Pornography is not Harmful

A resolution was passed condemning pornography in Utah several months ago and a number of conservatives have recently spoken out about the harmfulness of pornography. Pornography is not inherently harmful, though studies show that many people view it as immoral. In that way it is similar to drugs and drug use. It can be harmful, and may be viewed as immoral, but it is not necessarily so. Leaving out outdated notions of sinfulness, pornography does produce something that doesn’t exist in nature and releases endorphins in a rush familiar to drug users – and it also reveals men’s connection to ancient dominance and misogyny.

Sex is hardwired into some of the deepest and most animal parts of our brains, and it makes sense that the pleasure derived from sexual gratification would be so similar to the euphoria provided by drugs. Some of the most popular search terms for pornography on the internet involve acts that are commonly seen as degrading to women. In modern society, largely based on systems and law, which have replaced bestial and pack nature, or sublimated them into unseen systems – raw expressions of dominance, sexual desire, and pleasure are connections directly to our ancestry. Men are, apparently, inherently misogynistic and violent.

Perhaps people are afraid of biblical sin, but it seems like some conservatives and politicians are horrified by the idea of unfettered access to the deepest parts of our minds, untouched by modern social and political systems.

If there is actually a problem with pornography it is the same problem that is permeating the rest of our culture and society. An abundance and easily accessible cache of drugs, media, food, and pornography has either been designed or made available on demand and drives deep into our pleasure centers. Our potential for addiction to pornography, and everything else, has never been greater. This is the true threat of pornography, not misguided and outdated moral outrage.

Homelessness and Nazi Rallies

In my previous post I discussed how extremist groups have managed to elevate themselves to a semblance of respectability and find common cause with regular conservatives, in this one I will discuss how to best counter their propaganda.

We should all just stay away. That is the obvious solution to preventing the rise and spread of extremist groups in the United States. It is unlikely in this country that popular support for Neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan could reach a proportion where they could take over the country, a la Nazi Germany. So with that in mind, the best way to prevent them from gaining any sort of mainstream foothold is to do what experts have recommended for years: ignore them. Without the massive counter-protest, which exacerbated and enflamed the violence, the extremist protestors would have gotten little press.

People want to resist, they want to do something to show their disapproval of neo-Nazis, but by doing that they’re playing directly in to their marketing strategy. For years advocates for homeless people have told citizens that the best way to prevent the scourge of panhandling in cities is to stop giving homeless people money. Without the incentive to panhandle the homeless are more likely to seek help and to leave commuters alone. Honest, good people contribute to the social problems of homelessness because of their impulses to help people, or to be seen as virtuous and moral. It is that same twinge of self-interested moralism that leads people to protest a Nazi rally.

I can’t help but think that if people weren’t going to post things on social media, they wouldn’t attend such rallies in such large numbers. Our society is obsessed with displaying each individual’s personal morality and virtue over communications technology, and because we are obsessed we can’t starve the beasts of extremism of what they crave most: exposure.

Brilliant Branding and the Far Right

Ask any conservative what the biggest problem they have with modern “liberalism” is and they will invariably tell you something about the left’s disdain for freedom of speech. To many, a sizable portion of Trump’s appeal was in his disregard for political correctness and his unrehearsed speech. A faction of, mostly, young liberals consider speech patterns encoded with racism and misogyny to be a form of institutionalized violence. People outside of this liberal group may consider the labeling of what was once considered regular speech as violent speech to be an exercise in imposing values on them which they do not hold. Liberals have, to a great extent, won the “culture war” of sensitive speech – a host of terms for different racial, disabled, ethnic, gender, and religious groups are widely considered offensive now where they were not even 20 years ago. Backlash against this, including by a variety of different political groupings to the right of the liberals who champion progressive speech, has been sustained and confrontational.

On the radical, or fringe, right openly declaring racism or other hateful ideologies has become too unacceptable and many groups of re-branded themselves to better fulfill their goals. Many declare themselves as part of the “alt-right” – a political grouping that has no real meaning and translates most accurately as “Trump-supporting.” Organizations like the NEI (Nazi ideology, operated by Richard Spencer) or American Renaissance (anti-black racism) are not immediately recognizable as hate groups if you glance through their websites. American Renaissance in particular is an excellent example of the modern “alt-right” re-branding strategy of hate groups. Their website repackages articles, columns, and blogs written by right-wing provocateurs like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter as if they were writing for the American Renaissance website. Instead of saying overtly racist and hateful things about black people they refer to their ideology as “race realism.” By giving hate an intellectual veneer and a moderate web presence and it is easy to start agreeing with their agenda until you realize it’s hateful nonsense. All of this re-branding and sanitizing of language provides these groups with cover from the media, sympathetic minds, and politicians. Under the Trump administration they find themselves being elevated to near-respectability by being lumped-in with the rest of the amorphous “alt-right” and having their rallies and conferences covered by the media.

