Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

[Moksha]

4. Give only lip service to religious principles that the Republicans have long cherished.

Ah, you're talking about the pleasure derived from shooting buffalo from the back of their private train car.
Don Jr. and Eric now prefer African safaris to shoot endangered species.

Being the most valiant in the Heaven War?

Sorry, running out of guesses on cherished Republican religious principles.

[Bought Yahoo]

Sorry, running out of guesses on cherished Republican religious principles.

You're a freakin idjut.

Evangelicalism. The Republicans have been hand in glove with Evangelicalism since the Civil War while, at the same time, flipping the bird to Catholics, the High Church protestants and Jews. The Republican party, for a period in the latter half of the 1800s, circulated a proposed constitutional amendment making the U.S. a Christian nation but at the same time prohibiting the Catholic Church.

[Physics Guy]

There's a conservative fear that letting previously excluded people into power means giving power to incompetent people. This fear assumes that the traditional barriers are simply standards of competence.

That's hardly ever true for the most important kinds of power, though. The most important kinds of power are those given for dealing with rare and terrible circumstances. We want a chief executive who can lead a nation through a disaster, for instance, but we don't stage annual disasters just to score candidates for high office. We rely on tests of other kinds of competence and hope that they work as proxies for the kind of competence we actually want.

How well a proxy test works depends on a lot of background circumstances, though. In its heyday the British Empire effectively chose its senior colonial administrators based on academic performance at Oxford and Cambridge, which meant that expertise in Ancient Greek was being used as a proxy for skill in governing India. And up to a certain point it might have worked (though not to a high enough point to make me happy if I were an Indian living under it), because enough people were trying to get good jobs in government by scoring well on Classics exams that the Classics exams served to some extent as tests of general intelligence.

Ancient Greek verse was still pretty damn irrelevant in itself to governing modern India. Plenty of people who could have done a much better job in government were in no position to study Classics at Oxford—most Indians, for example. The talent recruitment system was systematically excluding them, for no good reason at all, and the government of India suffered a lot. It got some talented people, no doubt, but it could easily have had many much more talented people, if it hadn't stuck to this clumsy proxy test.

US Senator John C. Calhoun famously declared that he would only recognize a Black person as human if they could "do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb". Even apart from the basic error of conceiving humanity as a competence to be tested, this was another idiotically clumsy proxy test for competence. No doubt Calhoun's own social circle consisted of people who had all been dragged through Greek and Euclid in school, and those who coped better with them tended to be those who were talented at abstract thinking in general, and at learning alternative ways to express ideas. So even though Calhoun himself didn't actually spend much of his time parsing verbs or proving triangles congruent, within his social circle knowledge of Greek and Euclid may well have been an effective proxy test for the kinds of competence Calhoun cared about. If the world consisted only of classically educated Southern gentlemen then Calhoun's criterion might have been defensible as a standard of competence. It was an idiotically lousy test for the kinds of competence that actually mattered, even to Calhoun, when it was applied outside Calhoun's circle of classically educated Southern gentlemen.

Insisting on clumsy proxy tests as standards of competence is a silly fallacy. It's a shame that the Classics in particular seem to have been abused this way.

The fallacy of blind faith in bad proxies for competence isn't necessarily restricted to conservatives. Liberals sometimes seem to behave as though they thought that certain expressions of noble intention were tests of competence. It's good to check whether a candidate's intentions are good, but that doesn't necessarily prove that they're competent.

[Moksha]

Sorry, running out of guesses on cherished Republican religious principles.

You're a freakin idjut.

Evangelicalism. The Republicans have been hand in glove with Evangelicalism since the Civil War while, at the same time, flipping the bird to Catholics, the High Church protestants and Jews. The Republican party, for a period in the latter half of the 1800s, circulated a proposed constitutional amendment making the U.S. a Christian nation but at the same time prohibiting the Catholic Church.

The group that now deifies Trump.

[Analytics]

There simply isn't an equivalence to this on the left.

