I’m trying to read things like Jacobin magazine more these days. I stumbled across this interesting article attacking “moral sentimentalism“:
There is a tension at the core of bourgeois morality. On the one hand, its claims are supposed to be universal. Since its claims presume to govern everyone, the institution requires, both practically and as a matter of ethics, that everyone behave morally. It could scarcely survive without widespread compliance.
On the other hand, bourgeois morality is a matter of the heart. It governs the individual and his intentions. Although it makes universal demands, its demands are not political. Bourgeois morality restricts itself to individual persuasion, proselytizing, praise and condemnation. Whether one behaves morally is ultimately left to individual conscience.
It whacks a lot of my personal boogeymen — Mike Kinsley, Fareed Zakaria, that awful ethicist feature in the NYT magazine (“We are living in a depraved age, while `The Ethicist’ frets about swiping umbrellas from restaurant bins”….heh indeed). But I wasn’t able to understand the difference between what the author class “serious moral discourse” and what he calls “moral sentimentalism”, perhaps because I am one “those on the Left who see morality as mere class ideology”.
Another author at Jacobin counters that:
I disagree heartily with his conclusion: that those of us on the Left must take back morality from the sentimentalists; that we must “revolutionize ethics.” Rather, I see an entirely different path forward for the Left: it’s high time to leave behind this idealistic kingdom of morality and rediscover the realm of self-interest.
I hate the high-mindedness of many on the left. It’s amazing how badly we’ve lost economic arguments by allowing them to turn into some morality play — I tighten up my belt, why shouldn’t the gubmint. The argument in favor of more stimulus is that people need fucking jobs and that you, the voter, could easily be or become one of those people (though I admit in this case, there’s a “common good” argument — the vast, vast majority of the country is better off when the country’s not in a recession).
What do you think? Are moral arguments a waste of time politically? I’m skeptical of their efficacy, and of course all the Brooks/Kinsley-type bullshit is worthless intellectually as well as politically, but I suppose I can see where they have their place on issues like marriage equality….which has become a winning issue for Democrats.
NobodySpecial
We all do better when everyone is succeeding. People making enough to enjoy their life with some luxury don’t tend to be the ones breaking into your home for electronics or jewelry to sell. People with a steady job find much less time to be out running the streets with nothing to do. Kids doing well at school are eager to go the next day. A lot less bitching and negativity when people aren’t worried about choosing between paying rent and putting food on the table, and a lot less having to worry about what the other guy is getting.
The problem is not linking the moral arguments to real, actual stories of people. That’s a messaging failure. Getting that one right is one of the best things Obama did in selling health care to a bunch of congresscritters who didn’t want it.
kc
What is this shit? I want some got damned pet pictures.
kc
I’m KIDDING. Pardon me while I go read that high-falutin’ stuff.
kuvasz
Self-interest was the core of the Labor movement. The Wobblies had it right.
KG
A lot of Americans believe they do the right thing more often than not and believe that we should do the right thing as a nation. So, convincing them that a particular policy is the right thing to do isn’t necessarily bad politics. It’s part of the argument, not the entire argument. You still have to explain how and why it’ll work, but it definitely doesn’t hurt to argue that it’s the right thing to do on a moral level. Isn’t that what the Kentucky governor basically did with McConnell and Paul sitting in the room at some local event when talking about the ACA?
mclaren
Absolutely 100% right.
I have repeatedly urged in the most strenuous possible terms that Democrats start talking to voters in terms of the voters’ personal self-interest.
“You need to vote Democratic, because if you vote Republican, those bastards will offshore your jobs and slash your medicare and close your factories and when you sit by the side of the road holding up a cardboard sign that reads WILL WORK FOR FOOD, the Republicans’ limousines will toss beer cans at your face while they whizz by.”
Self-interest is the way to get through to voters, as far as I can tell, now that economic times are so desperately bad.
Demos should be airing commercials like a TERMINATOR 2 spoof with a Scwarzenegger lookalike reaching out to some voter saying “IF YOU WANT A JOB, COME WITH ME.” While the Republican terminator blows away other voters.
Ooohhh! Too divisive! Too harsh! Too extreme!
Gimme a fuckin’ break.
This country is about to disintegrate into open partisan warfare, with Republican governors openly calling for secession. I say it’s time to hit back hard. Appeal to the voters’ personal self-interest. Do you want your children to starve? If not, vote Democratic. Do you want your daughter to die from a septic back-alley abortion? If not, vote Democratic. Do you want your son to come back from some unwinnable foreign war so crazed with PTSD that he kills his wife and children and then eats a gun? If not, vote Democratic.
