Conflict theoretic models

1 Observation grab bag

There are some tendencies in this body of thought, at least as encountered in internet drive-bys, that I am curious about.

1. The unwieldiness of the coordinations implied, i.e the size of the coordinating group is often surprisingly large and dispersed (“The bourgeoisie”)
2. What the group interests are seems hard to pin down in some models. Status? Dominance? Prestige? Money? Control of other resources? See group coordination.
3. People seem to be loose about the intentionality and explicitness of the coordination. Are the group coordinations discussed conspiratorial or emergent? These get conflated.
4. Are the conflict explanations intended to be truth statements or persuasion gambits?

Empirically, conflict is a great thing to use in rhetoric, because it gets people motivated to act, in a way that incompetence or systemic failure does not. So, in a democracy, it might be the best way to get people to act to make things better. It might be the most effective way to motivate people to bring about systemic change even if there are no enemies, just well-meaning people at loggerheads by dull chance.

At the same time, framing things as conflicts has obvious downsides. For one, maybe it is just wrong, and there are no enemies, so we might pay a price in truth.

For another, it might be a hyperstition, a self-fulfilling prophecy, which will make enemies, and to use people instrumentally as enemies is to treat them as means, not ends, which is repugnant to me.

Further, even if there are enemies, and the conflict is real, thinking about it as a conflict might encourage us to seek zero-sum or negative-sum solutions, because once we have decided that someone is our enemy, we might be more inclined to punish them than to solve the problem.

2 Group coordination

The most interesting bit of the puzzle. When can a large group coordinate? When they are small enough to conspire, surely. But many coordinations we observe are large and dispersed. How might they work?

In Richard Ngo’s Elite Coordination via the Consensus of Power he builds a model of coordination by altruistic punishment and norms:

Whenever we interact with others in society, we need to figure out which social and political norms to use. (Here I’m using the term “norms” broadly to include which factions to favor in which ways, which ideas are within the Overton window, etc.) A crucial feature of norms is that they don’t just guide your own behavior, but also which behaviors you reward or punish when done by others. So you benefit from adopting (and enforcing) the same norms as other people, especially powerful people. This means that it’s advantageous to track not just which norms other people follow, but which norms people believe other people will follow, and which norms people believe that people believe that other people will follow, and which…

This suggests a definition for the consensus of power: the norms which are common knowledge amongst the ruling elite. Of course there’s no clear demarcation for who qualifies as a ruling elite; what I’m trying to gesture towards (but can’t yet define precisely) is a version of common knowledge which weights more powerful people more highly. Note that this is very different from just aggregating powerful people’s preferences, because norms can persist even when they’re extremely unpopular. Often when someone goes against the consensus of power, you don’t personally care. But you know that others will punish you if you’re associated with it (because others will punish them if they don’t punish you, because…). So you push back against it—and thus help uphold the consensus of power. I’ll call people who consistently uphold the consensus of power “apparatchiks”.

The consensus of power, like the conspiratorial stance, attempts to explain the surprising level of coordination often seen within ruling elites. But direct coordination via conspiracy and indirect coordination via consensus are very different mechanisms that make importantly different predictions. I’ll elucidate the differences by framing each of them as a type of superagent containing many individual people.

Conspiracies are centralized agents who coordinate in a top-down way, by deferring to the decisions of leaders. This allows them to be highly goal-directed, and to plan and execute complex strategies. But it also bottlenecks them both on trust in those leaders, and on how well those leaders can gather and process information. This leaves them vulnerable to direct attack: disrupt or undermine their leaders and you can take out the entire conspiracy.

By contrast, consenses are distributed agents. They need not have any leaders, or even any central nodes. Instead, each apparatchik observes the behavior of many other apparatchiks, and gradually adjusts their own behavior accordingly. This allows consenses of power to perceive and act on a lot of information in parallel.

In Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist Scott Alexander raises some rational-agent collective action objections to whether groups can produce the kind of coordination that conflict theorists might assume.

I think you can stitch these two together, since they both have differrent axiomatisaions of collective action. It seems to me that they predict different kinds of interests over which groups might coordinate, and different kinds of coordination; Ngo essentially argues that coordination by Schelling point is possible, while Alexander argues that teleological coordination is not. I think both can be simultaneously true.

3 When does conflict theory model the world well?

Provocative example: Geoff Shullenberger, The Guild and the Grifters

The “grifter” accusation hints at a crucial backdrop of these ongoing ideological battles: the dismal and worsening career paths in both academe and journalism, both of which have become increasingly precarious industries in recent decades. As the aspirants and incumbents in these fields confront waning prospects, it is not surprizing to see them organise informal guilds dedicated to protecting their interests. This, in any case, is one way to understand the tendency of journalists and academics on Twitter to line up in lock step behind certain orthodoxies and denounce dissenters as “grifters” and worse.