I agree. And I am not claiming that there is equivalence, although I understand that it would appear that way. I have noticed, however, that there is a fair amount of internal strife between people from the center to the left. A lot of name calling and virtue signaling. In saying that I am not suggesting that people on the right don’t have their versions of the same. Still, I don’t remember things being so tense as they got in the last two presidential cycles.

Fair points. A dusty old metaphor surfaced in my mind, I believe originally made popular by Stephen Covey. He talked about everyone having an “emotional bank account.” Whenever you did something nice, considerate, or kind, the recipient would drop a few coins in your “your emotional bank account.” In contrast, if you did something that was dickish, people would make a withdrawal from the emotional bank account, but they would cut you slack as long as the balance stayed positive.

Emotional bank accounts seem pretty low right now.

[Atlantic]

There's a conservative fear that letting previously excluded people into power means giving power to incompetent people. This fear assumes that the traditional barriers are simply standards of competence.

Relatedly, there's a conservative fear that previously excluded groups obtaining power will result in either a) a dramatic reduction of their own power, or b) some form of outright subjugation. I'm related to, and know personally, many ardent, conservative Trump voters. They really feel, deep within their bones, that they are legitimately owed some level of social capital and economic power, and it is being stolen from them through illegitimate means. I've heard them express a deep, consuming fear that someone, (government, democrats, immigrants, etc.) is coming to steal their property, take their children from them, or imprison them. There's lots that could be said from a sociological perspective about the group/out group dynamics animating these beliefs. But honestly, I do think it is incredibly sad for someone to carry that type of visceral fear around with them at all times, even when not based in fact.

[Bought Yahoo]

You're a freakin idjut.

Evangelicalism. The Republicans have been hand in glove with Evangelicalism since the Civil War while, at the same time, flipping the bird to Catholics, the High Church protestants and Jews. The Republican party, for a period in the latter half of the 1800s, circulated a proposed constitutional amendment making the U.S. a Christian nation but at the same time prohibiting the Catholic Church.

The group that now deifies Trump.

Yer right.

[Physics Guy]

They're coming to take our guns, and our precious bodily fluids.

Every country has its share of crazies, of course, and if you look a few decades back then they've been a much bigger force in some countries than they are in the USA now. But my admittedly amateur impression of American political history going back to before the Civil War is that there has always been a pretty high groundwater level of craziness. Trump didn't have to dig his well all that deep.

Why is that? I don't know. The little I know of American history prompts some speculations but I know that I don't enough for them to be worth anything.

[Symmachus]

I have to say I find this thread kind of amusing in its utter lack of self-awareness:

Why would someone getting his ideas from "not overly educated thinkers on the Right" who support "white supremacy" and who don't care about "ethical violations and hypocrisy" while being "neo-fascist" devotees of a "personality cult" spreading "poison" use an awful word like "fascist" to describe a letter to the editor written by someone who describes the party he dislikes as "a cabal" but who in this case "has a lot of interesting and useful things to say" and is not at all an unhinged caricature? I mean, we good people, with our objectively better positions, may have our issues and some of our people make us look bad and hurt our electoral chances, but at the end of the day we're the good guys! Why are those bad guys letting the discourse get so bad?

I guess we'll never know the answer.

Everybody in the country believes their side is both good but also losing because the other is nefarious and unscrupulous and immoral; each is a noble victim: conservatives like Commentary crowd or the National Review pencil twirlers are convinced that they are the people of ideas suffering at the hands of superior political operatives in the Democratic party who will use anti-Semitism to their advantage. The gender-fluid readers of Vox feel exactly the same way mutatis mutandis. The everyday Republican voters believe they now live in a socialist tyranny installed by a bluntly rigged election, just as the everyday Democratic voters still believe they endured four years of fascism at the hands of a puppet dictator installed by Russia in a more elegantly rigged election. Not crazy at all, that view, and certainly not the result of political propaganda making an "extreme idea sound reasonable."

