Divided by a Common Language
Imagine, for a moment, a society, divided into two groups of people who utterly despise each other, both thinking the other group are beyond mundane badness and into the realm of outright evil.
Now imagine an article comes out, which breaks down the beliefs of both groups of people, explains them to one another such that they both now truly understand the other, and unity is achieved, as they realize that most of what divided them was not so much a difference in belief, so much as a difference in language.
This isn’t that article; I don’t imagine myself to be so brilliant. Instead, this is pointing out that such an article is -possible-. The two groups of people are the Democrats and Republicans*, and they are divided by a common language.
*Henceforth Blue Tribe and Red Tribe, respectively, because this captures something more than political party does.
So, to begin with, something I think Blue Tribe people - Democrats - really, really need to understand: Red Tribe people - Republicans - live in a matriarchical society. Women run things. The preacher might be a man, but the person who actually runs the church is almost inevitably a woman; in Red Tribe culture, the man is the -spokesman- of the family, but the woman is the person actually in charge.
The Blue Tribe, meanwhile, historically lived in patriarchical societies; the men ran things.
How does language come into this? Well, a Blue Tribe argument for women’s rights will say something about patriarchy - about how men really run things. And superficially, Blue Tribe and Red Tribe societies looked similar in many respects - the men generally go to work, and women generally stay at home. But there was a critical difference: In the Red Tribe, “women’s work” is venerated; the stay at home mother was seen as the keystone of society, doing the most important work; “only” poor women worked outside the home, because doing so was low-status. In the Blue Tribe, “economic work” is venerated; the businessman building skyscrapers is doing the truly important work - and when women entered the workforce, it was not as a group of people entering into a low-status condition, but as a group of people finally having a chance to achieve the same high status as their male peers.
What would a Red Tribe argument -against- women’s rights look like? What would an argument against women working from home look like? It will be about the importance of mothers, the indignity of women being forced into the labor force. These arguments will not be framed in terms of matriarchy - that being the language of the Blue Tribe - but in terms of the language of the Red Tribe; family, virtue, duty, dignity.
You may begin to notice something: Academic language is a Blue Tribe language. The Red Tribe language is rooted in tradition and colloquialisms. One is not superior to the other, and if it seems at first that the academic language must be superior, recall that many of the great authors of the American tradition are Red Tribe. Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, both of whom were at frequent odds with the academic approach favored by the Blue Tribe even in their era - not infrequently mocked and derided in the cosmopolitan newspapers.
Nor should we assume that the Red Tribe language is superior - the Blue Tribe had its own great authors; Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, for example. The Blue Tribe’s language tends to be more precise and analytic, with particular emphasis on diction, and with an emphasis on things like deliberate metaphor as compared to the just-so nature of Red Tribe storytelling.
Not that Red Tribe language is empty of metaphor - rather, the metaphors are less deliberately constructed. A Blue Tribe novel might, for instance, use whales as a constructed metaphor for nature. A Red Tribe novel might, instead, tell a story about a woman who poisoned a man and slept with his corpse for years - there’s no metaphor there, exactly, but rather a vignette of the human experience, a glimpse into another person’s experience. But at the same time, it is in its entirety a metaphor, for the human experience. You aren’t expected to take a specific constructed meaning from the story - you’re expected to instead understand another human being.
A member of the Blue Tribe might write an article arguing that deceiving somebody to procure sex is a form of rape. A member of the Red Tribe might instead write a story about a woman who was promised marriage in exchange for sex, and the promise turns out to be a lie, and the woman’s experiences of this experience.
They are, in a sense, both communicating the same idea: That deceiving somebody for sex is a bad thing to do to them. But one is constructing an analogy to rape so as to argue that it is bad, and the other is instead constructing a story illustrating the experience as bad in and of itself.
Thus, in a significant way, “Lived Experience” is the Red Tribe style of communication, and is favored by the Red Tribe. It’s not an accident that the phrase is most associated with black people in the US; black people are fundamentally Red Tribe, culturally. The "black accent” is a slightly modified southern accent and the stereotypical black foods are all basically southern foods.
