Moreover, if you want to prevent Less Wrong from becoming a cult like the Objectivists, it may be advisable to absolutely avoid to perform rituals explicitly modeled after religious ceremonies, like this or this.
Mmm. I think it’s fairly clear that modeling ceremonies on religious rites (or doing much ritual at all outside a certain narrow scope, for that matter) is more likely than the alternative to lead to undesirable perceptions of LW. And PR is important, yes. But I’m not convinced that they’re actually epistemically dangerous to any significant degree.
There’s a lot of possible reasons to do ritual. The two ceremonies you link seem to mainly fall under the general heading of “affirmation of shared values”, which could be used as part of a more general Dark Artsy scheme but don’t seem terribly dangerous in themselves; rituals with those aims show up in dozens of secular contexts, from the Boy Scouts to martial arts dojos to the Pledge of Allegiance recited by American schoolchildren. I might have been given pause if it snuck in some seriously controversial content, like a pledge to sign up for cryonics or that believers in the collapse postulate were stupid and also evil, but as long as it limits itself to cheering for a materialistic humanism I don’t think there’s much to object to. That’s way too general to be epistemically risky, and attempts to cast it as such would probably be more funny than menacing.
Now, why pull from a theological source when there’s all these other sources available? Well, religions have been doing it the longest, for one thing. In the absence of a deep understanding of the mechanics of something, a good heuristic for getting it done is to find someone that does it well and plagiarize.
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens: I, for one, found the Pledge of Allegiance really frigging creepy as a kid, and I’m not sure how I feel about it even now.
I would recite the Pledge of Allegiance ending, “With freedom, and justice, for all except the children.”
I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if they had a ceremony where those students who wanted to recited the Twelve Virtues once a week, or Frankena’s list of terminal values, or the rules of algebra. Repetition is a perfectly good way to install association and thereby skill—you can use it to repeat good things or bad things. It’s not much different from printing that way.
Well, sure, repeating the multiplication table or the digits of Pi every day can be quite useful. It helps you memorize products of single-digit numbers and also Pi.
But repeating a pledge to obey an institution is, IMO, irrational at best. Imagine that the United States did something insane (well, more insane than all the things it’s doing right now), like starting World War III with no provocation whatsoever. Would it still be deserving of your allegiance ? That is to say, would you still do your best to uphold its principles and further its goals, which now include “kill everyone on Earth with nukes” ?
Now, if the Pledge said something like, “I pledge to support those institutions who have a reasonably good chance of improving the lives of all humans, and to reform or abolish those institutions that hinder progress toward this goal”, then I could probably get behind it.
Similarly, I wouldn’t pledge to drive my current car to work every day, be it rain, hail, or shine—but I could reasonably promise to stick with my car while it functions, fix it when it breaks down if fixing it is financially feasible, or get a new car if I can afford it. Such an oath may not sound as solemn, but at least it’s practical.
I agree the Pledge sounds a bit creepy in retrospect—I was only disagreeing with the idea that any possible thing you repeat at the start of class is creepy.
Ah, understood, that makes sense. Repeating the multiplication at the beginning of class would not be creepy at all (unless you also pledged allegiance to it, somehow, I suppose).
I would recite the Pledge of Allegiance ending, “With freedom, and justice, for all except the children.”
I don’t think anyone has suggested that ‘freedom and justice for all’ should mean that children be treated as if they were morally responsible and independent agents. I think children probably aren’t capable of freedom in any meaningfully political sense, and it seems like it would be enormously cruel to subject them to everything justice demands of an adult. At the very least, we’d be up to our ears in assault trials: kids are both violent and litigious.
If I believe that a subset of the population ought not receive justice, or is not capable of freedom, then it seems I ought not declare universal liberty and justice among the defining characteristics of the Republic I’m pledging allegiance to.
So, I expect we agree that ‘freedom and justice for all’ isn’t only the proper motto of a republic which lets violent criminals do what they like, and prosecutes children for assault whenever they get into a schoolyard fight.
If so, then we agree that ‘freedom and justice for all’ can be the motto of a republic which makes exceptions of certain classes of people freedom-and-justice-wise. ETA: Clearly not every kind of exception is a fulfillment of the motto. So then the question is just whether or not children should be accorded whatever it is we promise by ‘freedom and justice for all’. What do you think?
The first is, if we don’t believe that everyone is entitled to freedom and justice, is “freedom and justice for all” a proper motto for our republic? To which in principle my answer is “no,” though in practice I would not, for example, endorse rewriting it to read “freedom and justice for those entitled to it,” even if it turns out that’s what we actually mean, because the political signalling effects of doing so would be too expensive.
The second is, to what degree are children entitled to freedom and justice? That’s a much more complicated question, and I’m not sure I can answer it in any detailed way. At a very high level, my answer is “to the extent that granting them those things improves both their experience of life and that of the community, rounded to the nearest Schelling point.”
Okay, I think we roughly agree then. Though I’d say that ‘freedom and justice for all’ can straightforwardly mean ‘freedom and justice for everyone capable and worthy of being free and responding to the demands of justice’ (where I take that to exclude children, the insane, criminals, etc. but include nearly everyone else).
As to the freedom and justice we accord children and adults, we agree at a general kind of level, though in particular cases I don’t think the improvement of someone’s experience should settle the question of whether or not (or the extent to which) they’re entitled to freedom or justice.
If giving someone justice makes their experience of life worse and makes their community’s experience of life worse, ought I endorse giving them justice? If so, why?
That’s not going to be easy to answer in the abstract. If you’ll forgive me answering a question with another, do you think you would argue that we should deny or grant freedom and justice entirely on the basis of an assessment of befits? Is the consent of the person granted or denied these things a nonissue, or does that get rolled into the assessment of benefits? Does anyone have a right to their freedom even if it does harm?
Well, switching from questions about endorsed targets to questions about decision procedures is tricky, because issues of reasoning under uncertainty come into play. In practice, we don’t usually know enough about benefits to make those kinds of decisions, so we make them on the basis of other considerations, such as rights, and in general I endorse that.
But if we can agree to ignore uncertainty and pretend that we actually know enough to assess benefits, then yes, pretty much. If I am somehow certain that an act will leave you and everyone else worse off, I ought not perform that act; that doesn’t somehow become false when issues of consent or of rights are involved.
Oh all sorts of things—I’m not a strong defender of freedom. I’ll happily, say, prevent a drunk friend from doing something very dangerous. I don’t mean that that’s where all or even most terminal utility comes from—I just mean that it isn’t literally zero, that there are at least some costs it’s enough to outweigh. Assuming as you do that I somehow have certain knowledge, and supposing someone about to die wants to watch a terrible movie that won’t make them happy, and I have the option of silently removing it from the list of options so that they end up with a better choice, there is still some value in them getting what they wanted.
Fair enough. For my own part, while there are all sorts of things that might lead me to endorse the watching of a movie that would make someone unhappy—that is, there are values other than happiness—and some of those values might be best achieved in practice by letting individuals choose, them getting what they wanted isn’t in and of itself one of them.
If only you had ruled Thebes, we would have one more stubborn girl and one less interesting play.
You may be right, but political doctrines consist in indefinite descriptions of classes of people, individual cases being the province of judges. So I think our two views are simply compatible: it is possible without contradiction to have as a matter of legal principle that everyone be accorded justice and freedom, while in individual cases, this law is made to fit practical concerns where necessary.
“With freedom, and justice, for all except the children
or the prisoners, or the mentally retarded, or the civilians in the freedoms of war, or the soldiers in those of peace, or those merely bound by their necessities in a worse way than what we consider normal.
Actually, now that I think about it, exposing kids to more pragmatism is probably a good idea.
The Pledge being creepy, sure, I can see that. (I wasn’t entirely comfortable with reciting it either, after a certain age.) Culty? Not without throwing out any conventional definition of “cult”.
I may have been a little hasty in implying that there’s no epistemic danger in public avowal of shared values; I’d expect it to be a reinforcer of those values and to contribute to unanimity effects, although probably not very strongly. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near as much of a red flag as V_V seemed to be suggesting.
Expecting small children to give a solemn vow filled with patriotic propaganda every weekday morning that they can’t even begin to know the ramifications of, OR ELSE, sounds like something you’d find in a totalitarian state.
Expecting small children to give a solemn vow filled with patriotic propaganda every weekday morning that they can’t even begin to know the ramifications of, OR ELSE, sounds like something you’d find in a totalitarian state.
It also sounds like something you would find in all sorts of other states that aren’t totalitarian.
Maybe, but as one small data point, I was really surprised (and creeped out) to just now infer from MaoShen’s comment and check on Wikipedia that the Pledge of Allegiance is recited at the beginning of every school day. In my country, the closest cultural equivalent is done once per year, in “Flag Day”, and I had previously assumed the American Pledge was like that, being said on July 4th or similar specially significant moments.
Maybe, but as one small data point, I was really surprised (and creeped out) to just now infer from MaoShen’s comment and check on Wikipedia that the Pledge of Allegiance is recited at the beginning of every school day.
Likewise (except now I’m only creeped out, the surprise came a long time ago).