This is both-sides-ism only to the extent that both sides are symptoms of an underlying pathology, not that they are equally guilty of the same sins in the same way. This pathology manifests in multiple aggrieved centers of political power and cultural influence that, for now, congregate under the traditional two parties but are not actually reflective of traditional concerns of partisan politics. It's something much more serious than politics since it involves the fundamental conditions out of which politics can arise in the first place. Trump heightened the contradictions of the system, to use Lenin's phrase, but there are yet more, and they will out.

Well, it seems that the need for tribalism is etched deep within our souls. Perhaps from 1945 to 1989 we saw "us" as the U.S.A. and saw "them" as the commies. When the U.S.S.R. fell we need new enemies, and with perfect timing Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were there to tell us that the liberals were the enemies.

No, lots of people had thought liberals were the enemies long before that, and they in turn thought conservatives were evil tools of capitalist interest bent on oppressing the working class. You are rehearsing an ahistorical progressive myth: we were all united under the Republic of Walter Cronkite until the Rebellion of Rush Limbaugh. Not so. One of the great splits in the left was the difficulty of so many liberals to acknowledge the horrors of Stalinism and of the Soviet regime in general (some, like Bernie Sanders, still have difficulty with it). The USSR enjoyed many supporters in the American media, in academia, and in centers of cultural production, and that resentment bubbled over more than a few times before the Soviet Union's collapse. The "we" that existed was not because of opposition to the Soviet Union and in fact pre-existed the Soviet Union. The existence of the Soviet Union helped as an organizing principle around which to have these fights, but such fights still existed. There was, though, at least a "we" there for generations born before the 1980s. There is not one today. I'm not sure I'm convinced by any of the theories out there to explain it.

When conversations about bad political behavior came up on the old Spirit Paradise board and somebody said the bad behavior came from "both sides" or at least from the extremes of "both sides," EAllusion could be counted on to say that is a false equivalency. The truth of that gets clearer every day. The leaders of the Republican party hire consultants to brainstorm about scary things and then conduct focus groups to find out what words, phrases, and potential threats are the absolute scariest to their base. Once those things are discovered, their propaganda machine goes into high gear to make the scary thing an issue.

It's obvious that this pathology manifest differently on each side, and that there is not a single one-to-one equivalency. But the left hand and the right hand are extensions of the same sick body, and the self-righteousness paranoia emanating from that body is the one the thing all Americans are united on. This thread starts out at realizing that there is something rotten in Denmark, but it quickly turns into a series of self-admiring apologia for Claudius because of the convenient and apparently comforting truth that Hamlet really is insane. Let's hope our play has a happier ending.

I highly encourage people to quit their fvqking social media accounts, to abandon their addiction to $h!tty cable news personalities, and especially to read history rather than news.

How does one determine if someone is merely virtue signaling or professing "wokeness" or if they are genuinely committed to progressive values/principles? Especially with the limited understanding we have of other people in online settings.

For example, someone claiming that I am virtue signaling by, say, using #BlackLivesMatter in my Twitter profile -- how does that person know what I do on a daily basis to tackle racism/white supremacy in my everyday life? How would anyone outside my inner circle have any clue whether I'm virtue signaling or actually engaged real-world solutions?

I don't think virtue signalling is about hypocrisy but rather about signalling that one is virtuous. So it doesn't matter whether you "tackle racism/white supremacy in [your] everyday life." The "virtual signalling" part is that you want people to believe you do, whether you do or not. Why do you feel the need to communicate to people that you have virtue?

"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven."

As for what you do to engage in "real-world" situations to combat white supremacy, I have no doubt that you keep all the good commandments and hold all the right views, but there is one thing that I wonder: hast thou sold all that thou hast acquired through thy white privilege and given it to communities of color?

There's a conservative fear that letting previously excluded people into power means giving power to incompetent people. This fear assumes that the traditional barriers are simply standards of competence.

Which conservatives have you read that has expressed this fear? I don't see them caring about competence of any kind, frankly.

