Liberal or Conservative?

[Colin Bower]

"The General Social Survey, a mother lode of information for social
scientists that has been collected annually or biannually since 1972,
has asked people in every survey to say whether they are extremely
conservative, conservative, slightly conservative, moderate, slightly
liberal, liberal, or extremely liberal. A really simple question."

 

Is it? A really simple question, I mean? I think it's a really difficult question. I wouldn't put myself into any of those categories, because I know I don't fit into any of them.  Maybe there are millions of others who also wouldn't. What happens to us in these surveys? Maybe there are also millions of others who choose a category simply because they have been asked to, and consequently choose one that does not truly reflect their real beliefs. Maybe there are millions of others who don't know what they are, and simply guess, perhaps erroneously. What happens to them? Remember, the survey is not seeking simply to discover what people call themselves (eg. "We have discovered that 60% of Americans regard themselves as moderates"), it is seeking to establish a substantive demographic profile (eg. "We have discovered that 60% of Americans are moderates"). Is "conservative" the opposite of "liberal"? Why, and in what way? What would you call - say - a Christopher Hitchens, or a Jean-Francois Revel? Would you call our own Mr Vavi a "conservative" or a "liberal"? (And I wonder what he would call himself!). If you are a "liberal" in what way are you different from someone who is "extremely liberal"? What happens to people who regard themselvs as being liberal, but who are actually conservative?  Since there is a category called "extremely conservative", why isn't there a category called "extremely moderate", and is a position of "extreme moderation" an extreme position, or a moderate position? Is being a "conservative" today the same as being a "conservative" was 40 years ago? Problems of this sort will vitiate any conclusion that anyone attempts to draw from the data. 

 

The question, and the blithe assumption made by Murray that real knowledge is created by surveys of this sort highlights the problem with every single survey questionnaire I have ever seen, and makes me believe that the designation "social scientist" is oxymoronic. Data produced by surveys often creates a kind of third realm of knowledge that is self-referential and bogus. There are many reasons for this.What we say we do and believe is not necesarily the same as what we actually do and believe. We can be intentionally dishonest, and there is no means of detecting that dishonsty, not even clever cross-checking can detect a subversive kind of dishonesty. There have been times that I have deliberately falsified information I have given about myself, sometimes in  playful mood of irreverence, sometimes to subvert a purpose that I disagree with. Mandatory "Yes/No" answers often misrepresent a position or a view. Sometimes important questions that should be asked, arn't asked.

 

Question: If you had to choose between betraying your friend, or betraying your country, which would you choose? 

Given answer (a) my friend, or (b) my country.

But real answer: until I'm in the situation of having to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I really don't know, and until then I can't know, so piss off with your stupid questions!

 

Colin Bower.

.

[Stephen vJ]

 

I have a similar concern with this type of question, but not exactly the same. Let me demonstrate. Close your eyes. Well, not really, coz you have to carry on reading this email... just blank your mind, take a deep breath and make some space up there for what you are about to picture.

 

I want you to picture the following stuff (all together in one big picture please, not separately). A desert. Now wait a moment and really get that picture of the desert clear in your head before adding the next thing. A cube. Okay, slow down and really see the stuff in your head, otherwise its not going to work. Now a garden. Wait for it. Make sure you see it clearly. Okay, now a ladder. Now breathe and count to 3. And lastly, a horse.

 

Right, so now you have a picture with 5 main elements - a desert, a garden, a ladder, a horse and a cube. See the picture in your head. Maybe stop reading for a bit and let it just come into focus in your mind before continuing. Right, now, how big is the cube ? Before you read any further, take a piece of paper or just open a new blank email and write down how big your cube is in a word or three.

 

There is a lot more you can use this picture for and I would really be interested in detailed descriptions of exactly what you see (if you have the time to type it up and email it to me). Each element has some significance as an indicator of how the wiring in your brain is currently arranged. But that's not why I wanted to share this... I was asking how big your cube is for a specific reason.

 

Your answer is something like "well, an average size" or "you know, kinda normal sized" or... well ? What did you write down ? Everyone says the same thing because everyone thinks he or she is normal. Whether your cube is the size of a single unit of diced carrot or the monumental intergalactic size of the monolith in the opening scene of 2001 Space Odyssy, you will probably describe it as "a normal size". Trust me, it's not "normal", no matter what you said.

