Allport's Scale & Freedom of Association
It's not possible to think both these things are true at the same time
The other week, I was watching Fair Cop’s Harry Miller on Triggernometry (as I’m wont to do; I like Triggernometry).
In that interview, Miller (briefly) discussed the way police forces have used the Allport Scale of Prejudice, something originally developed by US psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954.
Now, as most people know, psychology is one of the “dud” social science disciplines (the other one is sociology). That is, nearly all its claims are false. It was (famously) the canary in the coal mine of the replications crisis, something now consuming the rest of social science at a rate of knots.
By way of background, only two bits of psychology are incontrovertibly true and well evidenced.
IQ measures something real and is predictive of outcomes, especially in the areas of future income and employment.
Stereotypes about both majorities and minorities are generally accurate (yes, even the negative ones), and descriptive of average behavioural differences both within and between groups.
The rest of psychology can largely be ignored, because it is cobblers. Also, the reason those two findings are discomforting should be obvious.
The idea that at least some police are drawing on something developed by a psychologist in the 1950s alarmed me greatly.
So I did some reading, and discovered I was quite right to be alarmed.
Allport’s core claim is that each “step” in the pyramid has a causal relationship with the step above it.
That is, “antilocution” (often translated as “hate speech”, although Allport himself did not use the latter term) leads naturally to exclusion of the “no blacks no Jews no Irish” or “no lady members” sort, which in turn becomes something like Jim Crow, which then turns into Kristallnacht or Stalin’s anti-Kulak purges, and culminates in the Holocaust or Holodomor.
[It’s worth looking at Wikipedia’s entry on the scale, which quotes Allport more precisely than the popular graphic.]
This is an empirical claim, and approximately five minutes of reflection will indicate it is false.
Genocides happen in some places but not in others. The places where they happen and where they don’t happen share behaviours in step one and step two — often over many centuries — and may never progress beyond them. Others (think the USSR, Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia) make extraordinary efforts not to engage in stages one or two and progress to three, four, and five anyway.
And before you think I’m lining Marxism up for a well-deserved shellacking, even Communist countries are distinct from each other. Vietnam was — and partly still is — a Communist country. It never progressed to genocide and actually brought the Cambodian genocide to an end.
Allport’s Scale is, as my dad used to say, fractally wrong: wrong at every possible resolution.
Freedom of Association
There’s another thing going on here, too.
I don’t think you can keep the Allport Scale and Freedom of Association in your head at the same time without serious cognitive dissonance.
The first and second steps in his scale, if taken seriously, do two things. The first mandates not tolerance, but acceptance. That is, it attempts to direct the pathways of human affection. Anyone who has ever spent time in a school knows this is bonkers. You cannot make people like you. You cannot make people hang out with you. And if nothing else, social media has shown the extent to which, as Americans say, “middle school never ends, not even in adulthood”.
The second wipes out freedom of association (“I’m making a club of all the people like me”). It is why feminists, despite their court victories in the UK, are slowly losing to trans.
Now (I’m not American, so this is a guess), it’s possible that anti-black prejudice across the pond was so bad that overriding freedom of association by force of law was the only way to fix it. In the UK (because Britain never had a colour bar), it was feminists who chipped away most intently at freedom of association.
As is so often the case, the two countries divided by a common language also have different histories.
It would be nice if we stopped basing public policy on pure bunkum is one thought that comes to mind. Oh, and the trouble with doing away with freedom of association is the fact that, one day, you may need it yourself.
The first point is easily proven and anyone who knows even a bit of history is aware of that. The behaviors in the bottom steps of the pyramid are universal human behaviors. Only a child could seriously believe that human nature can be changed by scolding, punishment, or any other means. It will inevitably play itself out, as can be seen in the fact that those who most promote this pyramid are also those who most exemplify the behavior indicated in the bottom two steps.
“I don’t think you can keep the Allport Scale and Freedom of Association in your head at the same time without serious cognitive dissonance.”
So many core beliefs of what passes for the left cause severe cognitive dissonance. The impossibility of keeping them in one’s mental space at the same time provides a good explanation for the bizarre forms of mental illness on display at, for instance, Libs of Tik Tok - people who believe they have hundreds of personalities, some of them animals, or that they are both men and women alternately, etc. The internal stress of maintaining so many indefensible positions must be nearly intolerable; a sane defense of these beliefs isn’t possible.
“Now (I’m not American, so this is a guess), it’s possible that anti-black prejudice across the pond was so bad that overriding freedom of association by force of law was the only way to fix it.”
Having grown up in the U.S. in an earlier era, I can say with certainty that there were injustices that had to be addressed. But the overriding effect of forcing people to associate was an abiding resentment that had little to do with race. No one likes to be forced. Nor does anyone enjoy knowing that they’ve been forced on those who would not otherwise have found common ground with them. The same effect could be seen if you were to force a church group to accept a percentage of atheists, or a classical orchestra to admit musicians who disliked classical music. Associations are made for reasons as clear cut as these, and also for murky emotional reasons that aren’t logical but are real nevertheless. We ignore them at our peril.
This is interesting:
"it was feminists who chipped away most intently at freedom of association."
Could you say a bit more about how they did so?