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.

When people have a distorted image of a discipline, and harbor a detailed misunderstanding of how that discipline achieves its results, this can result in a “misnorm”. A misnorm combines a fanciful picture of what a discipline really accomplishes, how it functions at the micro and macro-level, why it has developed its various practices, and consequently, how it is most effectively managed.

Management is where misnorms are most damaging — where groups of practitioners are required to conform more closely to the misnorms of their own field, or where well-meaning innovators attempt to import “best practices” from other fields. In such cases, rigor means introducing effort-wasting burdens, removing necessary flexibility and autonomy, and, worst of all, the smothering of the tacit skills and intuitive judgment that are the substance of mastery of any craft.

This last casualty of misnorms, is itself the result of the greatest misnorm of modernity: scientific rationality. Behind the misnorms of scientific rationality is the craving for a fully explicit world, where articulate logic plans, directs and evaluates all behavior, which makes all gut responses, inspirations and talent obsolete. These irritating ineffables are quarantined to another misnormed sphere of activity: creativity.

This is why reexamining the history of science, ethnographically studying the daily practices of scientists doing science, and philosophically interrogating scientism is so crucial to life outside the laboratory. These investigations reveal a scientific methodology that resembles life as most of us know it, where logic, language, craft and inspiration are combined in flexible collaboration — not segregated and forced either to march in line or to frolic whimsically.

If scientists were forced to conform to the misnorms of science, science would cease to happen. Luckily, the prestige of science is such that this does not happen. But unfortunately paralyzing imposition and enforcement of misnorms does happen all the time in other less prestigious and empowered fields, such as education, where teachers are forced to conform to innumerable incompatible misnorms of education. Where education still happens, it is done entirely despite the control of politicians and administrators. It appears this misnorming dysfunction is also happening in the field of medicine, where the power of doctors is overwhelmed by the even greater resources of the insurance and legal industries.

The 20th Century ideal of originality was based on an individual as sufficient condition of creation: “I alone originated this.” Or “the help I got arriving at this original idea could have come from any number of sources, but I alone am the one irreplaceable element.”

I hope the 21st Century ideal of originality will be based on an individual as necessary condition of creation: “Had I not been there this would not have originated. But the same is true of my fellow-collaborators.”

Some people, when confronting an abstract idea, ask “what can I do with this, practically, concretely, in specific applications?”

Other people, when confronting a concrete practicality, ask “what can I learn from this, theoretically, abstractly, generally?”

Unfortunately, all too many people in the business of concrete practicality do not regularly confront abstract ideas because they lack a taste for the theoretical, and too many people in the business of abstract theory do not regularly apply their theories in concrete situations where they need to affect change, because they lack a taste for the practical.

Had I understood myself earlier, I might have protected myself from the harassment of the business world, but I think I might have followed a better-beaten curriculum. Then again, I might have travelled further along a paved road and come to where it could be paved further. But then… is “further along the same path” really where we want to go? I don’t know. My curriculum has been a mixture of accident and intensely urgent questions that seem to erupt up from beneath myself in response to my efforts to live this practical life I’ve blundered into.

An irritable, snobby, consensual contempt — “everyone who matters knows those people are hateful idiots” — stands on one side; paranoid, delusional belligerence stands on the other. Both claim privileged knowledge of “what’s really going on”, and this knowledge not only absolves them from respect, or even forbids them to respect — it philosophically precludes respect. We are philosophically ill, and this illness, being a species of mental illness, is reflexive: mental illness shows us a world that confirms the truth of our views.