Tribalism Can Be Positive

On the ethics of group conflict

People are good team players. Sometimes we forget that. We work together so often that it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s good for your soul to take a step back and look at all the incredible achievements that have been made by people cooperating.

When groups of people clash, though, they can behave very badly. I’m not just talking about historical horrors, such as wars or the Holocaust. Right now, there are groups of jerks are making the American political climate toxic. There’s plenty of blame to go around, from Antifa to the Proud Boys. Even mainstream media sometimes play host to hateful, resentful screeds.

Not all group conflict leads to destructive behavior. Businesses competition in the free market has, over generations, made humanity wealthy beyond our ancestors’ imagination. Teams of athletes competing drive each other to work harder and reach new heights. Competition in politics leads to the worst leaders being replaced and most groups of people having some of their demands met. Even war, the most destructive of human activities, has evolved rules to reduce its harm. The wars of today are gentler than the total war of World War 2 or the ambushes, raids, massacres and rape of tribal warfare.

Still, we’re much better at being good people individually than we are at being good in groups. If we thought more about how we ought to act in group competitions, then maybe we could raise our standards. At the very least, we could come to a common understanding of what group behavior is right or wrong, the same way we almost universally agree that murder, adultery, etc. are wrong.

Groups don’t have individual agency, of course. They don’t have a single mind that can choose between good or evil. Even when a group has a strong single leader, the leader responds to the needs of his followers and is guided by their reactions. That’s one reason why we can’t simply judge groups the same way we judge individuals. We must adapt our views on individual morality to groups.

There are three dominant perspectives on morality among philosophers. They’re called virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology. They say, respectively, that morality is about what kind of person you ought to be, what kind of outcomes your actions ought to have, and what kind of rules you ought to follow.

Virtues

Virtue ethics says that doing the right thing means behaving the way a good person would behave. Specifically, it means behaving in a way that’s kind, honest, brave, fair, etc. Different virtue ethicists have come up with their own lists of virtues, going all the way back to Aristotle.

It’s difficult to apply virtue ethics to group conflict. If we need moral guidance for our individual situation, we can think of people who inspire us with their personal traits. If I’m feeling lazy, I can aspire to be as hardworking as my grandfather; if I’m mad, I could try to be as forgiving as my friend Anthony.

When we want guidance for our group, it’s more difficult to imagine examples. The groups of people we celebrate are mostly honored for the consequences of their actions, rather than for their character. Even pacifistic, loving reformers like the Civil Rights Movement included a wide variety of people, some of them not so nice.

It’s also harder to get concrete guidance. If we want our own group to behave virtuously, we can try to ask ourselves “what would Gandhi’s movement do?” but it’s not clear we could answer that, given how different are our goals and situation.

Consequences

Some people think of morality in terms of its end results. In other words, they see the ends as justifying the means. The most important of these views is utilitarianism: the idea that an action is good to the extent that it creates more overall happiness than suffering.

In other words, it’s good for me to donate my money to an orphanage because it will bring the orphans more happiness than it could bring me. It’s good for a sick person to steal medicine he can’t afford, too, because the good the medicine does will outweigh the harm to the pharmacy.

Many of the worst atrocities in history were done by groups with this view. Think of the Communist revolutionaries that promised a utopia worth any amount of spilt blood and oppression. It’s a very dangerous way to think.

One problem is that humans are terrible at predicting the consequences of their actions on a large scale over a long period of time, which is the level that groups operate at. Communists and anarchists brawled with Nazis on the streets of Weimar Germany… and in so doing, helped the Nazis gain power. The sexual revolution, and the War on Poverty of the ‘60s, weakened family ties and inadvertently led to nearly 3/4ths of African-American children being born into families without father figures. Beautiful intentions can have terrible consequences.

Duties and principles

Ethics that deal with following rules are called deontology. One example of a principle-based approach to ethics is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Jewish Rabbi Hillel came up with a negative version about a century earlier: if an action is hateful to you, don’t do it to others.

It’s not possible to directly apply these rules to a group setting. You can’t control what your own group does or does not do. You can, on an individual level, decide not to hurt other people, or make insulting or dismissive remarks to them, or lie to them. That already seems to be asking too much of people, though.

