Sen's Violence & Identity

Violence is what happens to you if you don't act rationally on the basis of your objective, unique, identity as the person who occupies a vulnerable corporeal body. In order to keep yourself safe you may have to change some of your traits or seek or reaffirm membership in particular 'equivalence classes' such that violence against one member of the class triggers collective retaliation 

In Identity & Violence, Sen writes-

Langston Hughes, the African-American writer,

who didn't keep getting beaten up or lynched because he was hella smart 

describes in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, the exhilaration that seized him as he left New York for Africa. He threw his American books into the sea: “[I]t was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart.” He was on his way to his “Africa, Motherland of the negro people!”

What Hughes is expressing is a sense of 'oikeiosis'-  the perception of something as one's own, as belonging to oneself. Hughes wasn't African but he knew he had maternal ancestors from Africa. He was literally returning to their motherland. But, he had sense enough not to stay there.

Soon he would experience “the real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.”

Hughes was a poet. He would find much inspiration in his travels. 

 A sense of identity

 Hughes already had a sense of identity which concerned being the person who occupied his own body. However, he- like many African American intellectuals- felt he did not fully belong in American society. He hoped to find a greater sense of oikeiosis in Africa. 

The irony here is that it is African Americans who, along with kikes and wops, have made American culture so attractive to people around the world- more particularly over the course of my life-time.

can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence. It is not surprising that the idea of identity receives such widespread admiration,

Very true. People who ask to check our ID are doing so because they feel great admiration for such documents. It is not the case that we find it admirable that a person has a strong sense of oikeiosis- i.e. strong bonds to his family, community, religion and culture. What we get excited about is the fact that he occupies a body and has DNA and dental records which tie his identity to that body and no other.  

from popular advocacy of loving your neighbor

which has nothing to do with identity but may have to do with oikeiosis. But, you may be encouraged to pick your neighbors carefully. If there is a brothel or crack house next door, maybe you should find somewhere else to raise your kids.  

to high theories of social capital and of communitarian selfdefinition.

again, this has nothing to do with identity. People may move to where there is better social capital. As for 'self-definition' of any sort, it does not change identity. I may say I am Beyonce and I may have plastic surgery to look like her but I remain me, I don't become Beyonce. 

And yet identity can also kill—and kill with abandon.

No. People can kill. Identity can't.  

A strong—and exclusive—sense of belonging to one group can in many cases carry with it the perception of distance and divergence from other groups.

So can a sense of not belonging to any group. Also, being paid to kill people can alter your perceptions. If you are offered a billion dollars for killing your brother,  you start to reflect you weren't really that close. 

Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord.

But what is that within-group solidarity fed on? The answer is the need to belong- i.e. oikeiosis- which supervenes on a particular type of human identity. The Stoic sage has an identity but develops a superior oikeiosis as belonging to the whole world.  

We may suddenly be informed that we are not just Rwandans but specifically Hutus (“we hate Tutsis”),

Sen is mad. He does not know that just as he knew he was a Hindu and not a Muslim, so too did Rwandans know what Religion and tribe they belonged to. It wasn't the case that some malevolent person suddenly informed Sen that he was a boy not a girl and a Baidya not a Brahmin.  

or that we are not really mere Yugoslavs but actually Serbs (“we absolutely don’t like Muslims”).

Who 'suddenly informed' Christians they were Christians and Muslims that they were Muslims? How did they do so? Did they send out ten million individual telegrams or letters? Or was a personal messenger appointed to go tell each citizen what their religion and ethnicity was deemed to be?  

From my own childhood memory of HinduMuslim riots in the 1940s, linked with the politics of partition, I recollect the speed with which the broad human beings of January were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Hindus and fierce Muslims of July.

His parents did not know they were Hindus. Premier Suhrawardy sent them a telegram. Thus they understood they should run the fuck away from Muslim majority areas.  

Hundreds of thousands perished at the hands of people who, led by the commanders of carnage, killed others on behalf of their “own people.”

In return for which they got money and land and greater prestige amongst their own people.  

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people,

Very true. There was this guy who was having sex and beating this lady. She said 'stop raping and assaulting me!' Thus, a belligerent criminal identity was imposed upon that gullible fellow. Had she said 'thank you for fixing my computer', instead of having the identity of a rapist, he would have been an honored and respected computer engineer.  

championed by proficient artisans of terror.

Al Qaeda was proficient in terror. Did you know that prior to 9/11 very few people knew whether they were Muslim or Christian? The Pope would often observe Ramadan just in case he was actually Muslim. Then, after the twin towers fell, the Pope had a Christian identity imposed on him. This made him very sad. He had to wave goodbye to his four wives. On the other hand, he got to eat pork.  

The sense of identity

no, the sense of oikeiosis or affiliation 

can make an important contribution to the strength and the warmth of our relations with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens, or followers of the same religion.

Equally, we might criticize those affiliated with us and seek to hold them to a higher standard by scolding them incessantly. They may begin to give us a wide berth.  

Our focus on particular identities

not identities but affiliative mechanisms. You remain the same person even if you join the Freemasons as well as the Labor Party and Gay Pride so as to enjoy a richer, more varied, social life.  

can enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centered lives.

We may make self-centered decisions to improve our social life by getting married or joining a club or Church or whatever.  

The recent literature on “social capital,” powerfully explored by Robert Putnam and others, has brought out clearly enough how an

affiliation not 

identity with others in the same social community can make the lives of all go much better in that community; a sense of belonging to a community is thus seen as a resource—like capital.

Forming affectionate ties with others may be a good thing. Loneliness, speaking generally, is a bad thing. But, it may be better to run away from a place where you are likely to starve or be killed. Sen's family was well settled in their ancestral Dacca. But it was safer for them to run away to a Hindu majority area. Sen still does not get this.  

That understanding is important, but it has to be supplemented by a further recognition that a sense of identity can firmly exclude many people even as it warmly embraces others.

Sen teaches at places which firmly exclude most of the people who want to study there. No doubt, Rahul Gandhi is warmly embraced in those places. But this has nothing to do with identity. It has to do with snobbishness.  

The well-integrated community in which residents instinctively do absolutely wonderful things for each other with great immediacy and solidarity can be the very same community in which bricks are thrown through the windows of immigrants who move into the region from elsewhere.

The community donates bricks to immigrants. They run away. But they are replaced by tougher immigrants who donate beating and rape to the community. What is wrong with that?  

The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion.

Some kids get into Harvard. Others don't. But, if everybody could go to Harvard nobody would want to go there.  

The cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts seems to repeat itself around the world with increasing persistence.

Unless there is an effective police force or Army. But there is plenty of violence in places where there are no 'identity conflicts'. The countries with the highest murder rates have a problem with organized crime, not ethnic or communal strife. About 20 percent of homicides arise in that way. Nine out of ten killings arise from disputes between individuals. Almost half of all women who are killed are killed by a current or former partner. Wars don't kill people with as great an avidity as people do. T 

 Even though the balance of power in Rwanda and Congo may have changed, the targeting of one group by another continues with much force.

But that targeting kills fewer people than conflicts between individuals.  

The marshaling of an aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity

or an Arab identity against non-Arab Sudanese Muslims 

along with exploitation of racial divisions has led to the raping and killing of overpowered victims in the south

they are now free to butcher each other  

of that appallingly militarized polity. Israel and Palestine continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side.

It appears the current conflict will spillover into Lebanon.  

Al Qaeda relies heavily on cultivating and exploiting a militant Islamic identity specifically aimed against Western people.

No. It relied on the fact that it had money and could get more money. It was playing a high stakes game for control of the vast mineral wealth of the MENA.  

And reports keep coming in, from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, that the activities of some American or British soldiers sent out to fight for the cause of freedom and democracy included what is called a “softening-up” of prisoners in utterly inhuman ways.

Why are American and British soldiers not running away from Muslims? That is what nice humans, like Sen's parents do.  

Unrestrained power over the lives of suspected enemy combatants, or presumed miscreants, sharply bifurcates the prisoners and the custodians across a hardened line of divisive identities (“they are a separate breed from us”).

Sen does not understand that different 'breeds' are part of any given coalition. Soldiers understand that they must not fire on allies. They must fire on the enemy even if they are of the same 'breed'.  

It seems to crowd out, often enough, any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race.