That's hardly ever true for the most important kinds of power, though. The most important kinds of power are those given for dealing with rare and terrible circumstances. We want a chief executive who can lead a nation through a disaster, for instance, but we don't stage annual disasters just to score candidates for high office. We rely on tests of other kinds of competence and hope that they work as proxies for the kind of competence we actually want.

Yes, see, in the media-run state of America, there are a series of proxy tests rather than just one. So for the presidency, the proxy tests are that, if you can convince some billionaires to give you money, look good on TV, score some soundbites that can be recycled on Twitter, access the friendship and patronage of people already in power, win over some prominent commentators by being in the right party, and in general win the approval of our media overlords while running a two-year campaign that you kick off by eating hot dogs with some Vietnam veterans at a diner in New Hampshire, then you are fit to be president. Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it marvelous? (that's a real inside ex-Mormon reference).

This is why every American president thinks they can solve some great international conflict as if it were just winning over some voters in a parking lot of one of their stump speeches: Biden, like Obama, thinks he can make a deal with these non-existent "moderates" in Iran (a completely meaningless concept in Islamicist politics); Trump thought he can make deals like North Korea was a goddamn bank he owes money to; Bush thought Iraqis just wanted to have a compassionate conservative democracy like his Hispanic voters; Clinton thought he could smile Arafat into a deal; and let's not forget Johnson, who knew that, if he could just get "old Ho" into a room, he could browbeat him into an agreement as if he were some dumb congressman from Arkansas. It is wonderful! It is marvelous!

How well a proxy test works depends on a lot of background circumstances, though. In its heyday the British Empire effectively chose its senior colonial administrators based on academic performance at Oxford and Cambridge, which meant that expertise in Ancient Greek was being used as a proxy for skill in governing India. And up to a certain point it might have worked (though not to a high enough point to make me happy if I were an Indian living under it), because enough people were trying to get good jobs in government by scoring well on Classics exams that the Classics exams served to some extent as tests of general intelligence.

Ancient Greek verse was still pretty damn irrelevant in itself to governing modern India. Plenty of people who could have done a much better job in government were in no position to study Classics at Oxford—most Indians, for example. The talent recruitment system was systematically excluding them, for no good reason at all, and the government of India suffered a lot. It got some talented people, no doubt, but it could easily have had many much more talented people, if it hadn't stuck to this clumsy proxy test.

You think the Indians were excluded from the British civil service because they didn't read Greek poetry at Oxford? No, I'm sorry, that's not the explanation for their exclusion. They were excluded because they were Indian and the British politicians were racists who considered them inferior.

Speaking of the non-Indians who governed large parts of India (but not all of it), how could it easily have found much more talented people? I'm genuinely curious to know what a physics professor in 21st century Germany, who draws his salary from the vast machinery of an administrative state created in the late 19th century, sees that people at the time missed as far as measures of competency go. Let's say you're a minister in the government of Disraeli—no, Gladstone, so how are you going to use your enlightened liberalism to build a more competent civil service with the tools at hand? "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics" and so on and so on.

I don't ask because I am a partisan of classics but because you are talking about history as if the present, and specifically your own situation, has always been the alternative reality, and only human folly kept people from accessing it in the past. I get that you are attempting to simplify things but it is really more of a distortion. For one thing, ancient Greek actually was useful to an extent, because, in the complete absence of handbooks on any of the languages of India or Persia, people who knew ancient Greek well at least had a solid foundation for learning Sanskrit and Persian, which are surprisingly close to ancient Greek in many ways, and from there one could pick up the various local languages. Sanskrit and Persian were already the pre-existing language of the cultured local elites who, in many cases, continued to administer large parts of India until the end of the British Raj. Many of these the British truly did try to understand the cultures that they stumbled into governing (and in the case of India, that is really how it got underway as the Mughal empire began to collapse in on itself). The same cannot be said of many American and European diplomats and foreign service officers, despite having master's degrees in international relations and government.

