Yves here. This post describes how many (most?) people decide whether to trust a speaker or information source based on whether they share your values. Readers Eclair and mariann discussed how efforts to indoctrinate them to trust only members of the Catholic community never took. But tribal markers are extensive: prettiness, accent and manner (such as in the highly stratified UK), use of identifying language, and of course having gone to the right schools or at least coming from a good community. In college, one of my friends from an affluent family stressed the importance of shoes as a status marker. A worked example is John LeCarre’s A Murder of Quality, which almost painfully focuses on class signifiers.
The point is that people often make preliminary decisions on whether to be predisposed towards a speaker or source even before they’ve said anything substantive.
However, that does not fully explain how self-censorship has become more widespread, as in it is the result of more intense overt censorship on charged topics like Israel’s genocide. But in keeping with Glenn Loury and Rajiv Sethi piece, I’ve remarked on the notion of belief clusters as a new form of tribalism. Of course, we are all too familiar with the PMC/Team Blue versus MAGA/”right wing populist” schism. But there are others. For instance, if you are a goodthinking member of the anti-imperialist community, you are presumed to be at least somewhat libertarian, as in hate all government deficits, be opposed to masking (even voluntary) and favor crypto currencies. If you straddle those views, you often have a lot of ‘splaining to do. Most people are not wired to do that. Easier to shut up and go along.
By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University & External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at his site
One of my favorite academic papers of all time is Glenn Loury’s 1994 essay on Self-Censorship in Public Discourse. There isn’t a single equation there but the work is mathematically deep, as evidenced by the kinds of technical successors that it has inspired. It’s also beautifully written and deeply interdisciplinary, building on Erving Goffman’s pioneering work on impression management, and using Julius Caesar for illustration.
Brutus, argues Glenn, makes a “naive, guileless, literal” speech defending the assassination of Caesar in Act III of Shakespeare’s play. This seems to meet with approval from the assembled crowd, until Antony responds with a “powerfully manipulative oration” that makes “the words honorable man in reference to Brutus mean exactly their opposite.” We know how that story ends.
Glenn and I discussed the paper at length on his podcast a decade ago, and returned to the theme earlier this year. It was the topic of my presentation at a conference in his honor in 2022. The piece will be republished as a short book soon, with a new foreword and afterword by the author, a simple title, and a striking cover.
A central concept in the essay is the ad hominem inference, which Glenn defines as follows:
Ad hominem inference, though denigrated by the high-minded, is a vitally important defensive tactic in the forum. When discussing matters of collective importance, knowing “where the speaker stands” helps us gauge the weight to give to an argument, opinion, or factual assertion offered in the debate. If we know a speaker shares our values, we more readily accept observations from him contrary to our initial sense of things. We are less eager to dismiss his rebuttal of our arguments, and more willing to believe facts reported by him with unpleasant implications. The reason for all of this is that when we believe the speaker has goals similar to our own we are confident that any effort on his part to manipulate us is undertaken to advance ends similar to those we would pursue ourselves. Conversely, speakers with values very different from ours are probably seeking ends at odds with those that we would choose, if we had the same information. The possibility of adverse manipulation makes such people dangerous when allowed to remain among us undetected. Thus, whenever political discourse takes place under conditions of uncertainty about the values of participants, a certain vetting process occurs, in which we cautiously try to learn more about the larger commitments of those advocating a particular course of action.
Note that Glenn refers to inferences rather than attacks. He considers such reasoning to be motivated by self-protection and perfectly consistent with human rationality.
But when judgements about values and character are made based on the content of speech, dissent from a widely shared consensus can become very costly, resulting in “social ostracism, verbal abuse, extreme disapproval, damage to reputation, and loss of professional opportunity.” These costs are most severe for those who do, in fact, share the values and commitments of the community; they may not matter at all for others. As a result, certain public speech acts are avoided by people who would like to remain in good standing, while being adopted with relish by those unconcerned with community approval.
The result is self-censorship and a hardening of orthodoxies:
For every act of aberrant speech seen to be punished… there are countless other critical arguments, dissents from received truth, unpleasant factual reports, or nonconformist deviations of thought that go unexpressed, or whose expression is distorted, because potential speakers rightly fear the consequences of a candid exposition of their views. As a result, the public discussion of vital issues can become dangerously impoverished.
As Glenn puts it in the foreword to the forthcoming book: the problem of censorship is far more subtle than commonly assumed, “entailing as it does not only the iron fist of state repression but also the velvet glove of social cooptation.”
Let me illustrate with a topical example.
