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!
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.
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