tsutsifrutsi:

nostalgebraist:

I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago.  There’s a specific thing there but I’m just not sure how to phrase it.

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you.  When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it.  And you tend to your collection.

I’ve always thought of the thing most “grey tribe but not necessarily rationalist-associating” people possess to be Nietzscheanism.

First, I think everyone you’re describing here has what people call a systematizing tendency: a desire for the world to have pattern and meaning. I think there is a baser level to this, though: a fundamental desire to perceive the “truth” of events and of workings, even through your inadequate sensory apparatus. It’s necessary, when you don’t have all the facts neatly laid out, to use your brain—specifically, to apply knowledge of patterns in the truth of things—to derive the truth, or at least something that is the closest to truth that you can get from the data you have. And so, from this desire for understanding, comes a desire for pattern-knowledge.

Following from that comes the belief—entirely implicit in your description—that nobody else has “the answer”; that nobody else’s imposed epistemic structure can be taken on faith. Most people come to pattern-knowledge as “common wisdom” or “religious teachings” or whatever else. But if you have already formed a desire for patterns that will help you comprehend truth before you get this exposure, you will see the models of the world offered by others as lacking: basically, they don’t have much predictive power. Others can take comfort in these models, or engage in social stroking through them, but since they don’t do work—and you’re expecting useful work out of your mental model—they aren’t for you.

Seeing no world-models on offer that are serviceable, you come to that conclusion that you must labor to construct your own epistemic model of the world. Perhaps you can take some good parts of others’ models, but you can’t take anyone at their word on what parts are good; you have to test the new patterns and evaluate their worth for yourself. You have to be your own ultimate philosopher, scientist, and ethicist. You have to stand equal to those that speak of truth-patterns, participating in the ecosystem of their creation as a peer, rather than a consumer. You have to be an Übermensch.

If you don’t screw up in this journey and end up in some attractor like Nihilism or Postmodernism, you tend to crash headlong into the grey tribe, because every time you independently derive a conclusion that clashes with red/blue tribe orthodoxy, the grey tribe tends to already be there looking at the same thing:

• Conclude that you want to “vote with your dollars” for medicine with the highest-ROI health outcomes? Everything in that category gets called “life-extension research.”
• Conclude that we could have more and healthier relationships through ongoing application of ideas from psychiatry+therapy? Almost anything you can try there puts you in the “polyamory community.”

Repeat ad nauseam, for everything the “grey tribe” does. The things the grey tribe has in common look like the sort of positions you’ll tend to arrive at when you go on an individualist pattern-seeking journey, ignoring the pattern-clusters anyone else happens to be congregating around. That’s not to say the grey tribe’s ideas are objectively better in any sense—they’re just the sort of ideas Nietzscheans arrive at on their own.

Of course, it’s a presumption here that you’ll see one of the most important patterns: that if nobody else’s model is very good, yours probably won’t be either—that you’re just making do and optimizing your model because you have to to understand, rather than because you think you can get anything truly right. That’s the difference between a grey-tribe Nietzschean and a movie supervillain. Luckily, we don’t tend to see many movie supervillains; it’s actually rather hard to feel a “follower-like” reverence for one’s own constructed model. Much easier to see it like an author sees a manuscript: always in need of one more tweak.

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As a side-note: I would posit that the “rationalist movement” is a particular pattern-cluster created by a bunch of ex-Nietzscheans: people who originally thought nobody had “the answer”, but after running into one-another, decided that the group of people that they met there, working together could maybe have (or create) “the answer.” There is no such thing as a Nietzschean follower, but there are people who consider themselves followers of the rationalist movement, who venerate rationalist “leaders” like Eliezer and Scott (when those are really just people who have managed to stay Nietzschean, and see themselves as peers in the Great Forum, rather than “followers” of their own considered philosophy.)

As you might expect, the people who still are Nietzscheans—and the newly-minted Nietzscheans just coming into things—feel put off by the “rationalist movement” just as much as by any other group saying it has “the answer.” Even though the rationalist movement’s “answer” is pretty good, in relative terms, a Nietzschean-by-bent cannot simply accept it, any more than they can accept any other tangled-and-opaque blob of truth-patterns.

Nietzscheans criticize the rationalist movement both because it is full of ex-Nietzscheans—people who a Nietzschean sees as “giving up” their cognitive autonomy, throwing away the ultimate goal of truth-seeking for comfort of shared context—and non-Nietzscheans, people who accepted the “wisdom” of the rationalists as equivalent to the wisdom of any other cult. (Though note that the latter was, largely, the point of the “rationalist movement”: getting non-Nietzschean follower types to at least put their faith in a world-model that isn’t brain-damaged.)

This is interesting, but I think it is very different from what I was talking about in the OP.  I also disagree with it in a more general sense.

First, I’m confused by your use of the word “Nietzschean.”  Admittedly I don’t know too much about Nietzsche, but I’ve read bits of Thus Spake Zarathustra and my impression was that being the Übermensch was about creating your own values (to replace those left by the death of God).  This is quite different from just “coming to your own conclusions about what is true,” which seems like a much more common thing; many people try to come to their own conclusions, but few people literally invent their own values.

This is largely just a semantic point, but not entirely so.  The connotations of terms like “Nietzschean” and “Übermensch” in the popular consciousness, which is consistent with the tone of Thus Spake Zarathustra, are ones of “pagan” self-assertion, radical audacity, the refusal to “bow down” to other people’s moral qualms.  This is not the temperament I was trying to capture in the OP, and indeed is sort of the opposite.

The most basic experience here isn’t audacity and standing tall, but fear and cowering; you start out being overwhelmed by the smallness of your mind relative to the complexity of reality, and feel vastly uncertain about any of your mental or physical choices.  This incidentally includes choices that are the default for your community, but the choice to question those doesn’t feel essential to the experience.  Of course they’re questionable, like everything else, but the distinction with the emotional weight here isn’t between socially default ideas and self-created ones, but between all ideas and the reality they are trying to grapple with.

