I need to own my reaction to the rhetoric of the mainstream Left a little more, I think. It is not only about how Trump folks react to the way they are portrayed and addressed by the left. I am also alienated by it as well, and I believe this gives me insight into what is happening.

I have this incredibly wise little how-to book called Difficult Conversations that my company had me read back in 2011. One principle in this book stood out to me when I read it: if you are in a tense conversation with someone, attributing motives to their word and actions shuts down the dialogue. When I told Susan about it we decided to make this one of the basic agreements of our marriage.

My concern with the way identity politics operates, there is a readiness — even an eagerness — or is it a habit that has become reflexive? — to immediately reach for a psychology that tells us the real motives of anyone to our right, despite what they say, or even what they privately think. Further, we apply this psychology differently depending on how we classify them, and again regardless of how they publicly classify themselves or how they understand themselves.

The experience of being treated this way is deeply offensive, and it might even touch on the essence of offense: being treated as if what we say does not matter, and worse being treated that way because of what someone else had decided we are. If this is not Othering, what is?

Now, I cannot prove to anyone who decides that the words I have just said are only a semiconscious or unconscious tactic for preserving my identity group’s power, and not, as I claim (and possibly even believe) the appeal from one individual to another to be respected, heard and conversed with as a fellow individual who might (despite how they categorize me) have things to teach you as well as learn from them. Maybe, if dialogue with me fails they will have no choice but to reach for theories to explain why I refuse to converse with them as a true equal. But if they reach for that theory before we even get going, it will be me searching for reasons why they are unwilling to treat me as an equal.

One more note, spoken in the language of Judeo-Christianity: if racists attack you with racist ideas, does it make sense to balance their racism with an equal-but-opposite counter-racism? Can that even be called antiracism? To liberals, this seems to be just another form of racism requiring a principled liberal stance against all dehumanizing reduction of individuals to categories. It is very difficult to do this. It is extremely tempting when faced with prejudice to pick up the sword of prejudice and start fighting. Liberalism, the modern heir to the long refinement of Jewish tradition universalized and disseminated throughout the world by Jesus and his followers, calls us to transcend the conflict and instead of fighting racists with counter-racism, to fight racism with respect, dialogue, reason and rigorous demonstration.

The political foundation of liberal democracy is democracy, but the philosophical foundation of liberal democracy is liberalism.

A majority of citizens must actively want a sphere of liberties protected by liberalism more than it wants to impose its collective will on individuals within that sphere. If the majority decides it wants to determine how individuals are to live, speak and think more than it wants individuals to choose for themselves, liberalism will be voted out of existence, law by law.

But liberalism is a difficult worldview to acquire and keep. It must be taught and cultivated.

An educational program that views its mission in terms of preparing its students for the labor market, or worse, qualification for entering it — a prosperity ticket — will mistake training for education and create qualified workers and illiberal citizens.

A semi-formed thought to entertain: If the the primary goal of liberalism is optimal distribution of judgment throughout society, then optimal distribution of material resources might be one means to that end. But this means must be balanced against the ultimate question every liberal must unceasingly ask: who decides? Whose judgment prevails? Or to put it more liberally, by what procedure is the decision made? To say “by the market” is to beg the question. To say “by ballot” is to forget the essential tension between liberalism and democracy. To say “by judicial ruling” is to forget the tension in the opposite direction.

In liberal democracy there are no easy answers, and appearances to the contrary signal a misframing of controversies, perhaps symptomatic of blindness to the liberal-democratic metaphysic. To put it in language popularized by “design thinking”, it is leveling down wicked social problems into tame technical ones.

To say about any social problem, “this problem has an obvious solution, and if people would get out of my way and let me solve it, they would see I’ve been right all along” contains a self-delegitimization.

