Wednesday, July 6, 2016

The Virtue of Restraint

Among the most underappreciated virtues is restraint. Or better, self-restraint. It belongs to the category of virtues that includes self-control and self-discipline.

In the minds of most it has now become synonymous with repression, and thus, is considered a vice, an impediment to your fully flowering as a unique individual.

John Dickerson values restraint. He thinks that we need more of it. He believes that the world cannot function very well without it.

By his lights, the less people practice self-restraint, the less they will engage in open and constructive debate. Nor will they become effective participants in the free market. It ought to be well enough known, but free markets only function when people play the game according to the rules. And that requires restraint.

Many people these days believe in freedom. Just as many misunderstand it. They embrace the freedom to do as they please but reject the freedom to be responsible for what they have done. Freedom is not an absolute and all freedoms do not have the same value.

Without restraint there is no freedom. If people are doing what they want, without restraint, they will be circumscribing your freedom of movement. If people believe that business is whatever they can get away with, the free market will become more like a free-for-all. If people exercise their freedom by interrupting others, by shouting them down, by making it impossible for anyone to consider their arguments, those others will lose their freedom.

Dickerson explained his idea at the Aspen Institute:

I am a fan of restraint. I think we've lost the ability to restrain ourselves and that leads to boorish behavior, bad outcomes, cruelty, and the forfeit of reason. I want this debated for just the reason you suggest in your question: because debate sharpens ideas, illuminates their more subtle points and makes fuzzy ideas seem exciting through the process of exchanging views.

It’s difficult to be a fan of restraint when the culture is telling you that restraint will make you sick. It is difficult to tout this virtue when the culture argues that it will cause you to be sexually repressed and emotionally stilted. If one wants to know why we no longer value restraint the answer must lie with the therapy culture.

Those who do not value restraint are not merely libertines. They might also be fanatics and zealots. They believe that their cause is so just that restraint is merely an excuse for perpetuating injustice.

Restraint functions best when people are rational. If the light of reason is extinguished, they will only have their emotions to guide them. And that will cause them to dispense with restraint. Lacking restraint they will not have the discipline to communicate effectively or to work efficiently.

Dickerson continues:

Most any religious figure could make the case for restraint if for no other reason than generosity and compassion require a pause in self-obsession.

Thinking of others instead of yourself requires restraint particularly in a world where we're being offered this, that, and the other thing to self-sooth, distract, or please ourselves.

Why did restraint go out of fashion? Dickerson offers this explanation:

What's the argument for a lack of restraint?

Well, if you don't act, threats grow. If you don't act, injustice is allowed to continue. Sometimes the first hot reaction tells us a truth that's more important than the product of cool reason. This was the undertone of the Clinton/Sanders debate. I tend to be a fan of restraint so I can't name the other arguments, but surely they're out there.

Call it conviction. Call it a conviction of your own rightness and righteousness. If you believe that you are totally right right and the situation is so dire—apocalyptically so—then restraint becomes an excuse for perpetuating injustice or bad weather. Sad to say it, but such convictions border on the delusional.

Don’t you see the absence of restraint in the rhetoric of the climate change activists? If you ask them to restrain themselves they will tell you that the world is about to come to an end and that we must act right away, regardless of what anyone thinks.

If restraint, as Dickerson says, promotes rational argument and intellectual debate, those who don’t believe it will do everything in their power to shut it down. They will often do it with ad hominems.

When someone disagrees with you, you need not debate the issue. You attack his motives. You call him by one or another insulting name: climate change denier, racist, homophobe, Islamophobe… you know the list.

Dickerson doesn’t use these terms, but his terms are also to the point:

I tend to think that most of our public debates would benefit if everyone didn't motive-judge from the outset. If there weren't a social media culture and special-interest-fundraising cycle that fed off lack of restraint that would be great, too.

2 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

I think this topic fits in with Daniel Kahneman's explorations of fast and slow thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWaIE6u3wvw Daniel Kahneman on Thinking, Fast and Slow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
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The book's central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
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So the virtue of restraint most simply may be allowing system 2 thinking to become engaged and avoid escalating conflict and problems that require more careful understanding than our reactive systems allow.

However Stuart shows that uses of conviction are problematic because we believe we've got 100% of the facts on our side, believe we've fully thought through all the possible blind spots to our positions, and therefore can confidently rollover anyone else's views that diverge with yours.