We liberals should be airing commercials showing blue sparks and flaring blue light and hideous screams coming from a prison cell window as the camera slowly zooms in. A narrator should intone:
“The party of torture…”
[More hideous screams, more sizzling electricity sounds]
“The party of endless war…”
[The screams like a horrible crescendo and then fall silent. Sick thudding sounds, like a blunt object hitting flesh and bone, now come from prison cell but we still can’t see inside the window of the cell]
“The party of economic destruction — the Republican party.”
[Fade to black over the sound of uncontrollable sobbing]
“If you want more of this, vote Republican. Otherwise, vote your conscience — vote for a Democrat this time.”
People go apeshit when I suggest this kind of thing, but fuck ’em. Time to use meathooks on the opposition party. Take off the gloves, and rhetorically speaking rip off their heads and shit down their necks.
kc
“Forget morality – let us reclaim selfishness.”
Yeah, good luck with that. I don’t think we’re going to be able to out-selfish the Ayn Randians.
Spaghetti Lee
Good policy and good morality are intertwined. We want health care reform because it will reduce costs and inefficiencies, but also because we’re sick of seeing people suffering. We want immigration reform because it will simplify the immigration process and boost the economy but also because people working so hard to get ahead deserve a better chance. And so on. This isn’t either or. And the other side, the reason we hate the right is because their morality is monstrous: poor people deserve to suffer, women who get raped had it coming, gay people are subhuman, black people are violent and lazy, etc. We’re not fighting them because of quibbles over numbers and policy, we’re fighting them because we fundamentally disagree on what’s good and what’s bad, what makes life worth living and what doesn’t. I think you’re on the wrong track here, Doug.
NobodySpecial
@mclaren: “Come with me if you want to vote.”
Mary G
I think some Democrats feel that making moral arguments will be seen as snootiness/elitism/judgmentalism and that’s bad.
kdaug
Summary.
Spaghetti Lee
Self-interest is a double-edged sword, you know. What’s more likely: Kinsley and Zakaria and Brooks and Richard Cohen write what they write because they sincerely believe it from the bottom of their heart, or because they know what pays the bills? They’re acting in their self-interest. Now, that means we should fight them right back in working for our self-interest, but it also means that we should remember that any political movement focused on short-term self-interest and doing whatever wins votes has a tendency to lose its way and get eaten by the establishment. You need some steely-eyed ballbusters and Rahm Emanuel types, sure, to get the practical stuff done, but without some uniting theme and at least some shared ideals about what’s right and what’s worth fighting for, any sort of liberal revolution won’t survive.
Petorado
Their is a simple rule that clarifies how this morality quandary plays out: people may ponder logic, but they will act on emotion. It’s not about what type of morality is superior, it’s which one will connect with people on an emotional level.
Having the dread “serious moral discussion” is how you filibuster the issue. Getting into someone’s emotional state by getting them mad about something will get them to act on it. “Are moral arguments a waste of time politically?” I’d say yes because once it’s brought to a logical level, you essentially quashed mass action on any issue. What the Right has been good at doing is manipulating emotions, and that’s where their fierce partisanship has prospered.
Felonius Monk
@mclaren: This argument
usually falls on deaf ears. Those sign holders will still vote for Republicans because they still somehow believe in fairy tales.
I do think we need more of this approach:
Redshirt
I want full Communism and I want it now. For real.
FlipYrWhig
For further thoughts on the relative effectiveness of “bourgeois” moral arguments, see abolitionism, history of.
gVOR08
@kc: Yes, we can. Randian self interest is stupid and ultimately self defeating. Self interest does not have to be self absorption. It can be rational. It can involve a recognition that for each of us individualy to do well, the community must do well.
Keith G
There are very few moral arguments that interest me, but a very do have important implications.
To hell with umbrella stands. Mr Obama’s Red Line have been crossed and crossed with abandon it seems. Will there come a time when there will be a strong moral compulsion for us to act with significant military force. Or can we get by with saying, “Look, our Civil War was bloody, but it’s was something that we just had to get through. Good luck.”?
FlipYrWhig
And frankly, I think a dismissive treatment of “moral sentimentalism” capitalizes on an equation between emotion and Girl Cooties, Ew! Sentimental only has to mean unproductively weepy if we let it. I don’t like eye-rolling at sentimentalism or the sloppy association between sentiment and the middle class. Just because white middle-class England and the Continent embraced sentiment and effusive feeling en masse starting around 1770 doesn’t mean that’s the only possible political valence it has. That also doesn’t mean that sentimentalism doesn’t have blind spots or fail to go far enough, not following through on how feeling bad can become doing good. It often does. But it doesn’t have to. There can be radical sentimentalism. Look into Sara Ahmed’s _The Cultural Politics of Emotion_ or pretty much anything by Lauren Berlant.
