The Myth of Left and Right: Caplan and Hanson Interview the Lewis Brothers

Brothers Hyrum Lewis (BYU - Idaho) and Verlan Lewis (Utah Valley University)’s new The Myth of Left and Right attacks the “essentialist” view that “left” and “right” are coherent political philosophies in favor of a “social” view that “left” and “right” are incoherent bundles of issue positions. In this interview, Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson find much common ground with the Lewis brothers, but still find some residual merit in the essentialist view. Hanson analogizes ideology to gender identity: Some features of gender are social, but are all of them?! Caplan maintains that the social theory is 85% true, but the authors stick with 100%. Also: Should there be affirmative action for right-wing academics?

[@BinanceUSD]

Good questions and looking forward to responses to the conversation on your substack Bryan. Bet on it

[@MyTruth1771]

I love a good well reasoned argument in good spirit.

[@CraigTalbert]

Re: 19:13 “the political spectrum fails even on a nominalist perspective.” Nominalism is that general ideas are mere names without a grounding in reality.

[@IAmInterested-cc4hr]

If I had a chosen theme it is that the Right believes in Personal Responsibility and the Left Believe in Social responsibility. Guns, personal responsibility says you can have the guns and you are responsible not to shoot someone with them and should be punished if you do. Welfare, personal responsibility says you are responsible for getiing yourself out of poverty and any helpbyou receive would be Charity not Forced government charity. You can apply this pretty thoroughly

[@jakez32]

Quite disingenuous to compare left/right to masculine/feminine. The gender binary only exists because of the biological binary, it's fundamentally tied to it. Do Bryan and Robin really think highly social constructs have as much regularity as constructs tied to biology or do they think left/right are tied to biology? If they do think they're tied to biology, do they give credence to something like Haidt's moral foundations theory, which is also deconstructed in the book? Would love to know

[@CraigTalbert]

Re: 1:14:50 - University of Colorado BOULDER (mascot is the Buffalos).

[@CraigTalbert]

Re: 29:40 - surprised no one called out Caplan for asking Verlan to prove a negative “prove that it’s zero percent philosophical.” Prove that the person writing this comment is not a Martian.

[@CraigTalbert]

Re: 1:09:00 I don’t think Robin read the whole book. Chapters 6 and 7 make this pretty clear.

[@lawrencetorrance7051]

The authors admit that not everybody is so completely tribal as to believe in their chosen party line 100%. At which point their whole thesis becomes tautological. Those who do believe strictly down their party line, do so for party loyalty rather than principle. That is true, but left unanswered is how many people actually conform to that description. The authors act like it's everybody. But it's not even close to everybody. In fact few would self-identify as a 100% believer in "left vs right" ideology. In fact no such list of "left vs right" policy positions exists.

[@murderparker7968]

Can you give me a simple tautological proposition that you’re deriving from this? I’m trying to understand your criticism better. Thanks in advance.

[@lawrencetorrance7051]

@@murderparker7968 The tautology is that people who irrationally side with one political side, are irrational. That those who self identify as party line true believers, are irrational. The book is written as if those people are the majority. When in fact they comprise a vanishingly small portion of people. The authors never tease apart a preference for one political side, from a total adherence to everything that side supports. They just proceed as if everybody with a general preference for a political side, is a true believer party line zealot. The abundance of nuanced people defeats their premise. One can easily be nuanced while also happening to agree mostly with one part or the other.

[@jakez32]

They talk quite a bit about single issue voters, who may abandon their party for such reasons

[@lawrencetorrance7051]

@@jakez32 They talk about people "abandoning their party" for some unspecified destination. Switching votes because of a single issue is not what people do. At best, they either vote or don't vote based on a single issue. But gun control advocates are not going to vote Republican because the Democrats aren't anti-gun enough.

[@AnalyticalSentient]

