So, I find many
people on the left annoying. It is not
that I dislike their political position. Au contraire, while I am not a
radical, I find myself much closer to the position championed by the left than
that found on the center – be it demand for universal health care and public services,
to the opposition to wars and the national security state, to defense of human
and civil rights, to support of immigrants and gay marriages, and to the demand for a fundamental systemic change and redistribution
of wealth.
My annoyance
with the lefties is more meta-cognitive (more about in a moment) than ideological. To be more precise – lefties love
abstractions. They love systems and
systemic forces while paying little or no attention to “men behind the curtain.” For them, the world is a clockwork mechanism in
which things follow a preordained order just as Leibniz claimed.
Except that they put Leibniz on his head and claim that this preordained world
order is evil, as it serves the interests of “world capital” (whatever that
is). And when they do not kvetch about
evils of capitalism, they escape into hagiography of their patron saints (Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.) and interpretations of their holy scriptures as
the ultimate truth about the world in which we live. It is
that copious knee-jerk recourse to scriptures and abstractions that I find
irritating.
The usefulness
of abstraction lies in its explanatory power - but if it obscures more than it
explains - it is not only useless, but it becomes a noise making apparatus and
thus it is dangerous. A belief that there is a unified "world
capital' with unified interests that are attained most of the time is the worst
kind of conspiracism that there is. A claim that there is a cabal of a few
hundred puppet masters secretly pulling strings more believable than this crap.
For anyone who
came to any understanding how complex systems work, it is hard to avoid a
conclusion how indeterminate those systems are. That is to say, even in
the ideal world of mathematics its is impossible to find *the* best solution or
outcome, as many different solutions are possible. A good view on this
has been provided by Paul Ormerod in his book "The death of economics" and also by Kenneth Arrow (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem).
So even if the "best outcome" cannot be found in the work of
mathematical abstraction, one can only imagine how messy it becomes in the real
world plagued not only with measurement errors, but also subjective
perceptions, conflicting interests, coincidences, unpredictability, plain
stupidity, inflated egos and the like.
A fear of
circumstances beyond human control is as old as humanity itself. It is
the reason for magic and religion that gave an illusion of control - or at
least understanding- of what is unpredictable, uncontrollable or inexplicable.
Of course, our modern "rational" world does not believe in
magic anymore, so we have to invent "rational" magic and its shamans.
Hence the demand for the consultants who crunch their numbers to create
an illusion that decision makes whom they serve are "rational" and
"know what they are doing." This is understandable - these
managers and decision makers do not want to appear clueless and impotent to the
public.
What I find
surprising, though, is that the critics of these managers and decision makers
not only swallow this illusion of control raw, but elevate it to even higher
level by purporting its near omnipotence and infallibility - that even the
managerial class itself would have problems believing. This goes well
beyond the ordinary fear of the uncontrollable. I see two possible
explanations of that - psychological and functional.
The
psychological explanation is that people with high IQ often have a certain form
of mental disorder manifested in the compulsive seeking of order and
regularities where none exist. This has been nicely portrayed in films
like "A beautiful mind" or
"Pi" .
In this particular case the relatively high intelligence of these
individuals is a disadvantage rather than advantage in the same way as a high
power engine is a disadvantage in a vehicle with faulty brakes. If I ride
a 50cc moped and my brakes fail, I can still manage to avoid crashing by
braking with my feet, but when I drive a 1000+ hp sportster and the brakes
fail, the crash is nearly certain. Ditto for high IQ individuals who fail
to balance their System 2 rationality with System 1 sense of reality - they are
lost in their own abstractions and often crash like protagonists in "A
beautiful mind" and "Pi".
The functional
explanation is that people who had high hopes of achieving "systemic
changes" - as many lefties did - but realized that their hopes failed to
materialize want to make sure that this was not due to their own faults or
mistakes. To do so, they portray their adversaries as far more powerful
and in control than they actually are, to create an illusion that they were
overwhelmed by a force majeure that was impossible to overcome. It is
easier to accept a failure when you believe that there was nothing that could
be done to win, than when you suspect that you fucked things up by your
inflexibility, dogmatism, intransigence, partisan bickering, and inability to
work with others.
Those two
explanations often work in tandem. They also point out to why so many
people find it so irritating to be around many lefties - they are highly
intelligent and on the correct side of the issues - but mad as hatters.
To be sure, this
infatuation with abstraction and doctrinaire inflexibility is not confined to the
left. It is also widely spread among
libertarians and right wingers. Yet,
while I view doctrinaire lefties as mildly annoying I have visceral gut revulsion
toward right wingers and libertarians, even if some of their claims are not that
far removed from those of doctrinaire lefties.
