While not a fan of jargon, I appreciate what you're shooting for. The political classification spectrum never seems satisfactory to me either, since I hold positions that, in some cases, fit conservative and others liberal. But I'll give it a try: systemic prudence. Yes, it's not one word, but it captures a modest, careful approach to both knowledge limits and policy caution.
The biggest problem with humilitism is that it sounds like militant or militarism which have a negative connotation and literal meanings that fall in the set of views that is nearly the opposite of what you’re going for
Yea, my first reading of the email title before opening things led me to think it was some sort of humanitarian militarism or something, like Kling was going to write about the pros and cons of sending peace keeping troops into Darfur.
"I do not have a ready answer to the question: what do you wish to conserve?"
That's bad framing because hung up on a misinterpretation. It's better to just use right and left.
The question really doesn't have anything to do with the meaning that "conservative" has taken in the American political context for a very long time. A contemporary American "conservative" has practically no ideological relationship to, say, the thought of de Maistre or even Burke in anything more than obsolete nostalgia.
As Hayek pointed out, the attempt to map the politically descriptive language of of the context of 18th Century Europe onto American politics has always been particularly un-literal, because America was *born* radically liberal, and so over time fidelity to maintenance of that new pattern of social organization became what was, only locally, the "conservative, traditionalist" viewpoint. Now that the founding-era patterns are mostly wiped out, any fidelity to them or desire to see them reestablished is "radically reactionary" or "restorationist" (cf. "Constitution In Exile") which, in practical terms, is what "Genuinely Conservative Supreme Court Justice" (like Justice Thomas) means today.
You might as well say that you aren't a liberal because you don't have a ready answer to the question of who you want to liberate - that's just obviously not what any American talking politics means when they say "liberal" for example, as in "liberal judge". That's why people keep trying to clarify with absurd modifiers like "social conservative" or "classical liberal", forgetting the first rule of English syntax for ideological terms, which is that one can presume any preceding modifier simply means, "not actually", as in "social justice" actually just means, "not actually justice."
One thing to notice is that few intellectuals who are not progressive or leftist nevertheless never seem to feel it is worth any time to point out why they are not a "liberal", and this was true even back 30 years ago when it was a lot clearer what American commentators meant when using the term. One theory of why, and why the terms survive, is what you might call anti-affiliation signaling. That is, the actually important thing is that one doesn't want to get identified as being on the wrong team, or at best insufficiently loyal in a fight. For example, if you took a bunch of positions, preferences, opinions, etc. and characterized them as being more tending to be "on the right" or "on the left", then one might find one's own opinions to be generally "on the right" which, for some people, would be terrible to admit, either because of the reaction of other people, or because of the kind of indoctrinated allergic reaction it provokes in people with respect to their self-regard given their general low opinion of people affiliated with "the right". Much easier to say one is *not* a "conservative" - a term devoid of literal meaning but opposition to which is coded as "against the right" even if most of one's opinions are mostly not against the right.
Ironically, the word conservative itself has been used as a euphemism for "right" by those on the right themselves, because people had been programmed to associate "right wing" as being one step removed from nazi fascist paranoid authoritarian skinheads or whatever, and "conservative" became a way to signal the distinction "but not one of *those* guys!!"
As a person of the left, I don't like to be called a progressive because it carries kind of a Squad or Elizabeth Warren connotation. It often means a particular faction.
I still like "liberal" because to me it fits someone like Obama during his presidency, or Biden before he became president. But I don't use that word for most Democrats today. Someone like Buttigieg I would maybe call a liberal.
What's a big point of enduring dispute between Buttigieg and Warren that signifies non- progressive liberal on one side and non-liberal progressive on the other, respectively?
I'm also a big fan of Pragmatism. I would like to see an America that held William James in higher esteem than either Chomsky or Buckley.
