mitigatedchaos
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User ID: 1767
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
If the room is suicidal, then it takes someone who actively refuses to "read the room," and doesn't give a shit how impolite that is, to reject suicide.
Does that impose selection effects? Oh, yes.
The Bush administration were neither anti-racist enough not to bomb Afghanistan, nor racist enough to conclude that development of Afghanistan would require imposing radical social change, but in an uncanny valley where liberal democracy is perceived as the natural order of the universe, so American interventionism is morally cheap.
Western elites are stuck in group think because, reasonably enough, none of them want to be the guy to break the perceived inter-ethnic peace and cause a massive conflict. To get someone willing to point out that Haiti is a massive ongoing disaster, we had to search very far outside the typical distribution of politicians.
Thus, you are having the undignified experience of being rescued by a professional wrestler.
His intervention is better viewed as a lucky chance, to be exploited, than a done deal.
What we're probably going to have to do is rebuild the philosophical basis for liberalism from a stage 5 (post-formal) moral perspective, focused on epistemic limits and epistemic humility. Conventional philosophical liberals are having trouble explaining why their principles exist.
The different moral development theories as commonly discussed (Kegan, Kohlberg) seem to have some common ground in an arc of { social morality, formal morality, post-formal morality }, usually around stages numbered 3, 4, and 5, depending on how people are charting it out.
You can think of this as team sports morality ("I'm a Democrat, and our good ingroup believe X") which can turn on a dime (social morality), principled morality that's trying to integrate moral intuitions into a formal system (this would be your conventional philosophies like Utilitarianism), and finally a sort of intuitive recognition that low-dimensionality constructs (like Utilitarianism) are insufficient to contain the whole of morality (for post-formalists).
The transition between each stage involves significant intellectual investment. This motion can be painful because it looks like the old principles falling away into meaninglessness and leaving nihilism.
It's not that Democrats didn't believe in free speech at all. Rather, most political types including most Democrats are social moralists, not formal or post-formal moralists, so they take their orders on their appropriate beliefs from those higher up in their social hierarchy, and then attempt to act on them locally.
2008 American liberalism was a fairly well-hedged ideology overall, so when Democratic leaders pushed for principles like free speech and procedural protections for those accused of crimes and so on, and Democratic social moralists embraced these principles locally, the Democrats as a whole looked a lot smarter than they actually are. The quality of their overall thinking has declined significantly due to the much worse epistemics of Social Justice, and many Democrats are wildly miscalibrated right now.
When I say that we should rebuild philosophical or political liberalism from a perspective of epistemic limits, what I mean is that many liberal principles are similar to prohibitions on economic central planning which is practically problematic due to limits on available information and computational power, but most current liberals don't know this and thus lose interpersonal arguments to "care/harm" types (who use conflict theorist epistemology) because their support for freedom seems "arbitrary."
By developing a philosophical framework which roots liberal principles in limits to information and personal morality, a kind of opposition to "cultural central planning," a new generation of intellectuals could be trained and gain an advantage in the coordination for the defense of liberal principles.
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