Kieran Healy

Empty Questions

Why is the right more prone to tendentious dichotomies than the left? I ask this question in the spirit of Daniel Drezner, who asks “Why is the left more sensitive than the right?” I have one less data point than Daniel, but that data point is Daniel himself, so I shall follow his fine example and plough on regardless.

Like Daniel, I’ll admit that it might not be possible to answer my question, since measurement is next to impossible and I can think up of at least as many counterexamples as positive cases. But let’s not let that get in the way. The distinguishing factor here is that in recent memory, political leaders on the left do not boil complex situations down to almost mindlessly simple alternatives. The same cannot be said about political leaders on the right—- see George Bush, George Bush and, um, George Bush. This blind shoehorning of complex questions into the procrustean bed of goodies vs baddies has the peculiar stink of self-righteousness that renders some on the right unable to distinguish informed analysis from high treason. In contrast, those on the left are pretty good at acknowledging that, at least in principle, political choices may come with more than two options.

Why is this the case? I just made up two possible explanations:

1) The right takes things personally. When you have a political disagreement with someone on the left side of the spectrum, the tendency is to have a good fight and then maybe think about collecting some data. When you have a political disagreement with someone on the right side of the spectrum, the tendency is for that person to believe that the disagreement is an indication of a deep character flaw, such as the inability to reason, or distinguish good from evil. More (admittedly laughable) proof: run a Google search on “evil” and “liberal” and you get 426,000 hits; do the same with “conservative” and you only get 380,000 hits. [Hey, I did the same thing with “left-wing” and “right-wing” and the right-wingers had more hits, 135,000 to 55,000—ed. OK, but do the same thing with “Democrat” and “Ankle-Biter” and the Democrats win by a massive, 102,000 to 4,800. QED.]

2) Conservatives have yet to adjust to the fact that they’ve graduated from high-school. Until recently, high-schools were thought to be centers of unhappiness for people who should be popular but are not, because they can’t throw a football and have a subscription to The National Review. This was certainly the case when I was in school. Anyway, those who form their political positions in a climate of adolescent moral absolutes are not used to thinking about the complex world beyond the debate team, and as a result are not likely to pay attention to it later in life. Conservatives face a much harsher political adjustment when they exit their parents’ homes.

If it’s the first explanation, there’s not much that can be done about it. If it’s the second, however, then there’s probably not much to be done about it either, as these habits tend to be set early in life.

Daniel says his story is “developing”. I will stay tuned for further installments, which I imagine will include such pressing questions as, “Why are Conservatives More Fun than Liberals?”, “Why does the Left Score Lower on IQ Tests than the Right?”, and “When did the Left Stop Beating its Wife?”

Where have you been? Post-Lewinsky, they’ve moved on to “Will the Left Ever Stop Beating Its Wife?” Next? “The Bell Curve II: Why the Left Will Never Stop Beating Its Wife”

I read this via CalPundit, who has an unerring eye for both the ridiculous (Drezner’s post) and the hilarious (yours).

Gore’s Hopes

Via Avedon Carol I see that a draft Gore campaign has been launched.We are grassroots Democrats from coast to coast

I loved “I just made up two possible explanations”. How I’d love to hear that said in the news, or out of George Bush’s mouth, for that matter.

Conservatives have yet to adjust to the fact that they’ve graduated from high-school.

Actually, just today I was reading John McWhorter, an African-American conservative who bangs on about black people not caring about the life of the mind—a man in dire need of a copy of Richard Hofstatder’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and a google for the concept of secular drift—and it occurred to me that his problem was really that he had had a lonely, nerdy adolescence.

Hey, I thought it was because they can’t sustain their positions with facts. Thus the need for platitudes! — DR

An Army of One

“Why are there so many personally obnoxious people on the Left?” asks Nick Denton, in an irritating post. In his

Theorem: Kieran Healy

is one of the sharpest webloggers posting regularly today. Also one of the few who regularly make me laugh actually,

You’re obviously aware of the writing of Malcolm Gladwell on the subject of creeping determinism. What you refer to here as “tendentious dichotomies” may have to do more with another concept Gladwell has written about, namely “channel capacity”. (The idea is not Gladwell’s—I first heard about it in Psychology 201 25 years ago—but I ran across it again in Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”.) It has to do with the upper limit on our capacity for processing information via multiple channels. It also shows up in the famous “7 plus or minus 2” limits on short term memory.

But here’s the thing—this phenomenon is not characteristic of either the Left or the Right. It’s not a characteristic of either the Rich or the Poor. It’s inherent in the species. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t apply to them is a big, fat stinkin’, self-deluded tub of lard, like Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly combined.

NRO More

I dropped by NRO’s The Corner a minute ago. I know, I know. John Derbyshire carrying the conservative banner of civility-in-blogging by casually stereotyping jews and blacks in the service of a bit of backhanded homophobia. But I’m sure thi…

NRO More

I dropped by NRO’s The Corner a minute ago. I know, I know. John Derbyshire carrying the conservative banner of civility-in-blogging by casually stereotyping jews and blacks in the service of a bit of backhanded homophobia. But I’m sure thi…

@ Bill Crutcher: OT, but the channel capacity goes back to Shannon’s 1948 paper “A mathematical theory of communication”, which you can download here. The magical number seven goes back to this George Miller 1956 article, which is worth the read (a) for the opening line My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. and (b) because it shows the picture is more complicated than “7 plus/minus 2”.
That aside, information theory sensu Shannon has not been particularly useful in psychology, since we quickly found out we can’t properly quantify information in most cases of interest to psychology.

On topic: the tendency to resort to black-white dichotomies is distributed in the population and obviously a group of people can be more prone to it than others. AFAIK this is however not true of conservatives in general.

oops, links don’t work:
Shannon: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html
Miller: http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

I think the crux of the biscuit is that conservatives feel fear more acutely then liberals. Everything else is mere correlation.

re conservatives and fear -remember The Strange Politics Of Dreaming?
at
http://www.kellybulkeley.com/articles/article_the_strange_politics_of_dreaming.htm

CT, Left exposed again

Here in Australia it has been 2004 for some time. My advice from the future is, buy IBM. Reading around this morning I see Glenn Reynolds going out on a high, high note for 2003, reminding us all why he…

Oh, the Humanity

Ted beat me to this, mostly. But I wanted to say this: I’m sure if we trawl through our 1990s archives we’ll find that the high-minded and their lofty correspondents Reader Keith Rempel gets at the heart of what’s wrong…