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

My older daughter has joined a reading group studying gentrification, and we’ve been having sporadic conversations on the topic of economic and cultural transformation of neighborhoods. I’ve also been reflecting on some similar transformations I have seen in my life, in particular what happened to the field of UX over the last 25 years — not only the methods, the culture, the politics of the field, but also the qualities and quality of the output of the field. From where I stand I see an explosion of productivity, unceasing change and novelty, and a dramatic diminishment of genuine excitement. There is a lot of force and motion, but somehow without much energy and life. Today, I see this in terms of disciplinary gentrification…

***

Any novel situation presenting new problems without established methods for resolving them will attract a particular kind of mind drawn to experimentation and improvisation, groping by intuition and tolerant of ambiguity, perplexity and anxiety, (and perhaps repelled by routinization, methodological constraints and prioritization of efficiency over exploration). Let’s call this type “pioneering intuitive”. The field is still more or less open, and this openness attracts intuitive pioneers exactly the way an open plain attracts settling pioneers.

Once the novel situation has been worked on long enough, the experimentation pays off, through development of general approaches to identifying, framing and resolving particular species of problems within the situation. The field develops language and reusable methods, guided by common heuristics. The open field becomes a discipline.

As the discipline matures, more and more methods continue upon the path Roger Martin describes in The Design of Business. What began as a mystery, and gradually developed as general methodology, now formalizes into an established methodology, with defined roles, procedures, specialized tools, technical language, and products. More and more, judgments guided by rules-of-thumb are sharpened into decisions determined by defined rules and criteria. There’s less need for deliberation and experimentation (though these things never completely disappear). The discipline now attracts experts who can march into a problematic situation, quickly diagnose it, provide a set plan using proven best practices and then efficiently resolve the problem effectively. At this point, the discipline becomes highly attractive to other experts who view competence almost exclusively in terms of expertise of this stamp.

It is important to note, experts are a type — a kind of mind very different from the intuitive pioneer type. Experts are analogous to the specialist tradesmen who flocked to western cities after the cities grew out of isolated trade posts. Experts want to ply their trade and their greatest joy is productivity, meeting set goals, honing skills, growing organizations and reaping the rewards of their work.

Once a field develops this far, it begins to lose the qualities that attracted the first wave of practitioners. And in fact it starts to drive them away. Seeing smoke from a neighboring cabin is unsettling because this signals change — change back into the regulated, routinized highly constrained and controlled existence the pioneer fled out into the frontier.

For experts, experimentation, reflection, deliberation, openness, indefiniteness, improvisation — those are means to an end of developing a mature, predictable, repeatable and highly efficient discipline. For intuitive pioneer types, these indeterminate qualities are the challenge of the work, and the primary pleasure of it. They begin to move away into other types of problems that have not (yet) become the domain of experts. And the field left behind has all the qualities that gentrified neighborhoods have. They’re stylishly and respectably cool, safe, highly valued and powered by ambition and accomplishment, but nothing deeply unexpected, daring or surprising can happen there anymore. The weirdos have moved on. Something is lost — some intangible feeling of inspiration and life has dampened out — and the products seem less interesting despite their increasing flawlessness.

This happens to all kinds of spaces — physical, cultural, intellectual — and they happen on all scales. Cities, nations, civilizations, questions, topics, fields of study, companies, industries, economies.

Our humanity is bound up with freedom of interpretation.

The capacity to interpret and respond effectively is what is meant by the word judgment.

To the degree an individual’s capacity to interpret is denied and interpretations suppressed, that person’s individuality and humanity is denied.

*

Society always requires some degree of denial — tempering — of individuality, but the proper degree is contestable and is a matter of judgment. The belief that such tempering is unnecessary and unjust might sound liberal, but in fact is typically the result of  illiberal privileging of one’s own judgment over the judgment of others who might experience excesses of untempered individuality as interfering with their attempts to live a reasonably peaceful life. The belief that the tempering of individuality can be settled unambiguously and rendered incontestable by laws or rules is also illiberal, because this belief generally presumes the objective correctness of one’s own interpretation of law.