“Lived Experience” is not truly accepted as a style of argument among the Blue Tribe, and the push to have “Lived Experience” be more accepted in scholarly circles was a schism in the Blue Tribe. It now enjoys a certain kind of tolerance, when particular people engage in it - but if you aren’t part of that group, or are arguing for the wrong ideas, it suddenly and dramatically transforms into “anecdotal evidence” and is dismissed, in much the same way that the Red Tribe is likely to dismiss Blue Tribe arguments that disagree with their own worldviews as something like “ivory tower bullshit”.
Here we see that some communication is necessarily happening. But a lot of the communication is missed.
So, let me translate something from a more recent cultural war exchange. The Red Tribe’s apparent obsession with trans people in women’s bathrooms.
The first thing to notice is that it’s always -women’s- bathrooms. Nobody really talks about trans people in men’s bathrooms, which you have to notice is odd, if your core assumption is that the Red Tribe is intensely patriarchical. But they aren’t patriarchical, and the argument has to be framed, in that cultural context, in terms of harms to women; harms to men aren’t nearly as morally relevant.
The second thing to notice is that there is an unstated assumption that men will pretend to be women - not be trans women, note, but pretend to be women - in order to gain access to women’s restrooms in order to assault them. The argument they are posing is -not- that transwomen pose a threat to women, per se, but rather that allowing transwomen into women’s restrooms permits cis men to pose as transwomen, gain access to the restroom, and assault women in the relative secrecy of the locale.
That is the argument that is actually being posed: That cisgendered restrooms create a dividing line that protects women from men, and that eroding this dividing line erodes this protection.
Likewise, the Red Tribe argument against transwomen in women’s sports is not, strictly, about transwomen per se - it is, when you approach it from the Red Tribe cultural perspective, an argument that -cis men- will pretend to be transwomen in order to secure scholarships intended for women.
Many of the Red Tribe’s proposed compromises require bottom surgeries - you can’t use the women’s restroom unless you have undergone sexual reassignment surgery and no longer have a penis and balls. This compromise offends many trans people, who have a variety of arguments against it - but from the Red Tribe perspective, the compromise isn’t about trans people per se, it is about establishing a reliable signal that you are in fact a trans woman - it is aimed, not at trans women, but at cis men. A cis man wanting to assault women in bathrooms isn’t likely to have his testicles and penis removed in order to achieve this goal - indeed, that would be entirely contrary to his purpose.
There is a subtler fear among the Red Tribe about transwomen, though - because their society is matriarchical, a man wanting to become a woman is seeking to secure a place in their society he, being of a lower social caste, is undeserving of.
The same kind of attitude underlies the Red Tribe’s relative acceptance of lesbianism, and relative hostility towards gay men. It makes perfect sense, in their worldview, that a woman might not want to engage with men sexually; men are morally inferior to women. They’re not fans of it exactly, but they’re not wholly hostile to it, either. It’s not like a lesbian is going to go around assaulting women.
A gay man, on the other hand, being a man and thus of morally inferior nature, and unshackled by a matriarch, is a threat to society. Men, in the Red Tribe’s perspective, require the civilizing influence of women in order to be complete as human beings; without a women, the natural state of men is savage and selfish.
Thus - the Red Tribe expresses concern about transwomen in women’s bathrooms, and transwomen in women’s sports - but their actual concern is about cis men. They aren’t subtle about this at all, but it is expressed in the form of a story; framed as human experience, a colloquial metaphor about the risks of men in women’s private spaces. The Blue Tribe, which sees metaphor as deliberate, find a barely-concealed dog-whistle.
But the Red Tribe doesn’t communicate that way; the metaphor isn’t deliberate and carefully constructed; everything is rooted in “lived experience”.
For another example, let us consider welfare recipients. The Red Tribe will speak of lazy layabouts who need an incentive to work; from the Blue Tribe perspective, which regards men and men’s work as inherently high-status, this doesn’t translate in its entirety. But in the Red Tribe, it is women’s work that is inherently high-status; men achieve status not by work itself, but by providing for a woman. Additionally, it is not monetary success itself that is high-status; the Blue Tribe archetype successful man looks something like an investor; something entirely separate from home and family.
