How to think about politics

Too many people get way too upset about politics. But that's because they think about it all wrong.

As near as I can tell, most people in America today think that politics is about morality, or ethics. They think that the purpose of politics is to Do Good Things in the World ... or at the very least, to prevent the Bad People from Doing Evil Things.

They are all wrong. 

Most people want the same ends. Oh, I know it doesn't look that way, but that's just because we diagree so badly about means. But I am prepared to argue—and one day I will write out the argument in this venue—that most people want pretty much the same basic things, namely, peace and plenty. People want to live their own lives their own way, with comfort and enough to eat, and without being bothered by someone else. But everyone's got a different idea how to get there, and we fight over these different ideas.

It's as if we assume that everyone sees things the same way we do. So if they advocate different means, it must be because they want to achieve different ends. Since We want peace and plenty, that proves that They must want war and deprivation! And therefore They must be the Bad People. Evil. Let's do away with them!

I'd like to propose a different picture.

Have you ever been to a fair where they had a big jar full of gumballs? There's a sign under the jar asking you to guess how many gumballs are in it. And whoever guesses closest to the real number wins the jar.

That's what I think politics is really about: it's all about guessing the right number of gumballs. In other words, we all want peace and plenty ... or, well, all but a negligible percentage who really do prefer war and deprivation, but they are far and away the minority. But Person A thinks we can get there with more taxation and regulation; Person B thinks we can get there with less taxation and regulation; Person C thinks we can get there if only we invade our neighbors to steal all of their peace and plenty for ourselves; Person D thinks we can get there if we wall ourselves off from our neighbors so that they can't steal our peace and plenty; ... and so on. 

The debates seem to be endless. But really, all that's happening is that everyone is guessing a different number of gumballs. We are all aiming for the same basic goal, but we all have different ideas about how to get there. And there's no simple way to calculate the answer, because human intelligence just isn't that powerful.

So we try one approach—either because a majority voted for it, or because a faction seized power extralegally. And either the approach works, or else it doesn't. And then we start all over.

But none of this makes our rivals into Evil People. They just have a different guess than we do about how many gumballs are in the jar.

P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I always guess the wrong number when confronted with this kind of challenge. I diligently count how many gumballs high the jar is, and how many gumballs wide; then I apply the best mathematical formulas I can think of; and I am always wrong by at least an order of magnitude. There may be a lesson here about the limited effectiveness of intellectuals in politics (cf. Plato, Henry Kissinger, or Pol Pot) but I try hard not to take the hint. 😀

           

Seeing what we expect to see

A couple weeks ago, there was a shooting at a protest in Minneapolis, and it already has its own Wikipedia page. Welcome to life in the age of the Internet.

The woman shot was Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a US citizen who had spent the prior day "legally observing" the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis. Then on January 7, something happened between her and ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Other people were there too, including Good's wife and other ICE agents. There appear to be multiple videos circulating around the Internet. Anyway, when everything was over, it developed that Ross had shot Good dead. Naturally the Internet has been full of discussion ever since.

I don't want to write about the shooting itself. Lots of people have done that. A simple Google search should find you plenty to read on the subject, and mostly I haven't read it. So I don't have any new or interesting take on what happened.

What interests me is the commentary I've seen. As soon as videos were available, I saw Twitter light up with comments urging, Watch this video, which proves conclusively that Renée Good was completely innocent, and that her killer was evil and unprovoked! And then a minute later I'd see more comments shouting, Watch this video, which proves conclusively that Renée Good threatened the officer's life, and that he acted in pure self-defense! 

I didn't click either link, but I assume they were advertising the same video. And this is what interests me. Naively, you would think that the availability of video evidence would cut down on the level of bias in the discussion. But empirically, it doesn't seem to. How can this be?

My own speculation is that people see what they expect to see. Some people approach this news with a reflexive distrust of law enforcement. When they see video evidence (which ought to be objective) they interpret it in a way that indicts law enforcement personnel. Other people approach the same news with a reflexive trust of law enforcement, and a distrust of protestors. When they see video evidence, they interpret it in a way that exonerates law enforcement personnel and indicts the protestors instead. This means that while police body-camera footage may be helpful in a court of law (and I am given to understand that it is often very helpful there), it is more or less useless in the court of public opinion. People on both sides of any contentious issue will interpret any available footage until it supports their sides.

I suppose I should clarify that, up till now, I have not studied any of the available video footage related to this event. Why not?

That's simple. I know where my biases are, and I know that the video footage will support my biases. Or rather, I will reinterpret what I see until it supports my biases. So I already know (more or less) what I am going to see. Why bother watching it?

Wait a minute! I don't have biases! It's just you lot that have biases!

