Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

Capturing a Bluesky thread from Matthew Sheffield.

‪Kai Ryssdal‬ asks:

Fight and help win a world war.

Establish a global order that cements your national power for 80 years.

Blow it all up.

What am I missing?

This is literally what I've been writing and podcasting about for years. I was planning to do an essay on this, but here's a [Bluesky thread].

The main reason is psychology. Due to personal, family, and cultural histories, some people are inherently scared of the world. The fear of the world usually manifests as fear and hatred of new things. They rarely admit to this fear (especially the men), but they show it in their actions of carrying a gun everywhere or thinking that if they don't cheat others first, they will be cheated.

This fear actually proceeds from an even deeper impulse, the belief that quick judgment thinking (what I call memetic epistemology) is superior to extrinsic thinking. They trust their instincts more than anyone else, regardless of their expertise. Conservatives and their reactionary cousins believe that their views are true because they believe them. They don’t need hard proof or to be able to argue for them. They’re “common sense.” This viewpoint is the fundamental unifier of everyone on the right, from atheist ancaps to Christofascists.

Memetic epistemology isn’t inherently bad. It is in fact how we experience love, art, music, faith, and maintain coherence in adversity. But the self-focused, somatic nature of memetic thinking means that it can be dangerous when applied to the world at large.

Society has become so large and so complex that one person can no longer have total mastery of even two fields of knowledge. The paradox of modernity is that each advance in knowledge also creates ignorance, in two major ways. The first is that knowing more things also increases the number of known unknowns. Our models of reality are not reality itself. Scientific laws are descriptions of physical obligation, rather than the obligations themselves. When we describe one thing one way, it unlocks other ways to describe it. This extrinsic epistemic approach has made modern humans able to advance through science in ways that would appear godlike to any ancient human.

But this new way of thinking is knowing through negation. And it’s not how humans did things for the entire history of our species. It’s “unnatural.” For more on the fear of the “unnatural,” please see this recent podcast episode I did with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: Robert Kennedy’s bizarre obsession with ‘natural’ isn’t going to make Americans healthier: historian of fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on why an obese president has a health secretary who moralizes about wellness (audio).

Cumulative advances in knowledge are threatening to people who only want to use somatic reasoning and who respond to all new things memetically. They want to imitate authorities rather than have humility and accept extrinsic realities through abstraction. This is the conservative epistemology.

Besides piling up all kinds of newfangled things, expansions in knowledge also can liberate minds from social prejudices. For centuries, women and other ethnic groups were not fully human, same-sex attraction wasn’t real, and trans people didn’t exist. As Virginia Heffernan and I recently discussed, this is the problem of other minds. Because cognition is done through hidden states and language is an only a very partial extrusion of thought, we can’t know for sure that other minds are as real as ours: Renee Good and the problem of other minds (audio).

But the problem of other minds also extends to institutions made by other minds. During the Great Depression and after World War II, the United States and many other countries built governmental and international institutions to alleviate poverty and resolve disputes. These institutions and the global order they created were very far from perfect, but they were much better than what existed before. Unfortunately, their creators didn’t realize that they needed to continue to advocate for institutions and to continue to reform them.

People are sometimes surprised that Trump and other reactionary politicians don't have consistent policies. They shouldn’t be. Reactionaries hate abstract systems and coherence. They don’t understand NATO, USAID, public broadcasting, literature, or science. So these things must be destroyed. Government as the ultimate mutual aid, cooperation, consent, and sexual autonomy are concepts that don’t make sense in a worldview where only the strong survive.

There's so much to do to educate the bystanders and the malcontents about what the right wing is doing. Please share if you could!

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I forgot to add that it’s no coincidence at all that the emergence of science and liberal democracy happened at the same time. Science and democracy need each other, and it's also no coincidence that reactionaries hate both, as Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discussed with me: Science is under attack because it left the public behind: NIH scientists Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discuss the deep connection between democratic principles and scientific progress (audio).

Science, democracy, and art all go together. And so does sexual freedom. They’re all ways of knowing ourselves, as Savannah Sly and I discussed here: The right-wing wars on science and sex are linked: New Moon Network founder Savannah Sly on the radical right’s attack on self-knowledge and autonomy (audio).

Not exactly my analysis, but related enough to add to my Understanding American Politics index.

Campism

A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie.

What’s campism, you ask?

In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what.

It’s the ideological/geopolitical version of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which manifests itself as the idea that any leader and/or regime positioned in opposition to the United States needs to be supported in the name of anti-imperialism.

For those who adopt this mindset, the fact that some world leaders who are seen as “enemies” of the United States are also brutal, murderous dictators who oppress, disappear and slaughter their own people is an afterthought, if even that.

More often than not, campists will insist that such beliefs are actually nothing more than Western imperialist propaganda. That in fact, folks such as Assad, Putin, Maduro, and now Khameini are really not so bad after all, and need to be supported because to not support them is to continue to prop up American empire.

[⋯]

Campism is to leftism what a fear of insects is to our personal well-being: an instinct that had a legitimate function in previous stages of our evolution but which nowadays does much more harm than good.

Let me elaborate on the former.

The origins of campism are rooted in the geopolitical shifts that resulted from the emergence of the “Great Powers” in the early 20^th century, which solidified in the years after the Russian Revolution and then cemented itself in the divisions that unfolded due to the Cold War.