In July of last year, while running for the Democratic nomination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr made the following remarks in a conversation that was surreptitiously recorded:
We need to talk about bio weapons… I know a lot now about bioweapons because I’ve been doing a book on it for the past two and a half years… We’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, Covid-19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to Covid-19… because of genetic differentials… of the ACE2 receptor… Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people; the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese… We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted… but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact… We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons… that’s what all those labs in the Ukraine are about, they’re collecting Russian DNA, they’re collecting Chinese DNA, so we can target people by race.
There is a lot in this bizarre set of claims that one could take issue with, but it’s important to first understand that there is indeed a Cleveland Clinic study that examined genetic differences across populations in susceptibility to the disease. As noted by Paul Offit in his critique of Kennedy’s remarks, this study predicted during the very early days of the pandemic that “the groups most susceptible to Covid-19 were Africans, African Americans, and non-Finnish Europeans; those somewhat less susceptible were Latino, East Asian, Finnish, and South Asians; and those least susceptible were the Amish and Ashkenazi Jews.”
However, as explained very clearly by Offit, this study is not relevant to our understanding of population-level differences in fatality rates:
Data were collected and analyzed well before SARS-CoV-2 started killing people in the United States. For that reason, researchers didn’t correlate genetic susceptibilities with clinical outcomes. They were just predicting who they thought would be most likely to suffer from Covid-19… the maximum frequencies of genetic variations among different groups was no greater than 1 in 100… while it was reasonable to predict that one individual might be more susceptible to Covid-19 than another, these genetic differences were far too rare to account for population differences. Now that the virus has been circulating for almost four years—and killed about 7 million people worldwide—we know that their predictions were wrong. Hospitalizations and deaths weren’t determined by racial or ethnic backgrounds, they were determined mostly by age, underlying health problems, and vaccination status.
So Kennedy misunderstood or mischaracterized a study in order to support a narrative about heinous military activities by major powers, including our own.
But most headlines and social media commentary at the time focused not on factual error or baseless speculation, but on particular attention to anti-Semitism. There was some vigorous pushback but this was largely drowned out in the cacophony.
This is the ad hominem inference at work. It is a perfectly understandable impulse, for reasons explained in Glenn’s essay. But it has some unintended political consequences.
Once a public determination has been made that someone does not share the values and commitments of a community, a bridge is burned and the prospect of cooperation to meet shared goals becomes all but impossible. Even a simple act of courtesy such as taking a phone call becomes difficult to countenance. And this kind of disrespect can drive the apostate into the arms of a different, more welcoming community.
A month before Kennedy’s remarks came to light, I argued that “if his party adopts a dismissive and contemptuous stance towards him and towards those whom he has mobilized, it will sink its own prospects.” I stand by that assessment. Self-censorship and the emptiness of public discourse is not the only consequence of ad hominemreasoning. At certain critical historical junctures, the impulse can alter the path taken by a nation.
Carl Schmitt, I think, identified politics of coalitions as identifying an enemy that unites would-be-coalition members. (Well, not exactly what he said literally, but thst is the implication.) This fits with the import of “ad hominim” in Loury’s argument. Of course, the “enemy” doesn’t really need to be built on “reality.” The example that I thought about first was the probably fictitious Emmanuel Goldstein in the 1984 universe, but then I thought of another example, from an episode of Crusade, a short lived spinoff of sci fi show Babylon 5: an alien government, with late 20th century tech level, has created an entire “conspiracy” in which “aliens” (humans, whose TV signals they encountered, but never actually met before.) are behind everything that goes wrong, to distract attention from their own malfeasance and incompetence. The plot of the episode revolves around the human spaceship whose crew discovers that they are widely believed by conspiracy theorists and alt media on an alien world they had never been as the villains behind the curtain…like the Putin.
Long point short, creating hate and making it one’s fumie or jabarat is the way to keep a coalition going, with ritual display of hate and contempt towards that object. In a more civilized society, we’d make those objects fictitious so nobofy gets hurt, at least, but we are not there yet, it seems.
The link to the Loury essay goes to the Journal’s website, where it is paywalled. However, Loury has made the essay freely accessible at his web site:
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/papers/Loury%20(Politcal%20Correctness)_02.pdf
Thank you so much! Very helpful.
This is probably why many speakers start with a joke: showing that you share similar sense of humor you pocket the audience on your side.
Ad hominem arguments are rhetorically very effective if logically fallacious. However, there may be a heuristic benefit in a world of seemingly infinite potential sources of information, these tags may assist in guiding a person as to who is worth paying attention to and who is worth ignoring. Its is not physically possible to treat every purveyor of theories, factual claims and analysis fairly and absorb their perspective given the short span of our lives.
In addition, given the corruption in the system, official gate keeping seems to be broken (or is focused on a function other than quality), so perhaps “ad hominem” tags become even more valuable as you cannot really trust institutional information sources.