(Indeed, I personally tend to feel more guilt and uncertainty about my non-default choices than my default choices.  Perhaps just for ordinary psychological reasons, but also because with default choices I feel I have a lower bound: many people do this, and some of them are unhappy, but generally it doesn’t unleash unprecedented horrors.  But with new ideas no one’s tried before, who knows?)

Second, you seem to be using “grey tribe” not as Scott intended it, but as @reddragdiva and others criticized it.  The “grey tribe,” like the other tribes, isn’t meant to be a set of ideas, but a big grab bag of correlated personal traits, some of which happen to be ideas.  And in particular, what determines whether you’ll end up “in the grey tribe” largely involves the non-intellectual traits.  So when you say things like “grey-tribe Nietzschean” you seem to be mixing up pure intellectual stances with messy “tribal” affiliations.  Maybe intellectual independence will lead me inexorably to polyamory (or whatever), but it won’t lead me inexorably to drinking Soylent or saying “sportsball.”  That was Scott’s point.

Now, you might ask: “okay, but how do you want me to refer to ‘the intellectual component of Grey Tribe traits’ without using the term ‘Grey Tribe’?”  The answer is that there is probably no simple shorthand, which is good; we should force ourselves to clarify which positions we’re talking about and why, if at all, they’re (necessarily or contingently) related.

If “the specific complex of beliefs of libertarian tech geeks” is a natural category in the space of ideas, that would be quite a surprise, like discovering that the code of conduct at Versailles was in fact written out in Plato’s world of Forms, and thus accessible to all seekers after truth.  If instead this specific complex is merely close to a natural category, we need to say what that category is, what qualities bind it together, and in particular, why almost no one but tech geeks, out of all the truth-seekers in the world, have ended up there.  Confucius and J.S. Mill and A. N. Whitehead and Charles Darwin and W. V. O. Quine were all married and apparently faithful men, but maybe if they’d known how to code, or lived in the Bay Area … 

Let’s look at the example of polyamory a little more.  I am poly myself, so clearly I must think it’s sometimes a good idea.  But I don’t think it will work for just anyone, or for any given combination of people; it’s worked for me so far, but I’m leery of generalizing much from that.  I certainly don’t see how it necessarily results from “application of ideas from psychiatry+therapy.”  Most therapists don’t seem to advocate it, after all, and not everyone sees “more relationships” as an appealing goal, even if it’s a possible one.

And of all the humans who have lived and sought truth, only a vanishing fraction have belonged to “the polyamory community.”  Likewise, the idea that life extension research is highest-ROI is something that relatively few people believe.  If you ask “why have certain people ended up in these positions?”, the answer seems to have a lot to do with the social networks they belong to and the inter-related ecology of ideas present there.  Life extension research has real intellectual appeal, but it is also a machine for generating ways of selling people supplement pills, and the traditional Californian enthusiasm for “alternative approaches to wellness” provides an environment in which one has an incentive to do such things.  Likewise, I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that polyamory appeals to people who live in the city where the Summer of Love once took place.

In sum, I don’t think that “Grey Tribe ideas” are what independent truth-seekers tend to come to naturally.  Most independent truth-seekers have not in fact come to them, and those that do tend to belong to the Grey Tribe (that messy social thing).  This, in turn, is one of the reasons I am uneasy with the rationalist community – not because they are too confident of their truth, but because their truth looks so much like the cluster of things that social forces have already produced.

Standing in the spot where the hippies once preached free love and natural foods, having marinated all our lives in the culture they shaped, we now discover that polyamory and the paleo diet are the necessary endpoint of any free reasoning mind?  It seems suspicious.  My priors incline toward certain other explanations.

(via tsutsifrutsi)

lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

The Righteous Mind is really interesting so far, but Haidt seems to be vacillating between

“psychologists should take more than just WEIRD people and harm/fairness morality into account if they want an accurate account of human moral reasoning” (completely sensible)

and

“people who only care about harm/fairness need to open their minds to other cultures with different moral foundations if they want to be good people” (much more contestable, and Haidt mostly seems to get this across through winks and nudges and jabs and doesn’t make an actual case)

This tension has come to the head in the highly confused section I just read, in which Haidt suggests that Bentham, and possibly Kant, were autistic (!) and uses this to make an attack on their philosophies (or their influence, or something).  Check out this highly scientific graph:

Haidt explains (if that is the word):

I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger’s syndrome. That would be an ad hominem argument, a logical error, and a mean thing to say. Besides, both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology have been enormously generative in philosophy and public policy.

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.²⁵ However, philosophy began retreating from observation and empathy in the nineteenth century, placing ever more emphasis on reasoning and systematic thought. As Western societies became more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, the minds of its intellectuals changed. They became more analytic and less holistic.²⁶ Utilitarianism and deontology became far more appealing to ethicists than Hume’s messy, pluralist, sentimentalist approach.

This trend explains why I found moral psychology so dull when I first studied it in graduate school. Kohlberg had embraced Kant’s rationalism. He created a theory in which moral development had one and only one end point: a full understanding of justice. This whole approach felt wrong to me. It was oversystemized and underempathized. It was The True Taste restaurant, serving up a one-receptor morality.²⁷

What is he saying here?  Utilitarianism and deonotology are not wrong as normative theories, apparently, but they don’t work as descriptive theories.  I am not sure why this bothers Haidt given that they are not supposed to be descriptive theories.  A descriptive theory, apparently, requires “observation … informed by empathy”; one has to wonder exactly where empathy fits into all of the carefully controlled, dispassionately designed psych studies Haidt has been reporting thus far.  Worse, the sorts of theories Haidt is complaining about here (normative theories like Bentham and Kant’s, or descriptive ones like Kohlberg’s) seem like precisely ones that try to remove what is outside the bounds of empathy – Kohlberg in particular proposed that children don’t start with innate moral senses but develop senses of justice by learning to put themselves in other children’s shoes.  Empathy can get us to these kinds of judgments, but not to the sort of judgments Haidt is enthusing about, which have to do with things like purity, hierarchy and sacredness.