I see Stuart quoted from Kahneman a year ago on the same line...
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2015/07/overconfidence-goeth-before-fall.html
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In an interview with the Guardian Kahneman explains that if he could rid the human species of any bias, any flaw in the human decision-making process, he would abolish overconfidence.

In Kahneman’s words: "Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion."
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So what is the "Virtue of restraint" for experts? We can assume they've carefully applied "System 2 thinking" to the best of their ability.

So perhaps there is some threshold, of conviction apparently, where you move from being uncertain of a situation, to finding confidence that you understand in partially, and a few apparent successes in understanding or prediction, and then you become overly confident, and replace reality with your model version of reality, and assume reality will match your model.

However if we abandon the idea of experts, because they can become idological about their models, then we end up falling back to "System 1 thinking", where we're even more likely to be wrong than the experts.

Stuart: Why did restraint go out of fashion? Dickerson offers this explanation:

Dickerson: What's the argument for a lack of restraint? Well, if you don't act, threats grow. If you don't act, injustice is allowed to continue. Sometimes the first hot reaction tells us a truth that's more important than the product of cool reason. This was the undertone of the Clinton/Sanders debate. I tend to be a fan of restraint so I can't name the other arguments, but surely they're out there.

Stuart: Call it conviction. Call it a conviction of your own rightness and righteousness. If you believe that you are totally right right and the situation is so dire—apocalyptically so—then restraint becomes an excuse for perpetuating injustice or bad weather. Sad to say it, but such convictions border on the delusional.

So that's the problem in a nutshell!

Stuart: And, Donald Trump, who seems lately to have cornered the market in overconfidence has managed to persuade a large number of people that he can just step into the oval office and do the job of president.

And on Trump today we hear again that he's promoting Saddam Hussein, and that we screwed up by removing a dictator who had no problem killing any threats like terrorists.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/donald-trump-saddam-hussein/490130/

So this suggests Trump's overconfidence is based on the principle of power. Saddam mantained law and order by the force of terror from the government, so everyone who stayed within the lines of Saddam's playground could live and have one of the most educationally and religiously free nations in the Middle East.

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: When someone disagrees with you, you need not debate the issue. You attack his motives. You call him by one or another insulting name: climate change denier, racist, homophobe, Islamophobe… you know the list.

Interestingly last week's Archdruid blog talked about the same problem of dismissing opponents by labels like racist, in relation to Brexit. Probably both the Remain and Leave votes were largely working on "System 1" thinking where reactive and dismissive name-calling thrives.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/06/outside-hall-of-mirrors.html
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Fast forward to the Brexit campaign. In polite society in today’s Britain, any attempt to point out the massive problems with allowing unrestricted immigration onto an already overcrowded island, which can’t provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services for the people it’s got already, is dismissed out of hand as racism. Thus it’s not surprising that quite a few Britons, many of them nominally Labour voters, mumbled the approved sound bites in public and voted for Brexit in private—and again, the pollsters and the pundits were blindsided.

It’s probably necessary to note here that of course there are racists and xenophobes who voted for Brexit. Equally, there are people who have copulated with dead pigs who voted for Remain—I’m sure my British readers can name at least one—but that doesn’t mean that everyone who voted for Remain has copulated with a dead pig. Nor, crucially, does it prove that necrosuophiliac cravings are the only possible reason to vote for Remain. One common way to define hate speech is “the use of a demeaning and derogatory stereotype to describe every member of a group.” By that definition, the people who insist that everyone who voted for Brexit is a bigoted moron are engaged in hate speech—and it’s a source of bleak amusement to watch people who are normally quick to denounce hate speech indulging in it to their heart’s desire in this one case.
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I think its true - as soon as you find the need or ability to stereotype all opposing ideas under a label, you know someone is doing "System 1" thinking, or nonthinking. By reducing someone else to a label, you instantly give them all the negative attitudes and rationalizations of the most extreme people who fit within that stereotype for you.

This is also where "reclaiming" comes in, so if a previously proud label has become maligned by political hate-mongering, some brave activists will take the now derogatory term and claim it, and try to declare positive virtues in it.

So that's where you get strange things like "slut-walks" to reclaim the ability of respectable women to dress like prostitutes, while not actually being ones. Ideally if you desensitize yourself to being shamed by "System 1" stereotyping tactics, then you're more free to be what you want to be no matter what wise men or fools say.

And then you have the actual problem where sometimes stereotypes are correct, and System 1 thinking could save your life, so when you're talking about defensive positions, its not a bad system. You at worse lose opportunities for seeing the worst in people who might otherwise have been helpful to you.