Sliding toward fascism

In psychologist Jonathan Haidt's seminal talk "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," he makes an intriguing statement:  "The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve, it's really precious -- and it's really easy to lose."

While I buy Haidt's basic premise -- and you should watch the talk, his claims are fascinating and well backed up by evidence -- I can't help but feel that a significant fraction of today's self-styled conservatives have completely gone off the rails.  True conservatism entails a respect for the rule of law, and protection of the interests of one's own community, state, and country.

In the last few weeks, this has been replaced by a reckless disregard for anything but consolidation of power at any cost.

We have a president whose actions seem hell-bent on alienating every ally we have, and just in the last three days included his disrespectful phone call to the Prime Minister of Australia and a veiled threat to send the military into Mexico to deal with the "bad hombres" down there.  Worse still is the sense that Trump has no real understanding of history or knowledge of international policy; in a conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, she had to explain to the President what the terms of the Geneva Convention are.

The most frightening thing of all is his capacity for whipping his followers into a frenzy, and their single-minded devotion to him.  People who have received national attention after criticizing Trump have received credible death threats.  Even smaller fish like myself have felt the backlash of questioning Dear Leader; one of my previous posts, in which I asked "what would it take to convince you that you were wrong about Donald Trump?", was vehemently labeled as "psychological manipulation" by one reader.  Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, in an article in The Atlantic:

Authoritarianism needs that predator edge; that shared understanding that the leader’s body carries within it the potential for violence– and the power to make it difficult to prosecute him.  Trump’s attacks on women; his targeting of Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, and others as dangers to the nation; and the threats from his supporters against the lives of ordinary citizens that follow his criticisms of them on Twitter (such as the union leader Chuck Jones and the college student Lauren Batchelder) all go into the category of things it’s safer not to talk about.  Normalization is actually decriminalization, a willingness to forget that such things were once thought of as lawless behavior.

All of this is symptomatic of a trend I'm seeing toward cronyism and loss of transparency and suppression of dissent.  And if the signs themselves aren't scary enough, read the article "Wait Calmly," by Volker Ullrich, that appeared in the German news source Die Zeit yesterday.  It chronicles the responses of German politicians to the rise of Adolf Hitler -- and how, across the board, the general reaction was, "It'll be fine."  In early 1933, the newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published an editorial in which the author stated that he was willing to wait to see if Hitler  would prove "whether he really had what is needed in order to become a statesman."  His ignorance of policy and law was excused, with his followers saying that it was more important that he rebuild Germany as a nation than it was for him to be well informed.

Even after Hitler became chancellor and began to purge the opposition, the "it couldn't happen here" sentiment was rampant. Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, said that even if Hitler wasn't a nice guy, in Germany there was a "border that violence would not cross."  Germans, Wolff said, would protect the "freedom of thought and of speech," would create a "soulful and intellectual resistance" that would prevent Hitler ever from becoming a dictator.

Most appallingly, the chair of the Central Association of Germans of Jewish Faith said, "In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly."

This was printed on January 31, 1933.  Five months later, Hitler and his cronies had suspended the German constitution and fundamental human rights, eliminated political parties, required that radio and newspapers release news that was consistent with the National Socialist party line, and stripped Jews of their equality under the law.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that parallel isn't terrifying enough, consider a second one: the similarities between what is happening right now in the United States and the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.  As Andrés Miguel Rondón lays out in his article "In Venezuela, We Couldn't Stop Chávez.  Don't Make the Same Mistakes We Did," Chávez rose to power on much the same kind of wave that Trump has -- populism, nationalism, breaking off ties to allies who were perceived as exploitative or hostile, demonizing the opposition, and playing the role of a plain ol' guy who is just brutally honest and "speaks his mind."  Rondón writes:

The Venezuelan opposition struggled for years to get this. We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chávez’s electoral base.  “Really, this guy? Are you nuts?  You must be nuts,” we’d say. 

The subtext was clear: Look, idiots — he will destroy the country.  He’s blatantly siding with the bad guys: Fidel Castro, Vladi­mir Putin, the white supremacists or the guerrillas.  He’s not that smart.  He’s threatening to destroy the economy.  He has no respect for democracy or for the experts who work hard and know how to do business.  I heard so many variations on these comments growing up that my political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually stupid. 

Neither is Trump: Getting to the highest office in the world requires not only sheer force of will but also great, calculated rhetorical precision.  The kind only a few political geniuses are born with and one he flamboyantly brandishes.

