I struggle a lot with how to maintain that heterogeneity, not just on how it influences me, but how to stay in conversations that are heterogeneously composed. You can end up pushed and manipulated and compromised by trying to think or act through an assemblage that doesn't share some broad ethical or human commitments--which is what I think Wilkinson is talking about when he describes liberalism as a big tent. As you know, one of the problems I see sometimes in your mudging is that you create an odd exemption zone around your own thinking; you heap obligations upon people that interest you that don't seem to boomerang back onto your own thought processes. For example, it seems to me that a loosely libertarian concern with the perverse consequences of regulation or state action, which is something you know I hold, would be heterogenous if it was open to voices or episodes that suggested that a) some perverse consequences actually turn out for the better rather than the worse and b) that some regulatory action actually comes out pretty well as it was designed.

The heterogeneity you're advising seems to me to require a kind of presumptive humility and a skepticism about one's own preferences and mudges, without getting to the point that you lose confidence in your own distinctive knowledge, vision, etc., and without being a kind of Zelig who just echoes the strongest voices in a particular room. At least some self-reflection, inward skepticism, provisionality in argument, is part of "thinking well".

I also think it's worth appreciating just how hard it is to do the thinking you're talking about. You tend to see subjects who are "outside liberalism" in very conventional, comfortable terms, as if they're you only they're peasants growing sorghum in West Africa, as "wise crowds". That's really just an alternative version of what you accuse Wilkinson of doing. The harder thing by far, for an example, is to take something like "witchcraft" as a moral, ethical, practical conceptual domain in parts of contemporary Africa and understand it in its own terms, to not quickly translate it into some familiar schema. You quickly recognize that this is an exceptionally difficult thing to do, and that if you do it too seriously, you risk losing the ability to criticize *anything*, because every practice and way of life has its own embedded authenticity, its legitimate otherness. Educated elites have their own culture; shouldn't you understand it and leave it its space? Global warming scientists have their own culture: where do you get off not appreciating that as part of diversity? And so on.

The trick is figuring how how to build a heterogeneity that works in some fashion, that does something besides merely exist as diversity. The world is already diverse; if you're interested in outcomes that are other than the world as it is (whatever they might be), you're thinking about the architecture of a working heterogeneity as opposed to a non-working one. If you're saying that we're to take the world as it is, then the only job open to us is description, observation, witnessing, and the best voice probably fiction. And a strangely bounded kind of fiction, because judgment and criticism and desire for something other than what is would be forbidden to it.

Hi Timothy,

Long time. I can't talk thoughtfully now - busy in RL. I'll hit you back later.

"it seems to me that a loosely libertarian concern with the perverse consequences of regulation or state action, which is something you know I hold, would be heterogenous if it was open to voices or episodes that suggested that a) some perverse consequences actually turn out for the better rather than the worse and b) that some regulatory action actually comes out pretty well as it was designed."

Is this a gray cats or a stopped clock argument? I have a different view of heuristic diversity and group problem solving. It starts with the assumption - based on some compelling research - that the first and most important step is to build diversity into the group. A second assumption is that the members can communicate, that their heuristic differences are not so great that they can't work together or even understand one another's specialist terminology. (This seems a more useful way to see the issue that you speak of as some sort of shared ethics.)

"I also think it's worth appreciating just how hard it is to do the thinking you're talking about."

Aye, thinking is hard. I don't do it often. I doubt that I have the energy to do it professionally. It seems like I'd have to approach it as a form of professional athletics where you are always at the training table and lose a step for every half decade that you live. Maybe I could coach, but not play.

"wise crowds"

We've had this dispute many times and you always get confused. A wise crowd is only useful for problems that have precise answers - how many beans are in the jar - and only when the crowd members are independent as well as diverse. If they hear one another's guesses then they get caught in a cascade and get wrong answers. A diverse problem solving group is not a crowd. They must talk to one another, and work on aspects of a single undivided, often indivisible, problem in a serial rather than a simultaneous fashion, like runners in a relay race. They can only be ad hoc groups since they will quickly learn one another's heuristics. There is a continuing need for new blood.

This is an entirely different subject than good governance of a diverse populace. The issue in governance is tolerance of diversity. Do we really need to justify that? I know Wilkinson doesn't get it, but I really thought that you did.

"You quickly recognize that this is an exceptionally difficult thing to do, and that if you do it too seriously, you risk losing the ability to criticize *anything*, because every practice and way of life has its own embedded authenticity, its legitimate otherness."

No, it's not difficult, just strange for those who have limited experience. If you do it often, and do it for a long time, especially if you grow up with it, it becomes second nature and you do not lose your own central identity. You can criticize any and all others as they can criticize you. We all sin.

"Educated elites have their own culture; shouldn't you understand it and leave it its space?"

I do. It's when then come prowling in my chicken coop that I get out the shotgun.

"Global warming scientists have their own culture: where do you get off not appreciating that as part of diversity?"

Same answer. Nobody cared what perversions that they got up to until they started trying to take over the government. None of us who payed attention to the science part doubted that climates were changeable. Terraforming is not a new idea. The science is primitive but interesting. One day we may become competent. It's sort of like nanotechnology . . . someday.

"The trick is figuring how how to build a heterogeneity that works in some fashion, that does something besides merely exist as diversity."

No it's not. Diversity doesn't need to be fixed. We would be the poorer for it in the same way that loss of biodiversity impoverishes us.