 

I am convinced that people who are asked whether they are conservative, moderate or liberal will have a bias towards moderate due to the same effect. I can see why someone could conciously become more liberal through education and thus might recognize him/herself as liberal that way... by I don't see how someone can consider himself accurately to be supremely conservative relative to the population (whom one would presume to be moderate) or to be religiously fanatical (as opposed to just devoutly religious).

 

That's my very long-winded way of saying I think this question is subjectively biased. It's like asking people to diagnose their own psychological issues and then rate those on a 5 point scale... or asking someone whether he would consider himself to be completely truthful in questionnaires like this one.

 

S.

 

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[Garth Zietsman]

Murray is a libertarian and I'm sure he was aware of those difficulties.  We can ignore them because they are difficulties for a small minority of people i.e. libertarians or fascists.  In general measures of pro social freedom attitudes correlate negatively with measures of pro economic freedom attitudes, so the traditional 1 dimensional liberal versus conservatism concept is uncomplicated to most people.  Conservatism means being pro free market, anti-abortion, drugs, gays, etc and pro religion, and liberalism means being pro welfare, 'creative' lifestyles and secular humanism.  Almost everyone else sees those things going together quite naturally.  While it is n principle possible to be pro or anti both social and economic freedoms it is rare and probably temperamentally unnatural. 

 

We should bear in mind that our way of looking at things is not the norm no matter how rational we may think it is. 

[Ivo Vegter]

Garth Zietsman wrote:

> We should bear in mind that our way of looking at things is not the norm
> no matter how rational we may think it is.

I disagree. My impression from those periodic Nolan Chart tests you see
online is that many people, when asked policy questions that are
reasonably neutrally formulated, turn out fairly libertarian.

Not only are many of the people usually described as conservative in
fact libertarian, but the libertarian quadrant also often includes
people who in their rhetoric sound like typical left-liberals, display
animus against big oil, big pharma and big box stores, and would oppose
a political candidate simply for being Republican.

--
Ivo Vegter | 084-210-2003 | @ivovegter

[Garth Zietsman]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Ivo Vegter <ivov...@gmail.com> wrote:

Garth Zietsman wrote:

> We should bear in mind that our way of looking at things is not the norm
> no matter how rational we may think it is.

I disagree. My impression from those periodic Nolan Chart tests you see
online is that many people, when asked policy questions that are
reasonably neutrally formulated, turn out fairly libertarian.

 

Garth: The Nolan chart is a crok.  Its a very misleading questionaire of leading questions.  The questions are not neutrally phrased but are put in such a way as to make any non-freedom answer seem unreasonable.  It almost guarantees a libertarian outcome.   The Nolan chart is a stark exception in the literature on political attitudes.  Everywhere else the pattern is the traditional left-right divide.  When a large range of political attitudes and beliefs are factor analysed the social and economic freedoms are never orthogonal but always end up at opposite poles of a single dimension.

Not only are many of the people usually described as conservative in
fact libertarian, but the libertarian quadrant also often includes
people who in their rhetoric sound like typical left-liberals, display
animus against big oil, big pharma and big box stores, and would oppose
a political candidate simply for being Republican.

 

Garth: I would say the opposite.  Many so called libertarians are conservatives with a fetish for economic issues.  My experience with libertarians is that they are passionate about economic freedom and small government but are fairly mute 'hippy' freedoms.  Recent presidential candidate Ron Paul is a case in point.  If you have seen recent libertarian debates in the US you will have noticed a large faction opposed to gay marriage and abortion on demand.  I have also heard that many libertarian meetings are opened with prayer.

[Leon Louw (gmail)]

This is an interesting exchange, for which thx to all participants.

 

Jim Harris, pessimistic about most things, was extremely optimistic about the proposition that humans have libertarian dispositions.  I'm at the opposite end, of the view that a libertarian disposition is a weird mutation/aberration, and that human animals have evolved (are hard-wired), like all life, to be pro-progeny.

 

If that means extreme genocide, war, rape-and-pillage, on one hand, or mild tax, regulation and red tape, on the other, humans are predisposed for it if it is pro-progeny.

 

Such (pre-)dispositions operate subconsciously, which explains why people can be wrong rationally, such as voting for sub-optimal parties/policies, or mating with sub-optimal partners, or driving when drunk ... or disagreeing with me about such matters. 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Garth Zietsman

To: li...@googlegroups.com

--

[Garth Zietsman]

I hope Jim gets this cause I'm not sure his email is working.

 

Jim and I disagree on how common libertarians are.  I defended the meaningfulness of the left-right political dichotomy for certain purposes.  .I said that while is is possible to be pro- or anti- freedom on both economic and social issues, people typically aren't, they almost always oppose them in the manner in which the left-right dimension is typically understood. 

