The Moral Load of Political Ideology and Identity

Social institutions are a system of behavioral and relationship patterns that are densely interwoven and enduring, and function across an entire society. They order and structure the behavior of individuals by means of their normative character. . . . . Social institutions are important structural components of modern societies that address one or more fundamental activity and/or specific function. Without social institutions, modern societies could not exist.

Regarding the 12% gender gap in the elections last month, the Washington Post writes about how one woman felt after leaving the GOP:

In Kansas last week, state Sen. Barbara Bollier left the GOP after more than four decades, citing Trump’s vulgar comments about women and issues such as the Medicaid expansion and reproductive health.

Bollier said she could no longer “stand up and say, ‘It’s fine to blindly support Trump Republicanism.’ ”

After changing parties, “now I can sleep better — it was a huge moral thing,” she said.

When an ideology comes into conflict over time with personal morals and identity, the conflict usually creates a major psychological burden.

Other women have left the GOP, in part due to ideological differences that are grounded in personal moral beliefs:

‘We are about to bury the rights of over 100 million American women under a heap of platitudes,’ protested Mary Dent Crisp, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Her colleagues assured her that the platform was nonbinding and that reproductive health services were not in danger.

But she was prescient. As pro-choice Republicans, we refuse to support a party that has rightly earned the labels anti-woman and anti-common sense. Our organization, the Republican Majority for Choice, the organization founded by Ms. Crisp in 1988, is shutting its doors. The big tent has collapsed for good.

In a recent blog post, Against Ideology, skeptic Steven Novella comments:

Our [the modern skeptical movement] belief is that you really should not have beliefs, only tentative conclusions. Essentially, our ideology is anti-ideology.

This is because scientific skepticism is not about any set of beliefs or conclusions. It is all about process, just like science itself – question, observe, analyze, repeat.

This approach is both empowering and freeing. One of the most common observations I hear from those who, after consuming skeptical media for a time, abandon some prior belief system or ideology, is that they feel as if a huge weight has been lifted from their shoulders. They feel free from the oppressive burden of having to support one side or ideology, even against evidence and reason. Now they are free to think whatever they want, whatever is supported by the evidence. They don’t have to carry water for their “team”.

At the same time, this is one of the greatest challenges for skeptical thinking, because it seems to run upstream against a strong current of human nature. We are tribal, we pick a side and defend it, especially if it gets wrapped up in our identity or world-view.

Novella points out the ‘huge weight’ that for some ideology imposes. That said, it needs to be understood that for many others, probably more other people, ideology imposes no significant moral burden but instead reinforces personal morals, self-identity and political identity. A reasonable guess is that Novella’s target audience is about 15-20% of Americans.

In this regard, political ideology is very much like religious ideology. Ideology is usually more comforting and self-affirming than troubling.

But amid all the dark free speech and discord, there may be a nascent reckoning is progress. Some people are coming to see the dark side of political ideology, which is a powerful social institution and as such is a powerful driver of political identity. Novella writes:

The end-game of all this is the conspiracy theory, which is the final retreat of the ideological scoundrel. A grand conspiracy theory is an all-consuming narrative that makes sense of the complex world through a paranoid lens, which explains away all disconfirming information as part of a conspiracy. Anything can be interpreted as consistent with the conspiracy, and if you point this out, that’s because you are part of the conspiracy, or at least a “sheeple” who is too blind or naive to see the Truth. It is a mental trap designed to prevent escape.

If there is a ray of light in all this, it’s that we are starting to see some backlash born of increased awareness of motivated reasoning, echo chambers, and conspiracy thinking. A recent essay by Jerry Taylor explains why he abandoned the libertarian ideological label:

I have abandoned that libertarian project, however, because I have come to abandon ideology. This essay is an invitation for you to do likewise — to walk out of the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” Ideology encourages dodgy reasoning due to what psychologists call “motivated cognition,” which is the act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you there. Worse, it encourages fanaticism, disregard for social outcomes, and invites irresolvable philosophical disputes. It also threatens social pluralism — which is to say, it threatens freedom.

Maybe a backlash against irrational political rhetoric and thinking is beginning to form. If so, it may be the case that decades of that irrationality, culminating with President Trump (so far), will turn out to be a silver lining in anotherwise black cloud. Time will tell if a backlash really is forming, and if so, just how far it will go.

If the backash is real and winds up being a powerful social force, there will be an ideological vacuum. Specifically, what else is there other than what there already is? An ideology that tries to be, for example, more liberal than liberalism, socialist than socialism, or conservative than conservatism? Arguably those options are all ideological dead ends because they have all been tried but there still is much discontent. If one accepts that reasoning, then what is there as a possibly viable, less irrational intellectual gas to fill the vacuum?