Why are people paid to be soldiers obeying orders and firing on the enemy? Why do they not reflect that enemy soldiers are fellow human beings? Also, why do restaurants charge money to hungry people in return for food? Should we not feed the hungry without demanding payment? Are we not fellow human beings? Worse yet, some people wipe their own bum but do not go around wiping the bums of everybody in the vicinity. It appears that identity causes people to selfishly wipe only their own bum. Yet do not all human beings have bums? Don't all bums require wiping? 

Recognition of Competing Affiliations

If identity-based thinking can be amenable to such brutal manipulation,

e.g. cruelly failing to wipe your neighbor's bum 

where can the remedy be found?

Not in Sen's work. They are utterly vacuous.  

It can hardly be sought in trying to suppress or stifle the invoking of identity in general.

Nobody invokes identity. They may invoke collective interests or obligations arising out of affiliations.  

For one thing, identity can be a source of richness and warmth

if you have an identity you have a body which can feel rich and warm 

as well as of violence and terror, and it would make little sense to treat identity as a general evil.

Why not? One could say, we have multiple identities on the astral plane but, encased in these meat-suits, we are confined to just a singular identity on this horrible planet.  

Rather, we have to draw on the understanding that the force of a bellicose identity can be challenged by

the police or the army. Pay professionals to deal with homicidal nutter or criminal gangs or crazy terrorists.  

the power of competing identities.

In other words, appealing to 'the better nature' of the bad guys. Sadly, this is no substitute for a professional police force and army. Still, it should be noted that Sen's parents did not try appealing to the 'competing identities' of Bengali Muslims in East Bengal. They preferred to run away. Guys who like running away may feel that no police or army is required.  

These can, of course, include the broad commonality of our shared humanity, but also many other identities that everyone simultaneously has. This leads to other ways of classifying people, which can restrain the exploitation of a specifically aggressive use of one particular categorization.

Sen thinks some guy classifying people in a different way can prevent war and crime and naughtiness. Why are we wasting money on the police and the army?  

A Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis, and yet he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer, and a human being.

But the Hutu laborer who doesn't get with the program may be killed. That's a strong incentive right there. If somebody chops your head off you stop being a Kigalian, an African, or even a human being.  

Along with the recognition of the plurality of our identities and their diverse implications, there is a critically important need to see the role of choice in determining the cogency and relevance of particular identities which are inescapably diverse.

What Sen's family found critically important was to run the fuck away from Muslims. Sen himself migrated to places still ruled by White Christians with kick-ass armies and police forces.  

That may be plain enough, but it is important to see that this illusion receives well-intentioned but rather disastrous support from practitioners of a variety of respected—and indeed highly respectable— schools of intellectual thought. They include, among others, dedicated communitarians who take the community identity to be peerless and paramount in a predetermined way, as if by nature, without any need for human volition (just “recognition”—to use a much-loved concept), and also unswerving cultural theorists who partition the people of the world into little boxes of disparate civilizations.

Nothing wrong with that provided these guys recognize that communities need to be productive enough to pay for an effective police force and army. Otherwise, they are at risk. Raising productivity is what economics should be about. Still, if it is your practice to run away to somewhere other people will keep you safe, why bother with productivity? If an enemy attacks, you can always just run away again so as to talk virtue signaling bollocks in a place where it is still safe to do so.  

In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups—we belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups.

Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity.

No. The fact that she has a corporeal body gives her an identity. That body of hers may be linked biologically or affectionately to a family and community. She may also join various groups. But it is her body alone which gives her a particular identity. Identical twins who belong to all the same groups nevertheless have separate identities because they have different bodies.   

None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category.

A person has only one identity- that of the person with a particular physical body. I may be a member of a group of people all of whom claim to be the genuine, authentic, Beyonce. But this does not change the fact that I am not Beyonce. She has a beautiful female body. I have an ugly male body.  

Constraints and Freedoms

Many communitarian thinkers

don't favor running away as a solution to collective action problems. This is because not everybody is a cowardly virtue signaling cretin.  

tend to argue that a dominant communal identity is only a matter of selfrealization, not of choice.

Unless you choose to run away.  

It is, however, hard to believe

for people who have a long ancestral tradition of running away 

that a person really has no choice in deciding what relative importance to attach to the various groups to which he or she belongs, and that she must just  “discover” her identities, as if it were a purely natural phenomenon (like determining whether it is day or night).

Why not run away from your own community with your best friend's wife?  

In fact, we are all constantly making choices, if only implicitly, about the priorities to be attached to our different affiliations and associations.

Only in the sense that a chair makes implicit choices about being a chair rather than a table.  

The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value, and defend.

Only in the sense that the freedom to determine to freely determine our free determination to freely determine stuff is very very very very fucking important.  

The existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that there are no constraints restricting choice.

The non-existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that choice does not exist. It's just that lots of constraints restrict the fuck out of it.  

Indeed, choices are always made within the limits of what are seen as feasible.

Implicitly no doubt. That's one reason few chairs take up careers in air-conditioner repair.  

The feasibilities in the case of identities will depend on individual characteristics and circumstances that determine the alternative possibilities open to us.

Feasibilities are different from 'what are seen as feasible'. They differ for different people but this does not mean they depend on differences between those people. Sen is pretending that 'identity' is something chosen and this changes what is feasible for the person. Why is he doing so? The answer is, he is suggesting that we can get rid of violence and crime and naughtiness just by talking bollocks about choice theory or by 'assessing' or 'classifying'. It is a complete waste of money to pay soldiers and policemen and judges. All we need is Sen-tentious professors explaining why everybody should choose a nice identity and be nice. That way nastiness will disappear. The problem here is that many of us prefer to maintain an identity which actually knows Econ and thus which rejects Sen-tentious bollocks as sheer magical thinking.  

This, however, is not a remarkable fact.

It is a lie.  

It is just the way every choice in any field is actually faced.

No. Sen, very foolishly, forgets that choices exist even where there is no scarcity and thus no 'budget constraint'. The economic theory of choice has no role to play when it comes to 'free goods'.  

Indeed, nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits.

No. You can breathe as little or as much as you like.  

For example, when we decide what to buy at the market, we can hardly ignore the fact that there are limits on how much we can spend.

Only scarce goods are sold in markets.  

The “budget constraint,” as economists call it, is omnipresent.

Only where scarcity obtains and allocation is done through a market mechanism.  

The fact that every buyer has to make choices does not indicate that there is no budget constraint, but only that choices have to be made within the budget constraint the person faces.

One can choose how much of a free good to take without any budget constraint. Sen doesn't even understand High School Economics.  

What is true in elementary economics is also true in complex political and social decisions.

No. What Sen has said is false in every type of decision.  

Even when one is inescapably seen—by oneself as well as by others—as French, or Jewish, or Brazilian, or AfricanAmerican, or (particularly in the context of the present-day turmoil) as an Arab or as a Muslim, one still has to decide what exact importance to attach to that identity over the relevance of other categories to which one also belongs.

Thus, if the Nazis identify you as a Jew and load you onto a cattle truck, you still have to decide what exact importance to attach to the fact that you will soon be gassed to death.  

In fact, a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture.

People are uniquely characterized by their bodies. They can either defend those bodies themselves or pool resources to hire a police force and an army to do the job for them. But this means that a particular collection of people need to be more productive so as to have a bigger surplus available for mutual defense. That is how the problem of violence and fraud and torts of various types are dealt with. Sen refuses to see that the job of the economist is to figure out how to raise productivity not to scold some imaginary savants who made some horrible metaphysical mistake 300,000 years ago with the result that our species features quite high degrees of inter-species violence. 

The implicit belief in the overarching power of a singular classification can make the world thoroughly inflammable.

No. People with stupid implicit beliefs can be beaten to death before they have managed to set fire to very much. But beating people costs money. Let less productive people beat each other to their heart's content. The more productive can afford collective security.  

A uniquely divisive view goes not only against the old-fashioned belief that all human beings are much the same but also against the less discussed but much more plausible understanding that we are diversely different.

But only one type of difference matters- productivity. Economists can be useful if they find ways to raise productivity. If they start talking bollocks about how everybody should have a multiple identity as Santa fucking Claus.  

The world is frequently taken to be a collection of religions (or of “civilizations” or “cultures”),

it may be useful to do so for a particular purpose. It is wholly useless to pretend that people of a particular sect are more likely to support each other against people of another sect.  

ignoring the other identities that people have and value, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics.

If you are paid to do a job, you ignore stuff which is irrelevant.  

This unique divisiveness is much more confrontational than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that shape the world in which we actually live.

