Fascism and ettiquette

[Nick Thompson]

Glen,

You caught me in a slap-dash quip which I regretted the minute I started
reading your post.  I have long been cranky with some of my associates who
have insisted, for instance, that using caps in an email message is
SHOUTING, or that it is bad manners to send messages in HTML.  Now, I
certainly can imagine a kindly message warning me that, given traditions in
some circles, one runs a risk of misunderstanding or censure for using
these practices (which are more common in teh world from which I sprang) ,
but it is quite another to claim that such practices are against nature.
It seems so unlike internet values of freedom and exploration to make any
such claim.

But crankiness began to seem deeply trivial in the face of your fascism
list.  What struck me is how closely your list corresponded to our current
political discourse on health care.  In fact, it scared the wits out of me.
Have we come so far??  Who is Eco and where is that discussion taking
place?  

Thanks for enobling the discourse.

Nick  

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> [Original Message]
> From: glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 9/4/2009 3:48:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Psychology Blogs
>
> Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-09-04 01:18 PM:
> > It may be the Berkeley Relic speaking in me, but I have often found
> > "ettiquette" to be the next door neighbor of fascism.  
>
> It doesn't ring the same bells for me.  I'm fond of Eco's (vague but
> indicating) characteristics of fascism:
>
>    1. cult of tradition
>    2. luddism/irrationalism
>    3. action for action's sake
>    4. anti-critical
>    5. fear of dissension
>    6. appeal to the frustrated middle
>    7. pervasive belief in conspiracy
>    8. the myopic underdog
>    9. life is warfare
>   10. contempt for underlings
>   11. herophilia or glorification of martyrdom
>   12. conflation of the biological with the social
>   13. abstracted (ideal, not real) body politic
>   14. newspeak
>
> And I don't really see a good place to put etiquette.  I suppose various
> colors of it could fall under (1), (4), (5), and (14)... and, perhaps
> (2) and (8) on a stretch.  But, mostly, etiquette is just an attempt to
> govern based on a minimal, civilized, set of soft rules.  Everything
> anti-fascist can still take place within the bounds of etiquette.
>
> But the thing I was trying to point out was that any "standard of
> behavior" over and above what is possible is easily punctured when the
> underlying components are simple and easily composed.  A great example
> is a unix shell.  An interesting example is, say, RESTful web
> development.  A self-referencing example is the recent discussion of
> kitchen-sink ABM frameworks.  A HowTo on "how to use a wiki" is a lot
> like one on "how to build an ABM".
>
> But a HowTo on "how to build a page graph in a wiki" is much more
> tenable, even though it's still multivalent.  The more specific and
> concrete you get, the more likely you'll be successful.  (... unless
> your goal is to use large catch-all buzzwords to get people excited
> without giving them any real tools they can take home with them, in
> which case you want to be as general and abstract as possible.)
>
> A more reflective point about puncturing standards of behavior (e.g.
> Ikea's recent font change) is that when a subset of the participants
> _expect_ an easily punctured standard, innovative participants will
> inevitably be considered rude or as not being "team players".  I think
> this is why the internet intensifies people's feelings that others are
> rude or obnoxious.... because the internet consists of simple, easily
> composed things that no matter what organization one chooses for her
> construct, it will violate some other person's standard.  That also
> leads to a much larger number of "should" statements... "One should
> never use orange text on a blue background!" [grin]
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
>
>
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[Jochen Fromm-4]

I guess he means the Italian author Umberto Eco.
In a 1995 essay "Eternal Fascism", Eco attempts to
list general properties of fascist ideology. I would add
"lack of differentiation", "uncontrolled growth" beyond
the normal limits, invasion of adjacent systems, and
generally "malignant, agressive and egoistic behavior"
to the list - the hallmarks of cancer.

Fascism is a bit like cancer for politics. The political
system allows the self-rejuvenation by granting the rights
to demonstrate and to found new parties. This can lead
to an ideology like fascism, which spreads and growths
like cancer, and eventually destroys the old system
completely. Cancer is the result of a self-renewal or
self-rejuvenation which has gone wrong. It is a bit like
the evolution of an ancient or alien life form inside of the
own system which is normally prohibited, and cancer
development is a remarkably similar to the process
of embryonic development and evolution itself.

-J.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2009 12:09 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] Fascism and ettiquette


>
> Have we come so far??  Who is Eco and where is that discussion taking
> place?  
>


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[glen e. p. ropella-2]

Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-09-04 03:09 PM:
> You caught me in a slap-dash quip which I regretted the minute I started
> reading your post.  I have long been cranky with some of my associates who
> have insisted, for instance, that using caps in an email message is
> SHOUTING, or that it is bad manners to send messages in HTML.