The Blue Tribe communicates more in the form of semi-concrete abstractions, or metaphors, or statistics. The Blue Tribe communicates in a more academic language, basically. A high income is a nice legible thing, and becomes an instrinsic part of social status.
What is a Red Tribe archetype successful man? It’s something with a much closer association with the home, with women’s work - the cattle rancher, for example, or a mechanic, or a doctor. Somebody who works with his hands, ideally close to home, in a way that reinforces his role within the community as a provider.
The Red Tribe communicates more in the form of stories - so this is where these ideas are expressed. It doesn’t need to be legible, and a high income is, while nice, not seen as a necessarily intrinsic part of social status.
From the Blue Tribe perspective, a person refusing to work is something like an ascetic - somebody who refuses the pursuit of status in favor of something else; because men’s work is inherently high-status, desirable in and of itself, somebody voluntarily choosing to pursue other ends is interpreted as refusing that desire in favor of something else. They are giving up something of value - so they must have something greater they are pursuing. Creating art, or literature, or pursuing enlightenment.
In the Blue Tribe perspective, then, if somebody doesn’t have a job - because working is high-status and the default option to desire, unless they have something more meaningful to desire - society has failed them. Society should provide good jobs for everybody, work being an inherently valuable thing; if somebody refuses to work, and isn’t pursuing any other meaningful options, it is because the work they have available isn’t high-status enough, doesn’t pay enough, isn’t good enough. Thus, the fault does not lay with the individual, but with the system they live in.
Thus, the Blue Tribe perspective on welfare is that it is something that should be available to all, but is low-status to participate in; they’ll be against things like mean-testing, and for programs that force society to provide better and better-paying jobs.
As this is communicated in more academic language, this tends to be expressed in things like statistics, and scholarly articles, and precise figures. But these aren’t the native language of the Red Tribe, whose language is Lived Experience, and who will find such communication to be confused and missing the point that it is humans experiencing these things.
When written as a story, it will often be written metaphorically - not as a human directly communicating the experience itself, but somewhat more abstractly; characters will not be characters, but metaphors and abstractions for social classes.
From the Red Tribe perspective, a person refusing to work is neglecting the duty to provide. They are not giving up something of value to themselves, but instead refusing to produce value, refusing to provide for their family and their community.
And, from this framework, if somebody doesn’t have a job - because working is a duty - they have failed society. It’s okay for them if they literally cannot work, but this is an exemption from a duty, and if they can work and do not, then they are not upholding their responsibilities to their family and their community. Thus, the fault does not lay with the system (unless literally no work at all is available), but with the individual.
Now, if a person works hard, and does not receive appropriate renumeration - if they provide for their community but this does not enable them to provide for their family - then it does become a problem with the system, or rather, a specific individual charged with the specific duty of solving the problem. And if they cannot find work at all, this is a grave dereliction of duty by those charged with it.
Thus, the Red Tribe will tend to support welfare support for those who cannot work, and additional renumeration for those who work but cannot provide for their families on their pay. They will support programs to provide better jobs only when the situation is plainly dire (when people cannot provide for their families), and will move from opposing to strongly supporting work programs when there is a sufficient shortage of available employment. These will often come with a desire for harsh punitive measures against those perceived as failing to fulfill their duties.
But they will impose things like means-testing on welfare payments, and support things like requiring those on welfare to hold jobs if physically able. During times of high unemployment, the Red Tribe may support programs they oppose during times of low unemployment; and they are more interested in economic regulation to the purpose of ensuring that workers can provide for their families, than they are for economic regulation to the purpose of blanket increases in pay.
