Right Virtues

The Atlantic is a subscription-only site now, as far as I can tell, and so it's been a while since I've read anything there. Realizing that, I went to the bookstore to pick up a physical copy of the January issue, so I could see what they were up to (other than those stories they released as podcasts) these days.

On page 18 was a column by David Brooks: Bring Back the Neocons. I suspected I knew what I was going to find, but I still like Mr. Brooks' writing, so I dove in.

According to Mr. Brooks, the second lesson of neoconservatisim is: "The most important values in a democratic society are the pedestrian bourgeois virtues. Aristocratic societies may do better at inspiring heroism, genius, love of honor. But democratic societies rely on showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity, respecting traditions." Okay, let's say for a moment that I buy into that. My question for Mr. Brooks (and a variation on the question I nearly always have for Mr. Brooks) became: If democratic societies rely on these "pedestrian bourgeois virtues," why aren't they worth rewarding?

Many cultural commentators seem to be allergic to economics, if for no other reason than economics says that it's not enough to simply make something into some sort of moral imperative. If you want more of something, pay for it. I know I've said this before, but I find it bears repeating: If people are no longer doing something that one finds it's important for people to be doing, ask: "why." People stopped "showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity [and] respecting traditions," because those things stopped being reliable ways to take care of oneself and one's family. For the person for whom showing up on time and working hard simply made them a chump, or the person for whom listening with curiosity simply made them confused, or the person for whom respecting traditions simply lead to a feeling of going through empty motions, it makes sense for them to find other ways to interact with the world.

The end of a widespread embrace of "the common bourgeois virtues: hard work, thrift, self-reliance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, and an intense focus on education," can be laid at the feet of one or both of two factors: they didn't pay off, and people could get by without them. Accordingly, bringing them back isn't simply going to be a matter of telling people that they're in a moral and spiritual crisis, and so they need to rededicate themselves to the values of the same people who brought us the Iraq War. They're going to have to be clear and direct solutions to people's problems. And in modern society, they aren't.

Mr. Brooks notes that Donald Trump "is a genius at cultural warfare." I'm not sure I agree with that, if for no other reason than it doesn't take a genius to go to people who are hurting and resentful and saying to them "if you allow me to mistreat the people who you feel are responsible for your problems, I will fix your problems." It's not like that's some sort of political innovation. It's a well-worn playbook by this point.

Mr. Brooks relates that the neconservatives were the children of immigrants who escaped poverty by apply themselves to the "common bourgeois virtues." But many, many, more people than the parents of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick were industrious and traditional, and many of their children watched them fail. Virtue by itself has never been enough; if a society isn't ready, willing or able to reward people for the virtues it claims to honor, people will gravitate towards the ones that honor is shown.

Viewpiont

In addition, what philosophers are talking about is stuff that affects us all. “For example, do we have free will or not? If we didn’t have free will then we’d have to completely reform the justice system.”

What’s the point of doing philosophy?

This is one of the things that I've always found interesting, and more than a little confusing, about the free will debate. If people don't have free will, whether or not they believe that free will is real isn't really up to them; many people would still have the sense that others' decisions are freely made, and thus would be amenable to interventions, like jail or corporal punishment, designed to alter people's behaviors.

It's one of the strange things about the debate over free will, that somehow the understanding that people don't have free will could be a catalyst for people to willfully change how they see others. Which, I don't think I need to say, sort of presumes that free will is, in fact, in play.

But then, I'm not a philosopher. There may be something in the formal education that philosophers receive that addresses comments like mine. But still, it seems a strange thing to presume that there is some proof out there that would convince people, but not require them to be able to will themselves to change their viewpoints.

Perhaps this is why I find philosophy so interesting. It's a completely different way of looking at life and the world. When I was growing up, for instance, I understood the search for "meaning of/in life" mainly as a punchline... some guy would have climbed a mountain to find someone living in a cave, and they'd learn something either blatantly obvious or completely nonsensical. Either way, it rendered their whole effort moot. Coming to understand that this was a serious pursuit among philosophers was something of a surprise.