(Possibly what Haidt means is that we should try to empathize with people who have those values?  But it is hard to see how to stop this from becoming an amoral relativism – I have to be able to empathize with people while still being able to say they are doing the wrong thing, or else I end up with “but you know, I can see Ted Bundy’s point of view, man.”  Anyway, he ought to be clearer if he is trying to say anything important.)

If I recall this section correctly, it seemed pretty clear to me that Haidt was criticizing Kohlberg for developing a descriptive account of morality according to which his own moral intuitions just happened to shake out at the highest attainable level of development.  The fact that broad swaths of humanity never reach the exalted plane of post-conventional reasoning (including many of Kohlberg’s fellow citizens outside the faculty lounge) was not considered a serious obstacle to the theory.  They were just wrong, or perhaps deficient.  Haidt is saying: if your theory describes almost all of humanity as literally morally retarded, it’s not strictly logically necessary that the theory be incomplete, but you might want to pause and take stock.

Now that I think of it, Carol Gilligan, one of Kohlberg’s former students, has similarly criticized the theory for presuming an extreme male style of reasoning (shades of autism again).  Supposedly young girls were more often marked down for suggesting that Heinz the Ideal Liberal Subject talk to the pharmacist and reach an agreement about his sick wife’s medicine (how embarrassingly Stage Three) rather than boldly liberating it in the name of net aggregate social utility.  The criticisms are directly analogous: both Haidt and Gilligan charge Kohlberg with mistaking a difference in mode of moral reasoning for an absence of moral reasoning altogether.

As for Bentham and Kant, my reading here is that Haidt is criticizing these traditions for taking the moral foundations that WEIRDOs de-emphasize and rounding them down to exactly zero, leaving entire generations of serious-idea-takers to come with a giant anxiogenic mess.  At best, their systems omit entire spheres of human experience that are probably necessary, even if only in trace amounts, for flourishing as a well-adjusted human being.  At worst, they leave you unable to explain why you should not lie to save the Jews in the attic, or donate both kidneys to strangers. To the extent that most people manage to live sane lives while endorsing these systems, they do so by selectively ignoring them and falling back on heuristics or convention, and I don’t blame them one bit. (Does any of this sound familiar, LW-adjacent tumblr?)

As Haidt would say, they are cooking with a cookbook that doctrinally denies that salt has anything to do with cuisine at all, then cheating a little bit at the end and adding soy sauce for reasons they can’t articulate.

On a closing note, I’ve noticed that many of your disagreements with writers get cashed out into charges of unclarity, as with here: why doesn’t Haidt just say what he means instead of all of this insinuation and pantomime, &c.  This one in particular surprises me because I found Haidt to be almost repetitive in his effort to get his ideas across: iirc each chapter both begins and ends with a summary of its most important theses, often literally in bullet points.  Perhaps it’s worth asking: is Haidt really being that cryptic here, or do you just disagree with him?

That all makes sense, thanks.  For the record, I did not get this out of Haidt’s exposition, and found him actually unclear in this section; that was surprising since, as you say, his exposition is usually repetitive and schematic.

I do think I have been noticing a repeated strain of confusion between normative and descriptive in the book.  Specifically, Haidt will make some perfectly good descriptive points – his descriptive-level criticisms of Kohlberg and Turiel seem entirely fair, and include experiments he conducted which seem to refute Turiel – but he will also insinuate that Kohlberg, Turiel et. al. just don’t know how to be good people, and that they would do well to (say) spend some time in India like he has.

It’s not that this is necessarily incoherent.  Haidt does say at one point that he thinks the theories of Kohlberg and Turiel became popular because of the political climate of their time, and so a bad descriptive theory was adopted because it fit (probably insufficiently considered) normative prejudices.  (More broadly, it’s hard to purely separate normative from descriptive here because, as you note, one must make moral judgments in order to assess “moral development,” and these judgments can be questioned.)  But I do think he is unclear on all this – for instance at one point he says

In this book I’ll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

which seems fair when he applies it to Kohlberg and Turiel.  But elsewhere we hear about how the good “sentimentalist” programme of Hume was disrupted by “rationalists” like Kant and Bentham.  With Kant I can see this, as he really was a pure reason kind of guy, but with Bentham it confuses me.  Yes, Bentham reduces everything to the harm foundation, but this is just a claim about what “real morality” consists in, and is no more or less inherently “reasoning-based” than some other system which includes more foundations.

In particular, there are plenty of people (I am close to being one of them) who actually just make harm-only judgments naturally – Haidt saw this with his WEIRD subjects.  I’m sure that Haidt can show that even arch-WEIRDos have purity foundations as measured by millisecond timing differences or whatever, but as a matter of fact these people often profess to find purity-based arguments intuitively unappealing or abhorrent, and it seems perverse to suggest that in doing so they are in a constant battle of using “reason” to overcome their natural sentiments.  If this were the case, broadening one’s foundations would only be a matter of letting go and embracing our gut feelings, when in fact many of us WEIRD types just don’t find much purity (etc.) there when we do so, and the proposed remedies are instead things like “spend a lot of time immersing yourself in another culture until its norms start to become second nature (which they weren’t before)” or “read a book called ‘The Righteous Mind’ which is full of reason-based, systematic arguments.”

Things get even more confusing when Haidt throws in Baron-Cohen’s systemizing and empathizing scales.  He seems to associate “high systemizing, low empathizing” with rationalism.  The empathizing part makes a certain amount of sense (if you look to empathy less often you’ll probably look to your own reason more?), but I don’t know what to make of the systemizing part.  Is Haidt saying that his own theory, with its six carefully delinated “receptors,” is somehow less an instance of “systemizing” than the theories of Kant or Bentham?  (The subsection introducing this stuff is called “Attack of the Systemizers.”)

