Yes, the red/blue divide is essentially accurate and using it doesn't create the divide, which is already there. The only real simplification is that it's more like a spectrum rather than a hard cut, but it's still a single dimension variable (there is less complexity to it than lots of people like to believe).
The best explanation for what it truly is and why it occurs throughout history is in "Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. I'll give a précis of the argument here:
The red/blue divide is ultimately a disagreement over the span of human nature. All humans develop intuitive beliefs about human nature merely through the act of living, so nobody is actually neutral or truly 'centrist' - people who appear to be are usually just people who haven't been in a situation where the differences actually matter. But if they were to be, suddenly you'd find they picked a side.
The "free speech" side believe that human nature is limited and relatively static. Humans are corruptible, always have been and always will be. They can't perceive or handle the true complexities of reality, never could and never will. Because human nature is flawed and unchanging, there will always be war, there will always be unfairness, there will always be a divide between the rich and poor and so on. Progress is an endless struggle to find incrementally better tradeoffs, but attempting to make one thing better over here frequently makes something worse over there, and our limited abilities mean it's easy to think you found a better tradeoff when really it was worse. Attempting to change any of these things is naive, futile and usually dangerous.
The "safe speech" side believe that human nature is essentially unlimited and relatively flexible. Humans may be imperfect but they can improve or be improved over time and in the long run are perfectible. This process of improvement occurs through debate, thought, learning and reflection. Intelligence and expertise are paramount, so the best outcomes come from putting decisions in the hands of the best people. That's an important point: because the span of human nature is very wide, some people are much further along the path of enlightenment than other people are, and it's important that the less developed people don't get too much influence in society.
Almost all left/right/red/blue/free-speech/safe-speech/conservative/liberal disputes in life flow from this disagreement over one thing.
With respect to Twitter, we can see the following ideas at work:
- Safe speech side: Ideas are important, spread easily and most people are easily influenced by them. Therefore speech can be dangerous because the mere act of someone speaking can significantly damage the human nature of the listeners, making them literally worse people. Speech control is thus highly important and a moral imperative; free speech by "bad people" can seriously damage civilisation itself. The best way to stop bad ideas spreading from bad people to the lumpen proletariant is moderation by better people, who can use a variety of speech-limiting tools to ensure the best ideas win.
- Free speech side: Ideas are pretty harmless, because people are robust and can easily reject bad ideas that other people talk about. Free speech is essential because nobody has the big picture, all we have are small fragments, and because power corrupts so being able to speak out against power is fundamental. Speech controls and moderation are themselves a form of power which will corrupt the moderators, so it's better to have no controls at all and put up with some level of abuse and spam than submit a free speaking place to the tyrannical will of a handful of self-proclaimed moral overlords.
This is not a US specific thing of course. I don't know why anyone thinks that. You can see it everywhere. For instance, in Europe the EU is essentially controlled by "safe speech" types. This can be seen most visibly in the reaction of the various EU leaders to Brexit. Martin Schulz who was at the time an important figure in the EU Parliament (and went on to be briefly important in German politics), said this:
For decades the UK tabloids have performed mass brainwashing, and the leave campaign force-fed their readers with intolerance of foreigners. No change to the EU will convince those who have fallen victim to these factors. A bonfire of the EU is therefore not the way forwards.
The safe speech / perfectible-human ideas are everywhere in this short quote. People are easily "brainwashed" by ideas that they would naturally reject, except they were "force fed" them and have become "victims" - Schulz believes that people are reprogrammable biological FPGAs whose political beliefs are entirely controlled by those who speak loudly and frequently. These sorts of people also have frequently referred to dislike of the EU as a "virus" that's "spreading". Because people's views are entirely created by listening to charismatic speakers, there is little point in actually changing how anything is really done.
It is impossible for people with such wildly different takes on human nature to co-exist in the same space. If a new space was created by people with free speech mentality, the safe-speechers will not rest until they have taken it over and imposed speech controls on it, because they feel that to not do this is literally dangerous. Hence their name!
I think that this binary thinking is more of result of two party system. Eventually you have to pick a party and from that moment on you are bound to see everything as us vs them.
In fact, bothers parties are uneasy coalitions, but in order to win this or that debate the most effective action is to rally "your side" on you identity as red or blue. Thus red people who are pro gun control will be more likely to be silent (and similar process on blue side) and be louder where they agree with their side.
There is no single set ideological divide and majority of actual people hold much more complex and inconsistent opinions.
