The Divisiveness of Cohesion
Suppose you live in a deeply divided society: 60% of people strongly identify with Group A, and the other 40% strongly identify with Group B. While you plainly belong to Group A, you’re convinced this division is bad: It would be much better if everyone felt like they belonged to Group AB. You seek a cohesive society, where everyone feels like they’re on the same team.
What’s the best way to bring this cohesion about? Your all-too-human impulse is to loudly preach the value of cohesion. But on reflection, this is probably counter-productive. When members of Group B hear you, they’re going to take “cohesion” as a euphemism for “abandon your identity, and submit to the dominance of Group A.” None too enticing. And when members of Group A notice Group B’s recalcitrance, they’re probably going to think, “We offer Group B the olive branch of cohesion, and they spit in our faces. Typical.” Instead of forging As and Bs into one people, preaching cohesion tears them further apart.
What’s the alternative? Simple. Instead of preaching cohesion, reach out to Group B. Unilaterally show them respect. Unilaterally show them friendliness. They’ll be distrustful at first, but cohesion can’t be built in a day. If respect and friendliness fail, try, try, and try again. There are no guarantees in life, but human beings are born reciprocators. If you stubbornly ask to shake a man’s hand, odds are he’ll eventually offer his in return. Once enough people walk this path of unilateral respect and friendliness, differences fade away – and cohesion silently takes its place.
A feel-good just-so story? I think not. Consider American politics in 2016. We’re basically the same people we were a year or two ago, but preachers of cohesion have achieved a new prominence. What’s happened? The American public is more divided than ever. Cohesionist themes have scared out-groups, who understandably feel threatened. And they’ve angried up in-groups, who understandably feel spurned. This is obvious for the Trump movement, but social justice progressives preaching “inclusion” exhibit the same dynamic. “We demand inclusion” makes outsiders feel threatened and insiders feel spurned – driving them further apart.
There’s an ongoing Twitter war between the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. If either side really wanted to promote cohesion, they would swap hashtags. Moderates and conservatives would reach out to African-Americans and progressives with #BlackLivesMatter. African-Americans and progressives would reach out to moderates and conservatives with #AllLivesMatter. Why won’t it happen? I’ll outsource that to Robin Hanson.
Summing up: The first rule of promoting cohesion is: Don’t talk about cohesion. The second rule of promoting cohesion is: Don’t talk about cohesion. If you really want to build a harmonious, unified society, take one for the team. Discard your anger, swallow your pride, and show out-groups unilateral respect and friendship. End of story.
P.S. Next week, I’ll post if any of my election bets resolve. Otherwise, I’m hoarding my words for mid-November when election tempers have cooled.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
I agree that preaching cohesion is bad. While unilaterally extending respect can be good in many contexts, I do not think that it is generically good advice to follow; rather, one needs to exercise discernment about when and how to do this. Not all groups, group identities, or moral perspectives are constituted the same way, and this can meaningfully affect what it means to "reciprocate" and whether:
1 You can get reciprocity that furthers your interests (e.g. you try to learn about someone's perspective to identify positive things you might have to offer them in trade, or ways you can do less of what they hate, and they do the same, or at least engage with your trade offers).
2 Only reciprocity you don't care about (e.g. if you're nice to them they'll say some empty words of approval but never ever expend any cognitive effort to change their actions in ways that help you or harm you less).
3 Reciprocity that's actively harmful to you (e.g. if you're nice to them they'll try to help you abuse your friends or validate you like a narcissist, helping you avoid noticing your flaws and persuading you that all your problems are someone else's fault).
Some people understand themselves to have legitimate grievances against or criticisms of the other side. Unilaterally extending respect to them is just good, because *they're not the other side in a conflict* - they're trying to solve problems, and everyone sincerely trying to solve problems has overwhelmingly convergent interests anywhere near current margins, except maybe specifically when men compete for the same woman as a mate, and even then I think convergence mostly dominates.
Some people are trying to demonstrate strength by showing what they can get away with. Unilaterally extending respect just validates their strategy, raising their status and lowering yours.
Some people are trying to demoralize forthright and prosocial people by invalidating their attempts to communicate. Unilaterally extending respect to such people demoralizes you.
Even if you know you're dealing with committed opposition such as the prior two cases, it can be worth performing the experiment, if there is a third party you care about who will justly evaluate the interaction, so that the person demonstrating good faith gains credit and the person demonstrating bad faith loses credit. But the sort of "cohesion" we care about consists in large part of such people constituting the bulk of society, or at least a dominant power in society, shaping our moral sentiments accordingly. If we're experiencing poor social cohesion, then that situation is not present and would need to be constructed.
Other strategies you might follow:
Knowledge is power. Presumably you're a member of group A and not group B because you believe group A is getting right answers on something important where group B is getting wrong answers. If you think group A is sufficiently better than group B, you might try to coordinate group A to conquer group B and rule benevolently. If the conquest is thorough then the cohesion will follow.
If you think group B has valuable information that group A lacks (despite being a member of group A), you might first try to integrate that information into group A to make it more powerful, giving it a stronger coordinating advantage against group B.
"What’s the alternative? Simple. Instead of preaching cohesion, reach out to Group B. Unilaterally show them respect. Unilaterally show them friendliness. They’ll be distrustful at first, but cohesion can’t be built in a day. If respect and friendliness fail, try, try, and try again."
This is the approach we've taken to immigration in the UK/most of Western Europe with disastrous (and much poorer than US) outcomes.