Psycho-conservatism: What it is, When To Doubt It

  • A large number of right-of-center thinkers have come around to a particular un-named consensus
  • Roughly defined as the intersection between the ideas of Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson and Geoffrey Miller
  • Call this consensus “psycho-conservatism” because all of the three above are psychologists
  • Psycho-conservatism is about human nature
    • Humans have a given, observable nature
    • It isn’t always pretty
    • Human nature places limits on what we can do as a culture and a society
    • Traditional wisdom is often a good fit for human nature
    • Utopian changes often fail because they run contrary to human nature
  • Psycho-conservatism is a type of “small-c” conservatism
    • Looks to the past for inspiration
    • Wary of radical changes
  • Psycho-conservatism is methodologically skeptical
    • In light of the replication crisis in the social sciences, psycho-conservatives look to the most rigorous and well-replicated results
    • IQ
    • Behavioral genetics
    • Big-5 personality traits and other stable, heritable phenomena
  • Share a distinct set of political and cultural concerns
    • Modern society isn’t meeting people’s psychological needs
    • Sympathy for older, more traditional values like obedience to authority
    • Belief that science on IQ and evolution is being suppressed in favor of more egalitarian, but less accurate theories
    • Disapproval of the “culture of victimhood” – better to be sunny and persuasive than to be aggrieved
    • Moderate or silent on “traditional controversies” like abortion, government spending, military intervention, etc
    • Interested in building more national cultural unity
  • What are some of the weaknesses in psycho-conservatims
    • Sometimes we do know what we’re talking about
      • Highly skeptical methodology prevents you from making errors, but there might be exceptions that your methodology doesn’t catch
        • Might be ways to engineer society to ensure better outcomes, even though social engineering in the general case fails
        • Might be biological interventions that allow you to do better than the default human nature
      • There will always exist a minority of people to whom your general social principles don’t apply – shouldn’t override those people’s preferences with one-size-fits-all rules
    • Sometimes psycho-conservatism gets the facts wrong
      • Not all cultural universals pointed to by psycho-conservatives are actually universal
      • For example: patriarchy was pervasive among cultures that primarily used the plow to do agriculture, but not among cultures that used the hoe
    • When a principle is at stake
      • The fact that it is in our nature to do something doesn’t mean that we should do it – that’s the naturalistic fallacy
      • The fact that certain social structures are easier to sustain because they’re in line with human nature doesn’t make those social structures moral
      • Sometimes the right thing to do when you’re told you’re going against human nature is to smile and say, “So what?”

