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.
I want to reply to this:
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.
Are you saying that on a local, small scale, people don’t say things they don’t mean in order to win at social situations? In my experience they absolutely do.
I want to talk about this more, but I have a hard time with words, and I need to go to work. @balioc, if you see this today, I would appreciate a replyto clarify what you meant in the quote above, and I’ll try to think of a way to explain my thoughts later
That’s not what I’m saying at all. You are entirely correct that people will say (almost) whatever they need to say in order to win their micro-scale social status games. That’s how humans have always been, and probably how they’ll always be.
This is a much more macro-scale point about the ideologies that have risen and fallen in public esteem, and the effects that this has had on our interactions (including by influencing “what will convince people” and “what you can get away with” in micro-scale encounters).
In the ‘90s, the conventional wisdom was that we should treat everyone the same – or, sometimes, that we should treat everyone as an individual – and that treating different groups differently due to perceived group differences was unenlightened and wack. It was the age of individual meritocracy, of colorblindness, of being too cool for labels. If you tried to get special treatment or special sympathy because of your identity label, you would get laughed at as a whiner and a weakling.
There were a lot of problems with this system. In particular, it was way more self-congratulatory than was justified and it liked to sweep its many failures under the rug.
But we weren’t in the business of handing out “Win an Arbitrary Fight Free” cards in the ‘90s. There were people who wanted such cards, from high-profile racial activists to women bitching about their mean ex-boyfriends, but…they basically weren’t available, not in a form that anyone would respect.
Now they are. Now, when you stake a discursive claim based on your race or sex or whatever, it gets applause rather than jeers.