Axes, Solving Systemic Problems, and Power

@theunitofcaring and @shieldfoss explored one of the contradictions we have about professional environments and how they can support minorities. This is a subject @rasienna discusses a lot. Sometimes people note than an intensely tribal office culture can exclude people who don’t share the interests and backgrounds of the prevailing employees. Sometimes people note that an extremely standardized, corporate environment is based on rules set up by the kyriarchy, and will be most accessible to people used to those rules.

Informal vs formal. Or even more fundamentally, chaos vs order. Which way lies more justice?

And it is tremendously easy to get tricked by this question. You can see some examples where one method led to the exclusion of an otherwise worthy worker or member of the community, and feel “Damned informality, it must be a tool of oppression!”

Someone didn’t get what the office jokes were about and so acted awkwardly. Informal office culture doomed their career.

... or, someone didn’t go to the right college and have the right standardized experience and classes, and no one appreciated the intangible of diversity they brought to the team over the Generic White Guy With A Good Resume, so an overly formal office culture dooms their career.

It’s easy to tell yourself this story, and end up crusading against that type of office culture everywhere. Now you’ve assigned yourself to chaos or order in some never-ending battle, and you think it’s what will always benefit the disadvantaged.

Here’s the thing: Power doesn’t give a fuck about chaos or order. It’s power. It will figure out how to flow either in a very informal environment, or how adapt to an extremely rigid one. If one group systematically has more money and representation and influence, then they will do just fine, whether you’ve got a casual laid back office that feels like a family, or a corporate hierarchy run solely by forms and algorithms.

Our enemy is always Power. Millions of women and black people and people without a college education are held back from anyone seeing their potential, because they don’t look or talk like the people with money and influence. When you see instantiations of this discrimination, you should try to stop it, and give a hand up to those people. You should always sympathize with the excluded.

You don’t need to say “all informal offices are toxic” or “all corporate hierarchies are inherently patriarchal.” Different people flourish in both chaos and order. There should be workplaces for either of them. There should be a workplace for the hispanic coder who gains knowledge of a new part of society because of how many friends she meets at work. There should be a workplace for the single mother who needs to fit a very consistent schedule so her children and babysitters aren’t caught flat-footed. There should be a workplace for nerds who make friends by showing off their code, and there should be a workplace for autistic people who can’t navigate social vague-spaces. And in a country of 330 million people, it’s pretty easy to find one.

This inference can occur on any axis our mind can pattern match to. We can see one example of oppression that occurred in a certain environment, and construct a narrative for why that environment always produces oppression and the opposite end of the spectrum does not. Masculine vs feminine, fast paced offices vs slow, non-profits vs private sector,  tech sector vs brick and mortar , on and on all the binaries we can invent.  And they should be treated as just-so stories until proven statistically significant.

Be compassionate. Be open-minded about candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. Be aware that even candidates who look traditional may be suffering their own lifelong oppressions they don’t wish to talk about. You can fight classism and racism and sexism on an individual basis by treating them like individual people.

Do not be that ideologue who says “because sometimes tribal chaotic office culture can go bad, it’s always a red flag” or “because corporate order is bad, no one would ever want to work in a Faceless Corp.” The world is a lot more complex than that.

Question 2 for Humanism Blog

My favorite thing about the ITT is the way people answer question 2 “ What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?”

I’m certain every single respondent has thought deeply about what they believe. They’ve seen studies that back them up, thought about ethical principles, and seen the effects of oppression first hand. But when asked “why do you really believe this? what swayed you so much that it would change your mind if it was contradicted”… they often dissolve into vagueness and “everything shows I’m right!” Everything, of course, can never be disproven.

It’s a fascinating insight into how ideology works. Ideology isn’t formed by realizing our terminal values, or reading a study, it’s a much more osmotic experience than that. It involves quasi-believing things because so many other people we know believe them, and not questioning them *too* much because doing so is uncomfortable (both socially, and to our own identity as a good person.) Like Ra, ideology hates it when you try to pin down terms and reasons too precisely.

So. Let’s do that. Here is my challenge to any rebloggers: What is the true reason deep down that you believe what you believe? What evidence could convince you that you were wrong?

I’ll start.

