Free Speech

The Signal is not the Strategy (It's OK to be hypocritical, Part 3)

This is a blog about “The Discourse”. About ‘free speech’ and persuasion. In my current work, I’m reading about the application of signalling theory to political science, and the theory and practice of cultural evolution. These disciplines make two core observations about political life in social species.

Firstly, a political strategy is comprised of two inter-related elements: behaviour and signal. A behaviour is simply an external action by an agent; a signal is a sub-type of behaviour which carries information content between one social actor and another. Of course, behaviour can act as a signal and a signal is a behaviour, but conceptually we can distinguish between those parts of an action which conveys information between agents and those parts that don’t. When it forms part of a strategy, sending a signal to another social agent has the objective of altering the beliefs of the receiver for the advantage of the sender. A corollary of this is that a signal is only that part of behaviour which is observable and comprehensible to the receiver - it does not include actions or motivations that are hidden from them. Through the written and spoken word, humans have unusually sophisticated ways of signalling one another, which the ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ proposes was largely evolved for the purpose of manipulating others in social settings.

Secondly, in the sphere of cultural evolution we say that social agents learn by imitating the behaviour of other agents. We imitate the social strategies of others more successful from ourselves, in order to minimise the fitness difference between us. A corollary of this is that we copy pretty blindly - so that if our instructor includes additional steps or rituals which are empirically unnecessary humans will tend to copy those rituals too as if there were essential to the behaviour. What isn’t copied are the reasons or motivations for behaviour - whether our social models and celebrities are Machiavellian manipulators, religious fanatics or eccentric oddballs, if their social strategies work, then we copy them blindly. In other words, we buy the breakfast cereals recommended by our favourite celebrities, even if their choice of product as little or no bearing on their success as an actor, athlete or musician.

What these two observations lead to is this: signals (i.e. speech) can effectively change behaviour - in other words, be persuasive - even if the receiver of those signals does not understand why their beliefs have changed or why others wanted change to occur. By performing that social strategy themselves, and sending the same signal, they create a new social equilibrium without, in the main, conceptually understanding or agreeing with it. So for instance, socialists and Marxists have an enormous body of theory justifying and explaining their economic ideas but if they have only one signal which is persuasive - i.e. “Medicare for All” - then that slogan, that symbol, will be the vector that spreads socialist behaviours.

Taboos

The more time that passes, the less individuals are likely to know the empirical reasons for the behaviour and the more they are likely to treat them as a given, as ‘common sense’. Liberal social contract rights such as universal suffrage and habeas corpus seem so obvious now that they hardly appear worth defending (often to our detriment). But several generations backs, these rights were hard fought gains that responded to very real systematic abuses. Over time, what was once sensible, necessary reform became symbolism and ritual, devoid of meaning - until the time we need to fight certain battles all over again.

This sanctification of politics is most visible in US political discourse, particularly around issues of race. The abolition of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were massive political achievements, hard fought and won with incredible violence. And yet a few generations later, major debates are occurring over the taboo status of particular words and behaviours. But the strength of the taboo is correlated first and foremost with the significance of the civil rights struggle - so much so that performing ‘black face’ can end careers - and not the behaviour itself, so that over time as memories of that struggle fade the ritual power of the taboo appears irrational and disproportionate.

We have seen this most recently in the centre-right (and corporate) response to Steven Crowder’s homophobic harassment of Vox journalist Carlos Maza - which has focused on the appropriateness of Crowder’s words (especially “queer”) and not on the behaviour behind it. What is objectionable about Crowder is the intent behind his crusade to dehumanise and harass another human being on the basis of their personal characteristics, and the broader social harm this causes, not the particular words, phrases and symbols used. The Right has become very good at disingenuously claiming that the signals they send are socially sanctioned - pointing especially to the innocuous use of those signals or symbols by others communities - knowing full well that the motivations behind their actions are almost impossible to prove.

patreon: http://patreon.com/InnuendoStudios tumblr: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com twitter: https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios transcript: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/182302598987/new-video-essay-internet-reactionaries-argue-as research: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/183630744222/research-masterpost Borrowed Observation #1 - David Roberts mentions the "card says moops" scene in Seinfeld while explaining postmodern conservatism: https://grist.org/politics/david-roberts-explains-postmodern-conservatism-in-36-tweets/ Borrowed Observation #2 - Jay Allen describes chan culture: https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/540095841948553217 Borrowed Observation #3 - Schrodinger's Douchebag defined by Sally Strange (not

The risk this causes for social progressives is that we might overly focus on the signal, not the strategy, for audiences that are not fully on our side, or theirs. The Right knows that when they use offensive language or symbols their signals have hidden structural meaning for their followers. And because we have studied our enemy, the Left knows what is motivating the right: when we say the Right is racist, homophobic or misogynistic, we’re not kidding. But for a non-informed audience who does not share the same social beliefs as us, we are limited to saying that certain speech has observable racist, homophobic or misogynistic consequences, or violates a social taboo. This then permits the Right to riposte with either ‘science’ (“You haven’t demonstrated the adverse consequences you claim”) or countercultural irreverence (“Stop being such a cultural regressive! It’s cool to rebel against taboos!”).

