Ideology is Comfort

Vox's first reaction to the Democratic defeat in the special election in Montana was "Republicans' 7-point win in last night's Montana election is great news for Democrats".

This is of course some terrible, Pravda-level analysis. In short:

• To turn this ship around, Democrats need to not just close the margin in some districts, but actually rack up Scott Brown style wins.
• Special elections are when protest votes against the incumbent party should be at their high-water mark. The effect will be smaller in midterms, even smaller in the re-election year.
• This was not the reddest of the red seats. While Democratic Presidents rarely pick up MT, it has an extremely strong local party, that has recently held both Senate seats and in 2013 elected Democratic Governor Steve Bullock. Of all the places an independent Democrat should be able to defy an unpopular national Republican party, it would be here.
• Most political watchers had already known the race would be close, and are not surprised by a “shrinking margin.” This margin was rather safer than we thought it would be.
• And the Republican aggressively assaulted a reporter the day before the election, putting him in the hospital and getting charges filed against the candidate. Democrats couldn’t even win against that epic news story.

All this combined with the earlier special election loss, and a Rasmussen poll putting Trump’s approval at 46%, mean things are really bad for Democrats. The broad public is not rebelling against Trump, not enough to stop him or even slow him down. This should worry us.

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But no one’s really surprised that Vox (with its famous liberal bias) wrote a piece saying “thing is great news for Democrats.” We should interrogate that.

If a writer is biased for one political party, we would expect them to talk up the virtues of their candidates and the sins of the opponent, sure. And days before an election, they might do all they can to pump up their voters and disillusion the enemy voters. This all makes sense from the tactical point of view of wanting to advance your political goals.

We can also see why they might just be blind to the costs of their policies, and the benefits of opposition policies. That’s just what a political standpoint means.

But what’s the point of this? What political gain is there in talking up how the situation really is great? And who cares about pumping up voters 17 months before any big election?

This is why I say the most important desire of ideology is being comfortable. Right now, Democrats are sad (I sure am.) The role of the ideology is not to channel our political instincts into successful programs, or even to rev up the war drums before a fight, it’s a much more fundamental human need: to make us feel comfortable. To reassure us when we are scared.

That’s what sells papers and gets re-shares after all. You read something that makes you feel better, especially when you’re uncomfortable, that shows what a cruel and pointless place the world is, and then you want to share it to like-minded allies. This is how the meme propagates.

And once you’re completely swimming in information designed to make you comfortable - not even to score tactical advantage - it’s easy to become wholly disconnected from the rest of the world. Ambiguity and uncertainty after all, aren’t comfortable. Making your enemy into a one-dimensional buffoon is comforting, even if it’s strategically counter-productive.

Ideologies aren’t good at achieving their stated goals, but that’s not what is really driving them anyway.

Quel Innocence

@mugasofer asked: I would be fascinated to hear you defend this claim.

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It's just the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Or Zizek's favorite metaphor, Wile E. Coyote, which is the same thing.

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(Okay, besides the last line about happiness, which is just a dumb platitude that attempts to mystify what makes people happy.)

What really works about Zizek's pop-philosophy writing style, is that he will give some very common everyday occurrence in normal life that is pretty weird when you think about it. Then he will give a psycho-economic explanation for it, based on Lacan or other critical theorists. This only works if you already empirically agree that his everyday example happens; it does not work for proving to you that such things do happen if that is not your experience.

In this case, he uses the example of "lovers who do not yet define their relationship." Are you flirting, are you dating, is this an affair yet, is this a relationship, all those ambiguous phases. Certainly in my experience this is a very common stage of most relationships. (For all the mockery the "Left Behind" novels get, they are an excellent depiction of the American Evangelical worldview, including the main character having just this sort of "undefined flirting" with the femme fatale.) Either you agree that exists as a phenomenon, or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you.

And the thing about these undefined lovers is that not only do they defy traditional answers to "what are you to each other," but they usually rely on not even asking the question. You can not even discuss "So, are we dating?" without it suddenly becoming awkward. See this parody from Reductress. The problem is not solely the labeling of the relationship, but even the consideration of what factors would determine the label. The magical moment of the new relationship relies on not questioning or even thinking about "what are you," but just going along with the ride.

This is the natural contradiction and mystification of ideology, where you can go along happily so long as you never ask the hard questions that challenge the ideology. We were just talking about progressive ideology's unwillingness to ask the question "which of our myriad causes is the most important?" or you can look at Republican ideology's inability to draw the line "how far would Trump have to go before you abandon him?"

This is our favorite coyote, who can run on air so long as he never notices. The minute he looks down, and becomes aware of his impossible state, is only then when he succumbs to gravity.