Heh, well, I hardly even read e-mails that are typed in all caps.  It
hurts my eyes (actually it hurts somewhere behind my eyes).  But it's
easily remedied in emacs. [grin]  And I've bumped up my spamassassin
score for HTML-only e-mails so that I don't usually receive them.  So,
you wouldn't get an admonishment from me at all... in fact, you probably
wouldn't get anything from me!  (Hm, perhaps that's why my company
doesn't get very many business leads. ;-)

> But crankiness began to seem deeply trivial in the face of your fascism
> list.  What struck me is how closely your list corresponded to our current
> political discourse on health care.  In fact, it scared the wits out of me.
> Have we come so far??  Who is Eco and where is that discussion taking
> place?  

Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 09-09-04 03:41 PM:
> I guess he means the Italian author Umberto Eco.

Yes.  Sorry for the absence of refs:

http://www.justicescholars.org/pegc/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

You'll find a lot of extremists cite the essay to argue that other
extremists are fascists.  But, if you read the essay, it's pretty clear
that neither our Democrats nor Republicans are fascists in the least.
So, the rhetoric is too hyperbolic to be useful for me.  Still, though,
it's interesting to consider.  Eco's 14 points have been mostly useful
to me to point out to whatever extremists I'm talking to that they're
abusing the words and that we'd make more progress if they stopped using
those words.

It seems to me that our tendency toward fascism is systemic ... emergent
[cough], as it were, rather than ascribable to any subset of the
components (people, laws, corporations, etc.) within.  It has something
to do with precedent (static treatment of a dynamic system), the need to
treat every circumstance with a rule (hyper generalization), and the
tendency to avoid smearing blame (aka reductive causality).  But I'm not
skilled enough to study it effectively.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com


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[Steve Smith]

Interesting what a strange bend this conversation took.

It started out (I think) as an observation that what makes the Net
"work" is that it has a few very simple, very well implemented/enforced
rules (low level protocols) and a mechanism for layering higher-level
protocols on those and everything else is just "convention", confined at
most by "ettiquette".

I think there is a parallel between the self-organizing "success" of the
ecology we call the Internet and the self-organizing "success" of the
ecology we call "civilization".    I "quote" success for both objects
(civilization *and* the Internet) because it is arguable, depending on
our measures about  "what means success?".

Nick> It may be the Berkeley Relic speaking in me, but I have often found
Nick> "ettiquette" to be the next door neighbor of fascism.  
Nick>
Nick> Do you all remember the "Sandwich Nazi" of Seinfeld?


<anecdote>
You may have meant it precisely this way Nick, but my own experience in
Berkeley (2005) was that the old hippies had all become extremely
authoritarian, and in some cases truly "fascistic".

A good friend (in Berkeley) supports the weekly activities of George
Coates ( http://www.betterbadnews.com/ and http://www.georgecoates.org/ 
) where he and a small troupe of actors slide into the Berkeley City
Council chambers right after the weekly City Council meeting and hold
their own spoof on the same... on TV!  on the very same Berkeley Public
Access Channel station where the *real* council meeting is aired.  It is
a spontaneous, just-in-time, ad-hoc, extemperaneous, ad-libbed
lampooning and spoofing of the very very Berkeley council.  A hoot.  
Too bad they don't air that on on the Internet.
</anecdote>

This observation by Nick reminds me that the conventional view of
politics (or personal values?) as a one dimensional spectrum from
conservative to liberal does not model reality well at all.   The 2D
models such as the Nolan or Pournelle Charts provide a little more room
for having complex thoughts and experiences as human individuals and groups.

I find it interesting that in our general political discourse,
rhetorical speaking (and too often thinking) involves mis-ascribing
various values and motives.  "Fascism" has become a term of slander.  
Any perceived authoritarian or extremist position is generally labeled
"Fascist" and all too often, it is the extremist who finds all others
who don't agree with her, an "extremist".

I'm no fan of Fascism myself, but mere extremism or fundamentalism does
not capture the key features of Fascism that offend/concern me.  

The key feature of Fascism for me is the nationalism and militarism
(more accurately, a belief that conflict is necessary).  Fascism and
Communism alike have demonstrated to us some extremes in
Totalitarianism, but this is a consequence of their designed-in
Authoritarianism which is far from unique to Fascism.

As a Flaming Anarchist, I actually like Ettiquete, as it provides some
sort of guide to social acceptance that allows one to maintain ones own
sense of self, while knowing how to behave in different groups.   Like
Tarzan of the Apes being able to become Lord Greystoke... could he have
ever pulled that off without Victorian Ettiquette?

Do we know of any ABMs that have been developed to interact and wander
about (self-organize) in the "Political/Sociological Landscape"?  It
seems that Nick/Owen's MOTH (Myway Or The Highway) is a limited version
of this.  

One of my attractions to modeling and simulation is that it requires a
different kind of rigor in thinking than more "conventional" analysis.  
By trying to actually *build* a model, many well held beliefs suddenly
must be inspected closely and considered carefully in the context of all
the other well-held beliefs going into the model.

Imagine for example, what a 1-D political ABM would look like?  About
all you might be able to show well is the mechanisms of bipolar
extremism and maybe a little bit about centrism.    It seems like an
absurdly degenerate dynamical system, yet it is the basis for almost all
of our political rhetoric.

