gemcode

Diverse, liberal democracies are founded on the idea that different groups of people, with very different value systems, can coexist within a single society. This is a good thing, because it gives people freedom to choose the frameworks that work best to help them live their lives. But it does raise an important question. Namely, if I go out of my way to be good to other people, but those people have different value systems to me, then how can I trust that they won't just take advantage of my good nature?

Suppose Amal believes in a strong variant of Free Speech. No exceptions. Copyright should be abolished. That whole “‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” thing has a terrible history. “Hate speech” is too hard to define. And so on. Amal goes out of his way to defend the rights not just of people he finds abhorrent, but even of people who say terrible things to him directly. Sometimes that requires a lot of self-control on his part. It goes beyond belief in a particular principle to become an entire practice, a developing virtue into which he sinks a great deal of effort.

Now let's consider somebody with a very different set of beliefs. Let's call them Bill. Bill is a lot softer on the idea of free speech. He thinks perhaps there should be a "hate speech" exception. He definitely thinks that semi-private spaces should take advantage of their autonomy to restrict certain types of speech, even when that speech is still legally allowed. Amal would be horrified, but Bill is actually practicing some virtues of his own. He believes in not hurting people's feelings. To support that practice, he's started to get really into understanding people's feelings. This, in itself, requires a different sort of acceptance of diversity, as Bill develops his ability to understand and respect feelings that at first seem incomprehensible to him. Bill believes in protecting spaces where people can be vulnerable, because those are the spaces where he is able to develop these virtues of understanding and respect.

In one version of this story, Bill and Amal are good people who learn a lot from each other. Amal thinks Bill's ideas about who should be allowed to say what, and where, are terrible, but Amal also believes in Bill's right to say these things. Bill thinks that Amal has some dangerously open ideas about speech, but Bill also respects the strength of Amal's feeling on the matter, and would like to listen to what Amal has to say about why he believes what he believes. So, they each engage with each other according to the virtues they believe in, and in the process they become good examples for each other. Bill takes more interest in the extent to which free speech ideas can be important for allowing minority sentiments to be expressed. Amal starts to think about whether there could be a place for freedom of association to allow people to create very limited safe spaces. Bill notices the ways in which respect for one person's feelings might make you shut down another person's heartfelt sentiment, and tries to avoid this pitfall of the compassionate virtue he is developing. Amal tries to incorporate genuine respect for the feelings of offended people into his free speech defenses, in the hopes of winning more people over. They never do stop being in two separate camps, but their views gain nuance and their virtues gain depth. They become better people from encountering one another.

In another version of this story, the opposite happens. Amal notices that Bill isn't respecting freedom of speech at all. Bill notices that Amal is dismissive of the feelings of people who are hurt by other people's speech. Both of them decide that they can "tolerate anything except intolerance" and suspend practice of their respective virtues when dealing with one another. After all, if Bill doesn't respect Amal's free speech, why should Amal respect Bill's free speech? And if Amal isn't respectful of Bill's feelings, then why should Bill be respectful of Amal's feelings?

After some time, Bill, having seen that Amal doesn't defend Bill's speech, concludes that Amal's free speech ideas are basically worthless. Meanwhile, Amal determines that Bill's compassion is worth exactly zero where Amal is concerned. Both of them become worse people, who aren't consistent in the virtues they advocate and who don't see any kind of worth in the other's sense of virtue at all.

In an ideologically and culturally diverse society, that initial calculation of "You don't recognise this virtue, so why should I practice it towards you?" is deeply, deeply dangerous. There will always be people who don't recognise a particular virtue, in the form that you understand it. But sometimes they have some other version of it -- deeply flawed, no doubt, from your perspective -- that they're still beholden to. And if you drop your version, and they drop their version, then the only thing that happens is that society as a whole becomes less and less virtuous overall.

One might, of course, try to advocate for societies that don't need virtue, except as measurable outputs that you can hold people to. Build a capitalist meritocracy, reward the people who play by the rules, and forget trying to cultivate the squishy subjective things that you can't even fully define, and that vary so widely between subcultures.

One might also look at liberal, multi-cultural democracies and diagnose them with an incurable degeneracy, a lack of social trust that inevitably leads to the decay of all personal virtue.

I will take neither of these. Virtue is at least partially its own reward, and we should cultivate it even in its unmeasurable subjectivity. A society that is so beholden to objective measurement that it fails to leave room for subjective judgement will fall to pieces on the blade of Goodhart's law. A society that attempts to enforce a single subjective vision will blind itself to the truth and terrorize its citizens. Diverse subjectivity is the only humane and sensible option.