Early feminists and racial minorities fought for voting and legal rights first because that was the ground on which they could convince those with power in society of the rightness of their cause. And they won. But of course winning legal and political rights wasn’t at the root of their activism - economic and social marginalisation, endemic structural violence and oppression were. But when the newly empowered minority groups use their newly acquired rights to point the broader structural inequality out, the ruling majority says “Hey! This isn’t what we bargained for! We gave you what you asked and now you’re just asking for more [you ungrateful subordinate]!”. Backlash inevitably ensues, and so we keep fighting.

Sex and Gender

We have seen this process play out within our own lifetime over the issue of gay and trans rights. The progressive/liberal position on sex and gender is pretty straightforward: who and how a person has sex, and how they identify with and express their gender, are socially irrelevant facts and everyone should just be able to do whatever they want so long as it respects the rights of others. But as it turns out, you can’t create a social majority for progressive change with that argument - there are simply too many authoritarians who believe that people shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want, and too many social conservatives who believe that how and with whom you have sex are socially important facts.

So the version of the gay rights argument which was successful, and which spread most widely, was the version that appealed to the minimum necessary coalition to achieve social change, which was “Well, people don’t choose to be gay and you can’t judge someone on the basis of a characteristic they didn’t choose”. This argument lets you persuade a wider variety of choice liberals, and even religious individuals. Voila! You’ve changed society; the “Born This Way” narrative which supports the new equilibria isn’t everyone on the Left’s true posiiton, but it’s good enough, so it’s what we went with. But sexuality is fluid and complicated. Bi- and pan- people exist; experimentation and contextual homosexuality is a thing, and not every gay couple wants a marriage, kids and a picket fence. Some want to live in polyamorous, kink-friendly communes. The Left doesn’t care either way, but to the Right, this is just evidence of the Left’s bad faith and endless appetite for social deviancy - and why the Left should always be opposed from the outset.

The trans rights argument is playing out much the same way. This came up in a recent debate between the Twitch streamer Destiny and a self-described ‘gender abolitionist’. The accepted social signal in favour on trans rights mirrors the “Born This Way” argument: trans people are simply born into bodies of the ‘wrong gender’. This is not the position of everyone in the trans community or on the Left, but it’s the signal which is most effective in persuading a minimal viable social coalition. Of course intersex and non-binary people are a thing; individuals may have mixed reasons for adopting a particular gender identity or expression, and those reasons may change over time. The Left doesn’t care: you do you. But by using the metaphysical gender argument, we leave ourselves open to counter-attacks that the male brain/female brain dichotomy is empirically weak (the scientism rebuttal), or ontologically false (it’s just ‘gender ideology’). For the record, I agree with Destiny on this: we should adopt the strategy which is most effective in achieving our goals, and hide our true power levels. Aiming directly for non-binary, luxury gay space communism will get us precisely nowhere.

Social and Economic Justice

To be clear, the signal/strategy dichotomy does not merely apply to cultural issues: it’s also of vast significance in the way we argue about economic and structural inequality. If we make the claim that corporations - or the “millionaires and billionaires” - are uniquely bad and evil people and the working class are uniquely oppressed and virtuous, then our persuasion is exploitable by both empirical and ontological claims that this is untrue. Sadly, Destiny himself has fallen into this trap. For the Marxist leftist, the moral virtue of the capitalist and worker is irrelevant - these are classes performing social roles that are determined by a material structure. In other words, no amount of charitable giving can make the existence of billionaires just - any system which permits individuals and families to accumulate that much wealth off the backs of the labour of others is inherently unjust.