In my country, the closest cultural equivalent is done once per year, in “Flag Day”, and I had previously assumed the American Pledge was like that, being said on July 4th or similar specially significant moments.
I don’t recall whether we have one at all. I remember we have a national anthem that we sung occasionally. Something about “wealth for toil” is involved.
Well, that’s what I thought too, but in those schools everyone is (supposed to be) a Catholic, and if not you (well, your parents) can choose a different school, whereas if I understand correctly children are asked to say the Pledge in all American schools, so (short of emigrating) you (and your parents) have no choice.
(Then again, some otherwise non-confessional schools in Italy keep a crucifix in each classroom—I think it used to be mandated by law, but it no longer is and a few years ago a Muslim sued his son’s school for that and managed to have it removed. But keeping around a sculpture that pupils might not even notice—I honestly can’t even remember which of certain classrooms in my high school had one and which hadn’t—is a lot less scary than have everyone pledge allegiance every morning, IMO.)
I actually never was asked to say the Pledge in any US school I went to, and I’ve never even seen it said. I’m pretty sure this is limited to some parts of the country and is no longer as universal as it may have been once. If someone did go to one such school, they and their parents would have the option of simply not saying the Pledge, transferring to a different school (I doubt private or religious schools say it), or homeschooling/unschooling.
As another datapoint, the pledge was announced over the loudspeaker but students weren’t required to recite it at the first high school I went to (though we were required to stand respectfully and most everybody still did the salute even if they didn’t recite), and theoretically required for any student that didn’t have a religious exemption note at the second high school I went to.
I have a funny story about the second situation, too. I’d been one of the ones who didn’t say the pledge, before I moved, and decided that I wasn’t going to change that unless they made me. The result of this was that the other students in my homeroom class stopped saying it, too—first the ones nearest me, then the ones next to them, and so on across the room. I happened to have a desk in one corner of the room, and by the end of the year a handful of the students in the other corner of the room were the only ones still saying the pledge, and they generally shouted it, raucously or sarcastically depending on their mood. (Makes a pretty interesting complement to the Asch conformity test, come to think of it.)
Are there countries generally regarded as non-totalitarian, other than the US, where people do anything like that?
It is highly likely (that there is at least one). It is a kind of insane practice but it isn’t quite that out of character for human social groups that I’d expect it to be a quirk unique to the USA.
Do all totalitarian states bother making all the children go to school and recite pledges?
Oh wait… Now that I think about it, Ireland’s Irish language policy is probably the biggest thing-like-that in the world. (Yeah, it’s saddening that people don’t know their great-grandparents’ language, but if the Irish government actually cared about preserving Irish, and not just about seeming to care about preserving Irish to an inattentive observer, they could achieve that in waaaaaaay more cost-effective ways.)
AFAIK things are slowly changing for the better, but this is my impression of how they were until recently. (People who have spent more time in Ireland than I have (EDIT: eight months) are welcome to correct me.)
1. Forcing every single school child in Ireland to study it four hours a week fourteen years (even in areas where Irish hasn’t been spoken for centuries, and in a way reminiscent of the study of dead languages and that it is nearly useless for actually having conversations with native speakers, or for remembering anything after a few years out of school) is just a huge waste of time and money, IMO. Making it optional would make much more sense, and make sure that only people actually interested will learn it.
1b. They also spend lots of money for translations of official acts hardly anyone will read. Changing the rule from “the public administration must write all documents in both languages” to (say) “the public administration can write all documents in either language, but must prepare a translation in the other language if requested with a thirty days’ notice” would save lots of money that could be spent otherwise.
2. They don’t even seriously try to assess what the situation in the Gaeltacht is actually like, which IMO is a fundamental prerequisite to fixing it. For example, the 2011 census asked the question “Can you speak Irish?” with possible answers “Yes” and “No”—cf “How well can you speak English?” with answers “Very well”, “Well”, “Not well” and “Not at all” (I’m told that this one was only added in the last census, but why didn’t they do the same with Irish?); and the question “How often do you speak Irish?” has answers “Daily, within the educational system”, “Daily, outside the educational system”, “Weekly”, “More rarely” (IIRC) and “Never”—and the first two were only split in the last census, after people realized that having an answer “Daily” would inflate the numbers because all school children would pick that. (Why didn’t they just ask “How often do you speak Irish, not counting language classes and the like?”?) And I’m not aware of any large-scale survey asking people in the Gaeltacht which language they prefer to use in which circumstances, as there have been for Welsh. (Are they scared of the answers?)
2b. They hardly do anything to make sure that children of living native speakers are comfortable with continuing speaking Irish, i.e. that they are able to cope with Irish in everyday life whenever possible and are forced to recur to English only when actually necessary. For example, they don’t even require Irish on food labels and the like. Living as a monolingual Irish speaker in present-day Ireland would be pretty much impossible, even in the Gaeltacht.
One interesting thing to note is that if you’re accustomed to pledging your allegiance to something every day as a child, while you’re still unable to enter into legal agreements and aren’t thinking about them, it may not occur to you that when you go to school on your 18th birthday, you’ve just pledged your allegiance in a way that… might be legally binding?
Regardless of what sort of government expects it’s children to pledge allegiance every day, do you agree with the practice of making people pledge allegiance?
Allegiance is kind of vague. It could be interpreted to mean doing normal responsibilities (not being a criminal, paying your taxes) or it might be interpreted to mean total obedience. I’m not sure whether to agree or disagree with the pledge. Maybe I should disagree with it on the grounds that it is too vague and therefore doesn’t protect reciters from feeling obligated to obey a tyrant, were one to end up in power.
Regardless of what sort of government expects it’s children to pledge allegiance every day, do you agree with the practice of making people pledge allegiance?
This is actually has been a problem with real-life examples. I’ve read that the oaths in NAZI Germany were specifically to Hitler himself, and that many members of the military felt bound by their oaths to obey orders, even when it was clear the orders shouldn’t be obeyed. I think the critical danger is in giving oaths to an individual (any of which have a very real chance of being corrupted by power, unless they take action to prevent it).
I see the difference that the U.S. pledge of alliegence is to the republic and it’s symbol, the flag. The saving factors to prevent abuses of power are:
The focus on alliegence to the nation as a whole, including all it’s members, it’s leaders, and it’s ideals.
The “with liberty and justice for all” line, which is the guarantee of what the State offers in return. The U.S. has to be worthy of the alliegence.
The extreme other war example is the U.S Civil War, where many military officers left the army to join the Confederacy. They formed ranks and marched right out of West Point because they opposed the U.S. leadership. And the soldiers who stayed let them go, knowing they were going to help the seceding states fight. Even if they disagreed, it was felt the honorable thing to do was to let them go.
This idea shows up specifically in our military training and culture in the definition of lawful orders. The military culture and legal rules define your duty to obey all lawful orders from your chain of command, up to the President. So that if you feel that an order is unlawful it’s actually your duty to disobey. Now, of course, that carries with it all the weight of being the first one to be the opposition, so it’s no guarantee to prevent abuses of power, but it does exist.
I gues my point is that the danger is in making oaths to a person.
I agree that it’s a form of indoctrination for children. But as long as the trade of alliegence and freedom it describes is a true and real one, I think it’s a good thing to keep those principles in their minds.
Ooh, I like these points, Troshen. You might be right that there’s enough “security” built into the pledge. Now you’ve got me questioning whether it might actually protect us.
If nothing else, it would make tyrannical pledges look bad by comparison, perhaps blocking them.
One interesting thing to note is that if you’re accustomed to pledging your allegiance to something every day as a child, while you’re still unable to enter into legal agreements and aren’t thinking about them, it may not occur to you that when you go to school on your 18th birthday, you’ve just pledged your allegiance in a way that… might be legally binding?
I suppose it could, yet countries don’t require you to do anything to place you in such legal binds. They have laws about “treason” that they can apply when people from their population don’t act out allegiance, whether they have pledged it or not.
Sure but the people have to enforce those laws (the government is something like 3% of the population from what I understand, which means that the people could overwhelm them easily), so if the concept of allegiance is foreign to them, as opposed to being very familiar and feeling like an obligation, or if they haven’t witnessed all the OTHER citizens pledging allegiance, it might feel like an empty word they can safely ignore.
Fair enough. A more accurate statement would be:
“Expecting small children...of, OR ELSE, is a mind-control tactic that I feel is wrong to use on children without the capacity to counter it, which I would expect to find in blatantly controlling nations, and not in a supposedly free nation.”
It does flow well, in as much as the first thing (ridiculous pledge obligation) is already opposed by most of the audience and so they can be expected to applaud when the enemy is associated with the hated thing. Unfortunately it is a crude harnessing of a fallacy.
I have seen footage of a documentary about Cuba, that used kids reciting their allegiance to the State, Party etc as a way of showing what an evil place it was. To this Londoner, yes, the whole thing of kids reciting the Pledge is very creepy.
Yeah. I can pledge allegiance, now, and when I do, I mean it—but coming out of the mouth of a child, it’s as meaningless as they all know it is. When I was a kid, I knew it was all kinds of messed up. I suspected that I would agree with it when I was older, and I was right. That doesn’t make it valid.
As a child I had to pledge that I will become a law-abiding citizen of my country, and a member of the Communist party.
