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.
> 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.
Dunno. Communist rhetoric is pretty violent and hateful -- why shouldn't we call it hate speech? And I'm sure the Bolsheviks had a "No reactionaries allowed" policy at their club meetings. The point is that the lower rungs are universals, and this scale is a way of selecting tarring any group you don't like with association with genocide.
On a tangent: I also heard that podcast, and thought of you (Hellen) when the guest got into a debate with Konstantin Kissin about whether the law against "grossly offensive" electronic communication should be on the books at all.
Kissin suggested that such a law is inherently open to abuse and thus suspect under a kind of normative-if-not-constitional first ammendment. Miller argued the statute was fine and abuse is the fault of contemporary institutions under the spell of contemporary human rights talk. Miler won. Being pretty well versed in British positivist doctrine, he was able to make clear arguments while Kissin floundered around to make his intuitiions clear.
First I think you'll enjoy the irony that Miller's is showing that human rights talk has led to a great evil -- but that evil is that Britons are being denied one of their basic human rights.
Second, I think I'd be more confident about such a law being fairly applied if I knew it were being adjudicated by American judges applying first amendment jurisprudence.
Both Harry & Konstantin got in a bit of a tangle there, partly because while Harry was right to point out that law is drafted with "what is the mischief to be addressed here?" uppermost in the legislature's mind, he'd forgotten what that mischief was, and the conversation went awry from that point.
Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, while Blairite in origin, consolidated a great deal of earlier legislation that is, indeed, no longer fit for purpose.
As originally enacted — in 1935, no less — Section 127 was to stop people harassing others by telephone. This means, yes, I've had to explain to people under 30 what it was like to be called up in the middle of the night and sworn at, or to have heavy breathing down the line.
Subsection 2 of the Act, meanwhile, is clearly directed to a sibling under the skin of harassing midnight calls: phoning the emergency services and telling them granny is doing the watusi on the living room carpet when in reality granny is alive and well and on holiday in Brighton.
Section 127 of the Communications Act has become one of the principal means by which the Internet is policed in the UK. It has done so with little debate about whether it is appropriately worded to deal with modern technology. It is one thing to protect individuals from ‘grossly offensive’ prank telephone calls. It is quite another to protect groups of people from what are in effect public performances. That it is now being used to regulate YouTube and Facebook is frankly bonkers.
Note, too, that as originally drafted, the grossly offensive communication had to be directed to an actual person. As interpreted now, convictions can be secured in response to a communication to the world at large, based on the perceptions of a single complainant.
Thanks for this background. I think it confirms for me that this sort of law works better under the shadow of an American style judges who can be expected to interpret it according to that First Amendment thingy.
Even English judges should be interpreting these laws in a similar way, and demanding that Parliament really, really, really say explicitly when it wants to crush free speech. And I'm glad Harry is filing suits and muckracking to hold them to that standard. But the American system is clearly working better in practice.
There was a long tradition in the UK of private members' clubs - sometimes called "Gentlemen's Clubs" - that excluded, typically, women and Jews (not, interestingly, black or Asian males, because Britain has a tradition of men from the aristocracy of various African nations plus India pursuing careers in politics or cricket in the UK, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iftikhar_Ali_Khan_Pataudi).
This needs some explaining: "gentlemen's clubs" had nothing to do with sex or strippers. These were very ornate establishments located in heritage buildings with libraries, smoking rooms, accommodation, and restaurants ("dining rooms"). Their membership was drawn from the aristocracy and wealthy, and there was sometimes a political affiliation. The Carlton Club, for example, was unofficially Tory; many others were targeted at particular professions.
Related to these were the UK's large network of golf clubs, which also typically excluded women and Jews and, in this case, sometimes blacks as well.
These places - which were all private associations - became the location of immense conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, in part derived from the feminist notion of "patriarchy", which is a type of conspiracy theory. That is, they were conceived of as places where men got together to conspire against women, and make deals behind women's backs, especially political deals.
No matter how many times the men who ran them pointed out that they were to get away from women and others who were considered to have disagreeable traits, at least some of the time, the "patriarchy" claim persisted. This was also an era when stereotype accuracy was first made into a taboo. It became impossible for a man to say - especially a posh man, who was expected to have manners - "I want to get away from women because they emote too much and chatter all the time" or "I dislike the way Jews do business".
