Conflict, mistake and a new religion

Why do people disagree about big issues to do with politics and society? More precisely: why do they disagree with you?

For many people, as I shall try to explain below, the reason they think other people disagree with them is because they are bad people - unbelievers, destined for a kind of secular hell. As I also try to explain below, this is a Bad Thing.

This, from Scott Alexander, is my starting point.

You might think that people disagree with you because they make mistakes. So, for example, you and I both want to improve incomes for the very poorest people in society - of course we do! - so when we disagree about the minimum wage it's because you think it's going to push up people's incomes while I think it's going to put people out of work. At least one of us is mistaken in our beliefs, but at least we can generally agree what sort of things count as evidence for each other's view. We can have a debate in good faith about what each other is saying. We might even ultimately agree on the facts but disagree on values (although this is rarer than it seems), but nonetheless be able to debate each other in good faith about whether consenting adults should be permitted to enter into low-wage contracts.

Or you might think that people disagree with you because they are bad. You might think that I disagree with you about the minimum wage because I hate poor people and I want them to starve to death. If so, you might think that if I start showing people evidence or argument based on my 'people will be put out of work' view then I am doing so because I am trolling, or trying to distract people from a moral abhorrence, or dog-whistling to fellow poor-haters, or in some other way arguing in bad faith. The actual words I use, on this view, are neither here nor there.

Alexander describes this as a mistake/conflict distinction. I'll follow that nomenclature.

Let us consider how debate varies between mistake and conflict cases. Imagine that you discover that I am a factory owner who employs people on extremely low wages. For the mistake theorist, you might be unsurprised that you have discovered my interest in the matter, but you don't regard it as proving that I'm wrong - any more than the fact that you work for a trade union proves that you are wrong. My personal circumstances are not a big part of your argument: you still have to grapple with the actual words I have chosen to use, just as I have to grapple with yours. That's what pressure groups are all about.

Now imagine that you are a conflict theorist. That discovery about my factory ownership just proves it, doesn't it? I mean, it proves that I am Bad. You are quite right to ignore what I am saying and to tell other people to ignore me. To a conflict theorist, the arguments used by your opponent are best ignored - but your opponent himself or herself, their background, their other beliefs, their position in society and so, are all fair game.

I am a barrister and so all my professional arguments are mistake-based. You can't tell a judge: "Don't believe that guy - he's only saying that because he's paid to say it!" or "she is only making that argument because she wants to make money!". Of course he's paid to say it; of course she gets money if she wins the case: that is both obviously true and entirely irrelevant.

So I am trained not to be a conflict theorist. More than that, I am trained to respond to the precise arguments being used, not to the motives behind them or the interests they promote. My job is all about trying to get as much as possible (maybe too much) out of the actual words that people have chosen to use in their agreements, their correspondence or their evidence.

Moreover, I am also personally disposed not to be a conflict theorist. I just don't find people to be motivated by evil, hatred and bad faith in their political views. Look, here are Mary Beard and Arron Banks having a sensible discussion about Rome and the EU!

But it goes deeper than that: I consider this a matter of having respect for individuals and their autonomy. That is what at some level disturbs me about the phrases that are used to dismiss people's statements or beliefs, phrases such as 'false consciousness' to dismiss beliefs or 'dog-whistle' to dismiss statements: these phrases evidence a lack of respect for the integrity of individuals, a lack of respect for their autonomous choice to use certain words or follow certain beliefs - and not others.

It follows that I think we ought to be tolerant of what some people might call bad-faith arguments. Do you recall that one of the arguments against Donald Trump's famous Wall was that it wouldn't work because people would use ladders to get over it? That argument was put forward by people who opposed the Wall for other reasons - indeed, who opposed it precisely because it would work. But I don't regard that as necessarily making it a bad argument: perhaps there are lots of very long and very light ladders that mean that the Wall wouldn't work - let's find out. No facts about ladders are ascertained by enquiring whether the argument was put forward in bad faith or not. Again, it is quite possible for a criticism of Israel to be both motivated by antisemitism and accurate. Or, as I learned from Jon Ronson in The Psychopath Test, Scientologists' general distrust of psychiatric medicine is consistent with them being a good source of information about the worst mistakes of psychiatry.

