Author Topic: The dominance of an intolerant minority  (Read 2097 times)

Pentagathus

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The dominance of an intolerant minority
« on: February 22, 2018, 10:07:48 PM »
This post is a thing I am posting now so I don't forget to post it later, but will probably not finish right now. So it is rawww and wriggling unedited atm. Also this could probably have been posted in the science and stuff part of the forum but I'm more interested in the political/philosophical consequences currently.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
This is an article I found pretty interesting, essentially it is trying to describe the phenomenon wherein an intolerant or inflexible minority can (or will) come to dominate a tolerant or apathetic majority. I should point out that whilst I found this principle very interesting, the article itself seemed very long winded and tedious to read to me, so if anyone knows of a better discussion on this principle then hmu fam. I also do not agree with all of the author's conclusions or suggestions.
The first example given is the prevalence of kosher soft drinks (in the US I think, but presumably all around the west) despite the fact the vast majority of folk are not Jewish (again in the US/the west). This can be explained by the fact that Jews will only drink kosher drinks, whereas very few people will refuse to drink a kosher drink, therefore since the price of production is not significantly changed it is more economical for soft drink manufacturers and marketers to just sell kosher soft drinks. Likewise the same principle applies to some extent to the sale of kosher and halal meat, although not to the same extent as a significant number of people in the west are opposed to kosher and halal meat upon the grounds of animal welfare (or sometimes simply due to antisemitism/Islamophobia) and also I imagine these forms of slaughter might be significantly more expensive.


This principle may have rather more significant implications than these examples however, particularly when it comes to politics. If it holds true in the case that there is an intolerant minority (in the sense that they will not bend of certain policies/ideologies) within a certain political movement or party whilst the majority of this movement/party is relatively tolerant or flexible then it would be seen that the views of this minority are dis proportionally over-represented within the movement/party. And to some extent I would say this does appear to happen within many left-wing political movements (although I'm not sure how true this appearance actually is) and even in the wider political landscape in the form of "political correctness gone made" (and in other forms too probably), wherein political or public figures are often very careful to avoid saying things that are not viewed as politically correct, despite the "fact" (apparent but not easy to truly determine) that the majority of the public are not usually that bothered about it, because a rather vocal minority are very bothered by it. I think in recent times we've been seeing a backlash against this, in the form of people becoming less tolerant of apparent political correctness and such like, which I would imagine is part of the rise of populist movements (Trump and brexit spring to mind).
An example of this that first springs to my mind would be a thing that happened during the (most) recent election of the head of the labour party (here in the UK) where Corbyn's rival (at this point iirc it was a two horse race) was accused of sexism after he said that Corbyn should be "rocking Theresa May back onto her heels" during prime-ministers question time. Now anyone with a functional brain should be able to realise this is a boxing metaphor, but the woman (an MP in the labour party ffs) who made the complaint thought that it was a reference to May's footwear (highheels) and so was a sexist statement. This could and should have been easily clarified without the need to apologise, but the "offender" who's name I cannot remember at all instead acted like an utter fanny and apologised and agreed that his comment was somehow sexist. Now I don't know if this a particularly significant example, but hopefully it illustrates the point.
An actually decent example might be the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which is an attempt to apply serious financial pressure to the Daily Mail (a rightwing armadilloheap of a newspaper that really does try to spread a fair bit of hate tbf) by encouraging people to boycott companies who advertise in the Daily Mail, and it has met with some successes so far. Now I don't know if  people who hate the daily mail are actually in the minority or not, and personally I'm one of them. But this campaign is somewhat worrying to me, how much will it take for a media outlet to be considered hateful by a group like this? Will this actually succeed in reducing the mail's reach or will it just cause their usual readers to pushback on movements like this?


As per usual I'm getting bored of writing this long arse rambling post. But I want to point to what I feel is a pretty significant logical error in the article - the notion that the Islamic empire converted regions that were mostly Christian or Judaic via this principle. I think this argument is flawed because it ignores the fact that the minority (Muslims) in this case were in a position of authority backed up by military power, and so they achieved gradual mass conversion of the populace not simply by being less tolerant than the majority but by being able to enforce their intolerance to a greater extent. Ie they were actually able to execute Islamic apostates and to declare that the children of a Muslim were always Muslims whereas Jews and Christians were not.
 
Also I was initially just going to post this paragraph as I thought these were questions worth discussing, so I might as well still post it:
"Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “ Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”"


Jubal

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Re: The dominance of an intolerant minority
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2018, 11:59:54 PM »
So, I think it's self-evidently true that vocal minorities can make their views felt strongly. However, I think there's more to unpack here than that, and there's a large difference - as you point out - between a majority acquiescing passively and one being forced to do so by a state apparatus. I think it's also very frequently true that political debates are led by vocal minorities on both sides of the argument, and I'm not sure this is a problem - indeed I suspect it's an inevitability.

To take your examples: broadly speaking, food labelling is an issue of majority acquiescence. There's no obvious preference not to do X, some people want X, it makes sense for markets to provide X. That's 100% fine and dandy.

Politics and political correctness are a much more difficult issue, for a number of reasons:

> Firstly, whose preferences count when we take into consideration what the "driving minority" is? Those of a party's MPs, or its members, or its voters, or the wider public? It's pretty clear that Corbyn broadly represents a majority view amongst Labour's vast membership on most issues (EU being the obvious exception). His faction are a dominating minority among MPs, but are able to hold a plurality of the electorate and a majority of the party membership in situations where other options are offered.