Like in here - there are plenty of conservative right Christians who areally not ok with pretty much any depiction of sexuality. That is how they treat students in their schools (including colleges), how they preach and who they socially sanction among themselves. However, rough red blue analysis treats them as non existent - despite them really wishing for power to influence what is available (and sometimes suceeding, through they have less power then they used to).
They are ignored, because their existence is uncomfortable for political point being made. Likewise, anti sex blue feminists coexist with straight pro-porn blue feminists, but which side gets pushed to prominence largely depends on what is beneficial for whoever is trying to frame issues to red blue to rally own side.
>The best way to stop bad ideas spreading from bad people to the lumpen proletariant is moderation by better people, who can use a variety of speech-limiting tools to ensure the best ideas win.
I take two issues with this: it's a very greatly simplified version of the real story, and the idea that the "safe speech" people wish to use legal means doesn't really hold very strongly; the idea is not framed within the liberal framework, the idea of rights doesn't apply here, it's something deeper than that.
Secondly, why did you specficially refer to the lumpenproletariat rather than the proletariat?
I also think that your generalisations are pretty poor; you lump a whole anthropology and sociology and psychology into two groups and act as if they are mutually exclusive and in total opposition; the truth is that authors everywhere hold very seprate views on these topics, including those of human nature. What precisely makes you categorise the idea of "there will always be poor people" necessarily in with "free speech advocates"? How do you know this is a valid dividing line to draw?
The fact you cited Sowell, and your general tone about the "safe speech side" (again, I hate the fact that this dichotomy is being made on totally false grounds) suggests that you have quite a bias. The dispute is in terms of various perspectives spanning various fields, you may even go one step up from your description to get to the very idea of politics, the very idea of epistemology even.
I'm interested in what reading you've done from people on the "safe speech side" in particular; are you familiar with the works of the Frankfurt School of critical theory?
Re: lumpenproletariat. A possibly misplaced attempt to exaggerate the views to make the differences clearer, I could have said proletariat and it could have been more accurate.
the idea that the "safe speech" people wish to use legal means doesn't really hold very strongly
Why not? In the USA it may appear that way because the first amendment is such a strong protection, so they end up using approaches that aren't based on changing the law (e.g. pushing for corporate censorship policies on large communication services).
But everywhere else in the world doesn't have the first amendment and there you see a proliferation of hate speech laws and other "crimes" that boil down to offending people on Twitter. In the UK the police arrest tweeters so actively that it's become a rolling criticism of the force, like, why are they arresting people who are just sitting on their ass tweeting instead of going out and catching "real" criminals? Answer: because the law expects them to.
What precisely makes you categorise the idea of "there will always be poor people" necessarily in with "free speech advocates"?
Because policy positions follow logically from the underlying intuition about human nature.
Let's start with the assumption that the existence of poverty is a problem. Sowell didn't use the term "free speech" vs "safe speech", he coined the terms constrained vs unconstrained instead. People with the constrained vision look at poverty and agree that it's a problem, but disagree that there's any solution. They see the world as offering only tradeoffs. We could raise taxes and redistribute to the poor through welfare (making poverty better), but that might discourage them from working and reduce the tax base as a whole (making other government services worse). They see hateful or offensive speech and maybe they agree that is a problem, but doing anything about it would only create bigger problems elsewhere. Thus "free speech" types tend to default to a position of inaction or leaving things alone, i.e. shrink the state (less action), if something is traditional best to keep doing it (don't change things), etc. Hence the description 'conservative'.
People with the unconstrained vision see a problem like poverty, but are sure there must be solutions out there, if only the right people can be found and put in power. They therefore spend a lot of time worrying about whether politicians are good people, moral people, they tend to suggest solutions like "tax the rich, feed the poor" and don't worry too much about possible negative side effects: if they acknowledge such side effects might exist at all, their view is usually that these effects are small and controllable, and at any rate, such worries should not stand in the way of experimentation and progress.
are you familiar with the works of the Frankfurt School of critical theory?
Those people who looked at Marxist philosophy and concluded communism was just a bad implementation, not that the outlook on humanity itself was flawed?
I haven't read much by the Frankfurt School, although I have studied what Marx himself believed somewhat extensively (well, relative to most people I guess). Marxist thought is such a nonsensical set of beliefs that anything derived from it is likewise guaranteed to be nonsense, so there are limits to how much time I want to spend on that.
