annafdd

Most of my friendlist has read the post of a middling famous SF writer and has spent the last few days blinking furiously and going over a rapid series of reactions that can be summed up as

1. You are joking, right?
2. But... but... but... do you realize what you're saying?
3. Mate, you are a fucking moron
4. I'm not buying any more of your books
5. Fuck you
6. Let me break it down for you in small bits....
7. And finally, FUCK YOU, no, really.

I went through much of the same reactions, adding the point and laugh mocking exercise and skipping most of the fuck yous.

I even tried the Buddhist way, which is to show compassion and love and see if maybe the heart of the hater is touched. No sign of it, but hey, you can never tell when a seed will grow.

The problem with trying to show love and compassion to these kind of people (yes, I will sum up what the post was about, but it was mostly a mad concentrate of homophobia and racism) is that it leaves the people they attack out. I know that recently a good friend of mine and a thoroughly good person, who shares much of my view of life, has said some really kind things about people who have really hurt me, and I was left thinking... but... but... but you're my friend... you know what they did to me... how can you?

And it's even worse when the people who are hurt are not your friends. If somebody is there screaming Death To Homos, and you answer with "Peace, my brother", your gay friends will look at you and say, What do you mean peace brother? I'll give him peace brother in the shape of a smack on the nose, and to you as well if you keep this up.

So let me say something first of all, before Jam distracts me long enough with acrobatic play: I am as appalled and outraged as you are. If I don't hate this poor bastard is only because hate hurts me more than it does him.

The problem is that the post in question is so patently, obviously, whackily crazy, illogical and just plain boggling that I can't see any way to respond argumentatively. Back when I was studying Philosophy one of the essays I was reading about Wittgenstein's On Certainty mad the then new point for me that when Aristotle said that either A or non-A, he wasn't stating a law of nature: he was simply saying that unless we can agree on some very basic fact, not human discourse is possible.

I am going to quote at length, in what follows, from Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, a book that everybody should read, like, NOW.

Altemeyer has been giving people questionnaires for close on thirty years now, studying how some personality traits go together. And he was identified what he calls RWA, Right Wing Authoritarians (LWA are not much different, btw).

If you are keeping track of my promises, as we roll along
together on the internet, I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why
authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The
key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2's observation that, first and foremost,
followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have
not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus
almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff
that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent
notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high
RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas
rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.
So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my
reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures.
But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence
of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning,
highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a
profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it
unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.

What struck me in the post in question was first of all its disconnect with the rest of the world. It showed not so much disdain as ignorance of the arguments for tolerance, empathy, and so on. This is strange because the author declares that he used to be a "supporter of the sexual revolution", whatever that means. There is also a disconnect between the demand for complete logic, and the refusal of "emotional" thinking, and the fact that the whole argument rests on his incoercible disgust for the mechanics of sex (any sex; but he manages to confine the practices that he is disgusted only to intercourse between some gender combinations).

The more I thought about it, the more disquiet I felt. This was obviously, for all its horror, a man who was deeply sincere. One of the commenters on Hal Duncan's patient take down of his post said that he was "compassionate", but I saw no hint of that (the original post has been removed, and I cannot check.) This is obviously somebody who cannot wrap his head around the fact that somebody could think and feel differently from him, and is deeply scared and angry about it.

He's not alone in that: his first comments, before he took down the lot, expressed not only agreement, but amazement that somebody could not see the world in the same way. "It's like they are saying: the sky is green! can't you see it?"

Do I sound the same as these people? I do, a little. The difference is, I know it. I know that some people feel disgust at the mechanics of sex. Just because I don't share this disgust it doesn't mean I disbelieve them. I know that some people derive their first principles from external sources - even if I do not.

Then again, my first principles are derived from something just as illogical, or to be more precise, a-logical. Or maybe pre-logical. The yardstick for morality for me is my gut, just as for the homophobes and authoritarians.

The difference is, I know it. And if I were to argue for the superiority of my system of first principles, I wouldn't say that it is patently obvious, or worse, God-Given. Although for all I know, it can be. I would just say that my system makes my life a lot more pleasant.