*

Forms of liberalism that try to create conditions of material and social equality according to a single privileged interpretation of fairness are not only shallow, but they inevitably degrade into illiberal leftism. Deep liberalism is democratic and agonistic.

*

Are you a liberal? Ok, then: Where are you prepared to make painful concessions to public will? Where will you sacrifice intense superficial convictions to your deeper loyalty to liberal principles?

Every afternoon Father Nicanor would sit by the chestnut tree preaching in Latin, but Jose Arcadio Buendia insisted on rejecting rhetorical tricks and the transmutation of chocolate, and he demanded the daguerreotype of God as the only proof. Father Nicanor then brought him medals and pictures and even a reproduction of the Veronica, but Jose Arcadio Buendia rejected them as artistic objects without any scientific basis. He was so stubborn that Father Nicanor gave up his attempts at evangelization and continued visiting him out of humanitarian feelings. But then it was Jose Arcadio Buendia who took the lead and tried to break down the priest’s faith with rationalist tricks. On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut tree and invited him to a game, Jose Arcadio Buendia would not accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Respect for someone — or even something — is maintaining an attitude that this person, or thing — this being — has something to teach us. Normally respect consists in a general mood of regard, maintained by various formal (etiquette) and informal signals.

This ambient background mood of respect is sometimes activated in an appeal to be heard and trusted on some matter that might not be considered if the one making the appeal is not respected. — “Hear me out…” “Trust me on this…” “Stay with me…” “Think this over…” — The “object” of the appeal might be a prediction or a plan, or a counter-intuitive fact or difficult concept, or maybe a gut sense or incipient insight, or a feeling or ineffable experience, but the activation of respect always involves some kind of extension of faith beyond the personal limits of the respectful, whether experiential, cognitive, predictive, practical, judicial, etc.

*

There are situations where an appeal for respect reveals false signaling of respect. The person was treated in respect a respectful manner, but was not actually respected. The appeal is denied, and what the person has to say is disregarded.

*

There are people who are so profoundly disrespectful they are not aware that respect is a reality indicated through the signals of etiquette. They think respect is etiquette.

If a person has a rigid and unfaithful mind that resists learning, etiquette will be the closest approximation to respect they can muster, and it is far better than nothing.

*

There are also situations where a person intentionally treats a person with contempt while maintaining perfect manners of respect. This is a delicate game that requires both mastery of the formal rules of respect and control over one’s own emotions. The players in this game compete to provoke the other to produce damning evidence of formal disrespect to present before a judge. This is a game of polite contempt.

The trick to surviving this game, if you lack one or both skills needed to win it, is to know how to change the game.

*

A kind of elevated, benevolent contempt can develop across power differentials — where the powerful go so long with so little sense of vulnerability to their inferiors that respect slips away unnoticed. It is simply a known fact that the disrespected do not know, are unaware they do not know, and are not even aware of the factors that obstruct or distort their knowledge. Their views can be safely dismissed. But not letting them speak is impolite, so the superior listens patiently — very patiently, because this is an act of waiting for the other to finish saying things that are known to be wrong. It is all done in innocence, but innocence is grossly overrated.

This is a variation on the game of polite contempt. Let’s call it benevolent contempt.

This benevolent contempt is often present in pity and exercised through charity.

It is why recipients of charity so often hate their benefactors.

The fact that the crime is committed innocently with conceit of equality with no trace of ironic self-awareness makes things far worse.

*

Contempt dehumanizes, alienates and infuriates. Even polite, benevolent contempt.

People treated with contempt will win back respect, one way or another, sometimes violently. “You thought you had no need to listen to what I had to say, didn’t you…?”

*

I am terrified at the ubiquity of contempt.

Everyone already knows everything, including why their opponents mistakenly think they know everything.

Friends ask me why I want to reclaim the hopeless word “liberal”. I will list a few answers.

