tribal epistemology

Fri Nov 2nd 2018 by abagond

Art by a Trump fan. (Via Skeptical Science)

A tribal epistemology is where you believe not what facts or reason or top experts say is true, but what your group or tribe says is true, especially its leaders. Like in a religious cult.

David Roberts of Vox, who came up with the term in 2017, put it this way:

“information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. ‘Good for our side’ and ‘true’ begin to blur into one.”

Epistemology: Roberts was trying to understand how Republicans in the US seem to live in a separate world of facts, how they came to live in the Republican Bubble, cut off from things like science. Epistemology is the study of how people know what they know, how they tell true from false.

A clear example of the Republicans’ epistemology was given by Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas in 2017:

“better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”

That is a tribal epistemology all the way.

Some effects:

Climate change: If Republicans lived in the same universe of facts as the rest of the Western world, the debate in the US would be about how best to fight climate change, with Republicans likely offering more business-friendly, market-driven policies. Instead the debate is about whether man-made climate change is even real!
Russiagate: Robert Mueller is about to make public his findings. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Mueller was honest, fair, and capable enough to carry out the investigation. It is as close as we are ever likely to get to the truth while Trump is still president. But like climate change, the Republicans could simply choose not to believe it. Then what?

How we got here: Back in the 1990s the right wing in the US complained about how the press and the universities were controlled by the left. But instead of pushing to reform those institutions to rid them of left-wing bias, the right created its own institutions: think tanks, talk radio, conspiracy websites – and especially Fox News.

An alternative information space was created. But instead of being more fair and balanced, it was more given to conspiracy theories and fake news than mainstream US culture. And that was before Trump became president.

Fox News is not CNN with right-wing spin or right-wing priorities, like you might expect. It is not a Republican window onto the same set of facts, as you might hope. Instead it is a living, breathing stereotype of what people on the right think CNN is: a propaganda channel spewing out self-serving lies 24 hours a day with no one to hold it accountable to stuff like facts.

Who is to call out Fox News or Trump on their lies and be believed by the 35% of the country who make up Trump’s tribe? No one.

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: mainly Vox (2017).

See also:

propaganda model – of the mainstream news media
- US cable news
  - Fox News
  - CNN
tropes
Russiagate
climate change
Republicans
- Republicans are going over a cliff
- The Republican bubble
- Donald Trump
  - alternative facts
  - Trump’s false statements: month one
  - The Trumpification of the US – the Department of Interior’s home page on climate change before and after Trump came to power
  - How to think like a Trump supporter
  - Is Trump a cult leader?
George Orwell: 1984

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Posted in stuff | 15 Comments

15 Responses

on Sat Nov 3rd 2018 at 21:23:04 femmebott

That picture is freaking hilarious

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 06:03:12 michaeljonbarker

I agree with this. But the same idioligical bent on the left is in a similar bubble with their own “values and goals”.

All of this media static and idiological postering distracts from the fact it’s corporations, stockmarkets, and war profit that run things. They buy politics and the only bubbles they care about are the ones they can make money with.

The mid terms are coming up. In the past a Republican president often got a Democrat house and senate. The same happened mid term when Clinton was in office, the Republicans made big gains.

I am not sure that this will happen this time. I believe the majority in the U.S. are bigots and many who are not white have embraced a kind of soft nationalism.

Hopefully I’m wrong.

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 12:42:31 dorisjean23

“Who is to call out Fox News or Trump on their lies and believed by the 35% of the country who make up Trump’s tribe?” – Fear not – “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small” (Plutarch)

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 16:38:52 Mary Burrell

And this madness under the administration of the orange syphallitic hobgoblin is driving this country to h3ll in a hand basket. All these crazy conspiracy theorist combined with Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and lying and gas lighting is what is causing these nut jobs to act out.

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 16:43:38 Mary Burrell

Turn the television on after something horrific happens and hatchet face Sarah Sanders comes on lying and gas lighting. She might not be the devil per se but she is one of his minions who goes to the 7-11 and buys his cigarettes.

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 16:47:23 Mary Burrell

That art that’s illustrated for the title of this thread explains how unhinged these Trump sycophants are. They would all murder their kids and set their hair on fire if Trump told them to.

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 22:11:37 lkeke35

As far as I’m concerned, a person cannot be a follower of that man, and call them self a good person, or a non-racist. Imho that person is willing to get into bed with a racist and/or swap spit with them, and that makes them a racist too. They’re no different. But i save my worst ire for those who will watch an innocent someone getting kicked in the head, stand there and do nothing, and then equivocate about how bad both people are.