Why do people break these rules? The most common justification is “they did it first, we have to keep up to win.” That leads to people trying to silence each other because they believe their group has been silenced, or even getting violent with each other because they see their side as victims of violence.

Principle of Non-Escalation

If we can’t aim as high as treating other the other side with love and kindness, we can at least adopt a principle of non-escalation. At worst we only use the same unkindness as the other guys do. If they disagree with us without saying we’re bad people, we don’t tell them they’re bad people. If they say we’re bad people, we don’t try to silence them with threats or reporting their tweets or anything. If they try to silence us, we don’t harass them in the real world. If they harass us in the real world, or worse, we call the police, and that’s where it ends.

As a caveat: one of the quirks of human psychology is that we give the benefit of the doubt to ourselves and our in-group and we’re more skeptical of outsiders, especially threatening ones. If we want constructive group conflict, we must always hold ourselves to higher standards than our rivals, because we inevitably overestimate our own morality and underestimate theirs.

Look at the example of the Covington Catholic students. Earlier this year, during a protest, a group of Catholic school students stared awkwardly at a Native American man. Their behavior was interpreted by some people as disrespectful. An appropriate response, then, would at worst be disrespect towards the students. Arguably we should show more leniency towards children, so not even advance to the level of disrespect.

Most people did react that way. Some went farther and, among other things, advocated violence towards the students. They violated the principle of non-escalation. Groups that counted the over-reactors as members had a choice: either denounce (and possibly eject) the offenders or accept responsibility for the behavior. If they chose the latter, then rival groups would be justified in threatening them in response.

Ideally, their rivals would choose to turn the other cheek instead of matching their threatening behavior. If their rivals did choose to match the behavior, though, they couldn’t be accused of occupying the moral low-ground.

Of course, their rivals might go beyond matching the critics. Instead of vaguely advocating violence, they might send specific death threats. In that case they’d be violating the non-escalation principle as well. Each step of escalation is worse than the last (going to war is a far bigger step than name-calling) so they would be the bad guys.

Principle of Precision

Limiting your response to your rivals requires that you identify them correctly. Kicking a puppy because you think it’s a member of Al Qaeda will not do. You must be precise in recognizing what group a person belongs to, and to what extent they represent that group.

If the Prime Minister of Canada talks about invading the US, it’s appropriate to see that as the first group threatening violence against the latter. If a random homeless Canadian person delivers the same speech, it shouldn’t be treated as Canada violently threatening America. The Canadian hobo is a Canadian just the same as Canada’s leader, but he doesn’t represent the nation.

If someone calls themselves a Trump supporter and other supporters recognize him as such, then he’s part of that group. If he escalates the situation, and isn’t condemned by his group, then it counts as his group escalating. If a random wacko starts threatening people, and everyone condemns it, then it doesn’t represent either side. We can’t use it as an excuse to escalate the situation.

The higher position in a group someone is, the more they represent that group. Think of the Nuremberg trials: the Allies wanted to punish the Nazis for starting World War 2 and committing mass atrocities. Out of the 8+ million Nazi party members, the Allies put 200 on trial. That’s less than 1% of 1%. The Allies ignored the rest of the Nazis because they didn’t represent the party.

Sometimes we want to retaliate against more people than just those who wrong us. We want justice against anyone who benefitted from their misdeeds. If a gang of thieves steals everything we own, we should be free to steal from them or any of their friends and family who benefitted as well… right?

This impulse has ugly consequences. For example, a nation’s military fights for the interests of that nation’s civilians. We don’t want all wars to turn into massacres of civilians, though. Civilians may be benefiting from their military’s protection (and even their aggression) but we still shouldn’t treat them as legitimate targets.

By the same logic, even if a mainstream party benefits from a radical fringe, we shouldn’t treat the party the way we treat the fringe group. As an example, don’t treat mainstream animal rights activists with the same hostility that you would treat members of PETA. Even if the former group benefits from the latter’s actions (which isn’t clear, anyway) it isn’t culpable for their extremism.