The Cold War created three general geopolitical groupings: countries aligned with Western capitalism, countries aligned with Soviet socialism, and the “non-aligned” countries. These three groups are where the concepts of the First, Second, and Third World come from. Three camps, if you will.

But even during the Cold War, when geopolitical lines were much more clearly drawn, adherence to campism could function as a trap. Consider the origin of the idea of tankies, a term which was birthed as a way to distinguish and call out leftists who defended the use of tanks by the Soviets in order to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Those who did so were so blinded by their allegiance to Communism that they either failed to or refused to consider that the reasons why Hungarians were revolting was legitimate and that such a show of force on the part of the Soviets was brutal and unjustified. Those who defended the Soviets in that instance, as well as during the ’68 uprisings in Prague, were engaging in campism and absolutely deserved the pejorative label that they received.

After the fall of the USSR, in the absence of the previously-stated categories, campism reinvented itself into what we see today. In place of a (theoretically) tidy capitalist / communist split, campism ended up taking on the trappings of what’s best referred to as Third Worldism. The divisions redefined themselves as follows: the Global South versus the Global North and / or the underdeveloped world versus the developed world and/or the colonized world versus the colonizer world.

Which is a set of alignments that from a leftist perspective should absolutely act as a guide, a compass, a framework that anchors where we take off from. But after the take off, nuance and critical thinking are paramount, and campism has no use for either. It’s black and white. Good guys, bad guys. And from that, the idea that any leader that the bad guys don’t like must be a good guy.

Which is how you end up with folks like Caitlin Johnstone, who has stanned pretty much every modern-day dictator that’s come up against American empire without fail. For her and other campists, the ends justify the means. The suffering and fate of millions of people is ignored in the service of taking an ideologically pure position against empire.

And such a position is abhorrent.

Covid-cautious socializing

My sweetheart & I are living the covid-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing.

Indoors

With not just covid but flu et cetera making the rounds, we don’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, or who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days.

Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we pack a Metrix test kit for use before sharing indoor air … though the awkward bit is that it takes 30 minutes to run the test.

Outdoors

We have both gas & electric heaters set up for our covered patio. They aren’t strong enough to overcome the coldest times of winter, but they take the edge off enough to be cozy on a chilly day if one also dresses warmly.

We are also trying to cultivate a list of venues with covered & heated outdoor seating.

• Victoria Bar
  our favorite, with good nosh — NE Albina
• The Rambler Bar
  N Mississippi
• ¿Por Qué No?
  taqueria — SE Hawthorne
• Bar Maven, Bar Carlo, Shami Cafe, 5 & Dime Bar
  surprisingly good food (except 5&D) but none of these have heat outside — SE Foster

We are also up for an adventure to try places like …

• Mirisata Restaurant
  Sri Lankan food — SE Belmont
• Laurelhurst Market
  a world of beef — E Burnside
• Tiny Bubble Room
  taproom & grill — N Lombard
• Interurban Saloon
  N Mississippi
• The Knock Back Bar
  NE Alberta

Divination and “AI”

Contrary to what many esotericists and civilians imagine, one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through which tarot cards or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts or whatever come up. Divination is a thinking process just as electrical engineering or film theory or medical diagnosis is a thinking process. It uses the cards-etc as an instrument to help convert semi- and sub-conscious understanding into a conscious form. One can conceive of this as creating an opening for the perception of subtle information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of this as an entirely psychological-materialist process. I myself embrace a radical agnosticism on where the information comes from, though in doing divination I do find it helpful to think as if the cards-etc contain a message from the Cosmos.

The random cards-etc present the reader with a big bouquet of multivalent meanings. The reader’s mind picks out elements of that stew, informed by everything the reader knows about life, the querent they are reading for, the question at hand, et cetera, including from spiritual forces if one conceives of the process that way. The reader takes what they notice and synthesizes it into a description of what they see the cards-etc “saying”. This usually informs a dialogue with the querent, who engages in a second layer of interpretation as their mind responds to the reader’s analysis and to their own perception of the cards-etc.

One can do divination solo, the querent responding to the cards-etc directly, without a reader, but this is notoriously difficult. The double cascade of interpretation supports a helpful sense that the insight comes from outside the querent’s own mind, even if one thinks of that as entirely illusory.

In summary, the reader draws cards-etc, notices patterns, stirs in a bunch of familiar classic ideas (change! growth! passion!), assembles that into a coherent-sounding story, and presents that to the querent; the meaning emerges from the querent’s experience of all that.

This sounds a lot like the way people project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously, and I am a skeptic of most LLM applications … but this makes me wonder whether the I think the Eliza Effect might make LLMs good at supporting divinatory readings for people.

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenged me suggesting this:

This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.

I share some of that reflex to reject LLMs as an instrument for spiritual work; my suggestion is an attempt to confront my own reaction by framing a question to explore.

I think my original thread implied that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which was a mistake on my part. This challenge made me more clear that I am asking whether a robot plus cards-etc might provide a better instrument for solo divination than cards-etc alone. I truly have no idea.

Divination may require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else, like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity. If so, this suggestion is a dead end; an LLM ain’t gonna be able help with that at all.

The usefulness of a robot in divination depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw cards-etc to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something more digestible?

Surely someone is trying the experiment?