The wonky Tree (1)
I hate to break it to you, but the fact that it is now Insert Current Year, and that we are in the Age of the Internet an' all, doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of Bad Ideas floating around.
Now, the official line on this, and it's one of those rare things that we seem to all agree on regardless of whether we are theists or atheists, Labour or Tory, pro or anti-Marmite, is that Bad Ideas are a kind of magnet that attracts Bad People. If I'm a Selfish Rich Git, for example, I will naturally, perhaps inevitably, espouse a political ideology and an economic theory conducive to the continued pursuit of Selfish Rich Gittery: I will probably end up as a Conservative, a Free Market Capitalist, a Libertarian, a Monetarist, maybe even a Fascist. If I am a Straight White Male, the headlong flight from the burden of my inherited guilt will naturally drive me towards the fold of White Nationalism (whatever that eats in winter), Men's Rights Activism, or some kind of Traditionalism, maybe even into the arms of the Alt Right. If I am a pampered, selfish, entitled First World female with a shrill voice and the reasoning capacity of a newborn water vole I will naturally become a feminist, and maybe also a Regressive and a Social Justice Warrior for good measure. Wherever you are on whichever political spectrum you happen to inhabit, your ideological opponents are not just wrong people, but also - rather conveniently to be sure - ugly, stupid, painful people. People who deserve whatever's coming to them.
Now take off those glasses. What do you see?
Same here. When it comes down to it (someone once estimated that "when" as a mere three missed meals away) all humans are basically the same bundle of hardwired drives and prejudices and shoveaciousness, modulated by statistical tendencies and obscure accidents of genetics and biography. We're not as different one from another as we crack ourselves up to be. Geneticists find us to be almost eerily lacking in the sort of diversity you'd expect a reasonably successful species to exhibit (Bill Bryant is good on this). We even have the same Mitochondrial Mum. Which is a pity in a way, because being so like our opponents makes reading their minds and hearts a relatively straightforward affair (thank you, Spock, but we won't be needing your mind-meld today), and hence, especially in the Age of the Internet, being actually impressed (let alone "influenced") by anyone becomes more and more difficult: the mask slips too quickly, probably faster than it ever did in the innocent, impressionable pre-Internet past. The appearance of virtue has given way to the presumption of virtue-signalling. The appearance of knowledge has given way to the presumption of Wikipedia. An insult which ten years ago may have stung now evokes only a wry grin, as you realize the writer is so green as to have reached for a tired old cliché of a putdown that went out of fashion at least a week ago, and which anyone savvy wouldn't be seen dead wearing any more, not here in Insert Current News Cycle. Arguments online come down to sniffing for blood: the smell given off by an assumed posture badly worn, by a pretence of knowledge or of virtue, by a tell-tale buzzword thoughtlessly invoked, by an uneasy sweeping under the carpet, by a promising susceptibility. We're all Less Deceived now, or fancy ourselves to be. And we're all yammering intellectual hyenas capering round the corpses of our imaginary foes. We're a disgrace, mon semblable, every last one of us. (Barring that one over there, of course. Typical - there's always one, isn't there.)
With the Internet, first we learned that a million monkeys with typewriters won't give us the works of Shakespeare. Now we also know that a million monkeys debating some religious or ideological proposition, no matter how secondary or how speculative, won't give us a single "you're right, I never thought of that" moment. Why are we like that? Me, I put it down to them glasses.
Put them back on again. That feels better, doesn't it? The world looks familiar again, as people once again fall into the narrow chromatic bands of various comfortable pastel shades of Us versus various ugly scarlet shades of Them. It just feels right to be tribal... which has led some to conjecture that this might be because we always were, as a species, tribal. I know it's a bit of a wild stab in the dark, at this stage, but the speculative notion has my support, for what it's worth. And not just because it might be right, but also because it's a mental model that helps to make sense of all sorts of things.
First, it means that you don't necessarily have to believe that your ideological adversaries are truly nasty people. They might be, but then again it might just be the glasses. Again for what it's worth, I heartily recommend getting old and terminally ill and falling to bits, at least in this regard, since the intellectual impairment that comes with advancing age and failing circulation forces you to realize how frail the human mind is, how easily bits of it can just rattle to a halt at a moment's notice, and how little you actually need to keep going in your head in order to carry on doing a fairly convincing representation of a fully employable human (a university teacher, no less, in my own case). (Sometimes I find myself hoping that the present crop of brash middle-aged knowitalls will discover as quickly as possible the experience of spoonfeeding a dribbling old ideological adversary post-stroke in the coming age of senescent population drift, and thus discover how pygmy ideas look next to humanity.) So while there are no doubt some very turbocharged, habitually chrome-plated minds out there, it is by no means certain that they are the majority, or should be taken as the default. Most of us are probably pretty dim most of the time, for reasons ranging from age to education to Victorian plumbing. So if, in your view, the only way anyone could possibly believe X is by being either wicked or stupid, I'm suggesting you go with stupid, since it appears to be far more common. To assume the opposite without evidence strikes me as, well, a bit stupid.
