Tone, emotional range, character

If you’d asked me ten years ago what I thought of the importance of tone when discussing contentious politics, I would have rated it low-to-non-important, this largely being down to having been tone-trolled by folks arguing in bad faith. Some people do have a tendency to expect you tread on eggshells around them, if only to distract you from what you’re actually trying to say.

“It’s the validity of the argument and the truth of the premises wot matters!”

If you’re only interested in the truth of a specific proposition, then okay, fine. But what if you’re interested in more?

Say you’re in the union movement and the prospect of a demarcation dispute with another union raises its head; you ask “Comrade, do you think X is the demarcation criterion we should be using to sort this out?” and get an answer in the affirmative. What does this tell you? Say you spool things out to have a discussion of why a given demarcation criterion is appropriate, and your interlocutor is on-point on all of the details. You absolutely agree on all the technical details.

Perhaps you bring an appreciation of social ques and historical context to this conversation. Perhaps they’re not telling you what they really think. Perhaps they do believe what they’ve told you, but are holding back that these details are actually irrelevant to their plans.

Maybe there’s no question of ideological trustworthiness, and you just want to make sure you’re both on the same page, or that you can campaign together from the same office. Perhaps the social ques and the historical context point to a healthy, stable solidarity. It could be that the tonal differences between bluster and genuine affection are what settles things and allows you to focus on the work.

It’s easy to take an appreciation of tone and character for granted, but it gets a lot harder to parse it all if your appreciation of tone is deprecated.

***

Over the last seven years, I’ve run into people who’ve had a pretty rough time participating in political discussions online, who’ve subsequently fallen into deep depressions. Blocking and withdrawing has been the order of the day, and seemingly with a relatively high error level; erring on the side of caution while realizing rightfully they don’t owe strangers their time.

But what about what they themselves are owed? The right to be healthy and aspire to happiness takes more than just being able to brush off abusers and trolls. What if, owing to an acquired tone-deafness, one lost the ability to tell the difference between passive-aggressive concern trolls, and genuinely caring individuals with valid criticisms? Or the difference between someone willing to offer moral support, and someone just looking to establish their base by flattering vulnerable people? Wouldn’t that be a bit isolating – unhealthily so?

“I’m happy to have a small, select circle, thanks! I don’t need to keep my enemies that close.”

Well, maybe. Maybe you’re due a break, and it’s not like you earn 4 weeks paid leave arguing on Twitter. You don’t need my permission to walk away.

Still, I’ve been seeing people adhering to crude, tone-deaf, by-rote heuristics to work out who is and who isn’t a bad actor; seeing people of good faith being turned aside, and seeing a number of those doing the turning aside winding up even more miserable for reasons they can’t begin to articulate. Worst case scenario; I’ve seen someone clearly isolate themselves this way, then blame the people they’ve turned away for making them do it.

“LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE MADE ME DO!”

A lack of range in your emotional capacity can do this. The numbness of depression can beget self-neglect. Self-neglect can beget further depression. It helps to have trusted people around you to help prevent this from spiraling out of control, and for that you’re probably going to have to put up with at least a little political disagreement.

Which brings us back to the matter of how to know who you can trust, and how tone helps.

***

A friend and I were musing the other week about two guys with a couple of very similar radical left sensibilities; sensibilities that friend and I regard as problematic. Two guys with the same particular tribes, much the same particular ideations, and to some extent even the same incoherence and inconsistencies. But independent of each other, friend and I decided that we regard their character as immensely different, such that one stands out as clearly more trustworthy.

There’s no particular political transgression that sets them stand apart. A crude, political dot-point heuristic couldn’t possibly clear things up; they’re both equally on-point with their political tribes. And yet, one of them would easily be welcome at a dinner party among like-minded(ish) friends, while the other is regarded as more than a little suspect.

One guy is clearly driven by empathy and good intentions, erring on the side of sappiness, while the other seems to have more pride invested in his tribalism, resulting in what passes as a mildly venomous smugness. Both will make the same dismissals, but while one will appeal to what he sees as people’s better nature, the other will lace his assertions with subtle backhandedness, and deliver them with a not so subtle sniff.

