Political Philosophy

Stories and Society

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There’s a promising new Substack, The Story Rules Project, written by Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black. Their subject:  How stories affect the human mind and emotions, and how they can be used to reduce polarization. (I must note that stories can also be and often are used to increase polarization.)  There are already several posts well worth reading.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” said Shelley, and indeed, it’s not only written stories that have an impact on how people think and feel, but also poems, music, plays, sculpture cartoons …also video games.  All are ‘media’ in a broad McLuhanesque sense.

I’m reminded again of Neal Stephenson’s book In the Beginning was the Command Line, in which he contrasts explicit word-based (textual) communication with graphical or sensorial communication, and applies this contrast both to human-computer communications and to human-to-human communications.  Here, I will be focusing on that second application.

As an example of sensorial communication Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll among stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they’ve been done, not as Disney’s engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would–with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar.

In one place, you walk along a stone wall and view some panels of art that tell a story.

…a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals…an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney’s Animal Kingdom…But it’s rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn’t have a PhD in Indian art history.

The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.

The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.

Clearly, this exhibit communicates a specific worldview, and it strongly implies that this worldview is consistent with traditional Indian religion and culture. Most visitors will assume the connection without doing further research as to its correctness or lack thereof.

One thing about the sensorial interface is that it is less open to challenge than is the textual interface. It doesn’t argue–doesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute–I’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.

Moreover: when you accept a point of view based on written materials, you have a good chance of being able to explain to other people why you hold that viewpoint.  This is much less likely when you are influenced toward a view based on something you saw at a theme park or experienced in a videogame.  In that second case, you are less likely to be able to defend your position in debate…since you really can’t identify exactly why you hold it…and are more likely to respond with anger and a demand to cancel your opponent. I think this explains some of the unpleasant characteristics of present-day political discussion.

So-called “Tunnels of Oppression” have been a thing on college campuses for quite some time…here’s an article I found describing some of them.  The article is from 2008, but additional searches indicate that these have by no means gone away.  These are clearly examples of the sensorial communications mode, which, as I noted above, is less open to challenge than the textual interface. Again, it doesn’t argue–doesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute–I’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.  This is propaganda more than it is education.

And in a society in which sensory communication threatens to become overwhelming, shouldn’t one of the primary responsibilities of the university be the preservation of the text-based communication mode and the propagation of the ability to deal with this modality? Don’t “Tunnels of Oppression,” by their very nature, tend to undercut this mission?

Indeed, how many college students today know how to take a proposition and then go to the library and/or the Internet and assemble seriously relevant facts and arguments, pro and con? And is there any evidence that this ability gets any better after 4 years in college? (Or, for that matter, 8 years?)

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Disturbing

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Victor Davis Hanson remembers Leo Amery:

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.  One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.  Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany. General Edward Spears, then a member of Parliament, described the scene in the House of Commons. Arthur Greenwood was a member of the Labour Party, Leo Amery was a Conservative.

Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.

Leo Amery, sitting in the corner seat of the third bench below the gangway on the government side, voiced in three words his own pent-up anguish and fury, as well as the repudiation by the whole House of a policy of surrender. Standing up he shouted across to Greenwood: “Speak for England!” It was clear that this great patriot sought at this crucial moment to proclaim that no loyalty had any meaning if it was in conflict with the country’s honour. What in effect he said was: “The Prime Minister has not spoken for Britain, then let the socialists do so. Let the lead go to anyone who will.” That shout was a cry of defiance. It meant that the house and the country would neither surrender nor accept a leader who might be prepared to trifle with the nation’s pledged word.

Greenwood then made a speech which I noted that night as certain to be the greatest of his life; a speech that would illuminate a career and justify a whole existence. It was remarkable neither for eloquence nor for dramatic effect, but the drama was there, we were all living it, we and millions more whose fate depended on the decisions taken in that small Chamber.

Hanson also cites a later speech by Amery, following the loss of the Norway campaign to Germany.  Amery responded with a blistering attack on the incompetence of the conservative Chamberlain administration by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s hallmark 1653 order to the Long Parliament:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

And go they did, very shortly thereafter, to be replaced by Churchill.