And by all means feel free to carry on using "stupid" as an insult - as long as you understand that, in this context, it literally means "not a statistical outlier", or in other words, average or normal. Because that's all I'm saying here: we're all stupid enough to get some stuff wrong, on a fairly regular basis. I've seen a lot of very bright people be calamitously wrong about all sorts of simple stuff. Haven't you? There you are, then.
But there's more. The Tribal Mind Conjecture not only explains why we habitually mislabel difference of opinion as moral turpitude (the Them have to be wicked, rather than just engagingly cantankerous, so we can steal their stuff with a good conscience); it also allows us to discriminate between at least two kinds of forgivable (because well-nigh universal) stupidity. What I mean is that if someone disagrees with you, and is therefore Wrong, it might be just because they haven't thought enough about stuff, which is pretty much all of us depending what stuff is under discussion, or it may also be because they have tried to do the thinking or the required reading, but keep coming up against the Tribal Fence, you know, the one that encircles the village, and demarcates the border between safety and being shot at. The existence of this metaphorical fence is part of the hypothesis, and the evidence in favour of its existence, I'd say lies primarily in that atavistic fury which the sight of new encircling fences being erected way over there, outside Ours, tends to evoke in all decent, right-minded people. (Think Montsegur, think Brexit, think Men's Rights, that sort of thing.)
Given the stark choice between pursuing an idea beyond the fence, where there are wolves, and staying inside, where there are familiar smiling faces and compliments on how nice your hair looks today, how many stick with following the idea? Not many, and arguably less now that the old hero narratives are no longer read to children. I suspect that some people these days don't even realize that losing all their friends in a good cause (before finding some unexpected new ones) is actually a perfectly realistic and doable option. That's how somatose we've become as a civilisation.
Now, the official line on this, and it's one of those rare things that we seem to all agree on regardless of whether we are theists or atheists, Labour or Tory, pro or anti-Marmite, is that Bad Ideas are a kind of magnet that attracts Bad People. If I'm a Selfish Rich Git, for example, I will naturally, perhaps inevitably, espouse a political ideology and an economic theory conducive to the continued pursuit of Selfish Rich Gittery: I will probably end up as a Conservative, a Free Market Capitalist, a Libertarian, a Monetarist, maybe even a Fascist. If I am a Straight White Male, the headlong flight from the burden of my inherited guilt will naturally drive me towards the fold of White Nationalism (whatever that eats in winter), Men's Rights Activism, or some kind of Traditionalism, maybe even into the arms of the Alt Right. If I am a pampered, selfish, entitled First World female with a shrill voice and the reasoning capacity of a newborn water vole I will naturally become a feminist, and maybe also a Regressive and a Social Justice Warrior for good measure. Wherever you are on whichever political spectrum you happen to inhabit, your ideological opponents are not just wrong people, but also - rather conveniently to be sure - ugly, stupid, painful people. People who deserve whatever's coming to them.
Now take off those glasses. What do you see?
Same here. When it comes down to it (someone once estimated that "when" as a mere three missed meals away) all humans are basically the same bundle of hardwired drives and prejudices and shoveaciousness, modulated by statistical tendencies and obscure accidents of genetics and biography. We're not as different one from another as we crack ourselves up to be. Geneticists find us to be almost eerily lacking in the sort of diversity you'd expect a reasonably successful species to exhibit (Bill Bryant is good on this). We even have the same Mitochondrial Mum. Which is a pity in a way, because being so like our opponents makes reading their minds and hearts a relatively straightforward affair (thank you, Spock, but we won't be needing your mind-meld today), and hence, especially in the Age of the Internet, being actually impressed (let alone "influenced") by anyone becomes more and more difficult: the mask slips too quickly, probably faster than it ever did in the innocent, impressionable pre-Internet past. The appearance of virtue has given way to the presumption of virtue-signalling. The appearance of knowledge has given way to the presumption of Wikipedia. An insult which ten years ago may have stung now evokes only a wry grin, as you realize the writer is so green as to have reached for a tired old cliché of a putdown that went out of fashion at least a week ago, and which anyone savvy wouldn't be seen dead wearing any more, not here in Insert Current News Cycle. Arguments online come down to sniffing for blood: the smell given off by an assumed posture badly worn, by a pretence of knowledge or of virtue, by a tell-tale buzzword thoughtlessly invoked, by an uneasy sweeping under the carpet, by a promising susceptibility. We're all Less Deceived now, or fancy ourselves to be. And we're all yammering intellectual hyenas capering round the corpses of our imaginary foes. We're a disgrace, mon semblable, every last one of us. (Barring that one over there, of course. Typical - there's always one, isn't there.)
