Some Counterarguments for Arthur. C. Brooks to Consider

I'm writing about his piece in the New York Times, Our Culture of Contempt.  The piece appeared on Saturday for the Sunday Review and I read it on Monday (yesterday).   This makes me behind the times (these days my usual state of affairs) and the Comments are closed at the article's Website. Plus, the multitude of comments (there were 837 on this article) makes me strongly suspect that the author doesn't read the vast majority of them and maybe reads none at all, so comment authors are really writing for other readers of the Times, using the article as a launch point only.  Instead, I would like to maintain the fiction that I'm arguing directly with Brooks, as rhetorical device to focus my counterargument, although the likelihood that he'll read this piece is nil.

I also want to note that I've written quite a few blog posts where some bits of what I have to say here are articulated at length.  I will make reference to those pieces and deliberately give an abbreviated version here so the piece doesn't get too long, though the reader should know up front that I'm a slow blogger and inclined to write long and ponderous pieces.  Not having to answer to an editor who imposes a word limit on the essay, I sometime indulge my worst tendencies and ramble in an incoherent way, as perceived by the reader, though from my author's perspective there is a reason to include the additional prose.   That is my warning.  Now let's get on with it.

The contempt that Brooks refers to is about our national politics - voters of one party have contempt for voters for the other party.  He describes the situation as symmetric for Democratic voters and Republican voters and assembles the usual suspects to ascribe the causes for this behavior.  Then he moves on to considering possible ways to resolve the problem.

Issue 1:  Is the situation really symmetric or not?

In this piece Brooks doesn't contemplate whether the behavior of our politicians ever merits voter contempt and if, in the case that sometimes it does, whether that sort of politician behavior is evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans or not.  Brooks' colleague at AEI, Norman Ornstein, is one of the authors of It's Even Worse Than It Looks.  (Disclaimer, I haven't read it, but I've seen Ornstein on TV talk about it.)  There it is argued for asymmetry, where far right Republicans are much more to blame than far left Democrats.   Further, when such Republicans would go onto TV news programs that were trying for balance rather than aiming to be inflammatory, I'm thinking particularly of the PBS NewsHour, which I used to watch regularly but no longer do, these Republicans would give pablum answers to questions as if read off a script and not engage the interviewer and the audience in thoughtful response.  It was very unsatisfying to watch.  This may be one reason why the Daily Show and the Colbert Report had become so popular a decade ago.  It may also explain the emergence of the prosecutorial style of interview and commentary shows, particularly on MSNBC, as a reaction to this sort of politician stonewalling.

Personally, I'm still all worked up about Mitch McConnell not taking up the Merrick Garland nomination.  I view this act as particularly heinous, a clear violation of the Constitution, certainly a significant factor in the 2016 election and maybe the determining factor, and something that should be punished, even now.  Yet I try to make a distinction between the contemptible political acts, and the voters who elected these politicians. as I did in this post,  What of Trump Supporters Now and in the Future?  I am guessing that many other Democratic voters don't make this distinction.  This gets me to consider the symmetry or asymmetry question from a different angle.

The end of the Fairness Doctrine happened while Reagan was President and the rise of Rush Limbaugh as a radio personality.   This is about a decade before the launch of both Fox News and MSNBC on cable TV.  During this period, to my knowledge there was no liberal counterpart to Rush Limbaugh.  And thus began the news/commentary business as entertainment in a way that might also be considered proselytizing if not overt propaganda.   While CNN, which started in 1980, offered Crossfire and Larry King Live, so there was an entertainment aspect to news programming, those shows aimed for some balance in perspective.   Further, Fox News took off pretty much from the outset, while MSNBC stumbled out of the box and it wasn't until perhaps 2004 or 2005 where MSNBC began to make inroads with viewers.

In the U.S., the 1980s also began the decline in manufacturing, the weakening of private sector labor unions, and the end of blue collar workers sharing in the gains from economic productivity growth.  It's because I have a pretty good sense about the history of income inequality in the U.S. since then that I can be empathetic for Trump supporters while being outraged by Republican politicians.  But for my own beliefs to be consistent this way, I have to also believe that the Trump supporters have been played by the politicians they vote for and the media that supports those politicians.  These voters end up not voting their pocketbooks, but instead vote based on racial resentment and immigration fears.  (This is Paul Krguman's hypothesis in The Conscience of a Liberal.)  The right-wing media machine that feeds this resentment is always on which, in turn, leads these voters to be in a perpetual visceral state of mind, so they never go through the thoughtful process of asking what economic policies should they want and which candidates support those policies.  

So, while everyone does end up angry, Democrat and Republican, things are actually quite asymmetric under the hood, at least in my view.

Now let me set up the second issue.  In the second half of the piece Brooks asks what might be done to reduce or end all this contempt.  In the paragraph that starts this section of the piece are these two sentences.

Disagreement is good because competition is good. Competition lies behind democracy in politics and markets in the economy, which — bounded by the rule of law and morality — bring about excellence.

On the one hand, there is no surprise here with Brooks extolling competition.  After all, he is President of the American Enterprise Institute, which is known for having an abiding faith in the free market.  Given that, however, the point is offered in an uncritical manner.  So, on the other hand, might there actually be a kind of market failure that produces some of the preconditions that Brooks laments about?

Issue 2:  What about Market Failure?  Is that relevant here?