I guess it should be clear by now that, even though I find this book very interesting, I am also finding it obnoxious.  Some of that is no doubt just the friction of encountering someone I disagree with.  But it’s also a frustration with the way Haidt is mobilizing the rhetoric of “cold systems vs. warm empathy” for what in the end seems like just another system, and for a set of judgments which don’t strike me as very empathetic (”if you say you only care about harm, you’re just deceiving yourself about your true feelings”).  Haidt can make emotional appeals for his system if he wishes, but I am uneasy with the notion that his system is somehow uniquely appealing on an emotional level, as though it is what we all feel deep down and would accept if only we were not so prejudiced toward pure reason.

ETA: I also don’t think the sort of “selective ignorance” you mention is really an ignorance of (say) utilitarianism per se.  If thinking hard about utility drives you into psychological paralysis and prevents you from doing anything, then “thinking hard about utility” is probably not the solution endorsed by utilitarianism.  This means that “being a utilitarian with a human mind” is a very tricky problem, but it doesn’t mean that utiliarianism is wrong.  (Compare: I often get more work done on the whole if I force myself to take breaks once in a while, but this is not a refutation of the claim “getting more work done is better, all else being equal” – it’s a technique for seeking that goal given the nature of the human animal.)

Sorry, it’s been a long week and I haven’t gotten back to this sooner.

I think I understand our disagreement now, so let me just state my interpretation of Haidt boldly:

Haidt has a descriptive theory about how human beings reason morally.  This includes the analytic, systematizing, stuff about how people perceive affirmations of, and challenges to, their values.  It also includes observations about what forms of social organization enable humans to be fulfilled, relaxed, cooperative apes and what turns them into distrusting, alienated little balls of anxiety.

If you believe that descriptive account, it probably can’t help but shape your normative opinions at least a little bit, just as knowledge of nutrition shapes one’s judgments of what children are owed.  If you think that baseline moral activity is more akin to perception than reason, you will be more inclined to sentiment and tradition than to argument and rational reform as signposts to human flourishing.  Of course Haidt doesn’t reject the latter out of hand, but he’s saying they’re not the whole of axiology.

I don’t necessarily see the tension, though: you can have an analytic, systematizing descriptive theory while remaining much more cautious and holistic about what is to be done.  The field of medicine seems mostly this way to me, for example.

Lastly, Haidt’s complaint about utilitarianism isn’t that it’s uncomputable or whatever; it’s that it keeps giving horrifying answers.  It’s a seemingly well-stocked pantry on an ocean-bound ship that ends up causing scurvy for reasons mysterious to the cook.  Or a never-ending buffet of bullets to be bitten.  Don’t feel like donating more than some nice round percentage of your income?  Too bad: net aggregate social utility.  Like your internal organs and prefer to keep them?  Too bad: the greatest happiness for the greatest number.  (I’m afraid I don’t take much comfort in @oxymandias271′s claim that mandatory organ donation is usually unwarranted, given the current shelf life on kidneys.)  Think that Tom Robinson, not having done it, ought to go free on account of the intrinsic nature of justice?  Not if it causes a big enough riot!  Think that an hour of torture is worse than thirty billion rabbit orgasms are good?… &c.

(There are more sophisticated formulations of utilitarianism than what I’m criticizing here, but they are all sophisticated in the same direction: away from the calculus of pleasure and pain.)

These are all standard issue objections and I’m not saying anything new here.  But what Haidt claims is that, as a matter of positive fact, moral systems of this form are deeply unsatisfying to human beings–even to the WEIRDOs most inclined to accept them–precisely because they fail to account for the other “moral taste receptors”.  Consider the “moral dumbfounding” evidenced by your own (smart and thoughtful) followers when asked to explain whether or not it is wrong to fuck a dead chicken.  It sets off screaming alarm klaxons and a blinking marquee reading DO NOT WANT in our minds.  Yet the act itself generates utils.  Thus are we forced either to confabulate ethical just-so stories about why it’s actually a util-sink, when you really think about it, or just choke on the bullet. The idea that it might be wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with aggregate welfare, in any sense that we could actually measure, never comes up.

Thanks for the response.  I can’t help but feel like Haidt’s book is really just not very well written, in that you’re capable of making me understand what he’s saying via these brief glosses when he still hasn’t done it in 175 pages.

So, for instance, when he talks about utilitarianism, he uses the “restaurant with only sugar” metaphor.  Which, I take it, is a way of metaphorically describing the fact that utilitarianism “keeps giving horrifying answers” – it gives answers that seem wrong because they ignore our other receptors, just as a sugar-only meal would seem wrong because it ignores the other four tastes.

What makes this unclear to me, in reading Haidt’s book, is that this story – that utilitarian answers don’t feel right, and even WEIRDos end up saying “my mind says no but the theory says yes, so uh, yes, I guess?” – with another story, which is that some people’s judgments actually are based on one or two foundations.  That is, a crucial issue I think he needs to address is: how many WEIRDos are actually just comfortable with utilitarianism or deontology?

He mentions that some people look for “hidden harms,” indicating discomfort which they’re trying to rationalize within the theory.  But clearly the core message can’t be that we all have the same intuitions, and that the WEIRDos are just playing a game where they ignore some of theirs.  Haidt mentions that he went to India and initially found it “shocking and dissonant.”  Indeed, many WEIRDos find the focus on loyalty, hierarchy and purity rather than fairness and harm in these societies to be actively (morally) repulsive at first (intuitive) glance.  It’s not just that they have some theory leading them around; they actually just appear to care more about some foundations than others, intuitively.  Likewise, when Haidt talks about the differences between liberals and conservatives, it looks like a real difference in intuitions rather than one of the parties getting pwned by their abstract theory.

(I mean, surely you can’t reconstruct the typical American lefty’s reaction to “America!!!” rhetoric as “well, they care about loyalty, which my moral receptors say is good … and thus I intuitively react with warmth to this sentiment … but wait … utilitarianism says that loyalty per se does not matter!  Shit!  Owned again!”)

We can see the same thing come up in the chicken debate, which I think you have misconstrued a bit.  I personally do have a negative reaction to the event, but (in my original post) was wondering if this was less a reaction to the impurity of the act itself as to what it says about the guy doing it.  I raised the hypothetical where the guy is forced to do it for some reason, and would never do it for its intrinsic “appeal,” which would actually neutralize my negative reaction, even though the chicken still gets fucked and the impurity still happens.  I thought this was an interesting alternative to Haidt’s analysis.