We actually live in a world where most people have to be productive. Not everybody will get paid for talking vacuous bollocks.  

The reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, often inadvertently, to the violence of low politics.

Because crazy jihadis read Habermas- right?  

Also, global attempts to overcome such violence are often handicapped by

our unwillingness to squander blood and treasure.  

a similar conceptual disarray, with the acceptance—explicitly or by implication—of a unique identity forestalling many of the obvious avenues of resistance.

Very true. If only Marshall Petain and Jean Paul Sartre had come out as a Gay couple, Hitler would have turned back his tanks. 

As a consequence, religion-based violence might end up being challenged not through the strengthening of civil society (obvious as that course is) but through the deployment of different religious leaders of apparently “moderate” persuasion who are charged with vanquishing the extremists in an intrareligious battle, possibly through suitably redefining the demands of the religion involved.

Fuck off! The way to deal with any type of violence is to pay people to kill the cunts doing it. Alternatively, you could run away.   

When interpersonal relations are seen in singular intergroup terms, as “amity” or “dialogue” among civilizations or religious ethnicities, paying no attention to other groups to which the same persons also belong (involving economic, social, political, or other cultural connections), then much of importance in human life is altogether lost, and individuals are put into little boxes.

Sen's family would have been put into little boxes- i.e. coffins- if they hadn't run away from religious violence.  

On the other hand, it must be admitted, probably the worst thing you can do to a person you are stabbing repeatedly has to do with ignoring her multiple identity as a librarian, a Lesbian and a person who is bleeding to death. 

Chesterton's fence & a defense of his Anti-Semitism

I'm not Jewish and have no Jewish friends or colleagues. Being as stupid as shit, it probably would make no difference to me if I was cut off from academic or artistic work produced by Jews. Also, I am a horrible human being. Under these circumstances should I endorse anti-Semitism just because it would be expedient for me to do so? The answer is no, if some other party can gain more by anti-Semitism gaining ground and that other party may soon want to fuck over me and my ilk but good. 

The Brits and the French and the Catholics had some very able anti-Semitic ranters. Sadly, it was Hitler who benefitted from their ranting. My point is, don't pretend to hate some harmless bunch of people if some other dude actually does hate them and will kill them and thus gain reputationally over you. This is the only reason I am not an anti-Semite. 

Even polities which were traditionally anti-Semitic should stop being so if the result is that an entity better at killing Jews gains power. In that case, after the Jews, it could be their turn. 

Chesterton's fence is the notion that it is unsafe to abandon a customary practice- e.g. hating Jews- which appears useless or mischievous till you have ascertained what purpose it served and may still serve.

The context was Chesterton's attempt to promote Catholicism (which lost ground as Hitler showed he was more anti-Semitic than the Pope) against the Protestant faith and thus was self-defeating because England had had anti-Catholic laws and perhaps still had strong anti-Catholic prejudices and yet had risen and risen ever since it broke with Rome. 

THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY  

IN the matter of reforming things,

i.e. enabling them to serve their purpose better 

as distinct from deforming them,

so they cease to serve their purpose, though, arguably, the original purpose of Christianity was to fuck over Jews. 

there is one plain and simple principle;

ensure the effort you expend is more than commensurately rewarded by improved performance. Otherwise, find something else to do.  

a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.

There had been fences against Catholics or Jews in the British parliament. Macaulay pointed out that it was irrational for Anglicans to deny themselves the best candidate to represent their interests just because of a religious prejudice. Good business practice is to buy where quality is best and the price is cheapest. Getting freaked out by foreskins or rosaries is silly. Anyway, there were always crazier, more anti-Catholic, or, if Catholic, anti-Jewish, factions. Why give them the opportunity to outflank you? 

If a fence is more useful to your neighbour, who also happens to be your enemy, knock it down by all means. 

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

This is foolish. Fences belong to some specific person or institution. They have 'control rights' over it, though this may be limited by law. If the reformer's suggestion is accepted by those with 'control rights' and no law forbids it, then the thing should be destroyed. True, at a later point, some utility to it may be discovered. At that point, those with control rights might replace it in some cost effective manner. But that sort of 'discovery' process continually occurs in all aspects of life. 

It may not be wrong for some officious fellow to say 'go away and think some more' before you decide to do anything with what is your own but, the truth is, such scolding is likely to be irritating or could amount to a growing nuisance. 

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense.

There is no paradox. Chesterton is simply saying 'don't do stupid shit. Think before you act. There's a reason your house has a door. Don't decide to take it off its hinges so that robbers can enter any time they like.' 

The gate or fence did not grow there.

Nor did buildings which are structurally unsound and which must be knocked down.  

It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.

So we can't know what is reasonable until we know why our species, very long ago, decided that it was a good thing to reason about certain matters but not others. One thing we don't reason about is what people do with their own property. If the landowner finds a particular fence or gate serves no purpose of his own, he is welcome to dismantle it. He does not need to show that he understands medieval economic history or patterns of property ownership in the distant past.  

It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious.

But those human beings aren't like ourselves or, at least, they aren't like the type of human beings we are seeking to emulate or imitate.  

There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools;

they were ignorant of almost all recent technological and scientific developments and discoveries.  

but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.

Idiocy may be heritable. However, for people who suffer no mental impairment, hereditary or otherwise, it would be foolish to believe our ancestors were as scientifically or economically advanced as ourselves. They cut their coat according to a meagre amount of cloth. We are not obliged to do so.  

But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution.

It is business-like to refuse to support, or to help fund the destruction of, bad social institutions no matter what hoary antiquity they may claim. If you don't make this your business, you may soon find yourself out of business.  

If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served.

People who are afraid of vampires may invest in crucifixes. But vampires don't really exist. Why not wear a crucifix as a symbol of your desire to live a Christian life instead?  

But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Because Vampires really do exist. Many of them work for the Post Office. Also, they are using the neighbor's cat to keep me under surveillance.  

We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare.

For Chesterton, that nightmare was that England had abandoned Catholicism. Why not protest instead against the abolition of serfdom or medieval strip farming not to mention Cromwell's re-admission of the Jews? 

This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road.

Both liked calling attention to themselves. Joan was a patriot and helped rid France of the English. St. Francis founded a great monastic order. We may feel that they were masters of P.R to some good purpose. 

Even Chesterton might have objected to people who refused to wear skirts and who sympathized with the feast and the fireside, if- like the late Queen Mother as I was informed by my old friend Giraffe Patel- they made it a practice to defecate on his front stoop. 

And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you."

This is silly. A Duchess may gain a reputational benefit by being known to play leap-frog, as opposed to the more common practice of kissing frogs in the belief that they will turn into the Prince of Wales, while a Deacon who does Yoga may experience improved health and mental acuity.  

Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home.

which isn't that different from the den of the animal or the nest of the bird.  

That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all.

The older type of multi-generational 'joint family' had disappeared in England some centuries previously. What could be seen was going to change quite drastically as, during the War, men had to go away to fight, while women had to go to work. The kids may have to be sent to stay with strangers in the countryside. But this did not destroy the family values of the British.  

They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down with out even pausing to ask why it was ever put up.

It is obvious why families exist. Kids need a lot of care. Our species displays 'neoteny'- i.e. a prolonged infancy and adolescence- because this gives us a cognitive advantage and thus raises inclusive fitness.  

It is true that only a few of them would have avowed this object in so many words. That only proves how very blind and blundering they are. But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life;

more particularly if their spouse dies or runs away 

something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all.

Theories tend to be shit.  

But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist.

In other words, it isn't anarchical at all.  

It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual.

Why did individual women get irritated if they were paid much less than men? Didn't they understand that even bachelors have to support their non-existent spouses and little kiddies whereas women just need a bit of 'pin-money' to keep themselves pretty?  

We are merely told that in this or that case a particular temperament was tormented by a particular environment; but nobody even explained how the evil arose, let alone whether the evil is really escaped.

Why did Annie Beasant convince the Byrant & May match-girls to go on strike? They should have been happy to die of phosphorous poisoning while earning a starvation wage.  

Much of this business began with the influence of Ibsen, a very powerful dramatist and an exceedingly feeble philosopher. I suppose that Nora of THE DOLL'S HOUSE was intended to be an inconsequent person;

Nonsense! She represents the 'New Woman' whose courage and enterprise would raise up her country by firmly rejecting feudal customs and mores. If Norwegian women could be independent, so could Norway.  

but certainly her most inconsequent action was her last. She complained that she was not yet fit to look after children, and then proceeded to get as far as possible from the children, that she might study them more closely.