 

Jim retorted that the statistics of American politics contradict my assertion.  Specifically he said surveys find that conservative, libertarian, liberal and populist (what I would have called fascist or authoritarian) are relatively equally common, with a small group of centrists.  I responded to this by saying that if the Nolan chart questions were the basis of the survey then the results are unreliable because those questions are tailor made to ellicit libertarian responses.

 

I took the liberty of doing a little mini survey of my own.  I used the General Social Survey - an annual or bi-annual random survey of thousands of American adults.  They ask them a large number of questions on dozens of subjects.  I selected two questions that I believed tap attitudes to economic and social freedom respectively very well. 

 

For economic freedom I used the question "The government should be involved in producing greater equality in incomes" which had responses "Definitely should, probably should, probably should not, definitely shouldn't".  I counted the definitely and probably should responses as anti-economic freedom and the definitely and probably shouldn't responses as pro-economic freedom.

 

For social freedom I used "Homosexual relations are - always wrong, almost always wrong, sometimes wrong, not at all wrong".  I counted the always and almost always responses as anti-social freedom and the 'not at all wrong' response as pro-social freedom.  I ignored the 'sometimes wrong' response because it was rarely chosen and its meaning is fuzzy.

 

I looked at whites only because blacks tend to be a fairly homogenious special interest group politically and are overwhelmingly Populist.

 

A Conservative would be someone who thinks government shouldn't try to equalise incomes and thinks homosexuality is wrong.

A Liberal would be someone who thinks government should try to equalise incomes and sees nothing wrong with homosexuality.

A Populist would be someone who thinks government should try to equalise incomes and thinks homosexuality is wrong.

A Libertarian would be someone who thinks government shouldn't try to equalise incomes and sees nothing wrong with homosexuality.

 

I found that there was a slight negative correlation between the questions, as I said was the case in political psychology studies, and found similar negative correlations on the other economic and social freedom questions I tried.

 

I found that of US adults 50% were Conservative, 8.8% were Liberal, 27% Populist and 14.2% Libertarian.  As Jim pointed out, that isn't what they call themselves or how they vote.  In terms of the traditional liberal-conservative dimension Libertarians show much the same pattern as Liberals, they are far more likely (almost twice as much) to call themselves liberals than conservatives.  Conservatives are much more likely to call themselves conservatives than liberals.  Populists (fascist/authoritarians) are more likely to call themselves moderates than either liberals or conservatives.  Conservatism and Populism dominate even those who call themselves liberal.  E.g. of those who identify themselves as extreme liberals only 36% are in fact Liberals - 25% are actually Conservatives, 25% Libertarian and 12% Populist/authoritarian.

 

With respect to Party identification both Libertarians and Populists are evenly split between Democrat and Republican (very fractionally more Democrat) with about 11.5% and 14.7% Independent identification respectively.  Conservatives were twice as likely to identify with the Republican party than with the Democrats and Liberals the other way around.

 

My little study showed the following.

I was right about the population prefering to see social and economic freedoms as opposing.

The prevalence of people who lean toward libertarianism is more than I said but less than what Jim reported from the Cato institute/Nolan chart studies - about 1 in 7 people.

Conservatives dominate the US political landscape.

Most, almost 2/3, support economic freedoms.

Most, more than 3/4, oppose social freedoms.

True liberals are rare. 

 

[Stephen vJ]

Another belated response... but I find this particularly fascinating. I agree with Leon... at the same time one would imagine that libertarianism is in fact most pro-progeny... yet that does not seem to be a natural conclusion for any majority, relative to alternatives or otherwise. People simply don't seem to be very logical, rational or consistent in general.

 

A quick search of, for example, Anarchist websites (and Anarchist groups on Facebook), reveals rather disturbing tendencies in these groups towards violence and threats of violence (albeit against the state, which I doubt really counts). So now I am thinking, if you want to do away with government, then surely the worst possible strategy would be to instigate violence against the state, since that would probably strike fear in the hearts of all who have children, a mortgage and have not recently sniffed something from the top shelf in the garage.

 

Typical reaction from the standard non-anarchic voting population (read majority) in the face of fear is seemingly to demand protection from the almighty government, so that the violent anarchist achieves through his violence exactly the opposite of what he intended i.e. fear amongst the voters which in turn leads to bigger government. So I conclude that violence is opposite to the anarchist ideal and would expect if anarchists be logical that they would also be pacifists... yet they seem generally not to be, judging by these online groups.