Then a bunch of people said that they actually didn’t see any problem with the chicken-fucking scenario.  Like, they weren’t “choking on the bullet”; the DO NOT WANT reaction was actually not there.  Several people actually seemed kind of startled that I had this intuition, and one even said it scared her.  I was as surprised by this reaction as you probably are, but it didn’t look like people scrambling to avoid the intuition; what happened is that I stated an intuition that I thought was pretty universal, and a bunch of people replied, “you have that intuition?  Weeeeeeird!”

Which, again, brings up the question of how many people are just natural utilitarians.  Or, less restrictively, how much the variation in responses to moral dilemmas is a result of actual variation in moral taste receptors, rather than variation in abstract theory.

A sugar-only restaurant would indeed be silly.  But then, people’s ability to taste bitterness varies genetically, and we ought to take this into account.  (Of course, we could then ask: “should we let the people who can’t taste bitter boss the rest of us around and make our food horribly bitter, just because it doesn’t bother them?”  But in any event, encouraging the non-bitter-tasters to really get in touch with their intuitions, and just discard their rationalizations about how broccoli isn’t bitter, is not a helpful approach.)

(via lambdaphagy)

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:

To put it more briefly: it’s not that I’m immune to emotional appeals.  But “you’d really agree with me if only you were as empathetic as I am and not deluded by your fixation on pure reason” is not a very good emotional appeal.

Yep. Saying “you’re too beepy boopy” is not a good discourse strategy.

But the thing is, I think it is true sometimes. Like, at some point in the midst of a “dust mote versus torture” conversation, I often feel like I’m peering into a conversation among insect-like aliens discussing the care of their human cattle.

Which is the point, I think. There is something that happens when you talk to the subject of your discourse, as opposed to when you talk about some non-human thing. And empathy is part of this. “Systematizing” is fine, but we’re the system, and that matters a lot.

People who seem very eager to deal with their abstractions, while forgetting that I’m the thing they are abstracting, well that can be hella off-putting. Don’t be surprised if that discourse strategy also fails.

Sure, but what I am responding to is the specific emotional appeal Jonathan Haidt is trying to make in The Righteous Mind.  The following passage describes the sort of worldview he thinks we ought to empathize with:

One cause of confusion was that I had brought with me two incompatible identities. On one hand, I was a twenty-nine-year-old liberal atheist with very definite views about right and wrong. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those open-minded anthropologists I had read so much about and had studied with, such as Alan Fiske and Richard Shweder. My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and dissonance. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen, not speaking to me the entire evening. I was told to be stricter with my servants, and to stop thanking them for serving me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my dissonance to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. Wherever I went, people were kind to me. And when you’re grateful to people, it’s easier to adopt their perspective. My elephant leaned toward them, which made my rider search for moral arguments in their defense. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.

The value system he characterizes as insufficiently empathetic is not (just) utilitarianism, but the broader values of “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic” people, which doubtlessly includes you and me and most people we interact with.  (”Going to an American university,” for instance, is generally sufficient to classify someone as WEIRD; they don’t need to be especially beep-boopist beyond what’s normal for American university students.)

Haidt says that we WEIRDos are too quick to dismiss patriarchal, traditional societies because we are too quick to dismiss the sort of intuitions (”ethic of community” and “ethic of divinity”) that justify them, preferring instead to think in terms of harms and individual rights.  He classifies this as a failure of “empathy.”  Of course, one could also claim (as many have claimed) that the proponents of these societies are failing to empathize with the members of those societies who get the short end of the hierarchical stick.  The notion of “empathy” is being used in a strange way here, I think.

That doesn’t seem like a counterargument at all, it appears to be equivocating between the technical and colloquial definitions of empathy. “WEIRD” (if it means what I think it means) criticisms of traditional societies lack empathy, defined as willingness or ability to envision the mental state of others, and because of this lack of empathy they are nonfunctional. WEIRDs then respond that this doesn’t count, because the traditional societies they criticize lack empathy, defined as feeling bad for people, and because of this lack of empathy they are cruel. 

Therefore their own lack of empathy doesn’t count? “You don’t understand the thing you are criticizing” – “But the thing I am criticizing is cruel, so that doesn’t count!” That doesn’t actually address the argument. Something being cruel does not mean you are excused from understanding why people do it.

Well, it’s kind of subtle.

Yes, one might say that (some) people who dismiss traditional moralities are displaying a lack of empathy.  And yes, “but those societies are cruel!” would not be a successful counter-argument.

But what Haidt is saying is a little different.  He’s not just saying “you WEIRD people should have more empathy for traditional societies.”  I’m not sure I would agree with that, but I would see the line of thought there and I wouldn’t have the same problem with it.

What Haidt is saying is “you WEIRD people have a morality whose basis does not contain enough empathy; you want to put everything in a clean system based on pure reason without looking at people’s actual moral intuitions.”

And the problem with this is that “WEIRD people’s moral intuitions” are a subset of “people’s moral intuitions.”  You could just as well say that the traditional societies ought to have more empathy for the WEIRD people and their intuitions.  Haidt faces a situation where different people have different intuitions, and divides them artificially into “the group that is perfectly OK” and “the group that ought to really have more empathy for the other group, jeez, why is it that you guys think you get to be special and different.”

(Okay, admittedly the WEIRD group is a lot smaller than the traditional groups.  Is this why Haidt makes this division?  I don’t know.  He doesn’t say.)

Now, where does the part about traditional societies being cruel come in?  Well, I brought it up because it’s another reason why Haidt’s “WEIRD = unempathetic” grouping is not intuitively appealing.  Appeals to empathy have commonly been used to advocate for WEIRD-style morality.  (”How would you feel if you were one of the people at the bottom of the hierarchy?”)  So, if you were going to break people down into “WEIRD” and “traditional” and decide that one of those groups is “the one that needs more empathy,” it’s not at all obvious that the WEIRD group would be the natural choice.  Many people would say the traditionalists are most in need of more empathy.