What’s the moral of the story?

Let’s move out of the realm of airy abstraction and return to the example from the beginning. Antifa and the Proud Boys are controversial new political movements. They both have a history of escalation: silencing those who haven’t silenced them, threatening those who haven’t threatened them, and committing violence against those who haven’t been violent towards them.

They also both are imprecise in their attacks. Antifa lumps all their critics into the alt-right, and so treats a defenseless journalist as a target for violence. The Proud Boys accuse their targets of being part of Antifa, even when they’re as mainstream as the Democratic mayor of Portland.

That’s not to imply the two groups are morally equivalent. The question of whether they’re equivalent is a distraction, though. If a murderer and a torture are engaged in a fist-fight, you don’t have to pick one to support. They’re both awful, and you should simply call the police on them.

To Understand Immigration, You Must First Understand Citizenship

Fuzzy ideas about citizenship make it impossible to clearly argue immigration policy

We don’t know what citizenship means. Maybe it doesn’t even have a specific meaning. We want our arguments about citizenship to be objectively true or false, but we can’t even be clear about what we’re saying. A more precise, explicit understanding of citizenship is needed. Failing that, we could at least understand our differing views.

There are two different views on citizenship: a thin, minimalist view of citizenship, and a thick view of citizenship that sees it as an important part of one’s identity. They don’t perfectly correspond to left- and right-wing positions. Each side adopts parts of the thick view and parts of the thin view. That shouldn’t surprise you. Ideologies exist to motivate groups of people to cooperate, not to be consistent or rational.

You can think of these two views as a continuum. You don’t have to adopt extreme version of either view, and it’s possible to meet somewhere in the middle. The current political environment discourages that kind of compromise, but it’s hypothetically possible.

Flag burning, anthem sitting

You can see how people view citizenship through their reactions to attacks on the symbols of citizenship. Those with a thin view of citizenship will be unphased. It’s like saying “I hate my mobile carrier” – you’re not saying you hate everyone who works there, or that you think it’s a force of evil that’s destroying the world. You’re simply expressing displeasure with a service you were entitled to.

Those with a thicker view of citizenship will take it more seriously. They see their citizenship as a more meaningful part of their identity. If you burn a flag, to them it’s like burning a Bible or Koran, or making racist remarks about groups of people. They won’t see it simply as a complaint that you aren’t getting what you’re entitled to, they see it as an attack on the people who make up that group.

Think of the controversial protest by Nike spokesman Colin Kaepernick. When he sat or kneeled during the anthem and said that it was because he didn’t want to show pride in the country, it split people into two camps.

One camp thought it was perfectly reasonable for Kaepernick to complain that he, and people like him, weren’t receiving the treatment they deserved. The other camp saw Kaepernick as insulting them (and their family, friends, and all other American citizens) even though they had done nothing wrong. He had become wildly successful because of this group, and now he was betraying it.

The first camp saw it as a perfectly justifiable reaction, like tearing up your membership card to a gym because you found out the gym had been shafting you on fees. The second saw it as extreme hostility, like burning a Koran because a radical minority of Muslims commit terrorist attacks.

There’s no objectively correct way to interpret Kaepernick’s actions because citizenship can mean different things.

Thick citizenship

An old view of citizenship sees a citizen as a special type of person who has powers and responsibilities in their community. Citizenship doesn’t just mean that citizens can make demands of their community, but that the community makes demands of them. While, in practice, there are irresponsible and selfish citizens, the ideal citizens are far-sighted leaders. I’m calling this “thick citizenship” but it’s also called “civic republicanism.”

Ancient Athenian democracy is the archetypical model of this kind of citizenship. Citizens (limited to a portion of adult males) were both the members of the group and its rulers. They had power and responsibility. They made the laws and obeyed them; they were free but forced to join the military to defend their freedom.

This kind of citizenship mostly fell out of favor with the rise of liberal democracy, as it involves a group making demands on the individual, and it puts some classes of individuals above others. There are still traces of it in our view of voting as a sacred duty, our obligations to answer the draft or jury duty, in President Kennedy’s famous demand to “ask what we can do for our country,” and, in places such as Australia, a legal requirement to vote.