What this means, inevitably, is that I am going to have to extend virtues to people who aren't extending those exact virtues back to me. I'm going to have to correct, continuously, for the perception that I am extending more trust than those who are different to me (whether I actually am or not). I'm going to have to cultivate virtue for its own sake.

Fortunately for me, "virtue for its own sake" is the best way to cultivate virtue, anyway.

When my husband and I got married, we both sort of felt that we wanted to use the "traditional" set of marriage vows. Not that we could have told you exactly which tradition. We would probably both have explained the idea as "You know, 'to have and to hold, in sickness and in health.' That stuff."

So we went looking for traditions to borrow.

Turns out, "that stuff" is old. How old? Well, the vows to be said by a husband and wife are some of the few English passages in the Use of Sarum, a liturgical handbook written mainly in Latin that dates from the 11th century, borrowing heavily from the French rites imported by the recent Norman invasion. Wikipedia quotes the husband's vows as follows:

The wife's vows are nearly the same, except for one additional clause.

This awes me, it really does. Nearly a millennium, and people in contexts so different as to be nearly unimaginable to one another are making vows that frame the course of their lives in almost exactly the same words.

Of course, not everyone does use these same words. Various tweaks, alterations, deletions and insertions have been made by all sorts of people over the intervening years. The first 1549 Book of Common Prayer adds in “to love and to cherish,” for example. This addition has been kept in most subsequent variations, even though (as my husband noted when trying to memorise the vows we eventually decided on) it breaks the pattern a little: it's still a pair, but it's a pair of similar things, rather than a pair of contrasting things. Speaking of pairs, the whole paired formulation is very appropriate for a marriage, is it not?

In modern times, it's common for spouses to write their own vows. This is in keeping with a more modern view of the forms in which we live. We are very conscious, these days, of the ways in which holding people to older forms can restrict their growth. Forms can deform us. They can bend us into shapes that cause us pain. But we still need forms -- our relationships still need structure, and our personalities still crave the definition of identity. Making new forms of our own is one solution to this problem.

Building a form from scratch is not the only option, though. We can shop around, make alterations, import the wisdom of our ancestors where it seems good and quietly ignore it when it seems bad.

You've probably already guessed that the extra clause to be said by the wife involves obedience, and you'd be right. The wording in the Use of Sarum is "to be bonoure and buxum in bed and at bord," which means, roughly, "to be good-natured and obedient in bed and at the table," albeit with much better alliteration. Later versions, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer (which drew heavily on the Use of Sarum when it was first written for the newly-created Anglican Church), add "to love and to cherish" for the husband, with "to love, cherish and obey" for the wife. But in modern times, couples married in the Anglican tradition have a choice as to whether to include a vow of obedience on the wife's part or not. And you won't be surprised to learn that, while borrowing heavily from Anglican versions of these vows, my husband and I chose not.

Still, disagreeing with older forms isn't the only reason people sometimes choose to write their own wedding vows, these days. Another reason is that, in modern times, borrowing someone else's words can be seen as insincere. Surely, if you meant what you said, you would say it in your own words, instead of just reciting something written by somebody else?

In my opinion, one way for a form to be a good form is if this isn't true. The wonderful thing about "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health" is that it is a form that can be inhabited sincerely. It doesn't promise perfection. It merely promises fidelity through imperfection. In its own way, it's more modest than some of the self-written vows out there. Yet it is still bold enough for the purpose.

Explaining what marriage involves is hard. I respect people who can write their own vows, but for myself I really don't think I could do better than the traditional version in form or in content. Indeed, I am amused to note that even some parts of various traditional forms punt a little on trying to describe what a marriage really is. When asking the couple to take their vows, the Use of Sarum tells the priest to translate, from the Latin, the phrase sicut sponsus debet sponsam. That is, “as a husband ought to do for a wife.” You know, husband stuff. Husband things, that a husband would do!

As we get further from the Anglican or Catholic traditions, many versions of the marriage ritual simply have people vow to “take someone as a husband/wife” with little or no further explanation. The traditional Quaker vow is:

There are also plenty of traditions in which the husband and wife do not recite vows at all. This includes most Eastern Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and, traditionally, Jews (although in modern times many Jewish couples do choose to recite vows). The Confucian equivalent of vows is the point in the ceremony where the couple pay formal respect to their deities, their ancestors, their families, and each other.
In contrast to these simpler promises, the Hindu "Seven Steps” or Saptha Padhi is a beautifully detailed list of vows about ways in which the couple will care for one another. If that were my tradition, I would adopt it gladly.

