This is fascinating *not* because it’s political, but because it’s evidence that however much some of us think the world “progresses,” there will always be atavisms. With a Randall Munroe namecheck at the end.
NYT, Jon A. Shields, 3 Feb 2022 (print paper 5 Feb 2022): How Trump’s Brutish Code of Honor Explains His Feud With Liz Cheney
In the modern Republican Party, there has never been anything quite like Liz Cheney’s war with Donald Trump. Whereas once, the party’s most heated rivalries were primarily ideological — like the feud between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater — today’s have little to do with policy. Instead, they are about rival systems of honor that are remaking identity politics on the right.
These competing honor systems grow in different social milieus: One is relatively blue collar and home to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, while the other is college educated and home to Ms. Cheney’s Never Trumpers. Like so much of American society, the G.O.P. is coming apart by class.
Though Ms. Cheney seems to view Mr. Trump as someone without principle, he lives by a code. As Bob Woodward once described it: “Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice.”
This ancient way of life, which permeated the Queens of Mr. Trump’s youth and is generally familiar to citizens outside the professional class, has gone by many names in America: “hillbilly justice” in Appalachia, the “code of the street” in poor urban neighborhoods and the “code of the West” in many Western states, including Wyoming, which Ms. Cheney represents in the House. The people who live in these honor cultures, as social scientists call them, are expected to protect their honor by always standing up to their enemies and generally letting others know they are not to be messed with.
Trump’s “code of honor” system values loyalty above all else, above principle and law. The point is that this is a primitive system, long overtaken, we like to think, by codes of law and declarations of values and constitutions of rules and elaborate systems of governance. As we’ve seen repeatedly, Trump, and apparently most of his supporters, care nothing for that; they all might as well be living thousands of years ago when people simply relied on a strongman to rally the tribe to stand steadfast against rival tribes.
Something similar is true about education, about understanding the real world. Every child is born, not a blank slate, but innocent of experience and education, born instead with a variety of intuitions built by evolution for survival, but otherwise dependent on those around him (usually the mother of course, and the father and other close relatives) for anything beyond bare survival. It’s up to the parents, or indirectly through other authority figures like teachers (of course mediated by the parents), for exposure to the world beyond immediate experience, and education of what the species has learned over thousands of years. Some parents prefer to avoid or suppress this (e.g. via home-schooling, or appeals to boards of education to ban books), instead inculcating the child into cultural traditions and social norms of their community, even when they conflict with the cumulative wisdom (and scientific understanding) of the species.
I suspect most of the world still does this; the wisdom of the species is there, for free, everywhere you look, available to all (as I’ve previously written), but that wisdom threatens, many people seem to think, the kind of tribal loyalty currently embodied by… Donalt T***p.
Tribal loyalty is easy; democracy is hard. As is education that challenges cultural verities.
Later in the essay:
Beneath the surface of their honor feud lurk clashing understandings of political ambition. Unlike Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney is seeking the esteem of future generations by doing what’s in the public interest even if she is cast out of office for doing so. Ms. Cheney told a Wyoming paper that just moments before her fellow Republicans pushed her out of House leadership, she warned them “that history was watching.”
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is so loyal to his narrow code that he lacks even the theory of mind to understand Ms. Cheney’s ambition. For him, losing any contest is always dishonorable because it tarnishes his reputation as a strongman. Hence, his enduring fixation with ratings, polling and the “stolen” 2020 election. It’s also why he asked Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” as they stood over the graves at Arlington National Cemetery, according to reporting in The Atlantic.
This passage includes a crucial key: the lack of empathy. “He lacks even the theory of mind to understand…” This means the a person simply cannot imagine that another person might be thinking something different, or why. This is something children, at early ages, don’t understand (see Jesse Bering) but typically learn by age 5 or so. Some adults, it seems, come to understand this only to a limited extent, always placing self-interest first.
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It’s occurred to me that when I comment about people who “don’t understand how the world works” in terms of scale and plausibility and the operations of government and the discoveries of science… that a prime example of someone who *does* understand how the world works, in amazing, mind boggling detail, is Randall Munroe, of XKCD fame. Read his books.
