This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think part of this divide has to do with the perception of how "concrete" (as opposed to "abstract") one is thinking about the implications of their discussions. By "concrete" here I mean something like "relevant to the everyday lives and experiences of individuals." So a discussion is very concrete if it is closely about how the politics under discussion will impact the lives of people and it is very abstract if the discussion is more about the politics or principles in a purely logos kind of way, disconnected from any individuals or particularities. My impression is that my political discussions with men have been much more abstract than my political discussions with women have been. This also tracks, I think, the topics you've mentioned discussing with each group as well as explains part of the reaction. It is much easier to become emotionally invested in a discussion or make inferences about another's moral character when one is imagining the people who will be suffering due to some purported principle, or policy, or whatever.
Why is this the case? I posit it is due to a kind of group political consciousness. That is, members of certain groups have, historically, been politically disadvantaged due to their membership in that group. In the United States the 15th and 19th amendments stand as reminders that it was once common to deny people participation in the political process on the basis of race or sex. Not to mention other laws like coverture and Jim Crow that impacted these groups legal standing in other ways. I think this also leads members of these groups to increased sympathy for people who will be on the "losing" end of a policy because of the perception that they were once in a similar position (not necessarily as an individual, but as a member of a certain group).
Consider this through the lens of discussing a particular political issue: whether women ought to have the right to vote. I suspect two men discussing this issue could do so dispassionately assuming the discussion stayed sufficiently abstract. About the merits, from a utilitarian or some other perspective of such a policy. Now imagine we concretize the discussion, we make it more personal. "I think your wife/girlfriend/mother ought not have the right to vote, much harm has been done by their participation in the political process." Would the discussion stay as dispassionate or would it become more heated? More like the conversations you have with women? All the principles in the abstract discussion imply the concretized statement, of course, but plenty of people don't "feel" the implications the way they do when the implications are stated more explicitly. Or imagine one of our interlocutors is a woman. No longer is this an abstract discussion about policies, it's a discussion about whether she and people like her ought to have political equality, about whether maybe society would be better off if she (and others like her) didn't.
I think the term you're reaching for is, at least in common parlance around here, is high vs low decouplers. It's both something innate to different people and something more or less easy depending on distance from topic.
I find this overly charitable to low decouplers, who can come in all sorts. Nearly everyone has historically been oppressed in one way or another to some degree. And even among you examples it has not been my experience that black men have decoupling abilities in line with white women like your theory would predict.
I've never been a fan of the "decoupler" verbiage. I think it inappropriately conflates a thing one does with a way one is. I phrased my description of the phenomenon in terms of the debate rather than the debaters deliberately.
I mean, aren't we supposed to be charitable here? That aside I want to be clear. I intend my description above to be an account of causes rather than reasons. I think having a political identity with a particular kind of narrative history with respect to that identity can cause people with that identity to have issues "decoupling", as you put it. I do not intend to claim that the reasoning I have laid out is something explicitly happening in the minds of people with that identity who is having issues "decoupling."
Depending on your definition of "oppressed", "one way or another", and "some degree" I am probably in agreement but I think the kind and degree of the oppression are important. Perhaps more than either it needs to be perceived as having contemporary salience. When feminists connect the contemporary struggle for abortion rights back to the century long effort to improve women's legal and political rights that is an act of building the kind of political group consciousness I'm imagining. Similarly arguments that trace the modern struggle for African Americans against biased policing back to slavery.
I am not sure I take my theory to have made any predictions about relative ability to "decouple" among groups that have the kind of consciousness I describe.
Charitable in that we should engage with the strongest form of counter arguments and assume good faith. Not charitable in that we intentionally discard reasonable hypothesis because they are offensive to some group. I'm very aware that the oppression based theory of increased empathy is fundamental to the progressive worldview and I don't think it's true which is why I'm reluctant to grant it here. I'm afraid it's too much to ask me to be charitable in swallowing the pill that may be the crux in a very large disagreement I have with one of the most powerful ideologies alive today.
But the theory you're arguing against suggests that Black men would have more in common with white men on decoupling because it's presumed gender/sex is the primary difference and your theory predicts they'd have more in common with women because recent oppression status is the primary difference. So it does seem like strong evidence in favor of the gender based decoupling theory relative to the oppression status based theory.
What "reasonable hypothesis" am I advocating "discard[ing]" "because [it is] offensive to some group?" I view the point of my post as attempting to explain part of why the phenomenon of differences in discussion styles the OP observes exists.
I would be interested in hearing your characterization of "the oppression based theory of increased empathy." I consider myself pretty progressive and am not sure I agree that any such theory is "fundamental" to my world view.
Ahh I see, I think I misunderstood your sentence. Do I characterize your experience correctly that, in discussions with black men, their ability to decouple is more like white men than white women? If so then I better understand how this is contradictory to my theory. I also don't really view my project as arguing against the OP's observation, but more trying to provide (perhaps mistaken) explanations for it.
It's difficult to formalize and I'm not super happy with how I phrased it there. It's a little cleaner and recognizable as "lived experience" or "the progressive stack" but not exactly. The idea that people who have experienced hardship are more credible in discussion pertaining to those hardships. Or it's more corrupted form, people who claim to have experienced hardship are more credible in discussions pertaining to hardships in general. In my view at best the hardships experienced introduce more bias than clarity and at worst as you privilege the voices of people who claim to have gone through hardship you create a Goodhart's law situation where legacy admit female graduates from Harvard genuinely think their voices should be privileged over white male coal miners. But even that comparison is playing the game. I think arguments should survive on their own merits and upturning the table for a failure to decouple is a defect bot strategy. The idea that men should be excluded from talks of abortion is ridiculous as an example that I sometime hear.
I'm wondering what kinds of things you would classify under "hardship" for this example. Would it include, say, blindness? It seems like a pretty unintuitive conclusion to me to say that being blind introduces such bias in blind people that sighted people better understand what it is like to be blind than blind people do. Or if blindness would not be included, what facts about a kind of hardship distinguish blindness from ones you would include?
For my part I do believe something like this. Very generally, that people who have had a particular experience have insight about what it is like to have that experience which people who have not had that experience are lacking. One area where I suspect we agree is that just because they have insight into what it was like to have had that experience they do not necessarily have insight into how to improve or alleviate that experience.
I would say that blind people would have insight, in that they may be able to bring things to attention that might have been missed if they were totally ignored. But I don't think it's difficult for others to understand the perspective once it's been raised. I often see a kind of motte and bailey where the motte is "Blind people can help identify what their difficulties are" and the bailey is "sighted people cannot then understand those difficulties once raised well enough to pragmatically make decisions that impact blind people". More commonly the problem is on some culture war grounds where some special interest accuses the opposition to something they're demanding of ignorance rather than a legitimate disagreement. The whole dynamic creates a grievance arms race where rather than carefully discuss issues people race to legitimize their positions by emphasizing how much of an underdog they are in an appeal to pathos rather than logos. It results in what could have been substantive debates being reduced to mere whining.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link