It’s the Implications We Fear
The object of a game of chess is to kill your opponent’s king. But chess games never really finish. Kings never die. Two combatants alternate taking turns. When a player moves a piece which directly threatens their opponent’s king it is called “check”. “Check” isn’t so bad. “Check” can be escaped. The threatened player can slide his king to a safe square out of harm’s way or he can use another piece to intervene in the emergency by sacrificially sliding it into the path of danger or kill the threatening piece.
But if all of the moves available to escape the threat would result in the opponent still being able to kill the king if it was his turn then this is called “checkmate”. When every direction leads to death. Checkmate. The game is over.
In other words, your opponent makes a move and it is not the move itself that is the issue it’s the implications of their next turn which is the real problem.
Our political and philosophical lives are plagued with fear of the assumed implications of threatening moves against us. Facts are presented, discoveries arise, sound moral arguments are laid out, knowledge is won and the landscape changes. We panic. We become convinced that we are being checkmated into conceding the game and abandoning our deepest moral and ideological convictions when, in fact, most of the moves are merely check. It is true that your king is in danger and it might need to move from the comfort of his current square. But there is no need to flip the board and walk away. There are plenty of escapes.
Here’s what I mean:
Your current state: You have deeply held positions and convictions about cross cultural tolerance and acceptance. You believe in not passing moral judgement on people and practices of other ethnic or religious backgrounds and contend that morality is subjective.
The check move: All women everywhere should have the right to show their hair in public.
Seems pretty easy, right? Why is that move threatening? To some, it must feel like checkmate and the only legal next move is something akin to:
The feared implications: Ban all Muslims, bomb Iran, resolve that religious immigrants are inferior in value.
Fearing being backed into a fatal corner which would necessitate abandoning a reverence for tolerance, they somehow deny the threat. Most often this is done by challenging the motivations of the person making it in the first place. Charges of “Islamophobe”, “white supremacist”, “cultural imperialist”, or any other such conversation ending labels are slung in an attempt to negate the legitimacy of the speaker.
But this a false checkmate. It is possible to accept the moral proposition of women’s autonomy to show her hair as having primacy over a cultural practice which is wounded without becoming David Duke… or Donald Trump. We can accept the validity of the moral claim and disagree deeply about what we ought to do about it. This is the difference between a moral position and a political prescription in response to it.
With the coerced hair covering example, there are plenty of more “progressive” moves to be made that involve promotion of religious reformers say. Or one can claim that historical racial imbalances and positions of power make something like “White” Western intervention or even public moralizing impossible and counter productive when it comes from certain people or regions. I don’t agree with that position but it is not forbidden by agreeing with the moral condemnation of the practice of forced hair covering itself, which should be a rather easy moral argument to accept.
There are also traditionally conservative arguments for resource scarcity which would necessitate inaction and prescriptions of non-interventionism which can morph into more extreme isolationism. One could also argue for a prioritization of localized problem solvers as to decrease the chance that there is crucial cultural knowledge that will cause foreign intervention to stumble.
The point here is that even after the first move (moral disapproval of forced hair covering) is accepted as legitimate the political issue is far from settled. It was not even close to a checkmate for a progressive, conservative, libertarian, or any particular political solution.
It is true that some “check” moves do morally and practically eliminate several subsequent positions. Here is a prime example of that:
Your current state: You love free markets and despise globalism. You think the market will self regulate us out of all problems and countries and communities should operate as autonomous competing agents in a global marketplace.
The check move: Climate change is a substantial threat and is primarily driven by human behavior.
This reality should not be difficult to acknowledge at this point, although we famously know it is. If my hypothesis is right, that resistance is explained by the feared implications.
The feared implications: Abandon unfettered free markets, move away from nationalism, ban SUV’s and plastic straws, and embrace globalism.
But again, this is mostly a false checkmate. There is still a myriad of responses which range from conservative to progressive. Carbon markets, regulation on machinery and travel, material bans, heavily subsidized clean markets, nuclear power innovation. The list goes on.
But we may have to admit that the grip on ideological nationalism (or anti-globalism) does weaken. Yuval Harari makes this point in a very underrated TED conversation. The necessity of at least a low level of global cooperation on a problem of this nature seems to be woven in. If we move our king in the direction of increased nationalism, isolationism, and unregulated free markets, it could be a legitimate checkmate. The short term and local psychological biases of humans likely loses us that game. But there are still plenty of ways to respond which fall far short of the “leave-no-footprints” fantasies of some environmentalists which don’t require full abandonment of conservative free market ideologies.
And finally the existential example:
Your current state: You are having a conscious experience which you did not ask to have in a strange world. You have desires which are sometimes met and sometimes denied. You look around and see that there are other people who also appear to have desires. And all of these desires are fulfilled or rejected unevenly and ultimately at random. Some conscious experiences look pretty great and some look downright awful. You think more people should be having a better time.
