Political tone policing falls flat with me

I was recently caught out being a bit bombastic. We were discussing how Conservatives tend to want to conserve things, and I interjected,

“But of course, the Conservatives want to destroy the environment.”

It’s true that the Conservatives do not want to destroy the environment. Every time we ascribe malice to someone else, especially in politics, are we achieving anything? People who are called evil don’t tend to change their minds; psychopaths don’t care, and others react defensively.  If someone identifies as a Conservative, calling Conservatives malicious in any way is unpersuasive.

In a world of ad-targetting, it might help to remind swing voters that one party is evil; perhaps it dissuades them from identifying with a group with such an awful reputation, but it’s still not really part of the ideal world of rational debate and the conflict of ideas.

We might say that Conservatism is an idea, and worth insulting, except that it isn’t. No major political party in this country represents a single, coherent ideology like that, and the Conservatives are the furthest from it. The ideology of the party has changed with whatever brings it power and we can’t really attack ‘Conservatism’ as anything worth talking about. We need to limit ourselves perhaps to current Conservative policy, or the ideas of leading Conservatives. I can’t pretend that environment destruction is an integral part of universal conservative principles.

So  there’s no reason at all to say something as extreme as “ The Conservatives want to destroy the environment”?

I’d have thought that the patent absurdity of the assertion would be sufficient for people to deduce that I didn’t mean it entirely seriously; the statement serves to emphasize the difference between conservation and Conservatism. I think there’s room for this sort of rhetorical flourish in meaningful debate; it’s implicit that their policies are so bad that they might as well want to destroy the environment, because they wouldn’t make many different choices.

Most of the time I can trust the intelligence of audiences to recognize an inaccuracy from a flourish (or in a flourish) and to understand the point being made. But maybe that’s because I have mostly polite and sympathetic friends. Can the general population be trusted to make the same inferences? Probably.

Yet, even if people understand the message, the phrasing can still contribute to bad outcomes. We already have political debates that focus far too much on people, and not enough on ideas. And we already have tribalism in politics and ideologies that blocks progress and co-operation. Dismissing others as evil is divisive and we see far too many personal attacks that are used as a way to avoid discussing the real issues.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I will avoid the real issues; I do prefer to discuss those. Yet if someone refuses to engage with evidence and reasoned discussion and continues doing something with objectively unpleasant effects, how are we to characterize that person? At first, we might forgive evil actions as the result of ignorance, but if the evil outcomes were well-known and the person was informed about them, and caused them anyway, can we say it’s incompetence or malice?

              Let’s take a concrete example. Imagine you have a car parked on the street and you wake up to the sound of your neighbour cutting his tree down. It’s going to fall on your car, so you rush outside and ask him to stop. He ignores you and before you have a chance to find your car keys lost somewhere in your house your car is crushed. At your local council meeting when you press for restrictions on how and whether someone can cut a tree down he says that this is unacceptable red tape that will prevent innocent property owners from enjoying what is theirs. If you want to do well in life you just need to work hard and then maybe you’ll cut down bad trees and replant ones you want.

              Was he evil?

              It’s hard to say. What is evil? He clearly didn’t care at all about you. But was it that he didn’t believe you when you said that your car would be damaged? Did he just not listen and tune you out? Did he think that he could control the tree and make it fall in a way a tree has never fallen before? Or did he want to hurt you for some reason? All the explanations seem absurd.

              And yet if he goes about telling everyone how good he is at manual things; if he insists that he is astonishingly competent at everything he tries, he’s ruled out all the explanations of incompetence. What explanation is left?

              And if things like this happen repeatedly, and then someone comes to you and says “I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be mean. It’s wrong of you to insult him”, that person might be right. But it’s a classic tactic of abusers to distract attention from their massive wrongdoing and focus on minor infractions of the victim. That’s why good-hearted people make the best victims; they are willing to consider their guilt, and they care a lot about doing and being good. Tell them ‘if you were just a bit more good, this relationship would work’ and they will swallow the lie for years, possibly a whole lifetime.

              That’s what happens a lot in politics too. People on the centre and the left have allowed disastrous policies to happen by telling us that we need to meet others in the middle; that if we betray justice and truth a little then we might achieve a little of them. And so we do, and we get betrayed by those in power. And then we’re told to forgive them: it was incompetence… no-one could have known… that went wrong, but things go wrong… our new policy will fix things if you just let us implement it…

              I am utterly sick of this narrative. I don’t want to be abused by Conservative (or other) governments any more. And if I occasionally attribute malice to them, I don’t think that’s the big issue. When women or minorities speak up we like to dismiss what they say through tone-policing; we white men are offended; please politely and quietly ask for your views to be considered and let us ignore you more easily.

              That tone policing is condemned, and yet it is more reasonable than tone policing of complaints against Conservatives. I don’t get any choice in being a white man; if you generalise about all of us and imply that we’re evil, you’re effectively saying that you will judge me for things I cannot control. But if I attack Conservatives, whether or not there’s a coherent ideology, a person can choose to stop identifying with them.

             

              So I think that ascribing intent to our governing party for the mess this country is in is forgivable. But I also don’t think that it’s worth arguing over for another reason: they are about as morally culpable whether or not they intended to cause all these terrible effects.

              We care a lot about intent in some areas of our lives. If your friend ignores your phone call to deliberately spite you it’s very different from when your friend doesn’t answer because he’s out for a run, or has no signal, or just rarely has his phone to hand and answers no-one’s calls first time. I think that we should care more about intent in many situations where we’re judging communications. For example, it’s a feature of modern life that people like to take offence about things others say. If a child is happily singing along to some music his friend has shared with him, and says the world ‘nigger’ on the bus, odds are that he’ll get some nasty glances at best. Yet it’s disgustingly mean-spirited to take offence at a child enjoying some music.

              But when it comes to politics, I don’t think that intent matters. We sometimes even call systems evil; not because an arbitrary collection of rules has a mind, but because the outcomes are so wrong. Politicians, especially those in government, have an absolute duty to reflect the best that society has to offer. They have a duty to question their actions, to look for evidence, to listen to evidence and ideas presented to them… and so on. If they are ignorant and incompetent and ruin millions of lives, it’s no excuse… unless there really was no evidence at the time. For example, although I disliked Labour in government, I can forgive Gordon Brown for his actions in the financial crisis. Were they perfect? Far from it. But there was a need for urgency, and he led the way in doing roughly the right thing. With only a few days and a host of competing voices, he got it more right than any other world leader at the time. (Can I forgive him for PFI? No.)

              In the case of many policies, both Conservative and Labour (but more so for the Conservatives) could easily work out how wrong they are if they’d just do a bit of reading and listen to people who must implement them. The evidence is there; the voices are there; alternative ideas are out there. Wilful harm is replaced by wilful ignorance, and it seems as though the wilful ignorance is often chosen simply because it’s a better defence than not caring about causing harm.

              We shouldn’t accept that. When they choose to ignore the evidence because it would force them to rethink their cosy hopes and flawed worldviews, it doesn’t matter that they are not being malicious towards the people whom we know will suffer. They are deliberately avoiding listening to the evidence about who will suffer and how much. It could be human frailty, cognitive biases and the desire to protect fragile egos and avoid changing their mind. It could be massive incompetence. It could be that they simply do not care about those harms, or cannot understand them, or their scale; a failure of intelligence and empathy. It could be all of these. But in the same way that we call a system evil when it produces bad results, we can still call them evil. They have a responsibility to do good, and are not meeting it. Any quibbling over this distracts us from holding them to account and demanding change, and is therefore… well, perhaps it’s evil too.