What Ibsen meant was obvious to his audience. Norwegian children must be raised to be independent. Otherwise, the country would remain an appendage of Sweden under the control of a paternalistic official class. 

Turning to Chesterton & Belloc's anti-Semitism, can any of us, at this late hour, remain on the fence about this? Surely, both were good men who had been infected by a paranoid hate-ideology of a wholly un-Christian type? 

The answer, I think, is that both Belloc and Chesterton were patriots. They were aware that the Tzar's scapegoating of Jews and the subsequent pogroms and vast waves of emigration (which the Brits restricted by the Aliens Act of 1905) would cause many British Liberals to recoil in horror from a Russian alliance. Yet, Belloc- who had served in the French Army- well knew that France needed a Russian alliance. Chesterton, as a young journalist had been alarmed and appalled by the poor performance of the British Army in the Boer War. As a leading light of London's Fleet Street, he would have heard that Kitchener had little faith in the British Indian Army. He thought 60,000 Russian soldiers on the Afghan border would pose a very serious challenge to the Raj. In other words, Britain too needed to keep the Russians sweet. If the price was an utterly deranged type of anti-Semitism, so be it. After all, British Jews were just as patriotic as Anglicans or Catholics. They too saw the need for the Russian alliance. Thus, though the thing might be immoral, un-Christian, and utterly mad, there was a pragmatic reason to support it. After the Bolshevik revolution, it obviously made sense to say 'all the Communists are Jews. What's more they are in cahoots with the Jews on Wall Street who financed Japan in the 1905 War. A lot of these supposedly Feminist 'women' are actually Jewish men who have cunningly covered up their long beards and side curls. I had a friend who married a Suffragette. On the honeymoon night he discovered his supposed 'bride' had a large, circumcised, dick. What the 'bride' did with that dick does not bear relating. Incidentally, Oscar Wilde, who converted on his deathbed to Catholicism, told his confessor that he only took up sodomy after Ada Leverson got him to stroke her pussy- except it wasn't a cat at all! It was a Jewish dick! On the other hand, Dreyfus didn't have a dick. He was actually a German woman named Mata Hari whom the Freemasons were able to get into a senior position in the Army. At an earlier point, he'd had an affair with the Kaiser and thus became the mother of Trotsky who, I need hardly say was Rabbi Hitler's Lesbian lover. '

Still, the fact that 'the Socialism of Fools'- i.e. anti-Semitism- was useful at one time is no reason to stick with that odious program. The real reason we should all hate Jews is because some 'Zionist' Jews are allowing pesky Palestinians to occupy Gazza's football strip. That's a diabolical liberty, mate!

Daniel Kelly wrong on 'moral progress'

Moral progress is associated with economic progress which in turn is linked to scientific and technological progress of a type which raises productivity. Increased affluence, means 'repugnancy markets' can diminish or disappear because a morally superior alternative is more affordable. We may say morally inferior options are 'inferior goods'- i.e. as Income rises, demand for them falls.

No moral progress occurs if a particular set of people gain power or become more aggressive in their bullying such that more and more people pretend to defer to the shibboleths they insist on. Thus, in certain countries, I would pretend that Jews and Homosexuals are very evil whereas in certain other countries I would feel perfectly safe to say the opposite.  I may say that progress in biology has permitted us to see that Homosexuality is natural and is predicted by the correct theory of genetics. Sadly, when it comes to Jews, the goal posts keep shifting. Currently, it seems that some people feel all Jews should be attacked and reviled just because there is a Jewish state of Israel which is similar to the Islamic state of Pakistan. 

Writing for Aeon, Daniel Kelly takes a different view. 

Here you are, just trying to eat your BLT in peace, and someone at your table starts going on about being a vegan. Your eyes roll as your blood pressure rises. You wish they would just shut up.

Not me. I immediately attack the vegan for her senseless cruelty to plants. I then bring up the fact that her father had a penis. Penises are very evil. Why did she not chop off her Daddy's dick? Is it because she was too busy devouring innocent nuts and fruits?  

It’s not that you don’t care about animal suffering. In other contexts, you actually care quite a bit – you would definitely do something if you thought a neighbour was mistreating their dog.

Only if you live in an affluent society where you can report the matter to a relevant authority who will take action. Otherwise, why get the shit beaten out of you by antagonizing your crazy neighbor?  

You’re a good person – an animal lover even! But it’s hard to care that much about the ethics of meat-eating when these vegan types are just so preachy and annoying.

It is likely that as science progresses and productivity and thus affluence increases, people will switch from eating animals raised in a repugnant manner to healthy and tasty alternatives which are cruelty free.  

This is, we suspect, a very common experience. When we’re told that something we see as ordinary – like eating meat – is actually wrong, our first reaction is to get irritated and dismissive. If it’s not about bacon, it’s about plastic straws. Or a phrase we’ve been using for years but is now considered offensive. Or having to share your pronouns.

In all these cases, power is being asserted by a particular group which is seeking 'interessement' and, ultimately, agenda control. You may join an opposite coalition. Buy a MAGA hat and suggest that vegans are actually pedophiles who are hand in glove with the Post Office and Oprah Winfrey.  

This is nothing new. In the 1990s, nascent attempts to combat casual forms of sexism, racism and homophobia – such as calls to end so-called ‘ethnic parties’ on university campuses, or efforts to use the term ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ when referring to people who have been sexually assaulted – were also seen as preachy and annoying, and were often derided as ‘political correctness’ run amok.

I think this sort of 'political correctness' created a backlash favorable to things like 'workfare' (to get rid of supposed African American 'welfare queens') and 'three strikes' (to permanently incarcerate a large cohort of African American young men). The Evangelical Right benefited greatly from this backlash.  

Women complaining about sexual harassment in the workplace used to be met with a similar reaction. For instance, a 1975 article in The New York Times reported that such women were told by their employers that they were being prudish and couldn’t take a joke. A 1980 article about new federal guidelines on workplace sexual harassment quotes ‘an indignant personnel vice president’ complaining that these regulations would cause men to ‘be afraid to speak to a woman in the office without first speaking to a lawyer.’

Women could prevail only because of their high productivity. If your firm gets a reputation for misogyny, the smartest women take jobs with your rivals and thus you sink relative to them. I suppose new technology also made it less imperative to keep women in the typing pool. You could shift them into more productive work which in turn meant that maintaining a 'glass ceiling' would hurt your bottom line. 

Today, these reactions land a bit differently. Most would agree that, even if those activities were once common, they were never OK.

They were okay because back then productivity was lower. You had take your workforce as you found them. It was only once productivity started to rise that you could afford to have an effective HR Department which in turn could help raise productivity yet further by attracting the best candidates. Of course, if productivity fell as a result of 'political correctness', the enterprise might soon go bankrupt or lose ground to competitors.  

That we no longer consider them acceptable is actually a form of moral progress.

No. An enterprise which is 'politically correct' in one country may be increasingly outsourcing work to places which aren't politically correct at all.  

It’s good that we take sexual harassment in the workplace more seriously than we used to! It’s a step forward that we no longer find casual homophobia funny, and that we try to be more considerate when we talk about sexual violence. ‘Ethnic parties’, it turns out, were always stupid and offensive.

Presumably, what is meant is that it is wrong for there to be a White only party but it is fine if there are Black only parties.  

This all might seem obvious now, but many people at the time probably weren’t expecting things to turn out this way. They listened to their guts, and their guts said ‘Ugh.’

If so, they gained countervailing power by supporting more conservative, or even rabidly Right Wing, politicians, pundits and Radio 'shock jocks'.  

What is happening here? Why, rather than taking the moral concerns behind social reforms seriously, do we so often respond with this kind of petulant, knee-jerk defensiveness?

We want to avoid confronting ranting nutters- unless, like me, we are ourselves are raving nutters in which case the vegan freak bursts into tears and runs home to Mummy.  But our response to annoying virtue signalers is to vote for the guy who says 'wokeness' is destroying the country. 

It’s not that we don’t care about right and wrong. But cases like these can feel like a far cry from the sort of moral issues that we’re inclined to take seriously – you know, like murder and human rights.

If its people like us who are getting murdered or tortured or whatever. But if it is happening somewhere at a distance from us and, moreover, such stuff has always happened there, why should we care?  

