Re-education

File this under the failures of morality and neurodiversity (the process of thinking) but also diversity of thought (the result of the thinking -- the actual belief). Is it just me, or does it feel more like there's a thought police than even when I started the blog eight or nine years ago.

I was watching a Korean movie and saw a reference to re-education camps. I looked it up and found this NY Times article from 1981 about actual thought police:

This is the first time that the continuing large scale of what are known as ''purification camps'' or ''re-education camps'' in South Korea has been disclosed in a publication here. It is also the first indication that there have been deaths caused by beatings in the camps, a charge that has not so far been made by South Korean human rights groups in Seoul an d that has been deni ed by Seoul officials. Camps for 'Hooligans' Opened

Army camps for ''hooligans'' were first opened in the summer last year, after military leaders headed by Gen. Chun Doo Hwan took power. Between August 1980 and January 1981, a total of 57,561 people were ''warned or re-educated,'' according to The Korea Herald, an English language newspaper in Seoul. The paper said that 38,259 of these underwent ''correctional programs in military camps.''

Arrests were originally made under martial law decrees. But the newspaper account, printed in January, said that ''purification'' programs continued into 1981 after martial law was officially terminated. Some 6,506 people were to continue under detention in ''reformatory training'' and 6,852 ''hardened hooligans'' were given ''hard labor,'' The Korea Herald said.

Tolerance has been preached with some emphasis since the re-education camps, but even in the movie there were still some wishing for those halcyon days when people who did not fit a majority groups vision for human could be dismissed as being subhuman -- a deplorable. And nowadays, is it worse? Because people aren't just hating typical targets like sociopaths or pedophiles, everybody seems to be at everybody else's throats enforcing their standard of morality on the other. The one good thing about this is as more and more people find themselves on the receiving end of social justice warriors and others looking to remake the world more in their image (either in appearance in thought) normal people are realizing that the tactics that they often advocated as being fair and just for use by their side might be less noble or effective than they thought.

I wonder what would happen if people realized that morality is in the eye of the beholder and stopped trying to force others to comply with their own particular flavor or brand. 

The Rationality of Tolerance

Even when I was little, I had a healthy skepticism for people's professed moral positions. Maybe I just didn't understand (and still don't) the nuances of morality well enough, but to me most people's moral codes seemed horribly inconsistent and regularly skewed to their own self-interest or to the care and benefit of those closest to them. Of course now we have social research cottage industry about the darkside or limitations of empathy. Also, it seems more obvious (at least to me) when there's been a regime change, and the same people who decried the dubious tactics of the previous ruling class adopt the same in order to augment and perpetuate their own power.

Religion, often the seedbed of social moral norms, often has some of the greatest hypocrisies, or at least religious people often act far from what they profess to be their moral obligation to others. I have most experience with Mormons and the LDS faith, so that is where most of my experience is with this as well, and it's such a stumbling block to the church's efforts and to members' experience with the church that they've been doing a social media campaign addressing differences and loving others unconditionally.


But the judgment and rejection that some experience in the LDS church, I believe, is just a reflection of broader societal problems -- writing entire groups of people off as being less worthy of care, being quick to disenfranchise others, judging people harshly based on one singled out aspect of their personality or one single event in their life, etc. None of it is really a rational way to behave, but I see otherwise perfectly rational people try to rationalize these feelings all the time, and even dig in when challenged about them. Mob mentality seems to reign much more powerfully now than I remember at any other point in my lifetime.

I know I've written about tolerance before, but I just see stuff like this and think that empathy seems so limited if it still allows this sort of behavior to happen (and often encourages or is the source of this sort of in/out group thinking). Whereas, think about how much better the world would actually be if people were able to withhold judgment and instead seek to understand and appreciate each others' differences or even just leave each other mostly alone, but try to allow a place for everyone to develop and express their unique talents somewhere in someway in this world. Just because that was not how we were evolved to think, in our tribe-first primitive social brain mentality, doesn't mean that it's not the best way to think now. 

Disgust (part 2)

Morality has always been a bit of a puzzle to me -- puzzling to figure out how I feel about it and puzzling to figure out how other people feel about it and why it has the power to get them to act the way that they do. One thing that I find so fascinating about empaths is how they will often justify what would otherwise be abhorrent behavior because they feel a particular way about something. Like this recent comment:

I believe that most people are good, but at the same time I am deeply and profoundly sickened by the fact that any cruelty that a normal person can justify to their conscience is acceptable to themselves and society. If you feel disgust towards something, you are justified in speaking against it and calling for its destruction, whether it be a person, animal, or object.

To illustrate how strongly disgust might motivate people to act out against the object of disgust, the other main story the This American Life episode from last post tells the story of a man called Gene who lived in a small town. After his fiancée was brutally murdered by her ex-husband, he seeks solace from her family, only to have them turn against him. Turns out they Googled him and discovered all sorts of disturbing things:

Someone with the user name Calvin asked, does anyone know the last name of Gene, the boyfriend hairstylist? I'm worried, because Gene is making his way down to Florida to meet with Paulette's side of the family. I'm truly fearful that this is not the end of this tragedy.