Unfortunately, I think that as happened to with liberalism, members of the leftist intellectual vanguard have made inroads into coopting the pragmatist label (see for instance the Klein & Thompson entry "Abundance").
Great post, Arnold. Our greatest philosophers have always pointed out our limits (e.g., Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mises, Popper, Hayek).
My first thought was Rob Rubin's preference for probabilistic statements (i.e., what today we might call sharing his priors). My second thought was America's only home-grown school of philosophy (as far as I know) of Pragmatism. Although an intellectually honest version of Pragmatism would be nice, rather than the wishy-washiness of Dewey or clinging to bad ideas.
In the real world, one issue seems to be the unwillingness to be patient in scaling up trials. Instead, policies just switch from A to B with no control group, just interest groups.
I very much appreciate this response by Dr Kling to our earlier discussions on him expressing his own political views. I also recognize that being forthright about political views is a great way to get publicly steamrolled, so I appreciate his willingness to go out on a limb to do this, even if the limb is "Guys, can we be less sure of our opinions?"
Humilitism though based on a realistic view of the human condition will not have much appeal in a secular age. People's political commitments in part serve an eschatological need once filled by religion. They are looking for salvationist formulas which will abolish tragedy and contingency from our lives, an impossible aspiration.
I agree with you, Arnold. The term "liberal" and "conservative" are next to useless for reasons thoughtful people understand completely. As a rule, I resist one-word descriptions of anything important because immutable, agreed definition of important concept quickly go the way of terms like liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc.
Maybe just a simple number scale of the positive integers from 1 to 5 will suffice, where each digit names a collection of 10 propositions. The set 2 can have no more than 5 of the propositions in the set 1, and the set 3 can have no more than 5 of propositions in the set 2, and so on.
Now, of course, someone has to come up with 50 propositions; then maybe by executive order from the POTUS and Monarch of England we can compel the Oxford English Dictionary folks to give the five set of ten propositions each its imprimatur. People can then declare themselves members of set "#" and everyone else will know what they mean.
I thought of giving the 50 propositions a go, but that task exceeds the reasonable limits of a comment dialogue box.
"Like pufferfish, they make themselves look bigger than they are, to try to intimidate others." Also, like pufferfish, they are poisonous and will kill those who don't submit to them or handle them with kid gloves.
How about Hippocratic? First do no harm. Probaby would need work to get more widespread adoption but it is humility in the face of a complex system and the knowledge of our own limitations
Chesterton's fence also may provide an avenue, but I can't find a catchy one-word there (not that Hippocratic is very catchy, although the philosophy is well understood and treasured)
“Thomas Sowell’s expression, ‘constrained vision,’ is quite good. But it does not boil down to a single word. And even at two words, it is not self-explanatory.”
“Thomas Sowell’s aphorism that ‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs,’ is humilitist. But it doesn’t make for a compelling battle cry.”
If it is a single word you prefer, how about Sowellist?
IMO it is a far better battle cry than “humilitist”.
“As a humilitist, I despair of the left. Even moderate Democrats are far too certain of their moral superiority and technocratic wisdom for my taste.
As a humilitist, my feelings about Donald Trump are mixed. For me, his most attractive feature is his portfolio of enemies. They tend to be institutions and causes for which I have some antipathy. But he is certainly no humilitist.”
SO. WELL. STATED!
I seemed to be somewhat more favorable than Arnold to DJT, but this combo description pegs me almost perfectly.
We need militant moderation.
"WHAT DO WE WANT?
GRADUAL SOCIAL CHANGE!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
EVENTUALLY!"
That's the best statement I've read all week.
Call it Humilitarism.
🙂
While not a fan of jargon, I appreciate what you're shooting for. The political classification spectrum never seems satisfactory to me either, since I hold positions that, in some cases, fit conservative and others liberal. But I'll give it a try: systemic prudence. Yes, it's not one word, but it captures a modest, careful approach to both knowledge limits and policy caution.
Systemic prudence is just conservatism, isn't it?