Bill E Pilgrim
Doug it’s an interesting discussion but I think you have a glaring blind spot, which is that most of the people who you’re addressing at this blog are far closer to the “Brooks/Kinsley” view on many topics than anything to the left of it. They may want to verbally “punch Galtians” (see last post, which I’m sort of addressing here also) but just as eagerly punch anyone to the left of David Brooks seen to be saying anything that reflects negatively on President Obama.
Matt Taibbi, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, even a New York Times writer like James Risen, have all had abuse heaped on them here, and I don’t mean by one or two people, it’s the prevailing view on most days.
Some of my favorite commentary comes from this guy on a weekly basis, and panel five is satirizing people like the majority here as much as people like Dianne Feinstein. This is what actual commentary from the left looks like by the way, at least some significant swath of it, for those here with the conceit that “the entire left wing” shares their sneering disdain for Greenwald, Snowden, or Noam Chomsky.
Dan Perkins AKA Tom Tomorrow is a pretty good barometer by the way. If anyone is going to try to make him out to be a Ron Paul supporter or right wing libertarian, well all I can say is good luck. I think moral discussions are probably worthwhile, but engaging in them while also engaged in massive denial is not going to lead much of anywhere useful.
Mnemosyne
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I find it kind of fascinating that, in your view, there’s absolutely no one on the left between David Brooks and Noam Chomsky or Matt Taibbi. Is there absolutely no middle ground between those two views, and we have to choose one or the other?
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: That’s was not the point he was making….it isn’t even the meaning of what he typed.
Jesus.
fuckwit
Man did you ever bury the lede!
It has become a winning issue how, why, and when? Maybe because LGBT activists have been busitng their ass on this issue, endlessly for 40 years, and especially hard in the last 20? Yeah, that’s why!
Your post exemplifies MY personal pet peeve with the left: not so much the morality, but the fucking ivory tower-ism!
Justice. Takes. Work. Hard work. Brutal, endless, ground-floor, grass roots, putting yourself in positions of getting arrested or looking like a jerk or giving up your days and weekend and sacrificing for a cause, that kind of work. It takes passion. It takes getting angry, making phone calls, writing letters, doing boycotts, talking to people, and never backing down.
LGBT activists have been relentless. They’ve been the lef’ts equivalent troopers to the god-botherers on the right in terms of their dedication, grassroots organization skills, militance, and refusal to give up. They have heckled everyone, including people on their own side. They have heckled the hecklers opposing them (i.e. Westboro).
That’s how justice occurs. That’s how you win. By working hard and never giving up. Not by messaging, or philosophy, any other such bullshit; that’s secondary. What works is when you see injustice, speak truth to power, speak up (ACT UP!), go for it.
I remember watching a great documentary about the 1992 election called “Spin”, made of off-the-record clips culled from unencrypted satellite communications internal to the TV networks. There’s a clip of Pat Robertson giving an interview, and an LGBT activist calls up and gets right in his face with a blunt question about his homophobia. It was sweet, sweet revenge, and a great illustration, because the reason evolution has been purged from our textbooks is because the god-botherers have no compunction about getting right up in the faces of school boards all over the country, and they’re relentless about it. They have moved the goalposts through their activism.
The goalposts have finally, finally been moved to the LEFT on an issue in this country, and all the credit goes to the DECADES of continuous hard work by LGBT activists, shoving those goalposts every day.
More recently, Occupy introduced the concept of the 1% into the national dialogue. They moved the goalposts to the left too, bless them.
The Civil Rights marchers 50 years ago moved the goalposts to the left.
Dating back to the progressive era or the Depression, labor activists and actual socialists moved the goalposts to the left.
If we really want to win on economic issues, to change the dialogue, we need that passion, that dedication, and we need to keep it up for a few decades. Then we will win.
Overton window, motherfuckers.
scav
@Redshirt: I’ve got a christmas list of things I want to nationalize (evidently my santa comes bearing a sickle) but will you still speak to me if I waffle with my own form of mixed economy? I think I’d also like to reserve the right to punch whomever and whenever I choose, and moreover, compromise when I inevitably don’t get everything I want.
FlipYrWhig
@Bill E Pilgrim: I don’t understand who you think DougJ is proposing using moral arguments on. I thought he meant using moral arguments on the mass public in hopes of swaying them to adopt liberal positions or elect liberal candidates. You’re talking about something else, and I don’t follow how you got there.
karen
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I think a lot of us are idealistic but pragmatic. We know what we’d LIKE but we know what we’re feasibly able to get. We know that while some of us live in blue states, others live in red states where the word “liberal” is a four letter word and blue dogs are the best chance that you have to get a Democrat.