Well, that would be nice of course. But I know better.

OK, what are these biases that you say I have?

Oh, that's easy. Whenever something goes wrong in the world, I hate ascribing it to simple human evil. That approach always seems too facile and too easy ... and therefore it feels stupid. So I try to understand the different sides in their own terms, which does not allow me to write any of them off as merely evil. On the other hand, it is very easy for me to believe that, in a situation that is tense or dangerous or fraught, anyone might react with actions that are impulsive or reckless. I know I have.* So I assume that the confrontation between Renée Good and Jonathan Ross was tense or dangerous or fraught [I think this part goes without saying.] and therefore that one or both of them acted in ways that were impulsive or reckless. And in the end Renée was shot dead.

Because I know that this is my bias, I am quite certain that this is what I would see if I watched the video. So I'm in no great hurry to watch the video. I already know that people do stupid things in dangerous situations, and I don't really need more evidence to prove the same point all over again, one more time.

For what it is worth, my bias drives a whole set of preventive actions, as well. I have a dear friend who visited me a few months ago, at a time when a No Kings protest was planned for the city where I live. I knew she wanted to attend, but she suggested that we not go because "I really don't think it's your kind of thing." 

Of course she's right. It's not my kind of thing. But this is why. 

I assume—exactly as I describe above—that people who insert themselves into situations which are tense or dangerous or fraught are likely to do stupid things and get themselves killed. 

I don't want to get myself killed.

And I have no confidence that I—me personally, myself—can avoid the temptation to do something stupid. 

Therefore I would rather avoid dangerous situations in the first place, and that means (among other things) that I would rather not go to protests.

Of course it is easier to avoid them because I also assume that nobody cares what I think about any concrete political issue. I vote regularly because it's the right thing to do, but I don't live in a state so small that my vote makes the slightest difference to the outcome.

Maybe this is a depressing way to look at things.

On the other hand, I'm still alive. For good or for ill.    

__________

* Cue the Monty Python routine, "The Mouse Problem."     

           

Destroying democracy in order to save it

On February 7, 1968, American forces in Vietnam annihilated the town of Bến Tre. The next day, Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett quoted an unnamed American major, who gave this explanation:

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The quote was was so crazy that it became instantly famous. Opponents of the war repeated it everywhere. Suddenly America's whole strategy during the war was reduced to the lunacy of destroying the thing you are trying to save ... because somehow, in someone's mind, destroying it is the only way to save it. Later that same month, Walter Cronkite aired his famous editorial arguing that the war was "mired in stalemate," and public opinion turned against prolonging the fighting.

Fortunately we've all learned from that, right? Nobody today would be crazy enough to destroy something in order to save it. Right?

You'd think so. But let's talk about California.

Tomorrow is Election Day in California (though mail-in ballots have been available for a while), and there is exactly one race on the ballot. That race is to decide Proposition 50, which is written to legalize gerrymandering.

Strictly speaking those aren't the words used by supporters. But they come awfully close.

Back in 2008, Proposition 11 created a non-partisan commission to draw electoral boundaries for State Assembly and State Senate districts. Two years later, Proposition 20 expanded their remit to include congressional district boundaries. Before the establishment of this commission, districts were regularly redrawn to benefit the state's ruling party (in this case, the Democratic Party). After, not so much. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives California overall a grade of B for the fairness of its districting: "Better than average with some bias." 

Proposition 50 suspends the bipartisan commission for five years, so state legislature can redraw the districts any way they like. The Princeton project has given the proposed redistricting plan a grade of F, saying that it gives Democrats and incumbents a significant advantage. And supporters don't deny this! They are reasonably open about describing this as the main purpose of the measure.

How is this possible? The basic argument is that it's all Donald Trump's fault. More exactly, supporters of Proposition 50 argue that the President wants to achieve goals which they think threaten democracy. They also point out that other states are in the process of redrawing their congressional districts, and that in at least some cases (e.g., Texas) the motive is to give the Republicans more seats in Congress. Therefore, the argument concludes, Democrats have to do the same thing to level the playing field. And since the Democrats have total control of the California legislature, that means letting them redistrict California in a way that benefits Democrats.  

Maybe it's because I raised two boys who were close in age, but I don't react well when someone justifies his own bad behavior by shouting, "He started it!" More seriously, the whole business reminds me of Peter Arnett's unnamed major. The supporters of Proposition 50 say they want to defend democracy; but in practice that means deliberate gerrymandering to defeat the will of the voters. How does that "defend democracy"? Also, like him or not—and I certainly have reservations of my own—President Trump was duly elected in 2024 according to the laws of the land. Preventing him from exercising his office is no defense of democracy. Yes, of course the system has checks and balances built in, to prevent any single individual from going crazy. And yes, of course it is fair to let those checks and balances play out the way they are supposed to. But this measure seems to reach beyond that point. It looks like California Democrats have decided that The People couldn't really have meant to vote for Donald Trump or for some number of Republican Congressmen, so it is their job to rectify The People's mistake by choosing the right Congressmen instead. I'm pretty sure that's how they handle voting in North Korea too, for what it's worth. So it's good to know that there is precedent.