I do not think I would have wanted to use Hindu vows without some personal connection to them, though. Which brings us to another point about traditions. Traditions can be a way to recognise community. I don't begrudge people their individualist choices, when planning their weddings – goodness knows my husband and I had a few of those, too – but we were basically agreed that while there is definitely a part of our marriage that is just between us, the whole point of a wedding is the way in which it involves the community in that relationship. We wouldn't need a party if it was just between the two of us. We're quite capable of celebrating the two of us on our own!

Forms can gain meaning by repetition. Each use echoes the previous ones. Of course, this is for some people another reason to break with old forms (if they want to declare that their marriage will not be like that of their parents, for example). But forms can also be reclaimed from bad uses in the past. And, privileged as I am to be the child of a functional marriage, for me it felt right to echo tradition while quietly tweaking things wherever I felt like it.

One of the thrilling things, for me, about the traditional Sarum-derived vows was their comparatively simple language. I liked the idea of being able to say something that I could have written myself, if only I were that clever. Something simple, and sincere, and without unnecessary ornament. This includes the wording of "tyl deth us departe." The odd-sounding modern wording ("til death us do part," or sometimes “til death do us part,” because that's how wording can change around over time!) actually came from what was once a much more ordinary-sounding sentence. "Departe" is from an old French word (Normans, remember?) that simply means "to divide" or "to part." Upon learning this, my own inclination was to re-word this phrase into a simple "until death parts us."

My husband disagreed! He liked "until death do us part," thank you very much! Just as it is possible to love a tradition for the ways in which it feels natural, so also we can love traditions for being unnatural -- for the ways in which their odd specificities mark an act as special. "Until death do us part" is one of those. It's not a phrasing anyone would use deliberately. It's a linguistic quirk that arose by historical accident, as "depart" ceased to have a sensible meaning in this context, and people replaced it with the version they were hearing as it was said.

Accident or no, it may be that we have kept this version because it really does add something. The word "do" adds emphasis. You could hear it as "until death really parts us (because nothing else will)" or even as "until death really parts us (because even death might take a while to really do so, as we mourn)."

In the end, my husband and I compromised a little bit on the wording. The main portion of our vows was lifted from "A New Zealand Prayer Book," which was assembled by the Anglican Church here in New Zealand: traditional, but local. That's as it should be, in my view. Tradition is all very well, but it needs to be able to be adapted to circumstance. And thus it was that I (atheist, but from Anglican family) and my husband (very liberal Episcopalian) were married, and vowed to take each other:

Such is marriage.

 Sadly, The Atlantic is shuttering its members' forums. Before everything I've written there has disappeared, I wanted to copy this particular post to my blog for posterity.

This post was written in response to this article in The Atlantic, which posits that American elementary education has gone wrong when it starts to over-value the general concept of "reading comprehension" (which allows kids to learn for themselves, in theory) above the idea of simply teaching kids about a wide variety of things:

Many teachers have told me that they’d like to spend more time on social studies and science, because their students clearly enjoy learning actual content. But they’ve been informed that teaching skills is the way to boost reading comprehension. Education policy makers and reformers have generally not questioned this approach and in fact, by elevating the importance of reading scores, have intensified it. Parents, like teachers, may object to the emphasis on “test prep,” but they haven’t focused on the more fundamental problem. If students lack the knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passages on reading tests, they won’t have an opportunity to demonstrate their skill in making inferences or finding the main idea. And if they arrive at high school without having been exposed to history or science, as is the case for many students from low-income families, they won’t be able to read and understand high-school-level materials.

My post in response was:

I wonder if part of the problem here is related to the way we value abstraction. In particular, I’m tempted to relate this to something I see when teaching mathematics at a tertiary level.

Modern higher math is greatly influenced by formalist philosophy. Formalist mathematics had its most influential proponent in David Hilbert, who is famously quoted as having remarked that, in geometry, “One must be able to say at all times – instead of points, straight lines, and planes – tables, chairs, and beer mugs.” Which is to say, the form of a mathematical statement, along with its logical structure, is considered more important than the actual content. To be maximally content-neutral, one specifies as little as possible in order to make ones logical deductions. Accordingly, those deductions will then be able to be applied to multiple situations at once, provided that those situations satisfy the given (minimal) specifications.

Confused? Probably. My statement is in desperate need of an example. Here’s one.

We quite like “undoing” functions. E.g. we can “undo” multipling by 3 by dividing by 3. We can “undo” squaring a positive number by taking its square root. But some functions can’t be “undone”. For example, if we’re allowed to have negative and positive numbers, then we can’t “undo” squaring, because we don’t know if the original number was positive or negative before we squared it. We would have got the same answer either way (e.g. (-2) squared is 4, just like 2 squared), so there’s no way to know which number we ought to go back to.

