Ouija politics

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

In which the JC plays amateur sociologist in the Christmas pantomime.

This I am making up from whole cloth: treat with due care.

Now every opinionated windbag knows the experience of trying in vain to dismantle a transparently fatuous “political” argument.

“Political” in the sense of being a generalised disposition attributable to a generalised class of people. These often are political dispositions, but need not be: “born-again Christians”, “conservatives” (with big or little “c”), socialists, bitcoin maximalists, Guardianistas libertarians — this kind of group. One to whom one might attribute a generalized position, or set of beliefs.

Of course, the group is a narrative, as is its putative agenda: unless someone has published manifesto, no two individuals in the group will share identical set of beliefs, and it may be that no single individual holds exactly the set of core beliefs ascribed to the group. As with all narratives, it is a filter on the noise of diversity to render a meaningful signal.

The signal is often a phantom. In the same way that, in a group of 1000 people no individual will necessarily conform to the group’s average for height, weight, hand-size, inside seam, waist and chest measurement: the more dimensions you measure, the less likely that golden mean becomes.

Hence your struggle mounting an intellectual assault: your argument is deconstructs an average to which your particular opponent does not necessarily subscribe. Your intricate syllogisms snatch at thin air.

Hence atheists and Christians can shout themselves hoarse at each other, rather enjoying themselves, and make no ground on the other’s beliefs.

That narrative view — albeit unheld in the particular — nonetheless has an emergent power of its own, that comes from that aggregated view