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This tumblr is arguing the humanist viewpoint, so I’ll focus on why I’m a humanist, and what could sway me into other philosophies (specifically: parochial tribalism, anti-human universalism, or rights based liberalism and materialism.)

My terminal value is not special. It’s basically happy people, with an emphasis on complex and interesting lives and societies. My own personal goal is to find a button that increases human happiness no matter how much you push it, and to keep pushing it until it breaks.

It turns out that most of the things that we think increase human happiness, such as having better living conditions or more money, don’t really. And even our attempts to build up economies so that people have more stuff, are horribly complicated and unpredictable. I am distinctly unimpressed with a lot of the rationalist projects in this regard, and I suspect they will spend decades trying to find ways to improve the happiness of others with material interventions, and rarely feel they have made much success. There will still be misery everywhere, even after billions are spent. (If rationalist interventions started making a measurable and sizable impact in the amount of misery in the world, that would be evidence to change my view.) (Yes I saw Scott’s chart about malaria interventions. I approve of malaria interventions. And the euphoria in the comments only emphasized to me how many rationalists are insecure about whether this project of theirs is having any results.)

Additionally, a lot of the rules we set down about how we should treat each other should increase human happiness, but mostly make humans miserable as they fight over the rules, and the rules are enforced haphazardly, with some receiving the extreme brunt of enforcement and others being afraid there isn’t enough enforcement. Which is why I am skeptical of rights based liberalism, and will continue to be until it is shown to be a better social technology than primitive tribalism.

The button that does work, that in my experience does make people reliably feel better, is listening to them and one-on-one interaction. Humans are social animals, and humans have very unique individual experiences. Respecting that individual complexity, and giving them social validation, seems the most reliably way to increase happiness, even if only on a very small scale.

If listening and validation are shown to be in the long run net-negative in happiness (if for instance, they operate like a drug that gives you a high that you then grow tolerant for) then I would be skeptical of that button.
If there is no button that can reliably increase human happiness, well that would say a great deal about the chaotic nature of the human condition, which fundamentally validates my anti-categorical humanism.

But basically… if any button on the human psyche is shown to have reliable results - peer reviewed and consistently replicated - about how to affect people and make them happy, I would throw my philosophy out the window and pursue that. My current stance is a result of failure to find anything like that.

Now, humanism might just be speciesist, and it’s possible I don’t give enough credit to non-humans and dehumanized subjects. By appreciating complexity, I may be favoring people who’ve had interesting lives over people who have been so beaten down by the system that they will always be boring to me. This is a real risk and why I dabble in universalism elsewhere. But for now, my interactions with any human have shown that no matter how degraded they have been by society, they’re still as intelligent and social as the richest person I’ve met when you just listen to them for 10 minutes. If this were shown not to be the case statistically, I’d feel guilty about the inherent elitism of humanism, and I’d focus more on a philosophy that tries to exalt the most degraded and inhuman subjects.

Similarly for species, there seems a large gap in cognitive quality between humans and any other creature. If some species existed that were just somewhat less intelligent than humans but still identifiable as having a subjective experience in there, I’d have to look into a much more gradient focused definition of sentience and moral agency.

What is Humanism?

This is in response to a pithy tumblr post from a libertarian/rationalist blogger

“Compassion is a brand, and I’m not in its demographic.”

http://raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/114307606193/compassion-is-a-brand-and-im-not-in-its

Which depicts compassion as a weak sentiment, trumpeted less because it’s a powerful philosophy, but more because it’s the last man standing whenever you pare away all the crazy ideologies that don’t mind trampling over humanity in their quest for purity and righteousness. We’ve all seen people with (and felt ourselves) under this sentiment “I sure don’t know who’s right in this situation, but well, that person looks sad or cute or weak and I just don’t feel comfortable letting them get hurt.”

At the most rational, this compassion-brand could be incorporated as this attitude of “left skepticism” http://oligopsony.tumblr.com/post/134837553428/left-skepticismhttp://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/134839526851/left-skepticism . At its least rigorous, well it’s what “charismatic megafauna” is to environmentalism. It’s judgment of important moral issues not by any deep commitment to principle or reasoned thought, but by a glandular reaction to big eyes and unblemished skin that is no better than our physical attractions or our fight or flight response. At its very worst it consistently values people who superficially look or appear more vulnerable over those who don’t, while depriving of us of any urgency to consistently do something about the state of the world and the reasons behind destructive conflict.

