I’ve gotten a lot of really interesting reactions to my post about how yes, people actually care that there are kids in detention camps, and it’s unhelpful to try to model them by imagining they’re just pretending to care so they look good.
A lot of people are still not quite grasping the thing I wanted to say, so I wanted to try another analogy that might resonate.
After 9/11, the US made a lot of horrible decisions that I think have approximately zero backers remaining today. We invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died as a direct result of our stupidity. The war in Afghanistan was more justified, but it didn’t go any better, and we had plenty of historical knowledge that could’ve left us confident it wouldn’t go any better, and Afghanistan has more terrorists than when we started, and overall we’d be vastly safer today – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who’d still be with us today, and the $2.4trillion – if we’d just stayed home.
I wish that we’d taken our pain and our grief and our anger, and tried as hard as we could to underreact to them. I wish we’d remembered that good policy is not usually made from a place of pain and grief and anger, and made considered, deliberate decisions. I don’t just wish that; I think it was absolutely morally mandatory, and I think failing to live up to it, and making decisions based just off “I’m sad and scared”, was one of our biggest and most unforgivable mistakes.
So I have a lot of sympathy for anyone whose perspective on the camps is ‘I have an instinctive very strong aversion to taking literally any policy actions based on gut horror’. I think that this position can cause you to get right lots of things that other people get wrong. For example, asylum throttling - where we force applicants for asylum to wait in Mexico for months to get the chance to plead their case at the border - condemns families with young kids to homelessness in the summer heat, hunger, and substantial danger (there’s a lot of predatory gang activity targeting asylum-seekers in the northern Mexico towns where they’re forced to wait under asylum throttling, since ‘tons of desperate homeless people’ is a magnet for people who want to do harm).
But it’s less viscerally horrific than ripping kids out of their parents’ arms and keeping them in cages and arguing in court that they don’t need soap, so it bothers us less. It’s gotten much less attention. Kids still end up ripped from their parents if their parents get murdered waiting for asylum, but it’s happening across the border and it sure appears to make Americans less angry.
So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who go “anger makes bad policy”. Anger does make bad policy.
But imagine if, after 9/11, you’d gone around saying to people “ohhh, another person claiming to be sad about some buildings in New York getting destroyed. I bet you feel so virtuous. I bet as soon as there’s no audience to impress, you’re totally fine. More people die in car accidents every day, are you sad about those? No? Vir-tue signaling!”
Some things punch really close to the gut! They really do! You can firmly believe that anger is not the basis for policy, that what we do as a nation cannot be about how sad we are, and still understand that some things hit home and haunt you and hurt and hurt and hurt.
And once you can empathize with that, you actually have a better shot at talking people out of policies that don’t help.
Hm, I feel like it’s not as easy as that.
Having strong emotional reactions to political issues is often convenient. Social norms accord some amount of deference to people who are experiencing strong emotions–it’s probably kind of rude to interrupt someone who’s crying, or to argue against them very strongly. Having emotional reactions often gets you read as more genuine or more motivated by virtuous considerations. It can just make your argument stronger–”I feel so strongly about this I’m willing to publicly display emotion in a way that makes me look vulnerable” is a thing that works.
None of which is to accuse anyone of dishonesty. I’m sure there were some people who pretended to be sad about 9/11 for their own gain. But I bet there were lots more people who were just really genuinely upset. An emotion being convenient doesn’t make it any less real; I mean, most of our emotions are probably convenient in some since given that evolution selected our ancestors to have them.
But still, the more you respect people’s emotional reactions to political issues, the more convenient you make it to have those strong emotional reactions in the first place. I don’t really think there’s a big area of “being respectful and considerate and thoughtful about people’s feelings but never letting them gain any political advantage from them”; I mostly think it’s just a spectrum between being considerate and demanding high standards of epistemic rigor and the optimal point on the spectrum isn’t obvious.