January Journal: Social causes

[liv]

zhelana filled the last lonely-looking gap in my January list by asking about social Causes I work towards

zhelana's is one of those good questions because my first answer is that I don't really work for Causes, and thinking about that has brought some insights. Basically, I don't see myself as being into activism. I put a much higher priority on being the most positive presence I can in my own communities, whether that's Jewish, workplace or especially friendship groups.

I think that's partly because I don't feel it's my place to tell other people what to think, but obviously that's not entirely true. I mean, I do want to tell anyone who'll listen to me not to be racist, for example, but I don't dedicate a lot of time to putting across anti-racist arguments. I'm extremely disillusioned about political protesting; I've never really been keen on being part of a crowd reducing causes to simplistic slogans, but since the government simply ignored two million people marching against the Iraq war I can no longer see any advantages to that style of making a political statement.

If I have to pick, the cause I'm most passionate about is diversity and pluralism. As far as I have any ability to change the world at all, I want to create contexts where people can have productive community interactions with others from different backgrounds. So I do quite a lot of interfaith dialogue, for example, and one of the few political opinions that I do go around insisting on is being vehemently pro-immigrant. I think this partly influences the fact that I don't do a lot of social cause activism, because being very committed to a Cause can make it more fraught to work with and connect with people who hold differing opinions. Also because my experience and belief is that the only way to get real diversity is through personal interactions between individuals, just making a big noise about how diversity is important doesn't get you all the way.

That's not to say my approach is superior to that of people who do devote a lot of time and energy and passion to their favourite Causes. I think that's a very admirable thing to do, it's just not really my inclination. I'm much more likely to be using my skills to create a supportive religious and community environment for the the people who happen to be members of my synagogue, or doing research towards better cancer treatments, or trying to influence my students to be thoughtful, considerate doctors.

[January Journal masterlist]

Comments

[ptc24]

There's a couple of lines of reasoning about protests that could be used to argue that they're more effective than they look; I don't go on them myself so you can see how much weight I'm putting on them.

One line is the "one battle ahead" argument: the Iraq demonstrations didn't stop us invading Iraq but they might have stopped us invading Syria.

The other is the "big prize" line: that the benefits of a successful demonstration may be so great that the expected value is positive even if the chances of winning are low.

I can think of additional ideas here. However, coming up with ideas that make sense is one thing, and demonstrating that they actually apply to the real world is another...

[liv]

Yes, those seem useful points, thank you. An example I could think of is all the gay pride marching from the 60s and 70s. It didn't obviously seem to be having much effect at the time but it probably did influence later political progress, like actually putting research money into AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and now same-sex marriage. I do hope you're right about Syria, because to me it looks like Blair's government committed the country to a war that was massively against public opinion and suffered no consequences politically.

[(Anonymous)]

Was the Iraq war massively against public opinion? I recall polls from the time showing the country fairly evenly split with perhaps a slight majority in favour of the invasion; the people I talked to spanned the whole range of opinion. Those against were louder and more fervent (they marched!) but not necessarily actually any more numerous.

It was massively against internet opinion, but opining on the internet is still a minority pursuit and was even more so eleven years ago.

(The fact it wasn't massively against public opinion would explain of course why he suffered no consequences politically, so that's a point in favour of that explanation).

[liv]

You have a good point; it's always easy to assume that the general public are closer in views to my friendship group than they really are. I guess the fact of two million people actively protesting implied to me that at least ten times that many were against the war, but it's a fair point that people who were in favour of the war didn't need to protest and shout about it because pursuing the war was the status quo anyway. The other thing that makes me think the war was unpopular was the need to lie about weapons of mass destruction; if people were in favour of the war generally, why bother making stuff up about Iraq's nuclear weapons?

[igmansfield.co.uk]

I think one of the things that matters in these situations is how strongly people are for or against it, as well as just how many on each side. My memory (though purely anecdotal) is that most of those in favour were of the 'well, on balance, it's probably the right thing to do, especially if they really do have WMDs which it seems they do' whereas those against were vehemently 'No! Not in my name!'. So even if it was about 50:50, a 'weighted average', if that makes sense, would have been against.

That's a really interesting point about the 'one battle ahead' effect: I'd not thought of things in those terms before but it seems very plausible.

[(Anonymous)]

So even if it was about 50:50, a 'weighted average', if that makes sense, would have been against

It'd be a bit dangerous to start giving more votes to people who really, really care about an issue, though. How would that work out on, say, same-sex marriage?

[(Anonymous)]

My general thinking is "probably quite well", depending on how you scale things (in particular you have to make sure people can't cheat by caring massively about everything). You have lots of people directly affected who want to get married, and lots of people who think it's an important principle to support. Possibly we might have got same-sex marriage earlier than we did.

It's hard to judge a shouting match from inside an echo chamber, but insofar as the marriage equality debate had a shouting match character, there were plenty of people shouting for it.

[ptc24]

Oooh, erm, that was me. Silly DW, keeping logging me out.

[igmansfield.co.uk]

Yes, although it would probably be impossible to actually give people who cared more more votes (and probably undesirable because it could be gamed in the way ptc24 mentioned above), in general I think it's good for society that people who care more have ways they can get more influence - because they're the ones who are willing to protest, march, write letters, give money, or make that cause the key determinant of how they vote.

[ptc24]

Yes, it's an interesting thought experiment, but really the main use of such thoughts is to get a new perspective on the way things are (or reasonably could be).

[(Anonymous)]

The vast majority of the population doesn't care much one way or the other: they may be mildly for or mildly against, but it's not a make-or break issue.

There are a very few people it directly affects -- whatever fraction of the relevant 3-5% of the population want to get married. There are rather more who care about it a lot as a principal.

And then there are also rather a lot of people -- possibly an order of magnitude more if you go by those rival internet petitions & assume they were both equally ballot-stuffed -- who are deeply against it, also as a matter of principal. If all their votes were multiplied by how much they care in the same proportions it would have to be get those deeply opposed to the Iraq war to outweigh those mildy or deeply in favour, I think it's doubtful same-sex marriage would have happened. It's certainly not a sure thing it would, and certainly not sooner.

[lavendersparkle]

I tend to think that protests rarely influence central government because political parties put enough resources into polling and tracking social media that they don't need people to take to the streets to realise when a policy is going to cause them problems and cost them votes. I still think that protests can be of value.

One is for the morale impact on the people protesting. If a group is feeling a bit helpless and voiceless getting together with placards can help them feel less alone and like they just have to silently put up with stuff. I think another use can be to demonstrate a show of sentiment in a community. I think it can be useful, for example after a racist incident, for communities to show that they disagree with what happened and are willing to show up to demonstrate this, like when there was a big anti-EDL march in Cambridge.