on being good.
Dec. 17th, 2015 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaHere are some links that are relevant to some thoughts I've been turning over in my head lately wrt the very broad areas of morality and tribalism:
Reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science. There have been a few grumpy analyses of academia by conservatives that I've read before, and I've found most of them unconvincing—they tend to obsess over things like "x% of professors voted for Obama!" without demonstrating how that actually affects their teaching/research. This one, however, is better-argued and far more damning, and was a little shocking to me in some respects. The author points out how a lot of social science research comes with pretty strong left-leaning biases because of the way their studies are set up and measured—i.e., a study that qualifies a trait like "openness to experience" in such a way that it really means "openness to upper-class liberal hobbies," and a study that identifies thoughts like "hard work tends to pay off" as a "rationalization of inequality" (???), shit like that.
This is pretty sad news for social science, coming on the heels of a pretty significant crisis in psych research—turns out you can't fucking reproduce most the results of the most important studies, oops. (Apologies that I can't find a better link than The Guardian atm; I was getting drinks with a CS/communication professor a couple weeks ago, and he talked in some detail about the specific systematic statistical / experimental design errors psych has been making & why they're so egregious, but he has not typed up a blog entry on the subject and I cannot find one at the moment!)
Anyway. The moral is, instead of the usual depressing-yet-normal pipeline of "good science is performed, but the results are tentative/incomplete, science journalism publishes a distortion of the original thing and people start believing a distortion," we have an even more depressing pipeline of "junk science is performed, said junk science gets even more distorted by journalism, and self-satisfied liberal-types will snarkily post BS studies like "religious people are less empathetic LOL THOSE BIBLE-THUMPERS."
Which sort of hackishly transitions into my next train of thought, which I was thinking about today because, well, some Very Smart Young Liberal Type cited that study during a casual conversation today, and it reminded me of Darcey's observations on moral values that are not based on SJ causes (plus a small addendum). (Darcey's blog is one of my favorite things on Tumblr right now and I recommend plumbing through the archives if you're into thoughts on death, mysticism, tradition, ritual, etc.) tl;dr, she points out there's a lot of virtues people can value, like taking care of your responsibilities, or being dutiful to your family, and so on, and it seems a little weird that left-wing radicals, particularly in the echo chamber that is Tumblr, focus almost exclusively on the SJ-based virtues.
Which resonates some with my experience. Basically, a lot of the culture of secular morality that I'm surrounded by these days is based on having "correct" beliefs. For instance: don't be religious; religion is silly fairy-stories that Educated People don't bother with. If you are religious, definitely don't mention it, or if you do mention it, emphasize that you're not one of those religious people, really, you don't actually believe the Bible, you just think it's a cool book. Stuff like that. It was an underlying attitude at my liberal undergrad college, and it's the underlying attitude at my liberal Seattle-based workplace.
And—to be absolutely clear—I don't mean this as a screed against Dem Coastal Left-Wing Elites, really. I check off pretty much all the boxes on the Coastal Left-Wing Elite list these days; they are one of the tribes I belong to now, for better and for worse. Plus, I just don't think there's a good solution to the general problem of ingroup/outgroup behavior—because that's totally what this is. When I lived in Kentucky, I was annoyed because being atheist/queer/etc marked you as an outsider weirdo, and I thought that was unfair; now that I'm in Seattle, being pro-gun-rights/religious/etc will mark you as an outsider weirdo. I don't really know how to change basic human nature in general, and have no desire to do so. But I guess I do have a desire to figure out... I don't know, a different standard to hold myself to? A higher standard? A personal morality based on something other than being successful & a relatively non-disruptive citizen & not being actively repugnant to be around?
Because I support a lot of social justice causes; I vote in elections; I donate to charities that matter to me; I try to be nice and such. But I think there's a difference between merely being nice and being good, and when I think good, I think of things like—well, honestly, I remember a lot of my old church leaders. The youth minister at my Baptist church kept me hanging around Christianity far longer than I would have otherwise, because he was just so energetic and giving and kind and conscientious that he made you want to treat others better, care more, give more, and I wanted to be like him. (I didn't leave the church until he did.) I think of, say, my grandpa, who volunteered so much time & energy to his small community in rural Missouri, serving on the school board, funding scholarships to the community college, volunteering to teach workshops and stuff like that. How, when he started his medical practice, most people didn't have any money to spare, so they'd offer him stuff from their farms—eggs or chickens or whatever they could manage to give—and he always said that's just fine. He spoke of medicine as a service, didn't seem to understand why you'd do it unless you really wanted to help other people—which was such a refreshing thing to hear compared to listening to the premeds I was surrounded by in college.
The grandpa thing is kind of a sappy tangent, sorry. But I guess it's kind of fitting, right, I guess, if I'm mulling over stuff like this.
I started a project a long time ago, where I was reading a bunch of random contemporary philosophical tracts, because effective altruism / radical utilitarianism distressed me, and seemed to be a dominant mode of morality among techie types, and I was trying to argue for post-Aristotlean virtue ethics as a more appealing alternative. It was an interesting project, interesting reading, but I guess now I'm interested more in virtue ethics (or any appealing system of ethics, really) in their own right, rather than as a reaction to utilitarianism, and also I want to do less intellectualizing about goodness and more doing it. Whatever it is that means.