Thick citizenship treats citizenship as an important part of one’s identity, perhaps on the same level as religion or ideology. It’s a group of people that you share a special bond with and you’re expected to watch out for each other’s interests against an adversarial outside world. It doesn’t force you to treat non-citizens poorly, but it does require you to treat fellow citizens better, just as you’d (hopefully) treat friends and family better than strangers.

Advantages

Thick citizenship can create feelings of cohesion and unity. People are forced to take part in their community and bear responsibility for what happens. There’s no “don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy.”

A closer connection between citizen and state would make it harder to profit off spreading false information, e.g. conspiracy theories, about the state. Figures who make a living spreading unjustified distrust (Alex Jones) would be a little bit poorer

Stronger group identity could reduce infighting and mistrust. Even when you strongly disagree with your family, you don’t think they’re Nazi communists out to destroy you. That level of trust makes debate possible, which in turn improves the quality of our ideas. In a mistrustful environment, we can’t effectively fact check our rivals, because fact checking is dismissed as covert propaganda.

Disadvantages

There are disadvantages, as well, which is part of why thick citizenship fell out of favor. We Westerners are strongly opposed to society making demands on individuals. Our individualistic, rights-based view of government has succeeded for the past few centuries. We don’t want to change it now.

Thick citizenship’s also exclusionary. By making citizenship so demanding, it creates a second class of people who aren’t willing or able to act as citizens. Perhaps they can’t do the required community service, or vote, or do whatever else is demanded of them. Perhaps they simply feel alienated and refuse to act as a citizen for their polity. Should you count them as non-citizens, or second-class citizens, or punish them, or simply let citizenship collapse into something without demands? There are no good options.

Political relevance

The left-wing uses a thick version of citizenship when describing what we owe to needy citizens. Without a thick view of citizenship, policies like “Medicare for all” would be unjustifiable. Saving the life of an American is much more expensive than saving the life of someone starving in a poor country. If we don’t have special obligations to other Americans, we have no excuse for spending money saving one American instead of saving ten non-Americans.

The right uses a thick view of citizenship more frequently. Their outrage at perceived betrayals towards America (by, for example, protesting the national anthem or burning the flag) reflects a view of citizenship as a community with shared norms and standards. Violating these standards is wrong. The “America, love it or leave it” attitude also reflects the belief that American citizenship shouldn’t be seen merely as a perk but as membership in a group.

Thin citizenship

The more modern, individualistic view of citizenship is that it’s a set of perks afforded to a citizen, ranging from rights to entitlements. This view gained popularity with the Western move towards liberal democracy in the 18^th century. There are minor responsibilities associated with this kind of citizenship, such as a duty to obey the laws and defend the polity, but for the most part it’s a boon. Some don’t even believe these duties are necessary, and that citizens should ignore laws they don’t agree with and even dodge the draft if they’re so inclined.

Thin citizenship is popular with those who value diverse, pluralistic societies. Thicker views of citizenship require more agreement on social norms and a stronger sense of kinship. A society that has room for a devout Muslim, an orthodox Jew, and an outspoken atheist will have difficulty sustaining a strong common identity – and might demand those groups to sacrifice treasured parts of their individual group identities.

Advantages

This view has advantages. It’s very empowering for citizens, though historically this empowering citizenship was limited to a small slice of population. Thin-citizenship governments can’t usually force citizens to act. That kind of freedom lets people live as they wish to.

The relaxed attitude towards cultural differences allows more sub-cultures and different perspectives to thrive, while the mainstream culture and perspective weakens. The social bond of citizenship loosens.

When there’s a weaker common bond between citizens, there are weaker mass reactions against threatening ideas. While that can allow for awful changes to take place, such as the obvious example of the Nazi regime emerging from the chaos of the Weimar Republic, it can also allow for revolutionary positive changes to take place, such as women’s liberation and equality between ethnic groups.

Disadvantages

There are disadvantages. Because thin citizenship is seen as an entitlement rather than a responsibility, every time its benefits are increased, it creates a new minimum. People will demand that minimum, in good times and bad, without offering anything in return. Unless there’s unlimited economic growth, the amount being demanded will eventually exceed the amount society can supply.