We had to destroy democracy in order to save it. 

    

On priestly psychology per Nietzsche

In the first essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche spends some time talking about the psychology of the priest. 

Think, for example, of certain forms of diet (abstinence from meat), of fasting, of sexual continence, of flight "into the wilderness" ...: add to these the entire antisensualistic metaphysic of the priests that makes men indolent and overrefined, their autohypnosis in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins ... and finally the only-too-comprehensible satiety with all this, together with the radical cure for it, nothingness (or God—the desire for a unio mystica with God is the desire of the Budhist for nothingness, Nirvana—and no more!).  [Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 6.]

What is the source of this priestly intensity? Why should priests be the ones in society whose behavior tends to extremes, the ones who are most likely to become fanatics? (As an aside, I'm not sure if priests really are the natural extremists, at any rate in today's society. But for Nietzsche they were.)

Nietzsche himself tries to answer this question by looking at diet and habits. But there is another answer that he misses, but which fits in exactly with the kinds of explanation he allows.*

Consider that part of a priest's regular job is prayer, and that prayer often takes the form of asking God for something. But we all know that God is not a vending machine; if you ask God for stuff, the odds are that sometimes you'll get it and sometimes you won't. Many volumes of theology and theodicy have been written to account for this outcome from the perspective of faith. (Meanwhile it's easy to explain it from the perspective of atheism. If God doesn't exist, then prayer is wasted effort; in that case, whether you get the thing you prayed for is a matter of random chance, which turns up now Heads and later Tails.)

But a priest's ongoing service of God generates a kind of relationship with God. And there is a huge literature in the field of psychology about the phenomenon of intermittent reinforcement in relationships. For a sample of what is out there, just now I did a quick Google search, and the following articles were among the first to show up: here, here, here, here, and here.

Briefly, intermittent reinforcement is a classic element of abusive or alcoholic relationships. It consistently results in the dependent partner becoming addicted to the intermittently reinforcing one, abandoning all other interests and any kind of self-care in order to get the love and attention that have proven so unreliable. What's more, if the dependent partner finds that a certain behavior increases the odds of getting the reinforcement they need, even by a little bit, she will repeat and exaggerate that behavior over and over, in ever more frantic efforts to tease out the needed reinforcement.

Isn't this an exact description of a priestly psychology, taking the form of a "crazy fool for God"? And doesn't this mechanism offer a simple, elegant—and, to qualify in Nietzschean terms, completely materialistic—explanation for the growth of priestly asceticism (and ultimately fanaticism) over time?

I think it does. If Nietzsche had known about this result, I think he would have mentioned it.

__________

* What follows is fleshed out from a Post-It note that I left in my copy of Walter Kaufmann's translation of this work, Vintage Books, p. 32. The note is dated 1992-10-12. So I've been sitting on it for a while, it seems.         

Rebels

Today were the nationwide "No Kings" protests across the country. I don't have a lot to say about the protests themselves, but I am a little curious how the protestors selected themselves.

I assume that if I asked a typical protestor "Why are you out here holding a sign today?" the immediate answer would be "something something Donald Trump something something." But suppose I pressed farther. Even if you disagree with him, why take to the streets? Where did you get the idea that this was a good way to respond to bad politial decisions by those in power?

I assume that at some point, honestly, the answer would frequently be, "Well I've always identified as a rebel. I've always supported the Little Guy against the faceless machines that threaten to crush him. That's just who I am."

OK, that's interesting. Always? So ... when you were three years old? Eight years old? Twelve years old? In a few cases the answer will still be, "Yes, always." (And honestly, some three year-olds can be pretty obstreperous.) But in a lot of cases the answer will be something closer to, "Well of course I had a conscience from an early age. But I really learned to lean into my identity as a rebel when I was in college."

There were a lot of old people at the "No Kings" protests, especially compared to (let's say) protests in the 1960's, which were almost universally manned by the young. This means that a lot of today's rebels are my age, or even older. So I think I have an idea what their college years were like.

There was an assumption back then that college was the time when you rebelled against your parents. The Catcher in the Rye was almost quaint and old-fashioned by that time; but the basic message—that adults were phonies and there was no salvation in that world—was a commonplace. 