So, one by one the clubs admitted women; those that held out were overwhelmed by the Equality Act in 2010. Interestingly, one of the ways they tried to keep women out initially was by refusing to install women's loos!
I hold a personal hypothesis that bias and bigotry in society is generally zero sum. If you get rid of it in one area it immediately crops up somewhere that you aren't looking.
To be fair to Allport, he actually said "This five-point scale is not mathematically constructed, but it
serves to call attention to the enormous range of activities that may issue from prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. While many people would never move from antilocution to avoidance; or from avoid-
ance to active discrimination, or higher on the scale, still it is true that activity on one level makes transition to a more intense level easier," which seems fair enough to me. As a whole, allowing for when it was written, the book makes some reasonable observations on the nature of prejudice hence its title. Nowhere does Allport suggest that his ideas should be taken as the basis for any kind of 'training'.
My objection to its inclusion in police and other public services' diversity training was, as with so much of the material used, it had been made unrecognizable by people who had never even read The Nature of Prejudice. It is the well-meaning, usually middle-class, white people who have had some kind of quasi-religious enlightenment about racism and who seek converts that should get the blame for the ubiquity of the scale.
In my (unfinished and abandoned some years ago) PhD thesis I set out how the whole concept of basing training on identifying people's prejudices was flawed. My conclusion was that the police service would have been better for not having done any training rather than the progammes they had undertaken regularly since the 1950s.
Yes, I'm aware Allport had no knowledge of the uses to which his ideas would be put (he died long before that).
However, this is still a large empirical claim: "still it is true that activity on one level makes transition to a more intense level easier". It is large because it implies a causal relationship. If you make a claim that big, then it becomes easier to falsify, once again with British and Vietnamese examples. There has been quite widespread low-level anti-semitism in Britain for many years that has had little effect - or at least, not since the reign of Edward I. Meanwhile, Vietnam bought into the whole nonsense Communist kit and caboodle (and it did produce bad behaviour - think of what it did to US POWs during the Vietnam War).
But the country turned away early from genocide or anything like it, and had the moral gumption to stop it in Cambodia.
I sincerely apologise for my tone -it didn't sound patronising in my head but now I re-read it, well...
I think the point I was badly trying to make was that I'm not convinced he was claiming a causal relationship, rather pointing out that if the state wishes to persecute a minority it is easier if that-minority is already the subject of widespread negative prejudice. I certainly don't read him as suggesting any sense of inevitability of progression from one thing to another.
I think we might be more in agreement than not, particularly over the way the scale has been used to suggest that if we allow jokes about minorities it is only a matter of time before there is another genocide. Your Vietnam example certainly shows that is not true. Is there an example of pogroms or genocide that hasn't been preceded by 'antilocution', though?
On a side point, I'm not entirely convinced that the antisemitism in Britain has had little effect on Jews. True, the UK has been nowhere near starting a state sponsored pogrom and, putting aside the anti-Jewish riots in Tredegar in 1911 and in London in the 1930s, Jewish communities have felt reasonably safe. Antisemitism did lead to a particularly damaging (to Jews) foreign policy in the 1930s and, later, led to Jews who reported the atrocities in the death camps being disbelieved.
Again,please forgive me if my tone is off - I am new to the practice of debating in this kind of format.
I didn't read it as patronising - I'm just direct (Scottish father & Australian birth will do that) and also coming out of a very different political tradition from most of my interlocutors (Australia is an unusually governed polity; while he was FM, Alex Salmond seemed to be trying to take Scotland down a similar path, something I admired at the time).
Among other things, I reject (along the lines of the comments in the last paragraph of your first comment) anti-racism initiatives. Separately, I also think that people are within their rights to dislike and disassociate (privately) from members of minorities they find annoying (based on stereotype accuracy or even no reason at all). I think a great many of our modern problems are borne of the attempt to "force people to be friends".
One final point: "Is there an example of pogroms or genocide that hasn't been preceded by 'antilocution', though?" asks people to prove a negative. It's like the CRT heuristic put about by the likes of Ibram Kendi. The question for him isn't "was there racism in that situation?" but "how did racism manifest itself?"
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.
Thank-you for an excellent comment! Not much more to say really.
> 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.
Dunno. Communist rhetoric is pretty violent and hateful -- why shouldn't we call it hate speech? And I'm sure the Bolsheviks had a "No reactionaries allowed" policy at their club meetings. The point is that the lower rungs are universals, and this scale is a way of selecting tarring any group you don't like with association with genocide.