We can generalise this. If the thing we did sometimes gives the same answer from two different start points, then we can’t undo it reliably. This is the abstract statement; the case of squaring both positive and negative numbers is just one example.

Having found such an abstract statement, we are in a potentially powerful position. We can now talk reliably about things that we know very little about. For example, if you tell me that when you beer mug a table the result is exactly the same as when you beer mug a chair then I can tell you that the action beer mug cannot be mathematically “undone”. I don’t even need to know what it would mean to beer mug a chair in order to confidently come to that conclusion.

This is fun and powerful and also wildly, wildly overrated.

Let me quote myself again, from above:

To be maximally content-neutral, one specifies as little as possible in order to make ones logical deductions. Accordingly, those deductions will then be able to be applied to multiple situations at once, provided that those situations satisfy the given (minimal) specifications.

This is an abstract statement. And if you’re not well-versed in formalist mathematics, it probably looked like gibberish to you when you first read it above. It might even still read like gibberish to you. In theory, this abstraction is “superior” to the single example that I gave afterwards. After all, it is applicable to many millions of other examples, all at once. But actually, if you haven’t seen any of those examples, it’s a pretty useless statement.

Understanding an abstraction is a more powerful than understanding a single example. But abstractions cannot replace examples. Indeed, I personally find it impossible to understand an abstraction even superficially unless I already know at least one example. Deep understanding requires many examples. So it’s not enough to simply teach the abstractions, no matter how reliable and beautiful they may be.

Mathematicians tend to think that abstractions can be true in isolation, even without the presence of examples, and they may even be right about that, but human beings still generally find that abstractions cannot be understood in isolation. Failing to understand this distinction can lead to some incredibly bad mathematics teaching at the tertiary level.

To return to teaching reading to elementary schoolers…

It’s a wonderful skill to be able to learn things from reading. In particular, strong and experienced readers can learn things by reading that are completely outside their experience to date. A good reader can sometimes infer the meaning of a word just from context, even if they’ve never seen it before.

But it would be a mistake to jump from this to the idea that people don’t need to read about things that are within their experience, and for which they have examples ready to hand. On the contrary, the ability to read outside ones accustomed context is obtained by having read within a wide variety of well understood contexts.

That is, just as abstraction depends on examples, so too deep reading skill depends on knowledge about a wide variety of types of content.

Privilege, in the social justice sense of the word, is an extremely broad concept. In this post, what I want to do is to draw out specific sub-elements of the concept of privilege that are particularly relevant to rationalists -- or, more broadly, to people who care deeply about seeking the truth by listening to a wide range of ideas, whether those people feel themselves to be "rationalists" or not.

I have two main purposes, here. The first is to draw more people into the habit of using those elements of the concept of privilege that they feel are relevant to them. I'd like to isolate useful ideas that people can employ without needing to buy wholesale into everything that "privilege" has come to mean. My second purpose is to enable more efficient steelmanning by people who have found themselves in an argument with someone who is accusing them of privilege. Not all privilege accusations are good argumentation in themselves, but the scrupulous debater who wishes to check, very carefully, whether their opponent might have a point should (I hope) at least be able to quickly run through some of the things I list below, in order to check whether they might apply to the situation at hand.

This post is deliberately constructed to lead you down the rabbit hole, as it were. I'm going to start with the most neutral, individualist formulation I know, and develop more controversial and/or societally-based arguments as I go along. At some point, you may find yourself thinking "Nope, this is where I get off the train." If so, that is fine. I'm not advocating anything here that I don't find convincing, myself, but nor do I expect everyone to be as convinced by these things as I am.

A. Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience

Let's start with the familiar notion of an argumentative fallacy. Consider the following arguments:

• The police have always treated me well as long as I follow instructions. So if they police treated this person badly, they must not have followed instructions.
• I am rarely disturbed by anything strangers say to me when I am out walking. People who complain about street harassment are obviously over-reacting.
• My social circle functions fine without belief in God. People who say religion is essential to the society where they live do not know what they are talking about.

The common thread, here, is one of people placing undue weight on their own experiences. This is a really common thing for people to do. It's basically where the typical mind fallacy comes from. Privilege, though, is more like the typical life fallacy. Most people are basically like me, right? Their experiences mostly mirror mine? Well, no, not always. This is obvious in the abstract, but obscure in the specific. It's just so natural to fill in the gaps in whatever story you are being told with whatever you think is most likely, and your sense of what is likely is frequently going to be based on your own experience, because what else would you use?

Because this argumentative fallacy emerges out of an ordinary element of human information processing, it's common in everyday life, even when no sort of debate is taking place. For example, my husband once remarked to me on the awkwardness of, say, being on a train, and seeing something interesting in the pattern of a woman's skirt, and then realising that you are staring and having to just carefully not look anywhere near that person for the rest of the train ride.