That's the thing about looking at the world with open, warm eyes: it makes you happier, and even makes other people happier. Not only that - I realize that not everybody has "happiness" as their chief value: it makes society more peaceful, more interconnected, more stable. It's not as if Buddhist countries are free from strife and horror and slaughter and cruelty, but you have to admit, the Buddhist faith itself, even if it has had unpleasant episodes, has never seen anything like the crusades and extermination of heretics or infidels that other religions we could name have had.

Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large
samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames
more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or
deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.
The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the
reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they
would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the
reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is
right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way,
they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.

And fear. The world of the authoritarians is a world full of fear. The post in question talks about destruction, death, ruin, "moral decay" - in short it has an apocalyptic approach. Fear is the prime mover of the authoritarian personality.

Interestingly, virtually everyone said she had questioned the existence of God
at some time in her life. What did the authoritarian students do when this question
arose? Most of all, they prayed for enlightenment. Secondly, they talked to their
friends who believed in God. Or they talked with their parents. Or they read scriptures.
In other words, they seldom made a two-sided search of the issue. Basically they seem
to have been seeking reassurance about the Divinity, not pro- and con- arguments
about its existence-- probably because they were terrified of the implications if there
is no God.
Did low RWA students correspondingly immerse themselves in the atheist point
of view? No. Instead they overwhelmingly said they had tried to figure things out for
themselves. Yes they talked with nonbelievers and studied up on scientific findings
that challenged traditional beliefs. But they also discussed things with friends who
believed in God and they talked with their parents (almost all of whom believed in
God). They exposed themselves to both yea and nay arguments, and then made up
their minds--which often left them theists. In contrast, High RWAs didn’t take a
chance on a two-sided search.

Which means that when you try to argue with an authoritarian, what you are doing in effect is threatening him or her. I'm sure this is a common experience for many of us - I know that I feel threatened when exposed to a point of view I find abhorrent. That is, after all, how many of us reacted to that post. So it's not as if I am made of completely different substance, and I can understand and empathise. It does leave me a bit at a loss on how to respond, though.

If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who pat
themselves most on the back by claiming they have more than anyone else. This one
is easy if you remember the findings on self-righteousness from the last chapter: high
RWAs think they had lots more integrity than others do. Similarly when I asked
students to write down, anonymously, their biggest faults, right-wing authoritarians
wrote down fewer than others did, mainly because a lot of them said they had no big
faults. When I asked students if there was anything they were reluctant to admit about
themselves to themselves, high RWAs led everyone else in saying, no, they were
completely honest with themselves.
Now people who abound in integrity, who have no faults, and who are
completely honest with themselves would seem ready for canonization. But we can
wonder if it is really true in the case of authoritarian followers, given what else we
know about them. So I have done a simple little experiment in my classes on several
occasions in which I give some students higher marks on an objective test--supposedly
through a clerical error--than they know they earned. High RWAs, for all their
posturing about being better than others, are just as likely to take the grade and run as
everyone else. But I ‘spect they forget such misdeeds pretty quickly. Self-
righteousness comes easily if you can tuck your failings away in boxes and put them
at the back of the shelf.

Hell yeah. This is why the original poster added a bit to his post after he deleted all the comments, saying that nobody had managed to dismantle his argument logically.

Well - I could go on quoting this forever. It's all there: high ethnocentrism, tendency to isolate themselves in small, tight communities that have no contact with the outside world, the feeling that the rest of the world is out to get you, a deep sense of insecurity and fear, and so on and so forth.

So what the hell do you do?

You are not going to convince these people. Mocking them will not get through. Cursing them will only reinforce their feelings of self-righteousness, as does threatening them with retaliation. Reasoning with them is also pretty fruitless.

I try to be kind. I hope this is not taken to mean that I am leaving alone the people who are the object of their fear and aggression. The main thing that you can do to decrease the general level of authoritarianism in a society is to get people to interact with each other. Altemeyer found out that the authoritarian quotient went down when people went to college, any college. In particular, their homophobia went down if they met some real gay people.

So, after my first reaction which was to express incredulity and contempt and mockery, I tried to feel - and to show - real compassion. I am not a religious person, but there is a concept, that of grace, that suits me: I can wish that the heart of my enemy is touched with love, and fear is dispelled.