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on Sun Nov 4th 2018 at 23:44:01 Mary Burrell

Those black Trump supporters are another anomaly that shows we are experiencing something abnormal. Black MAGA hat wearing clowns chanting and showing love to Trump is mind blowing. This malignant reality is a nightmare.

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on Mon Nov 5th 2018 at 00:01:28 Origin

Quote:
“information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.”

Sounds a lot like a Religion.

After that thought I wondered if anyone took that angle of analysis then I saw this book on Amazon.

Description:

On January 20th, 2009, the United States entered a new era in terms of race relations in the country. The hopes of many Americans were not to be fulfilled and many believe race relations are worse now. The reason is the legacy of race is integral to the American nation. The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States traces this legacy to show how race is defined by more than beliefs or acts of injustice. […] In this way, the racial tensions during the Obama era become sensible and inevitable in a nation that finds ultimacy in white supremacy.

Excerpts of book’s introductory chapter on Amazon

What do I mean by the religion of white supremacy? First and foremost, I do not mean tattooed, bald, neo-Nazis, nor do I mean nor do I mean men in white robes burning crosses. This must be made clear because I do not want a reader with white skin to think I am simply writing about extremists. I am writing about whites and whiteness as a whole. This particularly includes me as a white Protestant, heterosexual, and male with the means to live comfortably in twenty-first century America.
…
The be sure, there were many differences between the whites who came to North America, and yet, a common meaning was found in their differences from the indigenous cultures and peoples from Africa. The importance here is found in the common feeling of superiority among the people who would become part of the American nation. […] the United states is a place that offers a radically different perspective depending on whether one is seen as a member of the nation or not. The sacredness is found in the being and knowing of the ruling body. No matter how hard a member of the out-groups tried, they could never understand the true ultimacy found in the power of what would become known as white.
…
The United States was the place in which Christianity and white supremacy could come together to form a new religious construct that makes white supremacy and the Christian tradition inseparable. The historical cases in chapters three through five prove the unique quality of the United States as the place of white supremacist Christianity. This means that the locale of the United States created a special meaning within the minds of those who adhere to white supremacist Christianity such that in one moment the nation can be described as a Christian nation and also be a place of unequal power possessed by a particular racial group from the historical inception to the contemporary present.
…
Analyzing the election of President Obama demonstrates the different levels in which whiteness operates. The majority of white people experience what Charles Mills calls an “epistemology of ignorance” that enables them to construct a societal myth that ignores the realities of societal conditions through a narrative that justifies their position. This blindness operates in most whites on passive levels, and this is one reason president Obama won the election. This all changed after the election when active voices of whiteness became prominent in media conversations. Groups, like the birthers or the Tea Party Movement, focused on ways the President Obama was threatening American democracy, either by his unlawful ascension to the presidency or by his alleged socialist policies that were going to result in wealth redistribution, death panels, and ultimately tyrannical communism. The media gave significant attention to persons like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who stoked these fears, but rarely did the media make the connection to the overwhelmingly white composition of these groups. One explanation for why this happened is that persons who operate with active whiteness, who who engage in white supremacy, were able to construct a narrative of President Obama that enabled more whites to see the president as a threat.
…
The culmination of the repudiation of President Obama is evidenced in the election of Donald Trump as Obama’s successor. Trump campaigned on the racial animus developed by the Tea Party Movement and his own reputation as anti-Obama. Trump’s ability to seize on the sentiments of many whites that Obama was not a citizen of the United States enabled him to become the standard bearer of a particular brand of “truth” held by many whites in the United States.

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on Mon Nov 5th 2018 at 23:47:47 michaeljonbarker

“People do not think; they feel. They do not believe what is true; they regard as true that which they wish to believe. A lie that affirms us will gain more credence than a truth that challenges us. That’s the foundational insight on which Trump built his business career. It’s the insight on which Trump’s supporters built first their campaign for president and now their presidency itself.”

David Frum

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on Tue Nov 6th 2018 at 03:19:05 Paige

Check out this billboard:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-christ-billboard-st-louis/

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on Tue Nov 6th 2018 at 03:32:32 Mary Burrell

@ Paige: Those Trumpanzees are a cult these people are insane.

