Week 47: Friends and Faux
Week 47: Friends and Faux
The practical work of improving lives, and the impractical terms we use to describe politics
Earlier this week I went down to the St Kilda Town Hall to speak to the Friends of Suai/Covalima. This is a group of people who, in conjunction with the City of Port Phillip (local council), dedicate their time, expertise and efforts to a community centre in the town of Suai in southwest Timor-Leste (my remarks are linked below).
It was a thoroughly enjoyable and heartening evening. I had a great time chatting to the members of the group, both about Timor-Leste in general and our recent options paper at AP4D – Shape A Shared Future With Timor-Leste. But also going to the pub afterwards to continue and widen the discussion.
What struck me about the evening was the dedication of people who do the practical work of politics and human advancement. Rather than the grandstanding or sniping on social media (or writing pretentious low circulation content, for that matter).
The overcoming of cynicism is one of our primary hurdles at present. A friendship association like this understands there is no perfect – you simply work within the conditions that are presented and make the effort to improve these conditions. This approach is also the recognition that positive change is often on the individual level, rather than state-level. And this is just as important.
Far-Right, Or Far-Wrong?
Watching the news on the ABC on Saturday morning there was a segment on the Argentinian president-elect, Javier Milei. The segment had an interview with a political scientist who referred (as did the presenter) to Milei as “far-right”. I found this to be curious.
Milei claims to be an “anarcho-capitalist”, although I suspect, as he seems to have more than a few screws loose, he has no consistent sense of the ideas he promotes. But if we were to take him at his word about what he believes then the term “far-right” fails to explain accurately what he believes.
Fascists or ultra-nationalists – who are usually deemed “far-right” – are statist parties or movements. They seek to concentrate as much power as possible in the state and exercise this power against those they despise. But more than this, these parties are deeply suspicious of liberal economics, understanding that everything they hate about the world is created by people being able to exchange freely with one another. Something I wrote about in Adam Smith vs the Ultra-Nationalists.
Someone who claims to be an “anarcho-capitalist” believes in a hyper form of liberalism, where the state is barely existent and exchange has no restraints. Recognising this distinction you can see how useless the left-right spectrum is for actually describing ideas. It groups different ideologies together that often have little to do with one another in order to create a reductionist binary.
Now it may just be that Milei thinks “anarcho-capitalist” sounds cool, and is using it as a weird populist trope. Popular politics, after all, is mostly just a game of labels and their associated vibes (with no focus on outcomes). But we – and political scientists definitely – should at least strive to investigate and scrutinise ideas with rigour. And this requires thinking seriously about the political language we use. Not just lazily describing the vibe of the thing.
Of course, the real – powerful – vibe here is “anti-politics” politics. People like Milei find an audience by claiming that the state and the political class are corrupt and need to be burnt to the ground. Clearly Argentina – once one of the wealthiest countries in the world – has been thoroughly mismanaged. There is an exasperation and betrayal to this from the public that is understandable. Yet, I suspect, like with Donald Trump, the Argentinian people thinking that chaos is the answer to insecurity isn’t an approach that will end well.
This Week’s Reading:
Grant Wyeth – A Bridge Adjusting To The Water
“An authentic friendship doesn’t need to be symmetrical. It can be based on each friend’s capabilities at a given time. While the investments we make in our friends should be reward enough themselves, if done so with grace and in a genuine manner they will also eventually be returned in various different forms. These returns may not be direct, but may instead exist in the realm of social norms that we all benefit from, and which we all have the agency to shape.
Which leads to an understanding of friendship in international relations. Australia is a developed country in a developing neighbourhood. We are also a country whose dominant culture is quite distinct from our neighbours. This gives us a unique set of responsibilities that most other developed countries do not have. It also means we need to make greater efforts to build bonds of trust. The relationships we build in our region are reliant on our character as a friend. Our ability to extend the hand of friendship in an authentic and committed manner. Confidence-building has to be central to our approach.”
Joost Hiltermann – Foreign Affairs
“Hamas appears to have drawn Israel into its trap, and now needs to tweak its plan in response to Israel’s ongoing military campaign. These are tactical adjustments that Hamas must have determined it can afford to make despite the horrendous destruction and suffering of Gaza’s population and its own growing losses in fighters and military capacity. By contrast, Israel was caught by surprise, had to scramble to forge an effective answer, and so far has produced only a military response—to be clear, a devastating one—without a discernible endgame. In its fury and its pain, Israel has struck out not just at Hamas but at the entire Gazan population as well. It may soon find that it is not only incapable of achieving its stated goal of destroying Hamas’s military capability and governance of Gaza but will also be stuck with reoccupying Gaza and ruling directly over its newly homeless, desperate, and very angry population.