I shrugged. "I generally just say 'nice skirt' and then it's all fine," I told him.

He had to actually point out to me that this wasn't an option for him. It doesn't come across the same way if you're not female. This was obvious, once he had pointed it out! I didn't see it, because it's normal to assume that people mostly experience things the way that you do, and most people need a reason to stop doing this; I am no exception. Absent other information, I will interpolate my own experiences into the stories people tell me about themselves, even in cases where this is wildly inappropriate.

This is the fallacy of Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience. We all do it. Best to be aware of it, and to memorise a few of the most common ways that your experience might differ from others, but you're never going to get rid of it completely. Might as well just thank people when they point out that, oops, there you go again.

B. The Insufficiently General Social Circle

Being overly confident in the generality of your own experience can be a problem, but it's generally a fixable one. Other people are different to you, fair enough. Not hard to understand, once it's pointed out.

Far worse are the problems that arise when the Insufficiently General Personal Experience in question is not just yours. You and everyone you know has a driver's license! Everybody has a driver's license! Requiring a driver's license in order to vote is just not that difficult! Look, we'll even put in a few extra ID options for those weirdos who never bothered to learn or are, like, I guess, blind or something? But how many of those people can there be? I have no idea what those people could even be like. Surely it can't be that hard for them to sort this out.

The situation where your experience suggests one thing as most likely, but your friend's experience suggests something else, is not so bad. Your friend can, hopefully, call you on your false assumption. You are likely to listen to your friend. They may even be able to fill you in on enough details for you to understand exactly what is going on.

On the other hand, when the only people who don't share your experience in this instance are not your friends, there are a wide variety of new problems that arise. The first and most obvious is that it's quite possible that no-one will ever call you on the false assumption that you are making. There will simply be no-one to tell you otherwise. A second problem that can happen is that, even when somebody does call you on your false assumption, all your friends will tell you that the person calling you on it is clearly wrong. They share your false assumption, and will back you up on it.

A third problem is that the difference in question may not seem simple, normal and understandable. On the contrary, the idea that someone might not share this part of your experience might already be enough to push them outside the circle of people you can easily empathise with. This can be a problem on an emotional level, where you instinctively double down on your error on grounds that if someone doesn't share something so basic to your experience, how could they possibly be worth your time? It can also be a problem in a more detached sort of way, where you find that changing that element of the picture in your mind leads to a new picture that just doesn't make sense.

Sometimes, even when you know that your social circle is insufficiently general, it can be hard to know where to go from there. Consider, for example, Charles Murray's How Thick Is Your Bubble? quiz. This was included in his 2012 book Coming Apart, which I confess I have not read, but the quiz was everywhere in the media coverage. At its heart, the argument this quiz is making comes across, to me, as a straightforward privilege argument: "Look at all these people whose experiences you and your social circle do not share! This probably means that there are a lot of important things that you do not understand about them." Makes sense. Good privilege argument. No controversy so far, on my end. Now what?

People have a lot of different answers to the now what. At the extreme end, I've seen people basically follow this up with "So you should immediately implement my political goals without asking further questions, because you obviously could not possibly understand things well enough to contradict me." This is impractical, not least because it is very, very easy to completely fail to understand two different groups of people who want contradictory things, and obviously you cannot simply defer to them both. Fortunately, you have other options.

At minimum, you can quietly note the gap in your knowledge, and fill it when/if the opportunity arises. I think you should always do at least this much. In theory, noting the gap in your knowledge should stop you from rudely interrupting people who try to tell you about it, which may make filling the gap a little easier than it would otherwise be.

If you want to go further, you can actively seek out more information. Read a book written from the perspective you're trying to understand, or a blog post, or an article. Learn some surrounding context rather than focusing on a single issue. The aim here is not, of course, to understand everyone in the world so well that you will never misunderstand anybody ever again. That's blatantly impossible. But even a little additional context can transform "This change to the picture makes no sense, how would that even work?" with "Okay, if they're saying this, then that probably has a bit to do with this other thing, which might make sense if I also include this." It's not that you stop making mistakes, it's that you can stop being completely lost.

C. Not Everyone is Participating In The Debate On The Same Terms

If you're reading this, then you may know I'm a feminist. If you know I'm a feminist, you may also have noticed that I've left an obvious question open.Most people have some women within the circle of people that they know. How is it possible, then, for the systemic, social type of privilege fallacy to arise when men try to understand women? If almost nobody has an insufficiently general social circle, in this regard, does that mean that the individualist type of Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience is the only potential problem, here?