It also helps that it’s clear – at least to those of us familiar with their tone – that one of them is both warmer and more capable of uttering the words “I think I may have made a mistake.”

There’s something to be said for having political disagreements with people you can trust – for one they serve as a check should you turn out to be wrong. Potentially this serves as a check on self-harm. So if your criteria for allowing social proximity is a reduced, narrow list of marginal political differences, well, that’s a bit daunting. And what’s it like for a political community, or a family with politically contentious advocacy needs, if most of the adults therein are isolated like this?

“You’re expecting ethnic minorities to sit down and sup with white supremacists? To never punch a fascist!?! That’s the politics of civility!”

No. I’m not expecting that. Obviously.

For the most part we’re talking narcissism of small differences level disagreements here, not overt, intentional political hostility; fine-grained disagreements about ontology or epistemology; arguments over the merits of deontology versus utilitarianism; concerns over to what extent functions of a mutually supported organization should be decentralized; differing perspectives born of differing material interests on what clauses of proposed legislation may have unintended consequences, and so on – all argued with what a healthy appreciation of tone would inform you is good faith, and what an appreciation of material, political reality would inform you is not being treated as an abstract, intellectual plaything.

If a democratic socialist can’t sit down for coffee with a social democrat to talk their differences over, then their problem isn’t political theory. Their problem is personal and it won’t be resolved or navigated through with the use of an ideological spot-check.

Tone and emotional range go a long way to helping here, and I was wrong to ever doubt it*. I for one am happier and healthier knowing this now.

~ Bruce

* PS. Neil, you were right.

“Hate”

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been accused of hating anyone or anything, let alone spuriously, and I’m at odds to explain why other than perhaps my ever-shrinking Internet presence of the past 10 years. I’m not a bit enough win, I guess.

Over the period, I’ve had a fair bit of time to reflect on the matter. Particularly on the relatively futility entailed in letting someone else make it all about you, and then proceeding to defend your case.

Whether or not a given individual, in their heart of hearts, actually hates someone is usually pretty nebulous, even if they’re arguing in bad faith. It takes a truly bad actor – say a mugger or the like – to make the matter utterly unambiguous. Similarly, you have to be an unmitigated saint in order to disprove all but the most absurd of accusations, and it’s impractical to expect sainthood of anyone.

It’s largely a distraction. It’s a distraction if you’re unfairly accused. It’s a distraction if you’re fairly accused – the purity of your soul isn’t really salient if there are material consequences to be considered. Unless you’re appointed to some role with a duty of care to the alleged hated, if you’re just some schlub off of social media, or a writer with a small platform, what’ve people got resting on it?

And yet it’s easy to be distracted by it. Maybe you’ll kid yourself that the way past it is to argue through it, only realizing the conversational mobius loop you’ve slipped into after the fact. The return on all that effort is pretty damn nominal.

I’ve been watching people I follow on Twitter being drawn into discussions of “why wouldn’t you fuck people from group X?”, or less colorfully “what is your sexual preference”. We’re talking about sexuality, and the apparent expectation that people make themselves available to certain dating pools.

If I were to participate, I’d probably have to say that I’m Popperian about my sexuality: inductively, I’ve only ever been attracted to natal women, but if I were attracted to anyone outside that group I’d accept it as the proverbial black swan that disproved the hypothesis of my hetero-sexuality. Beyond that, in terms of civics, I’d assert that I’m not under any obligation to date anyone I’m not attracted to, or anyone I am attracted to, and that anyone who thought otherwise was exhibiting the kind of sexual entitlement bias that deserves the attention of a forensic psychiatrist.

Going by the way discussion has gone, this would variously be seen as evidence of a lack of hate, or evidence of hate. For the life of me, I don’t think this does demonstrate hate, but I can see how it’s not compelling as well – it doesn’t disprove hate.

And who’d want to get bogged down in that discussion? And why? And over Twitter?