Which explains why I am so unhappy about the growing prevalence of conflict theory approaches to political argument. Alexander gives the example of an article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist. Quite. My experience is that the Daily Mail is generally treated in this way: if it has a story saying that immigrants are putting pressure on the NHS, for example, a large number of people will respond by saying that the Daily Mail is evil, racist, obsessed with immigrants and that this story is an example of it, even if the story itself is entirely accurate and free of racism.

Now, I understand that people have to take short-cuts in life. I appreciate that my instinct on being told of some alleged Israeli atrocity by a source I have come to regard as tolerant of antisemitism is to dismiss the allegation. Other people take similar attitudes to stories in the Guardian or the Daily Mail. We don't have the time or the energy to look carefully at every point put before us in the way that a judge has to look at the arguments put before a court; and while the law has lawyers to filter out all the worst points, a society with free speech does not have any filters on the rubbish that people can spout - and quite right too. You might be right in thinking that once a news source has shown itself to be biased, you are entitled to ignore it thereafter except to note that everything it says just confirms that your low opinion of it.

But that is something quite different from what seems to me to be the increasingly common immediate resort to conflict-theory to explain what are obviously mistake-theory differences in opinion. Here's one good example, but the one that struck me most forcefully was the interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman on Channel 4. Here is Conor Friedersdorf with the interview and some sensible and careful comments - have a read and look out for the lobster!

The headline to Friedersdorf's piece is "Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?". This blog post is in part my attempt at an answer to that question. Take, for example, these exchanges:

Newman: … that 9 percent pay gap,  that’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.

Peterson: Yes. But there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.

Newman: But you’re saying, basically, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t getting to the top, because that’s what is skewing that gender pay gap, isn’t it? You’re saying that’s just a fact of life, women aren’t necessarily going to get to the top.

Peterson: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.

Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?

Peterson: I’m not saying that they should put up with it! I’m saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. There’s no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. 

...

Peterson: There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.

Newman: Again, a vast generalization. Some women are not more agreeable than men.

Peterson: That’s true. And some women get paid more than men.

Newman: So you’re saying by and large women are too agreeable to get the pay raises that they deserve.

Peterson: No, I’m saying that is one component of a multivariate equation that predicts salary. It accounts for maybe 5 percent of the variance. So you need another 18 factors, one of which is gender. And there is prejudice. There’s no doubt about that. But it accounts for a much smaller portion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim.

Newman: Okay, so rather than denying that the pay gap exists, which is what you did at the beginning of this conversation, shouldn’t you say to women, rather than being agreeable and not asking for a pay raise, go ask for a pay raise. Make yourself disagreeable with your boss.

Peterson: But I didn’t deny it existed, I denied that it existed because of gender. See, because I’m very, very, very careful with my words.

Newman: So the pay gap exists. You accept that. I mean the pay gap between men and women exists—but you’re saying it’s not because of gender, it’s because women are too agreeable to ask for pay raises.

Peterson: That’s one of the reasons.

Newman: Okay, so why not get them to ask for a pay raise? Wouldn’t that be fairer?

Peterson: I’ve done that many, many, many times in my career. So one of the things you do as a clinical psychologist is assertiveness training. So you might say––often you treat people for anxiety, you treat them for depression, and maybe the next most common category after that would be assertiveness training. So I’ve had many, many women, extraordinarily competent women, in my clinical and consulting practice, and we’ve put together strategies for their career development that involved continual pushing, competing, for higher wages. And often tripled their wages within a five-year period.  

Newman: And you celebrate that?

Peterson: Of course! Of course!

...

Newman: So you don’t believe in equal pay.

Peterson: No, I’m not saying that at all.

Newman: Because a lot of people listening to you will say, are we going back to the dark ages?

Peterson: That’s because you’re not listening, you’re just projecting.

Newman: I’m listening very carefully, and I’m hearing you basically saying that women need to just accept that they’re never going to make it on equal terms—equal outcomes is how you defined it.

Peterson: No, I didn’t say that.

Newman: If I was a young woman watching that, I would go, well, I might as well go play with my Cindy dolls and give up trying to go school, because I’m not going to get the top job I want, because there’s someone sitting there saying, it’s not possible, it’s going to make you miserable.

Newman is not deaf, or an idiot, unfamiliar with the English language. What is it about Peterson talking about multivariate analysis, agreeableness and assertiveness, all while accepting prejudice as one cause of the pay gap, that makes Newman hear him denying that there is a pay gap or talking about the Dark Ages and playing with Cindy dolls? This interview has apparently become well-known for Newman saying "so you're saying" and then saying something that Peterson was not saying: why did that happen?