This happened in Western countries until the ’70s, as their governments’ control of the economy grew past the 50% mark. Then right-wing reactions cut benefits and shrank the state down to 30-40% of the economy.

This type of citizenship can be quite unfair, as well. It’s a package of invaluable benefits given to people who happen to be born in a certain time and place- or, maybe, were able to move there. It makes the birth-lottery even less fair. Residents of a rich society will always have unfairly good opportunities, but at least those opportunities require them to do something.

Political relevance

The left-wing tends to adopt the thin version of citizenship when it comes to immigration restrictions, responsibilities of citizenship, and attachment to national symbolism. Citizenship is just a nice entitlement that we should grant to other people and not treat as sacred.

The right-wing uses a thin view of citizenship regarding what we owe other citizens. Just because a needy person happens to be born nearby (or moved here) doesn’t mean we’re obligated to do anything for them. Let voluntary donations by their friends, family, and community handle that.

A consistently thin view would oppose borders and nationalism, but also be skeptical of the social safety net. Welfare programs would be supported only in terms of cost-benefit, with assistance given to able-bodied workers who could pay it back. This view is a kind of libertarianism; in most of Europe it would simply be called liberalism, as that word has different connotations than in America.

Postnationalism

There are some who dream of moving ‘beyond’ thin citizenship, into global citizenship. This kind of postnational citizenship squeezes out national identities by creating a thin global citizenship with a commitment to (supposedly) universal human values and deference to subnational identities, such as racial or religious groups, particularly minority groups.

This dream has several problems. First, the definition of a protected minority would be set by the whims of social trends and those in power. For example, Asian-Americans live longer, healthier lives than the average for America, as well as making roughly 50% more money, but wouldlikely receive special consideration under a postnational citizenship regime. Americans descended from the French make less money than average and have done so for generations. They would not receive special protection. They’re tossed into the majority “white” category that would have a weaker legal status than protected groups.

Second, multinational identities have a poor track record. The USSR collapsed into national pieces as soon as its government had to reduce spending. The EU has never been able to create a pan-European identity and may be entering a tailspin. The second half of the 20^th century saw failed attempts to create pan-Arab and pan-African identities.

The mistake postnationalists make is thinking that nationalism too small and closed-off an identity and we can build something broader. More often than not, nations are too broad of an identity for human nature and are difficult or impossible to maintain. Empires are even harder, and a global empire would be hardest of all.

Immigration, naturalization, and natural-born citizens

How does this help us resolve the immigration debate? It can help us see where we, and our opponents, are being inconsistent. That may not be a problem: consistency is anathema to politics. If you would rather have a clear view of immigration than be popular, though, this will help.

The thicker we view citizenship, the more benefits we extend to citizens and the more we demand of them. The current American model puts high demands on immigrants to become citizens, but very low demands for American-born people to be citizens. We practice jus soli, granting citizenship to anyone born on US soil.

That puts us in an odd place. Naturalized immigrants have demonstrated a high level of commitment to the American community and would meet the criteria of thick citizenship. Natural-born citizens and non-citizens haven’t necessarily bought-in to American citizenship to the same degree.

Jus soli is based on the implicit assumption that people born and raised in the US will have a minimum level of respect for, and understanding of, the US and what citizenship entails. If that assumption is wrong, we need a thinner view of citizenship.

If citizens don’t share norms, or feel attachment to a shared community, or fulfill any special duties as a citizen, then it would be a mistake to treat them substantially differently than non-citizens. That would mean weaker rights and privileges for American citizens. It would be very difficult to justify welfare programs that benefit US citizens if US citizenship meant nothing – that money could be spent far more efficiently helping people in poor countries.

It would also mean easier immigration and naturalization. Paradoxically, it would also mean less concern for the current migrant crisis and similar situations. The people in border camps are better off than other suffering people in the world, so there’s no reason to prioritize their well-being simply because they’re on American soil. It would be more important to pressure Kim Jung Un over suffering North Koreans than Donald Trump over suffering migrants.