Hanson:

We need a voice like Amery’s. Like Britain from 1939 to 1940, America is in existential danger.

The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border—and immigration law with it.

Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.

China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function Covid virus that killed a million Americans.

President Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.

In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.

Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.

There’s much more–read the whole thing.

Most of what Hanson says is true, and needs to be communicated very clearly to the American people.  The question of how this is best done, and how many people are really persuadable, is a difficult one.  But that’s not primarily what I want to discuss in this post.

The Hanson post also appears at Zero Hedge.  Take a look at the comments–but only if you have a strong stomach–and think about what the opinions expressed there suggest about our current political situation in America.

Discuss.

Seth Barrett Tillman: “A Dialogue on Migration”

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This is very good.

Left-of-Center Candidate: I understand. We will work to ensure that your wages are not compressed.
 
Audience Member: You are not listening. That’s not what I said; I don’t like the direction the nation’s immigration policies have taken our country. You have supported the Government’s policies—at the very least, you have not opposed them. I don’t like where we are now as a result—not that the other opposition parties would do anything different.
 
Left-of-Center Candidate: No, that’s not right. My job is not to ensure your personal vision of the good society. I live in the real world—in the European Union—which (in effect) determines our national immigration policy—in conjunction with international law and our treaty commitments. My job is to act within that context in protecting your objectively rooted economic interests…

Sound familiar? The immigration policies of the Democratic and establishment Republican parties appear to include:

1. Open borders.
2. A preference for the interests of an international coalition that includes American elites over those of Americans overall, and for the interests of refugees and illegal immigrants over those of poor and working-class Americans.
3. Hostility to Americans who oppose current US immigration policies and want their government to promote the interests of Americans exclusively.

In the real world that Seth’s hypothetical candidate invokes, many US and European pols should lose their jobs for disregarding the voters’ wishes on this issue.

(See also Seth’s earlier American Spectator piece: East Wall and the Plantations: Ireland and Its New Migrants)

UPDATE: See this 2016 post by Seth.

“Cricket Morality”

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Conservatives, libertarians, and well-meaning and rational people in general often remark on the unfairness of many practices of the “progressive” media and other institutions of today’s Left. Selective prosecutions, for example.  The fact that those same publications that mocked Dan Quayle for his verbal clumsiness are totally dismissive about any concerns regarding the verbal weirdness of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  Many, many other examples.

It is true. The unfairness is obvious and palpable.  But, listening to these entirely-justified complaints, I am reminded of a passage in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 book Darkness at Noon.

The protagonist of this novel is Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime and is facing trial and probable execution.  Among his musings are the following thoughts:

It is said that No. 1 (Stalin) has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of fair play by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one that the end justifies the means.

We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country; the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it. We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason — that was our greatness; the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism. That is why we will in the end be absolved by history; but not they. . . .

Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it. We are sailing without ballast; therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.

And this is indeed the logic of so many of our present-day “progressives.”  They have convinced themselves that we are not in one of those “breathing spaces of history” in which fairness is to be expected–rather, everything must be about ultimate things, must be “existential”, to use one of their favorite terms.

But to what extent do they want to throw out the rule of fairness because they believe we’re at a critical turning point at which no other option is possible…versus to what extent is it the other way around, i.e. they are motivated to believe we are at such a turning point because they want to throw out the rule of fairness?

And how many of them have ever considered the possibility that perhaps it is precisely those critical periods in which the rule of fairness is particularly important?

Quote of the Day

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John Podhoretz:

In November, the right won the election in Israel and then, upon assuming power in January, began to implement the policies on which it ran. At which point, some of the losers of the election took to the streets. Ever since, those in ideological agreement with the losers have expressed continual wonderment and pride at the fact that 8 or 9 percent of the population of the small country is out in the streets on a weekly basis. Yes, but more than 50 percent of the electorate in Israel voted the other way. Imagine if they took to the streets. But you can’t, because they won’t, because they shouldn’t have to. Democracies exist to make street action unnecessary…

You could say this about other countries as well.