How about an anti-bias ideology?

The Sea Shepherd

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: An aggressive environmental movement

B&B orig: 12/17/18

Battery-Free Implantable Weight Loss Device

The journal Nature Communications has published a paper describing a small device that tricks the brain into believing the stomach is full after a small amount of food is eaten. The device has been tested in rats and must now be proven to work in humans before it can be sold to treat obesity. The device shown in panel d below is small and simple but ingenious.

The device is placed on the stomach and two gold-tipped wires are placed near the nerve that communicates stomach food status information to the brain (the vagus nerve). When the stomach churns in response to food, the device generates small electrical pulses that mimic the nerve's food status signals to the brain. Stomach churn causes the device to flex and that natural movement is the energy source for the electrical signal. Stomach movements are shown in panel a below and a trace of the resulting electrical signal is shown in panel b.

Since this has only been tested in rats, clinical trials will be necessary to demonstrate the device, or a variant of it, will be effective in fooling the human brain and lead to weight loss. Typically for drugs that are successful in mouse or rat testing, the chance of the drug ever receiving regulatory approval for marketing is about 0.1% or less. Most drugs that are reasonably effective in animals do not even make it into human testing for various reasons, e.g., toxicity, unknown mechanism of action and thus no obvious way to get regulatory approval, high cost of clinical trials, sometimes hundreds of millions, etc.

The odds of clinical success here are probably much higher, maybe about 40-50%, because (i) electrical signals are not drugs that have to act on a target molecule(s) which may or may not work the same way in humans as in animals, and (ii) similar but bigger, battery powered devices have been effective enough for marketing approval for treating obesity.

B&B orig: 12/20/18

Video Animation of Cell Division

This video is the best animation I am aware of about is going on in a cell when it is dividing. It is both trippy and creepy at the same time. All the little machines are marching around doing stuff we are completely unaware of, unless we watch the video.



B&B orig: 12/21/18

Things A Modern Authoritarian Regime Can Do

The New York Times reports that Hungary's far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, recently signed into law a provision that allows businesses to require workers to put in up to 400 hours of overtime per year. Prior law allowed companies to impose 250 hours of overtime/year, and gave them one year to pay extra for the overtime. The new law gives companies three years to pay, and in some cases the rate of pay may be the same as the normal hourly rate.

Street protests against the new law have been held, with protesters calling it a “slave law”, but Orban dismisses opposition as “hysterical shouting.”

Bogus logic: A trait that seems to be constant among authoritarians is their liberal use of false information and irrational logic or reasoning. That detachment from reality and reason makes it easy to justify their actions and to criticize political opposition. In the case of the Hungary’s law, the ruling party asserts that the law is good because “those who want to work more to work more, and those who want to earn more to earn more.”

That irrational argument fails to recognize the facts that (i) if people wanted to work and earn more, they could arrange that with their employer voluntarily, and (ii) make sure they received extra pay for the overtime they agreed to work. In other words, the protesters are right to oppose the law.

The NYT comments: “Since re-entering office in 2010, Mr. Orban has made a series of moves that have set off alarms among European allies and others in Hungary: curbing judicial independence, restricting news media freedom and plurality, and blatantly enriching his business allies.”

Presumably this law is intended to enrich Orban’s business allies, and maybe some non-allied businesses as well. Things like this exemplify the rightist authoritarian mindset. The main thing that societies have in their defense against authoritarian attacks on average people are strong independent institutions such as courts and law enforcement, a free press and significant political opposition. When those institutions fade away, tyrants and kleptocrats are mostly free to rule as they wish.

Interestingly, public opposition to other Orban authoritarian moves has been met with limited public opposition. Orban won election to office by vilifying immigration, which made him popular. This new overtime law provoked opposition presumably by affecting people in personal, obvious ways.

There is not much that is subtle or new about how modern day tyrants, oligarchs and kleptocrats go about their corrupt business. The game plan has been about the same for millennia. The question is stark and obvious: What form of government is better, honest democracy or corrupt authoritarianism?[1] Countries like Hungary, China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and others have made their answer clear, at least for the time being. They want corrupt authoritarianism, not honest democracy.

Footnote:
1. Another authoritarian trait is to claim to be honest and working for the public interest. Despite the incessant contrary claim, authoritarian regimes arguably are usually (~90% of the time) significantly more corrupt than honest, assuming there is a reasonably accurate and objective way(s) to evaluate levels of regime corruption. Authoritarianism and corruption seem to be fairly constant companions through history.

B&B orig: 12/23/18