Chávez died in 2013, and Venezuela still hasn't recovered from the years of isolationism, corruption, and damage to the governmental infrastructure.  In October of 2016, it was declared by CNN Money to be "the world's worst economy" despite having some of the largest known oil reserves, and there are now widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities, even among the former Venezuelan middle class.

The problem is, the message coming from the Trumpian populists -- I'm not going to slander actual conservatives by using that term -- has been amazingly successful, as Hitler's and Chávez's were before him.  Don't believe the media, they're lying.  Fight like hell against people who criticize Dear Leader.  Anyone who objects to what Trump, Bannon, Spicer, McConnell, Ryan, and others are doing is at best a "whiny, fragile snowflake," simply throwing a snit fit over having lost, and at worst a traitor to America.

In other words, don't question anything that comes from the Party, but ignore everything else.

People keep saying "it can't happen here."  We're not the Weimar Republic, we're not pre-Chávez Venezuela.  What terrifies me is that the same sentiments were widely spoken in the Weimar Republic and pre-Chávez Venezuela only months before dictatorship emerged.  Every democracy thinks it can't fail, can never be upended by fascism -- until it happens.

My own personal difficulty with fighting all of this is that I was taught by my (very conservative) parents to play fair, be nice, not pick fights, stay respectful, let others have their opinions.  But that, I think, is no different than the chair of the Central Association of Germans of Jewish Faith telling his constituents to "Wait calmly."  We can't be silent.  We have to challenge these people on their own turf -- while we still have a chance to.

I'll end with a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers that I've always thought was heart-wrenchingly poignant.  When King Théoden of Rohan is facing legions of Orcs swarming into Helm's Deep with the intent of slaughtering his people, he looks down on them in despair and says, "What can men do against such reckless hatred?"

And Aragorn replies, "Ride out to meet them."

To which I can only respond: Amen.

Five channels plus the facts

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University has pioneered research into what he calls the "five channels of morality" -- the five foundations of human morals and ethics worldwide.  These are compassion/harm, fairness/cheating, in-group loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation.

As Haidt describes in a wonderful TED talk called "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," liberals tend to have a "two-channel" model of morality (placing emphasis on compassion and fairness) whereas conservatives have a "five-channel" model (placing nearly equal emphasis on all five moral bases).  (And if you decide to listen to his talk, especially those of you of the conservative persuasion, don't get pissed off and shut it off after the first five minutes -- because it sounds like he's hammering on the conservatives at first, but takes a rather surprising right-hand turn halfway in and makes a powerful point that we all have something to learn from the other side.)

Four researchers at Cornell University have used Haidt's model to analyze why some people are so reluctant to take action on climate change, and to see if there's a way to frame the problem that might be more successful at convincing the folks who are currently sitting on their hands.  Janis Dickinson (Natural Resources),  Poppy McLeod (Communication), Robert Bloomfield (Management and Accounting), and Shorna Allred (Natural Resources) released a paper last week in PLOS-One called, "Which Moral Foundations Predict Willingness to Make Lifestyle Changes to Avert Climate Change in the USA?"  Their research found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that an identification with morality based on compassion and fairness predicted a desire to act on climate change, whereas an emphasis on in-group loyalty, authority, and purity predicted a reluctance to act.

The unsurprising part is that, by and large, the liberals have been pushing for action for years and the conservatives resisting it.  (An overgeneralization, I realize, as there are exceptions on both sides, but it's largely true.)  And since Haidt showed that the two-channel model corresponded to a liberal outlook and the five-channel model a conservative outlook, it's not to be wondered at that the correlation holds with respect to climate change.

What I still don't get, however, is why so many conservatives still don't believe in climate change.  I mean, consider it this way.  Suppose there's good reason to believe that there's a violent intruder, bent on causing you harm, in your house.  There are various courses of action you could take -- hide, flee, fight back, call the police -- but under no circumstances is it helpful, or even logical, to pretend that the intruder doesn't exist.

This seems to me to be the stance being taken by the vast majority of the conservatives currently in congress, not to mention the leaders of the incoming administration.  The evidence is at this point completely incontrovertible; not only is the world warming and the climate destabilizing, but the cause is fossil fuel burning, and we are fast approaching a point of no return, if we haven't already gotten there.

Consider just one metric, which is on my mind because the latest report just came out a few days ago -- the extent of polar sea ice.  The Cryospheric Science Laboratory at NASA announced that both the Arctic and Antarctic ice pack are currently at record lows -- and that air temperatures in the Arctic, in November, are 35 degrees above average.

Yes, you read that right, and it's not a typo.  Last week it was raining near the North Pole, in November.