In fact, there seems to be an unspoken expectation that when we’re confronted with genuine, important arguments for moral change, they’ll be easy to recognise.

But no change will occur unless productivity has risen and thus a morally inferior alternative can be rejected without any great welfare loss.  

Probably they’ll be accompanied by a flash of righteous anger, or a pang of compassion. And of course we will rise to the occasion. Annoyance and irritation, though, are often taken as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal, that the arguments are mere quibbles that can be safely dismissed. Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it.

More particularly because an equal and opposite ranter can easily be found. You counter one nuisance with another nuisance. Since I iz bleck I start banging on about centuries of sexual exploitation featuring aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus  inflicted on my ancestors by Viceroy Sahib. 

As philosophers who work on moral cognition, we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress.

Eye-rolls aren't enough. You have to back an equal and opposite type of ranter. Buy a MAGA cap if not Vivek Ramaswamy's book on 'Wokeness'.  

Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying.

All of them are experienced as annoying if what you are trying to do is to have sex.  

Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons.

Because you are trying to maintain your erection.  

Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

The psychological mechanism involved is one whereby you agree with a homicidal maniac that cats are indeed trying to control our brainwaves.  

While this aspect of the human mind is a critical part of our facility for navigating our social world on a day-to-day basis, it can also make us resistant to social change – even when that change is for the better.

We are not resistant to social changes which make us richer and more secure. We are highly resistant to shite that will make us poorer and our country weaker.  

Let’s start with a primer on norms and norm psychology. Think about all the things we could do on a daily basis, but don’t. We don’t wear our underwear outside our pants,

because that would defeat the purpose of underwear. It costs less to wash skid marks off underpants than it would to dry clean trousers every day.  

we don’t hold hands with strangers on the bus,

We may want to hold their breasts but are afraid of being slapped and then arrested by the police.  

we don’t write work emails in iambic pentameter.

Most of us don't know what that is.  

Most likely, these actions would never even occur to us. But why not?

They are silly.  

There are so many possible ways we might conduct ourselves socially, yet in practice we don’t even consider the vast majority of them.

Probably because of 'mirror neurons' or the fact that the social situations we are tolerated in are one's where our behavior is seen as normal or natural or, in my case, highly entertaining. 

Instead, we mostly stay within the bounds of the local norms – the intricate fabric of social rules that structure human cultural environments, dictating which behaviours are permissible, impermissible or obligatory.

The reason we may do so is because we have been incarcerated or otherwise quarantined with others like ourselves.  

This includes everything from how we’re supposed to behave in different public settings (eg, what it’s appropriate for a person to say, wear or do while at work, school, church, on public transit) to how we’re supposed to act around our friends and family (send Mom flowers on Mother’s Day, offer to help your friends when they move).

Again, if you don't behave in particular ways what happens is that you lose access to certain social spaces or relationship networks. You end up stuck with others like yourself or else are a social outcast simply.  

Sometimes, these rules are explicit (‘Don’t chew gum in class!’), but very often they’re implicit and unspoken (how close you should stand to a new acquaintance you’re chatting with at a party, which topics you should avoid).

Failure to observe implicit rules tends to result in being excluded from milieus where they apply.  

Our norm psychology consists of a cluster of emotional and cognitive mechanisms that helps us handle all these rules, allowing our actions to be steered by them, often effortlessly and without rising to the level of awareness.

 Our behavior causes us to be included in certain social spaces and relationship networks and (sometimes very gradually) excluded from others. 

When our norm psychology is working properly, we glide through the norms of our social environment like fish through water. How much do you tip in the US? Why, 20 per cent, of course. Of course you don’t wear shorts to a funeral. You can curse around your friends but not your grandmother. In familiar environments, navigating norms like these is second nature.

If you are a foreigner or appear mentally distracted, people may point these things out to you.  

Still, sometimes we do notice norms. The loud talker at the table next to you in the restaurant grates on your nerves not just because they’re distracting, but because they’re breaking one of these unspoken rules.

Unless they aren't. You may say to yourself 'the people of this country or sub-culture should adopt such and such norm.' But, you may equally come to relish the joi de vivre and exuberance on display.  

Norm violations grab our attention and, even when perfectly harmless, can still trigger a flash of irritation. This is because our norm psychology tunes our emotions to our social expectations. When those expectations are met, it feels fluent and smooth. When we are surprised by a rule-breaker, we experience it as an emotional signal that something in our social environment has gone awry.

This is the case even where there are no norms or implicit rules. If the cat isn't coming to snuggle on our lap, something has gone awry. What is it? Perhaps you need to take Mitzi to the Vet.  

Consider another example: Alice is visiting an unfamiliar country. She finds her fish-out-of-water experiences mostly enjoyable, relishing all the new, mind-expanding adventures she hoped to have on her travels. She knew she was going to be a stranger in a strange land and is thrilled to learn all the various ways they do things differently in the new culture.

It sounds as though Alice's expectations had been fulfilled. She got value for money.  

But she also notices that common activities take a lot more out of her than back home. Ordering at a restaurant, taking the subway, walking down a street are all opportunities to be slightly out of step with others’ expectations. Even when she pulls them off without a hitch, social interactions take more effort and attention. When there is a hitch, it can be jarring and fraught, and by the end of many days she’s worn out by her clumsiness.

She is homesick.  

Alice feels discomfort because her norm psychology is misaligned with her social environment.

No. She feels discomfort because she is far from home and feels insecure and has the nagging feeling she does not belong. But the same thing can happen to a dog or even a potted plant which has to move to some new area where its requirements are not as seamlessly met.  

The norms from her own culture, which she has internalised and is inclined to follow, don’t match the local norms. She is normatively and socially a little out of step with the culture she is exploring.

But this can happen even if her 'norms' are 'in-step'. Consider Ayesha- a British Pakistani girl raised in a devout Muslim family in Birmingham. Her family had financial problems and so it isn't till she got a job and accumulated enough savings that she could visit her ancestral home in Karachi. She arrives there and immediately feels at home. Her relatives marvel at her excellent Urdu and pious observance of Islamic customs and rituals. In the streets and cafes and shops, everyone treats her as an 'asli desi'. Nobody dreams that she is from a far away country or suspects that she can speak the Queen's English. Though she is perfectly at home with Pakistani norms, she still feels homesick. Why? Ayesha may say to me, after she returns 'you know, what I missed most about home was the Cornish pasty they sell at Greggs.  At the office, we used to joke about how flavorless and rubbery it tastes. Yet, for me, it somehow symbolized all the wordless things I feel about home.' Then Ayesha spoils it all by asking you to invest in her start-up which will sell Cornish Pasties to British Pakistanis in Karachi. You do a bit of Googling and discover there is already a Cornish Pasty franchise in Lyari. At least, you pretend to have done so. Who actually knows what is or isn't sold in Lyari? The residents are very enterprising when they are not shooting each other. 

When a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her, norms make their presence acutely felt.

 A person may suddenly come to reject the norms she was brought up with. What makes its presence acutely felt is cognitive dissonance. She may decide she needs to emigrate to a place where the new norms she has chosen rule the roost. This will reduce her cognitive dissonance. Or so she imagines. 

It is also the experience of the recent immigrant, yanked from familiar waters and thrust into a strange social environment where the rules are suddenly different. It can be the experience of first-generation college students

this is also true of fifth-generation college students. College is different from school.  

learning the ropes and values of higher education. It can even be the experience of a tween staying over at a friend’s house for the first time and discovering that other families have different rules.

The tween discovers that though it is obligatory to kiss your own Mum after scoffing down the food she has prepared, nevertheless, it not okay to kiss your friend's beautiful new step-mother. Instead you are supposed to say 'Thanks for the delicious meal!'  

Moving from one social world to another throws off the predictions of our norm psychology.

This is the case even if that social world is identical to the one we left behind. There is no great difference or distance between West Kensington, where I used to live, and Fulham where I now live. Still, initially I experienced a sort of dissonance or confusion. For example I'd head the wrong way after coming out of the tube station. What had been 'thrown off' was my prediction as to which path would get me home. 

This, in turn, colours our experiences. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.