Someone named Mouth then said, keep that creep away from the children. He is trouble. What would you do if the perv was chasing your grandchildren? Calvin thanked Mouth for the warning.

And then someone who called himself Bugs added, Gene is not a nice guy. He cheated on his first wife. I know Paulette and Gene well, and they were both sickening out in public, kissing all over one another.

It continued on like this. People accused him of every kind of character flaw you could imagine, of getting fired from every job he had, of being a liar, a drunk.

Once the gossip ball started rolling, it didn't stop. People stopped talking to him in his town. He got fired from his job because no one wanted him to serve them. His life in the town was over, so he picked up and moved, but not before he contacted an enterprising lawyer. After over a year of legal battles, the source of the gossip was finally revealed: "they were all the same woman, a woman who had gone to the trouble of making multiple accounts and then having fake conversations between those accounts." Why would she go to all of this trouble? (This is where it becomes really crucial to listen to the show if you get a chance, they have a recording of this woman saying these things):

I don't like the way he looked at the younger girls in staff where we worked together [for three months]. Looking them up and down, lusty look. You know what I'm saying? There's a difference in looking, and there is a difference in (ELONGATING) "looooking."

He's the reason the woman's dead. He is the very reason that woman is dead. He knew how her (EMPHASIS) "husband" was. But yet, he kept doing what he was doing. He'd come in there with her on numerous times. Sit in the corner, and that woman couldn't even eat for him pawing at her, being gross. You know what I'm saying? You don't do stuff like that out in public, for God's sake. People went back and told the ex-husband to get the ex-husband riled up and disturbed enough about it to kill the woman.

And this exchange:

Interviewer: What business is it of yours, though? I mean, it seems like you're making a lot of assumptions.

Woman: Did you not understand or listen to what I said? He brought it upon himself in my opinion.

Interviewer: Are you proud of what you did?

Woman: [SCOFFS] Am I proud of what I did? I'm proud of standing up for what I believe in, for what I know. I'm proud of telling the truth.

Gene ended up getting a legal judgment against for for over $400,000, but he still hasn't seen a penny of it. The good news is that he was able to move back to his hometown -- people had heard about the trial and decided to stop treating him like human trash.

When the book first came out, I was a little surprised at the level of disgust that some people feel towards sociopaths. It wasn't anything as crazy as what people feel for pedophiles, maybe more like what people currently feel towards gay people -- the majority does not, but the ones that do feel pretty strongly about it. I understand why. It seems like an evolutionary advantage to a point, to have extreme group cohesion and oust anybody who doesn't play by the rules. But it has always been a blunt instrument. And the internet plays a funny role in the way people make these sorts of moral judgments:

You could tell somebody something and they'll kind of believe you. But if they see it in writing, they're going to believe it. Once you write it down, it's not gossip anymore. You know, that becomes truth for what people are concerned with.

Morality leads to hate?

This article on outrage porn (I usually call it public shaming) makes an interesting argument that a deep sense of morality and justice actually contributes to a culture of hate:

Another reason for our outrage addiction may be found in the way the norms of traditional liberalism are dissolving before a more moralized politics. In a perceptive 2001 essay for National Affairs, Thomas Powers argued that traditional liberalism sought "to lower the stakes of politics by removing contentious moral (and religious) opinion to the private sphere. Political life thereby becomes a less morally charged matter of presiding over competing 'interest groups,' whose squabbling is amenable to compromise."

Powers went on to argue that when fundamental justice and morality are reintroduced into politics, and when the beliefs and attitudes of citizens become the potential subject of state action (through amelioration, re-education, or official stigma), people are more likely to fight — and to fight with dread in their eyes.

It's notable that ongoing culture-war disputes are the particular habitué of elite media, white-collar job-havers who spend much of their day sitting in front of the outrage generator. We spend all day worrying about who are the real bad guys, and the real victims. Our ideological songs venture into ever higher falsettos, straining to sing our laments above the noise.

As a result, when a politician utters a barely outdated cliché, or the slightest impolitic word, we no longer hear it as a faux pas or mere insensitivity. Instead it becomes the latest menacing incarnation of the evil we oppose. Micro-aggression is no longer "micro" at all, but the very real appearance of Patriarchy, or Anti-clericalism, or whatever evil you most fear. If your ideological hearing aids are tuned correctly, a gaffe becomes a threat, returning you to witch-trial-era Salem or the Vendée before the massacre.

Worse, this kind of hypermoralized politics has some serious implications for how we look at governance and power. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." In other words, if we are simply doing good in the world, and our enemies evil, then there's no limit to the power we ought to acquire. What a charming fantasy that can be. 

See also this post. Or maybe it's not a fantasy and moral outrage is propelling people to very necessary action to right the world?