If we prefer thicker citizenship, and its benefits in welfare and trust, then we must demand more from our citizens. It can’t simply be a perk that anyone can be born into. There would also have to be greater social sanctions on Americans who attack the community. A high level of mutual trust can’t be sustained when citizens always feel threatened by each other.

Only by understanding the trade-offs between thick and thin citizenship can we reach a compromise on what citizenship should mean. If we switch between views when it’s politically convenient then our rivals will do the same and our problems will be intractable.

Reform and wisdom

Change isn’t always progress

“It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.”
-G. K. Chesterton

The history of reform is normally told as a story of brave individuals exercising their individual conscience and triumphing over the unfair old way of doing things. This isn’t always wrong! It’s not always right, either, and it risks turning arbitrary social change into a Manichean story of good versus evil. The end result is that ambitious people will look for things they can change with no regard for whether the change is wise or foolish.

The risk of foolish change is real. It’s easy to overlook, because, when we learn about history, we study the history of things that worked or were at least important. We don’t study many of the dead-ends or false starts or pointless back-and-forth tugs. Those movements didn’t fail because people were dumb, but because they were human. We’re as error-prone as they were

We don’t always know why traditions work, and we’re always susceptible to our own biases. The most pernicious bias may be motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is the technical term for the way our mind deceives us into believing something is right and true when, really, it’s just something we like. Welfare programs and tax cuts always sound better when they benefit people on our side, and worse when they benefit our rivals.

Motivated reasoning means we’re automatically biased towards reforms that benefit us and against traditions that constrain us. If you combine that with the belief that all traditions should be evaluated by our individual perspectives, and the fact that traditions are tacit knowledge not explicit arguments, you have a recipe for people always pushing to change society in a way that benefits themselves. It won’t be out of cynicism, usually, but out of these systemic problems. They’ll be even more motivated to action by our limited historical perspective, where nearly all the change we study turns out well and nearly all reformers are heroes.

That’s good and bad. It’s good when it motivates justified reformers even when the odds are stacked against them. It’s bad when it motives foolish reformers when the odds are stacked against them because their ideas are terrible. It empowers change without regard to the quality of the change.

The main problem is that the reformers who succeed tend to be the ones who reflect the values of the powerful. Those with the most economic, political, or cultural sway pick reforms they like and dismiss reforms they dislike. It can be hard to accept that, because our myths of reform describe them as crusades taken by the oppressed against the oppressor, but in reality, if a crusade succeeds that means it had more power on its side than against it.

That may sound too cynical. Sometimes, reforms attract the powerful because they speak to a deeper moral truth. Perhaps abolitionists didn’t start with power on their side (although it was an attractive cause to industrialists) but became powerful because freedom for all is such a compelling ideal. Perhaps the reason we passionately embrace their legacy isn’t history being written by the victors but because that ideal is so meaningful that it still resonates with us.

But that surely doesn’t describe all reforms, especially when there are so many incentives to invent new reform movements. Motivated reasoning is a huge part of the moral reasoning of every human: if something is good for us, it will look a little more noble; if something is bad for us, it will look a little more wicked. By itself that’s enough to start crusades against morally neutral issues, but when you add in the social prestige attached to reform, the sense of purpose, and, sometimes, the financial incentives, the result is necessarily a lot of dubious reform efforts.

Even if we remove motivated reasoning from the picture and assume the reform is built on the best ideas, there’s still the practical argument against it. Think of the difference between communism and capitalism. Communists believed they could engineer a perfect economy, without all the waste and corruption of capitalism. They were proven wrong.

We may believe that we can engineer a perfect society, without all the ignorance and barbarism of tradition. We’re likely to be proven even more wrong than the communists. A top-down imposition of order on seeming chaos is appealing for those at the top, but it comes at the cost of the invisible merits of the chaos. The tacit knowledge of traditions has been proven by the continued existence and continual improvement of the societies they’ve created. Any new, untested idea has the potential to disrupt this process. The more radical the proposal the greater the risk.

