Atlantic states, and the immigrant population has different sources. In some ways, mass communications networks have ‘leveled’ the culture across the coasts, but there are still noticeable differences. The Atlantic has stronger cultural ties to Europe, and the Pacific to Asia, for obvious reasons. Generally speaking, Atlantic institutions are older and more prestigious than Pacific ones, and Pacific cities are less dominated by old money and old families. 

On a somewhat unrelated topic, it is worth noting that the presidency of Donald Trump seems to have dramatically affected American culture. Because of partisan reactionism, the American liberal/left wing has come to staunchly support immigration and cultural diversity in ways that it never had before. To see this, simply look at the Billboard Hot 100: between 2017 and 2018, 6 songs classified as ‘Latin’ (i.e. mostly in Spanish) made Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 chart. From 2000 to 2016, only 5 Latin songs earned that distinction. And 31 Latin songs made the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018 and 2019, in contrast with the 11 making the chart in 2014/5/6 combined. Note further that this only includes songs which are majority Spanish, not all songs which include significant portions in Spanish; if we count this way, the difference is even greater. And recent hits such as “Havana” and “Señorita” focus on themes from Cuban and Cuban-American life, though they are both in English. It is also not hard to connect the Trump presidency to the #MeToo movement and its cultural impacts. Movies featuring non-men and non-white protagonists have moved from ‘alternative’ to ‘blockbuster’, much to the chagrin of the American right. Though many of these trends existed before Trump, the extreme partisan divide has undoubtedly pushed the Democratic Party further to the left politically and has fundamentally altered the American cultural landscape. Movies like those mentioned above are seen now not just as works of art or political symbols, but as acts of political defiance, a blow to the political opposition. But the metrics I have discussed here do not do justice to the emergence of a greater cultural schism along partisan lines. The reason that the media I discussed above seem to be unambiguously moving ‘left’ is that the primary consumers of these forms are young and urban -- a demographic that is almost entirely contained within the Democratic Party. It is telling that the most popular (by far) country song in recent memory (or, arguably, ever) in the United States, “Old Town Road”, is by a queer black man. It is impossible for many Americans to consume country music in its more usual forms because it is associated with conservatism and Trump; to listen to most country music would be, for most young, urban American media consumers, an act of treason.

These topics are not wholly unrelated, and I hope to delve deeper into both at a later date.

[languageandnothingness]

Offense, Defense

A strange phenomena in modern political discourse -- particularly online discourse, but this applies to other media as well -- is that everyone seems to wish to ascribe a weakness to their opponent by saying that they are too easily offended.

Yes, I am talking about the far-right which is constantly mocking “SJWs” who are offended by reality. But I am also talking about figures such as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, two pseudo-intellectuals who have made careers out of claiming that those who argue that they are wrong are too easily offended. This manifests itself in complaints about “political correctness” and the cultural construction of millenials as effeminate.

But this is not limited to the political right. The left, too, often mocks the right for being offended by everything from coffee makers to people not standing during the “Star-Spangled Banner”. I do not mean to promote ‘both-siderism’, or to equate these phenomena. Yet they are both fundamentally about mocking others for being offended. As a form of taunt, it is clear that this discourse has largely emerged from online discourses and has been spread through the meme format, which is often used to portray strawman arguments. An irrationally emotional or ‘offended’ figure is an easy strawman, and through this the state of being offended is construed as a state of weakness.

I hope I have made it sufficiently clear that there are significant gender dynamics at play here. Especially in right-wing discourses, the underlying claim is that those who disagree with the speaker are too feminine. In left-wing versions, we also see that the implication is that right-wing men are not masculine. Once someone is constructed as stupid and impulsive, they are emasculated; this is a direct counter-discourse to right-wing discourses through which men attempt to portray themselves as hypermasculine by posting pictures of themselves with trucks or guns, insulting or objectifying women, and posting about what ‘real masculinity’ looks like. This has prompted a response, with many groups devoted to mocking particularly bizarre instances of men making statements about what is or is not masculine and posts which make them appear more childish than masculine. And this is precisely the process of emasculation which is leveraged against the right.

