Scott Alexander’s recent post on Ethnic Tensions was, as usual, excellent. It’s best to read the original rather than trusting my summary, but in a nutshell, the point was that philosophy texts on how arguments go wrong don’t even know how to deal with the most common mode of communication failure in modern political discussions because philosophy texts assume there is a single topic at hand, when in fact there’s usually a rag-tag fleet of connected topics with various degrees of relation to the topic the discussion is purportedly about that get affected. This is what happens with, for example, the Israel-Palestine debate. That’s actually a whole host of related issues, and "Israel" and "Palestine" are fuzzy umbrella terms for two opposing sides on each of these issues, and although we should take each issue by itself on its own merits, what we tend to do instead is lump them all together under the umbrella terms and choose our sides accordingly. This has, as a side-effect, that you can argue for your side in many cases by avoiding the issues entirely – because if you just score enough warm fuzzy points for your side, or cold prickly points for the opposing side, people come to have positive associations with your side, and their judgements about individual issues connected to that side are affected. So, for example, lots of my anti-Israel friends have recently taken to posting videos of nationalist Israeli protestors telling African immigrants to Israel to go home. This is not directly related to the question of whether the US should give Israel military aid, but the chain of "reasoning" (in shock quotes beacuse used VERY loosely, obviously!) they seem to want me to follow is that because the particular Israelis in the video are beligerent and arguably racist, that Israel itself must be, and that since beligerence and racism are bad, I should not want the US to contribute to it. At least, that’s the only sense I can make of that when they follow their posts with "we give these people 3billion a year." It’s an insightful post about how political debates operate in the real world.

Still, I feel it’s missing some pieces.

For example, I recently got into some discussions with Noah about that Hollaback! video – you know, the one where the hot actress walks around New York City for 10 hours and gets all kinds of unwanted sexual attention, lots of it crossing the boundary into harassment. Thing is, even without having seen the video, I felt attacked by it, which I really shouldn’t since I’m shy and can barely even make eye contact with people I pass on the street; I am mentally incapable of harassing passers-by without first being provoked, so I’m not what the video is complaining about. The interesting quesiton is why, given that’s the case, did I feel a bit of solidarity with its, let’s face it legitimate for the most part, targets?

Well, it seems like the kind of thing that should fit Alexander’s model. "Feminism" is definitely one of those fuzzy umbrella terms like "Israel" that is used to label sides on a whole host of tenuously connected issues, and people tend to argue about it accordingly. There’s no reason that someone can’t support the Paycheck Fairness Act and oppose California’s Affirmative Consent Bill, for example. The two are theoretically unrelated. And yet because "feminism," as a term, gets applied to a clear side in the debates about each, you have people who would otherwise recognize affirmative consent as a danger to due process getting frustrated with people saying exactly that because they’re worried that if too much bad kharma gets attached to "feminism" as a result, it will bleed over into reduced support for the Paycheck Fairness Act. So it seems like it should fit Alexander’s model.

But here’s the thing. I’m not sure that the hypothetical pro-Paycheck Fairness Act campaigner of the previous paragraph is actually operating on the warm fuzzy vs. cold prickly terms that Alexander lays out. And I think that because in my own experience with being engaged with "feminism" in exactly this way, I think what I’m usually doing isn’t trying to manipulate people’s feelings about "feminism" so much as jockeying for their attention.

For the most part, when feminists raise one of their issues, I have one of two – sometimes both of two – reactions. (1) I feel that the issue is worthy but deserving of more complicated treatment than it’s likely to get. For example, I really do want to have a talk about street harassment of women, but I only want to have that talk if it’s going to include a broader discussion of gendered responsibilities for initiating relationships – aka the fact that it falls on the man to do the asking out. (2) I feel that the issue is worthy , but that it will distract from things that I think are more worthy. For example, I’m happy to talk about women’s body image issues and the various other psychological effects of the way culture encourages women to be overly critical of their weight and appearance, but I really feel like the fact that the suicide rate is more than twice as high for men as for women is indicative that the psychological pressure society exerts on men is probably even greater across the board, and I think we’re unlikely to talk about that as long as we’re narrowly focused on body image.

Both of these objections have a lot more to do with apportioning attention than they do with garnering the right kinds of associations. In (1), I’m worried that the issue won’t get the attention it deserves, that it will be packaged into something shallow. In (2), I’m worried that the issue will take attention away from related and more deserving issues. In most cases to do with feminism, I don’t actually disagree with the broader agenda, I just don’t like the level of resolution.