In the Lived Experience language of the Red Tribe, arguments for these will be expressed as things like stories and songs, expressing what it is like to live under these conditions, and sharply criticizing those who failed in their duties. (Rich Men North of Richmond, for a particular modern example)
For the Red Tribe, the duty runs from personal to communal; the individual has a duty to their family and to their community. For the Blue Tribe, the duty runs from communal to personal; the community and the family has a duty to the individual. In the Blue Tribe, duty is communal; the husband has no -individual- duty to be a good husband, but rather a communal duty, as part of the family. Thus, in the Red Tribe, it makes sense to have more segregated areas of concern - if it is the husband’s duty to take out the trash, this is an individual duty, and if the trash is not taken out, it is the husband at fault. In the Blue Tribe, on the other hand, the duty is communal; if the trash is not taken out, it isn’t just the fault of the individual whose task it was, but everybody else’s fault as well, for not stepping up.
This means that, for the Blue Tribe, the transition from a traditional nuclear family to a modern dual-income family had relatively less friction from a perspective of "the man failed his duty”, and relatively more friction from other perspectives (normative sexism, that is, women aren’t as good as men and don’t belong in the workforce). For the Red Tribe, the idea that women aren’t as good as men doesn’t make sense, as it holds that men are savages civilized by women - however, it is like if she starts taking the trash out, when that is his duty - an implication that he is not fulfilling his duty to support the family. And such work is, within the Red Tribe, lower status than homemaking. So it had more complex frictions, more divided among class lines than gender lines. (In poor families, women frequently had to work anyways.)
Likewise, in the Blue Tribe, as this shift happened, it was/is difficult to get men to engage in the “low class” work of assisting with child rearing. Whereas in the Red Tribe, men taking up the duties of child rearing was/is an assault on the mother’s duty - an implication that she is not fulfilling her duties.
The interaction of the flow of duty, and the class of work, meant that, for the Blue Tribe, the transition to the two-income household had women pushing for it on both fronts (more higher status work for her, and less lower status work for her), and men opposing it on both fronts (less higher status work for him, and more lower status work for him); whereas in the Red Tribe, it was more complicated, with both men and women opposing and supporting it in turn.
All of this was and is communicated in scholarly form - statistics, articles, precise arguments - and by stories and art rich with abstraction, metaphor, and individuals who represent entire groups of people - in the Blue Tribe; typically it will be framed in terms of the agency of men, who after all are the ones who actually do things, while the role of women will be to struggle against men, typically in a reactive rather than proactive fashion - the role of women is to prove that they are as good as men, as judged by men. It will end with men agreeing to and implementing some change - being the ones who actually do something, and showing their fundamental moral nature.
In argumentative form, this communication takes the form of “patriarchy”, a framing of the world which assigns all agency to men; men build civilization, and women must aspire to be as good as men. From the Red Tribe perspective, this entire framework will seem absurd; why should the aspiration of women to merely be men? That is a step down for them, within their value framework.
In the Red Tribe, it would be expressed as a story, say as a man struggling with his identity after losing his job and struggling to find a replacement, while his wife manages to procure employment (and finding it depressing and unsatisfying) and so must do so while forced to struggle with her identity as she is no longer able to perform her homemaking duties, now taken up by her husband, who typically will find them deeply satisfying - and such stories will typically end with a return to the status quo when the man finds a job and the woman can return to homemaking, with little comment on the fact that the man enjoyed homemaking more than the work he returns to.
In argumentative form, this communication will focus on virtues, and ideas like how homemaking is fundamentally more rewarding than work. From the Blue Tribe perspective, this will seem like some elaborate trick on women, where men try to brainwash them into accepting an inferior social role.
For a period of about thirty years, from the 1970s to the 2000s, the predominant narrative of welfare was oriented around the “welfare queen”. Prior to this, and after this, the predominant narrative was and is oriented around lazy men. This period of history is thus somewhat interesting, and deserves further consideration.
To understand the Red Tribe perspective here, we must analogize. The default high-status position in the Blue Tribe is something like the investment broker; the default high-status position in the Red Tribe is the mother.
The Blue Tribe analog for the “welfare queen”, then, is something like an investment broker who embezzles funds from an investment fund; somebody who abuses their high-status, high-trust position within society to unethically enrich themselves at the expense of that society. It is a grave transgression against the status and trust society has placed in them.
Well, almost. Because Enron is much closer an analog; duty doesn’t flow from individual to communal, for the Blue Tribe, but from the communal to the individual; thus, it is “evil corporations” who are the closest true analog.
