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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   36081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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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'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 find this overly charitable to low decouplers, who can come in all sorts.

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."

Nearly everyone has historically been oppressed in one way or another to some degree.

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.

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 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.

I mean, aren't we supposed to be charitable here?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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