​@lawrencetorrance7051 Indeed most will admit that if directly asked or when push comes to shove. But the ubiquitous fact remains that in modern America, the way _a majority_ express and act _is_ an ultra-simplistic, non-nuanced, binary ally-enemy 'us vs them' message, mentality and behavior, colloquially commenting on politics and communicating to and about those who they ostensibly politically oppose, in a way that _implicitly_ entails such irrational tribalism because they often, e.g., express broadstroke claims about 'people on the left' (or 'these damn "leftists" or "liberals" ruining the country') or 'people on the right' (or 'these damn "republicans" or "conservatives" ruining the country'), in ambiguous or imperfect ways... Meaning they often fail to _explicitly_ specify 1) what features about the other major political tribe are destroying the country, AND 2) the evidence that such feature(s) are _actually_ accurately attributable to all (or even most!) members of said opposing tribe (much less someone specific they might be bandwagoning a strawman attack on, assuming the positions of and grossly stereotyping in a sloppy, intellectually lazy way). Re: "few would self-identify as a "100% true believer in [the false-dichotomy] L vs R ideology" - again that is often only when directly asked or challenged on that, briefly in-passing lip service prior to then talking or acting _like_ exactly that, or when push comes to shove. Sad reality is that people, as evolved, subjectively-scheming social creatures _casually_ AF "self-identify" and then effectively (or i.e., mostly) refuse to significantly, bluntly and emphatically draw any harsh deviating distinctions with the tribe they've decided to self-identify with because (among other reasons) that is often uncomfortable for a human psychology to do and lest we upset (others in) our precious tribe. I don't think this all unfolds entirely (or in some cases like when doing fast rather than slow thinking, at all) consciously thus to some extent (and in some cases) I doubt people are even aware that they are to some degree doing it (to whatever level they're doing it, which itself can vary) Ultimately, in critical commentary and communicating with (and/or about) others more constructively, we would do better to _explicitly_ identify political problems in question specifically, rather than orthogonally criticizing broad, poorly-defined groups or individuals because of issues of _implicit_ or assumed disagreement(s) that are not always even representative of that (again, ubiquitously, colloquially over-simplified, stereotyped) group or group member. Our common (though not universal) failure to do so is often contributing to unnecessarily excessive inter-societal conflict, confusion, division and decay. So yes, the grossly imperfect and significantly (though not 100%) ambiguous and arbitrary 'left vs right' or 'left or right' dominant terminology and language usage patterns to describe policy position sets and political grouping (at least as popularly implemented in the lazy lexicon to this day), is not only not optimal, but _far_ and beyond away from that AND is quite unnecessarily _contributing_ to the destructive implosion of our country. This needs to be supported as a broader conversation and the framing, overton window and ways in which we responsibly use language ought to be reconsidered and argued for revising and optimizing cautiously and democratically en-masse. Note, I do think there is a place for certain terms to capture key distinctive groupings, rather than _only_ ever referring to specific, individual issue-by-issue positions per se in any and every instance. For example, some minimum set of criteria to avert idiocracy and ensure the preservation of a stable country (where progress is even practically tenable at all) - term used could be 'civilization-ist' - to denote a plainly definable party _set_ with a limited set of universally shared features. So would be a broad, diverse group among which there is variation for _other_ miscellaneous positions BUT _invariable_ common-thread support for, e.g. - 1) 📜 🇺🇸 protecting the exhaustively and thoughtfully developed US constitution as supreme law of the land, the revision of which is possible but should be a scrupulous, democratically extensive, drawn out process etc. (not something that can or should be allowed to be executed on a whim, without debate and democratic deliberation, etc.). Acceptance of and affirmation for the social contract (practical premise allowing for the continuation of civilization) in general would also be a vital shared clause. Among other reasons, this fundamental feature would be necessarily included in order to ensure safeguarding of the stability and structural integrity of our constitutionally-limited, democratically representative republic 2) 🤬 Freedom of Expression Includes information (unless _actually_ threatens national security - not just, e.g., economic interests of arms dealers, weapons manufacturers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Pfizer, or basically, multinational corporations for instance, or the USG from the dissent of its own citizenry - power elite basically...or unless infringes on private PII), speech (unless evidentially proven beyond reasonable doubt as i.e., libel, slander, direct threats of physical violence), press, etc. 3) So-called "💰💰💰 in Politics" (campaign finance reform - democratically debate, develop and implement measures to minimize oligarchical, plutocratic capture of the process) 4) 🗳 Electoral Integrity (Election Security + RCV/IRV)...commitment and collaborative robust efforts to ensure prevention of electoral fraud...also note, "RCV" is aka ranked-choice voting (and "IRV" aka instant-runoff voting) 5) 🧠 Epistemic Education... More focus in public education on key 1st principles namely intellectual honesty, intellectually honest confidence levels, and healthy skepticism. Also a dedicated curriculum on cognitive distortions (emotional-intelligence -related aspect - is outlined in field of CBT psychotherapy), cognitive biases, formal logical fallacies, and basic principles & core concepts of critical thinking, hard philosophy of science and the modern scientific method Last part would include falsification principle, fallbilistic probabilism, and the guideline of considering carefully drawn, logically sound, evidentially-supported arguments and patiently, gradually exposing them to dissent among the hardest of evidential + logical challenges, rather than offloading or outsourcing blind trust in authorities and habitually avoiding argumentation or potential dialectical disagreement due to intellectual insecurity, fear, laziness, prejudice, and/or disdsdain. Would outline key, systematic process (pattern) i.e., including observe, hypothesize, measure, model, experiment, trial, test, analyze, replicate, synthesize, repeat, and revise over time, etc.)...more rational, empirically informed electorate = more intelligently informed and operating country 6) 🥗 Holistic Human Health & Fitness Pro- effort to optimize public health, including education on low and no-cost fundamentals such as maintaining and optimizing: -breathing -hydration with essential electrolytes -essential nutrition; about dose, content, quality, frequency, nutrient timing, etc. and identifying need for sufficient bio-available EAAs from whole foods, EFAs from whole foods, non-rancid EPA & DHA Omega 3s, essential vitamins, minerals and trace minerals from foods and natural products like seamoss and shilajit, and knowledge on beneficial nutraceutical properties (that pharmaceutical industry quietly and continually attempts - to varying success - to mimic, patent artificial synthetic isolations of, and profit off) naturally found in a range of whole foods, roots, herbs and spices including chemopreventative, anti-inflammatory and inflammo-regulatory, antioxidant and endogenous antioxidant-promoting, antifungal, antiviral, mildly anticoagulant and antiplatelet (antithrombotics), anti/pre/probiotics aka biotically benefical (sometimes dually so - e.g., fresh crushed garlic acts as an antibiotic and prebiotic), vaso-dilatory and vaso-regulatory, prometabolic, neuro-protective, etc. -regular physical exercise & daily frequent light, therapeutic movement -biome-savvy essential hygiene -daily chronobiological/circadian control of light exposure -sleep -stress management (broad category, includes anything that stresses your biology, from basic physiology all the way 'up' to the psyche - i.e., baseline physical like exogenous and environmental toxins, _and_ psycho-social stress...and also about hormetic stressors) ...healthier population is a happier, clearer thinking, more stable, better population 7) Anti- racism, sexism, nepotism, nationalism, classicism, speciesm (or _at least_ the first 2...I know shedding or at least intellectually recognizing and disavowing these arbitrary destructive biases is still _so hard_ for humans 😮‍💨) Anyway, something like that. My 2 cents.

