Here is the peroration of John Kass’s long, rambling post in reaction to the verdict in Kenosha:
If you were on the street in a riot, would you take a beating, just so a prosecutor wouldn’t get upset? Would you just lie down and let them put the boots to you? I don’t think that would be a good idea. The jury didn’t think it was a good idea, either.
We’re Americans. We don’t kneel and take beatings.
What the American people want is fairness. Yes, we need the law, but we need what’s behind the law, too. In “The Ox-Bow Incident†movie, the cowboy, Gil, played by liberal icon Henry Fonda, reads a letter from one of the innocent men that the self-righteous posse has just lynched.
It is a letter from the dead man to his wife:
“Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?â€
Is the media stoking rage and racial resentment a civilized act? No. It is an act of force, an exercise in power. There is no restraint in an activated mob. There is no conscience to it. You can’t ride the mob as if it were a horse. Once it’s lathered up, there is no directing it.
If you reject both internalized guilt and externalized shame as regulators of human behavior, you are left with power. Is that the the world they want? It’s not the world I want. Is that the world you want?
I want people to do what’s right because it’s right. I remain unconvinced you can come to a determination of what’s right without being taught right from wrong and in the absence of a belief in God. As Voltaire put it, without God I couldn’t trust my wife, my friend, my barber or my valet.
I actually think there is no conscience in today’s journalists and their editors. It seems so many of the root causes of today’s societal fragmentation is due to the distortion of or omission of facts in their reporting on controversial events.
Much of the contradicting commentary, after the Ritterhouse verdict was announced, circled around how the media portrayed the main actors in the Kenosha riots for almost a year versus what was actually brought out in the trial. What the media wrote mostly turned out to be pure fiction – including the men shot were black, to Ritterhouse’s affiliation with white supremists, painting a portrait of him meandering around with intentions of shooting people. In court the real racial make-up was clarified – all were “white.†Rittenhouse was not a white supremist, but rather a supporter of police. The day he was in Kenosha he was cleaning up graffiti, put out a fire, carried not only a gun but a medic bag, and ran away, not towards, people who were accelerating the violence that night. The media, however, never lingered on these details, but instead dramatized and enlarged the narrative they had in mind – Rittenhouse was a bad guy. And, media misinformation can be as infectious as a virus, contaminating the moods and minds of those who believe it, putting a divisive wedge between it’s falsehoods and what is really true.
In fact the media spin started way before Ritterhouse even went to trial. Right after the August riots a NYT’s reporter, Nellie Bowles, went to Kenosha to interview those who had been most effected – small business owners whose businesses had been randomly destroyed —-> over 100. When she took her story back to the paper for submission, they refused, saying to wait until after the November election. Almost 4 months later, on November 9, it was finally released. That old axiom of “justice delayed is justice denied,†can be applied to this case as well – “news held back loses it’s newsworthiness.†Without a true, full picture of those riots, and the impact it had on razing a relatively poor business community, it totally whitewashed what really went on that night, giving more room to mischaracterize the role that Ritterhouse actually played, directly contributing to the polarized opinions of right/wrong verdict afterwards.
Epilogue: Nellie Bowles became disillusioned with the leftward bias shown by the NYTs, and shortly thereafter joined her friend Berri Weiss by leaving the paper.
“I remain unconvinced you can come to a determination of what’s right without being taught right from wrong and in the absence of a belief in God.”
I’ve heard this most of my life. I wouldn’t attempt to convince you, but I see no reason doing the right thing can only be accomplished accompanied by a belief in God. It seems an odd assertion.
Interesting comment , Drew.
If not God, what?
Respect of your fellow beings?
Stalin rejected that along with faith in God, yet achieved total power in Russia through criminal acts, (bank robbery, rape, murder, mass murder),
find an historical video of Stalin where he was NOT smiling. He loved his life and was beloved by his people as is Kim Jung Un.
It may well be the opiate of the people, and if God is truly fiction, rationality should lead me to murder you for your wealth, if I think I can evade the law.
On a pragmatic level, societally speaking, I believe a working definirion of “right” can be extracted by disentangling certain human universals.
What happens when self-interest and analogical intelligence intersect in a human body defended by instincts? What stable tendencies emerge at the societal level?
There’s a nonrational logic in there that, when extracted, leads to convergent social solutions when exponential technology gets involved.
But the translation is a hard problem.
