Isegoria

After watching the second televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea:

Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?

Guadalupe reached out to Joe Salvatore, a Steinhardt clinical associate professor of educational theatre who specializes in ethnodrama — a method of adapting interviews, field notes, journal entries, and other print and media artifacts into a script to be performed as a play. Together, they developed Her Opponent, a production featuring actors performing excerpts from each of the three debates exactly as they happened — but with the genders switched. Salvatore cast fellow educational theatre faculty Rachel Whorton to play “Brenda King,” a female version of Trump, and Daryl Embry to play “Jonathan Gordon,” a male version of Hillary Clinton, and coached them as they learned the candidates’ words and gestures.

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Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression — his tendency to interrupt and attack — would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.

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We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened” — meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman — that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another — a musical theater composer, actually — said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate — you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience. There was someone who described Brenda King [the female Donald Trump] as his Jewish aunt who would take care of him, even though he might not like his aunt. Someone else described her as the middle school principal who you don’t like, but you know is doing good things for you.

T. Greer shares a parable concerning tolerance:

There once lived in a far country a people of gentle nature and perceptive understanding. They were led by a man of great vision. At great cost to his person and his standing, he decided to dedicate his life to preserving his people’s established way of life. He did this because he saw in them a beauty and virtue he could find nowhere else. In a world of bigotry and darkness they were a rare light: they blindly followed no authority, nor were they were slaves to custom. No trace of the regressive attitudes so common to their countrymen could be found among them. Women were valued highly among them. Indeed, their women were cherished not only as mothers or wives, but also as honored leaders. This was a people filled with a spirit of love: all men and all women were their friends, rich or poor, young or old, saved or heathen. The poor they sustained; the needy they gave generously to (and gave to, no matter how low their background or coarse their appearance). In their eyes, to be learned was considered good. The more learned one was, they supposed, the greater service one could give. Kindness was thus their byword; brotherliness their call-sign. They disdained violence. In politics it was their part to push for less war, smaller armies, and a more peacable way of living with other humans on the Earth. This view extended into the domestic sphere: in political controversies, theirs was always the voice of tolerance. Let the downcast, the unusual, and even the heretic be allowed their natural liberties, they would say, and do not fear if they live among us. In their conception a good society was a society that let men of different beliefs and customs all live happily together. It was a self-serving position: they understood that only if tolerance ruled the day could their less enlightened countrymen be compelled to tolerate them. But this did not bother them: they were happy in the knowledge that in this case self interest aligned so well with virtue.

Their leader was not content (visionaries rarely are). The fight for toleration had been difficult. He and his allies had not been truly victorious. Their future was uncertain. He foresaw a rising tide of anger and reaction that could not be beat back. What then for his happy people? How could they secure their way of life then?

The answer was clear: separation. He would do what he could, of course, to bring about a victory for the light within the kingdom that then existed, but more drastic measures were needed. A new realm was needed. His people would secede. They would establish their own government that would protect the rights of his people. This new country would champion their values: it would be an example to the other nations of the Earth of just what humanity could achieve unencumbered by the dogmatisms and hatreds of the past. But it would be more than that. This new country would not just be an example to the world: it would be an invitation to it. His people would not just protect their own rights–they would protect and cherish the rights of any man or woman who moved there. All sects, all kindreds, all kinds of people would find a home in their homes. Love would be emblazoned in the title of her cities; toleration would be embedded in the hearts of her citizens. It would be a land without war, without fear, and without prejudice. It would be a country man (and woman) was meant to live in.

Read the whole thing — and definitely read the addendum.

If politics flows downwards from culture, David Ernst says, then it was only a matter of time before a politician mastered the role, and Donald Trump cracked the code. Ernst explores that postmodern code:

Postmodernism is the source of the emphasis that our culture puts on authenticity, and the scorn it directs towards phoniness. After all, if the only one true thing in the world is that all truth and morality are relative, then anyone who pretends otherwise is either an idiot or a fraud. Hence the contemporary appeal of the antihero, and the disappearance of the traditional hero.

Heroes who stand for traditionally good things in a world where everything supposedly “good” has long been discredited are corny Dudley Do-Rights who are at best too stupid to know better. Antiheroes, by contrast, ingratiate themselves with their audiences for their gritty realism and their candor, no matter how bad they are. Frank Underwood breaks the fourth wall with his viewers and brings them along for his evil schemes; Walter White’s moment of redemption is his final admission to his wife that he sells meth because he likes to, and not to do right by his family; and Tony Soprano establishes a close bond with his daughter early on when he admits to her that he’s not actually a “waste management consultant.” In the postmodern world, there is no greater virtue then authenticity, and there is no greater vice than phoniness.