I can see why people consider that a brand, and why they might even be proud to not be a target of it.

But one can make a much better argument for compassion.

Humans are complex. In our fundamentally meaningless universe, it is as close to a “moral fact” as anything else that there is nothing like a human - be it in the fact of our sentience, or in the numerous complex systems that sustain us, or the wonderful emergent social systems we swim in. The closest are the other megafauna who are our close cousins, and they too are basically unique in that there is nothing in the universe like them.

Most ideologies fail in just how much they get wrong about humans. Patriarchical ideology fails when it stereotypes women because so many women obviously don’t fall into the categories they set up (and neither do many complicated men.) No matter how you try to categorize humans, there will be exceptions - and not just minor exceptions, but big significant ones, ones that make the whole categorization scheme sound unfalsifiable and meaningless.

Meritocratic ideologies (like capitalism) try to categorize people into the bags of useful or unskilled. Well that depends on what skills are useful in this context, how much motivation a human has to show this skill, whether you’re talking innate talent or practiced result, how they act under pressure or just on a test or being resourceful in a field or how good at communication they are to demonstrate their skill. Meritocracy itself is just another poor attempt at mapping messy humans.

Even the most fundamental categorizations - good and bad - fail when confronted with the complexity of humans. The worst murderer cares deeply about some people and goes out of their way to be kind to them and believes in their head that their crimes were part of a greater plan. And the most lauded saint has probably been cruel and petty to people, participates in economic systems that oppress others, and has moments of anger or weakness. Even the willfully evil few have reasons that led them to this choice, and have someone who loves them.

(Some very very few people may have none of this complexity. But this is such a small number that it is unlikely to come up in any day to day interaction you have. If you have a horrible encounter with a person and reduce them to “they are just crazy” then you are almost certainly wrong.)

There are cities inside each and every person. You can find the whole story behind why they like a certain book, or the mixture of emotions they feel when a certain person’s name is mentioned, or the dreams they gave up as they got older. There is not a person out there whose story would not enrapture you for hours if it was told in the right way. And all of them have felt such strong, overwhelming emotions as they experienced this story.

No one is just a caricature, a stereotype, a good guy or bad guy, a statistic, or a pariah to dump all of the problems of our ideology on. Humanism saves us from the many times we are tempted to see people that way.

Humanist compassion is about respect for that complexity. It’s the defense of complex things. Even if this human being may be a member of a bad group, or have done bad things, they still represent a unique object with a thousand facets. If this person is destroyed, then the universe will have been robbed of something that cannot be easily replaced.

It’s also respect on an emotional level, that takes advantage of the pathos we gain from hearing their stories, or looking in their eyes, and respecting “hey, there’s another creature there. Another thinking being. Just like me.” There is so much evil in the world that takes advantage of our emotional buttons - that uses our greed or our anger or our fear - that emotional reactions dedicated to this sympathy are a rare lifeline. We should treasure that there is at least one gland that pushes us in the direction of defending complexity.

As we exercise this emotion, as we learn to pull out people’s stories and emotions, we become better and more natural at using empathy on more and more people. This causes a virtuous cycle which makes us *better humanists*, much like rationalism should cause a similar cycle that makes you better at analyzing decisions each day.

You might also feel compassion for cities, grand works of art, social networks, or anything complex enough to evoke that same emotion for you. That is okay, because those things too are unique and difficult to replace too.

Note that one of the most powerful tropes in art is “humanizing the inhuman”, when the author takes something that is monstrous and simple, and adds little complex human details. What type of tea does Darth Vader like? How does Captain America feel towards his long lost best friend? What sort of music do the agents of Heaven and Hell most enjoy on Earth? How does the Devil mourn Heaven, or feel about the aesthetics of Hell? These sort of tropes break down genuinely inhuman, simple beings into complex beings that have a multiplicity of facets. And they are *fun as hell* and people can’t stop reading about them. (See, like, the entirely of a slash fiction archive.) We like adding even more complexity to our fictional constructs.

This is humanism is not just a “what do we have left when all commitments to ideals are stripped away”, but a proactive commitment to the defense of complex beings, that willfully interprets the whole world around “humans are messy, and every human really is special.”