Israel could end up assuming this responsibility because no alternative is readily available. Hamas has relinquished its role as the territory’s governing authority. And in its single-minded pursuit to destroy Hamas, Israel appears to have ceded the initiative for planning what should happen after the war ends to its Western allies, even though its military operations will set the limits of what is feasible. Leaders in the West have floated a number of vague scenarios, none of which seem to have much hope of being realised. There is a way out of the endless cycle of violence, but there is no indication today that either side is willing to reach for that lifeline.”
The Netanyahu Doctrine: How Israel’s Longest-Serving Leader Reshaped The Country In His Image
Joshua Leifer – The Guardian
“Netanyahu is not a conventional ideologue. His opposition to a two-state solution does not derive from any messianic conviction or biblical inspiration. While many of his supporters are religious traditionalists, he is staunchly secular and doesn’t even keep kosher. Instead, his worldview is shaped by deep pessimism. “I’m asked if we will for ever live by the sword – yes,” he told a group of Knesset members in 2015. He had absorbed this view as a child. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a dyspeptic historian of the Spanish Inquisition who died in 2012, at the age of 102. “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts,” Netanyahu Sr once told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. For Netanyahu the son, that catastrophic vision of history has meant that nearly all matters of defence appear refracted through the lens of existential threat. According to such calculus, any Palestinian state would almost certainly devolve into an Islamist terror state threatening Israel’s existence; therefore indefinite Israeli control over the occupied territories is an absolute necessity for Jewish survival.
After he returned to power in 2009, Netanyahu vowed never to lose it. As Israeli journalist Ben Caspit details in his book, The Netanyahu Years, Netanyahu crushed or expelled any potential rivals within Likud. By 2015, he had “metamorphosed”, Haaretz editor Aluf Benn wrote, “from a risk-averse conservative into a rightwing radical”. He transformed a party that, while always staunchly and even violently nationalist, had once included economic and social liberals into an authoritarian populist party centred on his charismatic personality. Encouraged by his wife, Sara, and his son, Yair, Netanyahu also began to think of himself as indispensable, as the incarnation of the national spirit, as identical to the state itself. “Without Bibi,” Sara Netanyahu has repeatedly said, “Israel is doomed.”
Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?
Peter Wehner – The Atlantic
Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanise others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.
Dehumanisers view their targets as having “a human appearance but a subhuman essence,” according to David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who has written on the history and complicated psychological roots of dehumanisation. “It is the dehumaniser’s nagging awareness of the other’s humanity that gives dehumanisation its distinctive psychological flavour,” he writes. “Ironically, it is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanised people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.
That is the wickedly shrewd rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.
Samuel Earle – The New Statesman
“In his 1919 lecture on political leadership, “Politics as a Vocation”, Weber references the grand inquisitor as an example of the diabolical equations that leaders can draw. Weber is concerned with not only how a political leader should act, but why people conform to a ruling power’s authority. The two questions are interrelated: a leader is ineffective, by definition, if people don’t want to follow them. So why do people follow a leader? What do they want? Their major “demand”, according to Weber, is “that the world order in its totality is, could and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos’”. Only the ability to offer a convincing image of the world – an “ethical foundation and justification” for its arbitrary privileges and “senseless” misfortunes – establishes “the basis of legitimacy, which the ruling power claims”.
The grand inquisitor understands this, too. There can be no assumption that liberty – any more than equality, or democracy, for that matter – is an unimpeachable priority for people. “The secret of human existence does not consist in living, merely, but in what one lives for,” he tells Jesus. “Without a firm idea of what he is to live for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on the Earth, even though all around there be loaves.” Only the leader who can put consciences at ease – who can not only promise to put bread on the table but also offer answers to the questions that keep people up at night and give them reason to get up in the morning – will summon support.
According to the grand inquisitor, Jesus has failed this test as a leader. Either by vainly “thirsting for a faith that is free”, or through a misplaced belief that humans need freedom to feel spiritually fulfilled, or both, Jesus has ordained a world where life is unliveable: the existential weight is too great. “It would not be possible to leave [people] in a greater state of confusion and suffering than You did, burdening them with innumerable anxieties and unanswerable questions,” the inquisitor scolds Jesus. He has fixed His error through fire and force. By providing for people’s basic subsistence and “freeing them from freedom”, killing those who don’t conform, he ensures that the vast majority are happy, their consciences calmed, the world in order.”