I think the problem is that people expect the GOP to be nasty dickwads. When Democrats aren’t nice (not necessarily nasty) people don’t expect it and freak out. The media is owned by rich people who have other rich people on their news and talkshows who want to preserve the status quo and the best way to do that is to trash whoever wants to change it.
FlipYrWhig
@fuckwit: Well, but then the question is, how do you accomplish that, through arguments about self-interest or arguments about benevolence and reciprocity or some other way? It’s not just showing up if you can’t get people who aren’t part of your struggle to want to join it at some level. LGBT activism started gaining more traction politically when organizations and individuals (PFLAG, case in point) started foregrounding issues like hospital visitation and marriage, IMHO, because that discussion is emotional/affective/domestic/sentimental. ACT UP pissed people off, deliberately, and with good reason, but it seems like playing the sympathy card clicked better than playing the rage card. And that, to me, is a “moral argument” about fairness through shared feelings, not through a rational calculus of self-interest.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Let him speak for himself. After reading Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon, apparently anyone who doesn’t think that Manning and Snowden are national heroes who should immediately receive full presidential pardons are just authoritarian Republicans at heart, so I’d really like to hear if there’s any middle ground left at all, or if anyone who thinks that maybe releasing hundreds of thousands of top secret documents (including information about individual soldiers) wasn’t a great idea should just vote Republican from now on since they’re obviously right-wing authoritarians.
Nemo_N
The “problem” with moral arguments is that you have to go all in. Not mildly and then apologizing the next morning.
fuckwit
@Felonius Monk: Nope. What happens is when self-interest turns into tribalism, then it becomes an unstoppable force. Unions get this: being for better working for yourself is great, but once you are part of a TRIBE that IDENTIFIES itself with better working conditions for the WHOLE TRIBE, now you are ready to fucking kick some ass.
Action needs to be collective in order to really have staying power. Unions in the early 20th century got this, Occupy sort of got this, the Civil Rights movement in the 60s definitely got this, the anti-war movement got it HUGELY in the late 60s (they even had their own tribal clothes, music, language, hairstyles, etc!) and the fundamentalist right got this big time in about the early 1980s. We have President Obama today because he got this in 2008 (and probably much earlier), and we don’t have Medicare for All and we do have Speaker Boner because the teabaggers and their Koch puppetmasters definitely got this in 2009 and 2010.
You have to 1) get people’s self interest involved, 2) expand it to being a collective self-interest with a tribal identity, and 3) get them PHYSICALLY into a room with the rest of the tribe, and have them bond tribally and take action together, collectively. If you can get them to make the tribe a part of their identity (I’m born again! I’m a brotherhood of sheet metal workers! I’m a hippie! I’m gay, out, and proud! I’m a feminist! etc etc) then you are able to accomplish anything. It has been ever thus, for humans are social creatures, evolved in small bands or tribes, that is our tightest, strongest bond.
If you are squicked by this and think it sounds cult-ish, you’re right, and too bad– you have a 5-day work week because of this, so be thankful. Not individual self-interest, but tribal, collective self-interest. This is what a million or so years of primate evolution has given us: we take heroic action to protect ourselves, our kin, but also to protect our tribe. Make your movement into a tribe, one that continues on across generations, and you will win.
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
You win this thread. I am going to steal that line.
FlipYrWhig
@karen: I don’t see a lot of value in declaring myself to be Sinistro, the Magnificently Uncompromising Leftist if I don’t have 50% of the public right behind me to back up my totally excellent views with tangible political power. Since I don’t, I don’t expect a lot of truly left-wing outcomes from American politics.
And I also don’t think that the famous Overton Window moves very far to the left, because, at least the way I read politics since about 1960, when the left gets loud the center doesn’t move left, it moves right. Where the center has moved left is precisely when the left uncorked… moral and sentimental arguments, ones no more complex than “How would you feel if that was you or someone you loved?” This doesn’t mean that there’s no place for loud activists, just that I don’t think loud activists do the kind of persuading that turns into, first, mass approval and second, liberal law and policy.
Spaghetti Lee
@karen:
What annoys me is when the arguments for pragmatism, which aren’t inherently bad, get turned into a bunch of people high-fiving each other for being pragmatists, as if it were some tribal identity rather than a tactic, and yelling at the far left types not because they’re actively fucking things up at the moment, but just because they’re out of the in-group. It’s just…dumb. Not because I’m terribly concerned about people’s feelings (although, you know, the world is more livable when we’re not gratuitously being total assholes just for fun) but because it takes away from the real problem: the fucking Republicans. Does anyone really think Glenn Greenwald is a bigger obstacle to a liberal society than Charles Koch or Rush Limbaugh? Yet it’s Greenwald who gets all the sound and fury.