Don't. Call it not being habituated to a particular environment or rule-set.  Affective friction arises where goals or expectations are misaligned in a work team or other type of network tasked with solving collective action problems. Concurrency problems- i.e. deciding the sequence of actions- have no 'natural' or non-arbitrary solution (this is Djikstra's 'dining philosophers' who starve to death because there is no canonical solution to the utensil sharing problem)- but analysis can show some 'critical paths' are better than others. This can reduce affective friction. However, where there is a fundamental disagreement about norms, there may have to be a parting of the ways or else 'pay-offs' to those who can create 'hold out' problems. In other words, you may have to get rid off or buy off people who claim to have conflicting norms. This is one reason why norms may be held for purely strategic purposes and thus displays of 'preference intensity' may be Machiavellian- i.e. fraudulent. 

Affective friction can also strike closer to home. Even within a culture, times change, currents shift, and old norms give way to new ones. As this happens, some individuals can find that their norm psychologies have fallen out of sync with their own culture.

Or they may find that pretending this is the case is beneficial to them in some way.  Thus, I refuse to contribute to Green causes on the grounds that dicks cause RAPE! including rape of environment Mem Sahib. Not till every dick has been chopped off will I give a penny to save the Veil though I don't deny that large marine animals are as ugly as fuck and should wear burqa at all times.  

This can gradually create the same kind of misalignment that happens all at once to travellers like Alice when they arrive in a foreign country.

Or when immigrants arrive in Alice's country and take her job.  

The experience of affective friction is similar as well: a loss of fluency combined with negative emotional signals arising from the gap between social expectations and realities. Even when the difference between an old norm and a new one replacing it seems trivial, the disruptions caused by the shift can create feelings of anxiety, awkwardness – and anger.

But all these feelings arise even if there is no 'affective friction' or gap between expectation and reality or new norm-set that is being introduced. If suddenly you lose the ability to have an erection, you become plenty anxious and angry and find it awkward to look your wife in the eye when she accuses you of having a young mistress.  

Take recent changes in the norms surrounding pronouns. It is now standard practice in some circles for people to share their preferred pronouns, and for people who identify as nonbinary to use they/them. The cost of abiding by this relatively new norm and adopting the use of people’s pronouns is small – though, of course not negligible, as it can take time to break a long-entrenched pattern in one’s own behaviour.

This pro-noun thing has been a gift to the Right. The Daily Mail had an article about a British University which had made it mandatory to refer to people who identify as cats by a serious of miaow miaow noises. Of course, this may not be true, but it reflects the expectations of those who read tabloid newspapers.  

But (we would argue) the benefits are of considerable moral significance. Making this minor change in how we address people is a relatively easy way of showing respect and promoting inclusivity.

So is addressing people who think they are the Pope as Your Holiness.  

Still, the norms that have historically governed pronoun use are learned incredibly early, and so they are often deeply internalised in individual norm psychologies. For those who have not yet adjusted to new pronoun norms, trying to follow them can feel a bit like a North American remembering to look right for traffic instead of left while visiting the UK.

In other words, what is being challenged is habitual behavior.  

A behaviour that was once ordinary, fluent and automatic is suddenly effortful and fraught – and prone to error. Even seemingly trivial changes in norms can be a source of minor bursts of affective friction.

But this is also the case where you are required to change your behavior for medical rather than normative reasons. It is very annoying not to be able to have a ciggie or scoff down a chocolate eclair even though you have been doing nothing else for the last forty years. 

Then there are all the ways that the social enforcement of norms can aggravate affective friction. Norm psychologies incline people to react disapprovingly towards whomever breaks one of these unwritten social rules. We’ve all had the experience of unwittingly committing a faux pas only to be abruptly corrected – or worse, judged – by our peers.

But this is also the case if you make a mistake at work. What matters is if the mistake adversely affected your employer. Suppose it turns out that your mistake causes the enterprise to gain market share and thus profits. You may be rewarded for the very mistake for which you were initially criticized.  

This can feel pretty lousy. Now, on top of the awkwardness of trying to adjust to a new, unfamiliar norm, you’re also embarrassed and shamed for your mistakes.

You got drunk and grabbed the titties of the CEO of the firm with whom your company is trying to do a profitable deal. You are threatened with the sack. Then, it turns out, the CEO liked getting his titties grabbed and has awarded your company the contract. You get a promotion and are put in charge of the project. 

While expert familiarity with local norms is a sign that you’re a member of the community, being singled out for violating a norm makes you feel like you don’t belong.

The reverse may equally be the case. The son of the founder of the company may be held to stricter standards precisely because the whole company will belong to him sooner or later.  

This sort of experience can lead to resentment.

Or gratitude. I was grateful to teachers or colleagues who pointed out mistakes in my English. It showed they thought I 'belonged' and thus should speak in as polished a manner as those destined to rise high.  

It can sow the seeds of backlash, especially in situations where a new norm is not spreading uniformly within the community.

But this is also true of a new technology or technique or consumer fad. Older people may resent the fact that the chip shop and 'caff' are disappearing only to be replaced by Sushi joints and coffee shops which charge a tenner for a cappuccino. Why the fuck is Starbucks selling monkeys? I bet it has something to do with some new sexual perversion the young people are into.  

In cases where norm diffusion is patchy, the differences between early adopters of a new norm, and those holding on to the old norm, often fall along familiar social divisions.

This is also true of the diffusion of technology. There still are some older people who write letters and don't have an email account. They resent the fact that more and more essential services require an 'on-line' presence.  

In situations where socioeconomic status, race, age, gender and political affiliation loom large, the activation of psychological responses sensitive to social identity and group membership can add more layers to the experience of affective friction.

This is true of new technology or new fashion fads. When I was young, certain hair-styles and types of clothes were closely associated with certain despised social groups. 

For example, social change can split populations along generational lines. The older generation runs afoul of a new norm championed by the younger generation, which leads to the younger generation correcting or even mocking their norm-violating elders.

But guys who mocked boomers ended up voting from Biden who is so old he belongs to the pre-baby boom 'Silent Generation'.  

In such cases, the older folks can easily slide into interpreting the norm-enforcing behaviours of the youth as a threat from a hostile outgroup.

More particularly if kids knife us and steal our wallets.  

Those who feel under threat often commiserate and seek support from others in their own group, solidifying their bonds in the face of the perceived opposition.

The 'Grey vote' did a great job securing the economic interests of the elderly.  

Once they’ve circled the proverbial wagons, breaking the new norm they feel is being imposed on them – maybe especially breaking it loudly and proudly – can begin to function as what evolutionary anthropologists call an ‘ethnic marker’: a kind of rallying cry and public affirmation of shared group identity.

But 'wedge issues'- e.g. Abortion- may divide those who carry an 'ethnic marker'.  

Under these conditions, attempts to spread a new norm

e.g. getting the tax payer to finance the industrial scale slaughter of fetuses. 

can start to backfire. When its proponents respond to violators negatively, they fail to ‘correct’ anything. Rather, they end up further entrenching the very behaviour they were attempting to discourage.

Actually, the 'backlash' may be much stronger than what it responds to. I didn't think I'd see Roe v Wade reversed in my life-time. But then I thought Hilary would have a walk-over against Trump.  

This is a dark trajectory. Misalignment creates disfluency, which leads to feelings of awkwardness and discomfort. When new norms are enforced by the community, it can add fuel to the fire, leading to embarrassment and alienation, which can deepen social divisions and quickly tip into fear, anger and outright hostility.

Which is why, as I said, moral progress can only be made when it is clear that there can be economic progress, based on raising productivity, which in turn is driven by scientific and technological progress. My generation's mistake was to underestimate the incentive for 'off shoring' and 'out sourcing' such that what appeared to be 'moral progress' in our own affluent milieus was actually underwritten by its opposite in the places which supplied our cool shiny stuff. Now, as Vivek Ramaswamy points out, we may have to push back on 'wokeness' so as to stay competitive with China. Once they get ahead in vital technological fields, they will be in a position to dictate the global rule-set. They may be able to use sanctions against countries where democratically elected politicians speak out against China's human rights abuses. They already seem to have gained several successes. There was a time when world leaders were delighted to welcome the Dalai Lama. Now he is a pariah.  Forget about 'free Tibet', Taiwan itself may be abandoned to Chairman Xi's tender mercies. 

This picture of norm psychology highlights several ways that norms can act as obstacles for those who seek to bring about positive moral changes in society.

Norm psychology is irrelevant. Marketing mavens have long known how to exploit 'cognitive dissonance' to get us to buy into all sorts of fads and fashions. I see a handsome guy on TV who says his success with women arises out of his use of a particular deodorant. To reduce my 'cognitive dissonance' I buy that deodorant. But this has nothing to do with norms. Suppose the TV commercial featured an ugly woman saying 'why do so many of you men smell like shit? Use this deodorant for fuck's sake! Maybe, that way I'd want to sleep with you.' My reaction would be to get rid of all the deodorants in my bathroom cabinet. If smelling like shit means not having to pork ugly harridans, so be it.  