On a tangent: I also heard that podcast, and thought of you (Hellen) when the guest got into a debate with Konstantin Kissin about whether the law against "grossly offensive" electronic communication should be on the books at all.
Kissin suggested that such a law is inherently open to abuse and thus suspect under a kind of normative-if-not-constitional first ammendment. Miller argued the statute was fine and abuse is the fault of contemporary institutions under the spell of contemporary human rights talk. Miler won. Being pretty well versed in British positivist doctrine, he was able to make clear arguments while Kissin floundered around to make his intuitiions clear.
First I think you'll enjoy the irony that Miller's is showing that human rights talk has led to a great evil -- but that evil is that Britons are being denied one of their basic human rights.
Second, I think I'd be more confident about such a law being fairly applied if I knew it were being adjudicated by American judges applying first amendment jurisprudence.
Both Harry & Konstantin got in a bit of a tangle there, partly because while Harry was right to point out that law is drafted with "what is the mischief to be addressed here?" uppermost in the legislature's mind, he'd forgotten what that mischief was, and the conversation went awry from that point.
Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, while Blairite in origin, consolidated a great deal of earlier legislation that is, indeed, no longer fit for purpose.
As originally enacted — in 1935, no less — Section 127 was to stop people harassing others by telephone. This means, yes, I've had to explain to people under 30 what it was like to be called up in the middle of the night and sworn at, or to have heavy breathing down the line.
Subsection 2 of the Act, meanwhile, is clearly directed to a sibling under the skin of harassing midnight calls: phoning the emergency services and telling them granny is doing the watusi on the living room carpet when in reality granny is alive and well and on holiday in Brighton.
Section 127 of the Communications Act has become one of the principal means by which the Internet is policed in the UK. It has done so with little debate about whether it is appropriately worded to deal with modern technology. It is one thing to protect individuals from ‘grossly offensive’ prank telephone calls. It is quite another to protect groups of people from what are in effect public performances. That it is now being used to regulate YouTube and Facebook is frankly bonkers.
Note, too, that as originally drafted, the grossly offensive communication had to be directed to an actual person. As interpreted now, convictions can be secured in response to a communication to the world at large, based on the perceptions of a single complainant.
Here is the original 1935 speech introducing Section 127's ancestor. It will explain the "mischief" point admirably: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1935/mar/19/post-office-amendment-bill
Thanks for this background. I think it confirms for me that this sort of law works better under the shadow of an American style judges who can be expected to interpret it according to that First Amendment thingy.
Even English judges should be interpreting these laws in a similar way, and demanding that Parliament really, really, really say explicitly when it wants to crush free speech. And I'm glad Harry is filing suits and muckracking to hold them to that standard. But the American system is clearly working better in practice.
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?
There was a long tradition in the UK of private members' clubs - sometimes called "Gentlemen's Clubs" - that excluded, typically, women and Jews (not, interestingly, black or Asian males, because Britain has a tradition of men from the aristocracy of various African nations plus India pursuing careers in politics or cricket in the UK, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iftikhar_Ali_Khan_Pataudi).
This needs some explaining: "gentlemen's clubs" had nothing to do with sex or strippers. These were very ornate establishments located in heritage buildings with libraries, smoking rooms, accommodation, and restaurants ("dining rooms"). Their membership was drawn from the aristocracy and wealthy, and there was sometimes a political affiliation. The Carlton Club, for example, was unofficially Tory; many others were targeted at particular professions.
Related to these were the UK's large network of golf clubs, which also typically excluded women and Jews and, in this case, sometimes blacks as well.
These places - which were all private associations - became the location of immense conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, in part derived from the feminist notion of "patriarchy", which is a type of conspiracy theory. That is, they were conceived of as places where men got together to conspire against women, and make deals behind women's backs, especially political deals.
No matter how many times the men who ran them pointed out that they were to get away from women and others who were considered to have disagreeable traits, at least some of the time, the "patriarchy" claim persisted. This was also an era when stereotype accuracy was first made into a taboo. It became impossible for a man to say - especially a posh man, who was expected to have manners - "I want to get away from women because they emote too much and chatter all the time" or "I dislike the way Jews do business".
So, one by one the clubs admitted women; those that held out were overwhelmed by the Equality Act in 2010. Interestingly, one of the ways they tried to keep women out initially was by refusing to install women's loos!
