Pattern recognition: backlash

October 20th, 2013 by Charles Cameron

In closing, I would like to offer this link to an article in Res Militaris by Jean Baechler, titled Outlines of a psychology of war. It’s a weighty piece, as befits its grand sweep, and I believe it throws some light on the obstinacies of the mind to which this post is addressed.

I tried excerpting it, but it appeared to me that each sentence in every paragraph in turn begged to be highlighted, approved, tweaked, questioned, or disagreed with, and I wound up feeling you should read it for yourselves. I’ll be very interested to see if it captures the attention of the ZP readership, and leads to a more extended discussion…

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Posted in Charles Cameron, cve, debate, Doublequotes, Islam, logic, military, pattern language, Patterns, recommended reading, Specs, strategy, Uncategorized | 3 comments

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    October 20th, 2013 at 11:09 pm

    Ha:
    .
    I just read a very interesting critique of a common, somewhat antagonistic Evangelical Christian approach to members of “cults” aka “new religious movements” by John W Morehead in Journal of Asian Mission 14:1 (2013), pp. 3–28. Titled Walter Martin Was Wrong: A Critique and Alternative to the Counter-Cult Approach to Cults, it is a very well-argued piece which i’d recommend to any interested in that topic — and came across the following quote, which encapsulates part but by no means all of Morehead’s argument — but also seems entirely à propos of the pattern I was primarily addressing in the post above:

    Apologetic debates rarely lead unbelievers or apostates to convert; they do not succeed in persuading renegade Christians to abandon their new beliefs to return to the faith of their birth. Harangues against the new religions do not lead their members to listen attentively to the arguments of zealous evangelizers. On the contrary, they drive them further away and elicit similar belligerent responses. 

    That quote in turn comes from John A Saliba, Dialogue with the New Religious Movements: Issues and Prospects, in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies 30, 1 (Winter 1993): 54.

  2. Charles Cameron:

    October 21st, 2013 at 1:08 am

    Well, zounds! — I appear to have hit the nerve of the day.
    .
    Adam Elkus, friend of this blog, just pointed me to Alyssa Battistoni‘s Jacobin piece Back to No Future on what Adam terms the “politics of apocalypse — it’s about the impact of global warming and subtitled “What use is playing the long game when the arc of the universe feels so frighteningly short?” — and I came from that directly to a piece by Anthony Judge innocuously if a tad obscurely titled Psychosocial Implication of Without Within, crammed full of links and ideas, as Judge’s pieces always are.  
    .
    It was there I ran across my third “backlash” comment — in an article which seeks to explain why what we knew about climate change in 2008 hasn’t resulted in “soaring public interest and ambitious political action” in the five years since, and carries these ominously familiar-sounding comments:

    Through a growing body of psychological research, we know that scaring or shaming people into sustainable behaviour is likely to backfire. We know that it is difficult to overcome the psychological distance between the concept of climate change – not here, not now – and people’s everyday lives. We know that beliefs about the climate are influenced by extreme and even daily weather.
    .
    One of the most striking findings is that concern about climate change is not only, or even mostly, a product of how much people know about science. Increased knowledge tends to harden existing opinions (Nature Climate Change, vol 2, p 732.
    .
    These findings, and many more, are increasingly available to campaigners and science communicators, but it is not clear that lessons are being learned. In particular, there is a great deal of resistance towards the idea that communicating climate change requires more than explaining the science.

    Three strikes and I’m in.

  3. joey:

    October 21st, 2013 at 9:16 am

    Romanticism has a lot to answer for.

    Its the strength of belief that is to be respected,  not that the belief system has any objective merits per se.

    Hense the phenomenon of individuals and societies lurching from one set of irrational beliefs to another. 

    Its not long dead economists we have to watch out for,  its long dead philosophers.