And of course, while all this has been going on, people haven’t been able to talk about the other matters they’re interested in; mental health, discrimination, confounding variables in social science research, public safety and the common good, medicine, the ontology of protected groups and subsequent proposed demarcations, the trustworthiness of our government, the scope and function of medical organizations, and so on. (Who ever said Twitter was bad for this kind of thing, right?)

Bringing things back…

I have a kind of confidence, and maybe it’s an unearned confidence, and maybe it’s because I’m a white man going through all of this in easy mode, but my suspicion is this: if in future I don’t contest the matter of my own alleged hate, and just ask that we move on to the material stuff – the points of contention – I’m confident that the kinds of people that I want to reach are going to be less inclined to be mistaken about my hate that if I’d dug-in and defended myself.

Sadly, though, I can’t generalize this confidence in the form of advice for others. For one, I’ve seen enough lesbians maligned as malicious in the last three decades to suspect that they can’t expect the same good faith that I can, apparent progress over the years notwithstanding. A good part of Aboriginal activism in Australia has extended good faith towards white Australia in a way that hasn’t been reciprocated.

If popular morning television serves as a barometer, when Aboriginal Australia is accused of hate and white Australia’s vanity is served by this accusation, is it likely that yet more good faith from Aboriginal Australia is going to bring ordinary people around?

All the same, any issue of privilege not withstanding, I think I’m going to go with this confidence in future should I need to. “Okay, so say I’m a hater. What about the important details?”

If I’m a hater, and it matters that much to them, they can always unfollow me and not invite me to their birthday party. Beyond that, I can’t see that it matters terribly much – I don’t wield that much power.

~ Bruce

Don’t worry, sample bias will tell you

There’s a moderately funny joke that circulates in various iterations, depending on the context.

How do you know someone’s vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

The reason it’s funny is the same reason it stays funny when you sub-out “vegan” with “paleo”, “intersectionalist” and “into cross-fit”: there are obvious populations of very noisy and intrusive people who’ve adopted these terms as identity labels that they then bang on about ad nauseum at the expense of other people’s personal boundaries.

What could stay funny though, every now and then in conversation, takes a turn down a road where wanting there to be a more serious point to the joke, people find themselves winding up in silly-town.

I’m not going to get into the issue of that passive-aggressive damned-if-you-do type game where a person will pretend not to know they’re in the company of members of the group in question while uttering the joke – all before lying in wait to pounce with a “that proves it!” when someone in said group outs themselves by responding*. Sure, that’s dirty pool, and it’s probably interesting to consider why these passive-aggressives think they’re being clever, but it’s not what this post is about.

This isn’t a “not all vegans et. al.” diversion either. Some people have serious grievances with behaviour coming out of these groups. I don’t want to negate or derail those discussions, at least in as far as they’re serious. This isn’t about that.

What I am on about, and what strikes me as odd, is when some people – scientifically literate people – utter this joke and then go on to treat it as roughly emblematic of serious social science as if the sample bias wasn’t glaringly obvious.

”Aha! But why is it that when I notice a vegan et. al., they’re always being noisy?!?”

Because you don’t notice the quiet ones as easily. Because they’re quiet. Your measurements are being thrown off. All the pieces of your answer are in the joke. Pay attention.

Why would a person with a particular interest in drawing attention to sample bias – especially sample bias in social science – fail to notice this? And why would anyone feel they need this to be more than a joke, even if they were motivated by defensiveness?

It’s not as if criticism leveled at these groups depends on the joke. If you can’t find decent quantitative research on vegans et. al. behaving badly, there’s plenty of material waiting around for qualitative analysis just on Facebook alone. And if you can get decent quantitative research, the joke’s made less than redundant.

Nothing’s hanging on the joke’s literal truth, so why so serious?

There’s another transgression in all of this, and I’ve possibly given an example of it here myself: killing a perfectly serviceable joke by taking it too seriously.

The take-home, I think, is that ideally “chill out, it’s just a joke” should apply equally to the people telling it, too. That and perhaps a few folks need to stop pretending they haven’t left their science hat at home.

~ Bruce

* I’m inclined to append a disclaimer to this post, but…