The composition of your social circle isn't the only thing that can distort the range of viewpoints you hear. Other things that can have this effect include:

• Some things are really hard to talk about. You probably know someone who is a survivor of child sexual abuse of some sort. You may not know that they are a survivor of child sexual abuse, however. Even if you do know this, they still may not call you on it if you make some sort of privileged assumption that someone who had endured sexual abuse as a child would be less likely to make. That would involve disagreeing with you on a subject that is likely to be highly emotional for them. This can be understandably hard.
• Some types of difference are stigmatized. A disabled person may not want to highlight the things they cannot do, for fear that people might react with pity or disgust. Instead, they may put up with problems that your false assumptions inadvertently cause for them, in exchange for being treated more normally by you.
• Relatedly, people who have less social power than you may not have the social standing to correct false assumptions that you make about what their lives are like. Women may have learned that seeming angry in any way will make people take them less seriously. Black people may have learned that expressing disagreement can cause them to be seen as angry or rebellious even when they are perfectly calm. They may choose not to speak up for these reasons. Or, they may in fact speak up, and you and the rest of your social circle may in fact dismiss them for precisely these reasons.
• Sometimes, the people who have historically been privileged just got there first, and wrote all the books, and that can seem like it settles it. The picture has been drawn, and everybody knows it looks like this. (What do you mean, that picture is wrong in places? That can't be right. Somebody would have said.) This can lead to a self-reinforcing silence. Anyone who speaks up will be attacked by people who have got used to the status quo. Better not to say anything.

By now, this might seem like a pretty broad taxonomy of privileged ignorance and the things that can drive it. I confess I'm quite proud of how much I've been able to include. But I promised to take you down a rabbit hole, and that really does mean that, if I can, I ought to keep going until logic itself starts moving in curves. 

D. The Same Terms Don't Affect Everyone In The Debate Equally

So far, it seems to me that everything I've said fits quite nicely into a fairly standard rationalist viewpoint. Include these potential blind spots into your understanding of the world, and make filling them part of your rationalist project. That's all.

That's not all. Here's the thing. Rationality is biased. To be clear, I don't mean that the ideal, perfect form of reasoning to which rationality might theoretically aspire is biased. I mean that rationality, as we understand it, is biased. The tried, tested heuristics of good reasoning by which rationalists try to operate have privilege built into their very core.

After all, how the heck did it take us this long to see how utterly, utterly common it is to reason from insufficiently general personal experience? Why wasn't this codified earlier? Why wasn't there a word for it? How did we end up in this situation? Somebody says "privilege" and a few decades later a whole freaking reef of concepts have grown onto this one word, finally this one, solid word, that has to carry so much with such variety because there's nothing else we can use to refer to all of these weird and wonderful and, yes, really common phenomena that couldn't be seen because they couldn't be said!

What else don't we see? What else don't we say? Emotion, that's what. "Emotional" arguments are traditionally excluded from rational discussion for perfectly good reasons, such as the fact that some types of emotion can indeed make it harder to listen to people you disagree with. Unfortunately, however, if you want to reason about human beings, you do have to have some emotional data about the sorts of feelings that people feel under particular circumstances. If direct emotional expression is disallowed, where does this emotional data come from? From personal experience, that's where. Insufficiently general personal experience, most of the time. And here we are.

That's not even getting into the more superficial constructs around rationality. Like, say, the fact that we construct things around the idea of a 'debate' at all, instead of something more like a discussion. Does everything have to be based on a conflict model? It seems to me that we could use some more co-operative models of rationality -- not to supplant the conflict models entirely, just to expand on them. There are plenty of careful thinkers out there who don't like conflict much. Frankly, looking at the state of the internet, we could stand to include them a bit more.

Yes, folks, I am all-out suggesting that we take rationality apart.

Yes, I know this has costs.

The problem is, we're already paying those costs. The problems I've pointed out, here? They're well known, along with plenty more like them, and right now people are using those problems as reasons why they shouldn't listen to people they disagree with, why they shouldn't bother trying to convince anyone, why rationality is useless and a sham.

They are not entirely wrong. That's the problem. We can lament the demise of enlightenment values all we want, we can decry "illiberalism" all we want, but if we really want to shore up our position, we've got to get better foundations than we have now. We've got to figure out precisely what it is we need to keep from that earlier model, and find new ways to get those things that take critiques of rationality into account.

Well, that's my current project, anyway. It's pretty fun! But if this journey has long since taken you beyond the realms where you would ever want to live, then I hope you at least enjoyed the ride. Thanks for reading.