My explanation is that Newman is a conflict theorist on this issue. When Peterson disagreed with her about the gender pay gap, that meant that he was a Bad Man; at some level, in her thinking, he really was talking about the Dark Ages and Cindy dolls. That is really how his argument sounded to her. That is why she said that that was what he was saying; that is why his actual words weighed so little with her.

It is the same as when someone says "there are various reasonable grounds on which one might favor a reduction [in immigration]" (Douthat's column, link above) and other people hear that as racism. All they hear is that they have been disagreed with, that they are therefore in the presence of a Bad Man, and that what they are hearing is racism (because the topic is immigration), or misogyny (if the subject is gender difference) or transphobia or .... This is why so many people detect Nazis in UKIP or Trump's entourage or what have you: they really do just hear disagreement on one of these topics and feel they have spotted the real Nazi beneath - regardless of what they actually say. 

If you've made it this far then you're wondering about the new religion. Here it comes. It strikes me that the best model for this resort to conflict theory, this inability to address the argument actually being made, is the over-excited religious believer.

Imagine someone who says, in the manner of the RE textbooks of my youth, "Jesus Christ was a good man, just like Nelson Mandela or Bob Geldof". A touchy Christian interlocutor might respond, "so you're saying that there's no God!" or "so you're saying Jesus didn't die for our sins!" or "so you're saying we should bow down and worship Bob Geldof!" None of those is what the first person said. But, equally, someone who says "Jesus Christ was a good man, just like Nelson Mandela and Bob Geldof" is not an orthodox Christian, and a Christian would be justified in thinking that the first person was expressing a view that is inconsistent with the entire structure of their religious beliefs. The first person really is an unbeliever, and if you believe that all unbelievers are Bad Men, then that person is a Bad Man. (Though that's still no excuse for accusing them of suggesting worshipping Bob Geldof - please always respect the words people choose to use.)

When we have that model, the model of the righteous religious believer and the sure-to-be-damned unbeliever, then the Newman-Peterson kind of conversation makes sense. Once Douthat or Peterson or Germaine Greer and various TERFs have shown themselves to be Unbelievers (and Believers are normally pretty good at spotting Unbelievers, whatever the religion involved) then they have shown themselves to be Bad, and their arguments are merely snares for the unwary that have to be brushed aside - temptations to Bad Thoughts that should be ignored - in the quest for true righteousness. Like the Devil, these people put on plausible countenances (although sometimes 'the mask slips' - look out for that phrase) as they try, with their silvery tongues, to tempt the weak from the True Path; but if you are strong, and if you stop up your ears to their empty blandishments, and if you 'call them out', then you shall prosper. 

What's more, like Goldman Sachs, you are doing God's work in attacking these unbelievers, these Bad Men: if there is no life after death then they have to be consigned to Hell right here on Earth, and, what's more, you are right to revel in their shame and destruction.

This is not good. Religions are good at providing conversions, anathemas, crusades, revival meetings, ceremonies, artistic inspiration and patronage, works of charity, hypocrisies, martyrs, moments of high drama or quiet comfort, and numerous other wonderful, ambiguous and worrying parts of human life. But they are a bad model for political governance. 

That is what I took to be the great achievement of Western liberalism: the creation of societies in which reasoned debate, based on the mistake theory, was possible or at least believed to be desirable; societies that had room for both religious and secular political spheres, with an uneasy but not impossible divide between them. After a whole load of wars over (relatively slight) differences in religious beliefs in Europe, we developed a way of talking about politics that was not religious in nature, that was not, as religions tend to be, totalitarian in its desire to enforce submission of the will and control over each individual's whole life, a way of talking that allowed different believers to rub along together reasonably peaceably. For all that they don't work in theory, these systems do work in practice: humans have never lived better than in these liberal societies. When this blog, in its more sombre moments, detects the Untergang den Abendlandes or the end of liberalism (try a search), the end of that world is what it is prospectively lamenting.

Liberal elites are capable of producing societies that are pretty decent places for small, very devout religious communities which themselves contain rules for governing their societies. Think of the Amish in America or Haredi Jews in London. I suspect the opposite is not true (Saudi Arabia, anyone?). The danger for liberalism is the risk that the elite becomes generally converted to this religious or conflict theory approach to political disagreement. I hope I am wrong to worry that they will. But people - even elite people - have a religious appetite that they need to feed somehow, and I'm not sure what else is on the menu.