In a sense, this is an old problem: George Orwell often remarked how identification with the “Left” in his time, even though that was itself a minority tendency, carried with it a whole set of assumptions about supporting Stalin, for example, or certain parts of the Republican side in Spain but not others. And if you ever frequented small Marxist groups in the 1970s, you will remember the fanatical insistence on ideological purity, combined with vicious ad hominem attacks, often disguised as accusations ideological faults. (I remember various Marxists at the time shouting “Stalinist” at each other, for example.)
The fact is, most people choose “sides” for basically emotional or aesthetic reasons, and form virtual or actual groups from which they derive emotional support, in return for ideological consistency. They also, as hk says, are given “enemy” groups ready identified to hate. This is what most people actually want. They do not have the time or the energy, or often the knowledge and experience, to make independent judgements, but they do know what satisfies them emotionally.
When I was younger I didn’t understand this, and thought that most people were interested in the truth, or at least in some approximation of reality. I couldn’t understand why my parents were so angrily resistant to reading or watching something that might change their minds, but that was, of course, precisely why they wouldn’t. But not only do people not want their minds changed, because that threatens their ego and their self-identification, they react badly to attempts to persuade them, and the more logical and calm these attempts are, the more emotional and ad hominem the reaction often is. So rational, patient persuasion is often construed as an aggressive and threatening act, because it attacks the emotional basis of what people believe. In the example cited, Mark Anthony knew that he could never persuade the crowd to support him on a rational basis, and that all that was left was ad hominem attacks.
More recently, when I pointed out that there were unmistakeable objective changes in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, people did not attempt to argue that I was wrong or had misunderstood, but called me a “Gorbymaniac.” When I told people about my first trips to South Africa at the end of apartheid, I was asked “I suppose that you want Communism in Britain as well then?” At the start of the war in Ukraine, I tried patiently to explain, on a couple of high profile sites, what some of the realities of the conflict were as acknowledged in the media, but was brutally dismissed as a “Russian asset.” I made a post on one of John Michael Greer’s sites on some of the political aspects of Covid, which I didn’t think were in dispute, and was treated as a troll and an apologist for the medical industry. I suspect many here have had similar experiences, and in the end it’s not worth it, unless you enjoy ad hominem attacks. So these days, in the few posts that I make on various sites, I have a rule never to respond to, or even finish reading, replies beginning “so I suppose you think that ..” or “you must be one of …” since the writers are obviously not interested in the facts. I’d honestly urge others to do the same.
Perhaps it was always like this, but the Internet has massively expanded self-censorship and facilitated the creation of rigid ideological blocs. You can join Russia Bad! or USA Bad! and be told what to think, but if you step outside the narrow and rigidly enforced boundaries, you will be dumped on, often by both sides, because you are seen as endangering the egos and personal identification of those who attack you,. Because they have often no rational basis for responding to you, ad hominem attacks are all they have. Depressing, but I’m not sure what we can do about it.
Very well put, and I like the point about people under time constraints not having the time to charitably parse ideologically ‘impure’ statements.
Excellent response, approaching the cathartic. Third paragraph in particular. [paraphrase] “if not the truth, maybe they were at least interested in some approximation of reality…” oh how one’s blinders must continually fall by the wayside. Thank you.
Like you, it took me time to realize that people don’t care for the truth. Except I probably took longer than you did to notice. I’m still not sure I have quite integrated that idea since I find it so ludicrous: everyone is certain they are right, and everyone has completely different opinions. The probability of being the person that is right on everything is 0. (limit of p^n where 0 < p < 1 and n goes to infinity is 0), yet everyone persists in that belief.
I always thought the Greeks were too fatalistic with their tragedies, but they clearly realized that most people behave deterministically, ignoring the evidence in front of their eyes, producing the same result despite whatever a few Cassandras wailed about. So, if we are all to die soon of WW3, or later from the consequences of providing technological development to our unwise brethren, so it will be. There seems to be very little that can be done about it. As you say, it’s all very depressing, particularly if you have an apparently irrational drive to leave the world slightly better than you found it.
Social media (plus tyranny of the [vocalest] minority) made self-censorship mandatory if one wants to be savvy about your career.
If you are an up and coming associate, you don’t want to have a photo of a __________ protest come across the screen of a powerful partner who you barely know who is pro/anti- ___________.
interesting how given the anecdotes swirl around the internet of people have no problem destroying family relationships over a controversial stance, but not too many people are vocally resigning from their job because of a company’s position on fill-in-the-blank.
Agreed. It’s terribly difficult to be an apostate, and when you try to find common ground between the rigid tribalism that animates our culture you are doubly so.
The space to explore the nuances of politics, economics and culture is what makes Naked Capitalism and its commentariat so precious
I saw the ad hominem paradigm at work at CalPERS.