I have failed to adhere to both parts. The first part, because “my beloved homeland” does not exist anymore. The second part, knowingly and willingly. (Although, as a 6-years old child, I would probably also guess that I will agree with both parts when I grow up. Mostly because of: “if that wouldn’t be a good thing, they would not ask me to promise it”.)
Or maybe it’s just because I had to recite the pledge only once. ;-) (OK, technically I had to practice it a few times first.)
What? I’d drop the ‘under god’ part, but that isn’t really what I was talking about. My not agreeing with everything the country does, does not have the pledge as its subject matter.
That is, say, the unjustified wars, etc.. The whole laundry list. The particular method of choosing representation in our government - ‘plurality of first preference’ voting, with closed primary elections, and districts chosen in a partisan way. There’s a reason congress is as messed up as it is.
Because states are still a powerful force for (or against) change in this world, you are limited in the number of them you can directly affect (determined largely by where you and relatives were born), and for political and psychological reasons that ability is diminished when you fail to display loyalty (of the appropriate sort, which varies by group) to those states.
Then the obvious strategy is to start feeling lots of loyalty toward Easily Affected Country, and donate lots to organizations in Powerful Country that effect change in Easily Affected Country. This diminishes your political bonus but the extra leverage compensates. Bot-swa-na! Bot-swa-na!
I actually think the apple pie reason is an unusually good one. There’s nothing wrong with cheering for things.
You’re assuming that display of loyalty can radically increase your influence. My model was that your initial influence is determined situationally, and your disposition can decrease it more easily than increase it.
That said, let’s run with your interpretation; Bot-swa-na! Bot-swa-na!
Yeah, but a lot of stuff is meaningless coming out of the mouth of a child. But you have to start teaching them about things like duty and loyalty at some point. The pledge is a reasonable way to get kids to understand that they’re part of a country, and that there’s a common moral and political activity that they’ll one day be involved in.
The pledge is a reasonable way to get kids to understand that they’re part of a country,
If the status quo didn’t already include the daily recitation of such a pledge, do you think you would suggest it as a way to get kids to understand that?
I think that’s a practical question too complicated for me to answer. I would want some kind of voluntary activity like that in place. The pledge isn’t great, but it’s likely that something better would require more resources. And while I don’t think (and would doubt) that the pledge has any kind of ‘brainwashing’ effect, it would be worth looking into whatever data we can gather about that.
Data point: My home country, Australia, does not have a pledge of allegiance. Overt demonstrations of patriotism were limited to being expected to sing the national anthem in school assembly once a week. I personally feel that there is still plenty of patriotism to go around. However, a common perception of the US is that you guys are over-patriotic.
Thinking a bit more on this, I can’t help wondering how much of this can be traced to free voting versus mandatory voting. How much of encouraging patriotism is an attempt to make people care enough to vote?
I wonder whether the reason why a lot of people don’t realise it might be because it’s not actually true.
I mean, ESR’s argument seems to me incoherent and mostly aimed at finding a way to identify Barack Obama as not only an America-hater but also a freedom-hater. (Step 1: True US patriotism is more about loving the ideal of liberty and less about tribal attachment to the US as such. Step 2: Because for a while Barack Obama chose not to wear a flag pin, he doesn’t love his country. Step 3, unstated but I think clearly there: Since true US patriotism means loving liberty and Barack Obama is not a true US patriot, he is opposed not only to the US but to liberty.) It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that his characterization of US patriotism may be as much a matter of political convenience as the (absurd) inference he draws from Obama’s not wearing a flag pin. Certainly at least one of them must be wrong; it cannot be true both that patriotism for Americans means loving their country “not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas” and that not wearing a US flag pin indicates “a lack of love for America as it actually is” and therefore a lack of patriotism.
And it’s certainly not only in the US that patriotism tends to involve not only tribal loyalty to one’s country but also love of what are taken to be its virtues. (Sometimes grand things like liberty and enterprise in the US, courage and fair play in the UK; sometimes little quirks like apple pie and baseball in the US, pubs and cricket in the UK.)
I’d be very interested in others’ opinions: Is US patriotism really as much more “abstracted” than other nations’ as ESR suggests? Is it true that “most Americans love their country … not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas about liberty”?
But the French, roiled by political instability and war, have never settled on a political unifying idea or constitutional touchstone. Instead, French patriotism expresses a loyalty to French language and culture and history. It replaces tribalism not with idealism but with culturism.
That sounds wrong. Certainly people who consider themselves French patriots are likely to say “Speak French, dammit!”, “Yeah, maybe it’s like that in your country but you’re in France now”, or “Go Napoleon!”, but no more than American patriots are likely to say the analogues.
Also, French patriotism is huge on political ideas. Motherland of human rights, French revolution, Resistance, and all that.
That’s OK; I, likewise, missed the part in what I wrote where I said that those words appear in ESR’s post.
I think he’s suggesting it, not saying it. And he comes pretty damn close to saying in so many words that Barack Obama “doesn’t love” America, which of course is far from the same thing as hating it but still a pretty serious accusation to level at a candidate for the presidency.
As for the stronger claim about hating, though, consider the following bits from what ESR wrote. (Please feel free to verify that the ellipses don’t misrepresent his meaning or tone.)
[...] a kind of anti-patriotism in which dedication to an imagined America-that-might-be produces actual, destructive hatred of America as it is and has been. [...] for this kind of anti-patriotism I shall analogously coin the label “chomskyism” [...]
But my choice of Noam Chomsky as an icon does reflect the fact that chomskyism is far more a phenomenon of the American left than of the American right. It is near impossible to imagine a conservative presidential aspirant refusing to wear a flag pin, or explaining that refusal as Obama did.
It seems to me that (1) ESR is defining “chomskyism” to mean actual destructive hatred of America, and (2) his comments about the significance of Obama’s not wearing a flag pin make no sense unless he’s taken to be saying that Obama was exemplifying “chomskyism”, and hence actual destructive hatred of America.
But no, indeed, he didn’t actually say it explicitly using the words “America-hater” or “freedom-hater” or any close analogue.
(I shall not comment further on the political questions at issue here. The actual point I was making was just that I don’t feel any obligation to believe what ESR says about American patriotism as compared with other sorts.)
Yeah, it seems like you’re going a bit far to connect the dots. ESR is saying that the “destructive hatred” is produced by “patriotism by dissent” “at its extreme”. He didn’t actually say that Obama has this extreme sort.
It seemed to me that he was just using the flag pin case as an accessible example of this “patriotism by dissent”. It didn’t seem to me that he was even saying anything was wrong with “patriotism by dissent”, other than noting that a lot of Americans seemed to disagree with it. Though he does suggest it’s a “pathology”, which would normally be a negative term.
In the comments, he even clarifies that he was not trying to call any particular person unpatriotic, and repeatedly says that he is trying to do an analysis of American patriotism. Given the sorts of stuff ESR has written on the philosophical side before, I’m inclined to believe him.
Whereas, given the sort of stuff ESR has written on philosophy and politics before, I’m not at all inclined to believe that he didn’t (alongside the theoretical stuff, which I’m sure he means sincerely) intend to insinuate that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country.
But I think taking this further would almost certainly get unproductively political, so I shall leave it here.
According to the article, patriotism-as-dissent is identified as un-American and as Obama’s theory. American patriotism is also conceptualized as loyalty-to-freedom, for example in the Franklin quote.
Something that a lot of people, both inside and outside the US, don’t realize is that what patriotism means in the US is not quite the same as what patriotism means in other countries.
I would expect nearly all patriotic people to consider patriotism to their own country to be different in some fundamentally important way to patriotism to another. The other patriots don’t care about Better Seating after all.
Requiring someone to make a mandatory pledge to a flag instills the Love of Freedom how...?
By making it Capitalized. Actually having the people loving freedom sounds all sorts of dangerous—people may expect you to let them do stuff. If you make them Love Freedom instead you should be able to keep them in line.
That doesn’t seem true to me. Do you have anything more solid to back this up? Also, see Esar’s comment below that the US is a mess but it’s his mess. How is that not regular old tribal patriotism?
First things first: do people have to be part of a country? If the division of humanity into mutually distrustful camps is ultimately a problem, not a solution. (I think it is. My evidence is history. Nothing specific...just open a page at random..)
you might be causally defending something that is as bad, or worse, than religious tribalism.
First things first: do people have to be part of a country?
You mean metaphysically? No. Practically? Yes. Having no citizenship is pretty serious problem. And these mutually distrustful camps aren’t very mutually distrustful at the moment. Most countries are actually very stable, peaceful, and trusting. More so now then at any other time in history. Other kinds of political organization may be feasible, and that’s fine, but this one is working pretty well and changing things would probably result in trouble.
From a simple consequentialist perspective, I think it’s hard to argue against the present system. Do you have an alternative suggestion?
At one time it was a practical necessity to belong to some religion or other.
Having no citizenship is pretty serious problem.
Just because everyone believes you need one. But does that pass the PKD test?
Most countries are actually very stable, peaceful, and trusting. More so now then at any other time in history.
Does that prove that nationalism is good...or that its one the way out? Europe went through a period of religious bloodshed...followed by an era of religious tolerance...followed by a period of irreligion. SWIM?