The starting point for a successful liberal coalition that can defeat the right is one that doesn’t crack up at a moment’s notice because of bullshit minutiae. Focus on the real enemy and devote your energy to taking down them.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Typical Mnemosyne weasel-word sophistry masquerading as “fair” and “balanced” and “reasonable.”
The fact that the powerpoint slides were classified TOP SECRET means nothing. The fact that the diplomatic cables were classifed TOP SECRET is a bad joke. Nowadays, TOP SECRET is the basic classification for the menu in the Pentagon cafeteria. Classification has been so overused and abused and misused by our military and intelligence services that today, the name of the goddamn president’s dog is classified TOP SECRET. TOP SECRET has become a horseshit scam. No sensible person pays any attention to the classification TOP SECRET because it is now used for everything from the manufacturer of the Pentagon’s toilet paper to the number of tons of garbage dumped overboard by our aircraft carriers per day.
Now that we’ve dispensed with that red herring, let’s move on to the big claim:
Provide hard evidence to back up that unsubstantiated claim, Mnemosyne, or stand revealed as a liar who is using yet another Senator Joseph McCarthy smear to try to obscure the real issues here.
Namely, that America is now a militarized garrison state in which even the laws and courts and the government’s own actions are classified TOP SECRET, making congressional oversight impossible and informed voter participation impossible and true democracy impossible.
FlipYrWhig
@fuckwit: Maybe I’m just terminologically confused, but IMHO self-interest can’t “turn into tribalism,” because it’s not the same force. Self-interest doesn’t scale up. That’s collective interest. “Collective self-interest” sounds like a contradiction in terms.
hilzoy
I subscribe to Jacobin, but I thought this article was really bad. For starters, I couldn’t figure out what ‘moral sentimentalism’ actually is. It has something to do with caring about day to day dilemmas as opposed to big political dilemmas, but it’s not clear whether the problem is people who think we don’t have to bother our tiny little heads about social institutions, because they don’t raise any moral problems — and who are those people, I wonder? I certainly don’t know anyone who thinks that there are no moral issues raised by social institutions like the slave trade — or the people he spends more time talking about, people who care about everyday problems *among other things* — which is surely not objectionable. He also thinks bourgeois morality is not actually supposed to be enforced by the state, which is, um, odd. I mean: we can debate *which* immoral things the state should forbid — only things that harm others, like murder? or those things and a few that are spectacularly bad ideas that other people will end up footing the bill for, like not wearing motorcycle helmets? or things banned by your favorite organized religion? — but on pretty much any account, some parts of morality, at least the parts about not harming others without their consent, are always enforced by something more than the individual conscience.
Being so confused at the outset, I suppose I should have expected things not to get much clearer, and they didn’t.
I think that in politics, you make those true arguments that matter to your interlocutor. If you think your interlocutor is wholly selfish, don’t bother with morality. (But do ask yourself whether you’re being uncharitable.) If you think your interlocutor cares about morality (among other things), and that there are moral arguments to be made that s/he might find persuasive, why on earth not make them?
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
Buddy, the way you get 50% of the public right behind you is to stand for something, preferably something vivid and clear and unmistakable.
People aren’t voting Democratic today because nobody votes for the a political program of “well, we stand for something, as long as it’s moderate and middle-of-the-road.”
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and FDR and Harry Truman and Bill Clinton did not try to appeal to people with a moderate middle-ground agenda. They said “Things are fucked up, and we need some serious changes, so vote for me.”
You’ve got it backwards. People don’t build coalitions and then suddenly come out with radical left-wing agendas — because if they try, their coalition of mild-mannered middle-of-the-roaders bails out fast with panic and fear in their eyes.
People build coalitions by appealing to the most committed and hardcore elements of their base. Then they build on that base by adding to the core policy agenda. This, by the way, is how the Republicans did it. It’s how the Democrats used to do it, until the Demos got hornswaggled by pollsters and DLC campaign “consultants” who have never actually won a fucking election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: What annoys me is when the arguers for pragmatism get accused of being closet Republicans, so it all works out.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: Yes, ‘mam.
@FlipYrWhig: It takes both and many more methods. ACT UP pissed people off and they got inside the heads of many in the public. Not everyone absorbs information in the same way.
The first step is always to say, “Hey..Look at us! We are over here, and we aren’t going away.”