Postmodernism is also the source of the assumptions underlying the glib jokes of late-night comedians who exhibit disdainful prejudice towards patriotism or religion, but show bitter judgment towards any form of perceived prejudice. It is the baseline for just about every plotline in funny shows about aimless, self-centered people like “Seinfeld,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and “Archer.” It is hyper-prejudice against prejudice, or in the words of Evan Sayet, “a cult of non-discrimination.”

In contrast to the many religions, systems of moral thought, and other ancient traditions that have distinguished every effort to better the human condition, postmodernism presumes that all of these endeavors are the cause of human failure. It therefore operates according to just one moral imperative: discredit anything that other people presume to stand for goodness, because the belief that anything is superior to anything else inevitably results in prejudice, interpersonal strife, and inequality.

Thus, the Venus de Milo has no more aesthetic value than a crucifix in a jar full of urine; Beethoven’s symphonies are no more profound than the latest round of top 40 hits; all religions are fundamentally the same, and their “moderate” postmodern adherents are all comfortably represented on the “Coexist” bumper sticker. In a sense, it isn’t culture at all, but rather an anti-culture that measures success insofar as it deconstructs anything that other people value.

Provided that the postmodern man believes in nothing and values nothing, one wouldn’t be unreasonable in concluding that he cares about nothing. But anyone who knows postmodern man also knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather, the “cult of non-discrimination” is filled with bright-eyed idealism about making the world a better place, and in the cases where it challenges baseless prejudice, it does make the world a better place. Like other utopian visions that seek to remake human beings into something alien to their nature, however, it is incapable of compromise, and thus lends itself to hypocrisy and fanaticism.

Marcus Sidonius Falx is a Roman of noble birth who has — with his assistant and amanuensis, Dr Jerry Toner of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge — written How to Manage Your Slaves (2014) and Release Your Inner Roman (2016). Here he explains how to be a patriarch:

If you marry a woman just because she is beautiful, then she will feel she never has to do anything else for you. She will not mind if the house is a mess or your meals are badly cooked. And you will have to put up with this because you married her just for her beauty and not for her domestic skills. The same is true if you marry a woman just because she is rich or from an important family. She will always think she has done enough just by being with you.

Of course, you do need to take her looks and her background into account. But wealth, good family and beauty do nothing in themselves to make a wife think kind thoughts towards her husband. In fact, the opposite is more the case. These attributes are more likely to make your wife feel superior to you. She will feel you do not deserve to have her as a wife and resent doing anything you tell her to do. Make sure you check to see whether her family has a good track record in producing healthy, male children. When it comes to a potential wife’s physical appearance, all that really matters is that she is strong, healthy and looks normal. If she is less than beautiful she will be less hassled by other men’s attempts to seduce, and if she has a strong body she will be better suited to hard work and bearing children.

Most girls get married in adolescence and your duty as an older husband is to teach your young bride how to become a good wife. She should be loyal, obedient, affable, reasonable, and work hard at her wool-making. She should be religious without being superstitious, dress modestly and use little make-up. She must be devoted to her family and show as much attention to her mother-in-law as she does to her own. The following checklist for a happy marriage will help her:

1. The passion of newlyweds soon burns out. Marriage starts with lust but will only last if a more sustainable fuel can be found.

2. When the husband got married, yes, he wanted his wife to have children. No, he did not want her to stop looking after him.

3. A modest wife should be seen in public mostly with her husband, but when he is away on business she should stay at home.

4. A wife should have no emotion of her own but should reflect the mood of her husband. She should laugh at his jokes when he is happy and be sad when he is low.

5. A wife should have no friends of her own but should cultivate those of her husband.

6. A happy marriage is one where the words ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ are seldom heard. All things, whether good or bad, should be shared, and the bond will be strengthened all the more by it.

7. A woman should never try to rule her husband. It is the man’s lot to govern his wife, not as a master does his slave, but as the soul does the body by sympathy and goodwill.

8. A sensible wife will stay quiet during her husband’s tantrums.

9. If there is one golden rule, it is that wives should be submissive. As my dream interpreter, Artemidorus, says: ‘If a man dreams that he has sexual intercourse with his wife and that she yields willingly and without reluctance to the union, then it is good for all alike.’