I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup

  • Genuine forgiveness requires you to think that what the other person did was actually wrong
    • It’s easy to forgive things like divorce if you don’t actually have anything against divorce
    • You can only forgive that which you find abhorrent
  • The same principle applies to tolerance – true tolerance is tolerating people whom you dislike
  • Tolerance can be described as respect and compassion towards an “outgroup”
  • Today, we have groups who proclaim their respect and tolerance towards all sorts of outgroups - ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, etc, all of whom were previously persecuted
  • Is this tolerance?
  • Before we can determine whether it is tolerance, we first have to define what an outgroup is
    • The conventional meaning of “outgroup” is simply a group that is different from you
    • But when we look at historical instances of persecution, we find that raw dissimiliarity is not a good predictor of persecution
      • Nazis and Japanese got along well, even though they both had virulently racist ideologies that proclaimed themselves to be the most superior race
      • However Nazis sent German Jews, who were far more similar to themselves than the Japanese, to death camps
    • A better definition of an outgroup would be similarity + small differences
      • When two groups that are radically different meet each other, they usually don’t persecute each other
      • The most virulent hatreds run between two groups who have relatively small dissimilarities, but which have been in close proximity for hundreds or thousands of years
  • Conservatives as “dark matter”
    • 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, yet Scott doesn’t know a single one
    • 40% of Americans want to ban gay marriage, but in Scott’s social circle that’s more like 5%
    • Scott live[d] in Republican state with a Republican governor – it’s astronomically unlikely that he would know zero people with “standard Republican views”
    • And yet it’s true – Scott does not in fact know anyone with standard Republican views
    • It’s as if conservatives are dark-matter to him – he knows they exist, by their effects, but he can’t observe them directly
    • This isn’t just true of Scott’s social circle – numerous online spaces have zero representation from “God and guns” Republicans
    • LessWrong has more conservatives than most on the surface, but when you dig deeper you find they’re either libertarians or neoreactionaries
    • How can we have bubbles this implausibly strong when we rarely select people explicitly by political belief?
  • Political parties are stand-ins for social tribes
    • Red tribe
      • Conservative political beliefs
      • Evangelical religious beliefs
      • Patriotism
      • Enthusiasm for gun ownership
      • Belief in traditional gender roles
    • Blue tribe
      • Liberal political beliefs
      • Agnostic or new-age religious beliefs
      • Concern over the environment
      • Belief in (formal) education
    • Grey tribe
      • Split off from the blue tribe
      • Libertarian political beliefs
      • Atheistic religious beliefs
      • Otherwise pretty similar to the Blue Tribe
    • These tribal categories are probably even more exclusive than political party categories
    • The reason Scott’s bubble is so strong is because every time he selects people who are interested in the same food, the same hobbies, the same lifestyle choices, etc, he is implicitly also filtering by political belief
  • The red tribe and the blue tribe are each other’s outgroup
    • When Osama Bin Laden was killed Blue-tribe people were able to talk about how, even though his death may have been necessary, it’s wrong to revel in the death of any person, even an enemy
    • When Margaret Thatcher died, these same people were throwing parties and singing, “Ding-dong the witch is dead”
    • Osama bin Laden was not a representative of the outgroup for the Blue-tribe, but Margaret Thatcher was
  • These tribal biases are as strong or stronger than other more-commonly-studied biases
    • In implicit association tests, political bias was detected to be 1.5x as strong as racial bias
    • Studies using fake resumes showed that political discrimination is significantly stronger than racial discrimination
    • People are more scandalized by the thought of their child marrying across political party lines than they are by the thought of their child marrying across racial lines
  • Certain words have become cultural markers for these tribal identities
    • Words like America, “white”, etc. are markers for the Red-tribe
    • This is what allows Blue-tribe publications like, Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, etc to write articles vociferously criticizing “Americans” or “white people” without offending their readers
    • It’s understood that even though the readers of these publications are also largely American and white, they’re not “the sort of people” that those articles are talking about
  • In fact, the Blue tribe does a neat sleight-of-hand trick where they can pretend that they’re engaging in self-criticism, since the words they’re using to refer to the Red tribe can also be interpreted to refer to everyone in the US
  • Both the Red and the Blue tribes persecute each other
  • In writing this essay, Scott made exactly the same mistake he warned about
    • Scott is a member of the Grey tribe, not the Blue tribe
    • It’s easy for him to write articles criticizing the Blue tribe, since he’s not a member
    • True self-criticism is never fun; if you’re having fun, you’re not engaging in self-criticism
    • Since the true outgroup of the Grey-tribe is the Blue-tribe, the Grey-tribe should work on tolerating the Blue-tribe more

Conservatives as Moral Mutants

  • According to moral foundations theory, liberals think of morality in terms of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity
  • Conservatives tend to be more concerned with loyalty, patriotism and respect
  • Many of the centrists that Ozy knows think that the onus is on liberals to be more accomodating of conservatives
  • Analogy with aesthetic preferences
    • Most people like traditional representative paintings
    • Ozy likes more abstract art
    • Is the onus upon Ozy to change their preferences, in order to make themselves more compatible with the mainstream?
  • However Ozy does not want to change themselves to value different things
  • From Ozy’s perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that matter in order to preserve worthless purity-based values
  • The fact that we’re compromising with someone with whom we’re morally opposed shouldn’t blind us to the fact that we’re morally opposed to them
  • From Ozy’s perspective, half the country is evil and it is in her best interest to shame their expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work towards a world in which their values are no longer represented

Book Review: Twelve Rules for Life

  • Jordan Peterson is a prophet
  • Prophets do 3 things
    • Tell you that good and evil are real and that you already know what they are
    • Tell you that you’re not doing a good job of living up to your standards for good and evil
    • Tell you that you can do better – that you’re not beyond redemption
  • If being a prophet is that simple, why aren’t there more prophets
  • The concept is simple, but the execution is difficult – you have to say those three things in a manner that actually causes people to listen
  • Peterson’s book is about a central conflict between “order” and “chaos”
    • Order is the comfortable habit-filled world of everyday existence
    • Chaos is all of the things that are pushing you out of your comfort zone
    • People live best with a balance of order and chaos in their lives
    • Failing to balance order and chaos retards our growth as human beings
  • Peterson believes that suffering is a choice – ensconcing yourself in a narrative of victimhood prevents you from having to make difficult choices
  • Why should we buy into Jordan Peterson’s philosophy
    • Alleviating suffering is good
    • In order to alleviate suffering, you must make yourself stronger
    • In order to build that strength, it’s necessary to endure some amount of suffering now
  • The problem with Peterson is that he never grounds his ideology in anything
  • He never answers the question of why do bad things happen to good people
  • Jordan Peterson’s superpower is saying cliches and making them seem meaningful