Once upon a time, @slatestarscratchpad talked about “Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory.” His particular take on this idea always struck me as a bit odd, for reasons largely having to do with its being super-focused rhetorically on one particular issue suite (distributive macroeconomics). Regardless, the dichotomy is a helpful thing to have available in your philosophical toolkit.
For general-purpose use, I’d suggest a refinement: replace “mistake theory” with, uh, let’s say “solution theory.” There are, roughly speaking, two analytical lenses you can use to examine a given debate. You can say “people are trying to figure out the Overall Best Solution [by whatever criteria], and their arguments represent either empirical disagreements-of-fact or genuine disagreements over the values that determine the Best Solution.” Or you can say “people are trying to advance their own interests against the conflicting interests of other people, they have formed alliances and coalitions in order to do this more effectively, and their arguments should essentially be understood as gambits and rationalizations within a power struggle.”
Each of these lenses is obviously going to be helpful sometimes, depending on the circumstances. Some people have a natural proclivity towards one, some towards the other, etc. We all know how useful conceptual dichotomies work.
OK. All that said, let’s talk for a minute about the kind of collective-grievance-driven identity politics that have taken over mainstream culture for the past five years.
If you want to understand how these arguments are working for the people making them, and why they have the particular effects that they have, I think it’s very helpful to try looking at them through a conflict-theory lens.
Which is to say:
Identitarians make claims like “members of the Oppressor Class act in ways X and Y and Z, it totally sucks and makes us miserable, the world is so unfair, justice must be done.” And a lot of people – in particular, a lot of the sort of people who Take Arguments Seriously – read this as having its obvious surface meaning, which is something like “the current ruleset is bad for us, we should change to a different social equilibrium where a different ruleset is enforced, a new Overall Best Solution is hereby proposed.” In the saddest cases, this leads to bewildered nerds screaming, “PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I DON’T WANT TO BE A SEXIST CREEP / RACIST IMPERIALIST ASSHOLE / WHATEVER-IT-IS! I’LL DO ANYTHING! JUST LIST THE RULES I HAVE TO FOLLOW THAT WILL MAKE IT ALL OK!”
Which of course never works even a little, which breeds a lot of resentment. It especially breeds resentment because there doesn’t particularly seem to be a correlation between “people who make the identitarians mad” and “people who counteract the identitarians’ stated desires.” (As has been pointed out time and again, many of the most-admired men in feminist circles are pretty traditionally masculine, in exactly the ways that come up in discussions of “toxicity.” Visibly trying hard to avoid Doing A Racism will at best make you a punchline and at worst get you hit with serious accusations of actual racism, whereas people who breeze right through the stated norms with a cheeky grin often get away with it. Etc. etc.)
But – as @bambamramfan has recently noted, correctly – it’s dangerous, and wrong, to read that lack-of-correlation as an anti-correlation. It’s not like the confident jocular straight white cis asshole is safe from potentially getting slammed by the wrathful end of identity politics. He’s just as vulnerable as anyone else, probably more so, the moment anyone gets upset enough with him to make an actual move.
The only real difference is that, because he’s a confident jocular asshole and therefore conventionally-likeable, he’s not making people upset quite as easily.
This bizarre circle can be squared, and the facts of the world accounted for more cleanly, if you drop some of your discursive charity and put on your conflict-theorist goggles. All those arguments about oppression, all those claims about what exactly the Oppressor Classes are doing in order to make the world horrible for the Oppressed Classes, are…beside the point. I’m not even commenting on whether they’re right or wrong, I’m saying it often doesn’t matter, because the people making them often don’t really care except insofar as they can win points by convincing people through logic or sympathy.
The actual “claim” underlying it all is something like: In conflicts between Oppressed People and Oppressor People, the Oppressed People should get to win more often and more easily. The very-generalized justification is something like, “life is overall very unfair to Oppressed People and therefore they should get to win more.” And there’s a real argument that the very-generalized justification is true, at least to some extent.
