Us and Them: The Blog

Spankers and Shackers

The basis of nations, races, social classes, religions, and all other ``human kinds'' is the obvious truth that personal traits cluster. Knowing one fact about a person tells you that other statements are likely to be true about them. The thing you know, or think you know, can be skin color, a symbol worn on a lapel, an accent, a rhythm coming out of headphones. It can be any perceivable bit of information. People can and have made everything into signals of identity.

As the philosopher Ian Hacking pointed out some years ago, modern life has added a technical source for such signals. In addition to the stuff we notice automatically (because of the way our minds work), we moderns also use identity signals that have been noticed for us. These are traits, or connections between traits, that have been found, vetted and digested by specialists -- researchers in bureaucracies and academia. They're just as exciting to the mind as the stuff we notice about appearances, language and other human-kind perceptions we get ``for free.''

Case in point today: Perhaps in some future election we'll cast aside red-state and blue-state here in the U.S., in favor of this distinction between spankers and shackers.

It Walks! It Talks! The Link.

The Horgan-Berreby colloquy is now up on bloggingheads.

The Extremes of Teams

Bill Bishop in his excellent new ``Big Sort'' blog explains the argument that ``like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded,'' as he puts it. ``Group polarization'' experiments, he proposes, help explain the tone of people at McCain-Palin rallies lately.

The only problem with this idea is that Democrats -- though they're just as prone to hang around like-minded people as are Republicans -- haven't been prone to jeering, insults and threats that have emerged in Republican campaign stops. There are extremes of feeling on both sides, but cries of ``traitor!'' and ``liar'' and ``kill him'' don't boil out of Obama-Biden gatherings. I think that's evidence that certain kinds of like-mindedness are different from others.

Specifically, I think the imagery of death, disease, untrustworthiness and immorality makes a difference. That rhetoric is a license for emotions that other kinds of rhetoric would discourage. It's not like-mindedness about anything that leads to extreme behavior. It's like-mindedness about the other side's malicious, depraved or unsanitary nature.

Some leaders offer those images to their followers; others refuse. We shouldn't think all shared opinions have the same effect, regardless of their content. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, like-mindedness in the defense of decency is no vice.

It Walks! It Talks!

To mark this week's publication of Us and Them: The Science of Identity in a new edition by the University of Chicago Press, I just finished a long conversational interview with John Horgan that is going up tomorrow (Saturday, October 18th) on the bloggingheads website. John and I talk about the Us-Them aspects of the 2008 election, how much people understand why they do stuff, and our society's principles of human rights, democracy and individual autonomy. Are these genuine advances in human thought? Or the secular equivalent of Byzantine Christianity or eighth-century Islam -- widespread only because they're the creed of societies that have the strongest military for the moment? (That's the philosopher John Gray's p.o.v., from which Horgan and I demur, for different reasons.)

Check, as they say, it out.