On that Men's Rights Reddit Survey

When I was in 7th grade, my English class had an assignment: look into our ancestry and try to find an instance, in our lives or family history, where our families were oppressed or disadvantaged because of stereotypes, race, or ethnicity. The assignment explicitly excluded Italian stereotype discussions because the teacher did not want to deal with half a class worth of discussions of mafia stereotypes, which was certainly defensible in Central Jersey.

I vaguely remember doing something on Danish people, as my mom's side of the family is part Danish. I don't recall what the nature of the grievance was, but I do recall that my great-grandfather from Denmark had dealt with some issues. In fact, I do not remember very much about the assignment or my project, other than that I loathed the assignment.

Fast forward a decade or so and I was in graduate school for history. Much of the discussions hinged on a series of issues or prisms of analysis regarding dynamics of power in empire and colonialism, and, usually, how they related to race, class, and gender. Arnold Kling would describe these discussions as fastened tightly to the oppressor/oppressed axis of the "three axes" of politics.*** Kling identifies two other potential axes: one, he dubs the freedom/coercion axis, and associates it with political libertarians. The third, he dubs the civilization/barbarism axis, and associates it with political conservatives.

This focus on the oppressed appeared in almost every book I read, every article I read, and every discussion: Discussions invariably moved to Gramsci, or Marx, or Foucault, or at the very least, garden variety blanket condemnations for Western colonialism and activity.

Of course, those condemnations are probably appropriate, considering the horrifying conduct of Europeans in the nineteenth century, and Americans into the twentieth. Indeed, we still see the aftereffects of those decisions everyday. My contention, though, is after four decades of relentless research, pedagogy, and argumentation, the oppressor/oppressed axis has essentially come to dominate intellectual discourse. The "freedom/coercion" axis is essentially a fringe world in academia, sometimes pursued by leading lights like Milton Friedman, but usually left to contrarians. The "civilization/barbarism" axis is systematically delegitimized in most polite, intellectual conversation; even highly-credentialed, intelligent professors like Harvey Mansfield are shunned by much of the academic establishment. This is unfortunate, and I think its absence shines through our entire academic and educational culture. With this in mind, that odd assignment in my 7th grade English class makes perfect sense: it was just another way to explore the oppressor/oppressed axis. I really don't believe that people think that they are using the axis; I just think that the oppressor/oppressed means of analysis has crowded out all other forms, so that one doesn't even see that there are alternatives.

Which brings me to an interesting survey performed recently about the Men's Rights Community on Reddit.com. Fully 90 percent of the users of the Men’s Rights subreddits were 20 years of age or younger. Now, young people may well be overrepresented on Reddit as a proportion of the population, but still, only about one-third of Redditers overall were younger than 25 as of 2012.

Let's accept that the data here is of questionable value, and certainly can't be given the sheen of validated social science. But there is something here: overwhelmingly, the participants in Reddit's community for Men's Rights are very young, aggrieved men. Why? My working hypothesis right now is that these young men have spent their entire lives in the educational establishment; few have any real world experience beyond school. And schools focus relentlessly on grievance, via this universal application of the oppressor/oppressed axis.

Educators, textbooks, etc. mean to instill young people with a notion about privilege, the idea that people have unequal advantages that they often cannot see from their own perspective. In theory, at least, educating people about privilege is a way to make them see their own advantages, and then work to keep the needs of those without privilege in mind as they go through their lives.

But not everyone likes the idea of thinking of themselves as privileged. And a certain subset of men look around themselves and can't see their privilege at all; all they see is boys doing worse in school, boys getting punished for misbehavior more regularly, and boys being relentlessly hounded about how they are the perpetrators of sexual assault. In my judgment, theirs is a distorted view of reality. But it persists.

So those men or boys look to the world around them. They see the discourse of "rights" and "privilege" and "oppression," and they then see themselves on the disadvantaged side of those relationships. Some gravitate to these online communities, where they make common cause with people who have reached the same conclusions about the world around them.

As people get further away from school and gain world real experience, they are probably more apt to see other ways of looking at the world, and then gravitate away from the simplistic, distorted "men's rights" frame. But young men are (apparently) vulnerable to this way of thinking.

The men's rights movement is a textbook example of the misapplication of the oppressor/oppressed axis. But its young practitioners probably don't have any better tools. They see themselves as disadvantaged by the system, and the only language they have available to explain that is the language of oppression. I see it as a classic example of the old aphorism: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The oppressor/oppressed axis is the hammer. The unfortunate state of these young men is the nail. We need to do better by these students.

This is an area where an infusion of the civilized/barbarism axis would be a better corrective. A narrow view of the axis would view it as suggesting that certain people (us!) are civilized and that others (them!) are not. But that would be an incomplete interpretation. Certain conduct is better described as civilized than certain people. The language of shared obligation essentially falls into the realm of the civilized/barbarism axis, because the construction is, on some level, "The civilized do this thing," or "The civilized have this responsibility."

Even if we don't use those terms, the subtext is about fulfilling one's duty, and how failing to fulfill one's duty is a shortcoming. Instead of a relentless focus on oppression, an added focus on social obligation, community, and responsibility would give young people a different prism for viewing the world around them. Instead of dividing the world with a line, separating the oppressed and the oppressors, we could explore the idea of what we owe one another as people in general.

Discussions of the disadvantaged should start with the notion that we owe the disadvantaged our assistance because it is the right and decent thing to do in a "civilized society," rather than starting from the point that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged because of the oppression of a dominant group. This may not be as intellectually satisfying, but it is more likely to gain adherents than to foster resentment and backlash.