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, but no one warned us about the liberal ideological complex:

There is, however, another interlocking public-private collaboration that is at once more insidious, more powerful, and more straightforwardly partisan: the liberal ideological complex. We do not always see this collaboration so clearly, because we tend to view each aspect of it as unique and not part of a larger picture. We look, for example, at public sector unions as a labor issue. We look at funding for Planned Parenthood through the lens of abortion policy. We look at EPA regulations and grants in terms of global warming and job destruction. And so on and so forth, down to the smallest, most narrowly tailored grant awards of the federal government.

Yet in each of these cases, the complex functions in essentially the same way. Federal funds are provided for organizations that carry out liberal policies. In turn, these groups employ like-minded staff and both the leadership and the staff of these groups contribute money, time, and services to the politicians who favor this use of federal funds. This creates a vicious circle in which campaign funds are indirectly skimmed off the top of taxpayer-funded organizations, all in the service of liberal ideology.

When progressives helped to replace the spoils system with government by so-called experts, they aimed to professionalize the government. The goal was to put policy decisions into the hands of intelligent and highly trained bureaucrats who would know the interests of Americans better than average Americans did themselves. Here is the basis for the extraordinary willfulness of progressive government, a matter that has been remarked upon frequently.

What has been less clearly observed is the effect of progressive government upon the governing class itself. Training, expertise, and administrative experience, progressives argued, would be in the service of the entire nation and would reflect the good of the whole. Progressive authors and intellectuals did not foresee, or did not care, that bureaucrats and experts would develop a set of interests distinct from the American people they served.

While there was perhaps never any such thing as objectivity in governance, the belief that there was kept executive branch actions within certain bounds and restrained partisanship and ideological predispositions. So too did the traditional idea that except for national emergencies and wars, government spending and government revenues should be kept in rough balance.

This world is gone.

In The Age of Empathy Frans de Waal explains that we are “pre-programmed to reach out,” but this empathy may not be such a good thing:

In 2012, a collection of papers entitled Pathological Altruism signalled the start of a new trend of skepticism towards empathy and compassion. Behind it lay the claim, as radical as it was blindingly obvious, that precisely because empathy is an evolved mechanism, it might have unintended consequences in the modern world.

Since then, psychologists and sociologists have been exploring the dark side of altruistic behavior, especially with regards to political and cultural tribalism. Jordan Peterson and Christine Brophy have discovered that so-called ‘Social Justice Warriors’ tend to be high in empathy towards the vulnerable, but draconian towards those perceived to be a threat. Similarly, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have pointed out that partisanship flourishes in a “victimhood culture,” because people respond to appeals from those they identify with socially.

These seem like lessons for the left especially, but as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, the right has its own sinister uses for empathy. Nationalists have long used the propaganda of victimization to foster in-group mindsets, and to motivate, in Jonathan Sacks’s phrase, “altruistic evil” towards outsiders and scapegoats.

Be all this as it may, the notion that what the world really needs is less empathy still strikes most people as absurd. Are these not cases of too little, rather than too much empathy? Is the cardinal definition of empathy not to “place yourself in somebody else’s shoes”? How would our close relationships function without it? And above all, without the capacity to be moved by another’s suffering, how is good supposed to come into the world?

These questions point, more than anything, to an almighty confusion about how phenomena like empathy, compassion, and altruism work and relate to one another. For this reason alone, we should welcome the most direct assault on empathy to date, Paul Bloom’s much-discussed recent book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Let’s take that adage about “placing yourself in someone else’s shoes.” As Bloom points out, it confuses two things that don’t necessarily go together. One is cognitive empathy, or “social intelligence,” which means the basic ability to grasp someone else’s point of view. This is rightly valued. Bloom’s adversary, however, is what he sees as empathy proper: feeling another’s pain as though it were your own.

This kind of emotional or “affective” empathy is not voluntary, of course, but according to Bloom, nor is it a good basis on which to act in public life. This claim is based on two main observations. First, to embrace empathy is often to abandon perspective and rational judgment, meaning that “our interests fail to coincide with any reasonable assessment of where help is needed most.” And second, echoing some of the research I cited earlier, empathy is actually quite picky about which shoes it enters. It conforms to our existing prejudices, and leads people to seek harsher punishments for perceived enemies, finding some of its purest expressions in “us versus them” situations.

That empathy can be divisive should scarcely be surprising. How often do partisans seek “single identifiable victims” — whether mistreated welfare claimants or destitute veterans — to frame a particular agenda in emotional terms? Once a debate has become suffused with empathy, all appeals to the bigger picture are easily dismissed as callous. And worse, the consequences can reverberate far beyond the debate itself.