• Liberalism is descriptive. Liberalism prioritizes individual freedom above all other political values, all its efforts are focused on protecting the freedom of all individuals within its domain, and all political problems are framed in these terms. To a liberal, there is no oppression of a group, there is oppression of individuals who have been classified as belonging to a group. Hannah Arendt spoke as a liberal when she said “the physical extermination of the Jewish people… was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.”
• Liberalism is despised by exactly the right people. Now that the illiberal left has joined the illiberal right in heaping scorn on liberals, this is a perfect time to re-embrace liberalism as a political identity and to oppose the common illiberal tendencies of its critics. The differences between Trump supporters and social justice warriors are superficial. Both ideological tribes vocally identify as a category of person, defined against and opposing other categories of people — while never allowing themselves to notice that their core loyalty is to Identitarian ideologies that exploit identity and tribal resentment to advance the interests of those who ditto/re#hash/retweet the party line to signal that they are woke/red-pilled to the true truth. Each Identitarian denomination enrages and justifies the other, while failing to see its own role in the other’s intensification.
• Appropriating the liberal pejorative is the punkest option. It is a linguistic reclamation (apparently!) that defies antithetical assignment — that is, avoids the pitfall of positioning as a member of your enemy’s enemy, who is also an enemy). By doing so, you become a reviled outsider’s reviled outsider. The two most highly respected, most mainstream tribes of “reviled outsiders” competing for the status of most aggrieved and oppressed group in America, Trumpism and SJWism, will reject you with equal disgust. It’s hardly surprising they react the same: from a liberal perspective the two tribes are more alike than different, and what unites them is an incapacity to see politics in non-Identitarian terms. Both feel vastly superior to the strawman liberalism of their stunted imaginations and like to attribute their own confusions about liberalism to liberalism itself, seeing liberalism as a confused and unconscious agent of its antithesis. (Thus, “All politics is identity politics; you just can’t see it, silly liberal.”) Calling yourself liberal ensured wins you the honor of double-rejection, with nowhere to go. Punk.
• Liberalism is ripe for rediscovery and rearticulation. Liberalism luxuriated in hegemonic complacency throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and like all hegemonic successes became boring. Requiring no help, it stopped attracting intellectual help, and got neglected, dusty and stale. But under the grime is fallow soil and untapped reservoirs of inspiration.

—-

I have been wanting to present my view of liberalism in terms that have inspired me. The following is a hasty first draft. I’m publishing it for the sake of getting it out there. Expect revisions, because this is an obsession:

• Liberalism exists to maximize individual freedom.
• Liberalism strives for human identity, specifically on the right to individuality shared by all members of this universal identity group. This striving is never perfected and is subject to gross delusions and missteps, but the ideal stands.
• Liberalism frames political problems in terms of the ideal of maximizing the freedom of all individuals. Liberalism, left-leaning, right-leaning or centrist can be recognized through it use of liberal framing of political problems and solutions.
• One important and often overlooked form of freedom is freedom of judgment. Freedom of judgment means judgments can, will and ought to differ, even on core questions of freedom and infringement of freedom.
• These differences in judgment produce radically different practical worldviews (aka lifeworlds). These worldviews can produce radically different visions of life. They are the stuff of religious conversion. Those who have been “born again”, or “woke”, or “red-pilled” or “enlightened” only one time should attempt a second conversion in order to grasp what is meant by pluralism, which is a central deep fact of liberalism.
• When freedom of judgment leads even to different judgments pertaining to the limits of individual freedom (for the sake of individual freedom) there are no means for settling differences before they are hammered out with actual trial. Conflict is necessary for liberalism, and the principled embracing of this fact is agonism.
• Individual freedom of judgment necessitates democracy. Democracy is grossly imperfect but it is the best available means for achieving practical equality and symmetry of judgment. Nobody’s judgment can be privileged over another’s however much that judgment judges itself correct and proves its correctness by criteria and methods it judges sound.
• Freedom of judgment entails objective pluralism. People sometimes bat around the term pluralism, to mean diversity of feelings or opinions about objective truth, but this misses the point. Objectivity is a hard-won accomplishment — not a starting point, and certainly not a firm foundation, regardless of what fundamentalists of religion or science tell you.
• Because democracy is imperfect and because factions can form, consolidate power and use nondemocratic means — bullying, terror, commercial coercion, even legislation — all for righteous and necessary causes (national defense or civil right emergencies calling for emergency measures, because EMERGENCY!) — it is crucially important to allow individuals to form creative alliances to oppose what they view as oppressive forces.
• To feel entitled to assign individuals to groups, and to not only see them primarily in terms of their group membership, or to treat them as such, or to expect them to accept this identity assignment — but to require them to accept legal status as a group member whether they want it or not is a violation of liberal principle and indicates that some group has gained so much power that it no longer feels democratic obligation. Such groups — whether formally organized or organically united under common ideology — are ripe for being taken down a few notches until they regain humility and a sense of liberal mutuality.
• The right to self-determination of one’s own alliances and group identities is an individual right, as is the right to reject the identity claims of others. Any practical imposition of categorization on another individual ought to be resisted.
• And finally, in case any illiberals have made it this far and still mistake themselves for liberals, I will scare them off with this: liberals understand that the single most important liberal institution is the free market. Left-leaning liberals think the market must be regulated to some degree to preserve its liberal effect. Right-leaning liberals think the market is inherently liberal. But all liberals value the free market exclusively for how it supports liberalism.