I can say that with some authority since as 19 yr old at Ohio State in 1977, I was handing out Gay Pride leaflets to students walking to class. “What the fuck is this shit?” was a common response. The second and third days we did it, we would see students from the day before change sidewalks to avoid us. We would wave. They were uncomfortable and they knew we were there. And we would be back.
scav
@FlipYrWhig: Change in scale of the “self” being (selfishly) promoted. Promote and protect the household (rather than single individual) without regard for the impact on the neighbors, or the neighborhood at the expense of the town, the national interest without regard to the rest of the world, the present generation at the expence of future ones or humans at the expense of other living entities on the planet.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
But, hey, it’s from those authoritarian boot-licking Obama-lovers at Der Spiegel, so it must all have been manufactured to make Manning and Wikileaks look bad, amirite?
FlipYrWhig
@Spaghetti Lee: OTOH, there’s a LOT of in-group high-fiving from the other side too every time there’s a Greenwald post — “I can’t wait to see how the Obots try to explain _this_ away, amirite?”
But I can’t help thinking it’s cheap and easy to be principled and uncompromising _on the Internet_. It’s like playing p0k3r for a penny a hand. Everyone’s all in, all the time, because there’s nothing to lose and nothing to think about. A striking fast-food worker impresses me, because of the risk in playing that hand. David Sirota doesn’t impress me, because there’s no risk. We don’t lavish praise on people who say that the US has to act to stop genocide in the Balkans or Syria because they’re so principled and at least they move forward the discussion of a vital issue. We want to talk about whether upholding the principle carries with it risks. So we’re all pragmatists at some level on most issues. The civil liberties stuff has taken an odd turn and become an exceptional case where the principle itself is, to most of the front pagers and a lot of the commenters, praiseworthy in its own right.
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: A mistaken recollection of Bill Clinton aside, if your idea worked, we’d have Lyndon LaRouche as President by now, because a small group of hardcore true believers have been working hard for decades to spread his word.
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
Bill Clinton did not try to appeal to people with a moderate middle-ground agenda.
…?
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Oh, wait, that’s from the New York Times, so clearly they completely made shit up about the trial and what the prosecution in Manning’s trial was claiming.
Mnemosyne
And while I would of course love to stick around and argue with mclaren, my migraine and I need some sleep. Ta-ta.
fuckwit
@scav: @FlipYrWhig: Maybe that’s an ugly juxtaposition of terms, but my point is: to get people involved, you start with self-interest, then expand it tribally. Maybe there’s a better way of saying that, I dunno. The example I gave is: you want a decent living wage and safe working conditions…. but when you are in a tribe of people who want a decent living wage and safe working conditions for everyone in the tribe, now you’re ready to kick serious ass. You want to go to heaven, bu when you get into a tribe of people who all want to go to heaven, now you’re ready to do damage. etc etc. The tribal force can be positive or negative, but it’s extremely strong. In general, it seems, the more broad it is, the more inclusive the tribe is, the more likely it is to do good rather than evil. i.e. ALL workers (the IWW, etc), ALL Americans (the Democratic Party, when it’s on message), the WHOLE planet (the environmental movement), etc. Solidarity, you know.
FlipYrWhig
@scav: I think that’s a vital process to how politics and other kinds of group dynamics work when it comes to, well, human beings almost as a species. I just wouldn’t call it “self-interest.” You still need to make that somewhat unpredictable leap between the atomized individual You and some other person or people, and at that moment, in my view, you start to substitute some other kind of feeling for what had been your self-interest. “Social feeling” or something like that. How “I” turns into “we.”
(How this works has bedeviled moral philosophers for centuries. I don’t have the answer. I’m only clinging to a strict definition of self-interest because that makes more conceptual sense to me.)
GregB
A rising tide lifts the peasants so that they are much easier to hit with a harpoon fired from the yacht.
All hail Ayn.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Spaghetti Lee: now that’s funny
Spaghetti Lee
@FlipYrWhig:
“I can’t wait to see how the Obots try to explain _this_ away, amirite?”
True. Maybe I have trouble seeing it because I’m more sympathetic to that group these days, or because on this blog at least, they seem to be fewer in number. But I definitely think that there are assholes on both sides of that debate, because your opinion on tactics and how to get people on your side has nothing to do with whether you’re an asshole or not, and people should be able to disagree on tactics without telling the other people how stupid and delusional they are.
There’s always a layer of self-righteousness and melodrama in most debates. I can live with that. What annoys me is people thinking that’s the most important part of the debate.
But I can’t help thinking it’s cheap and easy to be principled and uncompromising _on the Internet_.
Also true. I’m of the opinion that the internet in general makes people crazy. It’s not a new opinion, but I think it’s important to remember when threads start going to shit.