ETA (Dec 27): This link came up on my Facebook and seemed to relevant not to drop here.
Reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science. There have been a few grumpy analyses of academia by conservatives that I've read before, and I've found most of them unconvincing—they tend to obsess over things like "x% of professors voted for Obama!" without demonstrating how that actually affects their teaching/research. This one, however, is better-argued and far more damning, and was a little shocking to me in some respects. The author points out how a lot of social science research comes with pretty strong left-leaning biases because of the way their studies are set up and measured—i.e., a study that qualifies a trait like "openness to experience" in such a way that it really means "openness to upper-class liberal hobbies," and a study that identifies thoughts like "hard work tends to pay off" as a "rationalization of inequality" (???), shit like that.
This is pretty sad news for social science, coming on the heels of a pretty significant crisis in psych research—turns out you can't fucking reproduce most the results of the most important studies, oops. (Apologies that I can't find a better link than The Guardian atm; I was getting drinks with a CS/communication professor a couple weeks ago, and he talked in some detail about the specific systematic statistical / experimental design errors psych has been making & why they're so egregious, but he has not typed up a blog entry on the subject and I cannot find one at the moment!)
Anyway. The moral is, instead of the usual depressing-yet-normal pipeline of "good science is performed, but the results are tentative/incomplete, science journalism publishes a distortion of the original thing and people start believing a distortion," we have an even more depressing pipeline of "junk science is performed, said junk science gets even more distorted by journalism, and self-satisfied liberal-types will snarkily post BS studies like "religious people are less empathetic LOL THOSE BIBLE-THUMPERS."
Which sort of hackishly transitions into my next train of thought, which I was thinking about today because, well, some Very Smart Young Liberal Type cited that study during a casual conversation today, and it reminded me of Darcey's observations on moral values that are not based on SJ causes (plus a small addendum). (Darcey's blog is one of my favorite things on Tumblr right now and I recommend plumbing through the archives if you're into thoughts on death, mysticism, tradition, ritual, etc.) tl;dr, she points out there's a lot of virtues people can value, like taking care of your responsibilities, or being dutiful to your family, and so on, and it seems a little weird that left-wing radicals, particularly in the echo chamber that is Tumblr, focus almost exclusively on the SJ-based virtues.
Which resonates some with my experience. Basically, a lot of the culture of secular morality that I'm surrounded by these days is based on having "correct" beliefs. For instance: don't be religious; religion is silly fairy-stories that Educated People don't bother with. If you are religious, definitely don't mention it, or if you do mention it, emphasize that you're not one of those religious people, really, you don't actually believe the Bible, you just think it's a cool book. Stuff like that. It was an underlying attitude at my liberal undergrad college, and it's the underlying attitude at my liberal Seattle-based workplace.
And—to be absolutely clear—I don't mean this as a screed against Dem Coastal Left-Wing Elites, really. I check off pretty much all the boxes on the Coastal Left-Wing Elite list these days; they are one of the tribes I belong to now, for better and for worse. Plus, I just don't think there's a good solution to the general problem of ingroup/outgroup behavior—because that's totally what this is. When I lived in Kentucky, I was annoyed because being atheist/queer/etc marked you as an outsider weirdo, and I thought that was unfair; now that I'm in Seattle, being pro-gun-rights/religious/etc will mark you as an outsider weirdo. I don't really know how to change basic human nature in general, and have no desire to do so. But I guess I do have a desire to figure out... I don't know, a different standard to hold myself to? A higher standard? A personal morality based on something other than being successful & a relatively non-disruptive citizen & not being actively repugnant to be around?
Because I support a lot of social justice causes; I vote in elections; I donate to charities that matter to me; I try to be nice and such. But I think there's a difference between merely being nice and being good, and when I think good, I think of things like—well, honestly, I remember a lot of my old church leaders. The youth minister at my Baptist church kept me hanging around Christianity far longer than I would have otherwise, because he was just so energetic and giving and kind and conscientious that he made you want to treat others better, care more, give more, and I wanted to be like him. (I didn't leave the church until he did.) I think of, say, my grandpa, who volunteered so much time & energy to his small community in rural Missouri, serving on the school board, funding scholarships to the community college, volunteering to teach workshops and stuff like that. How, when he started his medical practice, most people didn't have any money to spare, so they'd offer him stuff from their farms—eggs or chickens or whatever they could manage to give—and he always said that's just fine. He spoke of medicine as a service, didn't seem to understand why you'd do it unless you really wanted to help other people—which was such a refreshing thing to hear compared to listening to the premeds I was surrounded by in college.
The grandpa thing is kind of a sappy tangent, sorry. But I guess it's kind of fitting, right, I guess, if I'm mulling over stuff like this.
I started a project a long time ago, where I was reading a bunch of random contemporary philosophical tracts, because effective altruism / radical utilitarianism distressed me, and seemed to be a dominant mode of morality among techie types, and I was trying to argue for post-Aristotlean virtue ethics as a more appealing alternative. It was an interesting project, interesting reading, but I guess now I'm interested more in virtue ethics (or any appealing system of ethics, really) in their own right, rather than as a reaction to utilitarianism, and also I want to do less intellectualizing about goodness and more doing it. Whatever it is that means.
ETA (Dec 27): This link came up on my Facebook and seemed to relevant not to drop here.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-18 08:21 am (UTC)