I think the problem with Scott Alexander’s original post is that the Israel-Palestine example that he chose to talk about is a special case of a more general problem. I think he probably chose the example because he was looking for an issue where there’s maximal opposition between the two sides – and that’s certainly true of that one! He wanted an issue where even though there’s a lot of theoretical room for compromise, people push back so hard that it can never be found. For that purpose, he chose the right example. But I think the curse of politics is that when all is said and done we agree more often than we disagree about fundamentals, and all things equal we would do All the Good Things and Do Them Together – the problem is one of resource allocation. We only have so much attention, and so much political capital, and so much money – at least given our prefered time horizon. It’s not that equal rights for women are not important to me, it’s just that as a man, I have a seriously vested interest in making sure that my own rights are secure, and so I’m sensitive to things that distract from that, and feminism is one of those things for obvious reasons. In fact, if you dust off all the cruft, when you really get right down to it, the most common objections to feminism you hear reduce to the single complaint that it’s hypocritical about equality. (Notice I said "most common," not "only." I’m well aware that there are plenty of people, male and female, who actually don’t believe in gender equality and think that we’re better served by an order that recognizes natural gender differences. So there is a substantive debate to be had about feminism. But that’s a different complication and a separate issue – most discussion about feminism isn’t substantive.) People don’t mind equality, they just need for it to be (a) clear and (b) consistent. Equal pay is a laudable goal, but it’s hard to take seriously if you only care about equal pay in cushy office jobs and don’t care about or see a problem with the fact that virtually no women are garbage men or work on oil rigs. When you clear away the cruft, most male objections to feminism are things like that.

When I think about other issues that are kind of nebulous, I hit the same wall. A good example is David Simon writing about the revelations that the NSA was collecting huge amounts of meta-data on communications between American citizens. His blase attitude toward it made a lot of people angry, including me. And I haven’t changed my mind – I’m still angry about it. But we don’t actually disagree on anything outside of priorities. I think stopping the NSA data collection is very important. Simon broadly agrees it should stop, or at least get more oversight to protect against abuse, but he rates the priority much, much lower.

There are reasons to object to governmental overreach in the name of law enforcement and anti-terrorism. And it is certainly problematic that our national security apparatus demands a judicial review of our law enforcement activity behind closed doors, but again, FISA is a basic improvement on the preceding vacuum it replaced. Certainly — and I find myself in rare agreement with the Rand Pauls of the world on this one — we might be more incensed at the notion of an American executive branch firing missles at U.S. citizens and killing them without the benefit of even an in absentia legal proceeding. Or ashamed at a racially-targeted sentencing guideline that subjects rock cocaine users to seventeen times the penalty of powdered-cocaine users? Or aghast at a civil forfeiture logic that allows government to seize private property and then requires citizens to prove a negative — that it was not purchased with money from ill-gotten gains. There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.

If I’m not reading too much between the lines, it sounds like his main concern is that authoritarian overreach has been going on a long time, and this time is only different because upper-middle class white folks are just as victimized as everyone else, and that frankly if we’re going to get outraged about authoritarian overreach, there are more pressing issues, like civil asset forefeiture. It’s a perfectly reasonable position, and I find nothing to actually disagre with about it. Civil asset forfeiture is a HUGE problem. Racially-targeted sentencing is a HUGE problem. The Drug War in general is a great cancer on our civil society that needs to be stopped yesterday. In fact, Simon and I probably don’t even disagree about the level of priority we should assign to rethinking our whole approach to drugs policy and working to undo the massive amounts of damage to basic rule of law that the old approach has done. The only real disagreement is relative – is the NSA surveillance program a bigger or a smaller issue. And that’s … that’s it. That’s all. And yet when I read Simon’s blog post the first time I was really angry about it. That’s just how it works: there is limited attention, there are limited resources, to go around on solving political problems, and here was someone arguing that the level of resources I wanted to spend on this one problem was too high. THAT is what most political disagreements are about.

So, if Alexander had to do it again, I would recommend he pick a different example. I get why he chose the one he did: Israel-Palestine is one of those issues that should be distant but isn’t; it definitely has the power to coral people into voicing support for things they would shun under other circumstances just to maintain a superficial consistency. But it was still the wrong choice. In choosing an extreme example to better highlight his point, Mr. Alexander ended up missing the more important mechanism by which these arguments that the philosophy books can’t comment on operate. Sure, sometimes it’s about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies, but I think more often than not it’s the same reason we ever have conflict: we’re fighting over resources. Usually: time on stage in the very small theater that is the public attention span. I want to help you with your patriarchy-induced body issues, I really, really do, but if I do that no one will ever talk about men dying on the job, dying in war, or killing themselves at twice the rate women do. The way Simon wants to talk about getting some more public oversight over the probably-unconstitutional FISA courts that sign off on War on Terror mass surveillance, he really does, but he’s worried that while we’re doing that real black people are going to real jails for crimes that really don’t have any real victims and come out for-real hardened criminals, and to him that’s more important than who’s reading your text messages. And you know, put like that, it’s even convincing. Because like I said, most disagreements aren’t [disagreements], not when you get right down to it. It’s all about the levels.