I looked up the etymology of the word “entertain”. Inter- (among) + tain (hold). To hold-among.

Then I looked up “consider”. Con- (together) + sideris (stars).

It is hard to miss the stark difference in situatedness between entertaining a a possibility and considering it: holding it among us versus gazing at it from lightyears away.

I think I am going to try to organize political conversations around a single all-purpose question: “With respect to this change you want, if you could wave a magic wand and pass any legislation you wanted, what would you legislate?”

This idea is not mine. I think I’ve heard it from at least two friends of mine. But I’m starting to think that this format is essential to political discussion. Until an issue or concern is framed in terms of legislation it is merely cultural or social and pre-political.

I’m sort tired of pretending that personality disorders expressed in political terms are political conversations. This is not because I find personality problems boring. On the contrary, I think they’re fascinating: it’s the legislation part I find hard to think about.

I am not sure I am interested in politics as I defined it. I think there are better ways of talking about my interests.

I think a lot of what is currently lauded as strength is actually aggressive weakness.

Aggressive weakness says “I’d be stronger if other people didn’t prevent me from being strong.” It resents signs of strength in others, interpreting them as evidence that these others are consuming an unfair portion of a limited supply of power that ought to be shared, so everyone can be equally strong. It celebrates outbursts of indignation, irritable analyses, passionate denunciations and other articulations of resentment as “brave” or “insightful” — despite the fact that they are riskless repetitions of tried-and-true formulas that guarantee applause, head-pats, dittos, retweets, etc. from fellow weak aggressives.

Strength is different. Strength likes strength. It wants resistance, challenge. Strength will even acknowledge its own weaknesses, often in the form of self-mockery. Strength does not need other people to make way to allow it to be strong, and in fact any refusal to make way and grant it permission or even better — to confront it — provides strength an opportunity to activate and to experience itself.

It could be argued that aggressive weakness is a preliminary to the taking of power in order to gain strength. I’m skeptical that strength is ever gained that way. I suspect if weakness manages to seize instruments of control its own weakness ensures it will use the control unskillfully, and at best will only undermine the strength of others without actual gain of strength.

In my experience strength is generated through living as one ought to. When one is prevented from living in a way that generates strength, then one has a case for taking aggressive action. But the focus is not on other people and how they live, what they believe or what they have. The focus is on the goal of being free to live in a strength-generating way. Other people’s lives, beliefs and possessions might be altered in the effort to free one’s self, but if the other and resentment toward what they have is the focus, my bet is on catastrophe.