This, of course, has really come back to bite feminists hard in the current "trans" moment, because women are trying to argue for "female spaces" after fighting so hard to topple the last bastion of male "spaces", something I wrote about here: https://capx.co/what-kathleen-stock-gets-wrong-about-the-tories-trans-and-feminism/
I hold a personal hypothesis that bias and bigotry in society is generally zero sum. If you get rid of it in one area it immediately crops up somewhere that you aren't looking.
I have no idea if this is true, but it's certainly plausible.
"fractally wrong: wrong at every possible resolution." I would have liked your dad.
To be fair to Allport, he actually said "This five-point scale is not mathematically constructed, but it
serves to call attention to the enormous range of activities that may issue from prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. While many people would never move from antilocution to avoidance; or from avoid-
ance to active discrimination, or higher on the scale, still it is true that activity on one level makes transition to a more intense level easier," which seems fair enough to me. As a whole, allowing for when it was written, the book makes some reasonable observations on the nature of prejudice hence its title. Nowhere does Allport suggest that his ideas should be taken as the basis for any kind of 'training'.
My objection to its inclusion in police and other public services' diversity training was, as with so much of the material used, it had been made unrecognizable by people who had never even read The Nature of Prejudice. It is the well-meaning, usually middle-class, white people who have had some kind of quasi-religious enlightenment about racism and who seek converts that should get the blame for the ubiquity of the scale.
In my (unfinished and abandoned some years ago) PhD thesis I set out how the whole concept of basing training on identifying people's prejudices was flawed. My conclusion was that the police service would have been better for not having done any training rather than the progammes they had undertaken regularly since the 1950s.
Yes, I'm aware Allport had no knowledge of the uses to which his ideas would be put (he died long before that).
However, this is still a large empirical claim: "still it is true that activity on one level makes transition to a more intense level easier". It is large because it implies a causal relationship. If you make a claim that big, then it becomes easier to falsify, once again with British and Vietnamese examples. There has been quite widespread low-level anti-semitism in Britain for many years that has had little effect - or at least, not since the reign of Edward I. Meanwhile, Vietnam bought into the whole nonsense Communist kit and caboodle (and it did produce bad behaviour - think of what it did to US POWs during the Vietnam War).
But the country turned away early from genocide or anything like it, and had the moral gumption to stop it in Cambodia.
I sincerely apologise for my tone -it didn't sound patronising in my head but now I re-read it, well...
I think the point I was badly trying to make was that I'm not convinced he was claiming a causal relationship, rather pointing out that if the state wishes to persecute a minority it is easier if that-minority is already the subject of widespread negative prejudice. I certainly don't read him as suggesting any sense of inevitability of progression from one thing to another.
I think we might be more in agreement than not, particularly over the way the scale has been used to suggest that if we allow jokes about minorities it is only a matter of time before there is another genocide. Your Vietnam example certainly shows that is not true. Is there an example of pogroms or genocide that hasn't been preceded by 'antilocution', though?
On a side point, I'm not entirely convinced that the antisemitism in Britain has had little effect on Jews. True, the UK has been nowhere near starting a state sponsored pogrom and, putting aside the anti-Jewish riots in Tredegar in 1911 and in London in the 1930s, Jewish communities have felt reasonably safe. Antisemitism did lead to a particularly damaging (to Jews) foreign policy in the 1930s and, later, led to Jews who reported the atrocities in the death camps being disbelieved.
Again,please forgive me if my tone is off - I am new to the practice of debating in this kind of format.
I didn't read it as patronising - I'm just direct (Scottish father & Australian birth will do that) and also coming out of a very different political tradition from most of my interlocutors (Australia is an unusually governed polity; while he was FM, Alex Salmond seemed to be trying to take Scotland down a similar path, something I admired at the time).
Among other things, I reject (along the lines of the comments in the last paragraph of your first comment) anti-racism initiatives. Separately, I also think that people are within their rights to dislike and disassociate (privately) from members of minorities they find annoying (based on stereotype accuracy or even no reason at all). I think a great many of our modern problems are borne of the attempt to "force people to be friends".
One final point: "Is there an example of pogroms or genocide that hasn't been preceded by 'antilocution', though?" asks people to prove a negative. It's like the CRT heuristic put about by the likes of Ibram Kendi. The question for him isn't "was there racism in that situation?" but "how did racism manifest itself?"