The climate scientists themselves are in no doubt about what this all means.  "The interaction between Arctic ocean temperatures and the loss of ice formation leading to continuing record minimums is clearly a climate change signal," said Thomas Mote, Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia.

[image courtesy of NASA]

I can understand, even if I disagree with, the stance that we shouldn't act on climate change.  The arguments could be from the standpoint that divesting from fossil fuels would destroy our economic infrastructure, that renewables aren't currently set to take up the slack and/or would be too expensive to install on a national scale, or even that it's too late to do anything anyhow.  I've even heard people (Matt Ridley comes to mind) say things like "humans have weathered much worse than this before now, we'll be fine."

All of those things we can talk about.  They're a little like deciding what's the right approach to the intruder in my earlier analogy.  But the stance that congressional leaders like James Inhofe, Lamar Smith, and Dana Rohrabacher are taking is not to question what we should do about climate change, but to question whether it's happening at all.

And that, honestly, has nothing to do with Haidt's "five-channel" model of conservative morality.  That's simply insane.

I do think that the research by Dickinson et al. is valuable in that both conservatives and liberals have a lot to learn about talking to each other in a way that the other side will understand and respect.  In many ways, neither side speaks the other's language.  But at some point, there's the issue not simply of talking policy, but taking the attitude that what the science tells us is true.

And that is neither conservative nor liberal nor anything else.  Despite what the politicians would have you believe, scientific facts have no spin.

Taking offense

A few days ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the following perceptive words:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin.  And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’.  That’s just treating other people with respect.” 

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it.  It’s peculiarly enlightening. 

I know what you’re thinking now.  You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Which I agree with, for the most part.  Gaiman is right that people often use "political correctness" as a catchall to cover their own asses, to excuse themselves for holding opinions that are bigoted or narrow-minded.  To me, the phrase has come to be almost as much of a red flag as when someone starts a conversation with, "I don't mean to sound racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

On the other hand, there is an undeniable tendency in our culture to equate "offensiveness" with "having our opinions challenged."  Witness, for example, the professors at the University of Northern Colorado who are being investigated for offending their students -- by presenting, and asking students to consider, opposing viewpoints.

One professor was reported for asking students to think and write about conflicting views of homosexuality in our society.  As part of the assignment, the professor had asked students to consider the following:  "GodHatesFags.com: Is this harmful?  Is this acceptable?  Is it legal?  Is this Christianity?  And gay marriage: Should it be legal?  Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?"

Note that the professor wasn't saying that homosexuality is immoral, or that the answer to any of the other questions posed above was "yes;" (s)he was asking the students to consider the claim, and creating an evidence-based argument for or against it.  The student filing the complaint didn't see it that way.

"I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated," the student wrote.  "[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics.  Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities."

Because learning how to counter fallacious arguments with facts, and answer loaded questions rationally, somehow creates an "actively hostile space."

[image courtesy of photographer Fredler Brave and the Wikimedia Commons]

The second professor's case is even more telling, as it came about because (s)he had assigned students to read the famous article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which addresses precisely the problem I'm writing about in this post.  After reading the paper, the professor asked the students to consider the questions raised by the article, specifically the issues of "trigger warnings" for minorities such as homosexuals and transgender individuals in reading controversial material.

"I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic] I was very offended and hurt by this," one student wrote in the complaint.

The university complaints office backed the student.  The professor was instructed not to interject opinions into his/her lessons -- including those of the authors who wrote the article.

So there's something to be gained by having students avoid all opinions that they disagree with?  If they think they're not going to run into those once they leave college, they're fooling themselves -- and if they haven't been pushed into thinking through how to respond to bigots and people who are simply ignorant, they're basically choosing to be intellectually disarmed adults.

Students should be forced to consider all sorts of viewpoints.  Not to change their minds, necessarily, but to allow them to think through their own beliefs.  I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "You might well leave this class at the end of the semester with your beliefs unchanged. You will not leave with your beliefs unchallenged."

Now, note that I am not in any way trying to excuse teachers (on any level) who try to use their classrooms as a field for proselytizing.  I only have the one source for the incidents at the University of Northern Colorado, and there might be more to the story than I've read.  If these professors were using their positions of authority to press their own bigoted viewpoints about gender and sexual identity on their students, they deserve censure.

But I suspect that's not what's going on, here.  We've become a polarized society, with half of us lambasting the political correctness movement and simultaneously feeling as if their right to free speech makes it acceptable to offend, and the other half afraid to voice an opinion for fear of treading on some hypersensitive individual's toes.  What's lost is the opportunity for civil discourse -- which, after all, is one of the best and most reliable pathways toward learning and understanding.