In any event, I don't typically find philosophy to have the sort of everyday relevance that's spoken of in the quote at the beginning of this post, but it's still an interesting field for all of that. Of course, "interesting" isn't the same as "useful," but that can be said of a lot of things. 

Rationalizing

It's not hard to find someone who will pontificate against the tendency of social media and news platforms to present audiences with "rage bait" and other fare that's designed to drive interaction by making people angry. What I'm much more curious about is why people are so willing to take the bait, and/or reward other people for doing so.

I suspect that part of the reason why it's so much easier to find people willing to talk about the former than the latter is that railing against, say, Jubilee on YouTube for posting videos designed to drive thousands of hot-takes is a form of rage bait, and perhaps virtue signalling, in and of itself. It allows people to present themselves as righteous, and an audience can feel righteous along with them, feeling themselves superior to both the purveyors of the content, and the people who rush to engage with it.

Understanding why it comes across as so compelling and satisfying to react to (even if one hasn't bothered to fully understand, or even watch, read or listen to it) is unlikely to simply present other people as stupid or uneducated. Sure, there's still likely to be the ability for an audience to hold themselves as above whomever is being spoken of, and to declare themselves immune from such open manipulation.

But I also think that the truth of the matter, the reasons why it's so easy to spark people to outrage, especially by simply hinting that certain people are not simply Other, but bad people for that, is that it's dry, and technical. And so it doesn't offer a quick dopamine hit, or a fix of Meaning. Instead, it's simply a lesson in human psychology, something that people don't find all that interesting, judging by how little it appears in feeds or podcasts.

Small Problems

I understand the push for companies to automate as much as possible; they're looking to keep their costs as low as possible, and having people do things can be expensive. Sure, eventually companies run the risk that automation is in such widespread use that their customers find themselves out of work (or stuck with poorly-paying service jobs) and can't afford their products and services, but that's a problem for future CEOs.

The problem that high degrees of automation bring now is that it's not infallible, and if there are few to no people around, there's no-one there to catch mistakes, like this one:

I'm not sure how this was classified as a Technology story; there are any number of places along the way where that could have happened. And, because Age of Sigmar is a niche within the greater niche of Warhammer tabletop fantasy wargaming, it's unlikely that most of the people who scrolled past this set of stories realized that it was misplaced.

But these are the sorts of admittedly minor errors that erode people's trust in technology; because if there are problems in areas that one knows something about, might there not also be errors in areas where one doesn't have firsthand knowledge? In this sense, it's similar to "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," which can be understood to be a reason behind a general distrust of media stories.

The answer from Google News would likely be that their classifications of stories are accurate enough... it's not like the categorizations are done at random, or anything. And that's likely true. But there's still a problem with not knowing if novel information is accurate that prevents these sorts of automated systems from being trusted sources in the way they were intended to be. 

Another Lap

It's another new year. I think I've learned my lesson with resolutions. My goal of being more politically engaged back in 2004 has resulted in a steady stream of fundraising e-mails from all around the country that has yet to dry up, and my gastrointestinal tract still hasn't forgiven me for deciding to go vegetarian for all of January 2019. Other years haven't been much better in that regard.

But still, it's nice to have goals, and so I do want to have one for this year. So maybe I'll just go with something simple, and put some effort into being more helpful. Helping people out with things, even minor ones, can make my whole day, and it's not like I'm attempting to make the whole world, or even the whole of Washington State, a better place.

It's easy to be negative; after all, I've become quite good at it, for all that it's gotten me. So why not instead do a little work to spread some positivity? The world is still likely to suck for a lot of people, but I don't have to be an active agent of that. Besides, as often as I say that I should be the change I want to see in the world, I may as well put my money where my mouth is.

The other thing that I'd like to do this year is try my hand at podcasting. That's a much longer shot, I have no real idea on what all that entails, but it can't hurt to learn, right? (I feel like I've just tempted fate with that last bit... we'll see how hard it bites me.)