Most intolerance doesn’t announce itself. It usually dresses itself up as something positive.
The cynic in me would say the so-called tolerant people within our society aren’t actually tolerant, rather they’ve adopted a potpourri of non-traditional behaviours in order to signal their faux tolerance, and then act with intolerance to so-called traditionalists (who are racist, homophobic, misogynist, authoritarian, etc). It all depends on how you value the liberal project. Personally I think it rests on shaky foundations, so I have some sympathy for this cynical view, although I think there are genuine moral concerns caught up in a very confused (and often destructive) ideology.
Probably the strongest example of intolerance dressed up as tolerance, though, is Western political ideology and how we relate to other societies. The democratic countries are extremely intolerant of other political systems; probably more so than many of their most hated rivals. This is expressed in terms of freedom, individual rights, etc, but elections and other Western political institutions are only tenuously connected to freedom. It’s certainly not the case, as is usually assumed by Westerners, that elections are by definition a form of freedom and no further argument is needed. A case needs to be made.
Most discussion of Western political ideology tends to assume what it’s trying to prove. For example, it’s assumed that being incarcerated for a political crime is much worse than being incarcerated for something recognised as a crime in the West, but this is only obviously the case if you already agree with Western political ideology. It’s not hard to come up with arguments (the standard line being that it’s too easy to abuse) but if a country started giving political prisoners fair trials and following accepted legal practice for incarcerating people based on well-defined political crimes, would we accept that? I doubt it. The fact is that we won’t accept anything short of them adopting our practices because their perceived superiority stems not from the particular benefits of adopting them but from that they are ours.
The same is true for freedom of speech, assembly, etc. I’ve been stuck in traffic because of a protest and it occurred to me then that marching down the street is something we make an exception for in political circumstances but would almost definitely outlaw if we didn’t have that ideal. Are countries that don’t share our ideals outlawing protests because they hate freedom or because that’s just a really, extremely obvious thing to outlaw if you don’t share our ideals? Calls for elections in countries without them are calls for the destruction of the prevailing political system. In the West, communists, fascists, anarchists and other rivals to the prevailing political system (as opposed to a party within the system) are not tolerated either. They’re often demonised and sometimes they’re arrested.
These are some of the ways we disguise intolerance for political and cultural differences as sympathy for the plight of individuals under other regimes (while simultaneously ignoring their differences from us, as if everybody has a Westerner trapped inside them, just waiting to be freed). There’s also the tendency to file under propaganda any expression of political views that doesn’t fall under the party system (for example., that the party system is not optimal). There are Chinese and Singaporean political thinkers (and some leaders) who write very eloquently about the limitations of Western political thought and are summarily dismissed as having ulterior motives. Almost everything the Chinese government does is dismissed as a way to prop up the regime, as if nobody there cares about the fate of their own country at all.
Of course, this all stems from the Western idea that the state is an antagonist and opportunist rather than an organic part of society (and, relatedly, that society doesn’t transcend the individual). These ideas are not shared by others but, again, rather than provide an argument we just assume differences in opinion are examples of oppression. Often these differences in opinion are shared by the very people we consider “oppressed” (this is where we bring in nice words like “enlightened” which deny the autonomy of the individual we’re expressing our sympathy for; once they’ve become like us, they’ll understand why being like us is better, but until then… well, screw their opinions).
Your examples are mostly intolerance of specific things, and I agree that there’s plenty of that going on; and I also agree that a good deal of our public praise of “tolerance” is probably not completely true. My question was however whether we really disliked weirdness itself, not specific weird behaviors. If we irrationally dislike 20% of weird behaviors, than we may not be living up to our ideals of tolerance, but it’s also unlikely that that intolerance is slowing our progress down much.
(edit) To take an example from another branch of this thread, a video game startup may claim to not have any dress code like those boring stuffy banks, but anybody wearing a suit will be sneered at anyway. SO, they are still intolerant, despite their claims to the contrary, BUT, a norm of accepting anything but a suit allows for a lot more variance than a norm of only accepting suits, so in practice you’ll still get the benefits of tolerance (in terms of finding comfortable clothes).
