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.

I have called him a myth; and, in so far as there are few, if any, of his mind and temperament to be found in the ranks of living men, the title is well chosen. But it is a myth which rests upon solid and even, it may be, upon permanent foundations. The Reasonable Man is fed and kept alive by the most valued and enduring of our juridical institutions-the common jury. Hateful as he must necessarily be to any ordinary citizen who privately considers him, it is a curious paradox that where two or three are gathered together in one place they will with one accord pretend an admiration for him; and, when they are gathered together in the formidable surroundings of a British jury, they are easily persuaded that they themselves are, each and generally, reasonable men.

—A.P. Herbert, Fardell v Potts

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