The reason goes
beyond ideological claims or even rational and gets into the realm of meta-rationality
of cognitive frameworks, of ways of processing information. There seem to be two different such frameworks,
which on the pain of great simplification I can label as core- boundary balanced,
or core or boundary-centric.
Some cognitive
scientists, e.g. my former professor at Rutgers Eviatar Zerubavel see cognition in terms of spatial relations, as ‘fields’ that have a “center’
and ‘boundaries.’ A good illustration is the concept of ‘neighborhood’ that has
its geographical center and it is delineated by its boundaries on the
periphery. The “core” is the essential
characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, e.g. to “be red” the light
must have a wavelength of about 650 nm.
The “boundary” is the line that separates members denoted by that
concept from all nonmembers, e.g. orange light that has a wavelength of about
590 nm. I selected the color spectrum as
an illustration quite deliberately, to underscore the fact that boundaries are
often fuzzy and set rather arbitrarily.
All people who are not color blind are likely to agree what red and
orange colors are, but you will not find such agreement to separate these colors near
their boundaries.
With that in mind, it is possible to define a concept in two
fundamentally different ways – by focusing on its core features i.e. the
essential characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, or by focusing on
its boundaries i.e. features that separate its members from non-members. In normal discourse you need of course both –
you obviously have to know what the core features are, but you also need to be
able identify the boundaries. However,
it is also possible to pay far more attention either the core or the boundary,
which I believe defines different cognitive frameworks of processing
information.
The cognitive framework that focuses primarily on the core i.e. the
central defining attributes but also pays nontrivial attention to boundaries is
a “balanced” one. This is how the so-called
normal cognition operates. We are
primarily concerned what the core attributes of a concept are, and that is why we
construct definitions, but we also want to know how to separate members denoted
by that concept from non-members. That is
why we devise operational rules.
However, a “balanced” framework accepts the fact that there are “borderline
cases” than cannot be easily decide to be “in” or “out” and can live with this ambiguity.
In “unbalanced” frameworks, however, two things can happen. One is excessive focus on the core features
and the neglect of boundaries. This is
the way mystics and hippies see the world – everything is connected with
everything else and everything falls into one gigantic category of one organic fluctuating
being. All has the same core principle, therefore all is one. On the other extreme is the framework that
excessively focuses on the boundaries while neglecting the core. This is the nit-picking or academic hair
splitting style of thinking that focuses on minute differences while forgetting
profound similarities.
These cognitive frameworks also guide our political and everyday life
thinking. A good example is attitudes
toward immigration. The balanced framework
is that we are a nation of immigrants and our core principle is tolerance of
newcomers, but we certainly need to have some reasonable border control. However, this border control does not need
to be perfect, and we can live with this imperfection as long as our core values of tolerance are
not too severely strained. The core-centric framework focuses mainly on our core value – tolerance, and ignores the
boundary issue. These folks essentially
believe that we should have open boundaries and welcome everyone who shows
up. The boundary-centric framework is its
opposite – it does not care about core principles, all it cares is protection
of boundaries. Hence its propensity for
building fences, "drawing lines in the sand," and dismay toward those who refuse to "toe the line."
Core- and boundary-focused frameworks are not necessarily mutually
exclusive – certain individuals may adopt both, albeit in different
situations. But that is a subject for
another discussion. More to the point, people
using any of these “unbalanced” frameworks often appear annoying to those who
use different ones. I would characterize
myself as using the balanced framework, perhaps with a slight tilt toward the
core-centric side. That is perhaps why I
find people with core-centric frameworks – the mystics, the hippies, the
floozies, the dope-heads and the like funny, sometimes mildly annoying, but not particularly repulsive. This also explains why I find the core-centric abstractions of many
lefties – such as those that see only “world capitalism” and fail to draw
boundaries between, say, a welfare state capitalism of Sweden or European
Union, and the nasty neoliberal variety found in the US, funny and sometimes
mildly annoying, but generally tolerable.
It is boundary-centered people that I find repulsive and their views viscerally antithetical to mine, regardless of what they actually claim. My visceral disgust toward right wing and libertarian frames is grounded
not as much in the content of their ideas, some of which may make sense, but in
their boundary-centered cognitive framework that in my book is synonymous with extreme
mental rigidity and doctrinaire hair splitting. It is not rational but meta-rational, that is far more influential on what and how we think than commonly believed.