Erasing history, reverse racism, and a host of terms from Orwell’s 1984 have been rallying cries from the right on the issue of the liberal impulse to correct what are viewed as historical wrongs. And this is where the Nazis come in. Tearing down statues is another example, for many, of political correctness run amok. For Nazis and members of the KKK, the statues are a sinister marker of racial dominance and pride. It is either a brilliant maneuver or a stroke of luck that by having members of the extreme edge of the “alt-right” protest the removal of Confederate statues there are conservatives and Trump supporters who will reflexively come to their defense against the anti-free speech left. Finding these commonalities and dovetails increases these groups visibility and respectability and it is something which conservatives and Trump supporters should be careful of feeding in to.

CBO, Public Opinion, and Institutions

Since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign he and his surrogates have attacked the norms and institutions of our modern government and society. Trump has exploited doubt and distrust to rail against the pillar of truth and journalism and has used his followers zeal to effectively crush the non-governmental political institutions: the Democrat and Republican parties. As he has continued his assault on the norms of governance from the executive branch, the Republican congress has begun assaulting other basic institutions of free and open society and government from the legislative branch.

Walter Lippmann published a seminal book in 1922 titled Public Opinion. In the work he describes the role, uses, and pitfalls of shared beliefs. Much of the book is focused on the control and dissemination of information, the nature and theory of democratic governance as it relates to the will of the people, and the biases and errors that are rife within people’s belief structures – and finally, the way our perceptions of public life can be manipulated. In the very last section of the book Lippmann promotes solutions that will help the public and politicians be better informed and allow them to make better decisions.

His greatest piece of advice is to create technical, scientific research councils that are independent of the direct control of Congress or the executive branch. These research organizations would collect and analyze data on social and scientific issues and would release the results to the public as well as to politicians, without making any decisions. Ideally, this would enable politicians to make decisions that were good for the public, and, because of the public release of information, would allow the public to hold politicians accountable for both sound and unsound decisions. Aside from some technical aspects of government, or organizations that are political and tangentially related to government (like think tanks, etc.) these ideas have never been truly adopted. Decision making in an increasingly complex world where more expertise is required to understand processes that are hidden from general view has certainly suffered from a lack of central research and publication of facts.

One organization that has generally been considered apolitical (or at least bipartisan) and has fulfilled Lippmann’s ideal well, has been the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO. Formed in 1974, the CBO was designed to provide accurate and credible analysis of the effects of bills submitted in Congress on the economy and social welfare of the United States. Since its inception the CBO has generally been insulated from Congressional pressure and its findings have been generally accepted. But recently some Republicans in Congress have been rejecting the accuracy and nonpartisanship of the CBO.

As part of the current Administration’s campaign against truth, and after particularly galling estimates about healthcare coverage under various Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, members of Congress and the Administration have attacked the integrity of the CBO. Many of the practices and policies of the Trump Administration have been destructive and dishonest, but these attacks are particularly frightening. Shamefully, Republicans in Congress have joined the attacks, as the shell of the Republican Party suffers further moral collapse. Out of all of the destructive and short-sighted policies coming from Trump, and of all the awful ministering of government, the most destructive longterm effect wrought by the current President will almost certainly be on public trust in institutions.

Liberals will not trust any conservatives, conservatives will distrust liberals. Not in the way they previously doubted the effectiveness of each other’s creeds, but in their fundamental sincerity of belief. Hacking away at the unspoken institution of truthfulness in society is corrosive, but tearing down the actual institutions of integrity, transparency, and science is an even swifter method of collapsing society.

Moral Relativism, Truth, and Social Breakdown

Years ago I took a philosophy class on issues in morality in college. At one point we discussed how many moral truths were universal and how many were dependent on culture. Philosophers have studied this idea and they have come up with lists of moral principles that are universal across societies because they are fundamental to the functioning and cohesiveness of basic social groupings. One of the fundamental principles is the acknowledgment of the value of truth-telling and the condemnation of lying. Society cannot function if people can never make the assumption that most people are telling the truth most of the time about most things. So what happens when groups have an interest in deliberately lying to the public and it is difficult to tell the difference between a truth and a lie? This is what Western Democracies face when an onslaught of fake news, which may be skillfully produced and disseminated by AI in the near future, overwhelms the modern communication channels.

Advances in the near future, widely reported on, will allow the seamless spoofing of video and audio. In our “post-Truth” society, and with modern propaganda sowing doubt and mistrust, how will it be possible to believe any damaging or otherwise important revelations? Even if there are digital footprints which can reveal meddling, they can be easily dismissed by partisans. In addition, it will allow important people and politicians to deny that they made statements, saying that they are fabrications, when in fact they are true.

Free society will be turned against itself, what will be the remedy to libel and slander that is impossible to prove one way or the other? In order to cut through nonsense and partisanship, focus will have to be kept on issues and policy themselves, something which is currently proving impossible. Debate over policy cannot occur if people are debating over the true nature of reality. Solutions can only exist if people avoid reports about the conversations or videos of leaders or they are dismissed in favor of actions. The other result of this change in our social dynamic, of questioning whether or not anything is real, is nothing less than the absolute dissolution and dismemberment of society. Post-truth society eventually has to face the realization that it will eventually lead to social destruction and chaos if left fundamentally unchecked.