Wessie du Toit goes a step further:

Deep-rooted problems like culture wars and a failure to think practically imply that vicarious suffering, more than ever, is welcomed not as a motivation for good actions, but as an end in itself. In other words, empathy is jealously defended because of its value to the empathizer. This, in turn, might point to an atomized, morally perplexed society, much of whose emotional sustenance comes from an ephemeral stream of online media. The feeling of helplessness that arises from passively consuming distant events is now central to the relationship of the individual to the world. In this situation, expressions of empathy and disgust, with their attendant comforts of tribal solidarity, are often all that stand between you and moral estrangement from reality.

Trump’s reactive autocracy is autocratic and not bureaucratic, socially networked rather than hierarchically networked, and integrated with global social networks rather than apart from them, John Robb notes. It uses social networking to “suss out” and shape the underlying desires of a governing majority of Americans. This form of governance operates very differently than the legacy cold war bureaucracy:

Incremental change vs. Rapid change. Bureaucrats make changes slowly and incrementally. Autocrats can make wholesale changes. Social networking makes it possible to route around bureaucratic roadblocks to create de facto change before the bureaucracy can catch up.

Adherence to Ideology vs. Adherence to Common Sense. US bureaucratic governance is based on neoliberal ideology and the sciences of social complexity (economics, etc.). Social networking has made people increasingly aware to the gap between results/common sense and ideology/models (a similar gap toppled the USSR). Trump exploits that gap.

Serial vs. Parallel focus. Bureaucratic governance mass media coverage focuses on one problem at a time (serially), or as closely to that as possible. In contrast, networked governance can focus on many in parallel. This makes it very difficult for gatekeepers to exercise control.

Virginia Postrel describes Americans as one nation, divisible by what scares us most:

Red America worries about deliberate human action. Blue America dreads unintended, usually inanimate, threats. Red America focuses mostly on the body politic. Blue America emphasizes the body. In the pre-Trump era, that meant conservatives talked about crime, foreign enemies, and moral decay while liberals emphasized environmental poisons, illness, unwanted pregnancies, and material deprivation. As we’ll see, Donald Trump added a twist of his own (and jettisoned the old conservative moral concerns). But the basic people-vs.-things division remains.

Consider two recent New York Times headlines. One frets that “Trump’s F.D.A. Pick Could Undo Decades of Drug Safeguards,” appealing to liberal fears of bad medicines. A second declares that “Trump’s Travel Ban, Aimed at Terrorists, Has Blocked Doctors.” Where the administration sees a human threat, the Times finds a benefit that addresses biological vulnerability.

Or take Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous comparison of Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles in which a few of the candies are poisoned. A colorful variation on the standard probability example of pulling balls from urns, the analogy’s real flaw was that it wildly exaggerated the likelihood of jihadi supporters among Syrian refugees. But to many outraged liberals, what made it offensive, rather than merely wrong, was that it equated people with candy. “They aren’t Skittles. They’re children,” was a typical tweet. In their cultural milieu, unhealthy food is legitimately scary, the source of endless anxiety. Foreigners aren’t. Conservatives, on the other hand, worry less about toxins and more about people.

As the dueling Times headlines demonstrate, both sides suffer from the same essential blind spot: They see — and often exaggerate — the threats they fear, while overlooking the dangers of the policies designed to stamp out those threats. A crackdown on immigrants means small towns won’t have doctors. Excessive drug regulation keeps beneficial medicines away from patients who need them. (Indeed, as we come to understand more about genetic variation, regulatory requirements could make the most effective treatments prohibitively expensive.) Both policies could, in the name of protecting the public, actually shorten lives.

Team Red looks to law enforcement and the military for protection, Team Blue to scientists and technocrats. Each despises criticism of its protectors, whether from Black Lives Matter or regulatory skeptics. Each equates the end with the means. Intensive policing and punitive sentencing may fight crime, but they also sweep up minor offenders, sow fear of law enforcement, and shatter communities. Challenge the trade-off and you’ll have few friends on the right. Higher energy prices may fight climate change but they also stifle economic growth and hammer Rust Belt residents. Question the toll and liberals will dismiss you as anti-science.

These debates aren’t really about calculations of risks and rewards. They’re about what’s salient to whom—what scares people most. That’s why both sides so often find themselves swapping anecdotes rather than statistics. Steve Jobs’s biological father was Syrian! Refugees in Germany keep attacking people! Each hopes to make the other — or the undecided middle — feel what it feels.

If our first impulse is to call immigrant-skeptics bigots, we would do well to step back and take a fuller look at the data, M.G. Miles suggests. After presenting many, many graphs of the data, he shares these conclusions:

On the contrary, as we have seen, there is a real civilizational divide between what we think and what Muslims in their homelands think about the proper place of government, women, religion, and morality in public life. They also show far lower levels of out-group trust than we do in the West.