(…but of course it’s impossible to separate “I believe I should get a handicap because life is genuinely unfair to me” from “I believe I should get a handicap because, well, I’m a human being with cognitive biases and therefore it seems intuitively obvious that life is unfair to me.” At some point the justification stops working, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that that’s the point where it will stop being employed.)
Anyway. Most of the time you can’t just say “I should get a ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ card,” because that doesn’t play well, everyone knows that justice doesn’t work that way. You have to say “I am being wronged in these specific ways and the following changes would make it better.” But of course the changes mostly won’t make it better. If that were the actual effective medicine, then people who sedulously followed the alleged rules would be rewarded for it. The actual effective medicine is –
“ – I get that job/promotion/award I want so desperately, instead of one of the other people who might get it, many of whom are white/male/straight/whatever.”
“ – when my boyfriend and I break up messily, everyone agrees that he is worthless slime and I am a Very Tragic Heroine.”
“ – when some hopeless loser displays too much interest in me, I can extract myself from the situation cleanly without having to feel mean and without having to put in too much effort.”
“ – when I get into an argument at a party, everyone will know that I am very wise and enlightened and that my interlocutor is a hopeless bigot.”
Or, in other words, “I should get some number of ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ cards.” That is what conflict theory looks like, on the social micro-level. That is claiming your share of the spoils, not because you can somehow prove before God that you deserve them, but because you’re going to stand up for yourself and your own and it’s not like those assholes in the other tribe deserve them any more than you do. Don’t you get the short end of the stick way too much already? Isn’t life just one long testament to that?
This is actually really bad.
I realize that, by putting it solution-theory-versus-conflict-theory terms, I’m kind of implying “this is just how the world operates at a fundamental level and we should wise up to it” – but, no, it’s a cultural disease, and we’re already infected, and finding the right antibiotics is critical. It probably is “just how the world operates at a fundamental level” for a sufficiently narrow understanding of “the world” (globalized, atomized, multicultural)…and yet we used to be holding it at bay almost completely, and right now we’re definitely not.
It’s really bad, in part, because it poisons the well of discourse. If your opponents don’t mean the things they say, if they’re just trying to rack up enough sympathy to get another ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ card, eventually you’re going to notice and stop paying attention to their arguments; and then, on the occasions when they’re actually right and you’re wrong, everyone is screwed. Debate is important if we want to fix the problems. That means we have to be able to have it, for real.
But even more so, it’s really bad because there’s no obvious place for it to stop once it starts. This is how group grievance politics work generally; this is why Lee Kuan Yew sold his soul to the devil to ensure that Singapore would not divide politically into the obvious ethnic factions. The goal is peace and harmony and stability, but individuals are always going to feel aggrieved in ways that can be theoretically traced back to group membership, and we’re not going to find a [viable][compromise] equilibrium so long as people think it makes sense to keep pushing for more spoils. Which in the end is equivalent to total war.
So…solutions? What does the antibiotic look like?
Shit, man, I don’t know. If I did, I’d be out saving the world, not writing this Tumblr post.
The best I can give you is: don’t let yourself get sucked into this game. Don’t honor anyone’s claim to a ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free” card, and don’t ever think that you yourself deserve one. If someone proposes a new social rule, follow it or don’t as your conscience dictates, but don’t imagine that doing so will actually mollify anyone. Try to evaluate right and wrong by the standards of the actual rules/principles/virtues/whatever that you espouse, not by simple demographic heuristics.
And if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t need me to tell you any of that. So great.
It’s worth putting in an addendum to say:
At this moment, as it happens, the cultural left has the particular kind of dominance that allows it to play identity politics and actually accomplish things sometimes. But it’s not as though the right hasn’t been positively eager to play the exact same horrible games when the constellations align differently…or as though the slimier parts of the right aren’t trying to play the exact same horrible games right now.