Often, real moral progress means replacing harmful norms with positive ones.

But if that 'moral progress' leads to famine or an invasion by a hostile power, it will be reversed soon enough. That is why moral progress supervenes only on economic progress- i.e. rising productivity.  

But the characteristics of our norm psychologies that enable social fluency and effortlessness when we are aligned with our social context are the very same characteristics that make them resistant to social change.

Society changes for the worse when it collectively makes stupid choices- e.g. putting morality before practicality. It doesn't matter if we are psychologically resistant to being invaded if we can't defeat and repel that invasion with something other than normative arguments.  

Worse, the affective responses that our norm psychologies produce can contribute not just to moral recalcitrance, but to backlash. Understanding the psychology of norms is crucial for pursuing social justice.

Pursuing social justice is like pursuing the unicorn. It is a waste of time because unicorns don't exist. Justice, as Hume pointed out long ago, is just a service industry. Its aim is utility nothing more.  

A modest first step will be to recognise that the eyeroll heuristic is deeply unreliable.

It is reliable enough if the eye-roller has countervailing power- e.g. can profitably refuse to do business with you.  

The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide.

Only an economic analysis can do that. Is the thing associated with higher productivity? If so, it is sustainable because 'repugnancy markets' have low or negative Income Elasticity. But if the thing reduces productivity, it is unsustainable. Don't do it unless you have a gun pointed at your head. Even then, cheat. 

The negative-experience of affective friction caused by the new norm isn’t evidence that the norm itself is bad or that we shouldn’t adopt it.

Because only productivity matters. Consider the 'War on Terror'. Had occupied territory in Iraq and Afghanistan been able to get on to a much higher productivity trajectory, the thing would have paid for itself. Indeed, many expected that to happen. They pointed out that being occupied by America had helped Germany and Japan to get onto a path of rising affluence. Indeed, there had been a Peter Sellers film, based on a story by Peter Ustinov, about a bankrupt European country which decides to go to war with America so that, after America defeated them, the Americans would lavish aid upon them.  

Reactions involving awkwardness, irritation, even resentment are precisely what we should expect even in cases where old, unjust norms are being replaced with new, fairer ones.

The irritation may have to do with the knowledge that since productivity isn't rising, the new norm will be either purely cosmetic or else a tool of harassment and 'rent extraction'. A country like India, which is very poor, has more 'labor-friendly' laws than America. But this is the reason the 'organized sector' is so tiny. Permanent workers won't do any work because they can't be sacked. So they are 'feather bedded' while the actual work is done by temporary staff supplied by a 'gang-master' or contractor. Needless to say, they have little or no statutory protection. 

These feelings have their roots in norm psychology.

Which is useless save in so far as it can be gamed by cunning marketeers or politicians or TV evangelists etc.  

And though they are very much a reflection of the genuine challenges of adapting to new and changing social environments, they are not sensitive to the merits of moral arguments or the moral value of different social norms.

Because evolution had no good reason to make this so. All that happens is that a particular norm-set gets associated with a 'costly signal' and is confined to a 'separating equilibrium'. Members of this separating equilibrium act one way to each other, or pretend to, while following the logic of the market in their interactions with everybody else.  

Far from it: our norm psychology helps us track and adapt to whatever norms happen to structure the social interactions in our communities and cultures.

It enables us to spot 'cheap talk' and thus have lowered expectations of 'pooling equilibria'.  

And, crucially, it does this regardless of whether those norms and conventions are just or unjust, harmful or beneficial, serious or silly.

No. We adhere to norms and conventions of obvious utility as 'Schelling focal' solutions to coordination games such that collective action problems are solved in a manner which raises productivity.  

Knowing this fact about yourself should lead you to pause the next time you reflexively roll your eyes upon encountering some new, annoying norm and the changes its advocates are asking you to make.

You should store up some crazy grievance of your own and start ranting and raving anytime anybody around you starts babbling 'woke' shite. Third Wave Feminism failed because ordinary women showed they could do kray kray better than cunts wot went to Collidge.  

That irritation is not your bullshit detector going off. As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar.

Also, if somebody pushes you down and sodomizes you, you should not feel annoyance or anger. All that is happening is that your norm psychology has become misaligned. You will soon get used to being buggered senseless by all and sundry.  

A better response would be to treat your feelings of irritation as a cue for further reflection. Instead of simply going along with your immediate gut reaction, step back and take those feelings under advisement, along with any other relevant factors, and then consider whether your response is reasonable: ‘Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it’s unfamiliar?’

My rapist is now cutting out my eye-balls. Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it's unfamiliar? Also, are you sure you would have this same negative reaction if your assailant was the Pope? Stop screaming and think about it for a second. 

At this point, a fair criticism is that we’ve focused too much on the experience of the people who are largely comfortable with the status quo.

i.e. not being anally raped and then having your eye-balls cut out so you assailant can add another trophy to his collection.  

For those privileged members of a community who have gotten used to enjoying advantages in virtue of their social position,

which protects them from being sodomized and having their eye-balls cut out 

social changes that are genuine instances of moral progress – new norms that reduce overall suffering or make a society fairer –

People from low status minorities- e.g. sadistic serial killers- should be allowed to gain self-esteem and self-affirmation by adding to their collection of eye-balls.  

are likely to be experienced not just as novel and unfamiliar but threatening to their immediate self-interest. This provides another reason to be sceptical of their use of the eyeroll heuristic.

more particularly if the person's eyes haven't been gouged out of her head. How is it Socially Just to coercively restrain people who collect eye-balls?  

However, taking a different perspective, affective friction and misalignment can mean something very different for members of oppressed groups.

e.g guys who are in jail for rape and eye-gouging.  

Most of us are familiar with feelings of social awkwardness, but the philosopher Céline Leboeuf

who has a vagina. How is it just that I don't have a vagina?  

calls our attention to a particularly insidious variant of it. Leboeuf suggests that, in the United States, people of colour often experience a distinctive form of social friction – what she describes as ‘bodily alienation’.

Because some peeps be White. Why can't they at least paint black stripes on themselves like Zebras? Would that truly be too much to ask?  

After spending too much time having to navigate white spaces, Black people can come to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors.

Because Black peeps in the US are constantly having to pluck cotton under the lash.  

This bodily alienation, which Leboeuf links to what W E B Du Bois called ‘double consciousness,’ can create feelings of awkwardness that disrupt social fluency, making it hard for Black people to smoothly navigate their social environments.

Sadly Du Bois, who had settled in Ghana and joined the American Communist Party, did not live to see the enactment of Civil Rights. His widow was forced out of Ghana by the new regime.  

It can also produce feelings of anger, and one way out of it, Leboeuf suggests, is to draw on that very emotion. Anger can spark people to action. It can inspire a rejection of oppressive norms and motivate people to pursue justice.

It can also motivate them to start collecting the eye-balls of their victims. Why is Biden White? Can't he at least paint black stripes on himself like a Zebra? Stuff like that can get a serial killer really steamed- or so his defense lawyers might argue.  

Leboeuf’s account of the progressive potential of anger

not to mention rape and killing. Eldridge Cleaver explained that he had raped Black women so as to get experience he could later use to rape White women. He ended up a Mormon and a Republican.  

may appear to sit uneasily next to our story about affective friction.

It is equally stupid. Still, Lebouef is actually African American. She doesn't have a spray on tan like Rachel Dolezal.  

We’ve expressed scepticism about the eyeroll heuristic and argued that irritation, anger and other negatively valenced feelings stemming from misalignment are not reliable trackers of morality.

Stupid people- e.g. moral philosophers- have no reliable trackers of anything save what might get them paid or laid or tenure or whatever.  

Note that the experiences of bodily alienation that drive this kind of anger and the feelings of affective friction that we have in mind stem from very different sources. Bodily alienation is a response to relatively stable features of one’s home culture. The social disfluency Leboeuf highlights in Black people is caused by their having to constantly confront the racism woven into the very fabric of their own society.

Or pretend to do so so as to advance their careers or create a 'threat point'. But two can play at that game.  

These experiences can give rise to justified and politically useful feelings of anger, which can in turn drive moral progress.