 

I'm starting to think that there are simpy very few thinking people (as Leon says, weird mutations) and that the vast majority of us are not. I doubt whether the average person lives as much as 1% of their lives on logic / rationality / reason - the other 99% being driven by animal instincts or a kind of genetic autopilot.

 

S.

[Leon Louw (gmail)]

Regarding whether people in general are rational, have any of you watched the Darwin series on BBC Knowledge?  It's really excellent. 

 

The point of immediate relevance is Dwarkins' experience in the series presenting the anti-religion evidence of science to people, including science teachers, and how incapable most people are of accepting conclusive hard evidence, how they simply assert without credible evidence that science is just one way of seeing things.  As he points out, that's like saying history is just one way of thinking Napoleon really existed, and the bald assertion that he didn't has equal weight.  Or that the existence of germs is merely one hypothesis, not proven because we can't see them, and asserting that there are no germs is equally credible.

[Stephen vJ]

I haven't seen that one, but will look out for it - sounds interesting. Reminds me of another series also from the BBC a few years back about the brain. There was a lot of impressive stuff in it, but one particular experiment surprised me.

 

They asked volunteers to come to some university to sign up for experiments. At the reception, volunteers were met by a young man behind a counter who greeted them with a friendly hello-can-I-help sentence or two. The subjects then said they were there for the advertised experiment and the young man said that they needed to fill out a form.

 

The man behind the counter then bent down behind the counter and ANOTHER man with different facial features, different voice and different clothing stood up with the forms on a clipboard, saying something like "here you go". If I recall correctly, less than 1 in 10 people noticed that they were now talking to someone else, and most just thanked him and started filling out the forms.

 

In another experiment in the same series they fooled a subject's brain into recording pictures as actual memories of real events with surprising ease (different parts of the brain light up under scanning).

 

One of the points they made was that eye-witnesses should be practically useless in legal cases and that seeing is not believing because the brain plays a bigger role in the seeing process than the eyes... and it's filtered version of events is dodgy at best. Our misplaced faith in people's memories and reasoning ability may have put countless innocent people to death or in jail over the course of history.

[Sid Nothard]

Yes, don’t bother us with the facts, we’re believers.

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[Sid Nothard]

The majority of people are still living with vestiges of the bicameral mind^##, and as a result are seeking guidance from outside authorities.

 

So they run to government and theologians to provide them with guidance.

 

Violence against the government gets one nowhere. In any case, the government has a monopoly on violence, and in a direct con-

frontation with government, you are sure to come off second best.

 

The Neo-Tech group in the USA have now begun an underground movement to convert enough people to using their brains to be

able to make a difference at the polls. I do not think it can happen here as there are still about 40 million bicameral people wanting

something from the government.

 

Sid Nothard

 

## See “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes

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[Michael]

Devotion to provable facts as opposed to irrational faith. The
intelligent ‘we’ and the numbskull ‘them’. The rot set in with
Bernhard Riemann who showed that Euclidian geometry was only one of an
infinite number of geometries, all equally true. But which is our
geometry?. In fact many are now used to explain different aspects of
the reality we now know. Statements about the physical world are now
sadly different from the physical space. Einstein said that ‘ as far
as the propositions of mathematics refer to realty they are not
certain and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality.’
Max Planck said that no one had any right to believe that physical
laws exist. Kurt Godel showed that finding a logical basis for
mathematics was futile. We are now attending a funeral ‘the funeral of
Dead Certainty’ as Stephen Leacock wrote. Etc etc.

Come and model my society, my economy, my universe. Or just my car
engine. Look how I marvel at your wonderful model of it. How it so
accurately predicts to almost infinite degrees of accuracy how the
changes in petrol going in produces exactly the right amount of
carbon, water and gas emissions. How it predicts the power, the wear
on the piston rings, the heat of the coolant. It’s perfect. What an
explanation. Only when you put your model under the bonnet my car
doesn’t move. It explains everything but does nothing. It is clearly
missing something. Sure you say.’ But if I see your car going past me
I can offer you an explanation accurate in every respect of how that
is happening. You, on the other hand, presumably believe it is blown
along on the breath of angels’? No I am saying that explanations are
not real, they occupy a different realm, as maybe do angels. If you
want to get anywhere get in the car not the explanation

Michael O'Dowd. Happy New Year.