In the *real* human-value/experience (and by projection, political)
landscape, there are many more factors at work than mere beliefs about
economic and personal freedoms.  It is an artifact of (somewhat) our
two-party system that we think one-dimensionally.   Throw in the Greens
and the Libertarians along with the Cons and the NeoCons and the Dems
and the Socialists and the Communists and you begin to get a truly
interesting stew.

- Steve



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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

I have already apologized for my original shallow remark, but I continue to
appreciate the rather deep responses it has provoked.   This is a very
forgiving list.

Perhaps my problem is not with etiquette (eg, nick should spell check his
messages) but with those who claim to speak on its authority. Etiquette is
an emergent.  Perhaps it's not etiquette I object to but the Emily Post's
of the world.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> [Original Message]
> From: Steve Smith <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 9/5/2009 11:27:47 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fascism and ettiquette
>
> Interesting what a strange bend this conversation took.
>
> It started out (I think) as an observation that what makes the Net
> "work" is that it has a few very simple, very well implemented/enforced
> rules (low level protocols) and a mechanism for layering higher-level
> protocols on those and everything else is just "convention", confined at
> most by "ettiquette".
>
> I think there is a parallel between the self-organizing "success" of the
> ecology we call the Internet and the self-organizing "success" of the
> ecology we call "civilization".    I "quote" success for both objects
> (civilization *and* the Internet) because it is arguable, depending on
> our measures about  "what means success?".
>
> Nick> It may be the Berkeley Relic speaking in me, but I have often found
> Nick> "ettiquette" to be the next door neighbor of fascism.  
> Nick>
> Nick> Do you all remember the "Sandwich Nazi" of Seinfeld?
>
>
> <anecdote>
> You may have meant it precisely this way Nick, but my own experience in
> Berkeley (2005) was that the old hippies had all become extremely
> authoritarian, and in some cases truly "fascistic".
>
> A good friend (in Berkeley) supports the weekly activities of George
> Coates ( http://www.betterbadnews.com/ and http://www.georgecoates.org/ 
> ) where he and a small troupe of actors slide into the Berkeley City
> Council chambers right after the weekly City Council meeting and hold
> their own spoof on the same... on TV!  on the very same Berkeley Public
> Access Channel station where the *real* council meeting is aired.  It is
> a spontaneous, just-in-time, ad-hoc, extemperaneous, ad-libbed
> lampooning and spoofing of the very very Berkeley council.  A hoot.  
> Too bad they don't air that on on the Internet.
> </anecdote>
>
> This observation by Nick reminds me that the conventional view of
> politics (or personal values?) as a one dimensional spectrum from
> conservative to liberal does not model reality well at all.   The 2D
> models such as the Nolan or Pournelle Charts provide a little more room
> for having complex thoughts and experiences as human individuals and

groups.

>
> I find it interesting that in our general political discourse,
> rhetorical speaking (and too often thinking) involves mis-ascribing
> various values and motives.  "Fascism" has become a term of slander.  
> Any perceived authoritarian or extremist position is generally labeled
> "Fascist" and all too often, it is the extremist who finds all others
> who don't agree with her, an "extremist".
>
> I'm no fan of Fascism myself, but mere extremism or fundamentalism does
> not capture the key features of Fascism that offend/concern me.  
>
> The key feature of Fascism for me is the nationalism and militarism
> (more accurately, a belief that conflict is necessary).  Fascism and
> Communism alike have demonstrated to us some extremes in
> Totalitarianism, but this is a consequence of their designed-in
> Authoritarianism which is far from unique to Fascism.
>
> As a Flaming Anarchist, I actually like Ettiquete, as it provides some
> sort of guide to social acceptance that allows one to maintain ones own
> sense of self, while knowing how to behave in different groups.   Like
> Tarzan of the Apes being able to become Lord Greystoke... could he have
> ever pulled that off without Victorian Ettiquette?
>
> Do we know of any ABMs that have been developed to interact and wander
> about (self-organize) in the "Political/Sociological Landscape"?  It
> seems that Nick/Owen's MOTH (Myway Or The Highway) is a limited version
> of this.  
>
> One of my attractions to modeling and simulation is that it requires a
> different kind of rigor in thinking than more "conventional" analysis.  
> By trying to actually *build* a model, many well held beliefs suddenly
> must be inspected closely and considered carefully in the context of all
> the other well-held beliefs going into the model.
>
> Imagine for example, what a 1-D political ABM would look like?  About
> all you might be able to show well is the mechanisms of bipolar
> extremism and maybe a little bit about centrism.    It seems like an
> absurdly degenerate dynamical system, yet it is the basis for almost all
> of our political rhetoric.
>
> In the *real* human-value/experience (and by projection, political)
> landscape, there are many more factors at work than mere beliefs about
> economic and personal freedoms.  It is an artifact of (somewhat) our
> two-party system that we think one-dimensionally.   Throw in the Greens
> and the Libertarians along with the Cons and the NeoCons and the Dems
> and the Socialists and the Communists and you begin to get a truly
> interesting stew.
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org