And many of their attempts at understanding India and Persia had tremendous impact not only on scholarship but on European civilization as a whole (to take just one example, Darwin said explicitly that the insights of comparative philology, developed by people like William Jones, put his mind to thinking about species in the way that they had thought about languages).

Also, what were the handbooks on international relations, as well as government and administration, that were available in 18th century and 19th century? One of the pre-eminent scholars of international relations today, Stephen Kotkin, ends the "Further Reading" section of his book on the collapse of the Soviet empire with this deliciously ironic maxim: "For those interested in studying contemporary history, there is no better place to turn to than Thucydides." Now, let's assume that's an exaggeration and not take it seriously, but the question still remains: what was the better guide at the time? The British, by the way, were by European and Indian standards innovative in using any examinations at all, and universities up to that time were not feeders of talent or seen as a labor pools as they are today. The British got their idea from the Chinese empire, which had been administering civil service exams since the Tang dynasty in the seventh century and continued to do so until the fall of the Qin in the 20th. And what was their exam based on? The Confucian classics. We can glibly chide a succession of Chinese dynasties for conducting examinations rooted in the literature of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE—but a better approach is to ask why they continued to think they were relevant for so long. Perhaps governance—in as far as it is the exercise of power over others—is less about technical competence than about morality.

US Senator John C. Calhoun famously declared that he would only recognize a Black person as human if they could "do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb". Even apart from the basic error of conceiving humanity as a competence to be tested, this was another idiotically clumsy proxy test for competence. No doubt Calhoun's own social circle consisted of people who had all been dragged through Greek and Euclid in school, and those who coped better with them tended to be those who were talented at abstract thinking in general, and at learning alternative ways to express ideas. So even though Calhoun himself didn't actually spend much of his time parsing verbs or proving triangles congruent, within his social circle knowledge of Greek and Euclid may well have been an effective proxy test for the kinds of competence Calhoun cared about. If the world consisted only of classically educated Southern gentlemen then Calhoun's criterion might have been defensible as a standard of competence. It was an idiotically lousy test for the kinds of competence that actually mattered, even to Calhoun, when it was applied outside Calhoun's circle of classically educated Southern gentlemen.

I think you are missing the point in a very large way. Calhoun is simply being rhetorical here by conjuring up something that he considered an impossibility. He was a racist who didn't believe Black people are fully human. Had Calhoun met a Black person discoursing on Euclid, he would not have considered that person fully human all the same, despite their knowing Greek verbs. I don't think his racism was a deduction from premises about a competency signal. It's at best a post hoc justification for his prejudice, but even that view doesn't capture the tenor of someone like Calhoun.

Insisting on clumsy proxy tests as standards of competence is a silly fallacy. It's a shame that the Classics in particular seem to have been abused this way.

I totally agree. But surely the first step in avoiding the fallacy is not to frame everything in these terms, or at least to apply the frame only where it is apt. I'm just curious, though: do you feel the same way about how math and science are used today as a proxy for competence? In the United States, we are convinced that everyone needs to know up to calculus for some reason and have to take college level course in biology, despite their having little utility in the everyday life of the vast majority of the population. Meanwhile, as I recall, you are someone who doesn't think we need much education in how to use language, despite its primacy in every feature of human life and at nearly every moment.

The fallacy of blind faith in bad proxies for competence isn't necessarily restricted to conservatives. Liberals sometimes seem to behave as though they thought that certain expressions of noble intention were tests of competence. It's good to check whether a candidate's intentions are good, but that doesn't necessarily prove that they're competent.

Again, I'm just curious about where all these conservatives are who care about competence. You are describing Elizabeth Warren's voters and Joe Biden's supporters when you talk about competency tests and signals, not Donald Trump's or any Republic for that matter. It is the Vox reader that cares about this stuff, not the Fox viewer.

[Bought Yahoo]

The group that now deifies Trump.

I don't agree. They've hardened around Trump.

Edited: oops. Misread deifies to defied. Yer right.