Now, is there a good reason to target exactly one of these groups with an appeal for empathy?  Probably not.  Probably they both could use more empathy, albeit empathy of different kinds.  But this choice is Haidt’s, not mine.  He specifically says that WEIRD morality, and its major figures like Kant and Bentham, are distinctly lacking in empathy (the implication is, “lacking in empathy relative to everyone else”).  If you get to the point of making a graph where the founders of a moral tradition are plotted as having very low empathy, and one of them is inside a box labelled with a clinical diagnosis … you’re clearly saying that this tradition is less empathetic than the norm.

Which just doesn’t seem convincing to me.  I can buy that WEIRD people should maybe have more empathy in a specifically defined way, for certain specific people.  But I can’t buy that WEIRD morality is somehow intrinsically connected to lower-than-normal empathy as a personality trait.  Haidt’s description of Bhubaneswar, for instance, does not exactly make it sound like a empathetic paradise putting our WEIRD society to shame.  (”I was told to be stricter with my servants, and to stop thanking them for serving me.”)

(via brazenautomaton)

fierceawakening:

marcusseldon:

fierceawakening:

nostalgebraist:

lambdaphagy:

nostalgebraist:

The Righteous Mind is really interesting so far, but Haidt seems to be vacillating between

“psychologists should take more than just WEIRD people and harm/fairness morality into account if they want an accurate account of human moral reasoning” (completely sensible)

and

“people who only care about harm/fairness need to open their minds to other cultures with different moral foundations if they want to be good people” (much more contestable, and Haidt mostly seems to get this across through winks and nudges and jabs and doesn’t make an actual case)

This tension has come to the head in the highly confused section I just read, in which Haidt suggests that Bentham, and possibly Kant, were autistic (!) and uses this to make an attack on their philosophies (or their influence, or something).  Check out this highly scientific graph:

Haidt explains (if that is the word):

I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger’s syndrome. That would be an ad hominem argument, a logical error, and a mean thing to say. Besides, both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology have been enormously generative in philosophy and public policy.

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.²⁵ However, philosophy began retreating from observation and empathy in the nineteenth century, placing ever more emphasis on reasoning and systematic thought. As Western societies became more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, the minds of its intellectuals changed. They became more analytic and less holistic.²⁶ Utilitarianism and deontology became far more appealing to ethicists than Hume’s messy, pluralist, sentimentalist approach.

This trend explains why I found moral psychology so dull when I first studied it in graduate school. Kohlberg had embraced Kant’s rationalism. He created a theory in which moral development had one and only one end point: a full understanding of justice. This whole approach felt wrong to me. It was oversystemized and underempathized. It was The True Taste restaurant, serving up a one-receptor morality.²⁷

What is he saying here?  Utilitarianism and deonotology are not wrong as normative theories, apparently, but they don’t work as descriptive theories.  I am not sure why this bothers Haidt given that they are not supposed to be descriptive theories.  A descriptive theory, apparently, requires “observation … informed by empathy”; one has to wonder exactly where empathy fits into all of the carefully controlled, dispassionately designed psych studies Haidt has been reporting thus far.  Worse, the sorts of theories Haidt is complaining about here (normative theories like Bentham and Kant’s, or descriptive ones like Kohlberg’s) seem like precisely ones that try to remove what is outside the bounds of empathy – Kohlberg in particular proposed that children don’t start with innate moral senses but develop senses of justice by learning to put themselves in other children’s shoes.  Empathy can get us to these kinds of judgments, but not to the sort of judgments Haidt is enthusing about, which have to do with things like purity, hierarchy and sacredness.

(Possibly what Haidt means is that we should try to empathize with people who have those values?  But it is hard to see how to stop this from becoming an amoral relativism – I have to be able to empathize with people while still being able to say they are doing the wrong thing, or else I end up with “but you know, I can see Ted Bundy’s point of view, man.”  Anyway, he ought to be clearer if he is trying to say anything important.)

If I recall this section correctly, it seemed pretty clear to me that Haidt was criticizing Kohlberg for developing a descriptive account of morality according to which his own moral intuitions just happened to shake out at the highest attainable level of development.  The fact that broad swaths of humanity never reach the exalted plane of post-conventional reasoning (including many of Kohlberg’s fellow citizens outside the faculty lounge) was not considered a serious obstacle to the theory.  They were just wrong, or perhaps deficient.  Haidt is saying: if your theory describes almost all of humanity as literally morally retarded, it’s not strictly logically necessary that the theory be incomplete, but you might want to pause and take stock.

Now that I think of it, Carol Gilligan, one of Kohlberg’s former students, has similarly criticized the theory for presuming an extreme male style of reasoning (shades of autism again).  Supposedly young girls were more often marked down for suggesting that Heinz the Ideal Liberal Subject talk to the pharmacist and reach an agreement about his sick wife’s medicine (how embarrassingly Stage Three) rather than boldly liberating it in the name of net aggregate social utility.  The criticisms are directly analogous: both Haidt and Gilligan charge Kohlberg with mistaking a difference in mode of moral reasoning for an absence of moral reasoning altogether.

As for Bentham and Kant, my reading here is that Haidt is criticizing these traditions for taking the moral foundations that WEIRDOs de-emphasize and rounding them down to exactly zero, leaving entire generations of serious-idea-takers to come with a giant anxiogenic mess.  At best, their systems omit entire spheres of human experience that are probably necessary, even if only in trace amounts, for flourishing as a well-adjusted human being.  At worst, they leave you unable to explain why you should not lie to save the Jews in the attic, or donate both kidneys to strangers. To the extent that most people manage to live sane lives while endorsing these systems, they do so by selectively ignoring them and falling back on heuristics or convention, and I don’t blame them one bit. (Does any of this sound familiar, LW-adjacent tumblr?)

As Haidt would say, they are cooking with a cookbook that doctrinally denies that salt has anything to do with cuisine at all, then cheating a little bit at the end and adding soy sauce for reasons they can’t articulate.