> Regarding political correctness; "political correctness" issues I don't think are a very analytically useful category to start with, since depending on who you ask things seem to vary between political correctness meaning "argued overreaction to a linguistic gaffe" and "saying transgender people should have human rights". I also really don't think this classifies as a true "intolerant minority" issue, because I think the group railing against "political correctness" essentially forms a second intolerant conservative-leaning minority, with the preferences of the public being more apathetic on either side. Or to put it another way, a successful intolerant minority isn't noticeable because they just sail through and win (for example peanut allergy sufferers in the article). Nor do I think you can classify the conservative vocal minority as a backlash - rather, in many cases they represent the current vocal minority position. To go back to trans rights: the idea that transgender women should be treated as women is currently not a position effectively imposed by the vocal liberal minority who believe in it. The reason it isn't is that there is a similarly sized vocal conservative minority trying to rally sections of the public in favour of permitting discrimination. The fact that any significant section of the public even has much of an opinion on this sort of thing is solely because it's where a political battleground has been pitched: were it not for there being two vocal minorities, the majority of the public would just acquiesce to the views of one side or the other.

>The above - the public essentially being a football between two groups of people actually engaged on an issue - isn't something we should treat as a problem. It's how literally all politics works, always. The things we should be concerned about on a systemic level aren't the levels of intransigence of viewpoints in the two groups; it can be entirely reasonable to be intransigent and uncompromising in your viewpoint, depending on the situation. If your opponent's viewpoint is simply morally abhorrent, or factually baseless, you can't meet them in the middle and it's unfair to ask people to try. This is one of the classic tactics of the far-right, to claim that we need to "have the debate" on things like "are white people superior" - it's unreasonable to ask anyone to come to a middle ground on an issue where the answer is "no, sod off". The systemic issues we should be more concerned about, I think, are whether the systems for resolving these disputes are adequate in terms of informing, and accurately representing the views of, the majority, and in ensuring that vocal minorities can't win "victory by conquest" aka winning the argument and thereby disenfranchising their opposing vocal minorities.

> In terms of how much we should tolerate intolerance: broadly speaking, I believe in freedom of speech with a few limitations, but also very firmly believe that freedom of speech is something that only operates vis-a-vis the state. I don't think we should go around arresting hard-right (or stalinist-left, but those are rarer) politicians, but I don't think we need to give them any more voice than they need, and I think we need to be aware that there are certain viewpoints that are fundamentally opposed to democratic values and that it's reasonable to ask that the services we use don't give them funding and oxygen. It's important to recognise that groups like Stop Funding Hate are very dependent on how large a percentage of the population they can mobilise, which I think is true of a lot of boycott-style pressure groups - this I think is a check on their abilities. If the Mail readership are desperate for the Mail to keep being published, they can crowdfund it tbh. This is also why I don't think student unions "no platforming" fascists is in any way bad or a problem - fascists can go hold meetings somewhere else, free speech means the government won't arrest them for it, it doesn't mean universities are obliged to give their views the time of day.
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Pentagathus

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Re: The dominance of an intolerant minority
« Reply #2 on: February 23, 2018, 04:25:00 PM »
Yes I agree that this is not a problem as such, but rather it could be a problem if you don't appreciate that it happens. And I've never really thought about this as a general principle before, which is partly why I made the thread. I'm thinking out loud for the most part (well not actually out loud since I'm typing not speaking but unfortunately that idiom has yet to be updated for  digital era).


Yep, it's certainly not a simple issue when trying to apply this principle to politics.
Regarding political correctness, I would loosely define it here as being oversensitive to potentially offensive language, and yes I know that is an appallingly flimsy definition but meh. My sense would be that the majority are opposed to this form of political correctness, but would often choose not to be too vocal in their opposition either due to a vague apathy or because they don't want to be associated with the far right. And to my mind the problem here is that pretty much everyone who is not part of the far right is opposed to the far right (and vocally so), whereas the same is not so true of the far left. In itself this is not problematic (I'd prefer mandatory quotas of 50%women in management roles as opposed to legislation which bans women from management roles for example, despite being opposed to both) but I suspect it may well be skewing the centre towards the left, and then consequently having an opposing squeeze to the right for those that remained in the centre (or maybe the polarization would have occurred simultaneously, idk).


On transgender issues, are you talking about the situation in the UK specifically? I'm not at all familiar with whatever developments have or have not been happening with regards to trans rights over here unfortunately. But it seems to me that it's far more complicated than a trans activist minority vs a conservative minority since the debate on whether gender is non binary is presumably not something on which trans activists would be able to achieve a consensus. I mean would someone who feels like they have been born in the wrong body not oppose the idea that their gender identity is arbitrary? It's not  something I understand much about, but it doesn't seem like there's an obvious middle ground for trans folk on this. I should probably take this to the trans thread though.


In general I have the feeling that your football analogy is a problem because it seems to me that often the centre ground itself is the "best" place to be, but that it seems rare for anyone to take a vocal and impassioned defence of the centre (although maybe this has been changing recently, or maybe it was an incorrect observation from the start). In fairness this could well because the figures in government have always (in my lifetime that is) been fairly central so there simply has been less perceived need of defending the centre.


I think I have more to write but I gotta to go.