It depends how you define weirdness, I think. What I’m claiming, by use of examples, is that we have a very specific out-group/in-group separation. What we usually label “weird” is harmless in-group stuff. We might even use it to signal our tolerance/freedom/etc. What is actually weird to us, we tend not to define explicitly at all, but to separate by exclusion and by favouring in-group stuff without argument. Sometimes we consider it offensive. The examples in the original article are not great, I think, since our society is tolerant of people wearing wacky clothing, etc (i.e., the other day I saw an adult woman in the supermarket wearing an animal onesie and nobody even looked twice). But if you take “weirdness” to be actual out-group behaviour then I think there’s ample evidence that we’re inherently intolerant of it (some of which I tried to provide).
I agree that it depends of what is meant by “weirdness”, and that if by that you mean out-group behavior then yes we are intolerant of it.
However, Caplan’s argument was that signaling conformity discouraged innovation, so the important question becomes how many potential innovations get discouraged—how many fall under ’harmless in-group stuff”, and how many fall under “actually weird out-group stuff”.
You could conceivably have an out-group/in-group separation such that the “out-group” is a restricted set of characteristics, and the in-group is anything else (it’s defined by what it’s not, which isn’t that rare), in which case most innovations wouldn’t be hindered. Or more generally, in-group borders can vary in how restrictive they are; some groups (catholic housewives) can be such that any innovation is likely to fall outside the group, and others (hippies, geeks), while still having borders, may be broad enough to allow a lot more potential innovations to fall in.
I think there are potential examples of “suppressed” innovation due to our ideology. Our political ideology is based on a particular view of individual psychology and sociology. I mentioned the view of the state as an antagonistic actor and the idea that society doesn’t transcend the individual. Both of these assumptions are absent from other traditions (pre-Englightenment West, Confucian, etc) and both appear to set the bounds of how we reason about people and society. I would add to this the idea that morality is problematic in that it doesn’t fit into the natural world without revision, which is perhaps the central philosophical problem that led to modern Western political ideology, and is the reason we look for legal and institutional solutions to social problems rather than the character-centric solutions common to traditional approaches.
It would be very hard, I think, for a Western sociologist or a political scientist to argue for a view of the individual and of society that wasn’t compatible with our political ideology. This also restricts the available possibilities in psychology because we tend to strongly favour “internal” solutions (representations, models, etc) rather than solutions that would imply the interdependence between individuals and culture/society. But again, only occasionally does this rise to the point where people say, “this is too weird!” Usually the suppression is more subtle. There are just certain places we don’t go, intellectually, because the coherence of our ideology depends on it not being true. I think it’s very hard to get a grip on how restrictive your own ideology is because of this.
For example, it’s possible to imagine that I might come up with a psychological theory that seemingly justifies authoritarianism and that might provoke a reaction in others, but what of a psychological theory that shows our very concept of authority to be mistaken? What if I think we’re confused about what freedom is altogether? It’s likely that such a theory would still be evaluated as authoritarian (or not) within the ideology it seemingly undermines. But the situation can be more subtle still. For example, many people have argued that the problem of free will is a non-problem. But what does a world where this question has been dissolved really look like? It certainly doesn’t look like our intellectual climate. Dissolution is merely accepted among the pantheon of answers. You could say that our ideology is especially defined by what we consider a problem rather than the answers we consider legitimate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our society is organised around ideas that come from the same era as many of our most intractable philosophical problems.
As someone who believes mainstream cognitive science is mistaken, I run into this issue all the time. Even people in heterodox research seem to have a hard time taking their theories “all the way.” I think it’s at least plausible that the sticking point here is an intolerance of the genuinely ideologically strange. In fact, I became interested in heterodox, pre-Enlightenment and non-Western political ideology while doing research in heterodox cognitive science, because it helps me clear away biases. So I’ve spent some time reading about other cultures and other eras and trying to get a handle on their perspective, so that I can “think outside the box.” Of course, I could be wrong about mainstream cognitive science, but I think it’s clear there are avenues of investigation that are closed off because they are intermingled with actually weird out-group stuff. I wonder if it’s possible to genuinely dissolve problems without becoming an outsider of sorts.
I think it would be interesting to analyze in more detail what you mean by “intolerance”. We might distinguish the sort of “intolerance” that is expressed by mass violence against its target, and the sort that is expressed by simply not taking the target’s claims very seriously.
Most intolerance doesn’t announce itself. It usually dresses itself up as something positive.