"If you're saying that we're to take the world as it is, then the only job open to us is description, observation, witnessing, and the best voice probably fiction."

It's only those of you who make a profession of social intervention who feel limited by norms and preferences that frown on poking the ant hill with various sticks and chemicals. I do understand the impulse to meddle. In my work it is all but irresistible and I always have multiple experiments in progress. However, human experimentation is mostly taboo for many good reasons. The only ethical way to do it is to form a cult of like minded malcontents. Ethics is a rare thing.

Let me put it more simply. I don't think you take your own advice, or think that it applies to you. Human diversity already exists; if you have any critique of that which already exists (and you do), you don't want the diversity which is, but some other diversity which you prefer. You either do that via a just-so story: once upon a time, there was real diversity and then government and elites came and did something to it and we just need to get back to that original condition; or through a naturalized story which amounts to the same thing (if governments and elites stopped acting upon societies, they would revert to a normal or natural state of diversity). But you have an understanding of what people other than you are like which doesn't really take any interest in how they are other than you.

I argue in favor of diversity, and argue against those who seek to diminish it. I have no nostalgia for a golden past. Where do you get these ideas?

My guess is that you skim read and confuse what is said here with what you read somewhere else, mashing it all together in your mind as one integrated narrative.

Gary, do you think your own practice is the model to which someone like Wilkinson ought to strive? E.g., that what you lay out in your own writing is the realization of the prescription you make for him?

In terms of diversity, I'm curious: how often do you write about people (not intellectuals bloggging, but whole groups of people) who are fundamentally different than yourself not just in where they live and what they do but how they think and how they act in the world whose difference is something you value? It's easy to say "I argue in favor of diversity" but if diversity is something wholly abstract, it's not terribly meaningful.

This is a very narrow theme blog. It can't serve as a model for anyone but grass farmers in the toolies, though I don't recommend it.

Diversity is an abstraction for everyone. No one can experience the whole of it. Since this is a narrow blog, and back40 is a narrow identity, experiences and knowledge outside the theme are not subjects here. But, do not assume that writing about things is all that there is to life.

Write what you know, but not everything you know.

Ok. I'm just saying that you have some very strong views about what other people should do and say. It might not hurt to consider how difficult it is to live up to some of the prescriptive advice you dish out, or occasionally turn the same lens introspectively inward.

No one can experience even a fraction of diversity. But everyone who believes in its importance--and the thing is, you and I are very close in this belief--can stand to think a bit about the tough, challenging specific difficulties involved in holding to that belief. If you're going to beat on somebody for what you perceive as their inadequacies in that respect, it wouldn't hurt to pick a boundary case that challenges your own commitment to valuing diversity. (Besides educated elites, whose 'local culture' you have no trouble rejecting or wishing to see changed.) There are all sorts of cases where I freely concede that I'm reading about or directly experiencing a cultural world that has its own authenticity that I find strange and disturbing. I can work through that, but it takes some habits of mind and some introspective honesty.

There are other cases where I'm sure I'm looking at something that is equally authentic but that I also think isn't a welcome part of human diversity. Armed banditry in parts of sub-Saharan Africa is an "authentic" habitus, a way of life, a particular perspective on society. But if someone figured out a way to get insurgents with guns to put them down, or frankly figured out a viable way to suppress them militarily, I'd be all for that. Valuing diversity isn't a suicide pact. But these are also tough cases, both because in many cases there isn't anything to be done and because it's sometimes hard to know where the boundaries between diversity which is strange to you personally and diversity which is destructive and oppressive lie.

I think anyone who claims to value diversity, and criticizes others for failing to do so, could occasionally take on some tough cases and think through them. To me part of what all the experiences I don't write about directly do to my writing about what I know is this: they humble me a bit, make me hesitate, make me qualify statements. Isn't that what you think educated elites should do, too? Be more provisional, less certain, more aware of their own limitations? So why is that not good for goose as well as gander?

"you have some very strong views about what other people should do and say"

Nah. I have views about what they said. Saying that Wilkinson doesn't walk the talk isn't a call for him to do so. He has other objectives. He's doing politics, not attempting to perfect his soul. Besides, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don't even know my views and wouldn't care if they did.

I don't write about everything, and only post 1 in 20 of the things that I write. You may have suggestions about things that you might wish to see written - others have made such requests back-channel - but that just isn't what I have for the net. I squeeze in a little tube time and write whatever comes to mind. Usually, it's just a comment on something I've read. Think of them as hideously verbose tweets and you won't be far wrong. It's very little, but it's what I have. I do physical labor 7 days a week, every week, year after year. This is what I do when I hurt too bad to do real work.

There is one exception to this: I prepare and post a few things specifically for the entertainment of a couple of my RL buddies, usually relating to some land management or animal health issue. The one about feeding raisin stems as a mineral supplement is an example.

You always want the same thing. If I fault experts for their incompetence and arrogance you want me to throw them some bones for the stuff they didn't screw up. It's just not an interesting thing to write about. Some things can be taken for granted. If another grass farmer found defects in a post of mine about our work, I'd never expect him to balance that with some bone about what he found acceptable. That's just silly.

Or said another way, I argue with Oliver Morton because he is smart, informed and writes so well. I used to argue with you the same way, but you haven't written anything that I can use lately.

Well, mere mortals sometimes can't satisfy those who look down from Olympus.