Maybe, prudent humility?
I experience you as a good solid Adultist in a world gripped by Childrenism. Keep it up, please. :)
The biggest problem with humilitism is that it sounds like militant or militarism which have a negative connotation and literal meanings that fall in the set of views that is nearly the opposite of what you’re going for
Yea, my first reading of the email title before opening things led me to think it was some sort of humanitarian militarism or something, like Kling was going to write about the pros and cons of sending peace keeping troops into Darfur.
"I do not have a ready answer to the question: what do you wish to conserve?"
That's bad framing because hung up on a misinterpretation. It's better to just use right and left.
The question really doesn't have anything to do with the meaning that "conservative" has taken in the American political context for a very long time. A contemporary American "conservative" has practically no ideological relationship to, say, the thought of de Maistre or even Burke in anything more than obsolete nostalgia.
As Hayek pointed out, the attempt to map the politically descriptive language of of the context of 18th Century Europe onto American politics has always been particularly un-literal, because America was *born* radically liberal, and so over time fidelity to maintenance of that new pattern of social organization became what was, only locally, the "conservative, traditionalist" viewpoint. Now that the founding-era patterns are mostly wiped out, any fidelity to them or desire to see them reestablished is "radically reactionary" or "restorationist" (cf. "Constitution In Exile") which, in practical terms, is what "Genuinely Conservative Supreme Court Justice" (like Justice Thomas) means today.
You might as well say that you aren't a liberal because you don't have a ready answer to the question of who you want to liberate - that's just obviously not what any American talking politics means when they say "liberal" for example, as in "liberal judge". That's why people keep trying to clarify with absurd modifiers like "social conservative" or "classical liberal", forgetting the first rule of English syntax for ideological terms, which is that one can presume any preceding modifier simply means, "not actually", as in "social justice" actually just means, "not actually justice."
I pretty much agree with you.
Re: liberal, I refuse to use the word standalone any more.
When describing people on the left, I have generally adopted “leftist”, which is accurate and compact.
If talking to someone of the left and concerned they will take the term to mean only the hardest, furthest left, I will reluctantly use “progressive”.
Since the left in tot is now unquestionably il-liberal, the term “liberal” to describe any of the left as a group is completely inappropriate.
One thing to notice is that few intellectuals who are not progressive or leftist nevertheless never seem to feel it is worth any time to point out why they are not a "liberal", and this was true even back 30 years ago when it was a lot clearer what American commentators meant when using the term. One theory of why, and why the terms survive, is what you might call anti-affiliation signaling. That is, the actually important thing is that one doesn't want to get identified as being on the wrong team, or at best insufficiently loyal in a fight. For example, if you took a bunch of positions, preferences, opinions, etc. and characterized them as being more tending to be "on the right" or "on the left", then one might find one's own opinions to be generally "on the right" which, for some people, would be terrible to admit, either because of the reaction of other people, or because of the kind of indoctrinated allergic reaction it provokes in people with respect to their self-regard given their general low opinion of people affiliated with "the right". Much easier to say one is *not* a "conservative" - a term devoid of literal meaning but opposition to which is coded as "against the right" even if most of one's opinions are mostly not against the right.
Ironically, the word conservative itself has been used as a euphemism for "right" by those on the right themselves, because people had been programmed to associate "right wing" as being one step removed from nazi fascist paranoid authoritarian skinheads or whatever, and "conservative" became a way to signal the distinction "but not one of *those* guys!!"
As a person of the left, I don't like to be called a progressive because it carries kind of a Squad or Elizabeth Warren connotation. It often means a particular faction.
I still like "liberal" because to me it fits someone like Obama during his presidency, or Biden before he became president. But I don't use that word for most Democrats today. Someone like Buttigieg I would maybe call a liberal.
What's a big point of enduring dispute between Buttigieg and Warren that signifies non- progressive liberal on one side and non-liberal progressive on the other, respectively?