The cynic in me would say the so-called tolerant people within our society aren’t actually tolerant, rather they’ve adopted a potpourri of non-traditional behaviours in order to signal their faux tolerance, and then act with intolerance to so-called traditionalists (who are racist, homophobic, misogynist, authoritarian, etc). It all depends on how you value the liberal project. Personally I think it rests on shaky foundations, so I have some sympathy for this cynical view, although I think there are genuine moral concerns caught up in a very confused (and often destructive) ideology.
Probably the strongest example of intolerance dressed up as tolerance, though, is Western political ideology and how we relate to other societies. The democratic countries are extremely intolerant of other political systems; probably more so than many of their most hated rivals. This is expressed in terms of freedom, individual rights, etc, but elections and other Western political institutions are only tenuously connected to freedom. It’s certainly not the case, as is usually assumed by Westerners, that elections are by definition a form of freedom and no further argument is needed. A case needs to be made.
Most discussion of Western political ideology tends to assume what it’s trying to prove. For example, it’s assumed that being incarcerated for a political crime is much worse than being incarcerated for something recognised as a crime in the West, but this is only obviously the case if you already agree with Western political ideology. It’s not hard to come up with arguments (the standard line being that it’s too easy to abuse) but if a country started giving political prisoners fair trials and following accepted legal practice for incarcerating people based on well-defined political crimes, would we accept that? I doubt it. The fact is that we won’t accept anything short of them adopting our practices because their perceived superiority stems not from the particular benefits of adopting them but from that they are ours.
The same is true for freedom of speech, assembly, etc. I’ve been stuck in traffic because of a protest and it occurred to me then that marching down the street is something we make an exception for in political circumstances but would almost definitely outlaw if we didn’t have that ideal. Are countries that don’t share our ideals outlawing protests because they hate freedom or because that’s just a really, extremely obvious thing to outlaw if you don’t share our ideals? Calls for elections in countries without them are calls for the destruction of the prevailing political system. In the West, communists, fascists, anarchists and other rivals to the prevailing political system (as opposed to a party within the system) are not tolerated either. They’re often demonised and sometimes they’re arrested.
These are some of the ways we disguise intolerance for political and cultural differences as sympathy for the plight of individuals under other regimes (while simultaneously ignoring their differences from us, as if everybody has a Westerner trapped inside them, just waiting to be freed). There’s also the tendency to file under propaganda any expression of political views that doesn’t fall under the party system (for example., that the party system is not optimal). There are Chinese and Singaporean political thinkers (and some leaders) who write very eloquently about the limitations of Western political thought and are summarily dismissed as having ulterior motives. Almost everything the Chinese government does is dismissed as a way to prop up the regime, as if nobody there cares about the fate of their own country at all.
Of course, this all stems from the Western idea that the state is an antagonist and opportunist rather than an organic part of society (and, relatedly, that society doesn’t transcend the individual). These ideas are not shared by others but, again, rather than provide an argument we just assume differences in opinion are examples of oppression. Often these differences in opinion are shared by the very people we consider “oppressed” (this is where we bring in nice words like “enlightened” which deny the autonomy of the individual we’re expressing our sympathy for; once they’ve become like us, they’ll understand why being like us is better, but until then… well, screw their opinions).
Your examples are mostly intolerance of specific things, and I agree that there’s plenty of that going on; and I also agree that a good deal of our public praise of “tolerance” is probably not completely true. My question was however whether we really disliked weirdness itself, not specific weird behaviors. If we irrationally dislike 20% of weird behaviors, than we may not be living up to our ideals of tolerance, but it’s also unlikely that that intolerance is slowing our progress down much.
(edit) To take an example from another branch of this thread, a video game startup may claim to not have any dress code like those boring stuffy banks, but anybody wearing a suit will be sneered at anyway. SO, they are still intolerant, despite their claims to the contrary, BUT, a norm of accepting anything but a suit allows for a lot more variance than a norm of only accepting suits, so in practice you’ll still get the benefits of tolerance (in terms of finding comfortable clothes).
It depends how you define weirdness, I think. What I’m claiming, by use of examples, is that we have a very specific out-group/in-group separation. What we usually label “weird” is harmless in-group stuff. We might even use it to signal our tolerance/freedom/etc. What is actually weird to us, we tend not to define explicitly at all, but to separate by exclusion and by favouring in-group stuff without argument. Sometimes we consider it offensive. The examples in the original article are not great, I think, since our society is tolerant of people wearing wacky clothing, etc (i.e., the other day I saw an adult woman in the supermarket wearing an animal onesie and nobody even looked twice). But if you take “weirdness” to be actual out-group behaviour then I think there’s ample evidence that we’re inherently intolerant of it (some of which I tried to provide).