That doesn’t mean all reforms are bad, and all reformers are deluded and self-interested. It does mean that the reforms come with hidden risks and should be evaluated with wisdom and patience, and that reformers should be held to a high moral standard. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a minister and a father. He had spent years contributing to society by tending to his flock and raising his family. He would have been a great man even before his successes in civil rights.

Contrast that with some campus radicals. They’ve only taken from society, never given, and are hostile to the ideas of patience and wisdom. They may still have good ideas – a stopped clock is right twice a day – but they do no credit to their cause. It’s easy to dismiss them as glory hounds who don’t understand their targets and don’t care about the consequences of their plans. Just as someone should learn medicine before trying to be a doctor, a would-be reformer needs to invest years into their subject before making a diagnosis. Society is much more complex than the human body.

In Politics, Intentions Don’t Matter

We spend too much time trying to read the hearts of our leaders. If they’re on our side, we want to know that they’re decent people. If they’re on the other side, we want proof that they’re terrible people. This is pointless.

Let’s travel to the early 20^th century in rural China. Chinese peasant farmers were a terribly exploited underclass. A famine in Hunan province pushed some over the edge, and they tried to protest. The protests were crushed. When they seized food, their leaders were caught and executed.

A young man saw this and knew it was wrong. He had grown up in the peasant class and knew from personal experience how badly they were treated. He swore to help the peasant farmers and end China’s corrupt, backwards, oppressive system.

That man was Mao Zedong. When he came to power, he implemented his vision of agricultural reform. It would replace a corrupt, oppressive bourgeois system of land ownership with a rational, forward-looking system. Exploitation would be replaced with solidarity.

His plan was called the Great Leap Forward, and it led to the deaths of between 25 million and 50 million Chinese farmers. The true extent of the horror still isn’t clear, because of the Chinese government’s efforts to cover it up. This was the legacy of Mao’s good intentions, personal experience of oppression, and moral courage.

Let’s look at a different man with a less idealistic vision for China. Deng Xiaoping was a practical man: he famously remarked “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice its is a good cat.” That quote got him in some trouble with people who did care about the color of the cat (i.e. whether the economy was truly socialist) instead of its mouse-catching ability (whether people were starving to death).

When Deng came to power, he reformed China’s economy. People were no longer limited to getting what the Communist Party allowed them to have; now the ambitious and greedy could earn as much as they were capable of. The boom of economic activity resulting from people trying to make a buck ended up lifting more than a billion people out of poverty, possibly the largest alleviation of human suffering in history.

The market economy created by Deng’s reforms wasn’t a welfare program, or a charity. It was an explosion of entrepreneurs who were just looking out for number one. Their self-interest had better consequences for the world than the works of any martyr or saint.

You’re Only as Good as You See Your Enemies

Looking for the worst in others will find the worst in you

There’s a brilliant idea in philosophy called “the principle of charity.” Despite how it sounds, it’s not about being compassionate to the poor, although that’s a good idea, too. It’s about given the benefit of the doubt to people you disagree with and understanding their arguments in the most fair and reasonable way.

Why’s that a good idea? Because our natural human tendency is to avoid thinking and being challenged, so we are always (subconsciously) on the lookout for excuses to dismiss other points of view. That’s why strawman arguments and their ilk are so appealing.

If we let ourselves ignore our critics, then we’re doomed to become parochial and intellectually flabby. We’d be like an industry that lobbies for tariffs so that it doesn’t have to compete. We need rivals challenging us to force us to learn and grow.

Intellectual Strength

Anyone can fall for bad ideas. The important thing isn’t to get all our beliefs right the first time (which is impossible), but to be able to figure out when we’re wrong and when we’re right. That’s why we need to take criticism seriously and fairly.

Take, for example, the prohibition of alcohol in America. In retrospect, it seems like an obviously bad idea. Outlawing drinking was just going to drive drinking underground, making a mockery of the law and giving a great deal of power to organized crime. How did prohibitionists miss this problem?

In part because it was easy for them to dismiss criticism. They could describe critics as rum soaked rabble who belonged to unpopular ethnic minorities like German or Spanish. Or they could call them greedy businessmen trying to make a profit off addicts.