I believe this is a liberal attitude, as opposed to what is called “liberal” today, but what is, in fact, a degrading left-wing illiberalism.

Rereading Richard J. Bernstein I can now see clearly why my first encounter Beyond Objectivism and Relativism was such a revelation and relief to me as a designer:

But we must realize that “individually the criteria are imprecise: individuals may legitimately differ about their application to concrete cases.” Furthermore, when the criteria are “deployed together, they repeatedly prove to conflict with one another.” Kuhn seeks to make sense of rational disagreement in theory-choice, disagreement that cannot be resolved by an appeal to precisely formulated determinate rules. Kuhn also claims that over time such disagreements can be and are rationally resolved by the force of arguments in the relevant scientific community. But even here it is misleading to speak of proof (if our model of proof is a deductive argument). Rather, the cumulative weight of the complex arguments advanced in favor of a given paradigm theory, together with its successes, persuade the community of scientists. “Such a mode of development, however, requires a decision process which permits rational men to disagree, and such disagreement would be barred by the shared algorithm which philosophers have generally sought…. What from one viewpoint may seem the looseness and imperfection of choice criteria conceived as rules may, when the same criteria are seen as values, appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails.”

Often in the name of scientific rigor, the kinds of rational arguments offered by designers in support of their judgments are dismissed as subjective. When you realize these attempts at rigor are actually scientistic misnorms to which working scientists do not conform (and that if they were to conform to these misnorms scientific progress would halt) designers have a way to disarm those who wish to suppress innovation in the name of objectivity and rationalism.

I am also seeing some fascinating parallels with Roger Martin’s mystery-heuristic-algorithm model for the evolution of knowledge. He sees heuristic as a step on the way to perfection of knowledge in codifiable algorithm. Years ago I argued with him on LinkedIn that algorithm is not always a desirable end, and in fact in some cases this stripping away of individual interpretation and judgment can harm an employee’s ability to connect with customers. But I can also see that Martin was applying some prejudices of the folk philosophy predominant among business managers.

Now I have a paranoid theory that Design Thinking is a sort of cargo cult — the methods and the symbols used by designers dropped into the business world, but stripped of the designer folk philosophy that permits those methods and symbols to produce quality work. It is a designeristic misnorm — a fanciful antithesis to business scientism…

Failure to stay current with philosophical thought has the form: “Beyond this point philosophy ran astray.”

“Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.” — Jerry Seinfeld

I’ve tried to say something like this before, but this is how to say it right.

As great as television has become in the 21st Century, podcasts are even greater. The wealth of insight available through podcasts is staggering.

My suspicion is that this is largely due to the medium’s low production overhead, which enables individuals to work relatively quickly and spontaneously (thanks to advancements in sound recording technologies and user interface design) alone or in small teams (also thanks to tech/UI) — the most fertile conditions for creation and to be able to reach a large audience without the need to persuade media distribution gatekeepers that their content will appeal to their target audience — a soul-killing endeavor that often fails, resulting in filtering, dilution and conservative punch-pulling of the most novel, risky and exciting experiments.

1) Good tools — light, transparent, activity-supporting — enabling users to focus exclusively on the creative object, 2) liberation from the need to enlist extended technical teams, with all the attendant money and management burdens, 3) cheap or free distribution of the creative product, 4) access to a market of consumers who become the arbiters of success, and 5) removal of approval gates (and gate-keeping mindsets) that come with all expensive endeavors — all these things support the takeover of industries by people with ideas and creative talent from the domination of technical, managerial and financial considerations.

In other words, the best creative products result from maximizing investment in design minimizing the overhead of management, engineering, finance, logistics, sales and marketing.

(When software development finally passes an analogous threshold, and software can be produced by designers focused exclusively on how people interact with what they’re making, we will have far better lean methodology for producing software.)

I use domain names as a sort of intellectual property registry. I know I will never use most of the domain names I register, but I do want to plant a flag in the terms I invent or want to settle and develop in my own way.