Other kinds of political organization may be feasible, and that’s fine, but this one is working pretty well
Nations solve the problems created by nations. Up to a point. Does religion “work” when there is a respite
in the slaughter?
and changing things would probably result in trouble.
Maybe things are chainging anyway. I’m a citizen of England, and the Uk, and the EU. If you are a Usian, you are also in a federated superstate.
In any case you don’t have to believe in (qua approve of) something just because you believe in (qua note the existence of) it.
As a teaching tool it seems almost useless; the language is antiquated, way past age-appropriate for elementary school, and while the meaning of the Pledge might be the subject of a third-grade civics lesson I don’t recall any substantial effort to break down its text in such a way as to integrate it into working knowledge.
Which now strikes me as a fairly clever bit of social engineering. At first I don’t think you’d need meaningful content; if you and your classmates are facing the flag, right hand over heart, and quoting from the text in unison, you’d still get group cohesion effects if the text itself was a list of Vedic demons or multilingual translations of the word “pickle”. But later, as children learn about concepts like duty by other means, they’re supplied with associations left over from their childhood practice. At least in theory; in practice this might be ruined by other associations, as elementary school’s usually not a terribly pleasant place for its inmates.
The “under God” bit can lead to some unpleasant cognitive dissonance as a secular child, too.
And I agree, ‘under God’ should be removed. But it’s not really a big deal. A substantial part of the value of secularism is in the fact that you have to go against the grain a bit.
Well, not just patriotism (which is good if your country is good) but also the whole ‘liberty and justice for all’ thing. I think it’s kind of nice. I want liberty and justice for all.
Patriotism can also sometimes be good independent of whether my country is good, insofar as it can facilitate cooperation among patriots, who even in a bad country might have good goals which are more readily achieved cooperatively.
That’s a good point, but I think there are stricter conditions on the goodness of patriotism than merely consequential ones. I’m not sure how to articulate this, but as a disposition, patriotism is enough like a belief that it ought to be true, and not just beneficial.
Hm. I understand how patriotism might be a beneficial belief if my country is good and harmful otherwise. But you seem to be suggesting that patriotism is true if my country is good and false otherwise. Which suggests to me that we aren’t using the word “patriotism” the same way. Am I correct in inferring that, on your view, “X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”?
But you seem to be suggesting that patriotism is true if my country is good and false otherwise.
Which suggests to me that we aren’t using the word “patriotism” the same way.
It looks more like you aren’t using the word true the same way.
Perhaps? I’m content to accept that “”X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”″ ⇒ “X’s patriotism is true only if X’s country is good”. This is admittedly an extended sense of “true”, to mean something like “does not entail falsehoods,” but I’m willing to work with it.
I’m content to accept that “”X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”″ ⇒ “X’s patriotism is true only if X’s country is good”.
I would accept those, or at least continue the conversation without commenting, although I’d squirm rather a lot at the final one. What I couldn’t accept is “patriotism is true”.
Am I correct in inferring that, on your view, “X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”?
So I suppose patriotism is a kind of love. We could call a love good if the lover has good reason to think the beloved worthy of love and if the love is on the whole a benefit to lover and beloved. Your initial remark was that that patriotism can be good independently of the goodness of its object, because it can be a benefit. I think this captures one half of the above, both leaves out the ‘worthiness’ part. In other words, I think patriotism has to involve something like knowledge of the moral goodness of one’s country. It’s in that respect that patriotism is concerned with truth, rather than just with benefit.
It’s not actually required that children say it; it would, in fact, violate the Constitution to mandate political speech, even from students. But it’s expected that students recite the Pledge, and most do.
For what it’s worth, another student noticed I wasn’t actually saying the pledge and hassled me mildly about it. I gave in immediately and started saying the pledge—it didn’t seem worth the effort of opposition.
This didn’t increase my (very minimal) sense of patriotism. Oddly enough, I don’t think it lowered my sense of patriotism, either.
The rituals in question were my rationalist marriage ceremony and Raemon’s solstice ritual. Obviously I have no objection to these being discussed, though I would strongly recommend doing so in a separate Discussion thread. As this thread is a part of a new sequence that may be used to introduce newcomers to LW, I am especially interested in keeping it clean.
I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt that two years ago you just had a temporary slip of mind and now it was some other overzelous admin that was still applying censorship, but apparently your problem is more persistent.
Whatever, if you enjoy making a fool of yourself in public, go ahead and delete this comment too, and then bang your head on the wall until you forget it. I won’t add anything else, I’ve already wasted too much time on this drama.
(I apologize to other readers if they find the tone of this comment too impolite for the community standards. It is impolite, but so it is deleting someone’s comments without explanation. At any rate, as far as I’m concerned, this discussion is over.)
It’s common courtesy to follow the rules of the forum you’re visiting, regardless of whether you disagree with the reasoning behind them. If you were unsure about whether a certain rule still applied, you could have just asked in advance about whether is still applied; not violate it as a test.
Many secular institutions perform ceremonies of typically two kinds:
Celebrating members who enter, leave or change rank within the organization (e.g. academic graduation, martial art belt change, …). These rituals seem don’t seem to pose an hazard to epistemical or instrumental rationality, and can be actually quite useful to ensure that members of the organization know who the other members are and what their role is.
Celebrating anniversaries, typically the founding date of the organization, or some other date related to prominent past members or relevant historical figures (e.g., a physics departement celebrating 100 years from Annus Mirabilis, or a computer science department celebraring the 100th birthday of Alan Turing). Again, these rituals don’t seem harmful, and they might be useful to reaffirm the mission of the organization.
Making children recite the Pledge of Allegiance, on the other hand, is indeed a form of essentially religious indoctrination, even without the “under God” bit.
There is a very thin line between government and organized religion, and instances of crossing it are not unknown of, in one direction (theocracies) or the other (political religions, such as North Korea’s Juche or Bolshevism in the former Communist states).
Even countries which are in general considered to do a good job at keeping the state separated from religion, like the US, occasionally resort to religious techniques of indoctrination.
Now, why pull from a theological source when there’s all these other sources available? Well, religions have been doing it the longest, for one thing. In the absence of a deep understanding of the mechanics of something, a good heuristic for getting it done is to find someone that does it well and plagiarize.
Religious rituals are effective at indoctrinating people: make people recite your “Truths” until they memorize and chant them mechanically without paying attention to their implications, associate them with all kinds of positive rewards, from large carbohydrate-rich meals to the sense of belonging to a close-knit community, and the effect you get is that you lower people’s critical thinking skills and make them more prone to accept your “Truths” without question, and become emotionally attached to them so that they will find rationalizations instead of throwing them away when presented with contrary evidence.
Is this the proper way of disseminating rationalist values? I don’t think so.
Even if you were 100% sure that whatever you are endorsing is so indisputable that there will be never the need to change it, people should believe rational arguments because they critically analyzed them and found that they stand on their own merits, not because they have been psychologically conditioned to believe them.
Religious ritual are effective at indoctrinating people: make people recite your “Truths” until they memorize and chant them mechanically without paying attention to their implications, associate them with all kinds of positive rewards, from large carbohydrate-rich meals to the sense of belonging to a close-knit community, and the effect you get is that you lower people’s critical thinking skills and make them more prone to accept your “Truths” without question, and become emotionally attached to them so that they will find rationalizations instead of throwing them away when presented with contrary evidence.
Is this the proper way of disseminating rationalist values? I don’t think so.
Sure, people believing in truths because they’ve repeated them a lot rather than because they’ve digested them and updated all their beliefs correspondingly is a problem. But it’s also a problem to see a new belief, agree with it, and then not repeat it enough to update all of your beliefs correspondingly. Getting a skill to the 5-second level takes practice, and often a lot of practice.
Sure, but the way to practice these skills is to apply them to actual problems, not to mindlessly recite their principles.
Recitation and worship can turn even good rational principles into articles of faith, disconnected from anything else, which you just “believe to believe” rather actually understand and apply.
V_V and Vaniver both make really good points, but the fact is that the U.S was not built to be completely rationalist, and people in general are not rationalists.
It’s a communal set of rules for a people and a place that’s designed to give the members the most freedom while still ensuring stability and order. And it has a really good track record of success in doing that.
I agree that it’s not an optimal solution in a future, ideally rationalist world. But it’s not a tool for teaching children to think for themselves. It’s a tool to get them to follow the social rules. And I’ll tell you, children want their own way and DO NOT want to follow rules. And if you let them have their way all the time you WILL spoil them. There’s a time to teach rules-following (especially rules that protect liberties and freedoms) and a time to teach mistrust of authority and rules-breaking.
What other device would you propose for a future, ideally rationalist world? I’m not being fecetious here. I’m curious. Spawned by the Wierdtopia idea, can you think of a better solution?
I personally think of it as like teaching an apprentice. Apprentices weren’t taught the why’s. They were taught the how’s. As a journeyman and a master you discovered the why’s. Kids are apprentice citizens.
Mmm. I think it’s fairly clear that modeling ceremonies on religious rites (or doing much ritual at all outside a certain narrow scope, for that matter) is more likely than the alternative to lead to undesirable perceptions of LW. And PR is important, yes. But I’m not convinced that they’re actually epistemically dangerous to any significant degree.