The civil liberties stuff has taken an odd turn and become an exceptional case where the principle itself is, to most of the front pagers and a lot of the commenters, praiseworthy in its own right.
I think it’s because the civil liberties issue feels more hopeless right now to that issue’s adherents than, say, gay marriage or union activism. People can get self-righteous about their principles, sure, but I’m more forgiving when that’s all they have to hold on to.
FlipYrWhig
@fuckwit: No, don’t get me wrong, I love the way you explain it, and words like “social” and “solidarity” are key. It’s just conceptually mysterious how that quantum leap from self-interest to what you’re reclaiming as the tribe actually occurs. I think it has a lot to do with stories and emotions and sympathetic identification, and very little to do with explanations of material benefit of the kind DougJ suggested in the original post. Which is why I would prefer not to scoff at sentiment and the sentimental mode. People didn’t use to mock us as “bleeding hearts” for nothing.
Spaghetti Lee
@FlipYrWhig:
I’m not accusing you of Randism, but that’s a big objectivist thing, that self-interest and group-interest can’t intersect-the group is always a parasite to the individual, as if groups aren’t composed of individuals themselves or something.
What liberals need to reclaim is the idea that the common good helps the goals of individuals: if we live in a stable society with good schools and good infrastructure and a functioning government and a healthy environment then we’ll be more likely to individual succeed. The reason IGMFY has been the rule of the day so much is that we as a society seem to have just abandoned that notion in a lot of ways.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee:
Part of the problem is that his is so damned obvious to most sane people that is hard actually to advocate for it. To me, it is akin to having to explain that people should breathe.
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
People don’t build coalitions and then suddenly come out with radical left-wing agendas — because if they try, their coalition of mild-mannered middle-of-the-roaders bails out fast with panic and fear in their eyes.
I mean, that makes lots of sense. People need to be honest about what they believe in, but I interpret that as explaining your beliefs to people and how they’re good for everyone and how they’re just and moral and whatever else, until you convince them on the merits. Your average citizen isn’t going to be so impressed with someone’s sheer zeal that they’ll say, “wow, I don’t know what that person thinks, but they’re so magnetic and inspiring that I’ll join up with them!” That’s just…not how people work, really, in my experience.
Suzanne
Moral arguments may not be a political “winner”, but that hardly makes them worthless. True, you may be able to convince more people to see things your way by pointing out what’s in it for them. But some of us aren’t in it purely for ourselves, and I think a greater sense of shared destiny and genuine compassion are things from which our public and political life would absolutely benefit. I think that when we forget this, we totally lose the plot.
BTW, I think liberals did themselves a great disservice many years ago by allowing the Talibangelicals to brand themselves as the moral group, and the Repukes the moral party. Why the fuck did we let that shit go uncountered?!
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Also, even if someone is in it for him/herself, that person probably wouldn’t mind a nice moral argument as cover.
scav
@FlipYrWhig I’m guessing my thinking is influenced by mathematical optimization concepts. There’s hardline adherence to a strict optimizing function (myself on top / my tribe on top!) thinking and then there’s exploring the production frontier, looking for tradeoffs and for pareto improvement, juggling fairness and acknowledging there are others being impacted.
FlipYrWhig
@Spaghetti Lee: To clarify, I would never say that self-interest and group-interest are invariably at odds, in that Rand-esque way. The group clearly doesn’t thwart the self. I mean, think of any relatively healthy family, most packs of animals. Solidarity everywhere. (BTW, this is why I love the original Ice Age movie. It’s 100% about all of this stuff and is nicely non-heteronormative in exploring it. But I digress.). The self-group leap works like a charm, it’s just conceptually difficult to explain why it does if you try to think it through as a scaling up of self-interest. That’s why some philosophers and later cognitive science folks started to explore if it might be inborn, “mirror neurons” and that sort of thing.
Spaghetti Lee
@Suzanne:
But some of us aren’t in it purely for ourselves, and I think a greater sense of shared destiny and genuine compassion are things from which our public and political life would absolutely benefit.
I agree, and furthermore, I think most people want to see themselves as compassionate and connected to others. Part of human nature is self-interest, sure, but part of it is wanting to belong. And I think liberals could win a lot of converts by talking about how our philosophy is compassionate and humanistic in basic, everyday ways.
Ayn Rand tried to create a philosophy that would take empathy and compassion out of the equation-set them up as dangerous, actually. The result turned out to be one of the most morally grotesque ideologies ever created. Any liberal who thinks we should downplay morality and play up self-interest as a matter of course needs to take a long hard look at objectivists, and wonder how they got that way.
FlipYrWhig
@scav: Ooh, I like that.