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on Tue Nov 6th 2018 at 06:18:46 Origin

I was reading a little more of the preview of the Eric Weed’s “Religion of Whiteness” on Amazon and I can’t help but notice some similarities to Marimba Ani’s 1994 book, Yurugu.

For example, from a chapter of “The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States” called, “Epistemology of Whiteness”, I’ll take this excerpt:

A preliminary construction of a theology of whiteness through the concepts of epistemology and ontology will provide the foundation for the religion of whiteness by unveiling its drive for the ultimate. […] With the theological foundation laid in this chapter, the next chapter applies these concepts to show how the theology of whiteness operates from a demonic model [explained earlier as being related to the intangible parts of the human personality that determines actions and emotions]. I begin the chapter by building how an epistemology of whiteness through the colonial mind-set of heathen as juxtaposed to Christianity, and how the right of domination, as justified based on religion, shifted to the correlation of white superiority and black inferiority by the turn of the nineteenth century. Here, epistemology is taken to mean the process of knowledge consumption and creation. As such, the epistemology of whiteness signified the ways in which whiteness is constructed and maintains itself through dissemination.

Here’s a quote from Ani, now, about the role of religion in white supremacy:

The European [basically “white people” by her usage] institutionalization of Christianity was something akin to a technological advance. It added the element of proselytization [“making disciples”] that more suited the objective of imperialistic expansionism within which those objectives could be hidden or camouflaged. Xenophobic, aggressive, and violent tendencies were molded into a more subtle statement that packaged them in a universalistic [i.e good for everyone], peaceful and moralistic rhetoric. In other words, “barbarian”, Indo-European pagan religion became more “modern” in Christian formulation, more suited to the new demands of European “progress”, progress clearly referring to ever greater efficiency of the mechanism for total control.
…
As always, the utamaroho remains the same.

They’re saying a lot of the same things. Here are some correspondences:

“drive for the ultimate”
~=
“total control”

“the colonial mind-set of heathen as juxtaposed to Christianity”
~=
“it [Christianity] added the element of proselytization”

Christianity as justification of right of domination
~=
Christianity as moralistic rhetoric within which imperialistic objectives could be camouflaged

“demonic model”
~=
“utamaroho”

A definition of Ani’s utamaroho is provided on page 560 of her book: “Utamaroho is the force that determines collective behavior. It manifests as the collective affective being (personality) of the members of the culture, tending to standardize their tastes and behaviors.”

I’ve always felt that most of Ani’s Yurugu had the ring of truth so I’m not surprised someone else is echoing her sentiments as he takes a look at the workings of white supremacy.

One idea that recurs is that the culture has an inexorable impetus towards fulfilling itself in white supremacy. Weed speaks of the “drive for the ultimate” while Ani mentions the thrust towards “ever greater efficiency of the mechanism for total control”. It’s as natural as birds flying or fish swimming. This suggests that spontaneous fundamental change is unlikely and the onus falls on those people who are the quarantined “objects” on which global white supremacy is demonstrated (“the other”), to break its stranglehold. It’s an ominous assessment, but almost certainly true.

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on Tue Nov 6th 2018 at 06:26:34 Origin

In the first part of the above post “Religion of Whiteness” is a misstatement of the actual title of the book which is “The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States”. I’m talking about the same book later on when I pull a quote from the chapter “Epistemology of Whiteness”.

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on Thu Apr 2nd 2020 at 18:02:46 Afrofem

As I read this post during the COVID-19 pandemic, I can see with greater clarity the division of Trump’s base into two major factions: the terrified White supremacist voter base reacting to the Obama presidency and a “Brown America” future.
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                                                       and
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the greedy, traditional corporate financial base who see in Trump an opportunity to move full bore into laissez-faire capitalism.

While most of Trump’s performances are to capture the attention of the voter base, his actions such as:

◉ reducing government oversight of businesses

◉ completing the hollowing out/privatization of government agencies started under the Clinton administration

are meant to cement his relationship with his financial base.

Trump’s actions during COVID-19 are consistent with his continuous rallying of those factions of his support. He performs the Trump Show for his voters and acts to feed his financial base at every turn.

The thing is, COVID-19 doesn’t care about his manipulations and falsehoods. The virus will not pass over Trump followers and afflict other political persuasions. All the virus cares about is replicating itself in more and more hosts, be they affluent or not, White or not, Red State, Blue State, Chinese, American, Italian, Spanish or Iranian, etc.

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