Marx wasn't completely self consistent over time, but in the Sowellian framework of visions, Marx was one of the rare people who had an entirely and utterly unconstrained view of human nature. He believed literally all flaws of human nature stemmed from capitalism ("alienation") and if institutions and markets were abolished, problems like people wanting more than their fair share would disappear as well. That's why he was stupid enough to believe that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was both (a) not a self-contradicting concept and (b) would simply wrap itself up and dissolve itself once its redistributive work was done.
The naivety about how people really are that's required to believe that could only come from someone living Marx's entirely cloistered life - any school of thought that descends from it deserves no respect.
>People with the unconstrained vision see a problem like poverty, but are sure there must be solutions out there, if only the right people can be found and put in power.
This seems to more describe a very limited range of people (as much of a range as a binary separation can convey) oriented entirely around the center of the political spectrum. The Socialist left dosen't talk about finding the right people to put in power, it talks about putting the people in power, over capital. They have no time to talk about taxes or tradeoffs or redistribution - to them, these are nothing but empty gestures that do nothing to change the power relations that make up the world.
I (and many in contemporary philosophy, sociology and anthropology) disagree with the assessment that Marxism is necessarily a "nonsensical" set of beliefs; we see it as a mode of analysis that must be constantly subjected to questioning (hence the origin of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxism, anarcho-Communism etc.). He didn't believe that all flaws stemmed from capitalism, rather, he believed in the materialist doctrine of history - that changed circumstances produce changed men (with some caveats).
Not only would Marx have markets abolished, he would render them useless; the market requires capital and money, it requires private property and all the relations that will drag with it - the double separation of the worker: separated from the means of production, and from the products of production. If this double separation is abolished, then markets can no longer exist.
But the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't a "dictatorship" as you may understand the word in terms of Hitler or Stalin, it literally means that society is under the dictation (direction) of the proletariat, not that there is some elite group which takes control and dictates things. The "wrapping up" refers to the concept of withering away of the state, which would happen in the case where the functions of the state have been transferred to the people. But there are other theories too, such as Kropotkin's anarcho-Communism.
But under no circumstance can you claim Marx lived a cloistered life; having the pressure of his father in particular weigh down on him to study Law for money, he chose philosophy, then exiled from his own country for publishing newspapers, he fled to London and with Engels collected hundreds of factory reports and studied them for theirty years in nearly abject poverty. This man was the very opposite of cloistered. But plenty of non-cloistered people have adopted his views and indeed many have been theorists too - check out Robert Tressel.
The Socialist left dosen't talk about finding the right people to put in power, it talks about putting the people in power
Yes, but that's a meaningless slogan. "People" can't be in power in general, only individuals can, that is the nature of power. And so when it comes to actual implementation time, socialists put specific individuals in power - often a lot of power - and they spend a lot of time trying to ensure those people are good/moral/intelligent/wise/etc.
This is why left wing movements have a habit of becoming obsessed with specific leaders. Mao, Stalin, Chavez, and in more modern times Jeremy Corbyn, to a much lesser extent Bernie Sanders etc.
You later assert that "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't actually mean dictatorship in the e.g. Soviet sense even though that's exactly what it always turns into. Because, again, dictatorship of the people is a meaningless slogan.
[Marx] with Engels collected hundreds of factory reports and studied them for theirty years in nearly abject poverty
I'm well aware of Marx's life story, that's why I said it was cloistered.
He spent his entire life doing nothing but reading books in his library and writing political philosophy, sponging off his friends to make ends meet. For a man who claimed to think about the poor so much, here are some notable things he appears to have never done:
* Visited a factory
* Gone down a mine
* Socialised with the working class
* Attempted to win votes or take part in any kind of political process at all
Basically, his life was devoid of reality checks of any sort, which is why his ideas turned out to be so useless and disastrous. He even turned down an invitation from Engels to visit his factory, iirc - that's how much he cared about real workers!
This entirely sealed off existence is one reason he ended up engaging in so much intellectual fraud. His books were notorious even in his lifetime for false claims and faked citations. In particular he frequently found himself making false claims that industrial capitalism was in a downward spiral, because he was citing decades old reports from factory inspectors. Those reports had gone on to trigger changes in legislation and factory conditions, which later improved. His entire thesis was that industrial capitalism would have an apocalyptic end, but it simply wasn't happening, in fact the opposite was happening.
If he had actually spent any time doing real work, or had even joined the factory inspectorate himself, he could have observed this improvement directly. But he lived entirely through the experiences of others, in a dreamworld of his own making.
Not even slightly. If asked to identify a particular place or institution where debate, thought, learning and reflection take place most people would point at universities.