Sorry to go on like this… I’m fascinated by the history of these kinds of things and they tend to be buzzing around my head, especially when I’m supposed to be working on something else.
Suzanne
@Spaghetti Lee: Absolutely concur.
We might win some elections by promising people that they’ll get stuff, and it might even be true, but, quite frankly, people who can be persuaded to give something as precious as their vote to whomever gives them the bigger gift basket are shitty people, and I really don’t know why we would want to glorify that.
IGMFY is for REPUBLICANS, y’all.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne: I think it was because we (OK, not me specifically, because I was a kid then) figured, “When they say ‘morality’ they mean sex. Everyone likes sex, so we win, infinity!”
Actually one person who likes to talk about liberalism through a prism of morality is… Barack Obama. But it tends to get sneered at as hollow eloquence. And I won’t fault anyone for doing that. When liberal policy has been underwhelming lately, rhetoric about morality is a cold consolation. It’s a good way to talk about politics and ideology, but not a great way to move legislation through Congress. Then again, nothing really is.
Keith G
@Spaghetti Lee: Maybe Mclaren was simplifying a very large idea. Zeal can be an essential early step. And, it can be just one of the blocks that shore up a political enterprise.
Patrick Henry and also the Sons of Liberty were zealots and rabble rousers. They played importants roles and yet once the actual Revolution commenced, different skill sets were required. So, other individuals stepped in to fill these new needs.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: Unions are how self interest scales up. And churches. And the Knights of Columbus fraternal life insurance. And REI. I think the devil’s greatest accomplishment was convincing us that self-interest requires that we not work in solidarity.
karen
@Spaghetti Lee:
I’m not pragmatic to be part of an in-group. I’m pragmatic because I’d rather have some of the loaf than nothing. I look at everything as a pro and con. If the pros outweigh the cons, then I can deal with it.
Nothing is perfect. No one is perfect. There are things any President in this era will do. Democrat or Republican. No matter who because if they pledged not to, they would not win the election. With any President there will be Patriot Act issues, NSA issues and war issues. Drone issues. If that’s the case, I’d rather have the lesser of the two evils because at least I’ll get some things that matter to me.
The truth is as much as people say they don’t want war (and a lot don’t) there are other people who see war as a jobs program (they work in weapons plants) or are scared of another 9/11 or just are not comfortable with the idea of pacifism. And unfortunately, they are the ones who vote.
And now they’re the only people who have the access or means to vote in a lot of states.
jomo
This is a fantastic thread. Spent an entire train ride reading it and figuring out where I fall and why the hell Chomsky and Greenwald piss me off to the degree that they do. Fact is the center -left and even sensible right of this country is massive and encompasses those for whom left wing politics will improve their personal situations – and fellow travelers who make more money but who feel a moral imperative to move the country leftward. There are those who will fight and agitate – and those who will empathize but who will not want to get too dirty. Interesting thing is that the right wing has never been as agitated as when there is a centrist Democrat in power. Takes away their center – gives them nothing to stand on – makes them insane. Of course it makes the left wing of the party insane too. Big messy party.
priscianus jr
Moral arguments and pragmatic arguments are complimentary. The most blatant realpolitik can be clothed in moral rationalizations, and policies based on morality can (and should) be clothed in pragmatic arguments.
On the other hand, Henry Kissinger types think morality is for sissies, so they will not stoop to morality, while puritans of both the left and right do everything in order that it be witnessed by either God or the Universe, as the case may be, damn the torpedoes.
My advice is, when you do something for a moral purpose, frame it pragmatically. Those who agree with the morality will still get it, and those who don’t respond to moral arguments may well respond to pragmatic ones. Like, you want to save this forest not because you love cute little bears, but because it’ helps the economy. And you need to show that. And by the way, you CAN show that.
hrumpole
“Only through the process of objectification–by seeing the self as other–can we free ourselves from our Cartesian prisons and shuffle off the oppressive demands of the bourgeois power structure.” Pass the mental kleenex–cleanup on navel 2. Now please pass the bong and the cheetohs. I wanna watch “Space Jam” again.
You either need different hobbies or better weed.
Matt McIrvin
@fuckwit:
On the other hand… the more broad and inclusive the tribe is, the more likely it is to split over internal disagreements and collapse in civil war. And that’s a large part of what makes this difficult.
Matt McIrvin
@kc: The weird thing about the Randians is that a lot of them aren’t even rich. They claim to be all about self-interest, but they’re not even pursuing self-interest; they’re fanboys for people who were better at being self-interested than they are, and they behave altruistically, just selectively toward billionaires and bosses.
I don’t understand it either.