Climate change is another issue where I fear we’ve gone slightly off the rails. Of course, this is not just a left vs right issue - there’s a broad technocratic consensus that something must be done. But by focusing our signalling of the minimal viable level of persuasiveness (i.e. the men in white coats say the world is going to end), we’ve left ourselves open to dissension on grounds of both science (“some scientists disagree; 1.5 degrees isn’t that bad!”) and epistemology (“why should we trust the experts anyway?”). When the Right claims that the Left is being disingenuous about climate change, and thus should be opposed on principle, they have a point. Climate change is an inevitable by-product of the structure of capitalism, and for the Left climate change offers a unique opportunity to democratise and regulate how we produce energy. But if we said that, nothing would be done. So we hide and bide.

My point in bringing all this up is not to critique the way the left has done things. I am a Whiggish historian and generally do think the Left has won and will continue to win most of thesd battles. But I don’t think it’s sufficient for us to rebut the Right by pointing out that they obviously argue in bad faith, because on some level the Left is also acting in bad faith. By calibrating political messaging to appeal to a broader coalition than would actually subscribe to our underlying philosophy, we have to be aware that the hypocrisy is baked in. This creates two problems: first of all, when you’re trying to persuade another person of your position, don’t believe your own talking points. It may be that you are genuinely committed to those points, because you - although a committed and passionate progressive - don’t understand the full consequences of the position you’re taking. Only by immersing yourself in the theory can we recognise, and therefore own, our own bullshit.

Secondly, we should strongly resist the urge to moralise and ritualise our persuasive strategies. We should be aggressive as we possibly can be in convincing other people to support a new social equilibrium, but also flexible and acknowledge that these positions are often hypocritical and adopted in response to temporary political alignments that will continue to change in the future. Don’t uncritically defend the ritual and symbolic importance of certain words, because taboos are merely tools for a political end and their symbolic value is merely a social construct. What we really care about is the social harm that those words licence. Don’t bother debating Rights about the reality of sex or racial differences because these are not things that matter to us and wouldn’t change our position. Know how to argue the science, because we need to rebut our opponents and persuade those in the middle. But never engage the Right on them directly, because they’re not being honest about their true position and neither are we.

The alt-lite and Rituals of Provocation

Landing in Australia last week, I found to my chagrin that Canadian alt right-adjacent internet personalities Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were 'touring' with a predictable response of protests, wall-to-wall media coverage and conservative concern trolling over 'free speech' [paywall]. Meanwhile, in the US, the Proud Boys are marching and rioting in famously progressive Portland, and well-funded conservative trolls Milo Yiannopolis, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray and Christina Hoff-Summers are routinely invited onto university campuses by right-wing student groups in order to get media attention and a rise out of their opponents. These provocateurs form an essential tactical bridge between classical (i.e. conservative) liberals, whose anxieties about freedom of speech they prey on, and the fascist alt-right, who rely on the violence these events generate to radicalise and 'blood' their foot soldiers. 

These modern agitators are working in an established tradition. Street violence between fascists and anti-fascists has a long history, dating back to the demise of the Bavarian Soviet in 1920, the Spanish Civil War and the street battles of 1930s Europe. This violence succeeded in convincing many liberal moderates that authoritarianism was a necessary palliative to restore order. The left was more successful in the aftermath of the war, with anti-fascists in the UK and Germany stamping down hard (cf. The Battle of Lewisham) on neo-Nazis and rendering them a (mostly) harmless political joke until Richard Spencer and friends came along and rebranded the alt-right. While political violence is often read as either instrumental, and therefore a product or elite manipulation, or irrational and therefore chaotic and anarchical, the truth is that the alt-lite's trolling shares a strategic form with contests fought along ethnic and religious lines: "Rituals of Provocation" that serve to sharpen and antagonise group identities.

Rituals of Provocation

In the 1990s, anthropologists including Stanley Tambiah, Allen Feldmann and Peter van der Veer undertook detailed studies of pre-conflict tensions between ethnic and religious communities in Northern Ireland, mainland India and Sri Lanka. Their accounts disclose a universal ritual, a shared type of performance common across diverse political and ethnic contexts. In short, processions through disputed territory (think the Orange marches in Northern Ireland) commonly led to riots, which in turn increased the salience of group identities and encouraged armed aggression between them. 

In these marches, the provocateur moves outside the environment of their own community and crosses a boundary demarcating the sacred territory of an opposing group. Marches "transform the [opposing] community into an involuntary audience" for one's own beliefs, and defile the opponent's territory through the aggressive display of political symbols, stereotyped and boastful rhetoric and triumphal music. A key component of such a performance, according to Tambiah, is an "array of triggering actions that are publicly recognised as challenges, slights, insults and desecrations inviting reprisal". In an Indian context, for example, such a procession may conclude with the slaughter of a sacred (or profane) animal in a public space holy to the other side. 

