We Need Modal Ideology
Please stop thinking in the context of all in which you live and what came before you
Life would be a little better if we all really did just fall out of a coconut tree.
(Quick disclaimer: I’m gonna criticize lots of different arguments in this piece. If you know me in real life, please be charitable and understand that I’m taking issue with the attitude of the arguments, not their content. These are not necessarily statements of my opposition to any given policy. If you don’t know me in the offline world, please take as much offense as possible.)
1.
Philosophers seem to be particularly good at thinking through hard problems—especially hard political problems.
has made this point forcefully, and I tend to agree. He cites who claims that the fundamental difference between those who philosophize and those who don’t is that the latter “don’t get reason.” They’re not good at understanding arguments, much less making them. Full of biases and semantic stopsigns and whataboutisms that stop them from getting at base truth.
I think this is a little extreme, though not very. Certainly I know and have argued with lots of people who are just totally incapable of arguing back (even if they feel like that’s what they’re doing), but I’ve also had lots of meaningful, reasonable arguments with people in my life. And very few of them are “philosophers,” in the sense that Chappell uses the word: “anyone who has received sufficient philosophical training.”1
Still, I tend not to be convinced by many of the reasonable political arguments they present. The conclusions sorta follow from the premises, which seem to be based in reality, but something always comes out wrong. And I think I have a theory for why.
Philosophers (and some strange sorts of mathematician) use modal logic more than anyone else. It has a whole very formal definition, but the important think to know is that modal logic deals in possible worlds.
If we attack the trolley problam with (informal) modal thinking, it might look like this:
The trolley is currently headed toward killing five people, but I can change it to a track where it kills one person.
Call the world where the trolley hits five people ‘A’.
Call the world where it hits one person ‘B’.
I have a direct choice between bringing about A or B.
Clearly, B is preferable to A.
Therefore, I should opt to bring about B.
There are three things to notice about how this differs from a more conventional approach. The first is that it doesn’t actually differ all that much—the setup is the same, the underlying moral calculus of “one person dead is better than five dead” is the same, and so on. Second, we’ve removed the idea of intent—we’re only talking about selecting between A and B; it doesn’t matter whether I’ve done something in making my choice. And finally, relatedly, we’ve gotten rid of the status quo bias by default.
2.
There’s lots more to be done in pure thought experiments with this style of thought. But it’s also very directly applicable to real life, and to political ideology.
A modal thinker’s political ideology has some possible world in mind. It has a vision of what maximized justice or abundance or wellbeing would look like, and then supports policies that move incrementally toward that vision.
Of course, this tends to be what true political ideologies look like!
Libertarians think that wealth and freedom are very good and cool, and we should be moving toward a world with as much of those as we can have. Communists have their own utopian vision, and reactionary monarchists have theirs.
Interestingly, the Libertarian and Communist and Monarchist Parties of America tend to perform poorly in most elections. Who does well?
The Democrats stand for progressivism. Progressivism isn’t so much a coherent vision of what the world should be, but a domineering sense that things should change. Generally speaking, that they should change in the direction of social libertarianism and economic socialism. The problem is that no one says that out loud. No one has any idea what the goal is, and so no one has any idea if we’ve reached it or not. There’s just a general feeling that we must keep pushing forward—hell, it was basically Harris’ campaign slogan, and it was Obama’s in 2012, verbatim.
The Republicans, at some point, stood for conservatism. Which, of course, is just the idea that things are probably pretty alright as they are, and we’d better be sure not to burn anything important down. Again—no coherent vision of an ideal society, just fear that moving forward will hurt us, and maybe a flicker of reactionism suggesting that we should move back a little. Right about to the time that I personally was 8-12 years old and everything was perfect. Romney ran on the slogans “America's Comeback Team” and “Restore Our Future.” It was better before, and then it got worse, we ought to go back just a little.
3.
You shouldn’t be convinced just by campaign slogans. So don’t worry, I have some real policy receipts too.
On the left: identity politics seem to be the clearest incarnation of this. Sure, there are some committed ideologues who believe this really is the path to a truly just society, but it looks like most of the Democratic voter base just got swept up in The Next Thing To Make Progress On.
For most of the civil rights era, color blindness was the stated goal. Equality of opportunity was the target. And once these had been achieved (or at least once most people felt like they had been), the goalposts shifted further: color blindness was regressive, and equality of outcome was the target.
Both parties lined up to this new norm. The Republican Party knew that old-fashioned KKK racism had gone pretty far outside the Overton window, so they happily jumped on what the progressive media had begun telling them was regressive: color blindness and meritocracy.
wrote compellingly after Trump’s inauguration that this was a major strategic mistake for the left:
But it was a philosophical failure too. Not for the people who truly believed in it—honest ideological commitment ought to be respected, and these tend to be the people you can argue productively with—but for those who just felt a pull to agree with The Next Thing, whatever it was. This comes from a lack of coherent ideology. And this is the vast majority of the Democrats’ base.
Of course, the Republicans have done the same thing, only in a significantly more extreme and insane way.
Remember the Tea Party? I sure don’t!
Part of that is because I was five years old when it died, but the other part is that it’s totally foreign to modern Republican politics. It was a modal movement with a clear goal in mind—unlike today’s Republican party, which seems to be much more focused on important policy projects like Triggering The Libs and Inflating Trump’s Ego.
JD Vance has proven to be so spineless that I think he’s been reduced to just a puddle on the floor of the West Wing. Elon Musk is dabbling in Nazi iconography for the lolz. And the biggest policies from the Trump administration so far have been in favor of killing millions of African children, killing or displacing many thousands of Palestinian children (and inspiring countless new dedicated jihadists), and wrecking our domestic economy from all directions.