And in the west, where is freedom of speech most restricted , imperilled and where is most obsessed with safe spaces and safe speech? Universities!
You’re painting all universities with the same brush. The universities that engage in debate are, unsurprisingly, not the ones that restrict such debate.
Interesting! I'm inclined to feel that the 'red/blue divide' is more about individualism vs collectivism, but I don't necessarily disagree with your interpretation.
Other considerations (individualism vs collectivism) are tightly related to the "human nature" consideration.
It's way far easier to control speech on a collectivist society, for example. You need a degree of totalitarianism to ban speech and ideas.
How about "balanced speech"? People that want to listen both/all sides of an argument and form their own opinion on then. Free speech yes, but presenting a different perspective to this as well. People can be changed by being subjected for a long period to just one perspective, but are able to resist foreign ideas for a while.
The best explanation for what it truly is and why it occurs throughout history is in "Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. I'll give a précis of the argument here:
The red/blue divide is ultimately a disagreement over the span of human nature. All humans develop intuitive beliefs about human nature merely through the act of living, so nobody is actually neutral or truly 'centrist' - people who appear to be are usually just people who haven't been in a situation where the differences actually matter. But if they were to be, suddenly you'd find they picked a side.
The "free speech" side believe that human nature is limited and relatively static. Humans are corruptible, always have been and always will be. They can't perceive or handle the true complexities of reality, never could and never will. Because human nature is flawed and unchanging, there will always be war, there will always be unfairness, there will always be a divide between the rich and poor and so on. Progress is an endless struggle to find incrementally better tradeoffs, but attempting to make one thing better over here frequently makes something worse over there, and our limited abilities mean it's easy to think you found a better tradeoff when really it was worse. Attempting to change any of these things is naive, futile and usually dangerous.
The "safe speech" side believe that human nature is essentially unlimited and relatively flexible. Humans may be imperfect but they can improve or be improved over time and in the long run are perfectible. This process of improvement occurs through debate, thought, learning and reflection. Intelligence and expertise are paramount, so the best outcomes come from putting decisions in the hands of the best people. That's an important point: because the span of human nature is very wide, some people are much further along the path of enlightenment than other people are, and it's important that the less developed people don't get too much influence in society.
Almost all left/right/red/blue/free-speech/safe-speech/conservative/liberal disputes in life flow from this disagreement over one thing.
With respect to Twitter, we can see the following ideas at work:
- Safe speech side: Ideas are important, spread easily and most people are easily influenced by them. Therefore speech can be dangerous because the mere act of someone speaking can significantly damage the human nature of the listeners, making them literally worse people. Speech control is thus highly important and a moral imperative; free speech by "bad people" can seriously damage civilisation itself. The best way to stop bad ideas spreading from bad people to the lumpen proletariant is moderation by better people, who can use a variety of speech-limiting tools to ensure the best ideas win.
- Free speech side: Ideas are pretty harmless, because people are robust and can easily reject bad ideas that other people talk about. Free speech is essential because nobody has the big picture, all we have are small fragments, and because power corrupts so being able to speak out against power is fundamental. Speech controls and moderation are themselves a form of power which will corrupt the moderators, so it's better to have no controls at all and put up with some level of abuse and spam than submit a free speaking place to the tyrannical will of a handful of self-proclaimed moral overlords.
This is not a US specific thing of course. I don't know why anyone thinks that. You can see it everywhere. For instance, in Europe the EU is essentially controlled by "safe speech" types. This can be seen most visibly in the reaction of the various EU leaders to Brexit. Martin Schulz who was at the time an important figure in the EU Parliament (and went on to be briefly important in German politics), said this:
For decades the UK tabloids have performed mass brainwashing, and the leave campaign force-fed their readers with intolerance of foreigners. No change to the EU will convince those who have fallen victim to these factors. A bonfire of the EU is therefore not the way forwards.
The safe speech / perfectible-human ideas are everywhere in this short quote. People are easily "brainwashed" by ideas that they would naturally reject, except they were "force fed" them and have become "victims" - Schulz believes that people are reprogrammable biological FPGAs whose political beliefs are entirely controlled by those who speak loudly and frequently. These sorts of people also have frequently referred to dislike of the EU as a "virus" that's "spreading". Because people's views are entirely created by listening to charismatic speakers, there is little point in actually changing how anything is really done.
It is impossible for people with such wildly different takes on human nature to co-exist in the same space. If a new space was created by people with free speech mentality, the safe-speechers will not rest until they have taken it over and imposed speech controls on it, because they feel that to not do this is literally dangerous. Hence their name!