These sorts of collective action might be understood to proceed from rational self-interest. The enforcement of ideological shibboleths serves as a form of gatekeeping that limits the pool of competitors for limited positions. As sceptics of the notion of “cancel culture” often observe, the supposedly “canceled” often seem to have had no trouble reaching large audiences. But what if the real aim is to prevent the adherents of some views from having jobs in certain professions, and thereby to free up a few positions in the relevant industries? By that measure, cancelation has enjoyed some small success. The accusation of “grift” attempts to reinforce the guild’s monopoly by reminding us that those excluded from it lack the patina of institutional legitimacy.

The problem is that the expulsion of dissenters also accelerates the decline in stature of the legacy institutions themselves, which look less and less like neutral arbiters of truth and more and more like another set of self-interested competitors. This process is self-reinforcing: As establishment insiders are forced to compete with upstarts and outsiders, they also come to resemble them. The grifter accusation, then, is a convenient way to avoid asking why those who remain in legacy organisations have lost the trust of the public.

Likewise, assertions from academics and journalists that the University of Austin is a “grift” distract from a more concerning question: Even if it is a scam—Trump University redux, as some have alleged—how much would that set it apart from much of what occurs in the more respectable realms of higher education? Many critiqued the first degree to be offered at UATX, an “Entrepreneurship and Leadership M.A”. But if that sounds vague and slapdash, it is of a piece with an array of overpriced master’s degrees of dubious value, cash cows that keep the nation’s prestigious universities in business.

TBD for now see the Benjamin Hoffman bit, the logic of Pol Pot which casts light on conflict-construction from an odd angle:

Pol Pot’s policies aren’t indicative of his personal badness, they reflect a certain level of scepticism about expertise narratives that benefit extractive elites.

Expertise narratives definitely have an extractive component. (Medical doctors use law and custom to silence others’ claims to be able to heal, but MDs are obviously not responsible for all healing, or only doing healing, and they ARE collecting rents.) If they are 100% extractive, then anyone participating in them is a social parasite and killing or reeducating them is good for the labourers. I think it’s easy to see how this can lead to policies like “kill all the doctors and let teens do surgery.” This naturally escalates to “kill everyone with glasses” if you are enough of a conflict theorist to think that literal impaired vision is mostly a motivated attempt to maintain class privilege as a scholar.

See also Oppression and production are competing explanations for wealth inequality..

Regina Rini, considers Wokeism as an aircon setting, which also possibly points at the same idea:

you can see the influence of superhero theatrics in public discourse about the culture wars. On Twitter and in podcasts, everything now seems to be an epochal struggle between two factions, the “Wokeists” and the “anti-Wokeists,” whose battles over social justice will doom or save us all.

Guillotines and pitchforks make for arousing imagery, but they won’t solve any problems. I find this “final battle” framing less socially enlightening than, say, a video on air-conditioner repair. Air conditioners are complex systems that can fail in many ways. Fixing one is a delicate process — one that is not enhanced by identifying ideological enemies. Imagine a team of repair technicians falling into dispute over allegations that some are “Coldists” who secretly aim to turn the entire building into a frigid wasteland. Their bitter enemies, the “anti-Coldists,” refuse to install another wire until their opponents’ plot has been exposed and halted.

This would be a terrible approach to air-conditioning repair. It’s also a terrible approach to social justice.

4 What if people are only motivated to change by conflict theories?

Do we need to lean all the way into conflict theory to change the world? I call such a possibility “All we need is hate”.

5 Decoupling and niche-construction for conflict theories

Activist and rationalist style, as seen on the rhetoric page, a.k.a. Decoupling. Is decoupling possible in conflict theories? Or is everything ideology?

Turning that around, does refusal to decouple construct a conflict theorist niche?

6 Conflict and democracy

See agonism.

7 Incoming

• The Failed Strategy of Artificial Intelligence Doomers
• Can Techno-Saints help us cooperate with Cathars? | Compass Rose
• What an Overly Pessimistic View of America Gets Wrong
• Against False Privilege
• William Buckner at the Human Systems and Behavior Lab based in the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University has a blog on conflict in cross-cultural perspective and other fun stuff (New address: Traditions of Conflict).
• In defence of conflict theory
• Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash: An argument that in the aviation industry safety has come from the notion that blame and especially criminal culpability are not assigned in accidents, because this will incentivise hiding mistakes, and thus obscuring the systemic problems which could lead to them.
• Rochelle DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory Advocates for conflict.
• Don’t Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes
• The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason considers gender as a simulacrum
• Elite capture probably fits in. See Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, On the Uses and Abuses of Identity Politics: See also his Boston Review piece, Identity Politics and Elite Capture.
• Malcolm Kyeyune really does not like certain social justice framings: Send them back your fierce defiance / Stamp upon the cursed alliance and Why elite parents are supporting Critical Race Theory

Did Social Dominance Orientation (Pratto, Sidanius, and Levin 2006; Sidanius et al. 1994) pan out?

8 References