The Biggest Hidden Bias in Politics
Brian Klass – The Garden of Forking Paths
“There are two distinct subsets of knowingness in modern society.
Type 1: People who think they know but they don’t; and
Type 2: People who don’t want to know.
These two distinct types of people provide corresponding subsets of ignorance bias (I’m coining terms with reckless abandon, I’m afraid): Apathy Bias and Bubble Bias.
Pundits and political analysts make a mistake due to apathy bias when they wrongly assume that other people care about politics like they do. This is rarely true. Those who professionally study and analyze politics are the biggest outliers in the voting public. They’re extremely unlike the people they study—and seek to explain.
Apathy bias skews your understanding of the political sphere when you falsely believe that other people have knowledge about politics that they don’t.
You see apathy bias at play when pundits chalk up a political figure rising or falling in the polls due to, say, a piece of legislation that just passed, or even a particularly blockbuster Congressional hearing. In fact, most people are oblivious to even the largest bills passing. (Only 27 percent of Americans said that they knew a great deal/a good amount about the Inflation Reduction Act, the cornerstone of Biden’s domestic agenda. And that’s a self-reported figure without any verification that they actually do know much about it, so the number is likely overly generous).
By contrast, Bubble Bias—named after the fact that millions of people inhabit badly skewed and distorted information bubbles—produces mistaken assumptions about the voting public based on the false belief that everyone is working off the same set of facts, has a basic grasp of political dynamics, and bases their beliefs on a shared sense of reality to everyone else. In the past, for better or worse, most people got their information from a few mainstream sources. Now, that world has splintered—and there has been an explosion of lies, skewed information, and polarising content.”
In Countries Where Manhood Must Be Proven, Men Have Shorter Lives
Ross Pomeroy – Big Think
“First author, Joseph Vandello, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who originally introduced the concept of precarious manhood 15 years ago, and his colleagues surveyed 33,417 college students in 62 different countries on their gender beliefs and attitudes. Included were four items intended to gauge the students’ precarious manhood beliefs. These were statements with which participants could indicate their level of agreement: (1) “Other people often question whether a man is a ‘real man.'” (2) “Some boys do not become men no matter how old they get.” (3) “It is fairly easy for a man to lose his status as a man” (4) “Manhood is not assured — it can be lost.”
Considering that precarious manhood beliefs were linked to greater risk-taking and worse risk-related health outcomes, the researchers wondered if precarious manhood beliefs might also correlate with reduced male life expectancy. They were surprised to discover a striking association. In countries high in precarious manhood beliefs (one standard deviation above the average), men lived 6.7 fewer years compared to men in countries low in precarious manhood beliefs (one standard deviation below average). The result held even when controlling for potential confounding variables such as human development and availability of physicians.”
Duncan Hosie – The New York Review
“Efforts to map modern notions of “dangerousness” and other concepts onto 1791 fared poorly. Matthew Wright, Rahimi’s lawyer, told the justices they could only look to sources from the founding era and “immediately” after it, but he could not explain how to bridge the vast gulf between that era—when women and racial minorities were not equal citizens in law or society, domestic violence was tolerated, and the guns people carried were muskets rather than AR-15s—and our own.
A related problem confronts attempts to locate constitutional meaning in distant history. Many practices in America’s history and traditions are repugnant. When judges focus their constitutional inquiry on sources from the era in which the relevant amendment was written, they need to either embrace the bigotry of the past or cherry-pick cases that suit the present. The former approach is untenable morally, the latter methodologically.
Most Americans have reached an understanding of what it means for women to be equal members of our polity, and it includes reproductive autonomy. The Court’s conservative justices have a different one, aligned with the patriarchal values of the ancient past. The same can be said of its gun rulings. Guns entrench existing hierarchies, suppress forms of protest and agitation that drive change, and roll back progress toward giving all people equal station under the law. They arm the socially dominant with a weapon capable of inflicting corporeal suffering and denying equal citizenship.”
As I am now ahead in time of most of the newsletter’s readership and I wish you all a pleasant Sunday, and provide what I think is a quintessential Sunday song – I Set My Face To The Hillside by Tortoise. Although it is now fast approaching winter in the Northern Hemisphere, hopefully there are some rays of sunshine coming through your windows and you can enjoy this song with a nice cup of tea.