Why I Am Not Not a Conflict Theorist

Several years ago, the excellent Philosophy Bear made a valiant effort at smuggling fragments of a leftist worldview past the rationalists’ Anti-Progressiver Schutzwall. In particular, he tried to get across the seemingly very basic notion that we simply do not all want the same things; we cannot all always get our way. Yes, everyone wanted smallpox gone and no one would have won a Cold War gone hot, but these are exceptional cases. Under ordinary circumstances, different policy choices will serve some interests at others’ expense. They may serve them well, or poorly. There may be interests we can only ever help a little, and at tremendous cost; there may be cheap enormous wins out there, waiting to be plucked. But there is no consensus on what to pay for what. No amount of technocratic know-how can say whose values we should serve.

It’s not hard to guess what happened next: the empirical claim that “political disagreements reflect differences in interests which are largely irreconcilable”, rounded off to “the conflict theory of politics”, was quickly taken up and transformed into yet another account of why The Left is Evil And Must Be Destroyed. Somewhat unusually, however, this was not just the slow semantic drift experienced by any neutral term that only very non-neutral people use. It was done explicitly, and all at once, by Scott Alexander.

I don’t especially dislike the guy; he’s mostly lost my interest these days, but he had some real flashes of brilliance way back when. Meditations on Moloch, most notably, might as well be “Marx for Dummies” - made all the more impressive by the fact that Scott has clearly not read much Marx. But I hate Conflict vs. Mistake.

“Conflict theorists”, Scott says, believe that

• predicting policy effects is easy

• “you can save the world by increasing passion”

• free speech and open debate are bad, and “anybody who says it’s good to let the enemy walk in and promote enemy ideas is probably an enemy agent.”

• “stopping George Soros / the Koch brothers is the most important thing in the world”

• “racism is a conflict between races. White racists aren’t suffering from a cognitive bias, and they’re not mistaken about anything: they’re correct that white supremacy puts them on top, and hoping to stay there.”

• “technocracy is stupid”, revolutionary politics are good

• “mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict”

That’s compression, not a caricature. The strongest words are his.

Mistake theorists, on the other hand, are just the opposite: liberal technocrats who see the interlocking systems of the world for what they are, and for the good of all of us simply want to fix them. In other words: the world consists of the most annoying caricature of an online liberal you can possibly imagine, and the smart and handsome neolibs nobly holding them at bay.

Scott doesn’t come out and say those precise words. He doesn’t claim that someone who holds some of these stances likely holds them all. But he speaks subtext perfectly, and he’s familiar with his fans - he knew or should have known how such a sharpened concept would end up being used. His arguments are not precisely “soldiers”, but they sure do carry guns.

This sort of hypocrisy annoys me. I have no principled objection to a little propagandizing now and then: idealized debate is all well and good and maybe even fun, but it cannot survive in the public eye; not for very long. Consider whichever topic you know best. Now see what the commenters on Hackernews have to say about it. That’s your marketplace of ideas in action. If you’ve got to set a crying puppy montage to Adagio for Strings to get people to listen, so be it. But at least admit that you’re doing it.

Politics is war. That’s not an endorsement, it’s just a fact. The only people who like it that way are agonistic liberal pluralist types; I, like right thinking people everywhere, very much do not. But there is peace, and then there’s surrender - the stakes are far too high for that. And though who wins is not the only thing that matters, it matters, and matters a whole lot. Insisting on an aesthetic of dispassionate, rational debate - and the aesthetic really does influence people, no matter how much you might wish otherwise - without regard for circumstance is simply choosing to lose. But acknowledging that fact does nothing to commit you to any particular policy position, let alone the incoherent radlib mishmash that Scott would call the left.

Let me provide a concrete counterexample. I far from the orthodox Marxist Scott thought he was addressing, but I’m a hell of a lot closer than whatever online liberal caricature he’s labelled “Marxist” in his head. Here’s how his checklist checks out for me. I believe that:

• Predicting policy effects is incredibly hard. It’s so hard, in fact, that only direct empirical evidence can really be relied upon. This is precisely why I also think any self-styled mistake theorist advocating neoliberal policy cannot be trusted. Social democrats face political constraints which might well prove fatal, and which have done them in before, but if you’re a mistake theorist that shouldn’t bother you. What matters is that they’re right, and by virtue of their rightness those constraints can be overcome. And they are right: the frozen wasteland known as “Finland” is rich and it is equal when it used to be dirt poor. It is not the richest, and not yet perfect, but it’s among the best compromises seen so far. Assuming, that is, that you conceive of “best” in broadly egalitarian terms. If not, then that’s another piece of evidence that mistake theory is wrong.

• “Increasing passion” is ill-defined to the point of uselessness. But you’re not going to save the world by “increasing intelligence” either. You won’t save it by increasing any individual trait; things are bigger than that now. Personal valor is besides the point; organization is what wins wars.

• Free speech and open debate are mostly good - not because the “marketplace of ideas” reliably works (it doesn’t, as anyone with an internet connection should know), but because political participation is a positive good in its own right. Having a spine is good for your health.

• Soros and the Koch brothers are epiphenomena; it would be someone else if not for them. Do with them what you will; it won’t matter in the end.

• Racists are imbeciles, racism originated as a tool of social control wielded by colonial elites against enslaved Africans and poor whites alike, but at this point in history survives through stupidity alone, and anyone who thinks “a conflict between races” can actually refer is mistaken about many, many things.

• Both technocratic and revolutionary politics have panned out pretty poorly. Mass movements in democracies have the best record (I would file them under “revolutionary”, though I suspect that Scott might not), but have still most often lost. Going up against all the powers of the world, it seems, is actually very hard.

• And finally, sincere mistake theorists, if they exist, are not the enemy. They’ve simply got things wrong.