> From: Leon Louw (gmail) <mailto:leonlo...@gmail.com>  
>
> To: li...@googlegroups.com
>
> Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 10:17 AM
>
> Subject: Re: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?
>
> This is an interesting exchange, for which thx to all participants.
>
> Jim Harris, pessimistic about most things, was extremely optimistic about
> the proposition that humans have libertarian dispositions.  I'm at the
> opposite end, of the view that a libertarian disposition is a weird
> mutation/aberration, and that human animals have evolved (are hard-wired),
> like all life, to be pro-progeny.
>
> If that means extreme genocide, war, rape-and-pillage, on one hand, or mild
> tax, regulation and red tape, on the other, humans are predisposed for it if
> it is pro-progeny.
>
> Such (pre-)dispositions operate subconsciously, which explains why people
> can be wrong rationally, such as voting for sub-optimal parties/policies, or
> mating with sub-optimal partners, or driving when drunk ... or disagreeing
> with me about such matters.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>

> From: Garth Zietsman <mailto:garth.ziets...@gmail.com>  
>
> To: li...@googlegroups.com
>
> Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:36 PM
>
> Subject: Re: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?
>

> For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/libsa?hl=en.

>
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[Trevor Watkins]

Michael says we can be certain of nothing (I am not even certain what that statement means), and I agree with him (See http://sketchesbyboz37.blogspot.com/2008/05/celestial-gardener-short-story.html). 

Colin says we cannot be certain of the meaning of each other's words, nor even of our own meaning for those words. He's probably right.  

But nevertheless it seems to me that we often succeed, at least partially, in communicating. And on this flawed base we build great edifices of thought, and fact, and reality. 

Everything is an approximation, an informed guess, a theory. But often this is enough to be going on with. So, a liberal is a liberal, a conservative is mostly conservative, and you do, in fact, get my gist. 

Don't let the best be the enemy of the good enough. Try not to suffer from the paralysis of perfection. 

And have a good 2010.
Trevor Watkins 

2010/1/1 Michael <m.od...@btopenworld.com>

[Stephen vJ]

Sure, but we have to be at least somewhere in the same ballpark in order to make the conversation meaningful... and the closer, the more meaningful. My view is that asking people to rate themselves is inherently flawed and thus outside the general vicinity, due to everyone considering himself to be certain things... one of those things being average / moderate / in the middle, when almost no-one actually is.

 

So whatever we understand under grades of liberal may be obvious... but that says nothing of the rating of those liberals of themselves.

 

To add another example... Von Mises stormed out of a meeting of the Mont Pelerant (sp?) society declaring them to all be a bunch of socialists, yet in 1957 (approx) he said in a speech in South America that he did not hate government and thought that government did in fact have some uses, albeit limited ones... which makes him a socialist relative to the stance of some people I know.

[Colin Bower]

1.) "Max Planck said that no one had any right to believe that physical
laws exist"

Do the physical phenomena that we observe "create" the so-called laws  that they appear to conform to, or do the laws exist separately from the phenomenon that conform to them, independent and antecedent to those phenomena? If they do, then it must be supposed that there is a law-maker. But it is impossible for me to conceptualise who or what such a law-maker would be, and so I choose to believe that these are only so-called laws, and really a human extrapolation from the behaviour of physical phenomena. Thus the speed of light is not governed by any law; instead we extrapolate a so-called law from observing the behaviour of the speed of light. Any other views on this matter?

2.) Wonderful to discover in the universe at least one other reader of The Origin of Consciousness by Jaynes. Has this work ever properly received credit for being one of the most original and defensable explanations for consciousness?  It is also, by the way, a wonderfully graceful exposition, written by an erudite man who wears his learrning lightly. Much recommended to those who can get their hands on a copy. I believe there is a website devoted to disseminating and sharing his propositions..

3.) Trevor: I agree with your summary of communication. I did not wish to give the impression of being a complete isolationist in this regard!  Yes, one of the great challenges in life lies the permanent attempt to try and achieve shared meaning with others, which means to confirm that when we use words, we achieve an exact sharing of meaning.  There is no absolute way in which we could ever confirm this, but the circumstantial evidence is so great that we do, albeit that we often fail, that I am happy to live believing that we have the potential to achieve substantive shared understandings of things with each other. But I am beginning to think that there is an apprehension of reality that precedes the invention of words to account for that reality. What would explain the invention of  a word like "gravel", if not in the fact that there was some prior apprehension of the character of "gravelness" that the word so accurately captures?

 

Colin.

[Sid Nothard]

Laws of physics existed long before man discovered them. They are absolutely rigid, and if not adhered to, televisions & any other electrical device will not operate.

 

Sid

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