There’s a lot of possible reasons to do ritual. The two ceremonies you link seem to mainly fall under the general heading of “affirmation of shared values”, which could be used as part of a more general Dark Artsy scheme but don’t seem terribly dangerous in themselves; rituals with those aims show up in dozens of secular contexts, from the Boy Scouts to martial arts dojos to the Pledge of Allegiance recited by American schoolchildren. I might have been given pause if it snuck in some seriously controversial content, like a pledge to sign up for cryonics or that believers in the collapse postulate were stupid and also evil, but as long as it limits itself to cheering for a materialistic humanism I don’t think there’s much to object to. That’s way too general to be epistemically risky, and attempts to cast it as such would probably be more funny than menacing.
Now, why pull from a theological source when there’s all these other sources available? Well, religions have been doing it the longest, for one thing. In the absence of a deep understanding of the mechanics of something, a good heuristic for getting it done is to find someone that does it well and plagiarize.
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens: I, for one, found the Pledge of Allegiance really frigging creepy as a kid, and I’m not sure how I feel about it even now.
I would recite the Pledge of Allegiance ending, “With freedom, and justice, for all except the children.”
I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if they had a ceremony where those students who wanted to recited the Twelve Virtues once a week, or Frankena’s list of terminal values, or the rules of algebra. Repetition is a perfectly good way to install association and thereby skill—you can use it to repeat good things or bad things. It’s not much different from printing that way.
Well, sure, repeating the multiplication table or the digits of Pi every day can be quite useful. It helps you memorize products of single-digit numbers and also Pi.
But repeating a pledge to obey an institution is, IMO, irrational at best. Imagine that the United States did something insane (well, more insane than all the things it’s doing right now), like starting World War III with no provocation whatsoever. Would it still be deserving of your allegiance ? That is to say, would you still do your best to uphold its principles and further its goals, which now include “kill everyone on Earth with nukes” ?
Now, if the Pledge said something like, “I pledge to support those institutions who have a reasonably good chance of improving the lives of all humans, and to reform or abolish those institutions that hinder progress toward this goal”, then I could probably get behind it.
Similarly, I wouldn’t pledge to drive my current car to work every day, be it rain, hail, or shine—but I could reasonably promise to stick with my car while it functions, fix it when it breaks down if fixing it is financially feasible, or get a new car if I can afford it. Such an oath may not sound as solemn, but at least it’s practical.
I agree the Pledge sounds a bit creepy in retrospect—I was only disagreeing with the idea that any possible thing you repeat at the start of class is creepy.
Ah, understood, that makes sense. Repeating the multiplication at the beginning of class would not be creepy at all (unless you also pledged allegiance to it, somehow, I suppose).
I pledge allegiance to the prime number 2, the prime number 3, and the prime number 5. And to their product, 30, and their sum, 10...
I don’t think anyone has suggested that ‘freedom and justice for all’ should mean that children be treated as if they were morally responsible and independent agents. I think children probably aren’t capable of freedom in any meaningfully political sense, and it seems like it would be enormously cruel to subject them to everything justice demands of an adult. At the very least, we’d be up to our ears in assault trials: kids are both violent and litigious.
If I believe that a subset of the population ought not receive justice, or is not capable of freedom, then it seems I ought not declare universal liberty and justice among the defining characteristics of the Republic I’m pledging allegiance to.
So, I expect we agree that ‘freedom and justice for all’ isn’t only the proper motto of a republic which lets violent criminals do what they like, and prosecutes children for assault whenever they get into a schoolyard fight.
If so, then we agree that ‘freedom and justice for all’ can be the motto of a republic which makes exceptions of certain classes of people freedom-and-justice-wise. ETA: Clearly not every kind of exception is a fulfillment of the motto. So then the question is just whether or not children should be accorded whatever it is we promise by ‘freedom and justice for all’. What do you think?
Well, there’s two questions here.
The first is, if we don’t believe that everyone is entitled to freedom and justice, is “freedom and justice for all” a proper motto for our republic? To which in principle my answer is “no,” though in practice I would not, for example, endorse rewriting it to read “freedom and justice for those entitled to it,” even if it turns out that’s what we actually mean, because the political signalling effects of doing so would be too expensive.
The second is, to what degree are children entitled to freedom and justice? That’s a much more complicated question, and I’m not sure I can answer it in any detailed way. At a very high level, my answer is “to the extent that granting them those things improves both their experience of life and that of the community, rounded to the nearest Schelling point.”
That’s also my answer for adults, incidentally.
Okay, I think we roughly agree then. Though I’d say that ‘freedom and justice for all’ can straightforwardly mean ‘freedom and justice for everyone capable and worthy of being free and responding to the demands of justice’ (where I take that to exclude children, the insane, criminals, etc. but include nearly everyone else).
As to the freedom and justice we accord children and adults, we agree at a general kind of level, though in particular cases I don’t think the improvement of someone’s experience should settle the question of whether or not (or the extent to which) they’re entitled to freedom or justice.
If giving someone justice makes their experience of life worse and makes their community’s experience of life worse, ought I endorse giving them justice? If so, why?
That’s not going to be easy to answer in the abstract. If you’ll forgive me answering a question with another, do you think you would argue that we should deny or grant freedom and justice entirely on the basis of an assessment of befits? Is the consent of the person granted or denied these things a nonissue, or does that get rolled into the assessment of benefits? Does anyone have a right to their freedom even if it does harm?
Well, switching from questions about endorsed targets to questions about decision procedures is tricky, because issues of reasoning under uncertainty come into play. In practice, we don’t usually know enough about benefits to make those kinds of decisions, so we make them on the basis of other considerations, such as rights, and in general I endorse that.
But if we can agree to ignore uncertainty and pretend that we actually know enough to assess benefits, then yes, pretty much. If I am somehow certain that an act will leave you and everyone else worse off, I ought not perform that act; that doesn’t somehow become false when issues of consent or of rights are involved.
I think there is terminal utility in you getting to do what you want, even if no-one benefits. However obviously other things can outweigh that.
I’ll note that “no-one benefits” is different than “it leaves me and everyone else worse off.”
So, what kinds of things can outweigh that terminal utility, and on what basis do they do so?
Oh all sorts of things—I’m not a strong defender of freedom. I’ll happily, say, prevent a drunk friend from doing something very dangerous. I don’t mean that that’s where all or even most terminal utility comes from—I just mean that it isn’t literally zero, that there are at least some costs it’s enough to outweigh. Assuming as you do that I somehow have certain knowledge, and supposing someone about to die wants to watch a terrible movie that won’t make them happy, and I have the option of silently removing it from the list of options so that they end up with a better choice, there is still some value in them getting what they wanted.
Fair enough.
For my own part, while there are all sorts of things that might lead me to endorse the watching of a movie that would make someone unhappy—that is, there are values other than happiness—and some of those values might be best achieved in practice by letting individuals choose, them getting what they wanted isn’t in and of itself one of them.
If only you had ruled Thebes, we would have one more stubborn girl and one less interesting play.
You may be right, but political doctrines consist in indefinite descriptions of classes of people, individual cases being the province of judges. So I think our two views are simply compatible: it is possible without contradiction to have as a matter of legal principle that everyone be accorded justice and freedom, while in individual cases, this law is made to fit practical concerns where necessary.
Sure; if we’re only talking about legal considerations, I mostly agree with you. And I’m not sure I’d have done any better than Creon.
or the prisoners, or the mentally retarded, or the civilians in the freedoms of war, or the soldiers in those of peace, or those merely bound by their necessities in a worse way than what we consider normal.
Actually, now that I think about it, exposing kids to more pragmatism is probably a good idea.
Or those who have too much love for paperclips.
The Pledge being creepy, sure, I can see that. (I wasn’t entirely comfortable with reciting it either, after a certain age.) Culty? Not without throwing out any conventional definition of “cult”.
I may have been a little hasty in implying that there’s no epistemic danger in public avowal of shared values; I’d expect it to be a reinforcer of those values and to contribute to unanimity effects, although probably not very strongly. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near as much of a red flag as V_V seemed to be suggesting.
Expecting small children to give a solemn vow filled with patriotic propaganda every weekday morning that they can’t even begin to know the ramifications of, OR ELSE, sounds like something you’d find in a totalitarian state.
It also sounds like something you would find in all sorts of other states that aren’t totalitarian.
Maybe, but as one small data point, I was really surprised (and creeped out) to just now infer from MaoShen’s comment and check on Wikipedia that the Pledge of Allegiance is recited at the beginning of every school day. In my country, the closest cultural equivalent is done once per year, in “Flag Day”, and I had previously assumed the American Pledge was like that, being said on July 4th or similar specially significant moments.
[Googles for it and reads it] Whaaaaaat??? O.o
Yep. I’m American. My school did it.
Mine, too, though I’d say it worked backwards in my case—I’m very cynical about formal group-bonding.
For what it’s worth, I only remember doing so until fourth grade, or about nine years of age. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.
I now regret using it as an example, though. Evidently I grossly underestimated its potential sensitivity, and I really should have known better.