The concept of "innocence" is similarly highly ideological. Innocence is not just "the lack of doing evil" but lack of awareness of the possibly of doing evil. That is why a child who sees a brutal murder is "robbed of their innocence." Or if someone is offered sexual favors, there is no "innocent" answer to it - they must suddenly consider whether they want that or not, and in doing so they have considered sex, and have entered maturity. (Or as we know, the truly innocent answer is to be so naive you don't understand the offer, and continue on blithely.)

This is why the Fruit of Knowledge destroyed the Garden of Eden. Because once Adam and Eve then had the choice between Good and Evil, once they knew Evil was a possibility, then they could no longer exist in a state of innocence, even if they chose Good.

We can see this Garden of Eden at work in most lively communities. A community floats on the magic of never explicitly defining their rules and boundaries. They might have some very loose ideals, or even a few rules made by geeks who enjoy that sort of thing, but it's still usually an open question of enforcement, and a million possible edge cases that no one wants to deal with. For instance, the comments section of a popular blog: the blog might enjoy proclaiming "Free Speech" and so declare a principle of anything goes in the comments, yet any blog that has done that and gotten a following has found that there become a lot of things you want to censor after all (for instance: commenters who harass other commenters for expressing the wrong opinion.) The blog author might vaguely know it's a possibly problem, but they hope it doesn't come up and they avoid thinking about it, because that's not the spirit of a fun-easy going community.

Once the harassment, and spam, and the desire to minimize disproportionately represented viewpoints, actually happen, then the leader(s) of the community have some very awkward decisions to make. And while some answers are worse than others, it is the mere experience of having to debate those questions that destroy the group's innocence. Things are now less fun, and more stultifying, until you find another community. And that newer community rarely has "found an answer" to these awkward questions, so much as it is once again a place where you can pretend you don't need an answer to them because the problem hasn't and never will come up. Thus continues the cycle of TAZ.

We should of course reject this form of innocence, willful ignorance of possibilities, and the attempts to float past ideological contradiction.

Atheism, MTD, and Liberal Ideology

@isaacsapphire​ , @discoursedrome​, and @ranma-official​ are discussing “Why is the Left anti-atheist” in a few other threads. This deserves some response, though most of the discussion is just-so story-making about reasons the Left dislikes Atheists.

For one, no, atheists are not the outgroup for even the most cliche social justice progressives. Social justice ideology is still a coalition of many different groups, beliefs, and experiences and there are definitely many atheists among them. It’s not like if you met an avowed feminist, and it came up she was atheist, any of us would really be shocked. 

There are not purity squads going around testing whether people believe in god and pouncing on any sign of atheism, the way they are for libertarians, or HBD, or ever having voted Republican. (Well there may be some, the world is wide and surprising, but they’re certainly less conspicuous than the other varieties.)

Atheism is not the official belief of progressive ideology these days, and in some ways it may be less cool than Suffi Islam or extremely non-specific spirituality, but it’s still a real part of the coalition.

So what’s going on here?

Well to some degree the answer is “cool liberalism doesn’t hate atheism, it just hates Richard Dawkins”, which is pretty self-explanatory. But I do think there is something more generalizable at issue.

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@oligopsonoia​ was talking about Moral Therapeutic Deism as an important advance in philosophical/cultural technology. And indeed, it was great at getting people to stop killing each other over god.

MTD is the theology of cosmopolitan liberal ideology. Or it’s atheist version “Jesus may not have been the son of God, but I think he was a great moral teacher.” It’s very soft-hearted respect for all this “religion stuff” without fully buying into it. That way, our “Coalition of the Ascendent”, including both academic Leftists and Muslim immigrants, can all get along.

As passionate atheist writers and Christian philosophers both say, if God exists that is the most important fact ever. To them, everything you believe about the world should be derived from the existence of, or absence of God. This is a committed ethical stance.

Not only is that awkward for the coalition, that committed ethical stance is entirely antithetical to how ideology works. A mature ideology does not want people who take their philosophical commitments more seriously than anything else! Those people are inconvenient, annoying, and not easily moved.

Ideology wants reasonable people. It wants people who are part of the “broad movement” overall, much more than passionate commitment to one ideal. Social justice ideology wants investment in anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, anti-bad-corporations, anti-traditional religion, and a lot of other things while never answering which of those is the most important if they ever come in conflict. It uses a great deal of social pressure to convince people to never ask that question.

Atheism as a cause might be able to make peace with all the other religious minorities, but it will never be in harmony with MTD. It takes God seriously, and taking something truly seriously, putting the intellectual foundation from first principles above any social necessity, is the predator to ideologies.

It’s not cool. It’s not harmonious. You can have your atheism, just don’t take it too seriously, and you be more on board making fun of Ivanka Trump’s fashion than trying to debate the source of morality in a God-less world, when you’re part of the ideological culture. (Dear lord, do not question “what is the source of our moral certainty.” That must always be assumed to be shared by everyone without any need for explanation or justification.)