Bottom line: we spend so much time on the issue of oppression that we see it as the sine qua non of scholarly thought and analysis. Other potential axes, or prisms for evaluation, are discarded. And we see that intellectual poverty in things like the men's rights movement.

*** Kling wrote an excellent essay on his Three Axes Model for the Kindle. I recommend it heartily.

On Causal Density

The most useful concept I have encountered in engaging with public debate and public policy over the past decade is the notion of "causal density." It provides us with a framework for evaluating almost any given subject.

I first encountered the concept in Jim Manzi's excellent book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. Manzi posits that causal density is a measure of the potential number of factors that could be the root cause of a given phenomenon. In areas of low causal density, causality is (comparatively) easy to determine. In areas of high causal density, causality is elusive, because there are so many potential factors that could be affecting your subject matter. Or, as Arnold Kling puts it, "causal density is a bear."

Academic disciplines can be characterized quite neatly using causal density. Randall Munroe hit on this, perhaps inadvertently, in a wonderful xkcd comic.

(Image taken from xkcd.)

Although Munroe is arranging his fields by "purity," you could just as easily replace purity with "causal density" and you'd have roughly the same chart. Math in its purest form has extremely low causal density. Admittedly, I am not a mathematician, but it is very easy, when dealing with numbers, to determine which inputs changed whatever outputs changed. As you work your way from right to left on his comic, it gets progressively harder to discern causality. Physics is comparatively easy, in that sense (and perhaps that sense alone!); we can control environments and variables very effectively. Chemistry is perhaps a bit more complicated. Biology, which deals with the interaction of living systems, is more difficult still. The further to the left you are in Munroe's comic, the more slippery causality becomes.

The toughest nuts to crack in the causality world are what academia identifies as the liberal arts. Below is my mental model, put together with the greatest of care (read: very sloppily) in the GIMP Image Editor on Ubuntu. I would be willing to reconsider some of the placements here, but I had a reason for each of them.

Admittedly, some of this is a product of ignorance; I don't know all of these fields. But that (sloppy) chart is basically how I view the disciplines. The further to the right, the more probable that explanations of causation are correct. The further to the left, the less probable.

A few points on this:

- I would separate "predictive theories of history" from the historical discipline more broadly, and the comparative method in history more narrowly. When history is merely trying to chronicle the past, it is less prone to causality issues that some of the other liberal arts, which are attempting to explain how humans operate, rather than how they once operated. Also worth noting is the comparative method. Comparison is an explicit attempt to discern causality, by trying to find similar cases and then to identify the asymmetries between them. The method has its limitations, and the causal density is still incredibly high. But it is a way to combat our knowledge problems. It is the theory of history--Hagel, Marx, etc.--that has the highest causal density, because it is essentially an attempted synthesis of all human knowledge and experience. And it is, then, the most problematic of the disciplines, from a causal density perspective.

- One of the challenges of the human-focused disciplines is the ever-changing nature of the subject. Human nature may be unchanging--and to a large extent, I believe it is--but the changing context has such an impact that models that make sense in one situation can become completely useless due to small changes. We just don't see that type of external shock to the "core laws" in the hard sciences.

- Causal density and complexity are not synonymous, at least in the discourse. The "harder" subjects often have lower causal density. This is because the "easier" subjects allow us to get away with more rhetorical and intellectual "hand-waving." The complexity of physics--a field of low causal density--should give us pause. Our experimental method gets us pretty close to The Truth that underlies reality, and that truth is massively complicated. (When I say "The Truth," I mean "the actual causes of given events." Such causes clearly exist, but they are difficult to determine accurately.) Political science is so much more complicated that our models barely scratch the surface of true understanding of causation.

- Many of the models in social science end up getting the correct answer via approximation. But we shouldn't equate that periodic "success" with the Truth, and we should be aware that the Truth may change in the future.

- I believe that many of our political disagreements are because politicians assume that we live in environments of low causal density. But the real world and human interaction is an area of extremely high causal density, and thus we should adopt lower confidence in our beliefs.

This reliance on causal density justifies, in my mind, certain deeply-held views:

- Tinkering with an economy is largely a fool's errand, because it is so difficult to get a handle on all the pieces. (On this, Hayek is completely right, in that the curious task of economics should be to demonstrate to men--and women--how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.)

- Trying to standardize medicine--to change it to "paint by numbers" style diagnosis and treatment--will probably cause problem.

- Decentralization is very often better than centralization, because we are prone to error in areas of high causal density, and reduced size reduces the scope of the error.

- Trial and error is more useful than theorizing.

- "Culture"--as a catch-all for "collective ways of seeing the world" or "stories we tell ourselves," as a friend from school described it--is a useful fiction, at the very least, because it encompasses potential causes that we cannot disaggregate. This implies that we should respect "cultures" that have been successful and do our best to preserve them; oftentimes, in pushing for a change, we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (I don't intend for this to imply that we should always support the status quo.)

A good shorthand for this is to think in terms of potential external inputs into a system. The more possible inputs, the more complicated determining causation can get.

My overall point here: Discerning causality in public policy is incredibly difficult, because people are incredibly complicated, and complex, dynamic systems are very difficult to fully understand. But with that said, we shouldn't hesitate to create grandiose historical theories, or theories of politics or sociology. They are entertaining and stimulating, at the very least, and they can help shape the way we see the world. But we shouldn't accept those theories without great skepticism, and if we do employ these ideas, we need to find ways to limit our downside and limit the degree of potential errors. (This is what I would call a Talebian posture.)