Whatever happened to the notion that California would hand out lots of cash to African Americans as reparations? Apparently they will spend about 12 million dollars on thinking more about this. The State has a 47 billion deficit so it is a drop in the bucket.  

Affective friction, in contrast, arises when there is a misalignment between an individual’s norm psychology and whatever norms prevail in their social environment (whether those norms are just or unjust, fair or unfair, etc).

No. It arises when there is a misalignment of expectations or goals in a work team or other group tasked with solving a collective action problem.  

In cases of social change, it is caused by instability in the social environment, a change to the previously fixed norms one was accustomed to.

Norms can change because powerful vested interests can bully other groups into accepting various measures which may turn out to be wholly cosmetic or counter-productive.  

So these two kinds of emotional experience are completely distinct. And while the experiences described by Leboeuf may be unique to Black people,

who teach worthless shite 

we think the phenomenon of affective friction is likely to be universal.

unless the rewards for affective harmony far outweigh the costs or, more simply, everybody is a 'price-taker' on relevant markets. 

However, the changing social dynamics that give rise to affective friction can be easily misinterpreted as oppression. This can lead to feelings of anger that might be subjectively similar to the rage experienced by those who are genuinely oppressed.

Society oppresses serial killers. When is the last time somebody with a nice collection of eye-balls got a Nobel Prize for something other than Peace?  

While the latter can motivate powerful forms of political progress, the former can motivate an equally powerful form of political backlash under the guise of fighting injustice.

Or telling woke nutters to fuck the fuck off.  

For some individuals, it may not be easy to tell the difference between awkwardness and anger that stem from real oppression, and awkwardness and anger that stem from changing norms.

Or awkwardness and anger arising from not being able to pay your rent or your utility bill.  

This makes it all the more important for people to reflect upon these feelings, and to think carefully about what’s causing them.

The problem with scolding people to be more thoughtful and mindful and respectful is that they might actually start thinking for themselves at which point they realize that people who like scolding others are a waste of space.  

Another way to criticise our story would be to argue that affective friction actually performs an important function by preventing us from adopting new norms willy-nilly.

Cognitive dissonance does that. But if we see that smarter, more successful, people are adopting a new norm, that same cognitive dissonance causes us to jump on the band-wagon.  

After all, we should expect any new norm we encounter to generate affective friction, regardless of whether it’s good or bad for society. Maybe the old norms are there for a good reason, and the new norm would make us worse off. In other words, affective friction might operate like a normative immune system, protecting us from getting ‘infected’ by bad norms. The system errs on the side of safety, and so a price we pay for its protection is that we end up rejecting a few harmless or positive norm changes along with all the bad.

'Infections' lower productivity. Taking up a particular meme or fad or fashion may not impact productivity at all. In such cases, why not go with the flow or else gain a reputational rent as a curmudgeonly eccentric with a heart of gold? 

This criticism gets something right: in practice, affective friction will sometimes prevent us from adopting harmful norms. But it’s a mistake to think this is what affective friction is for, or that our norm psychology aims at internalising norms that are good for society.

We have a complex psychology for evolutionary reasons. But those same evolutionary reasons explain why most of us, at a pinch, can ignore psychological compulsions so as to do things which promote our personal and species survival.  

The function of our norm psychology is to keep us in sync with our social environment.

This is like saying normative quantitative entanglement causes us to gain 'Buddha nature' for the cheap cheap price of $9.99. The plain fact is, norms are one type of thing and psychology or quantum mechanics are other things entirely. If you are pretending otherwise, you are a charlatan. 

This one, specialised, piece of our minds does not ‘care’ whether the norms it processes are good or bad, or whether some alternative set of norms might be better or worse. But we care. Our minds contain much more than our norm psychologies, and we can consider all kinds of things – including moral arguments and reasons – in making judgments, deciding what to do, figuring out which norms are better or worse.

Why bother? Just do what smart people would do. Thus if a guy turns up with a knife and he offers to sodomize you and then gouge out your eyes, shoot him or kick him in the balls or scream very very loudly.  

As we sort through all the possibilities, we shouldn’t place too much trust in a psychological system whose default response to any norm change is to treat it like it’s bad.

We shouldn't place any trust in advise given by stupid pedants teaching worthless shite.

Affective friction is liable to contribute to group-level resistance to moral progress as well.

Not if that 'moral progress' is predicated on higher productivity. Essentially, a surplus is generated which can be used to buy off 'hold-outs'.  In any case, there are always ways to make 'group-level resistance' ineffective or counter-productive. 

It is primarily an individual experience but, as noted, some episodes of norm change will cause affective friction in many members of a community at once.

When the French surrendered to Hitler they knew there would be 'norm change'. What they didn't know was that Hitler would be crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union while also declaring war on America. Suddenly, joining the Resistance seemed like a career move.  

Their individual experiences, especially if they are exacerbated by the darker sides of our social identities and groupishness, can produce dramatic collective effects.

But those dramatic collective effects may just be political theater of a wholly ineffective type.  

Their accumulated influence can manifest as powerful resistance at a societal level, gumming up the gears of social change.

Killing people or paying them off brings about social change. We want to maintain effectively enforced laws which incarcerate those who want to bring about social change by stabbing us.  

Is there anything that can be done?

It is what smart people who solve collective action problems are already doing. Sadly, some of those smart people will turn out to be as stupid as shit.  

Probably, but there aren’t any magic bullets. To brainstorm solutions, focus on factors likely to mitigate affective friction and make us more receptive to new norms.

Productivity. That's all that matters. People with lower productivity tend to get displaced from territory or high social rank by those with higher productivity.  

One strategy might be to harness the power of curiosity, which causes people to find novelty rewarding as opposed to aversive.

Don't be content to be bi-curious. Be curious about how it feels to have your eyes gouged out.  

Think again of Alice, who intentionally immerses herself in a new culture, delighting in its distinctive traditions and norms. Her curiosity led her to explore, to seek out and embrace the unfamiliar instead of fleeing or resisting it.

Alice is a nice girl. She would not resist having her eyes gouged out. Shame on you for fleeing so happy a fate.  

Another approach might be to lean into our propensities to play and pretend. One way to have fun is to temporarily suspend our commitment to the norms that tell us how we’re supposed to act ‘in real life’, and imagine other ways of doing things.

Why nott sing 'Kumbaya' as your eyes are gouged out?  

When we play, we can let ourselves experience what it’s like to live by different rules, or even explore what it might be like to be someone else entirely.

 Why not play games suggested by sadistic serial killers? 

We can also try to mitigate feelings of intergroup conflict by presenting new norms in a way that appeals to a person’s social identity instead of threatening it.

In other words, don't say 'chop your dick off you disgusting piece of shit after which you should be very careful to use 'miaow, miaow' as the pronoun for anybody who might possibly identify as a cat' . Instead, try saying 'you are a very nice man. Shame you have a dick. I'm sure a smart person like yourself will chop it off after office hours. Also, a refined intellectual like yourself will always use 'miaow miaow' as the correct pronoun for everybody because, sooner or later, they too will identify as cats'. 

Finally, we can try to advocate and enforce new norms with positive rather than negative feedback, praising people for doing the right thing instead of shaming them for doing wrong.

Very true. I'd often praise Professor Sen for devouring dog turds and thus helping to keep clean the pavements of the London School of Economics. Sadly, the Registrar tried to shame me as if I had done something wrong. I explained to him that as a Marxist mathematical economist well versed in the Kantorovich-Monge problem, I had an intellectual obligation to attend Sen's lectures and shout him down with my condign praise of his dietary preferences.  

It’s not clear how to implement these ideas in practice.

In which case these ideas are not action guiding. They are not prescriptive. They are just cheap talk.  

But changing the social world for the better will very often mean

doing what smart peeps do and ignoring shitheads who teach worthless shite.  

changing some old, harmful norms and replacing them with better ones. And very often, that’s not going to feel good.

Knowing you are a stupid shithead teaching worthless shitheads can feel good- if you know that you are as stupid as shit and can get no other type of employment.  

Much of the time, it’s going to feel preachy. It’s going to grate on your nerves. It’s going to make you roll your eyes. A lot of moral progress is going to be annoying.

Ugh.

Moral progress is achieved when we find ways to be more productive and thus have the means to avoid 'repugnancy markets' which, as a consequence, shrink or disappear. Why does Mauritania still have slavery whereas Maryland doesn't? The answer is that productivity is much lower in the former which, it must be said, did officially ban slavery in 1981. 

Being poor sucks.

Ugh indeed.