As an aside: I remember that my college friends assumed I must be conservative because I regularly wore a belt to hold up my pants, and because I wore socks under my shoes. (It sounds like I'm kidding, but I'm not!) Of course, they tolerated these eccentricities, because they liked me anyway. It also meant that when their parents suddenly arrived on campus demanding to meet "some of their friends," they always sought me out. Maybe my hair was a little too long, but I shaved regularly, I showered once a day, and I was never hungover or drugged out; so I could make a good impression.

Notice what this means. It means that a large fraction of today's rebels—especially the geriatric rebels, but I assume the same dynamic has molded the younger ones too—rebelled against their parents and "societal expectations" at exactly the time that society expected them to rebel. And they did it, largely, because all their friends were doing it. In other words, their lifelong stance or identity as a Rebel was in fact dictated by societal expectations. By standing out there on the streets holding signs, they are conforming to the most restrictive of the possible identities offered to them by their elders. 

    

Context is everything

I tried to post this on Twitter, but it's too many characters. And I won't pay for more, because that means admitting who I am in real life. (Or maybe I'm just cheap.)

I wanted to reply to a post that talked about the kind of invective used by the Left against George W. Bush back in 2000 and 2004. And what I wanted to say—based entirely on personal recollections and conversations with my own friends!—was this:

In 1980, left-wing Democrats said "Reagan is basically Hitler."

In 2000, left-wing Democrats said, "I'm not mindlessly partisan, and I don't blindly hate all Republicans. Old-time Republicans like Reagan weren't so bad. But Bush is definitely Hitler."

In 2016, left-wing Democrats said, "I'm not mindlessly partisan, and I don't blindly hate all Republicans. Old-time Republicans like George W. Bush weren't so bad. But Trump is definitely Hitler."

So I assume it's only a matter of time before left-wing Democrats start saying, "You know, Trump was a little goofy but he really wasn't that bad. On the other hand, this New Guy [whoever the New Guy happens to be] is definitely Hitler."

Context is everything.  

Quebec and her King

What's going on in Quebec?

Yesterday I saw a news item that the provincial legislature of Quebec had voted to "break all ties" with the British monarchy. You can find news articles about it in places like these:

• Globe & Mail, "Quebec’s National Assembly unanimously votes to break ties with the monarchy." [This article is behind a paywall.]
• CTV News, "Quebec legislature votes unanimously to cut all ties with the monarchy."  
• MSN, "National Assembly votes to cut ties with British monarchy."  
• Montreal Gazette, "Quebec legislators vote to cut ties with British monarchy after King’s visit."   

What I don't understand is, What does it mean?

None of the articles that I read sounded alarmed. So maybe I shouldn't take alarm either.But I can't stop thinking about it.

Legally, Charles Windsor is King of Canada. Surely the consequence is that as long as Quebec is a province of Canada—and as long as Canada remains a monarchy and not a republic—there will necessarily be some ties between Quebec and the monarchy regardless what the legislature says. Doesn't that follow? And therefore it seems to me that this measure can only be construed as an ultimatum: either Canada gives up the monarchy, or Quebec will give up Canada. Republicanism or Secession. That sounds like a stark choice to me.

Le chef du Parti québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon

Naturally there might be other options. Perhaps the measure can be canceled or overruled by a higher authority (like the federal Parliament). Perhaps it was intended as no more than a protest vote, and the Quebec legislators who passed it unanimously knew they would never have to stand behind it. Such things are always possible.

But if the measure is not quietly effaced, the other alternatives don't look so pleasant. Will the rest of Canada agree to renounce the monarchy? Recent polls suggest the monarchy is largely popular in Canada right now. Will Quebec then secede? They have threatened it for years. If they try to leave, how will English Canada respond? When South Carolina tried to secede from the United States in 1861, the result was a terrible, bloody war. I remember Pierre Trudeau's willingness to deploy the Canadian Army inside of Quebec during an earlier crisis, and so I cannot rule out that the threat of secession might end badly.

On the other hand, the Canadian government might decide they have no taste for civil war. They might let Quebec go. I fear that would be a grave mistake. If Quebec were allowed to secede peacefully, I would expect Alberta to follow them out the door in another couple of months. Next would be maybe Saskatchewan and Nunavut. And suddenly Canada would look a lot more fragile than before.

I remember back in 1990, when tiny little Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Everyone cheered. But at the same time the world held its breath, waiting for the tanks to come and squash the fledgling independence movement. 

And no tanks came. The USSR decided to let Lithuania go. They were so little, after all.

Yes, they were a tiny pebble. But such tiny pebbles cause great avalanches. In less than two years, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

I wonder if Canada will follow the same path?