On living a post-partisan life

Another reader-inspired meditation

She is so often my inspiration

It's reassuring to encounter fellow souls, ahead of you on the journey. People who already clawed their way out of the maelstrom to reach for different ways of seeing and being in the world.

To recognise that you are not alone. That other people do get it. This thing that you clumsily explore in real time by publishing a newsletter about groping toward the light (whatever that is).

So it was, with these previous reflections on off-the-shelf political alignment, which prompted

Stoic Observations

Michael DC Bowen to react with this.

"I know your feelings, and I certainly went through them. It took me several years in my post-partisan path to figure out how to describe myself. What I recognized in 2008 was that an identitarian populism had taken over American politics and I wanted no part of it. So I started getting healthy instead, which is somewhat easy for me as a Californian, with my "body as message" closer to my personality.

I find it interesting that you disclaim the politics (and should the optics) and emphasize the process of thinking. This is a brilliant observation. My fallback to Reebokism was second nature as was my continual investment in philosophical thinking - adjunct to my profession in business intelligence. So while I was doing burpies, learning Ruby and searching for better processes of delivering my public spiritedness, I did one more thing that was healthy. I started hanging out with hackers and first responders. In both ways I decided that I didn't want to be in the belly of a beached whale. I saw that no banks were ringfenced. I saw that Obama didn't make us post-racial he amplified the national obsession by confessing "I am Trayvon Martin". I say without irony that he and Trump contributed to today's essentialisms. All of this was tolerable until the triple witching hour of Evergreen's "No Whites Allowed Day" in which my distrust of institutions, my expectation that politicization of anything just makes it worse and my comprehension of the failure of calm reason hit a crescendo.

But I was healthy. I learned how to bandage the wounded, find network security holes and submit an administrative case to the FBI. I joined for a time, that strata of Americans that put out fires, break up fights, and otherwise get cracking when others are on crack and crack up. These were my new tribes. And they included the Intellectual Dark Web, and the stickmen. But these are all transient memberships. I didn't find my *kind* of people. I found my *sort* of people. Then I re-sorted myself into other tribes. When the Trumpists and the MeToos marched into town, I could not be positively identified as the Enemy. That's because I determined that I didn't need a home and a family on the left, on the right, in the middling middle. I didn't need to care and make my care known. I simply adhered to the best practices, the continuous process improvement. My humility became my process. I didn't need to exploit any skill at an existential level. It wasn't about be. It was about do.

One day while playing Assassin's Creed, I reached a level in which I became a 15th century Italian lord. I owned a castle, ate fresh fruit and vegetables, and cared for the security of local shopkeepers, pig farmers and mud collectors. I realized they could all be Constitutional Peasants if they bothered. And I realized as a 21st century gamer, that I needn't be bothered with 21st century politics, religion or philosophy. I wound up searching into the Western Canon, started with Epicurus and wound up with the Stoics. I imagined myself in the dirty feet of Diogenes giving Trump the finger. That worked.

Finally I discovered in Karl Popper that my attention to process and my willingness to be corrected (in fact my need to have all my code debugged) was central to the reality of science and essential to the open society. This is the transparency that saves us all, and the sooner more of us stop gauging ourselves by anything the news comedians emanate, the more of us will survive the degradation of society. Open source wins in the end. The parties are proprietary and it comes as no surprise that Fox, for example, tell the masses the precise lies they want to hear.

The hubris of today is massive. I don't want to burn it all down, but I will watch dispassionately if it does. If COVID had crippled me, I might be a bit more fearful. But there remain within the belly of America, practitioners who keep practicing. So I'm not surprised that the right stuff can be produced. Then again, you should be building aircraft carriers 10 years before you desperately need them. I don't know what exactly is going to hold American society together, but humans have survived through worse. The apocalypse isn't exactly here, but it's fairly easy to identify the zombies and robots. I hope I don't have to wear the uniform."

You can sign up to Michael’s newsletter here.

Michael’s words gave me a shiver of the fur.

He talks first of a dichotomy between being partisan and being healthy. This seems to be a reasonable distinction to make in this era, when apparent connections between one's politics and one's wellbeing have surfaced as a scientific discussion.

How could anyone really feel OK if they believe that ideas or speech can be harmful in themselves, independently of any potential to encourage law-breaking? That people who don't share their values are bad or less, in some way, than them.

How do we ever feel equanimous with the world when we feel fury or fear at every utterance that doesn't match our own intuitions and leanings? How do you ever maintain good mental health while embracing a philosophy rooted in a thinking model that technically functions as 'reverse CBT'.

Michael talks of seeking out and learning from people who process things differently. Those who have different challenges to overcome in meeting different objectives.

I don't know what Michael might make of this speculation but I want to say that his approach seems to represent a form of heterosis. An embodied variation on reading more widely. The pursuit and embracing of a synthesis rather than joining and staying on a side, partly by introducing an element of chaos or unpredictability. Seeking the type of company and the kind of learning that guards against the inevitable ossification that comes with hard-agreeing on everything with everyone around you, or getting really good at one thing and just endlessly repeating that.

The idea of doing what Michael reports had never occurred to me until his words landed under that piece. I'd often noticed that I tend to feel somewhat oddly delighted, inspired and nourished in the company of (genuinely diagnosed) Asperger's people, developers/coders and guys who like rebuilding vintage vehicles even though I'm not particularly aspie, have no brain for logic and care nothing for cars. This is my idea of diversity. In which skin tone or gamete type or sexual orientation are flavour notes, not identities.

Michael avers that "politicization of anything just makes it worse" at the precise moment when I'm thinking that humanising issues is what makes life better than politicising them.