There is actually very little that is universal. Being able to distinguish larger from smaller and a sense of justice based upon that emerges at a very early age and that seems to be universal. Human universals don’t extend far beyond that.
Even as basic as “thou shalt not kill” is not universal. Some human lives are cheaper than others and, short of divine edict, that has always been the case everywhere.
Utilitarianism depends on the assumption of knowledge the individual does not in fact possess. It is therefore fallacious. If not fallacious it is arbitrary. My “greatest good” will inevitably differ from yours.
While I think the verdict is correct I found this by Kass to be kind of stupid.
“How would he survive inside, a kid like that? He wouldn’t. A kid like that wouldn’t survive five minutes. ”
This is the same kid who thought that he had the training, the judgment, the skills to go out and deal with an angry mob, by himself. He was certainly willing to take those risks, because he had a gun. What alternative plans did he have other than shooting someone? If you think you are old enough to carry around a gun in a volatile, risky situation knowing you have no experience or training then you are old enough to accept the consequences. Note that in Wisconsin you need 36 hours of training to become an armed security guard and in Chicago you need to be 21 to become a police officer.
Steve
Thanks, Dave.
See what I mean about the translation problem? I have answers for each of your objections, but they require my already having constructed the relevant frame of reference.
Three human universals: (1) everyone reflexively sorts the world into “us” and “them;” (2) no two people will ever draw that line in exactly the same way (although long sections may match at times); (3) exponential technology makes “us/them” solutions nonviable, essentially because” their” ability to evade being excluded is evolving faster than “our” institutional separations can adapt.
That’s the problem.
The methodology is to use consensus techniques to map existing universalities in the nonrational logic of the PROCESS of human decision-making (rather than its endlessly variable CONTENT), then run them in parallel to see what emergent stabilities pop out at the societal level, and finally design strategies based on those constant constraints that can help us navigate the exponential technology vortex.
The real answers pop out of the details of exactly HOW self-interest drives the bus, which isn’t at all what is expected. But as I said, it’s a frame of reference problem.
R. Strauss’s “Don Quixote” was a cellist. This may or may not be relevant…
HOW self-interest drives the bus,
What do we want?
Power, admiration, sexual gratification, status?
Or group loyalty, welcoming, friendship, mutual trust, comfortable loving relations.
I think that these traits are ingrained, not acquired or taught, and the reason we have prisons.
And will always have war.
They are ingrained, but their ingrained structure is fundamentally misunderstood.
Ask yourself, what exactly does instinctive self interest mean, if analogical intelligence constructs a distributed sense of self?
Make that universal, and put it in the presence of rapid technological expansion, and the resulting physics force convergent strategic solutions.
convergent strategic solutions:
That you suggest maybe superior to ethics evolved over 5-50 thousand years of human experience, due to the presence of rapid technological expansion, which makes everything different this time.
Count me out. The technological expansion may cause extreme social disruption, but strategic solutions are not new and have a dark history.
And let me remind, never extrapolate a trend……
See? It’s a hard translation.
I don’t disagree with anything you wrote.
Nevertheless…
I take a bigger-picture look at the “belief in God” part.
Every human society has developed something that is either a religion or functions exactly like a religion. And a big part of that is developing mores and values intended to apply to the group and to distinguish the in-group from out-groups. This is no less true for atheists or what McWhorter describes as the “woke” religion.
That certainly sounds correct, and as history records human group interaction fits into patterns that resemble that construct, but I can’t for the life of me think of a group that I belong to, or identify with.
The aged, maybe.
Identity is a bit of a two-way street.
You might not personally have an ingroup or an outgroup, but you are most assuredly part of someone else’s, if only as a symbolic token.
If everyone on the planet were granted a “destroy the outgroup to protect the ingroup” wish at once, as exponential technology seems prone to do at some point, then the human race would be extinct many times over, yes?
But to me, “everyone does us/them” and “no two people do it exactly the same way,” when taken together, is a screaming tell that some deeper, hidden universality is at work. That’s our potential escape.
If “us/them” categorization cannot be turned off, as seems likely in a categorizing intelligence, can it be diverted and/or reframed? I think the answer to that question is “yes, both.”
The diversion involves expanding “us” to include “all possible values of them,” investing human dignity and meaning (and respect) in the resulting verifiable universals, and then using that universality to manage our real and imagined differences within the context of common ground so as to minimize friction.