The check move: Animal populations evolve and tend to cluster along phenotypic lines. Different traits, abilities, and cultural practices correlate with that evolution. The evolved animal Homo Sapiens is, of course, not exempt from these forces.
Charles Darwin published his theory in 1859. He didn’t get everything right but denying this situation amounts to a willful ignorance of evidence and basic logic. I always imagine an absurd picture where the admission that natural Darwinism governs the natural world, including our physical bodies, and rises like a tide starting at our feet but somehow magically stops just short of our brains and minds. The field of evolutionary psychology announces that this miraculous barrier doesn’t exist.
The feared implications: Race realism, genetic superiority, dismissal of the inherent value of humans in specific cultures, ethnic cleansing.
This too is a false checkmate. But it is perhaps the most challenging one to escape and the one in whose presence we tremble faced with a litany of historical failures on embarrassingly large scales like slavery or ethnic cleansing. Our species can appear to be on a spin cycle of failing to imagine any other directions for our king other than those terrible implications.
Steven Pinker’s masterpiece “The Blank Slate” lays out this argument beautifully by dispelling the myth that our world is one where the mind has no innate traits and there is something like a soul in the machine making choices completely free from biology and evolutionary pressures. Pinker goes on to explain how it’s actually a good thing we aren’t “blank slates” since presuming we are leads to the conclusion that all inequality of any kind was at some point stolen by systemic structures rather than innate abilities or localized advantageous evolved cultural practices.
Okay, we can see that is a very dangerous area to linger though and if anyone stopped reading after that last paragraph I would be frightened by their next thought. This check requires slightly longer attention spans. So keep going please.
The motivations of the speaker must be very carefully weighed in this part of intellectual conversation. Bret Stephens’ recent NY Times opinion piece about the out sized success of Ashkenazi Jews stepped on this land mine, and even more recently Richard Dawkins detonated it with a tweet about eugenics “working”. And yes, plenty of the available moves to escape this “check” result in unspeakable disaster. As we look around for open squares to move the king, eugenics lurk, skull measuring whispers, genocide haunts, and slavery rattles its chains.
How are we to navigate this?
In a Financial Times article Steven Pinker warns that this threat isn’t going to end any time soon.
“Why can’t we build on our accomplishments and aspire to utopia? The reason is that we are not blank slates. The hard-won knowledge that has allowed us to marginalize our superstitions and biases must be relearned every generation in a Sisyphean struggle, never perfectly.”
But once you learn it. Are there safe available moves? Do you have to deny the legitimacy and accuracy of evolutionary psychology and unlearn it somehow? Do we have to reject Darwin and cling to incoherent religious claims about divine creation and libertarian free will? Do we have to sling the “racial supremacist” label at the motivations of anyone who dares whisper about this kind of thing?
The fashionable version of this strategy is to charge someone with “using right wing talking points.” I hate this. A fact, scientific discovery, or moral claim is not right or left wing. What one decides to do in response to the fact is those things.
Can you use a right wing talking point in service of left wing solutions and vice versa? Sure, I’ve easily done that in this essay. The charge of “using a right wing talking point” should be heard for what it truly is, an announcement that the person lacks the imagination and intelligence to see several safe responses if they accept the talking point as true.
We have our work cut out for us here. Consider these two claims.
All men are created equal.
All men are not created with equal qualities, abilities, desires, opportunities, impulses, biases, environments, and instincts.
The puzzle of what to do with the discovery that there is an important difference between these claims is the biggest challenge. Does the second claim negate the first? To our horror, have we discovered that all men are not created equal after all?
Denying the second claim is not the answer. Ignoring it is not sustainable. We know too much to pretend we can survive in such a state of cognitive dissonance. There will always be data to discover by those who display a staggeringly dangerous lack of imagination and creativity and will conclude that this is a game ending move and we are checkmated into a world of genetically determined superiority and ingrained cultural hierarchies. Sam Harris defended his decision to talk to the famous taboo-question-asking Charles Murray on his podcast when he asserted that we will be “continually mugged by this reality” and we ought to figure out how to deal with it… especially in a time of such availability of information.
It is time we grow up and wrestle with the difference between the claims. There is obviously a sense in which both states are true. All men are created equal. There is an inherent value to all conscious life which is untouched by the truth of evolution. Reconciling the two claims is the real game. It's called philosophy and it’s much more hopeful and optimistic than people fear.
We are the kings on the chessboard. And it is up to us to navigate our way to safe legal moves. Yes, it’s true that a few directions that we wished to go may now be blocked. But with some creativity, imagination, and courage we can look around and notice there are plenty of moves to make. It’s only check. We can still win this game.