What rules of politeness should we have when discussing political or intellectual issues? Consider the following:

• Offensiveness is irrelevant. Only truth matters.
• Allowing offensiveness systematically excludes people who are more vulnerable, thereby biasing the discussion.
• Outgroup statements are more likely to seem offensive than ingroup statements, so disallowing offensiveness also biases the discussion.
• To lower the temperature, we should disallow emotion from our rational debates.
• You can't usefully discuss matters involving human beings if no acknowledgement of emotion is allowed. Disallowing "emotion" just favours noncontroversial emotions over controversial ones, since noncontroversial emotions do not need to be vividly expressed in order to be understood and taken as meaningful.

I could go on. The truth is, there is no set of rules of debate that is unbiased, not even "no rules at all".

Historically, a set of intellectual "rules of debating" did exist in the Western enlightenment tradition, and it was useful. Two people who had never met, and who had very different viewpoints, could nevertheless hold an intellectual discussion on a shared footing of "no personal attacks" and "use reason not emotion" and so on. But the reason that system broke down was precisely because it was flawed and, yes, biased, and its purported universality made that bias so much worse than it would otherwise have been.

Within feminist communities, there arose the idea of the "safe space" in which ideas and feelings could be expressed on vulnerable topics. For example, a woman could come to the discussion and say "my boss did this, and I felt violated" without being immediately required to voice a full-fledged defense and definition of sexual harassment as a concept. The notion was a powerful one. It allowed painful truths to be incubated, to be given time to grow definition and defensibility before being forced to face the outside world.

As a tool for broadening the discussion, safe spaces are invaluable precisely because they broaden the types of discussion that can take place. But safe spaces broaden the discussion by means of a local narrowing, by disallowing certain types of criticism. Indeed, a rule that makes a space "safe" for some people may in fact sometimes make the space less safe for others.

There is no universal safe space, nor should we try to make one. To do so would be to engage in a new version of the fallacy that made the old "rules of debate" so infuriating. "If you can't make your point in this safe space, then it must be hateful and wrong" is just as false as "If your viewpoint can't survive these debate rules, then it must be irrational."

The only way out is to allow multiple sets of rules. That way, truths that are unsayable in one context can still be said in another. Other people can then respond, and the ideas can have the opportunity to be refined or critiqued from the local viewpoint. If we have multiple fora, we can have a system where pretty much anything can be said somewhere.

Ah, but doesn't this just give rise to multiple "bubbles" in which people only hear viewpoints close to them? Well, yeah. I think that's the system we currently have, to be honest. In attempting to break free of the more universal rules that existed previously, a whole set of justifications for narrower rules has been built up. Some of those justifications are even pretty good! But it's given rise to a situation where large numbers of people don't even try to listen to differing viewpoints. Worse still, even if they did try, there are relatively few communities that treat engaging with an outsider as worthwhile in the first place.

The thing we need, and don't have enough of, is overlap. We need ideas to travel from one community to another, changing (and hopefully improving) as they go. In order for this to happen, we need at least some communities to take breadth of represented viewpoints as a local virtue that they try to encourage. Currently, this is rare outside of rationalism, and that's a problem, because a single broad tent is not enough. We need multiple broad civilities in order to ensure that many different types of people have the opportunity to engage with people who are coming at things from a radically different angle.

It is my hope that explicitly acknowledging the usefulness of a pluralist notion of civility will help with this.  When we try to argue for a set of norms that are open to enough viewpoints to plausibly be universal, we fail over and over, giving rise to more and more insular communities. If we argue instead for breadth and overlap, we are at least arguing for something that can be achieved. We should encourage people to enter discussions in good faith even if they disagree somewhat with the local norms of engagement, knowing that norms should differ from forum to forum, so it's not wrong to allow different sets of norms to stand.

Here, then, is my (local) pluralist manifesto.

• Respect that discussion norms are local. Don't try to make them universal.
• Be part of the overlap. Belong to more than one community.
• Encourage other people to recognise that discussion norms can and should differ from place to place.
• Encourage other people to recognise that broad discussion norms are incredibly valuable and should be nurtured wherever they are compatible with community aims.

Andrew Sullivan says some things I've sort of agreed with for a while, some things I definitely disagree with, and one thing that articulates something new that I hadn't put my finger on before: 


As a New Zealander, I am very much in favour of constitutional monarchies, precisely because a monarch can symbolise a country in an apolitical way. I look at the struggle Americans have when choosing a president, the tension between "Who represents us?" and "Who speaks for us?" and "Who will implement policies that I agree with?" Putting all three of those things in the hands of the same person was a mistake. A country needs someone to articulate who they are and what they stand for without that being explicitly a means to a political agenda.