I agree that it depends of what is meant by “weirdness”, and that if by that you mean out-group behavior then yes we are intolerant of it.
However, Caplan’s argument was that signaling conformity discouraged innovation, so the important question becomes how many potential innovations get discouraged—how many fall under ’harmless in-group stuff”, and how many fall under “actually weird out-group stuff”.
You could conceivably have an out-group/in-group separation such that the “out-group” is a restricted set of characteristics, and the in-group is anything else (it’s defined by what it’s not, which isn’t that rare), in which case most innovations wouldn’t be hindered. Or more generally, in-group borders can vary in how restrictive they are; some groups (catholic housewives) can be such that any innovation is likely to fall outside the group, and others (hippies, geeks), while still having borders, may be broad enough to allow a lot more potential innovations to fall in.
I think there are potential examples of “suppressed” innovation due to our ideology. Our political ideology is based on a particular view of individual psychology and sociology. I mentioned the view of the state as an antagonistic actor and the idea that society doesn’t transcend the individual. Both of these assumptions are absent from other traditions (pre-Englightenment West, Confucian, etc) and both appear to set the bounds of how we reason about people and society. I would add to this the idea that morality is problematic in that it doesn’t fit into the natural world without revision, which is perhaps the central philosophical problem that led to modern Western political ideology, and is the reason we look for legal and institutional solutions to social problems rather than the character-centric solutions common to traditional approaches.
It would be very hard, I think, for a Western sociologist or a political scientist to argue for a view of the individual and of society that wasn’t compatible with our political ideology. This also restricts the available possibilities in psychology because we tend to strongly favour “internal” solutions (representations, models, etc) rather than solutions that would imply the interdependence between individuals and culture/society. But again, only occasionally does this rise to the point where people say, “this is too weird!” Usually the suppression is more subtle. There are just certain places we don’t go, intellectually, because the coherence of our ideology depends on it not being true. I think it’s very hard to get a grip on how restrictive your own ideology is because of this.
For example, it’s possible to imagine that I might come up with a psychological theory that seemingly justifies authoritarianism and that might provoke a reaction in others, but what of a psychological theory that shows our very concept of authority to be mistaken? What if I think we’re confused about what freedom is altogether? It’s likely that such a theory would still be evaluated as authoritarian (or not) within the ideology it seemingly undermines. But the situation can be more subtle still. For example, many people have argued that the problem of free will is a non-problem. But what does a world where this question has been dissolved really look like? It certainly doesn’t look like our intellectual climate. Dissolution is merely accepted among the pantheon of answers. You could say that our ideology is especially defined by what we consider a problem rather than the answers we consider legitimate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our society is organised around ideas that come from the same era as many of our most intractable philosophical problems.
As someone who believes mainstream cognitive science is mistaken, I run into this issue all the time. Even people in heterodox research seem to have a hard time taking their theories “all the way.” I think it’s at least plausible that the sticking point here is an intolerance of the genuinely ideologically strange. In fact, I became interested in heterodox, pre-Enlightenment and non-Western political ideology while doing research in heterodox cognitive science, because it helps me clear away biases. So I’ve spent some time reading about other cultures and other eras and trying to get a handle on their perspective, so that I can “think outside the box.” Of course, I could be wrong about mainstream cognitive science, but I think it’s clear there are avenues of investigation that are closed off because they are intermingled with actually weird out-group stuff. I wonder if it’s possible to genuinely dissolve problems without becoming an outsider of sorts.
On the other hand, someone who consistently dresses as a distinguished gentleman can do so in a jeans-and-T-shirt culture, if he actually is a distinguished gentleman. When the richest dudes around wear Crocs and bike shorts, it’s just another way of expressing personality.
That said, the situation for women’s clothing seems to be substantially more fraught, especially for engineers.
(And I expect it is different again in the game industry, which seems to have its own sort of presumptuousness.)
I think it would be interesting to analyze in more detail what you mean by “intolerance”. We might distinguish the sort of “intolerance” that is expressed by mass violence against its target, and the sort that is expressed by simply not taking the target’s claims very seriously.