With the Internet, first we learned that a million monkeys with typewriters won't give us the works of Shakespeare. Now we also know that a million monkeys debating some religious or ideological proposition, no matter how secondary or how speculative, won't give us a single "you're right, I never thought of that" moment. Why are we like that? Me, I put it down to them glasses.
Put them back on again. That feels better, doesn't it? The world looks familiar again, as people once again fall into the narrow chromatic bands of various comfortable pastel shades of Us versus various ugly scarlet shades of Them. It just feels right to be tribal... which has led some to conjecture that this might be because we always were, as a species, tribal. I know it's a bit of a wild stab in the dark, at this stage, but the speculative notion has my support, for what it's worth. And not just because it might be right, but also because it's a mental model that helps to make sense of all sorts of things.
First, it means that you don't necessarily have to believe that your ideological adversaries are truly nasty people. They might be, but then again it might just be the glasses. Again for what it's worth, I heartily recommend getting old and terminally ill and falling to bits, at least in this regard, since the intellectual impairment that comes with advancing age and failing circulation forces you to realize how frail the human mind is, how easily bits of it can just rattle to a halt at a moment's notice, and how little you actually need to keep going in your head in order to carry on doing a fairly convincing representation of a fully employable human (a university teacher, no less, in my own case). (Sometimes I find myself hoping that the present crop of brash middle-aged knowitalls will discover as quickly as possible the experience of spoonfeeding a dribbling old ideological adversary post-stroke in the coming age of senescent population drift, and thus discover how pygmy ideas look next to humanity.) So while there are no doubt some very turbocharged, habitually chrome-plated minds out there, it is by no means certain that they are the majority, or should be taken as the default. Most of us are probably pretty dim most of the time, for reasons ranging from age to education to Victorian plumbing. So if, in your view, the only way anyone could possibly believe X is by being either wicked or stupid, I'm suggesting you go with stupid, since it appears to be far more common. To assume the opposite without evidence strikes me as, well, a bit stupid.
And by all means feel free to carry on using "stupid" as an insult - as long as you understand that, in this context, it literally means "not a statistical outlier", or in other words, average or normal. Because that's all I'm saying here: we're all stupid enough to get some stuff wrong, on a fairly regular basis. I've seen a lot of very bright people be calamitously wrong about all sorts of simple stuff. Haven't you? There you are, then.
But there's more. The Tribal Mind Conjecture not only explains why we habitually mislabel difference of opinion as moral turpitude (the Them have to be wicked, rather than just engagingly cantankerous, so we can steal their stuff with a good conscience); it also allows us to discriminate between at least two kinds of forgivable (because well-nigh universal) stupidity. What I mean is that if someone disagrees with you, and is therefore Wrong, it might be just because they haven't thought enough about stuff, which is pretty much all of us depending what stuff is under discussion, or it may also be because they have tried to do the thinking or the required reading, but keep coming up against the Tribal Fence, you know, the one that encircles the village, and demarcates the border between safety and being shot at. The existence of this metaphorical fence is part of the hypothesis, and the evidence in favour of its existence, I'd say lies primarily in that atavistic fury which the sight of new encircling fences being erected way over there, outside Ours, tends to evoke in all decent, right-minded people. (Think Montsegur, think Brexit, think Men's Rights, that sort of thing.)
Given the stark choice between pursuing an idea beyond the fence, where there are wolves, and staying inside, where there are familiar smiling faces and compliments on how nice your hair looks today, how many stick with following the idea? Not many, and arguably less now that the old hero narratives are no longer read to children. I suspect that some people these days don't even realize that losing all their friends in a good cause (before finding some unexpected new ones) is actually a perfectly realistic and doable option. That's how somatose we've become as a civilisation.
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