Likewise (except now I’m only creeped out, the surprise came a long time ago).
I don’t recall whether we have one at all. I remember we have a national anthem that we sung occasionally. Something about “wealth for toil” is involved.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen it said in any of the US schools I’ve attended. It’s not universal.
Are there countries generally regarded as non-totalitarian, other than the US, where people do anything like that?
If “anything like that” includes reciting prayers, practically all catholic private schools in Europe will count.
Well, that’s what I thought too, but in those schools everyone is (supposed to be) a Catholic, and if not you (well, your parents) can choose a different school, whereas if I understand correctly children are asked to say the Pledge in all American schools, so (short of emigrating) you (and your parents) have no choice.
(Then again, some otherwise non-confessional schools in Italy keep a crucifix in each classroom—I think it used to be mandated by law, but it no longer is and a few years ago a Muslim sued his son’s school for that and managed to have it removed. But keeping around a sculpture that pupils might not even notice—I honestly can’t even remember which of certain classrooms in my high school had one and which hadn’t—is a lot less scary than have everyone pledge allegiance every morning, IMO.)
I actually never was asked to say the Pledge in any US school I went to, and I’ve never even seen it said. I’m pretty sure this is limited to some parts of the country and is no longer as universal as it may have been once. If someone did go to one such school, they and their parents would have the option of simply not saying the Pledge, transferring to a different school (I doubt private or religious schools say it), or homeschooling/unschooling.
As another datapoint, the pledge was announced over the loudspeaker but students weren’t required to recite it at the first high school I went to (though we were required to stand respectfully and most everybody still did the salute even if they didn’t recite), and theoretically required for any student that didn’t have a religious exemption note at the second high school I went to.
I have a funny story about the second situation, too. I’d been one of the ones who didn’t say the pledge, before I moved, and decided that I wasn’t going to change that unless they made me. The result of this was that the other students in my homeroom class stopped saying it, too—first the ones nearest me, then the ones next to them, and so on across the room. I happened to have a desk in one corner of the room, and by the end of the year a handful of the students in the other corner of the room were the only ones still saying the pledge, and they generally shouted it, raucously or sarcastically depending on their mood. (Makes a pretty interesting complement to the Asch conformity test, come to think of it.)
Yes, FWIW catholic schools in the US do that too.
It is highly likely (that there is at least one). It is a kind of insane practice but it isn’t quite that out of character for human social groups that I’d expect it to be a quirk unique to the USA.
Do all totalitarian states bother making all the children go to school and recite pledges?
Oh wait… Now that I think about it, Ireland’s Irish language policy is probably the biggest thing-like-that in the world. (Yeah, it’s saddening that people don’t know their great-grandparents’ language, but if the Irish government actually cared about preserving Irish, and not just about seeming to care about preserving Irish to an inattentive observer, they could achieve that in waaaaaaay more cost-effective ways.)
What would be better methods of preserving Irish?
AFAIK things are slowly changing for the better, but this is my impression of how they were until recently. (People who have spent more time in Ireland than I have (EDIT: eight months) are welcome to correct me.)
1. Forcing every single school child in Ireland to study it four hours a week fourteen years (even in areas where Irish hasn’t been spoken for centuries, and in a way reminiscent of the study of dead languages and that it is nearly useless for actually having conversations with native speakers, or for remembering anything after a few years out of school) is just a huge waste of time and money, IMO. Making it optional would make much more sense, and make sure that only people actually interested will learn it.
1b. They also spend lots of money for translations of official acts hardly anyone will read. Changing the rule from “the public administration must write all documents in both languages” to (say) “the public administration can write all documents in either language, but must prepare a translation in the other language if requested with a thirty days’ notice” would save lots of money that could be spent otherwise.
2. They don’t even seriously try to assess what the situation in the Gaeltacht is actually like, which IMO is a fundamental prerequisite to fixing it. For example, the 2011 census asked the question “Can you speak Irish?” with possible answers “Yes” and “No”—cf “How well can you speak English?” with answers “Very well”, “Well”, “Not well” and “Not at all” (I’m told that this one was only added in the last census, but why didn’t they do the same with Irish?); and the question “How often do you speak Irish?” has answers “Daily, within the educational system”, “Daily, outside the educational system”, “Weekly”, “More rarely” (IIRC) and “Never”—and the first two were only split in the last census, after people realized that having an answer “Daily” would inflate the numbers because all school children would pick that. (Why didn’t they just ask “How often do you speak Irish, not counting language classes and the like?”?) And I’m not aware of any large-scale survey asking people in the Gaeltacht which language they prefer to use in which circumstances, as there have been for Welsh. (Are they scared of the answers?)
2b. They hardly do anything to make sure that children of living native speakers are comfortable with continuing speaking Irish, i.e. that they are able to cope with Irish in everyday life whenever possible and are forced to recur to English only when actually necessary. For example, they don’t even require Irish on food labels and the like. Living as a monolingual Irish speaker in present-day Ireland would be pretty much impossible, even in the Gaeltacht.
One interesting thing to note is that if you’re accustomed to pledging your allegiance to something every day as a child, while you’re still unable to enter into legal agreements and aren’t thinking about them, it may not occur to you that when you go to school on your 18th birthday, you’ve just pledged your allegiance in a way that… might be legally binding?
Regardless of what sort of government expects it’s children to pledge allegiance every day, do you agree with the practice of making people pledge allegiance?
Allegiance is kind of vague. It could be interpreted to mean doing normal responsibilities (not being a criminal, paying your taxes) or it might be interpreted to mean total obedience. I’m not sure whether to agree or disagree with the pledge. Maybe I should disagree with it on the grounds that it is too vague and therefore doesn’t protect reciters from feeling obligated to obey a tyrant, were one to end up in power.
Of course not. I was stabbing one of our soldiers in the back. Because, frankly, that metaphorical soldier had it coming.
This is actually has been a problem with real-life examples. I’ve read that the oaths in NAZI Germany were specifically to Hitler himself, and that many members of the military felt bound by their oaths to obey orders, even when it was clear the orders shouldn’t be obeyed. I think the critical danger is in giving oaths to an individual (any of which have a very real chance of being corrupted by power, unless they take action to prevent it).
I see the difference that the U.S. pledge of alliegence is to the republic and it’s symbol, the flag. The saving factors to prevent abuses of power are:
The focus on alliegence to the nation as a whole, including all it’s members, it’s leaders, and it’s ideals.
The “with liberty and justice for all” line, which is the guarantee of what the State offers in return. The U.S. has to be worthy of the alliegence.
The extreme other war example is the U.S Civil War, where many military officers left the army to join the Confederacy. They formed ranks and marched right out of West Point because they opposed the U.S. leadership. And the soldiers who stayed let them go, knowing they were going to help the seceding states fight. Even if they disagreed, it was felt the honorable thing to do was to let them go.
This idea shows up specifically in our military training and culture in the definition of lawful orders. The military culture and legal rules define your duty to obey all lawful orders from your chain of command, up to the President. So that if you feel that an order is unlawful it’s actually your duty to disobey. Now, of course, that carries with it all the weight of being the first one to be the opposition, so it’s no guarantee to prevent abuses of power, but it does exist.
I gues my point is that the danger is in making oaths to a person.
I agree that it’s a form of indoctrination for children. But as long as the trade of alliegence and freedom it describes is a true and real one, I think it’s a good thing to keep those principles in their minds.
Ooh, I like these points, Troshen. You might be right that there’s enough “security” built into the pledge. Now you’ve got me questioning whether it might actually protect us.
If nothing else, it would make tyrannical pledges look bad by comparison, perhaps blocking them.
I suppose it could, yet countries don’t require you to do anything to place you in such legal binds. They have laws about “treason” that they can apply when people from their population don’t act out allegiance, whether they have pledged it or not.
Sure but the people have to enforce those laws (the government is something like 3% of the population from what I understand, which means that the people could overwhelm them easily), so if the concept of allegiance is foreign to them, as opposed to being very familiar and feeling like an obligation, or if they haven’t witnessed all the OTHER citizens pledging allegiance, it might feel like an empty word they can safely ignore.
If the concept of allegiance becomes completely foreign to the citizens of a country, than the country effectively ceases to exist.
Fair enough. A more accurate statement would be: “Expecting small children...of, OR ELSE, is a mind-control tactic that I feel is wrong to use on children without the capacity to counter it, which I would expect to find in blatantly controlling nations, and not in a supposedly free nation.”
I just thought the first version flowed better.
It does flow well, in as much as the first thing (ridiculous pledge obligation) is already opposed by most of the audience and so they can be expected to applaud when the enemy is associated with the hated thing. Unfortunately it is a crude harnessing of a fallacy.
And I would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for your meddling rationality!
I have seen footage of a documentary about Cuba, that used kids reciting their allegiance to the State, Party etc as a way of showing what an evil place it was. To this Londoner, yes, the whole thing of kids reciting the Pledge is very creepy.
Yeah. I can pledge allegiance, now, and when I do, I mean it—but coming out of the mouth of a child, it’s as meaningless as they all know it is. When I was a kid, I knew it was all kinds of messed up. I suspected that I would agree with it when I was older, and I was right. That doesn’t make it valid.
