By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
Last year, John Tooby, a founder of evolutionary
psychology, was asked by the website Edge.org what scientific concept should be
more widely known. He argued for something called the “coalition instinct.”
In our natural environment, humans form coalitions.
Coalitions are slightly different from tribes, families, or nations in that
those are all groups we are involuntarily born into. Coalitions are the teams
we join.
“Coalitions,” Tooby explained, “are sets of individuals
interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract
identity.” The coalition instinct is a bundle of “programs” that “enable us and
induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from,
factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose and
attack coalitions.” Most animals don’t have this instinct, and none have it as
finely honed as humans do.
Because coalitions are formed to protect the interests of
their members, we have a remarkable ability to forgive behavior when it is done
by our teammates and condemn similar behavior when it is done by members of a
rival coalition. “This,” Tooby said, “is why group beliefs are free to be so
weird.”
And that brings me to last week. Kanye West, a
legendarily skilled self-promoter, had some kind words for Candace Owens, a
young African-American conservative activist. “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,”
the rap mogul tweeted. He then doubled down and praised President Trump.
Many liberals reacted with unbridled moral horror and a
seething sense of betrayal. Meanwhile, many avowed conservatives — particularly
those who are most ostentatiously in the Trump coalition, and who had spent
years ridiculing West — suddenly embraced him as a free-thinking hero.
On one level, this is just another example of the
hypocrisy and opportunism that saturates so much of our politics today. But
hypocrisy can be an underappreciated sin, because it illuminates a principle:
Without a standard to violate, there’s no hypocrisy.
The challenge of the coalition instinct is that it blinds
us to the violations of our own team while exaggerating the violations of rival
coalitions. As George W. Bush once put it, “Too often, we judge other groups by
their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”
Over the weekend, Trump held a rally at the same time as
the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. CNN ran a graphic from the
latter event’s red carpet: “Trump Skips Event Honoring First Amendment to Rally
His Base.”
Now, it’s true that the annual dinner is supposed to
honor the First Amendment. But come on. The event has long been a riot of
narcissistic self-adulation and Hollywood envy, which explains the red carpet
in the first place.
Days later, the air is still thick with conservative
denunciations of Michelle Wolf’s caustic routine — and with liberal defenses of
it.
Conservatives insist, rightly, that Wolf was crude and
nasty toward White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wolf’s liberal
defenders, who’d never accept the comedian’s vitriol if it were aimed at one of
their own, ludicrously celebrate her courage for speaking truth to power.
Liberals have a better argument when they note that
Sanders and her conservative defenders have been, at best, blind to Trump’s
even cruder personal attacks on women and others. When Trump says indefensible
things, those in his coalition leap to his immediate defense and say, in
effect, “Lighten up, don’t be so sensitive.”
Indeed, Sanders’ father, former Arkansas governor Mike
Huckabee, is understandably angered by the attacks on his daughter. But he is
also apparently oblivious to the fact that he routinely denounces “snowflakes”
who can’t take a joke (or what he passes off as jokes).
Of course, last week was just the latest chapter in an
ancient story. Humans have always come preloaded with the coalition instinct.
What feels different these days is that, more and more,
one hears people jettisoning universal norms — free speech, constitutional
fidelity, rhetorical decency — in favor of relativistic ones that simply suit
the needs of one coalitional identity group or another. Some on the left now
denounce free speech solely because it is a threat to their power. Many Trump
supporters wave off his rhetorical grotesqueries because “he fights!”
Rather than simple blindness to our hypocritical
violations of standards, we’re declaring war on the standards themselves. If
this trend continues, we may get less hypocrisy and more open war between
coalitions.
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