Politicising something seems to so often involve flattening it. So that, in Britain, where tens of thousands of strangers coming ashore in small boats leads to the instant categorisation of those who worry about it as hateful, cruel, racist  and worse by the pro-small boat people. And the instant categorisation of the small-boat people as a dangerous invading force, intent on causing harm to the host country, by the other side and the government that panders to them.

In this example, politicising the issue forces you to care only about the small-boat people or those who worry about the arrival of the small-boat people. The politics of this appear to involve being pro one kind of person and anti another kind of person. There is no conversation about understanding, let alone accommodating, the feelings, fears, needs and preferences of all the humans involved.

Partisan politics thrives amid a good wedge issue like this. Humans don't. Only one side can possibly matter in a partisan culture. This is how I came to see politics as weirdly anti-human. Pick the human that matters to you and the other human can go fuck themselves.

Michael's observation that 'I didn't need a home and a family on the left, on the right, in the middling middle. I didn't need to care and make my care known' describes perfectly where I landed and why I now write Rarely Certain. But then comes the clincher...

"My humility became my process ... It wasn't about be. It was about do."

As I'd decided, too, when clumsily exploring that distinction here 19 months ago.

There is a sense in which I feel greatly reassured that there are Michaels in this world, who recognise the gulf between what science is and how it's popularly portrayed. As if a process is a solid edifice with a rigid final conclusion carved into its face. People who can see that a closed shop, dictating top-down edicts on the 'little people' who are incapable (like me) of earning a white-coated credential, is less healthy than a transparent community of good faith, curiosity-driven seekers peering into the mechanics of our world.

Which is what I believe humanity's scientific cohort mostly is, but whose standard bearers in the media and credentialed class fail to quite grasp. Amid their fear of chaos and disorder among people who refuse to bow to their betters. That a beautiful cyclical process of discernment-hypothesis-test-observation-re-test-re-hypothesise-check-conclude-manipulate and finally engineer is just that. A way forward and out. Not the immutable Word. Not the forever now.

Michael seems long ago to have become the kind of me I sensed crawling out of a confused mêlée two or three years ago and deciding to write about what it's like to make sense of things once again from scratch. Outside of any tribe while neither hating nor aligning doe-eyed with any of them.

Ah, yes. There are others. Not just mysterious Chinese figures from history, or successful podcast founders, professional writers in the sensemaking niche. Just men and women who got the same vibe from the Machine’s mimetic morass and figured that some ways to look at it might not be the ways in its usually described.

People like Michael and (gradually) me and those who encourage us to try articulating it, because we all sense that there's something being missed every time you rely on a partisan information source, watch a self-interested political operator or align with the doctrine that keeps you in the good books of polite company.

Thank goodness there are these others I keep bumping into. People with the capacity to dispassionately watch the world catching fire and wonder about the forces involved and where we might best stand for a vantage point that makes sense.

Rarely Certain is lucky to have readers like Michael. And others. You'll know who you are. The kind of people who, instead of just saying 'great article, Mike' (because it cathartically reinforced their priors) come in from left field to offer the quirky angle, or to gently point out that nothing said here is really new.

The reassurance that genuinely wise people have expressed some of the things I try to articulate, often long ago. Readers who've already been there and figured some of it out before I set out on this project. Kindred souls. What a privilege it is to find them.

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There is always a silver lining...

Anyone who tracks the leftish-dominated field of social psychology (my personal source is a regular digest of papers emailed out by Psypost) will be aware of the flaky 'research' that even the most casual non-expert reader can spot as activism, rather than good faith pursuit of insight.

I still can't get over the fact that men are more likely than women to have orgasms during partnered sex due to 'male entitlement'. This according to a paper that made no reference to the reproductive significance of ejaculation or even the role of sex in passing genes on.

Much of the 'work' in that field is astonishingly transparently motivated to reinforce supposedly liberal social objectives rather than add to the sum of human knowledge.

The success of this discipline in PRing its findings is what seems to have led to the canard that 'truth has a liberal bias'. It makes pages 1 to 5 of Google search the last place you should go for a balanced picture of strongly contested areas such as group differences, gender, attitudes to virus containment measures or whatever The Guardian or the NYT insist is 'the science' on many complex and nuanced things about which our understanding is really evolving rather than fixed.

There's plenty of good faith commentary on the state of the field, from disillusioned academics, but their complaints about consistently low quality work rarely achieve prominence when it's more rewarding for most news providers to please rather than give their audiences pause for thought.

A favourite topic in the social sciences is right wing authoritarianism and the (inevitably Dark Triad) personality traits of people who prefer conservative leaders.

This begins to grate once you've seen the authoritarianism displayed by the leftish or the extreme milquetoast technocratic centre and its determination to screen out information and opinions it doesn't like. If you haven't seen the various Ministries of Truth established over the past few years for what they are, where the heck have you been?

So it made a refreshing change to see this observation from a study that popped up last week.

“It’s obvious to a lot of people that left-wing persons can be just as authoritarian as right-wing persons, and yet academics have been curiously reluctant to admit that, or even to show interest in studying it. We wanted to provide more definitive scientific evidence that left-wing authoritarianism was a real and pervasive problem, not just in the United States, but around the world.”

https://www.psypost.org/2023/03/left-wing-authoritarianism-is-a-real-and-pervasive-issue-according-to-a-massive-new-psychology-study-69434

Too bad that Psypost confuse a Tankie with the more familiar and typically hegemonic leftish, in their header picture, but they reported the study and that's what counts.

Endnote

Rarely Certain usually alternates between free and paywalled stories. But, like last week’s, this one is again free because Michael DC Bowen was generous with his words and gave me permission to use them all. Just paying it forward.