I'd like to first take this issue entirely outside the realm of politics.  Not too long ago I wrote a post, What If We Banned Marketing? that gives a fuller analysis.  Here I will focus on just one example.  My university email inbox has been largely taken over by messages from vendors I have never met. Most of those messages are about starting a conversation for them to give me a spiel about their product.  The thing is, I've been retired since August 2010.  It's really not that hard to learn that.  The info is in the sidebar of this blog and in my LinkedIn profile.  But for some reason, these vendors think I'm still a campus administrator with purchasing power on behalf of the university.  And in some cases, they send to my @uiuc.edu address.  The university went to @illinois.edu well over a decade ago.  Then, to top it off,  I now frequently get vendor email intended for my wife.  We are both L. Arvan.  Of course, since the university has an electronic directory, you could look it up at a source that is reliable.  These vendors who make this mistake must be getting the information elsewhere.  I would characterize all of this as vendors who don't do their homework.

My view is that what such vendors do is socially pernicious.  We would all be better off if these type of transactions were regulated in a way to reduce their volume greatly.  Suggestions as to how are in my post.   This gets me to the next related point, which applies more to the phone version of these things than to the email version.  This is a belief that people can be sold things, even if up front the people express no interest in the product whatsoever.  In this view, sales people want to exert a kind of social pressure.  The unwitting buyer might cave into that pressure and make a purchase, just to relieve the tension.  That type of transaction belies the idea the economics exchange happens because there are gains from trade, as we teach in intermediate microeconomics via the Edgeworth Box.  (Sales people can deliver value when they provide information that the buyer doesn't have that helps make the purchase decision.  So I'm not saying there should be any sales people.  What I am saying is that there are too many who don't provide any social benefit.)

Then, the third type of market failure is where the vendor is selling snake oil.  There might not be that much of a hard sell, but there will be a great deal of hype in extolling the benefits of the product.  You'd like to think only rubes get fooled this way.  But its not true.  Think of the list of Bernie Madoff's clients or those who purchased shares of Enron.

I would love it if somebody developed national income accounts that actually measured in aggregate this sort of pernicious activity, so we could consider it as a share of overall economics activity and see if it has been on the rise.  It feels that way to me, but I'd like to see the numbers.

Now let's bring this back to discussion of politics.  In that quaint old time before cable TV, the national network news on each of the TV channels was aired at the same time.  So Walter Cronkite was on while Huntley-Brinkley were on, etc.   The programs competed with one another, but the competition was mild.  The programming was comparatively staid.  Now we have 24 hour news channels and they compete with regular programming, as well as with Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.  This is much tougher competition and that the news/commentary shows end up as a kind of entertainment in this situation is not surprising at all.  The competition requires that.  Perhaps it is surprising that the only way so far discovered to make the audience keep coming back is to raise their hackles.  Given that, I don't see how Brooks can laud competition.  It is one of the sources of the problem.

Issue 3:  What is required to get people with differing views to argue over those views in a way where the discussion is respectful, there are no ad hominem attacks, and where the participants might actually change their own point of view based on the discussion, after they see the merits in the other side of the argument?

It doesn't occur to Brooks to ask what benefit contempt confers to the person who holds it for another, but it might be a useful question to ask, because the benefit might be necessary even if the contempt is not.  I will make a quick sketch about this here.   I wrote about this in a post called Learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't?    Go back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  Safety is next after the physiological needs.  If safety isn't assured the person can't climb to a higher rung.  Might contempt for another be a way for a person to assure his own safety?   My posing the question should suggest my answer to it.   If you want to reduce contempt, you first must find another way to satisfy the safety needs.   If you don't do that, no progress can be made.

There is then the question of how people learn when there is evidence that contradicts their own world view.  Often, the initial reaction is to deny the evidence.  And if immediately after that the experiment is put out of mind, then there will be nothing learned at all and the prior world view will remain intact.  Instead, if immediately after there is either a repeat of the experiment that confirms what was observed or there is an extended discussion of the experimental results so that the person remains aware of them, then the person will feel a tension within.  The tension needs to be resolved.  The resolution ends the discomfort and is how learning happens.  But the period where the tension is present is of indefinite duration and its not possible to predict in advance with any accuracy when the end might come.

Now let's apply this to arguing with people where we disagree.  It's quite different with a friend than with a stranger.  If people start out as strangers and want to have such an argument, they really need to have a "bonding experience" first as a way to build trust between them.  Highly experienced academics, who argue as a way of professional life, may be able to argue with other academics without that bonding experience, but they do have knowledge that the other is an academic and thus possesses the mores of academia.  It is a mistake, akin to Daniel Kahneman's WYSIATI, for an academic to assume that non-academics can do the same thing. They really can't.  Thought this way, contempt is like the fight instinct and clamming up is like the flight instinct. Each is a response to a perceived threat, that person we disagree with.

If you find my analysis plausible, then in asking whether people who disagree should argue, you need to ask whether they have the time and the wherewithal to produce the prior bonding experience.  Possibly the answer is no, in which case avoiding the discussion would be best.  When the answer is yes, you then need to ask do they also have the time and the wherewithal to deal with that period of discomfort when evidence and prior belief seem to be mutually contradictory.  Again, if the answer is no, avoiding the argument may be the best course of action.  The best case for such an argument, then, is an ongoing conversation, say for an hour each day over coffee, over the course of several weeks or even months.  Under these conditions we definitely should disagree.  But how often do those conditions present themselves?

Let me wrap up.  Brooks ends his piece by suggesting we don't respond to provocation with anger, but try to be lighthearted and use a sense of humor.  I think this is good advice even for when there aren't evident disagreements, simply to make your interactions with others more enjoyable. But it doesn't mean that a fundamental disagreement will be resolved just by embracing a better demeanor.  For that, it would be better to have a fuller understanding of what might work and when that's possible.