For a communication breakdown in the other direction, there’s a consistent narrative within the Blue Tribe; the abusive family, the unsupportive parents, the individual whose bad home life led them down a dark path. From the Blue Tribe perspective, an individual in this position is a matter of fundamental sympathy - because the duty is from the communal to the individual; the family has a duty to the members within it. Thus, from the Blue Tribe perspective, an abusive family is seen as a broad excuse for (some amount of) bad behavior of an individual.
The duty in the Red Tribe is from individual to family. The abusive parents may not be upholding their duty to the family, but this is not transitive - the family has no duty to the child, the child has a duty to the family. So, the parents are to blame for their bad behavior - but the child of an abusive family is not a position of fundamental sympathy, and an abusive family is not truly an excuse within this framework.
Likewise, abortion - in the Blue Tribe, the individual has no fundamental duty to the family (they have a collective duty, as part of the family, to each other individual, but not an individual duty). So a prospective mother has no duty to the unborn child, who is not yet an individual.
However, in the Red Tribe, the individual -does- have a fundamental duty to the family - and while the unborn child may not be an individual, they -are- part of the family, and thus there is a duty.
Crime, too. Crime is a communal failure, from the Blue Tribe perspective - and the criminal is frequently seen as an object of sympathy, with society broadly at fault. Crime is an individual failure, from the Red Tribe perspective - and the criminal is specifically at fault, with society broadly regarded as the object of sympathy.
I can keep going on examples in this vein, exploring the cultural differences arising here, but this is intended to be primarily about the way the communication fails.
So, broadly, the Blue Tribe, and here I’m changing to “left” and “right”, communicates in representational abstractions; the right, meanwhile, communicates in terms of lived experiences.
I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of the “Great American Novels” come from areas which culturally are identified as right-wing/Republican now; to be blunt, the “lived experience” style of communication the right engages in makes for much better literature in general, and tends to explore the themes of the human experience in much greater depth.
Not that the representational abstractions style of communication is bereft of value, and certainly they are not unrepresented among the “Great American Novels”. But, well, there is an archetype of the failed novelist becoming an academic for a reason - it’s far to easy to forget the fundamental humanity necessary for great literature when your primary focus is not human experience in and of itself. Rather, where the representational abstraction style of communication tends to excel is in other pursuits - mathematics, for example. And I don’t think it is entirely accidental that the leftist culture has taken over the universities; the emphasis on legibility provides something measurable.
I have read other authors here arguing, at various levels, that this emphasis on legibility is backfiring in the sciences. (The links provided tend to circle a relatively small group; this should not be taken to imply that only those people are talking about it, these are just the articles I could quickly find reflecting the topic, and so the small group should be taken to reflect my laziness.) At its core, Blue Tribe science can no longer innovate at its core - it has become an endless cycle of refining ever-more-specific models whose core was created decades ago.
I think it’s backfiring more broadly. When you get down to it, the joke that is post-modern art is basically Blue Tribe artistic expression taken to the point of parody. It is representation without substance - without the fundamental humanity embodied in the Red Tribe ideals. Programming - factories building factories building factories - representation without substance, nigh-impossible to use yet powerful.
Mind, the opposite paradigms aren’t great either - Red Tribe science, to its logical conclusion, is limited to blunt truths like determining that objects usually fall when you drop them. Red Tribe art, in its purest form, is a painting of a forest; beautiful to behold and yet devoid of meaning. Its programming is spaghetti; pure function without the slightest form, easy to use and yet requiring painstaking effort to do anything.
If we were to embody them as materials, the Blue Tribe is steel and glass, and the Red Tribe is fabric and wood. You can make houses out of both; a Blue Tribe house will withstand the harshest environments, but will be utterly devoid of comfort. A Red Tribe house will be comfortable, but destroyed easily by the first calamity.
Merge them, however, and you get comfortable houses that can withstand calamity. You get programming languages that are simple to use and powerful. You get art that is both beautiful and meaningful. You get science that can deal with truths both obvious and subtle.
Somebody needs to bridge the communication gap, because what we have isn’t working.