And I’ve only barely scratched the surface!
Trump has also been happy to waste time with culture war shenanigans that have no definite philosophy behind them. He’s against DEI and transgender self-identification because the left is for them. He has no interest in traditional values for their own sake—only for the opportunity to signal that he’s against moving forward.
4.
What do I want then?
Put annoyingly: what’s my modal preference for a world filled with modally-preferenced politicans?
In a word, consistency.2
The frustration I’ve had arguing with capably-reasonable friends stems from their failure at specificity and lack of temporal awareness. It’s all well and good to point to past decades and centuries of misogynistic discrimination—those have had, and continue to have (to a lesser extent) real negative consequences—but women are a majority of college graduates now! The conclusion that “equality is good” remains valid, but the actions we should take to achieve equality have probably shifted somewhat. Defaulting to progressivism doesn’t make a real argument for what you think those actions ought to be.
Similarly, relatives will point out to me the long-run history of antisemitism and all the harm it’s caused, and then make arguments for deporting all the college students who protest for Palestine. The conclusion that “Jews are human people” remains valid today (so does the conclusion “Israel is good,” I think), but we probably don’t need to take extreme, free speech–chilling actions like that in the modern US. Defaulting to anti-immigrant reaction is misguided.
And, again, the problem is that this is most of America. Yeah, there are lots of registered independents out there—but there are still more partisans. And let’s be frank: those independents tend not to be modally motivated. They vote on vibes too. Vote for forward or vote for backward depending on the price of eggs, without real consideration for the world they want to see.
I’ve made half-joking comments before to friends that maybe we ought to drop this whole democracy thing and simply let ourselves be governed by the Supreme Court. They seem like decent philosopher-kings, Congress can’t pass a budget anyway, so why even bother with them. At least the Justices have ideologies with endpoints in mind—I don’t love originalism, but at least it knows precisely what it’s arguing for. And even oppositional, interpretive theories like purposivism3 are well-grounded and well-specified.
Supreme Court Justices don’t just make a decision based on vibes and call it a day—they apply their ideology rigorously, do extensive research, and then write up very lengthy defenses of their positions. They think like philosophers!
5.
I worry that in the intellectual circles I frequent, ideology is too often used pejoratively. Ideology is blinding X, or stubborn ideologues cause the most harm, things like that.
There’s truth in these complaints, for sure. It’s very easy to slip from ideology with a desired possible world to blind utopianism, or to unearned self-righteousness and intellectual overconfidence. These are the potential consequences of believing in a specific vision.
But, of course, without the vision, we’re just sort of drifting aimlessly down a river. One side says “that waterfull looks fun, let’s go toward it,” and the other says, “no, and if you bring it up again I’ll fucking sink us all, because when I was a kid, we had just as good a time swimming in the icy water on our own without this bloated, corrupt raft in the way.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we landed on some shore—any shore at all? Or, at the very least, if we had real public discourse focused on which shore looks most welcoming and why.
Lukethoughts
(I’m beginning to worry that this section is more entertaining than the blog itself. Ah, well, here are Luke’s thoughts today.)
“Coffee should be banned because of what it did to your [my] MacBook.” (Ed. note: Yeah, this one’s not on the coffee, it’s on my klutzy ass. Lucky thing I have a beautiful low-to-mid-range Linux desktop to blog from while my laptop is sitting in rice.)
“Brooklyn 99 is an incredible show that does a [really] good job of attacking real life issues and maintaining strong comedic integrity. Watch it.” (Ed. note: Look, I like the show too, but I wouldn’t say it’s socially very important. I think it’s at its best when whimsical, and that Season 8 was more of a tonal misstep. They also started talking so fast for some reason.. is it just me, or was that super weird and distracting?)
“It is crazy that basketball is one of the few few sports that people are unable to play at the highest level due to a physical attribute out of their control: height. You could be the most technically gifted player but if you are 5’6”, you have a better chance of getting into Harvard five times.”
(Ed. note: I think Luke is severely underestimating the genetic component of… every other aspect of athleticism: muscle mass, talent, etc. It’s also hard to be a professional basketball player if you’re 6’8” and have type 1 diabetes. And hard to be a football player if you’re dedicated, talented, and happen to have dwarfism. So it goes. Also his math is just wrong: from here, we see four players 5’6” or shorter. There have been 4500 NBA players ever, so we get 4/4500 = 0.09%, or a little less likely than getting into Harvard twice: 3.59% * 3.59% = 0.12%. This is about five orders of magnitude more likely than getting into Harvard five times.)
“Everyone should have a Costco membership.” (The classism is so real, I should’ve been a progressive all along…)
Boy, “sufficient” is a funny word that almost implies a shit-ton of circularity. Almost like Chappell might be setting up a little motte-and-bailey for himself, where I can say “I’ve never taken a philosophy class in my life, but I can make non-confused arguments sometimes” and then he can respond with “well, then whatever training you have had is sufficient.” I think I know what he’s trying to get at, and it’s probably not that, but this phrasing is still uncomfortable.
I can’t help but link one of my favorite ever SNL sketches.
Say that ten times fast.
Insightful. Why do you think most people seem to be like that?.. Is there a particular challenge in imagining something that hasn’t been experienced before? Is there a hard wiring of reacting to immediate feelings to seek pleasure or avoid pain (i.e., do humans have a baked-in preference for acting based on the localized “delta” that will be generated)?
Vitalik Buterin wrote some interesting stuff on more nuanced classifications. For example: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html