Not surrendering, not singing happy songs together for eternity, but finding consensus, self-evident methods of de-escalating conflict and recruiting allies. “Engineering,” not “woo.”
To do this, we need access to the reframe:
The reframe involves turning the “us/them” concept inside out. The visceral identity leveraged by instinct shares a body with the abstract identity constructed by intelligence. Mind/body entanglements between the two identities exist, such that If I threaten YOUR job, your BODY reacts.
Thus, the reframe substitutes “us/them” with “me/not-me, for extended values of me.” Your in-group IS you, analogically speaking, while your out-group is not-you. Although the details are much more complex.
Play that simultaneously in everyone on the planet, and stable rules emerge over time. This is the physics that dictates whether our various engineering attempts will succeed or fail. All we need to do is figure out how to measure its properties.
The significance of expo tech is that it (1) grants the public vast access to other people’s minds via social media, making accessible enormous amounts of data; and that it (2) makes keeping the out-group at arm’s length less and less possible, lending urgency to a new form of solution.
Not that I’m not even making an argument here, just describing one! The methodology, detailed findings, implications, and applications are a whole other mess, let alone actionable summaries.
Don Quixote would be proud.
I don’t believe that can be accomplished without reference to transcendental values:
Qur’an:
That’s the challenge, isn’t it? Especially since it transcendental values (1) resist universal consensus and (2) don’t give actionable results. I’ve a different methodology in mind. More of a reverse-engineering approach.
We can generate common ground for any argument by iteratively applying the Law of Radical Consensus (“Any disagreement can be reframed as a form of consensus, simply by jointly acknowledging THAT the dispute existsâ€) until consensus and universality converge in a handful of self-evident observations. (We don’t, as a general rule, but we CAN.)
The trick is to go back far enough.
When I apply the LoRC to human decision-making, eventually I arrive at the following three points:
1. Instinct handles the basics of human life.
(Heart rate, reflexes, thirst/hunger, circadian rhythms, fight/flight reactions…)
2. Conscious attention has functional limits.
(Speed, latency, power, focus, bandwidth…)
3. Human intelligence uses patterns and mental habits as workarounds.
(Categories, associations, arguments, analogies, routines…)
In keeping with the strategic goals of the LoRC, each of the three listed attributes is (1) universal in scope; (2) widely acknowledged to be true; (3) independently verifiable by self-evident observation; and (4) impossible to turn off. Together, their simultaneous presence gives us a solid epistemological floor.
[Deeper complexities do lurk beneath that floor, but the LoRC has successfully collapsed them into irrelevance. This too will become a recurring theme.]
Also in keeping with those goals, debates over terminology (e.g., “instinctâ€) are to be solved by assuming the broadest of possible definitions, unless specifically noted otherwise.
We can build a universal model of human decision-making (briefly defined, the space between inputs and actions) by serially recombining these three listed elements: put them in a box together, shake the box, study them in combined motion, and them map their first and second order logical interactions. Disputes are to be solved as they arise, by using the LoRC to loop back to the most recent consensus and then working forward again. Of course this is easier to do in conversation than in writing, but the principle holds.
The model is nice and all, but what I am really after is its real-world applications! To get there, we first need to build a shared frame of reference. So all of the above is just to build the below-the-surface part of the iceberg, so that we can make better sense of the part that is sticking up out of the water.
But essentially, everything we are seeing, all of it, is a straight-up logical consequence of having shoehorned limited attention and pattern-based intelligence into a body defended by instincts.
and since there is no such thing and the prospects for forming it are limited, the exercise is futile.
There are a few things you might want to read to expand on your thoughts. One of them is Jean Piaget’s The Moral Judgment of the Child. One of the things you will conclude is that instincts govern a much broader array of human behavior than you might otherwise think.
The shared frame of reference IS that there is no shared frame of reference. Certain universal characteristics of that shared frame, once explored, generate interesting and useful tactical insights.
Faux-paradoxical linguistic artifacts (such as the one immediately) above pose a major translation headache to the frame I propose, but that’s another story.
And yes, I’m very much in the camp of instinct as being the engine for everything! The trick is in mapping out just how it is connected to the cognitive steering (in which rational argument plays a small, but nonzero, part), and what can usefully be done with that mapping.
Huge appreciation for the back and forth! Every conversation helps me get closer.
(Standing in the middle of this thing, I often don’t know which questions need answering)