While I do not wish to put too much weight on psychoanalytic speculations, it is worth noting that the gaze works differently online, and this is what lends an emasculating (castrating, in psychoanalytic terms) dimension to the mockery of people whom are offended by things. Content can be endlessly reproduced and distributed, and the decontextualization of a post, the reposting of a post in a group politically opposed to the original author for the explicit purpose of making the author’s views seem nonsensical, is what allows that community of gazers to imagine a castrating effect of their gaze on the author. To take offense is to exhibit emotion and to display weakness in discourse; it permits the gazers to imagine that they have the power to conjure negative emotional responses from the author. So the gazers stand in unison against an exposed author, whose decontextualized protest stands alone as a testament to their weakness and not to the content to which they were responding.

Here, too, lies the current oppositional framing of political discourse, where there are no parties or positions, only anti-parties and anti-positions. The Democratic Party platform amounts to the statement ‘we are not the Republican Party’, and vice versa. (I do not mean to exempt other political parties; most socialist groups, for example, are equally guilty of this in slightly different ways, usually in relation to the Democratic Party.) It has been argued that the internet permits the formation of communities of ever more like-minded people, and that this is a detriment to political discourse. I would argue, however, that this is not a problem because it limits cross-party discourse, but rather because it constrains all positive political imaginaries. All political expression on the internet either takes the form of reaffirming social membership in some group or critiquing another group’s lack of internal consistency. One cannot, on the internet at large, object to a position based on a clear set of assumptions, because that makes one vulnerable to offense, to being gazed upon and emasculated. Further, the allowable amounts of information which people often transmit and read are not very large, and this makes it difficult to articulate a coherent, independent position. So the only allowable form of argumentation becomes an argument against someone based on their own internal inconsistency. Therefore, one’s own personal views become increasingly relegated to private and social discourses, limiting the exchange of ideas and the creation of a positive socio-political imaginary. Within politically homogenous groups, conflict is discouraged; and if you do disagree too strongly with some post, why don’t you just create your own splinter group for people who think even more like you do.... So these become sites for social belonging rather than the creation of a shared political imagination. It is not insignificant that many groups define their own identities by mocking other positions, other things to which people take offense, and therefore the creation of an online space is inherently differential and negative, not only in the purely formal sense, but also in the sense that it creates its antagonists -- those to be gazed upon -- as part of its own formation.

I have attempted to articulate some of the reasons why ‘taunting’ has become such an important form of contemporary discourse, and the reasons why I find this concerning. It is worth noting that the process of emasculation which I have described is not literal, in the sense that it does not consist of ascertaining the gender of the author. It is purely cultural, the process of attaching non-masculine cultural codes to the author and the author’s relationship to the specific text. While some would argue that this process actually consists of a recourse to Enlightenment discourses about reason and knowledge, I maintain that the Enlightenment discourses are a purely secondary cultural reference in the construction of the author as non-masculine. It is the implication that the author is insufficiently masculine which is more rhetorically effective in the formation of negative political communities than the direct statement that the author is not masculine.

[languageandnothingness]

Libraries and PSYCH 101

Psychology is certainly one of the oldest fields of human knowledge, if one counts figures such as Aristotle and Hobbes proto-psychologists. It could even be argued that many varieties of theology are, in fact, proto-psychologies; but this does not concern us here. Modern psychology began sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, after, I would argue, Freud’s psychoanalytic theories began to lose their hegemony in the realm of psychological thought. I refer here to the emergence of behavioral theories of psychology and, in particular, the emerging discipline of social psychology.

As a student in PSYCH 101, the thought that, if people really believed in well-established results in social psychology, society would collapse, recurred to me quite often. In light of such results as those obtained by the infamous experiments of Stanley Milgram and others disenchanted with the Enlightenment conception of human autonomy, it seems difficult to retain faith in liberal democracy as a form of government. People do not like to think about the extent to which their actions are socially regulated and determined. Astrological systems, as a precursor to the many pseudo-scientific classifications prevalent today (I am specifically thinking here of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, though there are many other such psychometric evaluations with little evidence supporting their validity which make claims to significance in contemporary discourse), attempt to conceal the social origins of behavior behind vague theories which give the subject the impression that their behavior is, in some ultimate sense, up to them to decide. Even as American society has become more open to the idea that consciousness is a fundamentally physical process, thanks in large part to Hofstadter and Dennett, we attempt to localize these physical processes, to retain our autonomy even as our selves are reduced to (pseudo-) deterministic processes.