A country is not just its politics. Indeed, we'd be pretty messed up if it was! Politics will always be somewhat grimy stuff. But nationality is an identity, and identities are real and important things. Being able to locate a central identity for a country that isn't allied to a specific political cause is really important. A figurehead can help with that.

Now, I will freely admit that both Britain and New Zealand have (completely different) reasons why they might not want the Queen to be that figurehead. The British note that she's pretty expensive. New Zealanders pretty much get her for free (yay!), but on the other hand, she's distant and not really one of us (boo). We have a local Governor General who is generally apolitical, albeit nominated by the government before being confirmed by the Queen. If we ever become a republic, we'll probably re-work that role somehow, and there are definitely ways of doing that which could work well.

Still, for now, if some of my fellow New Zealanders want to direct their nationalist energy towards a distant but glorious figure who has absolutely no politics whatsoever, well, I'm very happy for them to do that, and I'd be hesitant about changing that just in case we end up with nationalism of a more pernicious kind...

I was recently reading Constance Grady's article on Vox about the inadequacy of some of our language around sexual harassment and assault:


Slime was the guy in his 40s who used to put his hands on my waist to unnecessarily "position me" before I walked on stage. Slime was the man who leered at me when I adjusted my very annoying bra strap when I was only twelve. Slime was knowing that any other boy could become fixated on me any time he wanted, and treat me just as badly as nursery rhyme guy, and I wouldn't have any defenses against it because ignoring him wouldn't make it stop.

It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned that sexual harassment could describe some of these situations. It definitely described some of the later iterations of nursery rhyme guy -- he went with nursery rhymes at fourteen, but by the time we were both sixteen he had graduated to making repeated explicit comments in the hope that he'd get a reaction to that. I wonder, in retrospect, whether I could have demanded that a responsible adult make him stop sexually harassing me, or whether I would simply have been fobbed off in the way that teachers like to fob off complaints so that they won't have to deal with them.

Sexual harassment is a very useful phrase. But I think Constance Grady is right that it's insufficient. It's very clinical and serious. We need clinical and serious words to describe these things, but we also need words that are not clinical or serious.

Skeevy describes some of these things. Creepy describes a few more of them. Indeed, it's interesting to note that the definition of the word creepy has been hotly contested in many of the same ways that, as Grady notes, sexual harassment has been contested -- and with far less justification. After all, a person inquiring after the precise meaning of sexual harassment may simply be asking for clarification of a new rule. This can be done in bad faith -- as when, for example, the rule is interpreted in the most uncharitable way possible in order to discredit it -- but it can also be done in good faith.

The fuss around creepy has less justification. There's no law against creepiness. You can suffer social consequences for it, of the "if you make people feel bad feelings, they will try to exclude you" variety, but that is all. Yet there are plenty of people who are willing to say that "branding" a man as creepy is unfair, that it's just punishing the socially awkward, that there need to be criteria before you can use that word, criteria that won't sweep up "innocent people".

Internet feminism has responded to this demand with impressive perceptiveness, and creepiness now sort of has a new definition as a result. It now frequently refers specifically to the practice of manipulating social conventions in order to get away with doing things that make people uncomfortable. True creepiness is a form of coercion, drawing on other people's politeness and goodwill as armour to shield yourself from having to truly respect others, and something can "feel creepy" if it is starting to feel like it might be an instance of this.

It's great that we have a word for this particular sort of behaviour. But what creepy used to refer to was, well, a sort of nebulous crawling feeling. It was a feeling that could arise in a number of situations -- notably, of course, the one above, but also other situations where the person involved might not even mean to do anything wrong. It could even refer to outright prejudice, such as the classism that makes visibly impoverished people just feel sort of ... wrong. And, of course, because it had this breadth, it was an ineffective weapon at stopping these genuinely wrong behaviours that it also referred to, and that's why it had to change. Creepy isn't a feeling any more. It's a specific behaviour.

We still don't have a word for the feeling. You know the one. Slime. And I don't think we'll ever get a word for that feeling that can stand uncontested until we are willing to let women's feelings about sexual violence and sexual bullying stand uncontested without needing justification. "This boy touched me on the cheek" is never going to win anyone over as a description of sexual harassment. Nor was this boy really creepy in the sense of pretending not to be coercive. I mean, he was bullying me pretty openly. But the point I want to make is, I know what I felt. I felt slime. And someday we'll have a word for that, as a society. Not a word for a specific behaviour, just a word for the feeling it induces.

I don't think we should jump the gun on this one, and try to make up a word and promote it. Teenage girls are excellent language innovators. They are also the group most likely to feel slime. They make up words for slime on the regular. When we're ready, as a society, to hear them, one of those words is going to make it big without the need for any sort of campaign.

Work on hearing girls and women. The word will take care of itself.