As a child I had to pledge that I will become a law-abiding citizen of my country, and a member of the Communist party.
I have failed to adhere to both parts. The first part, because “my beloved homeland” does not exist anymore. The second part, knowingly and willingly. (Although, as a 6-years old child, I would probably also guess that I will agree with both parts when I grow up. Mostly because of: “if that wouldn’t be a good thing, they would not ask me to promise it”.)
Or maybe it’s just because I had to recite the pledge only once. ;-)
(OK, technically I had to practice it a few times first.)
Also because observations contradicted the belief that your country was good.
Brainwashing success!
I don’t agree with everything the country does, that’s for sure. But on the broad strokes, I’m willing to stand for it.
Why? In other words, which parts of the pledge would you keep, and which would you change/remove and why?
What? I’d drop the ‘under god’ part, but that isn’t really what I was talking about. My not agreeing with everything the country does, does not have the pledge as its subject matter.
That is, say, the unjustified wars, etc.. The whole laundry list. The particular method of choosing representation in our government - ‘plurality of first preference’ voting, with closed primary elections, and districts chosen in a partisan way. There’s a reason congress is as messed up as it is.
But it’s my messed-up country.
Why is it your messed-up country?
Because its laws treat you well, and you want to support that system out of gratitude?
Because you’ve lived there a while, and you’re attached to things in it?
Because you were born there, and… that matters for some reason?
Because you have relative from there, and ditto?
Because you have relatives from elsewhere, and it sucked, so you cheer for the least-bad country?
Because bald eagles look awesome and apple pie is delicious, so you have positive emotional associations to the corresponding countries?
I wonder if “rationality of patriotism” has been discussed on LW? Probably in the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Something like that was discussed here.
Because states are still a powerful force for (or against) change in this world, you are limited in the number of them you can directly affect (determined largely by where you and relatives were born), and for political and psychological reasons that ability is diminished when you fail to display loyalty (of the appropriate sort, which varies by group) to those states.
Also, apple pie is delicious.
Then the obvious strategy is to start feeling lots of loyalty toward Easily Affected Country, and donate lots to organizations in Powerful Country that effect change in Easily Affected Country. This diminishes your political bonus but the extra leverage compensates. Bot-swa-na! Bot-swa-na!
I actually think the apple pie reason is an unusually good one. There’s nothing wrong with cheering for things.
Wouldn’t that… if enough people did it… I mean, wouldn’t it sort of… work?
Wait, that wasn’t serious?
You’re assuming that display of loyalty can radically increase your influence. My model was that your initial influence is determined situationally, and your disposition can decrease it more easily than increase it.
That said, let’s run with your interpretation; Bot-swa-na! Bot-swa-na!
Yeah, but a lot of stuff is meaningless coming out of the mouth of a child. But you have to start teaching them about things like duty and loyalty at some point. The pledge is a reasonable way to get kids to understand that they’re part of a country, and that there’s a common moral and political activity that they’ll one day be involved in.
If the status quo didn’t already include the daily recitation of such a pledge, do you think you would suggest it as a way to get kids to understand that?
I think that’s a practical question too complicated for me to answer. I would want some kind of voluntary activity like that in place. The pledge isn’t great, but it’s likely that something better would require more resources. And while I don’t think (and would doubt) that the pledge has any kind of ‘brainwashing’ effect, it would be worth looking into whatever data we can gather about that.
Data point: My home country, Australia, does not have a pledge of allegiance. Overt demonstrations of patriotism were limited to being expected to sing the national anthem in school assembly once a week. I personally feel that there is still plenty of patriotism to go around. However, a common perception of the US is that you guys are over-patriotic.
Thinking a bit more on this, I can’t help wondering how much of this can be traced to free voting versus mandatory voting. How much of encouraging patriotism is an attempt to make people care enough to vote?
Something that a lot of people, both inside and outside the US, don’t realize is that what patriotism means in the US is not quite the same as what patriotism means in other countries.
I wonder whether the reason why a lot of people don’t realise it might be because it’s not actually true.
I mean, ESR’s argument seems to me incoherent and mostly aimed at finding a way to identify Barack Obama as not only an America-hater but also a freedom-hater. (Step 1: True US patriotism is more about loving the ideal of liberty and less about tribal attachment to the US as such. Step 2: Because for a while Barack Obama chose not to wear a flag pin, he doesn’t love his country. Step 3, unstated but I think clearly there: Since true US patriotism means loving liberty and Barack Obama is not a true US patriot, he is opposed not only to the US but to liberty.) It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that his characterization of US patriotism may be as much a matter of political convenience as the (absurd) inference he draws from Obama’s not wearing a flag pin. Certainly at least one of them must be wrong; it cannot be true both that patriotism for Americans means loving their country “not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas” and that not wearing a US flag pin indicates “a lack of love for America as it actually is” and therefore a lack of patriotism.
And it’s certainly not only in the US that patriotism tends to involve not only tribal loyalty to one’s country but also love of what are taken to be its virtues. (Sometimes grand things like liberty and enterprise in the US, courage and fair play in the UK; sometimes little quirks like apple pie and baseball in the US, pubs and cricket in the UK.)
I’d be very interested in others’ opinions: Is US patriotism really as much more “abstracted” than other nations’ as ESR suggests? Is it true that “most Americans love their country … not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas about liberty”?
That sounds wrong. Certainly people who consider themselves French patriots are likely to say “Speak French, dammit!”, “Yeah, maybe it’s like that in your country but you’re in France now”, or “Go Napoleon!”, but no more than American patriots are likely to say the analogues.
Also, French patriotism is huge on political ideas. Motherland of human rights, French revolution, Resistance, and all that.
I would say that many Americans don’t properly keep the two concepts separate.
I missed the part where he was identifying Obama as an “America-hater” or a “freedom-hater”—I don’t see those words, or any analogues, in the post.
That’s OK; I, likewise, missed the part in what I wrote where I said that those words appear in ESR’s post.
I think he’s suggesting it, not saying it. And he comes pretty damn close to saying in so many words that Barack Obama “doesn’t love” America, which of course is far from the same thing as hating it but still a pretty serious accusation to level at a candidate for the presidency.
As for the stronger claim about hating, though, consider the following bits from what ESR wrote. (Please feel free to verify that the ellipses don’t misrepresent his meaning or tone.)
It seems to me that (1) ESR is defining “chomskyism” to mean actual destructive hatred of America, and (2) his comments about the significance of Obama’s not wearing a flag pin make no sense unless he’s taken to be saying that Obama was exemplifying “chomskyism”, and hence actual destructive hatred of America.
But no, indeed, he didn’t actually say it explicitly using the words “America-hater” or “freedom-hater” or any close analogue.
(I shall not comment further on the political questions at issue here. The actual point I was making was just that I don’t feel any obligation to believe what ESR says about American patriotism as compared with other sorts.)
Yeah, it seems like you’re going a bit far to connect the dots. ESR is saying that the “destructive hatred” is produced by “patriotism by dissent” “at its extreme”. He didn’t actually say that Obama has this extreme sort.
It seemed to me that he was just using the flag pin case as an accessible example of this “patriotism by dissent”. It didn’t seem to me that he was even saying anything was wrong with “patriotism by dissent”, other than noting that a lot of Americans seemed to disagree with it. Though he does suggest it’s a “pathology”, which would normally be a negative term.
In the comments, he even clarifies that he was not trying to call any particular person unpatriotic, and repeatedly says that he is trying to do an analysis of American patriotism. Given the sorts of stuff ESR has written on the philosophical side before, I’m inclined to believe him.
Whereas, given the sort of stuff ESR has written on philosophy and politics before, I’m not at all inclined to believe that he didn’t (alongside the theoretical stuff, which I’m sure he means sincerely) intend to insinuate that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country.
But I think taking this further would almost certainly get unproductively political, so I shall leave it here.
According to the article, patriotism-as-dissent is identified as un-American and as Obama’s theory. American patriotism is also conceptualized as loyalty-to-freedom, for example in the Franklin quote.
I would expect nearly all patriotic people to consider patriotism to their own country to be different in some fundamentally important way to patriotism to another. The other patriots don’t care about Better Seating after all.
Requiring someone to make a mndatory pledge to a flag instills the Love of Freedom how...?
By making it Capitalized. Actually having the people loving freedom sounds all sorts of dangerous—people may expect you to let them do stuff. If you make them Love Freedom instead you should be able to keep them in line.
That doesn’t seem true to me. Do you have anything more solid to back this up? Also, see Esar’s comment below that the US is a mess but it’s his mess. How is that not regular old tribal patriotism?
Both forms of patriotism exist and are frequently confused, even by said patriots.
First things first: do people have to be part of a country? If the division of humanity into mutually distrustful camps is ultimately a problem, not a solution. (I think it is. My evidence is history. Nothing specific...just open a page at random..) you might be causally defending something that is as bad, or worse, than religious tribalism.
You mean metaphysically? No. Practically? Yes. Having no citizenship is pretty serious problem. And these mutually distrustful camps aren’t very mutually distrustful at the moment. Most countries are actually very stable, peaceful, and trusting. More so now then at any other time in history. Other kinds of political organization may be feasible, and that’s fine, but this one is working pretty well and changing things would probably result in trouble.