As of late, I have frequented psychology sections of libraries, examining their various journals and books. The research usually paints an unequivocally dim picture of human life and discourse, one in which humans avoid conflict because it lowers their self-esteem and ascribe negative personality traits to people who disagree with them, even if they are in many of the same demographic groups as the person under question. (In anticipation of the objection that many conclusions drawn from psychological research have not been reproduced in other laboratories, I shall state that, while some ‘results’ are likely incorrect, there are enough well-established and well-tested results which fit the pattern which I am describing as to make its significance in the body of psychological research indisputable.) In many ways, it seems, the psychological study of personality is perhaps most profitably directed towards the analysis of the various ways in which persons are affected by their society, and an examination of the current literature which is ostensibly on the psychology of personality reveals that this is perhaps not an unpopular opinion among psychologists.

This forces me to conclude that, though my initial reaction to the Kavanaugh hearings were thoroughly negative, the partisan response was not only understandable, but predictable. It is worth noting that, while I certainly think that Kavanaugh’s mannerisms betrayed him, I did in fact understand the context, and it is impossible for me to say whether I would have understood his behavior during the hearings in a similar way had I been of a different political inclination, or had truly not understood the situation. Further, very few people consume news directly. The C-SPAN family of channels, while invaluable, are hardly highly-rated. People consume news in a social fashion: they get their news from people who think like they do, they like, share, retweet, and reblog views which confirm their own, and this entire social activity is predicated around reaffirming one’s own membership in some group. So it is not as though people saw the hearings and then read analyses of them; rather, the analysis was foregrounded, and the small parts of the hearing they consumed directly were already contextualized by their headings in such a fashion that their response was mandatory. ‘To remain in this imaginary community, your social group, you should have the following reaction to the following six-second video clip....’ In this way, communicative capitalism as theorized by Dean is the underlying organizational principle in the split in reactions to the Kavanaugh hearings. Yet it is too simplistic to simply ascribe the cultural conflicts around Kavanaugh to media fragmentation. There is a more complicated history here, and a more complicated biopolitical network around age, drugs, and sexuality which was foregrounded in the conversations around Kavanaugh. While it is often noted that right-wing commentators defended Kavanaugh by reframing the hearings in terms of a witch hunt targeting men, one which could just as easily be turned against you, your husband, your father, or your brother, I do not think that this phenomenon is worthy of direct analysis: the conceptions of masculinity at work here are more easily approached from another direction, namely that of the treatment of justice as a biopolitical concept intertwined with cultural codes surrounding age, race, drugs, and memory.

[languageandnothingness]

Deceit and Social Psychology

There’s a lot that needs to be said, so I will just say a few things.

Firstly, I want to talk about something that most people are no longer talking about -- Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. I want to mention these, not just because I think that he should not have been confirmed, but because they revealed some startling aspects of American society.

Before I go any further, I should mention the part of this whole affair which was the most confusing to me. Most people have a sense of when people are lying and when they are being truthful. Some people pride themselves on how good they are at determining which people are more honest than others. And there are a number of behaviors which people perform which make us think that they are or are not telling the truth.

The most surreal aspect of watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearings was that he was definitely lying. I mean that, if I had no understanding of the context or consequences of the situation, but had watched a short video clip of his testimony, I would have had no doubt that he was lying. His tone of voice, the way he modulated his volume, his posture, his facial expressions: every part of him screamed that he was lying. If he were in a movie, it would be clear that the audience was supposed to understand, immediately and unambiguously, that the character is untrustworthy and deceitful.

On the other hand, Dr. Christine Ford seemed, well, entirely truthful. At least, there were no indicators which made me instinctively think that she was lying. And everything she said was cogent, it seemed plausible, it made sense. Brett Kavanaugh seemed to -- was -- yelling at Senators, accusing them of participating in a conspiracy. He not only seemed like a liar, but a totally incompetent liar.

I suspect that most people had the same intuitive response that I did. At least, it is hard to imagine instinctively trusting the yelling man accusing his questioners, refusing to answer questions, and making demonstrably false statements over the doctor who delivered an extremely believable account. But many Americans believed Kavanaugh. Although he was historically unpopular for a Supreme Court nominee, and although some of the population supported him without disbelieving the accusations leveled against him (which is a different issue), the fact remains that north of forty percent of Americans believed him over Dr. Ford. What were the causes of this strange phenomenon? This was, of course, a very partisan issue. But how does one’s party affiliation interact with one’s instincts regarding whether someone is trustworthy? This is a complicated question.