In other words, rituals of provocation are not about advocating for one's beliefs, or even addressing those beliefs to an audience that disagrees with them. Rather, they are an intentional violation of the sacred - a defilement of the 'safe spaces' of the target community with ritual words and phrases ("there are only two genders") specifically chosen to trigger an emotive and potentially violent defensive response (I've written about Jonathan Haidt's work on the sanctity trigger previously). We all recognise this strategy, whether in the form of al-Qaeda attacking the heart of US financial and military power, ISIS-inspired gunmen shooting up gay nightclubs, or Jesus attacking the moneylenders in the Temple at Jerusalem. The defilement of the sacred sharpens contradictions: the performance forces the 'audience' to choose one identity and take a side, where previously ambiguity and co-existence might have prevailed. Tambiah writes that many mixed communities manage to co-exist peacefully until provocateurs activate the latent fault-lines beneath them. 

In the West, we are used to thinking of ethnic and religious conflict as being in some sense irrational, emotional and performative, and political conflict as a separate sphere that is rational and instrumental, but this is a false dichotomy. The lines between religion, philosophy and political ideology are blurry, and each rely on a universal human psychological substrate to operate their social 'code'. In the Muslim and Christian worlds for example, one might identify with the majority religion while also offering gifts to the ancestors - up until some fundamentalist comes to town and starts tearing down your shrines. But politically too, we may happily profess both our commitment to freedom of speech and opposition to racism until some Nazis show up and use their freedom of expression to advocate the ethnic cleansing of your neighbourhood. 

Back to the free speech wars

The fact that the modern free speech wars centre around public universities is not, therefore, a function of the fact that educational institutions have become uniquely intolerant of divergent opinions. Universities have always been, and remain, some of the most vibrant centres of debate in any society and the idea that they have become Leninist training grounds for "Cultural Marxist warriors is, and always has been, empirically absurd. Rather, universities are being chosen specifically as sites for these rituals of provocations precisely because they are the territory of the young, political active and progressive. In the same vein, kids these days aren't special snowflakes who need protecting from opposing viewpoints: rather, they are being actively and consciously 'triggered' by political provocateurs who know precisely what words and phrases will provoke an emotive and media-friendly backlash. We find it easy to see religious believers as being uniquely vulnerable to manipulation of their sacred symbols, but should recognise it everywhere and amongst everyone. 

Lauren Southern, Stephan Molyneux and their ilk are therefore performing for two audiences simultaneously: on the one hand, they carry out acts of daring transgression that make their opponents appear weak and encourage their own base to engage in more risky and violent behaviour. But for the neutral observer who is not activated by their defilement of the sacred in the same way or to the same degree, their actions stripped of their symbolic meaning can seem reasonable or even defensible, and the emotive and defensive reaction of the target community in turn irrational and unreasonable. Lauren has the 'right' to speak, much as the Orange Order has the 'right to march' or Muslims in India have the 'right' to slaughter and eat beef. A wedge is thereby created between the norms of one community (the liberal moderate) and the norms of another (students who don't want Nazis at their university). 

As far as I can tell, there are few good defences against this strategy. Terrorism and extremism work because it only takes a few radicals in a community to sharpen contradictions and force a majority of citizens, who were formerly happy to ambiguously co-exist, into overt conflict. The history of political, ethnic and religious violence suggests that once activated, conflict is very difficult to damp down absent heavy investment in norm-building, de-escalation and co-existence. Yet I see little sign that the alt-right and their agents want to de-escalate current political tensions - quite the contrary. Perhaps the best we can do, right now, is for both socialists and liberals to recognise the tactics being used against us for what they are, and to consciously work to avoid being manipulated by charlatans, trolls and other bad faith actors. 

Respectability Politics and the Great Free Speech Panic of 2017

So, it’s 2017, and we’re going through a moral panic about freedom of speech. For cynics, the peril in which the right to freedom of speech finds itself is yet more evidence that we’re entering a new political dark age. This culture war is mainly being fought over the issue of protest and no-platforming right-wing speakers on US university campuses, and thanks to Anglo-Saxon borrowing Australian and British conservatives are also getting in on the act. Many smart, liberal(-ish) writers who should know better – Andrew Sullivan, Jon Haidt, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher - and papers of record like The Atlantic, Guardian and Boston Globe are piling on. The latest skirmish involves lefty West Coast radio station KPFA cancelling a launch event for Richard Dawkins' new book on account of his excessive and discriminatory singling out of Islam as part of his New Atheist polemics against all religion. 

Don't Panic . . . .