Perils of certainty

One of the families I grew up with had a younger daughter who was somewhat troubled. She was the youngest and the family had started having troubles by the time the child was about 7 years old, which is shortly after I met them. The girl was really awkward and annoying in sort of a spoiled seeming way. She seemed oblivious to just about anything going on around her and she would do these really bizarre things or throw fits and scream like she was possessed. I hated being around her and I (along with almost everyone else who knew the family) blamed the mother, who seemed to baby her and not set any limits. Recently I spoke with the aunt of this child. The aunt said that the now 20-something-year-old girl is an engineer and is your basic Asperger's type, which to me explained a lot of what I considered unacceptably obtuse and annoying affectations when I was younger. The aunt opined that the child's mother turned out to be wiser than we all knew -- that the mother understood the child was exceptional, which is what prompted the hands-off parenting style. The theory sounded right to me and it was a relatively small thing, but in that moment I experienced a distinct paradigm shift, not just about this family but about parenting and how well we think we understand people and the world around us, compared to how little we actually know. It made me think of this NY Times op ed, "The Dangers of Certainty" (worth reading in its entirety). The article discusses the author's experience of watching The Ascent of Man as a child, and one episode in particular:

For most of the series, Dr. Bronowski’s account of human development was a relentlessly optimistic one. Then, in the 11th episode, called “Knowledge or Certainty,” the mood changed to something more somber. Let me try and recount what has stuck in my memory for all these years.

He began the show with the words, “One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.
***
There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. 
***
Dr. Bronowski insisted that [physic's] principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty . . . no physical events can ultimately be described with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more we know, the less certain we are.

In the everyday world, we do not just accept a lack of ultimate exactitude with a melancholic shrug, but we constantly employ such inexactitude in our relations with other people. Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth of conversation and social interaction.

For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

The relationship between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.

At this point, in the final minutes of the show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.

 


It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred of the other human being. 
***
When we think we have certainty, when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself. Arguably, it has repeated itself in the genocidal certainties of past decades. . . . We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.

Twitter mobs

Fredrik deBoer writes about the dangers of so-called "twitter storms" in his blog post "smarm and the mob". First he rehashes the story of Essay Anne Vanderbilt, and the subsequent moral judgments that various people made on that scandal. More important to him than the merits of people's suppositions about who-killed-who was the moral certainty to which they clung to their own beliefs, as if there was no possibility of being incorrect:

But I think the simplicity and force of that causal argument, whether explicit or assumed, is precisely why I’m still reading about it now. Because I think that’s what the Twitter storm needs; it needs to assert, in every situation, the absolute simplicity of right and wrong. To publicly state online that you are conflicted about any story that has provoked the mob into action is to risk the immediate wrath of the storm. It happened that, on the day the Jameis Winston case was blowing up, I watched the Ken Burns documentary about the Central Park Five. I thought about making the point that, perhaps, we shouldn’t rush to judgment when a young black man is accused of rape, given our country’s history on that front, but I didn’t dare. I knew the risks.

What people have built, on Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook, is a kind of boutique moral ideology that has one precept that precedes all others: the sheer obviousness of right and wrong. The very words “grey area,” in any context, have become anathema. The ideology of the Twitter storm is a kind of simple, Manichean morality that would make George Bush blush. They used to make fun of him, for that, the liberals and the leftists; his “you’re either with us or you’re against us” worldview was seen as not just illiberal but childish, a kind of moral immaturity that resulted from evangelical Christianity and neoconservatism and dim wits. Now, the shoe is so firmly on the other foot that the default idiom of the lecturing Twittersphere is a kind of aggressive condescension, one which assumes into its expression the notion that all right-thinking people already believe what the mob believes. It is on a foundation of this kind of moral certitude that all of history’s greatest crimes have been built.

That, to me, is the self-deception, a confidence game in the same way Scocca means above: a willful belief, among members of a social and cultural strata, in a kind of frictionless universe where putters can be made out of Stealth Bomber materials, or where all moral questions have long since been settled. It would be nice to live in a universe where there is straightforward relationship between good and evil and where all tragedies have accessible villains. But you don’t live there, and the notion that you do makes actual moral progress harder for us all. I would call that attitude smarm, myself. The problem is that the self-same people who were enamored of Scocca’s smarm essay– the ones who made its popularity possible– are the ones who make up the Twitter storms. And this has been my greater point about smarm: I find it a useful notion in a vacuum, but the mechanisms of internet culture makes me pessimistic about its actual use. As I said at the time: tons of the people who lauded that essay had, days earlier, gone gaga for BatKid. But BatKid was textbook smarm. It turns out that smarm, like so many other human faults, is easier identified in others than in ourselves, even when we are the ones who need to be indicted most of all.

And this is the problem for Scocca, and for us all: he’s a writer of great integrity whose ideas can only be spread with the will of a mob. I don’t blame him for not pointing out that the most influential purveyors of smarm are in fact the very people whose approval his essay required. I have many convenient blindspots to the comprehensive corruption of my present life. I just think that the altitude of his rhetorical station might need a little adjusting. Same message for him as for the Twitter mob: you can position yourself however you’d like. But we’re all down here in the grime.

For more on different moral universes, here.