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What we need isn't necessarily centrism, but lowered emotions. Emotions are what skew reason and then catch like wildfire. It happens that they tend to push peo

by _bxg1 8y ago

What we need isn't necessarily centrism, but lowered emotions. Emotions are what skew reason and then catch like wildfire. It happens that they tend to push people to the extreme ends of the political spectrum, but that itself isn't really the problem. It's not about sheer distance from the center, it's about voting based on anger and hatefulness and fear. Anti-fascists in Nazi Germany would've been "extreme" relative to the center at the time, but they wouldn't have been "extreme" with regards to how hate-based their stance was. Edit: Or more accurately - since many of them probably did develop hatred for the nazis - the anti-fascists' stance made the most sense when hate and fear are removed from the equation; were a person in that context to consider things stoically, there would've been little motive to side with the fascists. To summarize: fear and anger warp your decision-making. It happens that they lead to polarization, but that's a red herring. What we need is to reduce the inflammation of society (largely thanks to social media), instead of tackling the symptom.

heraclius 8y ago
It’s tempting to think that we can operate politics without emotion. However, it is unclear what the foundations of our political beliefs are if not intuitive reactions of the sort that emotions are as well. For example, most people who oppose torture oppose it because they have an intuition that it is unacceptable and value that intuition. We can construct “objective” methods to derive political claims from other claims, but ultimately they involve a value judgement—politics without value judgement has no way to decide between competing objectives. “Reason” does not provide a coherent morality, as the failure of the Enlightenment project shows; “emotion” is quite capable of justifying a centrist view—I should imagine most have negative emotional reactions to the Leninist and Hitlerite states. I imagine that one reason for the decline of the liberal order is its abandonment of emotional claims and pretence to objectivity as if that were possible. Those who continue to use emotion, to appeal to our intuitions as to what is right, instead of simply referring to empirical concepts whose connexion to such intuitions is severely dulled, appear to have the most success; unfortunately they do not seem to be particularly constructive at the moment. Anger and fear are not entirely unreasonable as emotions go: we fear and are angered by the spectres of poverty and dictatorship, and those are not unreasonable positions to hold. Attacks on morality and value judgements in politics often take the form of, to take an example, Sir Humphrey’s utterances in Yes Minister. Government, in his view, is about order, and the prevention of chaos. Hacker, the minister, suggests that it is about doing good. Why is Sir Humphrey so scared of chaos? His fear thereof is the same sort of fear that drives morality; we might even call it a moral belief. It is not an implausible belief—chaos has its problems. Most of the time what seems “objective” is no longer on demanding a further reason. “Lowered emotions” should not really be the end; a sensible method of dealing with competing emotions is the need of the hour.

by _bxg1 8y ago

heraclius 8y ago

It’s tempting to think that we can operate politics without emotion. However, it is unclear what the foundations of our political beliefs are if not intuitive reactions of the sort that emotions are as well. For example, most people who oppose torture oppose it because they have an intuition that it is unacceptable and value that intuition. We can construct “objective” methods to derive political claims from other claims, but ultimately they involve a value judgement—politics without value judgement has no way to decide between competing objectives. “Reason” does not provide a coherent morality, as the failure of the Enlightenment project shows; “emotion” is quite capable of justifying a centrist view—I should imagine most have negative emotional reactions to the Leninist and Hitlerite states. I imagine that one reason for the decline of the liberal order is its abandonment of emotional claims and pretence to objectivity as if that were possible. Those who continue to use emotion, to appeal to our intuitions as to what is right, instead of simply referring to empirical concepts whose connexion to such intuitions is severely dulled, appear to have the most success; unfortunately they do not seem to be particularly constructive at the moment. Anger and fear are not entirely unreasonable as emotions go: we fear and are angered by the spectres of poverty and dictatorship, and those are not unreasonable positions to hold. Attacks on morality and value judgements in politics often take the form of, to take an example, Sir Humphrey’s utterances in Yes Minister. Government, in his view, is about order, and the prevention of chaos. Hacker, the minister, suggests that it is about doing good. Why is Sir Humphrey so scared of chaos? His fear thereof is the same sort of fear that drives morality; we might even call it a moral belief. It is not an implausible belief—chaos has its problems. Most of the time what seems “objective” is no longer on demanding a further reason. “Lowered emotions” should not really be the end; a sensible method of dealing with competing emotions is the need of the hour.