I'm not sure what your threshold for "enduring" is, but free college and mandatory Medicare for fall would be examples.
1. This is not how language changes.
2. "Pragmatist" might fit the bill.
I'm also a big fan of Pragmatism. I would like to see an America that held William James in higher esteem than either Chomsky or Buckley.
Unfortunately, I think that as happened to with liberalism, members of the leftist intellectual vanguard have made inroads into coopting the pragmatist label (see for instance the Klein & Thompson entry "Abundance").
Great post, Arnold. Our greatest philosophers have always pointed out our limits (e.g., Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mises, Popper, Hayek).
My first thought was Rob Rubin's preference for probabilistic statements (i.e., what today we might call sharing his priors). My second thought was America's only home-grown school of philosophy (as far as I know) of Pragmatism. Although an intellectually honest version of Pragmatism would be nice, rather than the wishy-washiness of Dewey or clinging to bad ideas.
In the real world, one issue seems to be the unwillingness to be patient in scaling up trials. Instead, policies just switch from A to B with no control group, just interest groups.
I love this. 100%.
I very much appreciate this response by Dr Kling to our earlier discussions on him expressing his own political views. I also recognize that being forthright about political views is a great way to get publicly steamrolled, so I appreciate his willingness to go out on a limb to do this, even if the limb is "Guys, can we be less sure of our opinions?"
May I join you in being a humilitist?
It works.
The need for a home is inescapable.
We’ve been on the road too long.
Humilitism though based on a realistic view of the human condition will not have much appeal in a secular age. People's political commitments in part serve an eschatological need once filled by religion. They are looking for salvationist formulas which will abolish tragedy and contingency from our lives, an impossible aspiration.
I agree with you, Arnold. The term "liberal" and "conservative" are next to useless for reasons thoughtful people understand completely. As a rule, I resist one-word descriptions of anything important because immutable, agreed definition of important concept quickly go the way of terms like liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc.
Maybe just a simple number scale of the positive integers from 1 to 5 will suffice, where each digit names a collection of 10 propositions. The set 2 can have no more than 5 of the propositions in the set 1, and the set 3 can have no more than 5 of propositions in the set 2, and so on.
Now, of course, someone has to come up with 50 propositions; then maybe by executive order from the POTUS and Monarch of England we can compel the Oxford English Dictionary folks to give the five set of ten propositions each its imprimatur. People can then declare themselves members of set "#" and everyone else will know what they mean.
I thought of giving the 50 propositions a go, but that task exceeds the reasonable limits of a comment dialogue box.
"Like pufferfish, they make themselves look bigger than they are, to try to intimidate others." Also, like pufferfish, they are poisonous and will kill those who don't submit to them or handle them with kid gloves.
How about Hippocratic? First do no harm. Probaby would need work to get more widespread adoption but it is humility in the face of a complex system and the knowledge of our own limitations
Chesterton's fence also may provide an avenue, but I can't find a catchy one-word there (not that Hippocratic is very catchy, although the philosophy is well understood and treasured)
“Thomas Sowell’s expression, ‘constrained vision,’ is quite good. But it does not boil down to a single word. And even at two words, it is not self-explanatory.”
“Thomas Sowell’s aphorism that ‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs,’ is humilitist. But it doesn’t make for a compelling battle cry.”
If it is a single word you prefer, how about Sowellist?
IMO it is a far better battle cry than “humilitist”.
“As a humilitist, I despair of the left. Even moderate Democrats are far too certain of their moral superiority and technocratic wisdom for my taste.
As a humilitist, my feelings about Donald Trump are mixed. For me, his most attractive feature is his portfolio of enemies. They tend to be institutions and causes for which I have some antipathy. But he is certainly no humilitist.”
SO. WELL. STATED!
I seemed to be somewhat more favorable than Arnold to DJT, but this combo description pegs me almost perfectly.
Thank you for this articulation.