On a closing note, I’ve noticed that many of your disagreements with writers get cashed out into charges of unclarity, as with here: why doesn’t Haidt just say what he means instead of all of this insinuation and pantomime, &c.  This one in particular surprises me because I found Haidt to be almost repetitive in his effort to get his ideas across: iirc each chapter both begins and ends with a summary of its most important theses, often literally in bullet points.  Perhaps it’s worth asking: is Haidt really being that cryptic here, or do you just disagree with him?

That all makes sense, thanks.  For the record, I did not get this out of Haidt’s exposition, and found him actually unclear in this section; that was surprising since, as you say, his exposition is usually repetitive and schematic.

I do think I have been noticing a repeated strain of confusion between normative and descriptive in the book.  Specifically, Haidt will make some perfectly good descriptive points – his descriptive-level criticisms of Kohlberg and Turiel seem entirely fair, and include experiments he conducted which seem to refute Turiel – but he will also insinuate that Kohlberg, Turiel et. al. just don’t know how to be good people, and that they would do well to (say) spend some time in India like he has.

It’s not that this is necessarily incoherent.  Haidt does say at one point that he thinks the theories of Kohlberg and Turiel became popular because of the political climate of their time, and so a bad descriptive theory was adopted because it fit (probably insufficiently considered) normative prejudices.  (More broadly, it’s hard to purely separate normative from descriptive here because, as you note, one must make moral judgments in order to assess “moral development,” and these judgments can be questioned.)  But I do think he is unclear on all this – for instance at one point he says

In this book I’ll use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

which seems fair when he applies it to Kohlberg and Turiel.  But elsewhere we hear about how the good “sentimentalist” programme of Hume was disrupted by “rationalists” like Kant and Bentham.  With Kant I can see this, as he really was a pure reason kind of guy, but with Bentham it confuses me.  Yes, Bentham reduces everything to the harm foundation, but this is just a claim about what “real morality” consists in, and is no more or less inherently “reasoning-based” than some other system which includes more foundations.

In particular, there are plenty of people (I am close to being one of them) who actually just make harm-only judgments naturally – Haidt saw this with his WEIRD subjects.  I’m sure that Haidt can show that even arch-WEIRDos have purity foundations as measured by millisecond timing differences or whatever, but as a matter of fact these people often profess to find purity-based arguments intuitively unappealing or abhorrent, and it seems perverse to suggest that in doing so they are in a constant battle of using “reason” to overcome their natural sentiments.  If this were the case, broadening one’s foundations would only be a matter of letting go and embracing our gut feelings, when in fact many of us WEIRD types just don’t find much purity (etc.) there when we do so, and the proposed remedies are instead things like “spend a lot of time immersing yourself in another culture until its norms start to become second nature (which they weren’t before)” or “read a book called ‘The Righteous Mind’ which is full of reason-based, systematic arguments.”

Things get even more confusing when Haidt throws in Baron-Cohen’s systemizing and empathizing scales.  He seems to associate “high systemizing, low empathizing” with rationalism.  The empathizing part makes a certain amount of sense (if you look to empathy less often you’ll probably look to your own reason more?), but I don’t know what to make of the systemizing part.  Is Haidt saying that his own theory, with its six carefully delinated “receptors,” is somehow less an instance of “systemizing” than the theories of Kant or Bentham?  (The subsection introducing this stuff is called “Attack of the Systemizers.”)

I guess it should be clear by now that, even though I find this book very interesting, I am also finding it obnoxious.  Some of that is no doubt just the friction of encountering someone I disagree with.  But it’s also a frustration with the way Haidt is mobilizing the rhetoric of “cold systems vs. warm empathy” for what in the end seems like just another system, and for a set of judgments which don’t strike me as very empathetic (”if you say you only care about harm, you’re just deceiving yourself about your true feelings”).  Haidt can make emotional appeals for his system if he wishes, but I am uneasy with the notion that his system is somehow uniquely appealing on an emotional level, as though it is what we all feel deep down and would accept if only we were not so prejudiced toward pure reason.

ETA: I also don’t think the sort of “selective ignorance” you mention is really an ignorance of (say) utilitarianism per se.  If thinking hard about utility drives you into psychological paralysis and prevents you from doing anything, then “thinking hard about utility” is probably not the solution endorsed by utilitarianism.  This means that “being a utilitarian with a human mind” is a very tricky problem, but it doesn’t mean that utiliarianism is wrong.  (Compare: I often get more work done on the whole if I force myself to take breaks once in a while, but this is not a refutation of the claim “getting more work done is better, all else being equal” – it’s a technique for seeking that goal given the nature of the human animal.)

I really liked his book, In general, save two things:

Oh no, a moral system that doesn’t take into account everything I noticed! MUST BE AUTISM!

and

He loses me when he says WEIRDOs aren’t motivated by purity and then vaguely sneaks in some “yeah maybe a few people on the left are”

Has he ever actually interacted with an SJer?

Or an environmentalist? Or a new age health nut?

Or an aggressive vegan.

This is particularly odd in light of the sort of things Haidt is now saying about (more or less) social justice culture:

The goal [of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy] is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.

The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?

[…]

But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

I’m not claiming to have caught Haidt in an actual act of self-contradiction, but the contrast in the rhetoric is striking.  (The Righteous Mind reiterates again and again that reason is mostly used for justifying intuitive reactions and rarely feeds back to influence those reactions.  But now we have, in CBT, explicit reasoning that causes “your emotions follow your new interpretation.”)

(via fierceawakening)

fnord888:

nostalgebraist:

fierceawakening:

funereal-disease:

fierceawakening:

Can anyone tell me what the “bingo post” @slatestarscratchpad mentioned is? I really want to know what’s being discussed.

here you go 

(It’s weird, because I was actually browsing everydayfeminism last night, came across this cartoon, rolled my eyes at it, and moved on, not knowing that the VERY NEXT DAY there would be a huge Thing about it on my dash.)

Egh.

I don’t say I don’t hate men because I’m an antifeminist, I say it because hate isn’t aimable.