Prohibitionists were never forced to take opposing arguments seriously, so they didn’t.

Or think of conspiracy theories. Criticism of these theories can be waved away as being part of a coverup, as being misleading evidence meant to lead people away from the conspiracy, or as the meaningless testimony of brainwashed sheep-people. Whatever contradicts the theory can be dismissed. Its why very, very implausible conspiracy theories can survive and spread.

One of the great advantages of the scientific method is that it has an openness to criticism built into it. If a theory isn’t falsifiable – meaning, if its proponents can wave away all criticism – it’s considered unscientific. A good theory must be open to refutation; if its proponents want to be taken seriously, they must at least pretend to know they’re fallible and could be proven wrong.

This generally isn’t true in our political arguments. Being a successful ideologue means you must make grand statements then find petty reasons to dismiss all criticism. The only acceptable way to admit fallibility is to say that maybe you’re not extreme enough or loud enough.

Moral Strength

It’s not enough to be a good critical thinker, of course. You also should be a good person. If you’re cynical about other people, especially people with different values than you, it’s going to be hard for you to push yourself to be a great person.

There’s a moral version of the “principal of charity.” It’s called the “principle of humanity,” and it basically means putting yourself on someone’s shoes when you’re judging their beliefs. Try to imagine why you would see those beliefs as noble or, at least, justifiable.

Take Richard Nixon. He’s an easy guy to demonize- for good reason! He did a lot of awful things that hurt individual people and undermined American democracy as a whole. That means he’s going to be a challenging test of our ability to apply the principle of humanity.

When would you be willing to break into a hotel to illegally spy on opposing politicians? Well, what if you thought the whole country was in danger of falling apart and being enslaved by the Soviet Union? That’s what Nixon was afraid of. It wasn’t a reasonable fear, so it didn’t justify his massive betrayal of trust (and the law), but now we can understand it as a human failing, not the failure of some cartoonish two-dimensional villain.

If we did things the easy way and simply saw Nixon as a power-hungry tyrant, then we’d never challenge ourselves to be better than that. We’d never learn a lesson from his fall. We’d never understand that our allies and leaders could easily be the next Nixon.

The ultimate example of this is when we see our enemies as Nazis. That’s not rare: every US President I can remember has been compared to Hitler. That’s poisonous for political debate, and even more poisonous to the individuals making the comparison. If they tell themselves they’re literally stopping a genocide and a world war, then they can justify anything. That’s not an exaggeration. There are people out there who justify lying, cheating, and even violence because they claim their enemies are the second coming of the Third Reich.

Disincentivizing Dissent

Dissent is the most important remedy to groupthink and the “madness of crowds.” As the scholar Cass Sunstein wrote, “Institutions that reward conformity are prone to failure to the extent that they do not do that [promote dissent]; institutions are far more likely to prosper if they create a norm of openness and dissent.”

If you try to stigmatize your enemies as Nazi communist racists, try to get them fired, or even physically assault them, then you’re creating a more conformist society. Unlike the other problems with trying to trivialize your opponents, this one doesn’t harm you personally so much as it harms the whole society.

When Josef Stalin was the leader of the USSR, he instituted widespread purges, where he rooted out and destroyed any corrupting, capitalist influences – meaning, anyone who displeased him. That benefited Stalin personally by strengthening his hold on power but destroyed the ranks of the leadership of the USSR. If he had seen his opponents as sharing his good motivations and intelligence, just differing on the details, the Soviet empire would have been better off.

Exceptions

I know we can’t always be charitable and humane. Perhaps we shouldn’t always be so. If your enemies are literally shipping off millions of people to concentration camps and invading and occupying foreign countries, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of common humanity and start treating them as mortal threats. When you go to actual, literal, physical war with other people, you would be foolish to try to empathize with their plight instead of defending yourself.

That’s not the situation we’re facing in the US, though. Not even close. Saying impolite words isn’t the same thing as kidnapping people and sending them to camps; welcoming immigration isn’t the same thing as military occupation. When people conflate disagreement with war, they’re just trying to justify their dumb ideas and bad behavior.