And when they come to our countries, it is often with the hope that we change our habits and customs, not the other way round. This can unsurprisingly rub their hosts the wrong way.

And despite a bourgeois class who both adopt western values and obey the law, there are a great many who fall prey to social dysfunction. The latter tend to commit more crime, use more welfare, and do less well in school than their hosts. This patchwork of anti-social behavior and rejection of Western values has made Muslims undesirable immigrants in the eyes of many.

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Whatever the ingredients in the cake may be, the evidence is stacking up that Muslim immigrants to the West, even the ‘moderates,’ feel deeply uncomfortable here. Even as they walk among us, they seem to remain stuck on the far side of a civilizational gulf.

So if our first impulse is to call immigrant-skeptics ‘bigots,’ we would do well to step back and take a fuller look at the data. The discomfort our Muslim newcomers feel is palpable, it is measurable, and it is long-lasting. As its destabilizing effects are becoming more intense, it should come as no surprise that many of us are reluctant to usher even more, refugees or not, into our rapidly fraying societies.

Steve Sailer explains how the vengeance of Edward Said has played out:

I’ve been thinking about this tendency for white liberalism to encourage nonwhite reactionaries as I’ve been reading perhaps the most influential left-wing book by a Middle Eastern immigrant in American academic history, Edward Said’s 1978 tome Orientalism.

Said was a superbly cultured man. But his legacy has been to make Americans dumber — and smugger over being dumber — about the Arab world.

And that was not an unintended consequence.

Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said was the wealthy son of a Palestinian Christian father with U.S. citizenship and a Lebanese Christian mother. He used the word “Orient” not in the American fashion of referring to the Far East, but in the European manner of referencing the Middle East and North Africa.

Reading Orientalism almost four decades later, it’s striking how useless it has been for helping anyone understand the Middle East.

That was Said’s intention. Knowledge is power, he believed, so he wanted Westerners to be more ignorant about his homeland in order that they would have less power over it.

No one ever expended more brainpower to encourage stupidity than Said did in Orientalism. He achieved his goal of increasing obliviousness by promoting anti-intellectual ploys, such as castigating pattern recognition as stereotyping the Other, that are now used by even the dimmest social justice jihadi, but which seemed relatively novel in 1978.

What’s more interesting than Said’s means were his motivations.

He was much celebrated in academia before his death in 2003 as a radical advocate of the Third World (for example, he broke with Yasser Arafat because Said thought the PLO too moderate).

But it’s worth attempting to think about Said instead as a conservative with natural, healthy concentric loyalties to his clan and race, a man who successfully did subtle but substantial damage to the traditional enemies of the Arabs by undermining the self-confidence of Western scholars and students and deconstructing our tools for understanding.

It can be helpful to think of Said as one of those “natural aristocrats” that the American founding fathers saw as rightfully destined to rule. He was a brilliant literary critic, a near professional-level classical pianist, and almost movie-star handsome. His many friends considered him a superior individual.

But cruel accidents of history deprived Said of a nation to govern and sent him into exile in the capital of his enemy, New York, where he became a professor of European literature at Columbia.

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Said intensely resented that some Western scholars, writers, and artists had devoted so much attention to what he called the “Arab-Muslim world.” He pejoratively labeled these Western intellectuals as “Orientalists” and blamed them for assembling the vast amounts of knowledge that made possible the Western political ascendancy over his homeland (which had culminated in the Zionist confiscation of his family’s house in Jerusalem).

My suspicion is that, shocking as it may sound to his fans, Said had normal, masculine, conservative affections for his blood and soil.

In particular, Said complained about Western Orientalists depicting the Middle East as feminine and alluring.

This was not just a literary metaphor for Said. For many years, adventurous European artists and writers like Flaubert had engaged in sex tourism in Muslim lands and come back to whip up spicy works for the European market.

Just as the men of Europe are finally starting to object to the sex tourism hegira now running from the Middle East to the blonder lands, Said, as a racial loyalist, resented men of a different ancestry defiling his people’s womenfolk…and, perhaps especially, his people’s boyfolk.

The cover illustration of Orientalism, which was chosen to highlight the evils of Westerners taking any interest in the Middle East, is the vaguely sinister 1879 painting The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme of a naked boy posing with a snake before a group of staring men in a Muslim palace. The painting is basically high-gloss pedophilic gay porn. It gets across the disgust Said felt for boy-bothering Orientalists.