[@eswyatt]

Romney was a big protectionist. Patrick Buchanan was too. W Clinton was far more free market. Even Obama was less protectionist than Romney. Netiher Romney nor Buchanan pulled many votes away from their more market friendly democratic rivals.

[@samhilgartner988]

I can’t figure out what’s at stake for Bryan and Robin.

[@amatingmind7258]

I wonder what Caplan would do if he ever had to work a real job.

[@apertureonline9566]

They want me to backdate after what they did like so they can possibly hate me more in the future and ill become irrational.

[@CrazyHermitVizard]

Caplans definition is not convincing to me because I would say like probably more than 50% of right wingers have nothing good to say about markets. I would say right wingers like tradition an left wingers generally want to change tradition in a fundamental way.

[@jakez32]

It could be argued that deregulatory efforts on the right have militated against tradition. Regulation in some sense is a holding of a norm

[@CrazyHermitVizard]

@@jakez32 yes. But that’s just a particular instance of tradition. But I agree there is conservative tendency in regulating too much. In that sense for example my home country is extremely conservative or traditionalist. We kind of even don’t have a party of deregulation.

[@jakez32]

@@CrazyHermitVizard Tradition, like left and right, is a fuzzy concept. It's good to interrogate them. I liked the idea of the right as the holding of the status quo or tradition vs the left as advocating change, but I've always noticed counterexamples and Hyrum and Verlan have brought many more to light, pretty much fully convincing me of their deconstruction of any philosophical core. This serious, critical analysis was long overdue and it's been fun listening to them in interviews. Interviewers who've used left and right mindlessly over the years are brought to confront the emptiness of the concepts in real time, and they invariably hold on for dear life and it's quite entertaining haha

[@CrazyHermitVizard]

@@jakez32 I agree that left and right as concepts are extremely superficial. Rarely useful.

[@arthurwright1433]

Right, but that’s why he didn’t mention markets in his “essence” if the Right. The common core of the right is that they are anti-left.

[@alankwellsmsmba]

I blame public schools. I dropped out of High School in the ninth grade so I avoided the worst of the indoctrination. My homeschooled kids now struggle with educating their broods in Public Schools. They may get lucky and if "Far Right Red Kentucky" ever financially supports alternatives to Public School the grandchildren might survive but my hopes are not high...