18AR23-20

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AR 23:20 - A bid to replace Western liberalism with "honor culture"

In this issue:

MORALITY - has "courage, integrity, and accountability" become "outdated, sexist, and barbaric"?

+ using algorithmic bots to maintain a culture of online civility

Apologia Report 23:20 (1,386)

June 21, 2018

MORALITY

Why Honor Matters, by Tamler Sommers [1] <www.bit.ly/2llyI8j> -- the promo reads: "A controversial call to put honor at the center of morality. To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. ... But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. ... Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society's most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society."

Kirkus finds it "an impassioned, but disturbing, defense of honor cultures. In a social critique sure to generate controversy, Sommers (Philosophy/Univ. of Houston) argues that honor cultures offer a better ethical model than 'Western liberalism,' with its insistence on universal dignity. Honor cultures, characterized by 'social cohesion and solidarity' - think sports teams, urban gangs, and Navy SEALS - emphasize 'courage, integrity, and accountability' and adherence to a 'formal and informal' set of codes. Such cultures 'take great pride in their exclusivity.' Societies guided by liberal values, writes the author, lead to 'diminishing personal accountability, increasing social isolation, alienation and a weakening sense of solidarity and community spirit.' Responding to the 'common objection' that honor cultures mistreat women, Sommers asserts that honor itself does not require 'sexist norms and practices.' He acknowledges, however, that honor cultures can inflict 'systematic violations of the rights of women,' as well as incite 'long, bloody' family feuds and 'trap individuals within rigid social roles, limiting their autonomy as rational agents.' To address these concerns, the author argues that honor cultures require constraints; white working-class Southern men, for example, engage in ritualized, circumscribed violence as a form of 'active resistance to the domination of others' and a way of gaining respect. Condemning the 'depersonalized, excessively rationalistic' legal system, Sommers argues persuasively that 'honorable punishment' can be facilitated through the restorative justice movement, which involves mediated encounters between victims and criminals. The violent protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was for Sommers 'an eye-opening event' because he 'didn't quite realize the extent' of white nationalists' 'abhorrent racist ideology.' Neofascists, he admits, 'do use rhetoric that isn't too far off from the language I've employed to describe honor communities,' and he belatedly acknowledges 'the morality of dignity and its focus on equality and respect for human rights.' A celebration of insular, exclusionary honor culture that does not adequately account for its pernicious effects." [2]

"Why do we act differently online?" by Gaia Vince <www.bit.ly/2M9sqUM> -- opens with an overview of the problem's severity and observes: "The constant abuse is silencing people, pushing them off online platforms and further reducing the diversity of online voices and opinion. And it shows no sign of abating. A survey last year found that 40% of American adults had experienced online abuse, with almost half of them receiving severe forms of harassment, including physical threats and stalking. Seventy percent of women described online harassment as a 'major problem'.

"The internet offers unparalleled promise of cooperation and communication between all of humanity. But instead of embracing a massive extension of our social circles online, we seem to be reverting to tribalism and conflict."

Vince cites research which finds that "Each moral or emotional word in a tweet increases the likelihood of it being retweeted by 20%. ...

"'Content that triggers outrage and that expresses outrage is much more likely to be shared,' says [Yale University's Human Cooperation Lab] director Molly Crockett. What we've created online is 'an ecosystem that selects for the most outrageous content, paired with a platform where it's easier than ever before to express outrage'." [Reminds me of a classic remark attributed to Owen Benjamin <hugepianist.com>: "Socialism is an envy outrage Ponzi scheme." - RP]

At Yale's Human Nature Lab <www.bit.ly/2ytp5hr> Nicholas Christakis "manipulates [a] network. 'By engineering [participants'] interactions one way, I can make them really sweet to each other, work well together, and they are healthy and happy and they cooperate. Or you take the same people and connect them a different way and they're mean jerks to each other.' ...

"In an attempt to generate more cooperative online communities, Christakis's team has started adding bots to their temporary societies. His team is not interested in inventing super-smart AI to replace human cognition, but in infiltrating a population of smart humans with 'dumb-bots' to help the humans help themselves.

"In fact, Christakis found that if the bots played perfectly, that didn't help the humans. But if the bots made some mistakes, they unlocked the potential of the group to find a solution. In other words, adding a little noise into the system, the bots helped the network to function more efficiently. ...

"One experiment found that the level of racist abuse tweeted at black users could be dramatically slashed by using bot accounts with white profile images to respond to racist tweeters. A typical bot response to a racist tweet would be: 'Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.' Simply cultivating a little empathy in such tweeters reduced their racist tweets almost to zero for weeks afterwards. ...

"It's worth remembering that we've had thousands of years to hone our person-to-person interactions, but only 20 years of social media. 'Offline, we have all these cues from facial expressions to body language to pitch,'" says Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil of Cornell University's Department of Information Science. "'Online we discuss things only through text. I think we shouldn't be surprised that we're having so much difficulty in finding the right way to discuss and cooperate online.' ...

"If social media as we know it is going to survive, the companies running these platforms are going to have to keep steering their algorithms, perhaps informed by behavioural science, to encourage cooperation and kindness rather than division and abuse. ...

"'I'm optimistic,' Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil says. 'This is just a different game and we have to evolve.'" BBC Future, 3 April 2018, <www.bbc.in/2HURIU1>

Have you ever been challenged by an app to prove you're not a bot? Will we soon need to challenge each other to do the same? And will the answer to the title's question "Why do we act differently online?" become: "We just don't have the right algorithms working for us"?

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Why Honor Matters, by Tamler Sommers (Basic, 2018, hardcover, 272 pages) <www.amzn.to/2LUlNWi>

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