But, well, I sometimes think “antifeminist” is a cryptid or a beast in a medieval bestiary. They’re supposedly ALL AROUND US!!!! but I can never seem to find anyone who, like, actually thinks she shouldn’t vote.

“Antifeminist” seems to mean whatever the hell people dislike most.

This is a tangent, sort of, but it has been weird to read threads like this on tumblr when all week I’ve been absorbed in reading about my latest mini-obsession, which is Douglas Wilson’s church in Moscow, ID and the various scandals centering on it.

Wilson is an articulate, charismatic guy, and having read some of his blog posts and seen videos of him speaking, I can see why he inspires such reverence among his flock.  Which he does – and his flock is a tight-knit, insular enclave.  He has his own college which follows his idiosyncratic views about theology and classical Christian education; he has his own publishing house; etc.

And his views are … extreme, and horrible.  He believes in old-fashioned Christian patriarchy and very strict gender roles, he thinks all the terrible shit God tolerated or mandated in the Old Testament was okay (including the bits about slavery and stoning homosexuals, as he loves pointing out), he thinks slavery in America wasn’t really all that bad and that whatever was bad about it was a result of not following how God said slavery should be done (!), he says he’d ideally like to live in a theocracy, etc. (Etc., etc., etc.)  His opinions about feminism are … well, I’m sure you can imagine.

Part of the reason I find the guy fascinating is that … we all know there are people with these views, but in the U.S. at least the stereotype is that they don’t tend to be well-educated or well-spoken.  Wilson clearly is.  You can see it in his blog (cw: everything you would expect), and in accounts of his college, which sounds like a legitimately intellectual (if also bizarre and scary) place.

So what are the consequences of, say, his pro-Christian patriarchy, anti-feminist views?

Well, uh.  His church has recently been embroiled in scandals about how he knowingly oversaw and helped arrange the marriage of a known pedophile (who was considered “highly likely to re-offend” and ordered by a court to stay away from kids) to a woman in his church.  And with the awful way he handled a case in which a member of his church, also a convicted child molester, conducted an abusive sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl.  (Who has now grown up and is talking about it, and he is out there right now belittling her on twitter and writing snarky, elliptical blog posts about her.)  There’s way too much stuff out there about this for me to summarize neatly, but if you’re curious, see here or here or (more specifically and personally) here and here.  (Interestingly, even conservative Christian Rod Dreher has weighed in against Wilson – here among other posts.)

My point in bringing this up, besides just wanting to infodump about my latest thing, is that this seems like an example where someone with (in many ways standard, if unusually extreme and distinctively religious) anti-feminist views has gotten a fair amount of views and has put them into practice.  And it looks … exactly like a feminist nightmare about what those views would look like in practice.  The sort of tactics Wilson uses in dismissing abuse victims in his church look a lot like the sort of rhetoric you’d hear from the anti-feminist side of a tumblr argument, except he’s not having an abstract debate, he’s talking, from a very literal and direct position of power, to the victims of a situation he’s helped create.

I think in internet arguments these things can sometimes become very abstract, with people theorizing about how other people’s abstractly held views could potentially “play into damaging narratives” or whatever.  But in addition to these indirect effects, there are also direct effects; patriarchal views sometimes create actual patriarchs, who apply their views in practice as husbands and fathers and pastors and so on.  It’s not just The Discourse all the way down – these guys are actually out there, doing the stuff they do, with (what I believe are) predictable consequences.

Sorry, this is pretty tangential and I’m not sure I’m disagreeing with you per se.  I guess I wanted to present another possible reconstruction of “anti-feminist as bad guy” – not as the Hated Other Side in The Discourse, but as Douglas Wilson, out there leading his creepy church.  I’m not saying that every 16-year-old with an "anti-SJW” blog on tumblr is as bad as Wilson – God, no! – but I am saying that when I read something like Barry’s comic with Wilson in mind, rather than the 16-year-old blogger, the contemptuous tone makes a lot more sense.

I feel like this is “cults of personality considered harmful” more than any particular ideology.

I happen to think that there are systematic harms that occur in patriarchal societies, and that feminism has and does combat them. But this guy doesn’t vindicate (in any politically or epistemically significant way) the nightmares of feminists any more than Jim Jones vindicates the nightmares of rightists.

I see what you’re saying, and at the very least this makes Wilson a less-than-ideal example for the case I’m trying to make.

I guess I would make a distinction between “the ways an ideology can be used opportunistically for abusive ends” and “the ways an ideology leads to problems when taken to its logical, intended conclusion,” where the latter is what I want to talk about.  Typically in a cult of personality, from what I understand, the ultimate goal of the cultish tactics is worldly, selfish personal gain for the leader and possibly for their buddies – stuff like money, sex, being treated as brilliant and important, the appeal of controlling others in itself, etc.  But while Wilson may use cultish tactics to achieve his ends, the ends themselves seem like a sincere outgrowth of his worldview.

E.g. I don’t think there was any self-interested reason he had to approve and conduct marriages within his church involving pedophiles/abusers; I don’t think the men in question were especially close to him, or that he owed them any favors.  I think he just did it because it was in line with beliefs like “different recidivism rates for different crimes don’t matter because ultimately it’s all up to Jesus” and “pedophilia is just another type of ‘sexual sin’ on the same continuum as adultery, and thus is the sort of thing someone can overcome with the help of good spiritual leadership” and “since a hardcore patriarchal ideal of marriage is just how things should be, there’s no reason to suspect anything will go wrong if we give that ideal of marriage to guys with a history of bad behavior.”

Also, this is more tenuous, but I think there’s a relationship between his cultish tactics and the ideals he advocates.  In some sense he considers himself a sort of father of his flock (with all that implies, given his view of the family), and his ideal vision of the family is itself a sort of mini-cult of personality centered on the husband/father.

(via fnord888)

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. 
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel 
            from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. 
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. 
For he is of the Lord’s poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry!
            poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. 
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection. 
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the 
            bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

(Christopher Smart [1722-1771] on his cat Jeoffry, from “Jubilate Agno”)