Cooperation, Trust, Communication and Productivity vs. the Doctrines of Class Warfare

From Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish a couple of years back:

Bruce Schneier:

In today’s society, we need to trust not only people, but institutions and systems. It’s not so much that I trusted the particular pilot who flew my plane this morning, but the airline that produces well-trained and well-rested pilots according to some schedule. And it’s not so much that I trusted the particular taxi driver, but instead the taxi licensing system and overall police system that produced him. Similarly, when I used an ATM this morning — another interesting exercise in trust — it’s less that I trusted that particular machine, bank, and service company — but instead that I trusted the national banking system to debit the proper amount from my bank account back home.

Here’s how I like to look at it. All complex ecosystems require cooperation. This is true for biological ecosystems, social systems, and sociotechnical systems. Also, in any cooperative system, there also exists an alternative parasitical strategy. Examples include tapeworms in your digestive tract, thieves in a market, spammers on e-mail, and people who refuse to pay their taxes. These parasites can only survive if they’re not too successful. That is, if their number gets too large or too powerful, the underlying system collapses.

The modern world is based on cooperation, sharing, trust, communication, altruism, and productivity; it is about friendship, not warfare. You become wealthy by creating wealth. This requires free people, and particularly freedom of thought and freedom of speech. It requires tolerance, because free thought, when it produces the new ideas a vital society needs, produces opinions which vary from the received wisdom. "If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox." (1)

This is particularly so in the university, which Robert Pirsig called The Church of Reason. Conor Friedersdorf recently called attention to the intolerance of a current form of activism:

Whether they wish to hear it or not, the most serious mistake these activists are making is intolerance. ...

Intolerance is not an absence of politeness. I did not argue that the Yale activists are intolerant because they failed to be demure or to please everyone. And while I noted that some activists spat on people leaving a lecture––surely an intolerant act––even that wasn’t at the core of my critique.

I called the Yale activists intolerant because it was not enough for them to protest an email that they found wrongheaded; it was not enough to fully air their grievances in multiple public forums and at the home of its author; it was not enough for Nicholas and Ericka Christakis to listen attentively to student critiques and to express heartfelt regret that the email hurt feelings; rather, the student activists demanded that the couple renounce the substance of their beliefs, or else face public shaming and an effort to remove them from their position. Never mind that Christakis believed what she wrote. She had to reverse her position, or else.

That is what I believe to be intolerant: a refusal to agree to disagree, however passionately and impolitely; a rejection of the notion that earnest differences held by people of good faith are not cause for punishment, even if they are mistaken, or unwittingly insensitive, or give offense; a stance that amounts to “error has no rights.”

In November's post on the doctrines of class warfare, Point 7 argued that class warfare

Is anti-intellectual .... There are no "neutral" intellectual positions, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to pure intellectual matters. There is no justification for socially constructed intellectual propositions which are blithely ignorant of the plight of the oppressed (see "state of emergency," ...).

Truth is what serves the cause.

Chris Bodenner, in Notes on The Authoritarian Turn of Academia, quotes a reader who notices the authoritarian tinge of the class warfare approach:

This liberal-minded reader worries about it:

My fiancee is a Mizzou alumna, and we got into a brief squabble about this the other night. It’s frustrating because she kept insisting that I wasn’t there and couldn’t know what the protesters had endured during their time on campus. She wouldn’t hear my argument that preserving free speech is important no matter what the situation, even though I agree with the cause of the protesters just as much as she does. I couldn’t seem to make her understand that their situation doesn’t excuse their attempted suppression of the free speech of others.

Once that line has been crossed, all the opposition has to do is say “but they did the exact same thing.” And they can hit back with the same approach but with much more cultural and institutional power behind it.

In other words, inroads to authoritarian behavior, even in the service of a noble cause, always lead to the use of authoritarian behavior against the people who first look to it as a line of defense. By preserving First Amendment rights, the protesters might make a slightly longer road for themselves in the short term, but they will also ensure that road doesn’t lead them into a box canyon of their own making.

The activist, class warfare approach, wherever it is examined, tends to be dysfunctional. Tolerance and freedom of speech are not only morally laudable, they work better than narrow-minded censorship.


(1) Orwell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prevention_of_Literature