From a simple consequentialist perspective, I think it’s hard to argue against the present system. Do you have an alternative suggestion?
At one time it was a practical necessity to belong to some religion or other.
Just because everyone believes you need one. But does that pass the PKD test?
Does that prove that nationalism is good...or that its one the way out? Europe went through a period of religious bloodshed...followed by an era of religious tolerance...followed by a period of irreligion. SWIM?
Nations solve the problems created by nations. Up to a point. Does religion “work” when there is a respite in the slaughter?
Maybe things are chainging anyway. I’m a citizen of England, and the Uk, and the EU. If you are a Usian, you are also in a federated superstate.
In any case you don’t have to believe in (qua approve of) something just because you believe in (qua note the existence of) it.
As a teaching tool it seems almost useless; the language is antiquated, way past age-appropriate for elementary school, and while the meaning of the Pledge might be the subject of a third-grade civics lesson I don’t recall any substantial effort to break down its text in such a way as to integrate it into working knowledge.
Which now strikes me as a fairly clever bit of social engineering. At first I don’t think you’d need meaningful content; if you and your classmates are facing the flag, right hand over heart, and quoting from the text in unison, you’d still get group cohesion effects if the text itself was a list of Vedic demons or multilingual translations of the word “pickle”. But later, as children learn about concepts like duty by other means, they’re supplied with associations left over from their childhood practice. At least in theory; in practice this might be ruined by other associations, as elementary school’s usually not a terribly pleasant place for its inmates.
The “under God” bit can lead to some unpleasant cognitive dissonance as a secular child, too.
My thoughts exactly.
And I agree, ‘under God’ should be removed. But it’s not really a big deal. A substantial part of the value of secularism is in the fact that you have to go against the grain a bit.
The whole thing, though, is a giant “under God” of patriotism. A small nod to religion isn’t a big deal compared to that.
Well, not just patriotism (which is good if your country is good) but also the whole ‘liberty and justice for all’ thing. I think it’s kind of nice. I want liberty and justice for all.
Patriotism can also sometimes be good independent of whether my country is good, insofar as it can facilitate cooperation among patriots, who even in a bad country might have good goals which are more readily achieved cooperatively.
That’s a good point, but I think there are stricter conditions on the goodness of patriotism than merely consequential ones. I’m not sure how to articulate this, but as a disposition, patriotism is enough like a belief that it ought to be true, and not just beneficial.
Hm.
I understand how patriotism might be a beneficial belief if my country is good and harmful otherwise.
But you seem to be suggesting that patriotism is true if my country is good and false otherwise.
Which suggests to me that we aren’t using the word “patriotism” the same way.
Am I correct in inferring that, on your view, “X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”?
It looks more like you aren’t using the word true the same way.
Perhaps?
I’m content to accept that “”X is patriotic” entails “X believes X’s country is good”″ ⇒ “X’s patriotism is true only if X’s country is good”. This is admittedly an extended sense of “true”, to mean something like “does not entail falsehoods,” but I’m willing to work with it.
I would accept those, or at least continue the conversation without commenting, although I’d squirm rather a lot at the final one. What I couldn’t accept is “patriotism is true”.
So I suppose patriotism is a kind of love. We could call a love good if the lover has good reason to think the beloved worthy of love and if the love is on the whole a benefit to lover and beloved. Your initial remark was that that patriotism can be good independently of the goodness of its object, because it can be a benefit. I think this captures one half of the above, both leaves out the ‘worthiness’ part. In other words, I think patriotism has to involve something like knowledge of the moral goodness of one’s country. It’s in that respect that patriotism is concerned with truth, rather than just with benefit.
In my experience with it, patriotism usually seems closer to a kind of hate. It does make people feel good about themselves, though.
It’s not actually required that children say it; it would, in fact, violate the Constitution to mandate political speech, even from students. But it’s expected that students recite the Pledge, and most do.
Because if they don’t, they are looked at with suspicion and ostracized.
For what it’s worth, another student noticed I wasn’t actually saying the pledge and hassled me mildly about it. I gave in immediately and started saying the pledge—it didn’t seem worth the effort of opposition.
This didn’t increase my (very minimal) sense of patriotism. Oddly enough, I don’t think it lowered my sense of patriotism, either.
Except that the OR ELSE, in that case, was “or else don’t say it”. Though my experience may have been atypical.
Wait, there are rituals? And someone deleted the links to them? Anyone want to tell me what they’re talking about?
The rituals in question were my rationalist marriage ceremony and Raemon’s solstice ritual. Obviously I have no objection to these being discussed, though I would strongly recommend doing so in a separate Discussion thread. As this thread is a part of a new sequence that may be used to introduce newcomers to LW, I am especially interested in keeping it clean.
Sure. I saved my thoughts for a different thread where they’ll be more on-topic.
The question you asked me on this thread was deleted too. If you happen to ask it again I’ll respond.
So it is you that deleted my comments.
I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt that two years ago you just had a temporary slip of mind and now it was some other overzelous admin that was still applying censorship, but apparently your problem is more persistent.
Whatever, if you enjoy making a fool of yourself in public, go ahead and delete this comment too, and then bang your head on the wall until you forget it. I won’t add anything else, I’ve already wasted too much time on this drama.
(I apologize to other readers if they find the tone of this comment too impolite for the community standards. It is impolite, but so it is deleting someone’s comments without explanation. At any rate, as far as I’m concerned, this discussion is over.)
It’s common courtesy to follow the rules of the forum you’re visiting, regardless of whether you disagree with the reasoning behind them. If you were unsure about whether a certain rule still applied, you could have just asked in advance about whether is still applied; not violate it as a test.
What rule is it that applies in this situation, other than “moderators may delete comments at will”?
It’s courteous to assume misunderstanding rather than malice. Which would entail explaining the reasons for deletions.
Many secular institutions perform ceremonies of typically two kinds:
Celebrating members who enter, leave or change rank within the organization (e.g. academic graduation, martial art belt change, …). These rituals seem don’t seem to pose an hazard to epistemical or instrumental rationality, and can be actually quite useful to ensure that members of the organization know who the other members are and what their role is.
Celebrating anniversaries, typically the founding date of the organization, or some other date related to prominent past members or relevant historical figures (e.g., a physics departement celebrating 100 years from Annus Mirabilis, or a computer science department celebraring the 100th birthday of Alan Turing). Again, these rituals don’t seem harmful, and they might be useful to reaffirm the mission of the organization.
Making children recite the Pledge of Allegiance, on the other hand, is indeed a form of essentially religious indoctrination, even without the “under God” bit.
There is a very thin line between government and organized religion, and instances of crossing it are not unknown of, in one direction (theocracies) or the other (political religions, such as North Korea’s Juche or Bolshevism in the former Communist states). Even countries which are in general considered to do a good job at keeping the state separated from religion, like the US, occasionally resort to religious techniques of indoctrination.
Religious rituals are effective at indoctrinating people: make people recite your “Truths” until they memorize and chant them mechanically without paying attention to their implications, associate them with all kinds of positive rewards, from large carbohydrate-rich meals to the sense of belonging to a close-knit community, and the effect you get is that you lower people’s critical thinking skills and make them more prone to accept your “Truths” without question, and become emotionally attached to them so that they will find rationalizations instead of throwing them away when presented with contrary evidence.
Is this the proper way of disseminating rationalist values? I don’t think so.
Even if you were 100% sure that whatever you are endorsing is so indisputable that there will be never the need to change it, people should believe rational arguments because they critically analyzed them and found that they stand on their own merits, not because they have been psychologically conditioned to believe them.
Sure, people believing in truths because they’ve repeated them a lot rather than because they’ve digested them and updated all their beliefs correspondingly is a problem. But it’s also a problem to see a new belief, agree with it, and then not repeat it enough to update all of your beliefs correspondingly. Getting a skill to the 5-second level takes practice, and often a lot of practice.
Sure, but the way to practice these skills is to apply them to actual problems, not to mindlessly recite their principles.
Recitation and worship can turn even good rational principles into articles of faith, disconnected from anything else, which you just “believe to believe” rather actually understand and apply.
V_V and Vaniver both make really good points, but the fact is that the U.S was not built to be completely rationalist, and people in general are not rationalists.
It’s a communal set of rules for a people and a place that’s designed to give the members the most freedom while still ensuring stability and order. And it has a really good track record of success in doing that.
I agree that it’s not an optimal solution in a future, ideally rationalist world. But it’s not a tool for teaching children to think for themselves. It’s a tool to get them to follow the social rules. And I’ll tell you, children want their own way and DO NOT want to follow rules. And if you let them have their way all the time you WILL spoil them. There’s a time to teach rules-following (especially rules that protect liberties and freedoms) and a time to teach mistrust of authority and rules-breaking.
What other device would you propose for a future, ideally rationalist world? I’m not being fecetious here. I’m curious. Spawned by the Wierdtopia idea, can you think of a better solution?
I personally think of it as like teaching an apprentice. Apprentices weren’t taught the why’s. They were taught the how’s. As a journeyman and a master you discovered the why’s. Kids are apprentice citizens.