Moral panics are ridiculous in general, relying as they do on the cherry-picking of highly-emotive anecdotes, and this one in particular galls me. Do people wringing their hands about free speech in student politics not remember what being a teenager/twentysomething was like? Universities are always going to be full of young people who take their beliefs too seriously and have poor impulse control. Part of becoming an adult is learning how not to engage with people who hold different views: which strategies are effective (mainly ignoring the trolls) and which aren't. The moralists want to take away young idealists’ capacity to make  mistakes and have these kinds of confrontations for themselves. Talk about coddling! 

Moreover, there’s no practical solution here that doesn’t involve a serious violation of student rights to protest and assembly. Aware of the power of student movements to have a real impact on social debates, conservatives have always sought to shut down campus democracy and turn tertiary institutions into degree factories. By protraying the inconveniences of a handful of (overpaid) loudmouths as a threat to Western civilization and democracy, the boosters of this narrative play into the hands of those whose own committment to personal liberty and the free contest of ideas is conditional and limited. 

Moreover, there’s things about the people pushing this panic that I find repellent. Such men, and they are almost exclusively middle-aged white men, frequently combine their punching down at young progressives with deeply misguided views of their own about feminism and Islam. Dawkins is in many respects the poster boy for this kind of public "intellectual". As much as they profess to care about freedom of speech, they mainly seem interested in their own freedom as powerful men to express bigotry unchallenged. In the end, the so-called ‘liberals’ and centrists who spread the myth that freedom of speech is under assault are at best being useful idiots for conservatives who want to shut down (progressive) student political activism.

 . . .but there is a discussion to be had

And yet on the particular issue of freedom of speech, I agree there is an debate here. Of course there is: when the rights of individuals rub up against one another, politics is required to resolve the issue of where the boundaries lie. Readers of Politics for the New Dark Age will recognise that I take a strong stance on individual rights and I don’t believe that no-platforming and boycotts are a particularly effective form of protest. Odious people should air their odious views, if only to demonstrate how genuinely ridiculous they are to and to prevent them from claiming martyrdom. Using social power to censor offending speech does in fact reveal authoritarian tendencies among those progressives that pursue it. I would prefer that intellectual strife be embraced as a generative and creative process for social learning.

But, unlike the Haidts, Dawkins, Sullivans and Mahers of the world, I just don’t care very much about the freedom of speech of conservatives. Culture war skirmishes at universities are not in the top ten issues affecting the ordinary voter, and probably wouldn’t break the top one hundred. The Dawkins issue is particular no-brainer: by sponsoring a book launch, KPFA was associating their brand with Dawkins' and they are well within their rights to protect their reputation by disassociating themselves from him. For both sides on this one, the question of delineating the correct boundaries of rights appears to be less important than the tribal affiliation of the speaker. In other words, this is a political issue that can only be resolved through power, not an issue of principle that can be resolved through argument. 

Respectability Politics

The moral panic over free spech is a classic example of how social position shapes political personality, and issue about which I have written previously. For affluent white (liberal) men (including myself), there are very few ways in which they [we] do not benefit from the status quo. Libertarian views are overwhelmingly more likely to be held by privileged men (nb: this relationship does not go the other way: men are not necessarily all libertarians), and as a result freedom of speech has much higher salience to them. This is particularly the case when either a) otherwise progressive individuals worry that immature student protesters might make them embarrassed  around their other elite friends, or b) if they suspect (on the basis of their own more crypto-conservative views) that one day they might find themselves subject to protests.

Centrist elites hold firmly to the belief that society is already sufficiently meritocratic (of course it is, they're at the top!) and that steps by the left to address racial, gendered or economic inequalities will only get in the way of action on the yuppie social issues they care most about. When inter-sectionalists ask them to empathise with how their preferred policy stances can affect other identities and interests in unforseen ways, they perceive that as an ask to diminish their own power and perspective rather than expanding it. My own book, Politics, does not employ identity politics as an ideological framework. But as a tactic, coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression, and building linkages across issues, is the only way that progressives can and must win. Even (especially) if it causes existing elites within the left some discomfort in adjusting to new realities. 

In this regard, the moral panic over freedom of speech suggests itself to me as a manifestation of respectability politics. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr that seems apt for discussion:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [greatest] stumbling block in [the] stride toward freedom is. . . the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

So as often through progressive history, we have a bunch of middle-aged affluent, centrist men dictating to a group of young people (with a high proportion of women and minorities) how they should behave in their pursuit of political ends. If they are genuine about wanting what’s best for the left, they need to get out of the way, and stop punching down in the name of their own self-serving aggrandisement.