When an organization of pensioners complained that CalPERS was deliberately overpaying fees to Private Equity, Real Estate, and Health Insurance as a percentage of AUM compared to the teachers pension fund a few blocks away, the pensioners were accused of being anti-public pension! Meanwhile, thanks solely to her gender, the phony CalPERS CEO was held up as the darling of the DEI Democrats, even while they were paying a quarter-million dollars a year for the biggest Republican-adjacent lobbying firm in town to privately advise her.
Many of my acquaintances still bristle when I say that I believe Biden to be worse than Trump. I can calmly run down the indisputable facts of Biden’s corruption, wars, and illegal promotion of a literal genocide while agreeing that Trump is a convicted felon who should be jailed, but my wrongthink places me as a troglodyte beyond the pale of polite discourse in their minds.
So, I must self-censor while planning ways to dress-up the cat food I’ll soon be eating…
I just want you to know you’re not alone!
Interesting article. Hmm, guess this explains why my TruBlu friends have a hard time with my stance that voting will not get us here in the US out of the hole we have dug, and binary performative politics is indeed part of the hole. Even more so with foreign policy, they don’t like the idea that maybe the Russians love their children, too.
There is a lot to like in this article. One of those I want to pass along to a friend or two. However this kind of content gets filed under the file “if I have to explain it you wouldn’t get it”.
I do have a quibble though. As the author decries ad hominem attacks, they actually engage in one.
Author suggests that RFKJr pitches “a bizarre set of claims”. Suggests that RFKJr makes (dark?) comments that need to come to light.
A careful reading of RFKJr statement suggests there is nothing bizarre there at all. Maybe things the author is unaware of? But not bizarre. Maybe RFKJr has misunderstood or mischaracterized some portion of the Cleveland study. But, 1, there is overwhelming evidence that there are, or have been bio labs in UA and China. 2, there is overwhelming evidence that major powers are studying and experimenting in bio warfare. 3, even the Cleveland study suggests that work has been done in the area of understanding how ethnicities may play a role in who is most harmed.
In RFKJr’s statement it may be true that the phrase “there’s an argument that” is doing A LOT of work. But it can be argued. And that is really all that RFKJr is stating. He even doesn’t claim that he is making the argument. He infers that he is willing to hear out the argument. Which is The Antidote to ad hominem traps.
And then as if to add more insult to RFKJr through ad hominem technique, near the end of the article, author throws in (in a difficult to read or understand) statement suggesting that RFKJr is anti semitic? Or his detractors are? Not sure how to read that. But seems like the ultimate ad hominem to throw in an anti semitic accusation.
In the final analysis it appears almost half the article is dedicated to an ad hominem attack on RFKJr. Maybe the article wasn’t really engaging in pushback of that rhetorical style, but just using it as cover to do the same. Author is very subtle but effective in this technique. I imagine there is a lot of confirmation bias in this article for those who do not want to listen to RFKJr’s perspectives.
Just for the record, I don’t think RFK is racist or anti-Semitic, and didn’t mean to suggest this at all. Hopefully my earlier posts on Kennedy, especially the one from July 2023, will help provide some context.
I do think the “ethnically targeted” language is a very poor choice of words, and that Offit’s critique of the substantive claims about population level differences is persuasive.
Sometimes one can game an ideology and, without seeming to, cast doubt on it in the heads of believers. Subtle argumentation and devious approaches may be required. Of course one runs the danger of having to change one’s own mind when one loses a round, which may be emotionally laborious. It can be very hard work. I wonder why this is so, physiologically speaking. Our brains seem to be very conservative about ideas they have taken in and approved of, regardless of their formal properties like logic or basis in evidence. Also, should one overtly change one’s mind about anything, one runs the risk of sometimes severe social judgment and punishment.
Like truly, I think there’s a lot to like in this piece but not sure the RFK Jr surreptitiously recorded conversation hits the mark. It also needs a better ending.
I’d argue that a generation of stagnation in health(care) research is largely the result of self-censorship that prevents the exploration of ideas that cannot generate large profits for Big Medicine / Pharma. Support for those enforcing the self-censoring is likely very thin amongst the rank and file researchers. Any such industry is ripe for takeover.
The piece ends with:
I’d take it another step and note that those who self-censor resent those who enforce the censorship and likely look up to those unwilling to be bullied as potential leaders.
Even if RFK Jr. is wrong about every health and corruption claim he makes, he’s challenging the self-censoring scientists to do better and shifting Overton windows. If he can drive the fear out of public and scientific discourse, we will see better ideas getting explored that will lead to a healthier America.
If self-censorship can be removed from health discourse perhaps we’ll see others trying the tactics on Gaza.